“And?” asked Wallis. “Bo invited us for a weekend. You’ll be back in plenty of time for the meeting.”
“How would you feel, Cricket, if Wallis and I just jetted out of town?” I said, turning to my mother.
“I’m a woman, Daisy, not a goldfish,” she said. “I can feed and care for myself.”
Next: “The airfare must be expensive this last minute...”
“I don’t want to hear one word about the expense of it.” Cricket was on top of that one, too. “I think I have some frequent flier miles tucked away somewhere.”
“But work—”
“You and Miles are on a break.” Wallis eyed me with such glee I forgot to be sad about the fact that this was true. “We have to go shopping. And you, especially, Dodo. All your clothes are terrible.”
My darling sister. “Even the dress you’re wearing?” I asked.
“Bring hats, too,” said Bo, back from the bar, sliding in beside us. “If you have them.”
“For the party?” Wallis asked.
“No.” He grinned. “For church.”
“I need another drink.” I had the urge to stick my tongue out at all of them as I walked away. “Cricket, want to join me?”
“Am I in trouble?” Cricket said as we headed toward the booze.
“You shouldn’t have encouraged this trip,” I said. “Blake might be in Charleston. Wallis is going to go hunt him down.”
“So?” Cricket said. We scooted past a group that included a reality television star obliging people with selfies. “Why shouldn’t she?”
I halted, stared at my mother, astonished.
Cricket saw my expression, shrugged, and kept threading through the crowd. “Maybe he’s come to his senses,” she said.
“And what if he hasn’t?” I said, following again in her wake.
“Well, then, Daisy, maybe she’ll get some closure.”
“At what cost?” I asked, dodging a guest gesturing vigorously with a glass of red wine. “I’ve never known exposure to even more pain and possible humiliation to bring closure.”
“Perhaps that is because you’ve never been in love.”
An accusation, delivered so frankly, it took me a moment to really hear it. “That’s not true.”
Cricket grinned, lifted a finger as though she’d caught me and gave me a push toward the drinks line. “Get me another club soda, will you? I’m going back to your sister.”
The wine was absolute crap, and I hadn’t been planning on a refill, but this was what the night was doing to me. As I waited my turn, I stared at my phone, searching for a good reason for me—and Wallis—to avoid Charleston.
“You’d think they’d have another bar,” said someone behind me. I was in the middle of a nice little headline skim, but glanced up briefly, murmuring my agreement and catching sight of a pair of gorgeous, private-sector-paycheck shoes the color of rattlesnake skin. I focused back on my phone, hoping I might be spared the inhumanity of long queue chitchat. “Daisy Richardson,” the voice said, with just the slightest hint of bossiness, “you’re ruining my big surprise.”
I looked up in confusion, which swiftly became shock, as she opened her arms for an embrace. Without full comprehension of what I was doing, I hugged her, smelling the perfume of her hair, noticing her shoulder blades under her jacket, feeling awkward and big-boned in her arms.
“I’ve done it, then,” she said, pulling back and smiling.
I was incapable of words. When I spoke, I forced myself to do so cautiously. Calmly. “Ari,” I said, wondering, doubting, despairing. “What are you doing in DC?”
She smiled, her teeth uncommonly white, her canines just the slightest bit wolfish. “Atlas,” she said. “Why else?”
Nineteen
“Are you surprised to see me?” she asked again.
Ariel had been just a picture on my internet browser, a headshot I could inspect, but now here she was standing before me. The memory of Atlas’s mouth on mine fluttered inside me, soft but persistent. Somehow, I stammered, “Yes. I am thoroughly shocked.”
“I just landed last week,” she said, clearly pleased. “And this is really my first night out on the town. And here you are. It’s fate.” The line toward the bar inched forward. “I have been asking Atlas for your phone number. I was hoping he could set us up on a friend date. After three years away, I don’t have many friends left in the city.”
“So,” I said, trying to get my wits about me, “you’re back to visit?”
