She could not, though, remember his name. Or who his children were, although his presence seemed to suggest that they must be somewhere at her school.
“Hi!” she said, her voice all manufactured brightness. “So nice to see you again. How are you?”
“Well, kid,” he said, wrapping his fingers around the metal bars between them. She was sitting on a lower bleacher, so that his eyes were nearly level with hers. “I just came over to ask you the same question. How you doing? You holding up?”
Madison could feel the girls on the bench beside her, their presences settling, heavy with their efforts not to eavesdrop. The curiosity sinking to their feet like lead, holding them still. Beyond them, she knew, if she turned her head to look out over the rest of the bleachers, the mothers would be doing the same thing. Everyone would continue to speak, but their bodies would orient toward her. Somewhere, she thought with panic, Wyatt Welsh’s mom is here. Suzanne Welsh, the most frantic gossip of all the mothers she’d known since childhood, was somewhere in the stands.
She smiled again, as if the man had just told her some wonderful news.
“Oh, I’m doing so well,” she said. “They didn’t warn us about all the work we’d have in tenth grade! But, I mean, otherwise I can’t complain. What brings you to the game?”
His eyes roamed across her face, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He looked like she’d just made a joke, and she saw with uneasy certainty that he felt in some way insulted, or dismissed. She hated when her father’s friends looked at her this way, like her face was one of those brain-teaser paintings, and they were waiting for the hidden image of her true opinion to emerge. This man (What was his name? Which bank? Or maybe he was a client?) had ruddy, mottled skin, like he’d been standing in the wind and the sun for hours. His hair was gray in a way that was really almost white, unlike her father’s, and there was a significant growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. His fingers were clasped so tight around the bleacher bars that his thumbnails were the pale, nauseous yellow of lemon pith.
She saw, then, that the man standing off to one side was with him, that they were both looking at her intently. This other man was much, much younger, closer even to her own age. He had chunky-frame glasses and the sort of thick, dark hair that looks like it could be used to sweep a kitchen floor, and he’d given up any pretense of trying to control the hair other than keeping it more close-cut at the sides and around his ears than it was on top, where it flapped a bit in the breeze. His nose and mouth both protruded, in a way, came to a point beneath his glasses, which gave him an air of being constantly curious, of listening very closely. He was dressed too warmly for the weather, like a teenage boy who’d been dragged to an afternoon occasion of some kind with his parents. A forest green sweater over a shirt and a ruby red tie—had it honestly not occurred to him that he was wearing Christmas colors?—and khakis that had once been pressed but had been rumpled since, as if someone had tried to erase the crease along the front leg. This man stood rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet, his hands in his pockets, giving the unmistakable impression that he had them there to keep himself reined in, on his best behavior.
“Just saying hello, sweetheart. You tell Bob I sent him my best. Tell him I said hang in there. Stick to his guns. It’s just a waiting game. That place has ridden out far worse than this.”
“Of course,” she said, refusing to look wildly around her to see who was watching. She could feel, of course, Zoë’s focus next to her, emitting its own heat. And somewhere beyond her, Allie—more ambivalent and conflicted about whether it was rude to listen, but equally intrigued. “I’ll do that. He’ll be so happy to hear you said hello.”
He works at Goldman Sachs, she thought, the final pieces of the memory returning. It was right, she was pretty sure, that she had initially met him at a museum event, with her parents. But the facts surfacing now came from a conversation she’d overheard another time. She was remembering gossip from Mina Dawes, Isabel’s occasional best friend—he must know Mina’s husband, Tom, that would make sense. She thought she remembered something about Le Rosey. This man had a daughter a few years older than her, but Mina had talked about them when her own daughter, Jaime, decided to leave for Andover. His kids had left America altogether, he’d “parked them”—Mina’s phrase—at Le Rosey, in Switzerland. So why was he here now, on this campus?
