For the good of the family, of course.
9
Caroline
The prices are sky-high, not that we bother about that. And it does cross my mind, being naturally skeptical, whether the claims made by the manufacturers have any validity whatsoever. Surely you’ve finished up a jar of expensive skin cream and wondered if it was worth the expense and the trouble?
No? Huh. Well, I have an image to maintain, a face to protect, you see. It’s what my family expects of me, though you certainly could argue it is a shallow expectation, and not well-matched with my talents, which do go beyond my sharp high cheekbones, long blonde hair, and deep-set brown eyes. I did graduate Princeton, after all, with distinction.
I let Marc at Uriel take care of my hair, that’s every two weeks minimum. But rich as we Crowes are, we do not have a live-in skincare professional, so my mornings always begin with these tubes and bottles, no matter how late I stayed out, no matter how many stimulants I’ve indulged in. I tell myself—and perhaps this is a lie—that the products mitigate some of the effects of lack of sleep, though it is equally likely that my looks are resilient simply because I have not yet crossed the chasm of thirty.
I’m twenty-eight, so closing fast. But let’s put that dreary thought aside.
There’s a system to it, as there is for nearly anything worth doing. First a hot washcloth over my face, not scrubbing but wiping off the effluence of a night’s restlessness and warming up my skin. Then I squeeze some of the cleanser into my palm, dab it on my face, and rub it in with my fingertips, making circles, going down either side of my nose, keeping a safe distance from my eyes.
I watch my fingers move but keep glancing back at myself, into my eyes, as though checking to see who is looking back at me.
I wipe the cleanser off with organic cotton pads, then splash cucumber water on my face, then go through the rest of the bottles: exfoliator, toner, astringent, serum, moisturizer, in their proper order.
When I am finished and the canvas is ready for makeup, I take a moment to look at my bare, clean face. I am on the point of an idea—and you know how it is, the interrupted thoughts are always thoughts of brilliance—when the jeerlings swoop down, screeching in my ears, this time about the size of my pores and the small red bump that has dared to appear on the left quadrant of my forehead. They open their wide mouths and let out a torrent of noise, quickly moving beyond the details of my skin to the whole sweep of my life, pecking and cawing as though I am already a carcass ready to be picked over.
I close my eyes tight and wait for them to veer off, or at least retake their perches nearby, but waiting is just another thing for the jeerlings to mock.
Quickly I wave on some Chanel mascara and a swipe of lip gloss, and get on with my day, such as it is.
Let me introduce Natalie, whom I’ve known since pre-school. Her family’s got a brownstone over on Seventy-Fourth where she still lives. Her nanny used to make the best chocolate-chip cookies and her older brother used to be generous with his weed, so in middle school everyone hung out there. She knows me as well as anyone, or at least she’s been around me for almost my entire life.
Nevertheless, don’t get the idea I tell her anything, not anything that matters. I’m not a person with confidantes, for God’s sake.
Natalie’s clothes are the kind of clothes that look casual but cost a fortune. Her hair is glossy and unstyled, the sort of thick abundance that’s possible with an upbringing of top-quality food and personal trainers. She’s always had a weakness for funky shoes, and I glance under the table to see a pair of Kate Spades she’s had for about ten years, a slingback with a super-pointy toe made of a delicate brown animal fur, the kind of shoe you’d wear out to a party but she wears to take out the trash.
Not that Natalie Delevan takes out any trash, ever.
We’re having lunch in a diner, which is delicious above and beyond the greasy fries because it’s the kind of thing that would amusingly piss Gordon off. His rants on how slumming is in poor taste are truly a thing to behold. While it’s true that I make an effort with Gordon and want him to be happy with me—I do live in his apartment after all, it’s just common courtesy—in this one thing, going to diners and dive bars—what he calls slumming—I go against his wishes because it pleases me so much.
“These onion rings are like crack,” says Natalie. “Now that I’m doing that 5-2 diet thing, I am totally a hog on the feeding days.”