“I’ve moved back for good,” she said, blunt, smiling.
“Right,” I said. “Totally.” I looked for a lifeline. Around me were only the faces of strangers.
“Long-distance relationships are impossible. And transatlantic long distance for that matter. But this job appeared, and so I called him and asked if he was really committed to making us work. I mean, if he had met someone in the meantime here in DC, that would’ve affected my decision to move. I think I would’ve stayed in England.”
My breath shortened and my fingers had started to tingle, but I didn’t feel in immediate danger of a panic attack. I considered running away, changing my number. Anything to survive being stuck with her for the remainder of this line. “That’s perfect.”
“It is!” she said. Her lips curled upward. “As soon as I began the conversation about the possibility of me moving back, it was like the floodgates opened for him. He confessed that he was really lonely here. He even said that he’d been jealous thinking of me being single in London. Is it bad that I loved hearing that?”
In the wake of this question, for which I had no answer, I wondered if Atlas had confessed to my kiss. Ari’s face was still perfectly composed, but I had to suspect that this was the type of statement meant to quash any claims I might have over him. “Atlas is”—I spoke like a child, reading a sentence aloud for the first time—“great.”
Would the bartender judge me if I ordered a tequila sunrise? I remember it tasting pretty decent in college.
Ari cocked her head, evaluated me. “What do you want?” she asked.
What did I want? Hmm. For my life to have meaning? For my sister and my mother to be happy and settled? For the air inside my lungs to feel like it was air, again, instead of salt water? And if I’m really being greedy, Atlas.
Ari continued to look at me expectantly, and I realized we had made it to the front of the line. She’d been asking what I wanted to drink. The bartender, who must’ve been about sixteen, wore an oversize black vest and appeared very eager to serve us. “Wine,” I said, gathering myself, remembering where I was and who I was supposed to be. “White.” After she ordered her whiskey, she tipped, and so I felt compelled to dig through my wallet. I had a twenty and a one. The former was out of the question, so I guiltily stuffed the dollar bill in the tip bowl.
Drinks and fresh cocktail napkins in hand, we moved out of the way of the guests behind us. Ari took a sip of her two-finger pour, grimaced, then told me an overly long story about doing a blind taste test of cheap and expensive whiskeys one night after a client dinner that had turned into drinks at a Central London speakeasy. She was the only person who could differentiate the top shelf stuff from the swill, she claimed. “Girl power,” she said, finishing her tale and cheersing her glass with mine.
You beat the men at a whiskey tasting. Good for you! That is precisely what the third wave feminists fought for. “You mentioned a new job,” I said instead. “Atlas told me you were lobbying?”
Ari wrinkled her nose. “You can call it legally bribing, Daisy. I know you want to.”
Legally bribing. I hadn’t heard that one before. Bo and L.K. would love it. “I wouldn’t presume.”
“My firm had an opening for a principal here in DC, and I went for it. I may just make enough money to live here.”
“The market has accelerated since you�
�ve been gone. There was an NPR story the other day—” I stopped myself, wishing I’d ordered the tequila.
“Did Atlas tell you his rent is going up ten percent this year? His lease is up in two months, and I’m considering asking him to move in with me... Daisy,” Ari said, “how old are you?”
“Thirty-four,” I answered, mechanical, before I could absorb what she’d just revealed.
“Baby!” she exclaimed. “I am thirty damn eight. You still have some good eggs left in there. Mine are shriveled like capers. I have plans, and I don’t have much time.”
A waiter carrying a tray of tiny toasts and caviar stopped before us. Ari partook; I did not, unable to bring myself to eat roe in the middle of this particular conversation.
“I know I just met you,” I said as the waiter moved on, “but I have the feeling your eggs will do as you command.” I didn’t mean this as a compliment, I felt too petty and rattled for that, but she flipped her hair behind her shoulder in a way that suggested she was flattered.
My phone rang; finally, someone who could get me out of there. One of the lawyers. A telemarketer. Someone informing me I’d just won a cruise. I’d take any of them.
