Heart and Soul

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “I know because I keep my eyes open,” the waiter told her. “I try to see these people for what they are … not what all their expensive haircuts and designer clothes would have you believe.”

  “Do I detect a note of envy in your voice?” Cassie laughed, though she could see by the waiter’s expression that he wasn’t amused.

  “Why in the world would I envy this crowd?” the man demanded. He had dark expressive brows that came together when he frowned. His eyes, Cassie decided, were the color of amber or rosin, something slightly precious and extremely durable.

  “Well, I just assumed, that being a waiter…” Cassie replied. “I mean, having to cater to them…”

  Her explanation was cut short when he said, “You think that…” but his question dissolved into laughter. It was a strange sound—part cough, part chuckle, but altogether not a very happy noise, Cassie decided. It ended as abruptly as it began. “You think I’m a waiter?”

  Cassie stood erect, not liking his tone of voice at all. What right did he have to be so condescending … and yet so secretive? He made her feel as though he knew something—no, a great many things—that she didn’t. “Actually I decided you were a struggling actor and this was what you do to keep bread on the table.”

  “God, I look that … disreputable?” the man said, though more to himself than to her. “I must be doing something right.”

  “Please enlighten me, then,” Cassie replied stiffly. “I don’t know anyone here … and I obviously misjudged. I’m sorry.” She thought of what he said, about seeing people for what they were. No doubt he saw straight through the expensive facade Miranda’s silk and suede had temporarily provided her—to the uneasy and uncertain person for whom he’d first opened the door.

  But he came to her rescue swiftly, dropping his sardonic attitude. “I apologize. Cassie, isn’t it?” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Jason Darin, Miranda’s husband. And, really, I’m sorry I embarrassed you. I thought you knew.”

  “You’re Jason?”

  “You’re surprised,” Jason said, his smile much kinder now. “Tell me—what exactly did you expect?”

  “Oh…” Cassie circled her hands vaguely. “Something … someone far more … polished? You know—I mean, are you aware that your tux doesn’t quite fit?”

  Jason again made the unhappy sound that passed for laughter and said, “Yes, I’m quite aware. I do this to annoy your darling sister. Clothes mean so very much to her.”

  “I see,” Cassie said, her gaze moving from him to the crowded, and now smoke-filled, room. Yes, she was surprised. She had envisioned Miranda’s life as one seamless crystal bowl of perfection, filled with the ripest and most expensive cherries. And yet the first person she met—Miranda’s own husband—was both something of an outcast and decidedly a critic of Miranda’s life-style. “So you don’t entirely approve of all this?”

  “I bought her this place as a wedding present,” Jason replied, though not answering her question. “I’d just closed a fantastic deal—one of the most lucrative real estate projects I’d ever helped broker—and I knew how much she wanted to live around here. With all the other society ladies. She wanted so very much to be a lady.”

  “It’s a beautiful … neighborhood,” Cassie said lamely. The conversation had veered away from her. Jason seemed to be talking mostly to himself.

  “Yes … but look who you get for neighbors! You see that old biddy swathed in blue sequins?” Jason nodded to the woman in the wheelchair with whom Senator Haas had been speaking. “She’s the Saint Peter of Manhattan Society. She decides who’ll get through the pearly gates … and who won’t. It doesn’t matter how much cash you dish out for the New York Public Library Fund or the Metropolitan Opera House. It doesn’t matter if you dress up in black tie every night of the week. It doesn’t matter if you’re a social worker … or a child molester. If she doesn’t take to you—you’re out. She lives half a block down the street. Lovely person to have for a neighbor, don’t you think?”

  “She doesn’t like you?” Cassie guessed.

  “Actually, she barely knows me,” Jason said. “No. She doesn’t or didn’t like my wife. Nothing Miranda did—and she tried everything—would break the old coot’s resolve to shut Miranda out. Until Miranda found her sponsor. It’s really a great deal like joining a fraternity, I suppose. Somehow, though, I doubt the dues you have to pay are worth it.”

  “What makes you so cynical?” Cassie asked, surprised when she heard herself utter the words she had merely been thinking moments before.

