She Regrets Nothing

by Andrea Dunlop

  The inheritance would take time wending its way through the legal system, and so, by the time the following week rolled around, it had mostly faded from Leo’s and Nora’s minds. They’d always had money; they’d never even had to think of it in any concrete terms. The idea of worrying over it was so foreign to them that they could not keep the notion in their heads. They’d convinced themselves that it would all work out, that Liberty would take care of them. It had always been her they’d gone to with their problems; why would her having the money instead of Opa or their parents change anything? No, it would be better! They knew nothing, of course, of Liberty’s real intentions for the fortune.

  By the following Thursday, Nora was instead completely consumed with an event that she and Laila were attending. Since Frederick’s death, Laila had been reinstated in the penthouse as though she’d never left. There was a party for the relaunch of the New York Spectacle, affectionately nicknamed the Spec: an ailing paper past its prime that had just been purchased by twenty-five-year-old wunderkind Blake Katz, a real-estate scion whose father had served time for money laundering and yet still managed to be obscenely rich.

  Laila sat on the chaise in Nora’s closet, wearing a silk robe and drinking a glass of champagne as her cousin fretted over what to wear. She’d bought three new dresses from Bergdorf’s that afternoon—the inheritance imbroglio hadn’t slowed down her shopping—and suddenly she hated them all.

  “How can I have all these clothes, and nothing to wear?” She howled, pacing an angry lap around the closet. She wore a flesh-colored pair of Spanx and a nude strapless bra, giving her the sexless appearance of a Barbie doll.

  “I love the Michael Kors,” Laila ventured.

  “Ugh, it makes me look old!”

  “What about the Jason Wu?”

  “Don’t get me started. Why did you let me buy something with a peplum, Laila? It totally emphasizes my gut,” she said, slapping her flat stomach.

  “You’re being crazy! Come here, sit down. Have a drink.”

  Nora relented and took a seat on the edge of the chaise, Laila handed her a glass of champagne, and she sipped with a quiet sigh as though imbibing something medicinal.

  “What’s going on with you?”

  “It’s Blake,” Nora said, looking at Laila helplessly.

  “The newspaper guy?”

  Nora nodded. “He went to school with Leo. We’ve known him forever.”

  Of course they had; another member of their set, as the twins referred to their social circle. As though it were a matching collection, one that presumably ought to be kept together and remain unsullied by the presence of outsiders.

  “And?”

  Nora let out a beleaguered sigh. “And I am completely, madly in love with him. Always have been. He always has a girlfriend, but he just broke up with someone, so he’s finally single for a minute.”

  “Oh! And what,” Laila said, grinning, “tonight’s the big night?”

  “Only if I can find something to wear; I can’t go out like this!”

  “You could throw some heels on, your chrome hearts necklace; it’d be a look.” Laila was enjoying being back with her cousins more than she’d expected to. It was a relief to be back in Nora’s paradise of delusion.

  Nora laughed. “I’m serious; help me!”

  “Let me think.” Laila got up and circled the room. A form-fitting, strapless, red silk Betsey Johnson dress with a sweetheart neckline caught her eye. It was the only dress she’d seen Nora wear more than once. “This,” Laila said, pulling it out decisively.

  “I’ve had that dress forever,” Nora said dismissively.

  “But you love it,” Laila ventured. “You feel like yourself in it.”

  Nora’s eyes softened, as though this were the first time in her life she’d been truly understood.

  “You’re right!” she said. “I really do. Oh, thank you!”

  Several thousand dollars of new dresses lay crumpled at her feet as Nora wiggled into her old faithful. In this dress, from a distance, Nora was knockout: a Jessica Rabbit facsimile. It wasn’t until you saw her up close that the slightly plastic wrongness of her features presented themselves, that you realized her eyes were just a bit too closely set together to be beautiful.

  “See?” Laila said. “Gorgeous!”

  “Oh, hurray! Put your dress on; let’s go hang out with Leo until it’s time to leave.”

