Doreen

by Ilana Manaster

  But she would do it, too. She would love to. For the right person, she would turn away from everything, she was sure of it, though it was easier to contemplate now that there was nothing to turn away from. Biz considered the notion of spending fall break shooting Seth and Miyuki. They would have something, a movie and something else, a secret between them, sex, intimacy. And Biz would stand by filming, a witness to someone else’s life. What would she have? A document. But of someone else’s time. Where would she be in it? Where was her time?

  Maybe the moment had arrived for her to step out from behind the camera and live her own life. Isn’t that what people always told her? It had been so comfortable for her there, shielded by her camera, bearing witness. But she didn’t want to be a bystander anymore. She wanted to feel something, too. To live.

  Look at Doreen. She had come to the school as a wounded victim. But she’d found love. In the face of whatever social hierarchy nonsense Heidi worried about, Doreen had gone out into the world of the living and uncovered someone who could matter to her.

  Yes, Biz decided. I want to live. The only question was: How?

  Biz arrived at her dorm room to find Doreen sitting comfortably on the chesterfield with a magazine on her lap.

  “What’s up with you?” asked Doreen. “You look flushed. Coming from a rendezvous with your muse?”

  “She didn’t show up,” said Biz with a grin. “The bitch.” She was not surprised to find her cousin so cozily laid out. Doreen had a key to their room and was often there without them. Biz liked it. Even if she knew that it was Heidi, and not Biz, whose company Doreen sought, finding her there made Biz feel like part of a tribe for the first time in her life.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Bizzy.” Doreen gave her cousin a sympathetic frown. “Still blocked? That sucks. That must be so hard. I know how important it is to you.”

  Biz could feel her insides unstick. Like Maria, Biz thought, Doreen had the power to make her into a believer.

  “I don’t know, I think something is going to change for me. For my work. I don’t know how to explain it.” Biz sat at her desk chair, allowing the collage of images to swirl in front of her. “I just think this may all lead somewhere, somewhere great but also a little scary.”

  “You sound excited.” Doreen tilted her head and studied Biz. “Yes, I can see it. I can see something different.”

  “Really?” Biz looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the bedroom door.

  “You’re not going to see it in the mirror, silly.” Doreen flipped the magazine onto the coffee table and walked up to Biz, bracing her by the shoulders with both hands and turning her slightly from one side to the other. “Something tremendous is going to happen to you this year, Elizabeth.”

  “You really think so? Like what?”

  “Who knows?” Doreen returned to the chesterfield, snapping her fingers. “Maybe you’ll fall in love!”

  “Like you and Simon.”

  Doreen picked up her magazine. “Simon Vale? Oh, that’s already old news, I’m afraid. No. That is over. Way over.”

  “But I thought—”

  “After his pathetic display at the football game?” Doreen grimaced. “I couldn’t. I could barely look at him after that. You must understand in some way, Biz. You’re an aesthete, aren’t you? He was so clumsy and graceless. Ugh! No, I’ve decided to go to the dance with Gordon. I know it seems early to make the transition, and I considered turning him down, but he is so keen on the idea. Anyway, it’s just a dance, it’s not like I’m engaged to the guy.” Doreen stretched her hand out in front of her, her eyes on a pearl ring.

  “Is that new?”

  “Hmm?” Doreen dropped her hand. “Anyway, that’s what I’m doing here. Heidi and I are journeying to Manhattan for a frock. Care to join? I know shopping is not exactly your passion, but you are entering this new phase.”

  “Uh, I don’t know.” Was this the sort of thing Biz was meant to do in order to feel she was living? But it all seemed so seedy. For Doreen to cast aside Simon so readily, and for what? A dress and a ring. That was not the kind of bite she was hoping to take out of life.

  Also this: Heidi and I are journeying to Manhattan for a frock. It was exactly something Mumzy would say.

  “I think I will stick around here for now,” said Biz. “The muse may show up after all. But maybe next time.”

  “Suit yourself.” Doreen returned her attentions to her magazine.