“I wouldn’t worry,” the man said to her. His hands were still gripping the bleachers. She told herself that it was silly to think that they might reach through the bars, try to touch her hands, her wrists. “Your dad’s a tough one. He’s scrappy. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”
“Sure,” she said, still grinning like a maniac. The man pressed even closer, his cheeks now touching the metal.
“I don’t need to tell his daughter, I’m sure, how skilled that man is. When it comes to getting off the hook,” he said. “You know. Blameless. Untouchable. That’s your dad.”
She waited for a moment, looking back toward the football field, as if she had all the time in the world. Then she swallowed and turned back to look the man squarely in his weatherbeaten face.
“He’ll be so thrilled,” she said, “to hear that you came over to say hello. That you came all the way over here, and interrupted the game, just to make sure I’d seen you.”
His face twisted into something ugly, but it snapped back so quickly that by the time she felt the first shiver of real fear course through her body, he was smiling again. He reached one meaty finger through the bleachers, and tapped it against her knee.
“Have a good weekend, sweetheart,” he said. And then he’d turned away, to walk back across the field. The younger man seemed to want to say something, in that first second before they left, but the older one made a movement of his head, abrupt, and they’d said nothing. They walked side by side, still not seeming to talk, until she could no longer see them at the edges of her vision.
Madison turned back to Zoë and Allie, who were chattering at each other in a blissful, unabated stream. She willed herself not to look at any of the adults. Chip was jogging back toward the fifty-yard line, tugging his helmet on. She wondered how long he’d stood near her before returning to the field. Everything now was just as it had been, the man’s appearance at her shoulder an uninvited, insignificant dream.
AFTER THE GAME, Madison stood in the senior parking lot, the trees darkening against the sky as it faded from stone gray to violet. She’d texted Lily earlier, hoping her mother would have conveniently forgotten that Madison had promised to find a ride home. She wasn’t sure that Allie or Zoë were really her friends, that she could yet do something as casually presumptuous as asking one of their mothers to drive her home.
She didn’t feel, just now, that she wanted to be in a car with a woman she’d never met before. Someone who didn’t know her parents well. That seemed unwise.
Even before it happened, Madison felt that he was going to walk up behind her. She felt it with the confident knowledge that so often accompanied the inevitable, for her. It was like the moments of her childhood just before her father laughed at something she said and picked her up at the waist, held her high in the air. The moments just before she entered her bedroom to find her mother waiting for her, eager to point to some error or shortcoming. A stain undisclosed, a low grade she’d hidden away in a drawer, some public moment when she’d slouched. She always knew these things were coming; it was one of the things that made her feel like a spy in her own house. If you knew what was around the corner, eventually you began to feel like you could move through walls.
“Hey,” Chip said, at her elbow. She turned to him—and she was so thrilled by this later, when she analyzed her own behavior—very slowly, with only a mild displayed interest in who was standing next to her.
“Hi,” she said. “Nice game.”
“You need a ride?”
“Do you drive?”
“No,” he said, chuckling, and ducked his
head, brushing one thumb to the cleft in his chin. This is a gesture I will memorize, she thought. I bet he does that all the time. When he’s nervous, maybe.
“No,” he said, “I meant, my mom could drive you.”
“No no no,” she said quickly, immediately mortified by the triple negative. “I’m just waiting for my mom. I got the timing wrong.”
And of course, as she said this, there was Mina Dawes, someone who was decidedly not Madison’s mother, careening into the lot in her inexplicable SUV. The woman had no children living in this state. She only ever had herself to drive around their relatively small portion of Connecticut.
“Oh,” Madison said. “Family friend. I have to go.”
“Hey,” he said, and put his fingers to her arm, just above the elbow. “Thanks for coming to the game.”
She wanted him to hold on longer, to let her be the one to shake him off, gently, as if he were an adoring pet. But by the time she’d had this thought, he’d given her a wave. He was already leaving.