  As they made their way to the bookcase door, they could hear the sounds of Leo playing a Billy Joel song. He sat on the piano bench in his sweatpants, a painfully skinny and dressed-up brunette glued to his side. She looked up, startled, when Nora and Laila entered the room—she doubtlessly didn’t know of the secret door and it would have seemed to her as though they’d materialized out of thin air.

  “Hi, sis, Laila,” he said. Still playing, still gazing down at his fingers, he sang out a couple of lines:

  If you said good-bye to me tonight

  There would still be music left to write

  What else could I do

  I’m so inspired by you

  That hasn’t happened for the longest time

  His voice was surprisingly sweet, and the girl was mesmerized. He let his fingers trail cacophonously across the keyboard and abandoned his station, standing up to greet them.

  “How was your day, Leo?” Nora stepped forward and put her hand on his forearm a little possessively. She shot a sideways glance at the girl sitting on the piano bench but didn’t acknowledge her.

  “It was good!” Leo ran his fingers through his hair. “I got through my second chapter! Alyssa came over to keep me company while I worked.”

  Laila thought the girl did not look dressed for hanging around with Leo while he allegedly wrote his book. Spending time with Tom and at the agency for more than six months had shown her the essential truth: that Leo would never finish this or any other book. He simply did not have it in him.

  “You girls look nice,” he said, taking them in, “where are you off to?”

  “The relaunch party for the Spec.”

  “Oh, good old Blakey,” Leo said.

  “Anyway, why aren’t you coming?”

  “Ugh, media parties. Tell him congrats for me, though! I’ll take him out for a scotch soon.”

  “An awfully big deal, him taking on a whole newspaper,” Nora said.

  “You say that like he’s stepping up to rule a small European country,” Laila said. She kept her voice light, but she found it wearisome how these Manhattan kids congratulated each other so much for winning a hundred-yard dash they’d begun at the ninety-yard line. If she had $100 million or so at her disposal, she might buy a newspaper too.

  “Only slightly more dysfunctional,” Leo said. The brunette laughed, and they all startled a little, having nearly forgotten she was there. “Anyway,” Leo continued, “if anyone can make it work, Blake can. He always worked so hard in school; God knows why, he didn’t need to.”

  Then as if by some telepathy, he and Nora sequestered themselves a foot away, talking in hushed tones. They did this every once in a while: pulled away in some secret twin tête-à-tête, regardless of who else was in the room. According to Liberty, they’d done it constantly when they were kids. It appeared as though Leo was comforting his sister, perhaps giving her a pep talk. Laila pulled out her phone and busied herself with it, the better to not have to acknowledge the girl at the piano; she knew from experience she’d never see her again.

  The party was the half-glamorous, half-frumpy mix that media parties always are. In a reverse of the usual equation, the less pulled-together someone looked, the more likely they were to be important. Laila therefore suspected every middle-aged man in grubby tweeds of having won a Pulitzer. The opportunities were both endless and obscured. She barely knew where to begin.

  Nora was warming up, flirting with guys she and Leo had gone to school with and lobbing empty and effusive compliments at the women she knew. Suddenly she whipped around and steered Lail
a toward the bar, saying, “Oh God! Come on, quick.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to get cornered by Imogen. She’s so dull, and for God’s sake, she’s got Zander Plus-one with her. Ugh, so desperate.”

  Laila examined the fortyish woman and her handsome date who, though she had her arm in his, seemed to be looking anywhere but at her.

  “He’s kind of hot, to be honest. Why do you call him Zander Plus-one?”

  “Yeah, he allegedly used to model, which he’ll tell you in the first five minutes he meets you if you let him. Anyway, he’s, like, everywhere, but never as an invited guest, only as someone’s plus-one.”

  “Oh.” Laila wondered if Nora heard the words coming out of her own mouth sometimes. For wasn’t Laila her perpetual plus-one? “I’ll be back,” said Laila, just as Nora spotted someone she did want to talk to. She waved her cousin off.