“‘Feeding days’ does sound sort of hoggish,” I say. “What is it again?”
“You fast, well, semi-fast on two days. Five hundred calories only. Then the other days you can eat whatever. It’s bliss.”
“You don’t need to lose any more weight.”
Natalie shrugs. “I don’t need to gain any, either. But you’re missing the point, Caro—with 5-2, I can eat a plate of onion rings. Not half an onion ring but the entire plate, and my jeans don’t get any tighter. And no barfing necessary. I was never a fan of barfing.”
Bulimia spread through our middle school like wildfire at one point. Natalie got chubby and resentful, and still brings it up often.
I shrug. “I just do trade-offs. Like, I’m having this black and white milkshake, but then I’ll skip dinner.” That queasiness hasn’t let up anyway, so skipping dinner won’t be difficult.
“Thought you were on the cocaine diet.”
“Nah, not anymore. I’m done with that.”
“Glad to hear it.” She’s looking at me suspiciously. One of the things I like about Natalie is that she’s doesn’t try to hide her suspicion, it’s all out in the open. And of course I can hardly blame her. I am lying, after all.
“Anyway, what I was telling you…I was thinking this would be a quiet Christmas, just what I was looking for,” I say, noticing that Natalie’s face looks over-Botoxed between her eyebrows. “But Wilson called to say he’s coming east in a few days. So just ugh.”
“Eh, who cares? It’s not like you have to change his diaper or something.”
“I have never changed a diaper in my life.” I mean, come on. Does she know me at all?
“I wasn’t being literal, silly. Besides, Wilson is cute.”
I roll my eyes until they ache.
“I know, married, blah blah blah,” she says, chomping on another onion ring. “I’m not saying I’m gonna hit on him or anything crazy. Besides, I know you—you’re just jealous that he’s got a wife now and you don’t get all his attention anymore.”
“Oh, please. I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” I should never have brought this up. The thing that’s gnawing at me, I have to keep to myself. For one thing, the entire Delevan family is in therapy, and has been practically since birth; I can’t complain about Wilson’s new venture, she wouldn’t get it at all.
Natalie laughs. “Maybe it’s just because I miss my brother so much now that he’s left the city. There’s nobody else who really gets what it’s like, you know? Gets the whole Delevan thing?”
I nod, trying to be polite enough but not encourage, but picking up on hints has never been Natalie’s strong suit. She wanders off into stories about me and Wilson from high school, then middle school. I stifle a yawn.
“I remember you were so protective about him,” she continues. “Forging your Mom’s signature on stuff so he wouldn’t have to deal with her bullshit. You were even shopping for him, making sure he had clothes—remember that trip to Bloomie’s that time? Melissa got nabbed for shoplifting and you had to show all the receipts from the boy’s department?”
I nod slowly. I know she’s talking about things that actually happened, I remember them too. But even so, it’s as though all of it happened to someone else. They feel like another person’s memories, not mine.
“Well,” I say. I look over at the big guy at the grill, scraping bits of meat and burnt cheese into a heap and scooping it into the garbage. “That was a long time ago,” is all I can come up with. I don’t know how to put any of what I�
�m feeling into words, which is ironic given that my head feels incessantly flooded with words all the time, so many words that sometimes I feel like I am choking on them.
What is Wilson going to tell this Sandie Shearer? Are there any limits on what he might say? Will he consider the effects on other people, or is he only thinking of himself?
I know the answer to that last one. Of course he’s only thinking of himself, that’s how we Crowes are built.
Natalie is tapping her finger on her chin, thinking. “You hate that he moved to California,” she says, looking at me more closely than I like. “Just admit it, Caro.” I look away, hoping she’ll get distracted and start up on some other topic. “You feel like he dumped you. I don’t mean rationally you think that, but subconsciously.”
I sigh. “You feel like going shoe-shopping?”
“Are you mad at him about something else then?”