  Valentino. Dior. Versace. Armani. McQueen. In the dressing rooms of New York’s finest department stores, the labels offered themselves to Doreen like ripe fruit to be plucked and devoured or tossed away on a whim without a second look. Scuttling, name-tagged employees hauled and hung and offered their wares, and though it was only Gordon’s money that gave Doreen access to the silks and sequins of haute couture, to the obsequiousness of salespeople, Heidi noted how quickly the girl had become accustomed to being doted upon. Where was that awkward, bullied schoolgirl who until recently had never eaten duck or sipped wine? Doreen frowned and gave orders like it was her birthright.

  At Saks, their third stop, Doreen emerged from the dressing room in a new dress. She stepped delicately onto the platform and spun around in the three-way mirror so the women could ooh and ah over her. Gordon’s charge card shined on her like a light from her borrowed fake Chloé bag. Yes, Heidi thought approvingly, Doreen seemed very comfortable indeed.

  The gown was a lavender, lacy, plunging wisp of a thing that clung to her chest and waist and hips as if it was unwilling to share her body with anyone. Doreen turned and gazed at herself from every angle. The color of the dress brought out the purple in her eyes. She was breathtaking.

  “What do you think?” she asked, though her face betrayed her new confidence.

  “It’s a perfect fit,” a saleslady said approvingly. “And the color—”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Doreen snapped. “Heidi? Do you like it? Do you think Gordon will like it?” She had her hands on her hips with her backside to the mirror. The diamonds on her new pearl ring sparkled. Heidi commended herself for the choice.

  “Doreen, the kid will not know what hit him.”

  “I’ll take it,” Doreen said to the saleslady, without removing her admiring gaze from her own reflection. “Please wrap it carefully. We have a long trip.”

  No bus would take the girls back to campus at this time. After a few additional stops—for manicures and waxes, some tastefully lurid underwear—Gordon’s man drove them up in the town car. They cleared the Midtown traffic on the West Side Highway and pulled onto the Saw Mill. The car passed directly through Yonkers before nosing up to Connecticut.

  While Doreen narrated the girls’ day to Gordon on the phone, Heidi gazed out at her hometown through the tinted window. She clocked the detour to her parents’ house at ten minutes. They could stop in and see Heidi’s mother. She would serve them liver mousse and crudité and feel very grand, maybe play them something on the old upright. Her father would come home, smelling of refuse, but thrilled to see her and meet her friend. What would Doreen think of them? Would she be charmed? Embarrassed? Heidi knew perfectly well what Doreen’s father would think of the Whelans. Roland would be disgusted. He would see nothing but filthy mediocrity.

  But Doreen was not Roland. She came from nowhere, too. Maybe Doreen would laugh at Heidi’s father’s stories and find her mother’s singing sweet. Maybe Heidi would be able to look at them again, freely, without disdain. She could love them again, then. If she could just see through the ugliness to the beauty that Roland Gibbons did not know enough to look for. She couldn’t seem to get there on her own. She could never seem to forget.

  About a week after she’d been fired from the Montauk Inn, when she was up late flipping through the channels on her parents’ old TV, she found The Wizard of Oz on cable. At first she thought of skipping past. Everything she used t
o love had become awful to her since she got back to Yonkers. Her father’s howling laugh, her mother’s bizarre insistence on formality, her sister’s moonfaced ignorance. The house was ugly! The block was ugly! Her friends and boyfriends were nothing but airheads and buffoons. Even the kindly librarian whom she’d known since she was a kid, the one who saved books for Heidi, seemed dowdy and small-minded now. She saw everything through Roland’s eyes, and found it all utterly lacking. This was the cruelest thing he did to her: he made her see her tiny, meaningless life for what it was.