  Jason turned and stared at her, his golden eyes darkening. His whole face looked as if a cloud had just passed over it. There was something forbidding about the measuring look he gave her, the set of his jaw.

  “That’s really none of your business,” he said.

  “I know,” Cassie replied simply. “I don’t know why I asked. But I doubt that everyone here is as ferocious as the dragon lady over there.” She wanted to see him smile again. She could feel him next to her—a coiled spring of a body—throwing off heat and bitterness. She wanted to see him relax, the way he had for a moment when he had first introduced himself. But, more than anything, she wanted him to open up to her. She realized how much she liked the rusty and strained sound of his voice. “Tell me about some of the others,” she urged. “That lovely redhead in the dark green dress over there, for instance.”

  “Ah, yes, Marisa Newtown,” Jason said. “A treacherous stretch of water, if you ask me. Makes a habit—or perhaps it’s become a hobby?—of bedding down with her best friends’ husbands. Told me a week or so ago that she was Miranda’s very best friend. I’ve been keeping quite a distance between us, you can imagine.”

  “So morals among the rich are everything we bourgeois are led to believe?” Cassie asked.

  “I don’t know what you believe,” Jason replied, his voice hard-edged once more. “Mine are in good working order, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Lord, you are touchy, Mr. Darin,” Cassie said with a laugh. “I was casting no aspersions whatsoever, I promise. I was just trying to be friendly. It’s a fatal flaw among us Southerners, I’m afraid.”

  “And I’m afraid I’m being a bore,” Jason said, shaking his head. “Come, let’s find the hostess. She’s probably working the crowd in the library.” Jason led the way through the high-ceilinged room with its lush oriental carpets, beautiful austere antique Shaker furniture, and glassed mahogany bookcases. It was jam-packed with people, though Miranda was nowhere in sight.

  Cassie trailed behind him as he impatiently pushed his way down the hall, briefly toured the ornately decorated dining room, and circled the huge ballroom with its rococo mirrors and marbled floors. Every few feet someone would greet him.

  “Jason, how’re you doing?”

  “Back in town for long this time, Jason?”

  “When are you going to get a haircut, darling?”

  And he’d respond with a clipped: “Just fine … Great … Yes, soon.”

  Finally she found herself alone with him, following him down the same carpeted corridor they’d transversed when he’d first shown her upstairs. He pushed a swinging door open an inch. He listened intently to a muffled conversation taking place in the next room. Suddenly the voices behind the door rose, and Cassie recognized one of them as Miranda’s.

  “I’m not prying, damn it. I’m only doing my job.”

  “I find it ridiculous to have to remind you, Miranda, that I dictate the parameters of your job. What I’m telling you is that this time you’ve gone too far. I want this silly so-called investigation to stop now. Here. Do you understand?”

  “Over my dead body.”

  The other voice, a man’s, rose with anger. “Don’t you dare contradict me, Miranda, not now. After everything I’ve done—”

  Abruptly Jason pushed the door open. Bright overhead lights from the butler’s pantry spilled into the corridor, blinding Cassie for
a second.

  “Why, here you are,” Jason said. Cassie already knew his voice well enough to know his tone was one of barely controlled anger. “All your guests are asking for you.”

  “We were just talking—” Miranda began. Cassie saw her then: a tall angel of a woman, dazzling blond hair haloing a perfect face. Like Cassie, she wore a powder-blue dress, but where Cassie’s was all fitted angles and tailored curves, Miranda’s was a sheer swirl of sensuality. Crepe de chine caressed her full breasts and fondled the still-boyish thighs. She was so beautiful! Cassie thought, feeling a rush of fierce pride, followed as it always was by a crushing wave of envy. She was so stunning. No wonder Jason stared at her with such an open look of anguish and need. He loved her. And in a flash of insight, Cassie realized that Jason was not the only man in the room to love Miranda Darin.

  The stranger was tall, his mane of silver hair carefully groomed to show off its rich fullness. His face was lined, tanned, and overtly handsome. Unlike Jason’s, his were the kind of good looks that called attention to themselves. He was the sort of man people turned to watch as he strode down the street. Was he a movie star? A singer? Cassie tried but couldn’t place him. He was impeccably dressed, in a dark suit and faultless shirt and tie that in their extreme understatement spoke loudly of custom tailors, butlers, limousines.