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Can’t believe she didn’t take the shoe-shopping bait.
“You’re sort of pale,” she says, peering at me. “Okay, I’m just gonna come out and ask it. I’ve always sort of wondered…it’s not…nothing…nothing happened with Wilson, did it? Like…that way?”
“God, no. Nothing like that…you’re ridiculous. Just—I just want everyone to stay in their lanes, you know? Live your California life, meditate and eat avocados or whatever they do all day. Wilson’s always trying to elbow me out of the spotlight with his drama, like an emotionally rampaging bull in a china shop. I just don’t need that right now.”
Natalie shrugs. “A cute bull, though,” she says. “And anyway, who wants to be in the spotlight all the time? Sometimes it’s good to hang out in sweatpants and not have to try so hard.”
That’s right, Natalie Delevan said that. Like she even owns any sweatpants.
Natalie rushes off to go shopping with her rich aunt who visits every Christmas and buys her practically anything she wants. Of course, what Natalie wants is something money can’t buy, and it occurs to me that possibly that is true for everyone, only some of us don’t know it.
I pay the bill, leave a good tip, and duck into the bathroom for a quick bump. Just pulling the little glass vial out of my pocket gives me a burst of anticipatory pleasure. I give the vial a good shake, then carefully spill a small heap on the flat spot between my thumb and forefinger after making a fist. I bring it up to my nose, cover one nostril, and draw the powder up in one big sucking inhalation.
I left something out before. Slumming is one thing Gordon hates for me to do. Drugs would be another, but he has no idea I’ve ever touched them. That’s the thing about Gordon—he’s always on the move, always hustling in ten different directions, his attention divided. He travels for work constantly; sometimes it’s practically like our apartment is the hotel and he has an entire life somewhere else. So I have more freedom than you might think, even if he can be seriously bossy about certain things. He’s got an opinion on everything and like any man in his position, he wants things the way he wants them. So I try to give him the idea that he’s getting what he wants, even when he isn’t.
I try to present a Caroline to him that is the Caroline he wants to see, if you grasp what I mean.
And with the unsettling clarity cocaine can confer, I suddenly realize that Mummy doesn’t do that at all. She is who she is, unbudgeable and steadfast in her own twisted way, for better or worse. And for a nanosecond, I feel a burst of respect for her.
I wander around the Upper East Side for a few more hours, going into some skeevy bar bathrooms to do more coke, and looking for boots. I try on a billion pairs but love none of them, though I have narrowed the parameters somewhat: black, no buckles. Still undecided on heel height and whether they should come above the knee. That over-the-knee look—it’s trendy, you could call it trashy, yet it has an undeniable appeal. I can’t quite decide if they project medieval badass or skanky need for attention. If they’re expensive enough, does that keep them from being cheap? The existential question of my zip code.
You might think that I would be reckless with the credit cards, being as loaded back on blow as I am right this minute, and given that Gordon isn’t fussy about how much I spend. But being high makes me study the boots rather than want to own them. I inspect the stitching with an intensity that frightens store clerks. I think careening philosophical thoughts about the history of boots, how the lack of boots changed the course of wars, how they can be eminently descriptive of a person’s personality or social status. I think about the animals whose skins form the boots, and where they might have lived, what they might have thought about.
I had a friend (who moved to Bolivia of all places, and we lost touch) who used to love his cocaine more than pretty much anything. He loved it so much he ended up in rehab for at least a couple of rounds; but in any case, I bring him up only to mention that he called cocaine “personality,” as in, “Let’s leave this boring party, score some personality, and hit a club.” It’s an apt term, though as anyone who’s spent any time with intoxicated people knows, the person who is high imagines far more personality is being expressed than anyone else.
When the sky is almost dark, I straggle home, bootless. I pop a Xanax in the elevator to help with coming down. Am startled to see Gordon standing in the foyer when the elevator doors open.