FOUR
In the waning light of the predinner hour, Mina Dawes sat across the table from Isabel, desperate to keep their conversation aloft. During the silences her gaze wandered out over Isabel’s pool, its surface entirely untroubled beneath the late-afternoon sun.
A pitcher of lemonade sat between them. Isabel’s girl had brought it out within moments of Mina’s arrival, placing it on an engraved tray that sat on the glass-topped table. Basil leaves floated just beneath the ice cubes, which was a classic Isabel touch. Every accent astonishingly simple: fluted calla lilies or random groupings of branches and vines thrown together in tall glass bottles, say, rather than the eruption and ostentation of actual centerpieces. Basil in the goddamn lemonade, Mina thought. She’d have to tell Tom tonight. He didn’t like to be reminded of how much time she spent with Isabel, but he could usually be appeased with one of these finicky little details. That is, if he came home. He’d been on the couch in his office every night for the past week.
“It’s always so lovely out here this time of day,” Mina tried.
Isabel nodded behind her sunglasses. Mina sighed and looked off toward the guesthouse, the thick tree line at the back of the property.
When Bob and Isabel had settled in Greenwich for good, knocking down the old gray-roofed colonial and its accompanying stone wall, building up the property so that it loomed above the road below, everyone assumed their plan was a compound. Why else tear down that charming, quaint little slice of Connecticut history unless to replace it with something splashy? A palace for Bob? He’d just been named CEO; he was getting written up in all the city papers.
But everyone had underestimated, of course, just who exactly Bob D’Amico had married. Isabel Berkeley, the only Berkeley woman to decline a Yale acceptance since the school had first invited them in. Isabel Berkeley, whose idea of an appropriate vacation home was the white house with its green shutters on Shelter Island, shielded from the road only by a thick copse of trees. Where the upstairs guest shower leaked and the proprietors of all three bakeries on the main road in town had known her family’s name the whole time she’d been alive. Mina had seen photos of some of this, and intuited the rest; she’d never been invited out to Shelter. Isabel’s second home—well, third, if you counted the house in Sun Valley, but they were almost never there so Mina usually didn’t even think of it—was not for entertaining. As far as Mina could tell, Bob was the only person without Berkeley blood who had set foot in the place, at least for the past few decades.
Mina remembered the party Isabel threw that first spring here at the new house, the guests wandering the grounds. The collective expelling of breath had been almost audible. She herself had explored a little, smiling at the cater waiters in that way she could never help, which surely inspired in them nothing but dripping contempt. She’d touched her fingertips to the different bespoke and reclaimed pieces of gorgeous furniture tucked into every nook, in every hallway, and she’d felt something almost like pride. Of all the women out here, Mina had known that this one was the real deal, and Isabel in turn had chosen Mina to draw closer.
Isabel wanted the other women to see this, too, to know that she saw them. How deeply they’d bought into all of it when they chose their husbands. Whereas her house was simple, elegant. It didn’t cram anything down your throat.
You had to know the world would accept you nonetheless, before you could cast it off, was the difference. You couldn’t possibly have the same attitude when your entire life came to you through your husband’s success. But of course Mina never said any such thing to Isabel. She preferred to keep it to herself, and imagine that Isabel would know just what she meant.
Toward the end of that party, Isabel had kicked her heels to the floor by the stage and Bob had twirled her around the draining dance floor, her hair slowly coming loose from its chignon. Mina remembered the lavender-blue color of Isabel’s dress, the hem puddling on the dance floor, the smudges of dirt visible at its very edges. That was the first time Mina had seen it, between them: that nothing about the way Isabel looked at him was performance. That his was the only opinion that would ever set Isabel’s stomach on edge. Bob had all the qualities Isabel adored in her father, her own family, despite his naked hunger, his bulging eyes when he was angry. He was her best rebellion, a way to throw everyone off balance without having to jettison anything she didn’t know how to live without.