  She wanted to preserve Dorothy, Scarecrow, and the Wicked Witch. She did not think she could take losing something else to the refinement of good taste. But there was nothing else on, so she watched. She watched the whole thing, even though it was late, and she was happy to find that she still loved the movie. Dorothy was so lucky! She got to escape dreary old Kansas and head over the rainbow. She loved all the scenes in Oz, the Good Witch, the Munchkins, the makeover. But then, at the end, after Dorothy clicked her heels three times and woke up back in Kansas, it struck Heidi for the first time that Dorothy got a seriously bum deal. Sure, she played the good niece, psyched to be back in Kansas, returned to Auntie Em and friends. But she couldn’t have been, not really. Once she’d feasted her eyes on a world more colorful than any she had ever known, how could she settle back into boring old black and white? How could she ever be satisfied again? Heidi had been over the rainbow, too. And Kansas? Sucked.

  She would never be content again until she found a way back to her Oz, to that luxurious, leisurely, Technicolor world she’d seen for only a flash. On the old couch her mother had reupholstered by hand in horrible salmon-colored toile, Heidi resolved to do whatever it took to hoist herself up over the rainbow again. If she had to run into the eye of the tornado? So be it.

  And she’d done it, hadn’t she? Whatever her methods, she had found a way to Chandler, to the elite world of the rich and privileged. Here she was being chauffeured around by an employee of one of the richest families in America. And it had cost Roland, too. But not enough. Not nearly enough. Money he had by the truckful. She wanted to see him lose something dearer than cash, something irreplaceable.

  “You seem pensive. What’s on your mind, lady?” asked Doreen when she clicked off with Gordon.

  “Hm?” Heidi hadn’t said a word for miles. Yonkers was now far behind them. “Oh, nothing. Well, actually it’s about your father.”

  “My father? What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing. Or everything.” Heidi checked her friend’s reaction through the corner of her eye. She would have to proceed with care. “I was thinking that maybe the whole Simon Vale affair was a way for you to seek revenge.”

  “On my dad? That doesn’t even make sense.” Doreen typed away at her phone.

  “Doesn’t it?” Heidi turned to face Doreen. “You said it yourself when we were in the shed. It delighted you to think of how castrated your father would look beside Simon.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t say castrated. Anyway, I was high as a kite at the time. Are we still liking this nail color?”

  “Okay. So maybe it was feminine. Simon’s manliness appealed to you because it would, hypothetically, make your father feel emasculated.”

  “Could you not with the AP Psych right now? This sounds like the time you diagnosed Biz with autism.”

  “It was mild Asperger’s. And I still think there’s a case to be made, but listen, about your dad—”

  “I don’t want to think about him, okay? We were having a good day. I just want to have a good day!” Doreen threw her phone into her bag in exasperation. “You don’t know my dad. I don’t even know him. He’s just the guy who writes the tuition checks. That’s it. Now can we drop it?”

  “Of course. I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

  Doreen crossed her arms and slouched into her seat. For a while they rode along in silence. Heidi knew she should let it go, but she couldn’t. “Doreen, don’t be upset. On the very first evening when we met, we talked about liberty. About delivering yourself from ties to live spectacularly. Remember?”

  “Yes,” said Doreen sulkily. “I remember.”

  “That’s all I’m talking about. If you rise, make yourself glorious—Chandler is just the beginning. He didn’t believe in you, right? Well, I believe in you, Doreen. You are already on your way. All I was saying is that Simon Vale has no currency for someone like your father. What he cares about is this world, the one with livery cars and American Express Black cards, unmarked doors in the back for members only.” Heidi grasped her friend’s hand. “If you can elevate yourself to the top of that universe, you’ll threaten his little fiefdom. And that will really show him.”

  “Show him what?” Doreen looked at Heidi directly now, her eyes pleading. The poor girl was still a lost child seeking a guiding hand.

  “Show him that he’s nothing special. That he’s ordinary. And irrelevant. Because you will be a beautiful, young girl in the spotlight, the darling of high society—no thanks to him. And what will he be? Just an old, drunk, worthless playboy. A cliché. And that will kill him, Doreen. I just know it.”

  Doreen turned toward the window. Heidi wondered if she’d given herself away. How could she know so much about Roland if she had never met him before? But Doreen just sat in quiet contemplation, staring out at the highway.

  “I would like that,” she said at last. Traffic was clogging up around them, but what did it matter? They had nowhere to be but together. “I would like that very much.”