“Caroline,” he says. He slips his arm around me and kisses my cheek, then lets me go and makes a grand gesture toward the wall at the end of the foyer. When I left the apartment that morning, a pair of Audubons had hung there, paintings Mummy inherited from her family. They have been replaced by a Leslie Dahlquist, a large canvas of two nearly life-sized naked women lying down together, their flesh bruised and lumpy. I acknowledge that the painting is masterful even though I do not like looking at it.
“They aren’t pretty,” I say.
“Pretty is not always the point.”
“You like pretty.”
“Of course!” He looks annoyed. “She is painting the inside and outside both at once, don’t you see?”
I look again at the women. Their nipples are so realistically rendered you feel like pinching them. “I like what she did with their bodies,” I say. “It’s their faces, their expressions…and okay, it’s…I understand the painting, I see what she’s after. It’s just that…why do you want that in your foyer? Why do you want the first thing people see when they enter the apartment to be anguish?”
Gordon leans his head back and laughs. “You’re such a delicate flower,” he says, not for the first time.
“Oh, shut up.”
He takes my hand and kisses me on the cheek again. “Dahlquist is very big with someone I’m currently doing business with. It’s a tactical decision, not a decorating one. But still…I do love it. I’ve been standing here in the foyer for a long time, watching the light change on its surface, studying their bodies. They’re not conventionally beautiful, but I find them arousing. Don’t you? Or perhaps you need to be with them for a time before you feel the effect. Dahlquist’s work has immediate impact, there’s no denying that, but it has other effects as well if you give it some time to settle in, if you don’t give in to the urge to look away.”
Thank god the Xanax is doing its job or I would be suffering even more than I already am. On the other hand, this entire exercise with Gordon would be much easier if I’d had a bump just before leaving the elevator. I would effortlessly be able to serve up a platter of arty bullshit for him to feast upon. As it is, however, all I want to do is get away, be by myself, far from the gaze of the woman on the right who seems the unhappier of the two, and blaming us for it.
“All right then,” he says, and I hear in his voice that I’m about to be dismissed. “I have to take a quick shower and get going. Dinner out tonight. You have plans?”
He’s funny.
Gordon disappears down the corridor and into his bedroom. I go to the kitchen and take the Miyabi chef’s knife with a birchwood handle from the long magnetic bar that
holds all the knives. I stand for a long moment in front of the Dahlquist, considering. Then I press the tip of the knife into the canvas, between the legs of the woman on the right. The material gives way in a satisfying manner, and I make two more slices in different places before returning the knife to the magnetic bar and going to my room.
10
1998
Maine
In Maine, the edges of everything were not dulled by humidity, so that the deck chair, the posts on the porch, the shapes of spruces—they were as crisp as the air, begging to be painted. At least this is what Ainsley Tennant said as everyone started to move away from the long table where they had lunch in the shade of a maple. She was a young talent being pushed hard by a New York gallery Gordon Crowe patronized, and he had invited her to Maine for the weekend to introduce her around to a few collectors he knew who summered there. And because, though she talked too much, she was beautiful in a somewhat unusual way, and he liked to look at her.
“I’ve never played before,” Ainsley said to Wilson, who had given her a croquet mallet and told her which team she was on.
“Glad you’re not on my team then!” he said, grinning. Eight-year-old Wilson was missing his front teeth and so adorably cute he could get away with saying almost anything. He shoved his friend Arnie and laughed.
Caroline knocked a ball back and forth, trying different striking techniques. Her blonde hair fell straight down in a sheet of yellow; her legs were tan and she had the coltish look of a ten year old about to grow quickly. Lillian left the lunch table before the main course was served, and then reappeared, seeming to burst out of the billowing hydrangea bushes that flanked the house.
“I want to play!” she said, her voice thin and falsely enthusiastic.
“You’re on Caro’s team,” Wilson told her. “Okay, so it’s Dad, me, and Arnie on one side, and Caro, Mom, and Miss Tennant on the other.”
You Made Your Bed: A Novel Page 5