No, in the end they built the house and a small guesthouse, redid the old tennis court and glammed up the pool, but most of the property was left somewhat wild by Greenwich standards. You had the impression that if you wandered to the edge of the lawn, you might take the step over the line, enter the woods, and find yourself lost.
And the house had been dwarfed, really, in recent years, by the newer ones. Twenty, thirty, even forty thousand square feet, some of them! Ice rinks, bowling alleys. Tacky was not really a word Mina was permitted to say out loud, not when she was talking to anyone in Greenwich, and so it was one she threw around often and with abandon in the privacy of her own head.
It was starting to seem like Bob might be the last holdout. Even the men who weren’t like him, who were third-generation Wall Streeters, even those men were falling under the recent Greenwich spell. Ordering new construction that would sprawl out across the old land like an unruly teenage boy trashing a tasteful living room.
Mina turned back to the table, to Isabel’s drawn face and large sunglasses, and poured herself another glass of lemonade.
“You know that new bakery had to close, already, did you see? The little jewel-box place on the Avenue, with the macarons? Lasted all of about six months,” Mina tried again. Isabel nodded behind her sunglasses, and they both sipped.
Lily (yes, yes, she could pretend that she didn’t, but she knew the girl’s name perfectly well) had left them to their lemonade twenty minutes ago, during which time Mina had tried and failed to engage Isabel in any sort of small talk. She’d even confided in her about Jaime, whose roommate at Andover had been discovered concealing some troubling habits, doing things like slicing up her ankles with nail scissors. It was a horrifying turn of events, but one that had left Jaime with an enormous dorm room to herself for the remainder of her junior year.
Mina decided to return the conversation to their daughters.
“It’s hard, no? Sixteen isn’t so young, but it’s hard to internalize that. That it’s no longer in her best interest for me to drive up there and curl up with her on her bed and let her cry. You know, she was drawn to this girl, who turned out to be smashingly unstable, and now she has to suffer those consequences. Consequences are what we’re supposed to teach them, right? So they don’t just sink into all of this for the rest of their lives?”
She cast one hand through the air, including the house and the pool and the glimmering slope of the lawn in the gesture.
“Well, you know what I’m talking about. Madison’s a sophomore, I’m sure you feel it, too.”
Isa
bel responded with a smile, if it could even be classified as such. Her skin looked like a porcelain teacup that upon close inspection would yield up its faint web of cracks.
This impression was troubling all on its own. Mina had known Isabel for years, since the girls were small—although the girls had never been friends, not by their own choice. But Mina would say that she was as close to Isabel, certainly, as anyone else in town. Yet each time she came into this house she fought the fear that something was awry on her own person. Lipstick gathering and mixing with spit at the corners of her mouth, her blowout beginning to frizz with sweat just where her temple met her ear.
Because Isabel projected not perfection so much as uniformity. Her body, her hair, her tawny skin and the deceptive, unguarded clarity of her large blue eyes—it all met the eye like some sort of rivetless instrument. You couldn’t see the joints, the creases, the tiny flaws that must be visible each morning before she was offered up to the outside world. Believe me, Mina, Tom always said. Nothing going on beneath the waist. Beneath the neck! Bob can keep her. And then he’d smack Mina’s ass and grab her, exposing the soft part of her neck so that he could kiss her there. The sorts of unapologetic intimacies you were supposed to have the freedom to enjoy when you’d shipped your daughter off to boarding school.
Of course Tom would want to sleep with Isabel, in a world without consequence. This was not even a question. But really he was talking about her posture, about the way she held herself apart even when she was sitting in her own living room, as though the pool and the cars and probably the house in Sun Valley and definitely the jet—as though they all stank, ever so slightly, of something unsavory. What he meant was that he preferred his own wife, plucked from one of the lesser districts of Long Island and touched up and reprogrammed for Greenwich life and the occasional appearance in Manhattan. He preferred Mina, a woman reconstituted just like most of the other wives, to someone whose opinion might actually make his palms sweat.
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