Hot Property

by Michele Kleier

  Her bags are already packed with her Lily Pulitzer flowered dresses and skirts—those cheery colors and crazy prints always make her smile—and sitting in her parents’ office, Isabel needs only to grab her luggage and find a taxi.

  Between rush-hour traffic and an accident on the Grand Central Parkway, Isabel’s nerves are completely on edge by the time she arrives at the JetBlue terminal, but her anxiety fades as soon as she gets through security and sees Michael and the boyish grin he’s beaming directly at her.

  “Finally!” he says, scooping her up in his arms; easy enough for him since he’s 6’1” to her 5’3”. (Kate is just under 5’2”—both girls are small, but have huge personalities that make everyone who meets them think they are much taller.) “I was getting worried,” Michael says. That is so like him, Isabel thinks. He has this sweetness about him, and it’s as if he wants to take care of everyone; in college he had a handful of dogs living with him at all times, ones he’d found hiding in the streets of West Philadelphia, or abandoned by some of the students he tutored. He couldn’t say no. And the fact that he is truly gorgeous, with beautifully sculpted cheekbones, aquamarine eyes, and thick, dirty blond hair that reaches almost to his shoulders, doesn’t hurt either. He takes her breath away.

  “Sorry—the traffic, the day . . . oh, I’m happy to be here,” Isabel says.

  “I’m so happy just to see you,” he says, kissing her. “The flight’s about to board. We should head over to the gate.”

  “I need to stop for a few magazines—I forgot to pack them,” Isabel says.

  “Got them,” Michael says, and holds out a plastic bag. Inside are copies of People and Us Weekly, a package of nuts and raisins, and a bag of M&M’s, Isabel’s favorite. “Airplane care package, courtesy of yours truly.” He smiles again, but this time more shyly, more sweetly. It’s that sweetness that gets her every time. Oh, was she lucky when Kate’s boyfriend Scott introduced her to Michael, who was a few years younger than Scott and in the same fraternity. Lucky, lucky, lucky. And she knows Michael thinks he’s lucky as well. An only child from a small town outside of Oklahoma City, Michael admires Isabel’s sophistication and her fierce attachment to her family. “I envy you your childhood,” he’s said more than once.

  There’s a slight delay before takeoff, and the plane sits on the runway for a while. Isabel sighs, but she is merely annoyed, not anxious. Both her mother and sister are terrified of flying, take at least one Ativan before they even get on the security line, and have dozens of rituals—always sitting on the left side of the plane, knocking three times with their left hand, saying “toy toy toy” and touching red before they step onto the plane, and always wearing the same clothes on every plane trip (Kate’s rule). They also check the weather up and down the coast for a week before flying, and once delayed a trip to Boca so many times because of a potential hurricane, they ultimately ran out of days to go and canceled the whole trip. For Isabel, though, boarding a jumbo jet is just another version of stepping into a taxi.

  As soon as she thinks of her mother and sister, she pulls out her phone. Since the flight is stalled on the runway, she might as well call one of them. She’s just about to dial Kate when Michael leans over and places his hand over hers, effectively arresting the gesture.

  “Who are you calling?” he asks. “No, let me guess. Your mom.”

  “Actually, no, my sister first.”

  “I was close, no surprise.” He continues to hold her hand.

  “And is that a problem?” Isabel feels the tiniest prickle of annoyance with him; this is not the first time he’s alluded to the fact that she calls her mother and sister so often. Nor is it the first time that he’s expressed a mild displeasure with it.

  “Kind of, now that you mention it,” he says.

  “Michael,” Isabel begins mildly, extricating her hand from his grasp. “I’m not going through this again. You know how close I am with my family, especially my mom and sister.” Michael, still looking a bit sullen, nods. “So I’m never going to stop talking to them as much as I do. I’m just not.”

  “It’s not just a lot—you talk to them all the time!” Michael protests.

  “Not all the time,” Isabel says suggestively, trying to be nicer, and laces her fingers through his. But this time, he’s not holding her back from anything; the gesture is reciprocal. “Besides, aren’t you crazy about my family, too? Haven’t you always said that you envy how close we are?”