But no—it was Atlas. “Speak of the devil.” I showed her my screen.
“Please don’t tell him,” Ari said, covering my phone with her hand. “When I ask him to move in, I want it to be a surprise.”
I pressed decline. She could have her secret. But also: Atlas could have my silence. He hadn’t told me that Ari was coming to DC. Our friendship, I could only assume, wasn’t as mended as I’d thought.
“I know you and I haven’t known each other that long,” Ari said, earnest, “although it feels like it’s been years. Atlas talks about how close you are. He trusts you, so I trust you.”
But he hadn’t trusted me with this. And by this I meant her, her plans for a shared apartment, her agenda for her eggs.
“This is where I’m leasing,” she told me, pulling up a page on her phone. “Do you think he’ll like it? Or is the building too generic for him?” She had chosen a modern high-rise along the H Street corridor, once a thriving commercial part of town before succumbing to urban decay. People were saying now that it was “back,” which I understood to mean there were new vegan restaurants and apartment buildings with rooftop pools and cabanas. I scrolled through pictures of a marbled lobby complete with coffee shop and zoomed-in shots of cabinets and light fixtures. “Will Atlas like it?”
“As long as it gets Premier League on the television, he’ll be happy,” I said, stepping back onto the heel of someone behind me, needing some distance but finding none. As I corrected my position, I somehow wound up even closer to her. The truth: he’d hate the apartment. No cozy corners or exposed brick. He despised open floor plans. Why pay DC prices to live in a glass tower that could be anywhere? We were in complete agreement on the subject. At least, we used to be.
“I just wish he didn’t have to travel so much,” she said sadly. “I just got here, and he’s already going away. I’m rooting for him to get out of journalism.” Ari smiled, if you could call it that. Then the edges of her mouth dripped back down. “He’ll get paid a little,” she continued. “No retirement. No benefits. And the owner of the paper he’s freelancing for is a billionaire. I mean, come on.”
“Atlas is great at what he does.” I didn’t like the fact Atlas had, by omission, allowed her to ambush me. But the way she was talking about his work—flippant, eye-rolly—I really didn’t like. “We need more people like him.”
Ari made a sound of agreement, then waved across the room at a person she recognized. “He is trying, I guess, to convince people that the first amendment matters to democracy. If I were Atlas, I would’ve said a long time ago, ‘You know what, I’ve done my part. You all go live in the small-minded world you’ve made for yourself.’”
“What would you have Atlas do?” I asked, miffed at her open cynicism. “Tend to a garden somewhere?”
“You’ve read Voltaire,” she said. She wore a turquoise ring on her middle finger, and when she gestured, it clinked her glass.
“This is DC,” I said. “Find me one bookshelf without Candide.”
“I so admire people like you,” Ari said. “You’ve got a sense of the world that is so unique. It’s old-fashioned, isn’t it? I’m so glad we’re friends.” Ari took the final sip of her whiskey and declared pleasantly that it was so great to see me. Before I could escape, she handed me a business card. “I do have to discuss with you something related to worky-work.” She sung this last bit, as though it were part of a nursery rhyme. “With Miles on HELP Committee—well, we have to talk about the short list for new HHS secretary.”
“As soon as we start to hear names, I’ll be happy to have a conversation,” I said, relieved that this was over and that she didn’t know I was on leave.
“I’ll give you a name.” Ari tipped her head toward mine. “POTUS wants a yes man. Or should I say, yes woman. Word is she’ll tap the Senate’s own Melinda Darley.”
I looked over Ari’s silk-draped shoulder, searching for Bo. This could be an important bit of gossip, one that might help me get back in the fold. I said something to Ari about being in touch, then crossed the room, handing my half-drunk glass to a cheerful waiter with a tray full of crumpled napkins and shrimp skewers.
Bo was by the exit, putting on his coat, turning up his collar. “Melinda Darley,” I said, catching him. “On the short list. We’ve got to tell Miles.”