  “Cassie,” Miranda said, “when did you get here?”

  “She’s been here over an hour,” Jason cut in, “as you’d already know if you’d bothered to check in with your other guests.”

  Ignoring her husband, Miranda crossed the room to take Cassie’s arm. “You look sensational, Cassie. Love that scarf. I’ve one just like it.” She led her toward the tall man who was smiling now, Cassie decided, a very false smile. “I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine. Vance Magnus.”

  “As in Magnus Media?” Cassie asked, trying to stay cool as she shook hands with one of the most powerful men in the communications industry. His logo—a lion clutching a sword—was emblazoned across the letterheads of more television, radio, and cable networks than anyone else’s in the country.

  “As in Vance to you, I’m sure,” he said graciously. His grip was firm and warm and very dry.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Miranda said with her low seductive laugh. “Why should I expect you just to know? This is my sister, Vance. This is Cassie. The one I told you so much about.”

  “Of course, Cassie,” Magnus repeated, his hand still enfolding hers. “I’m so pleased to meet you at last. Delighted.” And though he stood there beaming down at her, Cassie felt a shiver pass through her body. When Cassie was growing up, that sort of feeling—a premonition, really—was known as “someone stepping on your grave.” And though she smiled bravely back at Vance Magnus … she felt her hands and her heart go cold under his overly warm and penetrating gaze.

  Four

  “I hate you, I hate you!” Heather’s high-pitched whine reverberated down the hall the next morning. Cassie sat up and listened as her niece continued to wage what seemed to be an entrenched campaign against her long-suffering Swedish nanny.

  “You will come now, young lady.” Cassie heard Miss Boyeson’s lilting voice follow Heather’s footsteps down the corridor toward Cassie’s room. “You will get into your bath this minute, do you hear? Or else you will soak in cold water, this I promise.”

  The door to Cassie’s bedroom opened abruptly and clicked shut. Cassie could hear Heather’s quick, excited breathing across the room. The maid had drawn the heavy brocade curtains the night before, cloaking the enormous guest bedroom in darkness, and Cassie guessed that Heather thought she had the room to herself.

  “I’ll take your bath if you don’t want it,” Cassie called out. She heard Heather gasp, open the door, slam it, and continue her rampage down the hall. It was just the beginning of a long day of siege.

  “Where is my Easter basket?” the seven-year-old demanded shortly after coffee was served in the oval sun parlor that was used as the Darins’ informal dining room. Tall French windows faced out on a back garden whose bushes and flower beds were still shrouded in burlap for the winter. The rounded walls were painted a rich eggshell enamel, drawing in and reflecting the bright morning light. Enormous tropical ferns perched on plaster pedestals, their tendrils moving gently in the warm moist air that circulated from hidden floor vents. This was Cassie’s favorite room in the Darins’ enormous town house: bright and intimate, it was one of the few places in the house designed for comfort rather than show.

  “You have to look for it, Heather,” Jason said, folding the paper and reaching for his coffee. He had on jeans and a dark blue wool turtleneck. He hadn’t shaved, and Cassie found herself watching him surreptitiously whenever she had the chance. He was so very different from the man she imagined Miranda would have chosen for a husband. When he and Miranda first married—a fact that Cassie had learned about in a brief telegram—Cassie had decided to do a little research on her new brother-in-law. She’d needed to dig no further than a long profile in the Wall Street Journal to discover that Jason Darin was something of a business renegade: a fiercely independent developer whose high standards in architecture and construction had gone against the grain of the 1980s building boom. When others threw up retail and office space as quickly and inexpensively as urban growth demanded, Jason Darin created buildings for the long haul. The insistence on quality paid off: there were waiting lists for Darin-made buildings at a time when twenty-five percent of commercial real estate in the city remained empty.

  Still, the lengthy analysis of the Darin success story, even the meticulous line drawing that accompanied the article, had done nothing to prepare Cassie for the man. The sarcasm, the brooding temper, followed by sudden bursts of warmth and tenderness—Cassie was beginning to realize that it would take more than a long weekend to understand him.