  Laila kept an eye out for the man of the hour as she crossed the floor looking for another waiter with a tray of champagne, or better yet, the bar. She was suitably intrigued by this Blake guy given Nora’s adoration, though if he’d gone to school with the twins, he would almost certainly dismiss her for being from the Midwest—meaning she would loathe him. Plus, he was only twenty-five! Men that age didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Too many men her own age—especially within this crowd—were childlike in their innocence, regardless of how debauched their lifestyles might be. So many of them hadn’t suffered a true loss, had never peeked over the abyss, had never taken one solitary step in life without a hundred layers of safety nets beneath them.

  Laila wandered the room solo, unable to get out of her own head and enjoy the party as she wished to, preoccupied by her own lack of a safety net. Her funds were running dangerously low. Even without having to pay rent, spending money in Manhattan was as easy and invisible as breathing. She’d played her trump card, and so far it had yielded nothing. Of course, her cousin had offered her a job; there was that. Laila had done a little digging and discovered that assistants at the agency started at $35,000 a year, and worse yet, that this was slightly higher than the industry standard. Thirty-five thousand dollars wouldn’t get her much in Michigan, but in Manhattan it was a like a kick in the shin. She’d learned that there were two kinds of assistants in publishing: the variety who ran to fetch coffee for their boss in their dainty Repetto flats, a Goyard tote stuffed with bound galleys bouncing off their shoulder, those girls whose parents paid their rent for a nice little one-bedroom somewhere “safe” like the Upper East Side or the West Village; their salary was spent on cocktails and hair care. Then there were the Kims of the industry: smart and scrappy without an ounce of style, toting manuscripts with them on the long train ride to their far-flung neighborhood in Queens—for even most of Brooklyn was now out of reach, barring Bed-Stuy and Bushwick. Laila knew Liberty admired the industry’s scrappers, and truthfully, Laila did too. She did not, however, want to become one. She knew that if she took that job and accepted that lifestyle, the world of her cousins would slip forever from her reach.

  All of these thoughts weighed heavily on her that night. No one at the party seemed to be paying much attention to her, nor was she enthused about mingling. She wasn’t interested in most of the men she saw. There was a type of man that moved to New York to pursue his fortune, and Laila was sick of them, their striving and arrogance, their neuroses, their fussy clothes and effeminate tendency to be familiar with handbag brands and to judge you accordingly; and this party was full of them. Or at least half-full. And the other half? Grubby tweeds. Laila had the unwelcome thought that she really longed for a man like Cameron; the memory of their last encounter suddenly went through her like an electrical charge. How lucky Liberty was to have him; where did someone find another like him? She felt certain she could not chance another tryst with him—though this knowledge did nothing but stoke her desire.

  Truthfully, young and handsome and rich was not terribly easy to come by—the repugnant Simon was more of a common model of billionaire. Was it so terrible to admit that you wanted someone to take care of you? Everyone talked about independence as though it was the highest virtue, but Laila had had plenty of looking out for herself.

  “Oops, I’m sorry,” an older man she had just collided with apologized, though she was fairly certain it was her fault that they’d run into each other.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. He had snow-white hair that was thick and tousled, wire-rimmed glasses, and warm brown eyes. She recognized him. He was Sam Green, the longtime editor of the Spec. She’d done her homework earlier in the day.

  “Are you enjoying the party?” he asked.

  “So far,” she said. “I just arrived.”

  “You look like someone who has just arrived.” She wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or not. Was he calling her an arriviste? But his eyes were kind; perhaps she was simply being defensive.

  “Sam!” a voice bellowed. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  A tall, young man leaned in to shake his hand and clap him on the shoulder.

  “Blake,” Sam said. Laila noted that he looked genuinely pleased to see him. “I was just about to introduce myself to this beautiful young lady, so naturally you would appear.”

  Blake laughed, revealing an impressive row of gleaming white teeth. He had light brown eyes and olive skin. Laila found herself utterly distracted by the sharpness of his jaw. He looked her in the eye only briefly, but it practically rendered her speechless.