From his unchanging expression, I could tell this was already old news. “Miles already knows this, doesn’t he? Why am I two steps behind everybody? I didn’t used to be this way.”
“I just found out five minutes ago, so, you’re not two steps behind,” he said, reassuring. “Only like half a step. Maybe even a third of one.”
Around the room, everyone else was happy. Everyone else was socializing gracefully. Everyone else was publishing books and renting new apartments and doing great at their jobs.
Bo laid a supportive hand on my shoulder. “Let me know about Charleston, will you?” Then he left, taking Miles with him.
I considered returning to the party, finding Cricket and Wallis, stuffing some cheese straws into my pockets and making a mad dash for the exit. But Ari was still in there, and the thought of having to see her beautiful face again, hear more about the wonderful life she was building for herself and Atlas, destroyed my appetite. Coming here, to this party filled with accomplished people, people not under investigation by the IRS, people without crooked fathers, people who’d found love and kept it, had been a mistake. Knowing Cricket would absolutely chastise me later, I left without saying goodbye.
Twenty
My psychologist, Patricia, works out of a garden-level suite in an old brick house in Georgetown. The irony isn’t lost on me that I seek refuge so close to the house on P. But she understands me, I like her voice, and she does not have a waiting room, which I appreciate. If you aren’t sad and lonely already, a therapist’s waiting room filled with other haunted souls and back issues of The New Yorker will make you so.
I was telling Patricia the very uplifting story of how, after the book party, I went home to my apartment and sat in my closet for about an hour. This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who’s been in therapy, but before long I was talking about my childhood. “When I was young,” I said, glad to have her willing ear and comfortable, feathery pillows to lean against, “I built forts in my closet on P Street. It’s funny, how it happened, but around the time I grew breasts that closet fort became a fortress.”
She told me that made sense. She reminded me that children often seek out quiet, dark spaces.
Patricia sits serenely in her leather club chair and is usually always wearing cashmere. She favors blue blazers and takes notes in a black jotter. She is always drinking cold sparkling water. She has one teenage son.
That’s the extent of my knowledge of Patricia. Although I hadn’t seen her since my father’s death for reasons that included lack of time and money, I knew I could count on her professional distance and impartiality, even though it had become nearly impossible to find someone in this town who hadn’t already made up their mind about me.
“That childhood closet,” I said, “was my sacred space. Until my father tore the door off its brackets one night I refused to come down for dinner.”
She asked me how old I was when this happened.
“Fourteen. It was a cheap bifold that never ran smoothly on its tracks. He ordered me to come downstairs, so I yelled that I hated him and wouldn’t eat with him even if he paid me.”
I must’ve been scared, she observed.
Patricia had a small water feature, a fountain that gurgled over smooth rocks. I stared at it long enough that my heart rate slowed to normal. The truth—and I’d really never dwelled on it—was that yes, I had been scared. I’d been terrified. But my father eventually apologized. And it seemed like one of those things that should be forgiven. My father, powerful, under constant pressure, was a person, and people make mistakes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. My tennis coach had that on a bumper sticker. It sounded, at the time, wise and true. Now it sounded wildly off the mark.
Patricia redirected my attention to the particular closet I found myself in last night.
It was dark, I was sad, and there, among the skirts that no longer fit and the special occasion dresses I no longer wore, even the dust bunnies around my shoes looked vicious. “The closet in my current apartment has a curtain. I sat in there and pulled it shut.”
And what was I thinking about?
“My life not being where I want it, or where I expected it to be.” I paused, reflected on the images from last night. “With work, especially. Miles unilaterally decided that I shouldn’t be at the office. Which is really hard, because I want to be there. I need to be there.”
For the money?
“Yes, but no. My father, he did good, but he also screwed things up so monumentally. Work was my only way of righting the scales. With time, perhaps I might’ve been able to do enough good to balance his bad. And now that chance is slipping away.”
Ladies of the House Page 15