  “I don’t want to look,” Heather cried. “I want my basket—and I want it now.”

  “Don’t whine, darling,” Miranda said as she drifted into the room. She had on a peach-colored satin kimono, her snowy blond hair drawn back from her forehead in a silk scarf. She looked fresh and luminous; the sweet smell of lily of the valley trailed her into the room. Cassie, who’d gotten one of the maids to iron out her gray suit, felt both badly and overdressed.

  “But, Momma, I want my basket!” Heather continued.

  “You’ve made that abundantly clear, Heath,” Jason replied. “Now I’m going to make myself clear: if you want your basket you’re going to have to—along with the rest of the children in the world—go … and … look … for … it!”

  “Jason, don’t,” Miranda said, frowning.

  “Don’t what? Discipline my own daughter? Try to teach her some manners? I swear to God, Miranda, you’re going to—”

  “We have a guest,” Miranda cut in, nodding toward Cassie who tried to look thoroughly involved with buttering her English muffin.

  “No, we have family. And I have the feeling that Cassie doesn’t mind in the least having some sense knocked into her bratty little niece.”

  “I’ve an idea,” Cassie said, pushing back her chair. The venom in Jason’s tone, the distaste in Miranda’s, made Cassie feel slightly ill. “Let’s both of us go find that basket, Heather. Come on…” Unwillingly, Heather followed Cassie out of the sun parlor.

  “I bet it’s in here…” Cassie called, opening up a glass-covered drawer of the breakfront in the huge darkened formal dining room. Two twin Venetian glass chandeliers glittered dimly overhead.

  “Momma wouldn’t like you looking there,” Heather told her as she came up behind Cassie.

  “Why not? There’s just linen and silver,” Cassie replied, standing up. “Nothing from the Easter Bunny.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Heather said as she followed Cassie into the library. “There’s no Easter Bunny. Even I know that.”

  “You know an awful lot, don’t you?” Cassie said, pulling up the cushions on one o
f the built-in window seats.

  “I know that Momma wouldn’t want you doing that.”

  “Well, if you don’t start looking for it somewhere, Heather, you’re never going to find it.”

  “Oh … I know where it is.”

  “You do?” Cassie turned and faced her niece. She would have been a lovely little girl if not for the sour expression she generally wore. Her hair was something like Cassie’s—a light strawberry-blond—tumbling to her shoulders in neatly curled waves that Cassie guessed were set by hand. She had her mother’s green eyes. In fact, her entire genetic makeup seemed drawn from Miranda: the creamy, almost porcelainlike skin, the determined chin, and the wide mouth that offset the slightly too-thin lips. Even her voice—husky and rich—reminded Cassie of Miranda. Not to mention her determination … and temper.

  “Yes. I got the new cook to tell me this morning,” Heather said proudly. “Dumb old cow. Told her I’d tell Momma she’d been stealing unless she did. Daddy hid it downstairs in one of the clothes washers. I should have known. He always hides it in the basement.”

  “Were you born this awful,” Cassie asked, “or have you just been working very hard at it ever since?”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.” After all, Cassie thought, she had nothing to lose by speaking her mind except Heather’s affection. And that was something she very much doubted she was ever likely to receive. How in the world did the child—who seemed to have been given every luxury known to man—turn out so grasping and mean?

  “Momma!” Heather cried as Cassie had known she would. “Momma! Aunt Cassie called me names. I hate her! I hate her!”

  Easter Sunday wasn’t a particularly happy occasion for anyone in the Darin household, as far as Cassie could tell. Jason disappeared after breakfast. Cassie was grateful when Miranda invited her up to her bedroom to pick out something to wear to church, but Miranda left Cassie to rummage through the dressing room alone as she pretended to write letters at the antique secretary by the window. Cassie couldn’t help but notice that Miranda sat staring down at the same blank monogrammed page—pen loosely held in the carefully manicured hand. In profile, Miranda’s features looked overly defined and somewhat drained, the fine blue veins showing through the translucent skin at her temples. Cassie, who accompanied a silent Miranda and a complaining Heather to the Episcopalian church on Madison Avenue, found the inspiring, music-filled service the high point of her morning.