  “That’s true,” Michael says. “I guess.”

  “There’s room for everyone,” she says.

  “I don’t know, I guess so . . .” Michael doesn’t sound so sullen now.

  “I know you understand,” Isabel tells him, and then leans over to give him a quick but somehow sexy kiss. Michael has a very short temper, meaning he gets upset and an instant later he is like a puppy dog. He smiles and picks up his latest script—he’s recently landed a small role in an off-Broadway play, his first such role ever—leaving her to place her call to Kate without further interruption while they’re still on the runway. She loves Michael; no, she is completely in love with Michael. But his failure to fully understand her attachment to her family has got to change.

  Once they are up in the air, Isabel opens the bag of nuts and raisins and has just opened People when the southern-accented baritone of the pilot intrudes on her plan. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain, and ah have an important announcement for y’all,” he begins. Isabel looks up from the glossy pages of the magazine, a slight wave of fear going through her. She hopes nothing is seriously wrong. The truth is, she tends to tense up quickly, while Michael is a rock; he rarely gets upset over things. But when Isabel looks, Michael is gone; she never even noticed that he got up.

  “This is kind of an unusual announcement,” the captain continues, “and, in fact, ah need the help of one of our passengers to make it.” There is a hiccup of static and some muffled voices from the cockpit. The magazine slips, unheeded, from Isabel’s lap, and her fingers tensely grip the armrests.

  “Isabel?” says a voice over the loudspeaker.

  She instantly recognizes Michael’s rich, resonant, born-to-be-an-actor voice. But what’s he doing in the cockpit with the pilot? She realizes this is nonsense, that her imagination is running away from her (terrorists? hijackers?); she knows she’s being ridiculous, but she’s gripped by anxiety nonetheless.

  “Isabel, please listen,” Michael says. “Will you marry me? I’ll be back in my seat in a minute—please don’t say no to me.”

  Michael is proposing to her on an airplane? This is so Michael, she thinks—very movie star! And crazy, impulsive, over-the-top, and totally romantic! And now Michael is back at her seat, kneeling down on one knee in the narrow aisle, extending a small navy blue box tied with a white satin ribbon.

  “So will you marry me, Isabel?” he asks softly.

  Isabel takes the box from him, her hands trembly. She undoes the ribbon and lifts the cover. Inside sits a large round diamond, wrapped in pavé diamonds and sitting on a pavé diamond band.

  “Yes,” she says in a tiny voice. “Of course!” she says loudly, delightedly; in an instant the other passengers have burst into applause, and Michael is looking both relieved and ecstatic. A pair of flight attendants appear with two big bottles of Möet & Chandon and two crystal champagne flutes, and the festive sounds of corks being popped can be heard amid the wild clapping. There, a mile above the earth and surrounded by a crowd of strangers, Isabel and Michael kiss. Even though he sometimes has to fly out to L.A. for work, he promises Isabel that he will never, ever ask her to leave New York—or her family. And given their little moment of tension earlier in the flight, this seems to her an especially important declaration—a must, in fact!

  When the commotion dies down, and Isabel and Michael are snuggling in their seats, he does make one request.

  “Just for the weeke
nd, let it be our secret, okay?” he says. “Even though you adore your family—and so do I—let’s not tell them just yet, okay?”

  And so, even though Isabel’s dying to call her sister and brother and parents the instant the plane touches down in Palm Beach, she agrees to Michael’s request. After all, it was almost as sweet and romantic as the proposal itself, and she doesn’t want to do anything to spoil it.

  But later she finds this is too big a secret to keep to herself, and so, feeling only the slightest twinge of guilt, she waits until Michael is taking a long, hot shower to call first her parents, and then her sister and brother. If he’s going to be her husband, he’ll have to understand—and accept—her relationship with her family, and that’s that.

  Her mother is thrilled, of course, and her father sounds like he is crying. Kate shrieks “Oh, my God!” into the phone. “I can’t wait to plan a wedding. I can’t believe you are engaged!”