  “I do have excellent timing,” he said. “I’m Blake Katz.”

  “Laila Lawrence.”

  “Lawrence?” Sam said. “Ah.”

  “The midwestern branch,” she added.

  “Midwest values meet New York glamour,” Blake said with a flourish, as though bestowing her with her own headline, “who could beat that?”

  “So, Sam,” Laila said, trying her best not to be dazzled by Blake, “I should confess that I’m a fan of your work. Big changes at the Spec, with the new boss and all.” She flicked her eyes over to Blake. She’d spent her day reading pieces from the paper’s online archives. It appeared to be an august publication; what the young millionaire might want with it was still a bit of a mystery.

  “It’s in good hands,” he said, looking warmly at the younger man. Who, to Laila’s complete surprise, blushed.

  “You’re just saying that,” he said. “I could only hope to live up to what you’ve built there.”

  “I never just say anything. The paper needed new blood.”

  And a massive infusion of cash, Laila thought. Still, she hadn’t expected Blake to seem so guileless and sincere; they were difficult qualities to fake.

  Unsurprisingly, Blake was pulled away moments later; it was his party, after all. Laila talked to Sam Green for a while longer before he was monopolized by a blowhard op-ed columnist with no interest in her, and she was slowly frozen out of the conversation.

  Laila drank too much that night, unsettled by her run-in with Blake and how generally out of place she felt at the party, especially after Nora’s comments. Was she a Laila Plus-one, herself? Nothing more than a hanger-on? At one point she saw Blake in the corner talking to Nora and another girl she didn’t recognize. She tried to feel glad for Nora, but she felt something slipping through her hands, something she was desperate to grasp.

  “We cannot do this again.”

  These were his first words upon waking. He hadn’t even looked over at her, or he would have realized she was still half-asleep, face buried in the pillow, her petite frame curled in on itself as it always did when she slept. He stared directly at the ceiling.

  “Mmmm?” She stirred, raised her head.

  “I’m serious,” Cameron said as though she were arguing with him. “We have to stop. You have to stop. What were you thinking, coming here last night?”

  His regret was looking for a place to put itself, and it landed squarely on Laila. Even as he closed his eyes, he could f
eel her there, pulsating next to him, a demon of his psyche, materialized.

  “What were you thinking, letting me in, then, if you feel that way?” Laila peeled her head heavily off the pillow, propping herself on her elbows to look at him.

  “What if Liberty had been here?”

  “She told me she was staying in.”

  “What if she’d been lying?”

  At this, Laila laughed. “Liberty doesn’t lie. She isn’t like us, Cameron.”

  The night before, he’d answered the door only after she’d buzzed several times. He’d been asleep, exhausted from an eighteen-hour day at the office. Laila had appeared at his door like a hallucination. She was drunk enough to be bold, not drunk enough to be easily swayed or dealt with. He’d argued with her at first, trying to put her in a car home, but she’d come in, bolted the door behind her, and peeled her dress off. She told him she’d been thinking about him all night, slipping her hand between her legs. That had been it for him. He’d roughly removed her bra and panties, ripping the delicate lace on the latter. She’d tried to kiss him, but he’d deflected it and sunk his teeth into her shoulder. Then she’d been on the stairs, propped on her elbow and knees, opened wide before him. Cameron, much like Laila’s cousins, had never wanted for anything, and so the desire that filled this void was for something no man could have, two opposing things at once: Laila and Liberty. He was fooling himself, however, if he thought that merely having each of these women would satisfy him. For he wanted to be both the man who could have anything he wanted and the man who had the character to resist temptation. His was a void that would devour countless mistresses, one no amount of sex or other indulgence could sate.

  “There is no ‘us,’ ” Cameron said now.

  “If you say so. I think you should just admit that you’re bored with her. She’s too conventional for you.”

  He stared at Laila. She appeared to be alarmingly calm this morning: poised, triumphant, her big eyes shining out from that deceptively innocent-looking, little fox face of hers. She was so unlike the woman he loved—and he did love Liberty, he did—were they really related?