  Heidi let her eyes glaze over the dull landscape, stunned by her own behavior. She’d injected Roland into their friendship, had done so intentionally, and there was no going back now. The story she’d told herself, about how Roland had nothing to do with her relationships with Biz or with Doreen, had been a lie. She saw that now. Sure, she was bored, she was looking for a noble project, but to claim her intentions with Doreen were pure charity was laughable. Heidi had a Roland jones. She wanted to see him suffer. And Doreen was her ticket.

  One afternoon, at the Montauk Inn, Roland was teaching her about wine. They sat on the terrace, away from the concierge desk, where five or six tastes had been poured from the hotel’s cellar. She picked up a glass, sniffed, and swirled as he had taught her to do. But she could never get it right. Her assessments were off, her taste uncultivated. He laughed at her and commended her for her impressive talent for bullshit.

  Then he received a call. Predictably it was from Benedict Ruehl, his art dealer. Since Roland had begun these sessions with Heidi, they were interrupted almost daily by Benedict—never by his wife, which struck Heidi as odd. Her own parents couldn’t eat lunch without telling the other what was on the menu. This time, the news from the art dealer was good. A painting had been sold for an exorbitant sum. Roland called over the waiter to replace the wine with martinis. They drank to art and, emboldened by the liquor, Heidi asked him about his family. Did they miss him? Did he miss them? Did he get updates on their whereabouts?

  Roland cleared his throat. He wore a white linen suit that day with an open-collared shirt. Everyone wore white in the Hamptons, but nobody wore it like him. “Constantina lives her own life, my dear, and I live mine. We are independent people. Our children, too, have their own circle of nannies and playmates that occupy their time. We prefer to keep our own space. I’m sure this is hard for you to imagine. I’ve never seen your parents’, uh, home, but I can imagine that the quarters are rather more cramped than ours. And so you are involved with one another. We prefer a bit more air between us.”

  “But you still love each other, right?” Heidi asked. “Because it doesn’t sound like it. I mean, not the way I think of love.”

  Roland’s mouth turned down. He looked at her with rage in his eyes. “One should not discuss things one knows nothing about. That does not leave many subjects open for you, I realize. But I would th
ink even you know when to keep your opinions to yourself.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I will let this slide, my dear. But please try to use your head. I would not like to be intruded upon again.”

  Heidi cringed at the memory. Until that point, Roland seemed to have endless patience for her mistakes. But to ask him if he loved his wife? Even a garbage man’s daughter should know better than that. He had every right to be angry. Thankfully, he seemed to forget all about the incident the next time they met, and they never discussed his family again.

  But there was something else there, too. In that moment, Heidi saw pain in Roland Gibbons. Whatever feelings existed—between Roland and his wife, Roland and his children—they were not satisfactory to him, she was sure of that. Here was a man who knew everything except how to be loved.

  Heidi looked at Doreen, who had leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes. Her lips remained slightly open, in a half smile. She was perfect, absolutely perfect, more beautiful than any work of art or fine automobile. Roland would want her for himself, to show off, to love. Heidi knew it.

  There was a hole in that man’s heart. Why else would he have paid any attention to her that summer? Alone, his family elsewhere, his wife just months away from leaving him for good, Roland plucked Heidi from behind the desk at the Montauk Inn because he wanted to be adored.

  When Heidi became inconvenient, he tried to make her disappear. He thought it would be easy to do, and cheap. In the end it was neither, Heidi made sure of that, but she was a stranger, a kind of servant, actually. She meant nothing to him.

  But Doreen was Roland’s daughter. A fresh chance for something real. If they played it right, they could make him care deeply. Doreen could make him feel like he had everything he always wanted. And then, with Heidi’s help, Doreen would take it away. Like that. No warning.

  They would present Doreen to Roland as his own Oz, his paradise. They would give him a glimpse and then snatch it away, send him back to Kansas alone and unloved. Then he would know what it feels like to have to live without color, in a world of black and white. And Heidi could finally be the one to laugh at him.