  The water is still running in the shower, so Isabel figures she has time to make one last call, and she does—to Jonathan. He’s as thrilled as the rest of the family and the most surprised, she thinks, and Isabel knows that if she could see him, he’d have an enormous innocent grin on his face, shocked that his big sister is old enough to get married. He’s an angel, her brother. Just sweetness and goodness through and through.

  “Michael is going to be the best husband,” Jonathan is saying. “I’ve seen you two guys together, and I can just tell.”

  Michael steps out of the shower while Isabel is on the phone with her brother. Her fiancé (oh, the fun of that word!) has a fluffy white hotel towel wrapped around his waist and a slight scowl on his handsome features. Isabel quickly says good-bye to Jonathan and braces herself.

  “I thought you weren’t going to tell your family,” he says, sounding a little petulant. “I thought this weekend was going to be just us.”

  “I know,” Isabel says. “But I just couldn’t—I’m so excited, I had to, I’m sorry, but I had to—” She tries to kiss him, but he pulls away.

  “So this is what it’s going to be like when we’re married, huh? Your family will always come first?” He sits down on the bed where Isabel is stretched out.

  “Michael,” Isabel says, willing her voice to remain calm and free of exasperation, “isn’t it as obvious as can be that the same devotion and loyalty I feel for my family, I have for you—please understand that it’s a good way to be.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that,” he says, and Isabel can see that he’s softening.

  “Oh, you should,” she murmurs. “You really should. Because I never disappoint the people I feel that way about,” she continues, leaning over and giving the towel a little tug. “I am yours one hundred percent . . .” Her voice trails off, and Michael smiles, offering no objection at all as she tugs again at his towel.

  They spend the rest of their weekend enjoying the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Beach, where their spacious room overlooks the ocean. The bedsheets are 400-thread-count percale, the pillows white goose down, the TV a 32-inch flat screen. The weather is gorgeous both days. Neither one of them has much inclination to go into town, preferring instead to lounge around the hotel and wander lazily down the beach. But they do make a quick stop at Rapunzel’s Closet, where Isabel buys some darling little T’s, and sparkly collars for all the dogs in their family.

  The rest of the time, she and Michael dine at the restaurants in the hotel, and when they want a bit more privacy, they order room service, enjoying their $20 sirloin burgers with jalapeños and caramelized onions, and they eat gazing out at the view or happily at each other.

  The only time they’re apart for more than ten minutes is when Isabel slips into the Eau Spa by Cornelia on the hotel’s first floor, where she has a manicure, so that her fingers will be gorgeous for the ring. The ring! She and Kate have been talking rings ever since they were teenagers, weighing the differences between emerald and cushion, oval and round. She takes a picture of the ring—so pretty on her delicate finger, and set off exquisitely by the pale, angel-skin pink she’s chosen as a color for her nail polish (Vanity Fair mixed with Waltz, by Essie)—and sends it to Kate, who responds with an e-mail that says, “OMG!!!!!!!!!!” Isabel smiles when she sees it. She can imagine the Page Six item now:

  We hear that Michael Prescott has just announced his engagement to his adorable, bouncy blond girlfriend Isabel Chase. Will lucky Isabel be a June bride?

  Isabel and her family all read Richard Johnson’s Page Six as soon as they get up. They call it their “gossip gospel,” and it’s a vital source of information about their clients. Weddings, divorces, babies on the way—all these key life events have a big impact on who is buying, who is selling, and why. But the Chase family is also successful enough in its own right to make it into those same pages themselves, and their own accomplishments and celebrations occasionally appear in the column; Isabel hopes her engagement will be boldface!

  The weekend passes in a romantic haze, and not until Sunday night, when Isabel is back home in Manhattan, does she sense that something is going on with her sister. Kate throws her arms around her the moment Isabel walks through the door of their apartment, and sounds happy for her, but even then, Isabel, who knows her sister so well, can detect a certain tension, and an accompanying sorrow whose source she can’t quite pinpoint or name. It’s only when she sits face-to-face with her sister and says, “You have to tell me what’s going on, Kate,” that she learns the whole story about Scott and the break he is once again taking from the relationship—a break that apparently was so mortifying to Kate she just couldn’t bring herself to discuss it with Isabel or their mother when it first happened that Sunday night exactly two weeks ago.

  “Two weeks? I can’t believe you waited this long to tell me!” Isabel says. “And you know, I wondered why Scott wasn’t around, but when I asked you a couple of times, you seemed so evasive I just didn’t want to keep asking. But how could you have kept it from me? Don’t we always tell each other everything?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate says, “it’s just so horribly embarrassing every time it happens. And each time he takes one of those breaks of his, you and Mom keep telling me that I shouldn’t take him back the next time he shows up again. And I couldn’t bear to hear it yet again from you guys, and I didn’t realize it’s been two weeks. I just couldn’t say the words, I guess.”

  “Oh, what’s wrong with Scott?” Isabel says. She wants to cry for her, she seems so fragile, her tiny hands rubbing Dixie’s pink stomach.

  “He’s an idiot, I guess,” says Kate. She gets up from their purple velvet Shabby Chic sofa and walks into her bedroom with Dixie, then closes the door quietly behind her. Isabel sits there for a moment until a wave of exhaustion comes over her, and she falls asleep on the sofa with a chewed-up issue of Vogue.

  The next morning she feels hungover, despite the fact that she hasn’t touched a drop of anything more potent than seltzer. But it’s Kate’s unhappiness that’s making her feel queasy, she’s sure of it. Kate is her older sister; she was supposed to become engaged first. So Michael’s proposal, thrilling and wonderful as it is, has inverted the natural order of things. Plus, the timing couldn’t be any worse: Why couldn’t Scott have chosen some other moment to take a break? She has the fleeting thought that she could ask Michael to talk to him; the two were in the same fraternity at Penn, after all, and have been friends ever since. But men, or at least the ones she knows, are generally not inclined to have long, heartfelt conversations about their love lives, like girls do, and so this idea probably isn’t a very good one, she realizes.

  These are the thoughts that tumble through her head as Isabel gets dressed and ready for work. She keeps waiting for Kate to emerge from her bedroom; unless one of them has a really early showing, they almost always take a taxi to the office together, and pick up their parents along the way. But today the door remains shut, and there’s no sign of her sister. F
inally Isabel knocks on the closed door, and when there’s no answer, she steps inside. The room is empty, except for Dixie curled up on Kate’s ruffled white duvet cover. Unlike Isabel, who is very neat, Kate always leaves her room in a state of disarray. The bed looks as if it has exploded, the bevy of crisp pink-and-white-checked throw pillows tossed every which way, magazines opened and strewn all over the floor. On one night table is a cluster of silver-framed photographs from every stage of their growing up—Isabel and Kate dressed in matching nighties and ribbons in their hair on Christmas morning; Jonathan in footie pajamas snuggled in Kate’s lap as she reads him a Dr. Seuss book; more than a decade later, there’s Jonathan in his Horace Mann Lions number 32 football uniform; Jonathan and Jen, his high school sweetheart, posed in front of the Chases’ building on Park Avenue on prom night; Jonathan, Isabel, Kate, and their mother in Jonathan’s black Mercedes SUV on freshmen parents’ weekend at Emory. Next to all the photographs are the wrappers from a dozen sour balls, an empty seltzer bottle, a tub of L’Occitane shea butter foot cream, a crystal lamp with a white silk shade, and a William Yeoward bud vase that contains a cluster of pink peonies.

  The closet doors are flung open to reveal the riot of pretty shirts, skirts, and dresses stuffed inside. Shoes are piled in a cheery heap; this is completely different from the strict order that governs Isabel’s own closet. Her eyes stray to the dresser, where there are yet more framed photos and a collection of antique perfume bottles from shops in London, from a trip Kate took there one Fourth of July with her friend Sam Siegal. Seeing them reminds her that she hasn’t told her sister about Delphine’s gift of the perfume; she hasn’t yet had the chance.

  Deflated, Isabel leaves the room. When she checks her phone, there’s an e-mail from Kate that reads: Couldn’t sleep, left early. See u @ the office xoxo. So there really is nothing for Isabel to do but give Dixie a kiss on her damp black nose and then get a taxi to the office herself.