Our Little Racket
Page 10
“Oh, sure, we miss her,” he’d said one night at dinner. They’d been eating pad Thai, which Mina had cooked from scratch, and peanut sauce had gathered at the corners of his mouth in a way that looked almost obscene. “But there’s great things about having the kid gone. You wouldn’t know this, Denise, but that’s something that automatically arrives with the first kid. Constant noise.” Denise had left the next morning, citing their mother, left home alone that week, as her excuse.
“It’s really a tragedy,” Mina repeated.
“Not for him, it won’t be,” Denise said, her voice sharpening. “Where’s he from again? Italian, right? Not from out here though, is he?”
Mina snorted. “He is, if this is possible, even less Italian than we are, Dee. He’s from that Italian part of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. I don’t even know if the neighborhood still exists, honestly. But the mother refuses to leave, she’s renting to NYU kids, or something. Isabel’s not big on the mother-in-law.”
“Well of course,” Denise said. “She’s not new to this, and the newbies talk way, way too much about how much money he makes, right? I’m sure the mom loves to. God forbid. You know deep down Isabel probably hates the guy. No way that’s a happy marriage, even before.”
“The relationship guru of Long Island over here,” Mina teased, even in a moment of levity careful not to use the word marriage with Denise. She shivered, too, hearing the hard g creep back into her speech, hearing the way her sentences sped up during a phone call with her sister.
Mina had first met Tom at Dorrian’s, and it had taken him a week to call. He’d written her number on his hand and she’d been so certain he’d wash it off, think nothing more of it. It was the late eighties; you could lose information so easily back then, it was so much simpler for blithe fate to intervene. But still, she’d stepped it up while she waited for his call. Her campaign to smooth the Long Island from her voice. It had been a goal, that first year in the city; after she met Tom, it became an urgency. She’d watched old movies, gone to restaurants she couldn’t afford and sat at the bars and listened to the women who were drinking vodka tonics and waiting for their dates. She’d always been a decent mimic—Denise had thought she should try to be an actress, as if that was all the job required—and it hadn’t taken but a few weeks. By her fifth date with Tom, you wouldn’t have been able to place, anymore, where exactly she’d grown up. She’d joined the ranks of young women in the city, the girls from Columbus or Pittsburgh or Overland Park or Moorestown. The girls whose personalities got them only so far, leaving them washed up on the shores of Manhattan. Where they could wipe themselves clean and unshackle themselves from their memories and histories, so the city could mark them as who they really were, without resistance.
She wouldn’t have been able to imagine, back then, that half the women who married men like Tom had accents like hers, and that few of them ever bothered to try to sound like any other sort of girl. It was only when she’d ended up out here in Connecticut, when she settled in to live the life she’d spent years planning, that she realized how excessive it had been, that fear of discovery. Almost every woman out here, with the exception of Isabel, was settling in. Their husbands moved through days of shining, brand-new success; everything was constantly turning over, rewarding a lack of history, an unknown name. The old families, the people Mina had once imagined mocking her accent, were all the people who owned the decaying Greenwich properties Tom’s friends started snapping up.
“Brooklyn,” Dee was saying when Mina snapped back into the conversation. “Interesting. And what’s this all about? He lost everyone’s money?”
“Just one newspaper, Dee,” Mina said, the satisfaction swelling in her throat. “You could read any newspaper. Not even the paper—just the front page.”
Her sister waited in hostile silence, and Mina sighed.
“It’s too complex to go into right now,” she said. “They took too much risk, really. And everyone’s getting hammered, right now, so if your neck’s stuck out too far . . .” She snapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Chopped off.”
“I see,” Denise murmured. Her sister knew Mina was grasping at straws. She knew that if Tom hadn’t fully explained it, then Mina hadn’t figured it out.
“Just his bank? They’re all losing their jobs, I saw, but what about the others?”
“His bank was one of the big five,” Mina said. “The others are—I don’t know. I don’t know, Dee. It’s so sad, like I said. He’s been there forever.”
She wanted these losses to sound big, the way they’d felt when she was over at Isabel’s these past few days. Coming down from the darkened bedroom with the same glasses she’d brought up the previous afternoon, the bubbled, day-old water.
She wanted her sister to feel what it was like, here. She didn’t want it to keep sounding so small, so petty and meaningless.
“Well,” Denise said. “I mean, imagine those secretaries. Imagine the girls there like us, Min. They’re sure as shit not gonna pay out anyone’s pension now, are they?”
Mina made a noncommittal noise, but she knew her sister would hear that this hadn’t even occurred to her.
“Maybe you’re right, probably they’ll take care of their own,” Denise said, smooth as ever. “I’m just saying. That’s just how my mind works. I think about all the little ripples.”
“I know you do,” Mina said, leaving it there.
“What does Tom say?”
“Tom has been in the city for a week.”
“You haven’t talked to him? God, him, too, huh?”
“No,” Mina shot back. “No, not at all. I just, I made the mistake of trying to talk to him about a fall visit, to drive up to see Jaime.”
“No, it’ll be fine,” Denise said, dropping the idea of Tom as abruptly as she’d raised it. But Mina wasn’t even irked; it was so remarkably soothing to hear her sister say that, just as she’d been saying since they were teenagers. Nothing else filled Denise with supreme confidence like other people’s fear, coupled with an ignorant certainty that she knew they’d be all right.
Mina wandered into the den and curled up on the window seat that looked out over the front yard, the slope that led up from the gate at the bottom of the drive. She watched the gardener move across the flat lawn at the base of the hill. He’ll be gathering the leaves soon, she thought. Everything about the outdoors was still summer, the dampness between her breasts as soon as she left the house, the weight of the air around her. But soon, that would be gone, and they’d forget, even, how it felt. She closed her eyes again and thought of being out with Denise, when they were teenagers. Taking the train into the city and sharing a fifth of rum they’d chase with cans of Diet Coke, and the way her sister always knew who at the bar to flirt with to get cocaine, and the way she’d grab Mina’s arm when they were dancing and say, Let’s do some more, it won’t kill us.
“Say that again,” Mina murmured.
“Say what again?” Her sister had kept talking, but Mina hadn’t been listening.
“Nothing,” Mina said. “Nothing. Anyway, I’ve got to head back over to Isabel’s. I’m trying to check in every afternoon.”
“You didn’t answer me earlier,” Denise reminded her. “It’s been a few days. She’s, what, sleeping all day? Screaming? Breaking the china, throwing his clothes out the bedroom window and into the pool? Inquiring minds, Min.”
Mina waited, for a moment, but by then she figured she’d so completely transgressed the borders of loyalty to Isabel that confiding one last detail couldn’t hurt.
“Sleeping pills,” she said. “Sobbing, and then almost catatonic, and then sleeping pills ever since. But I should take her something else today, right? She can’t just sleep forever. She’s got to be able to stay awake without losing it.”
“That poor woman.” When she heard a faint sucking sound, Mina realized that her sister had lit a cigarette on the other end of the line. “That poor, poor woman. What a scumbag, leaving he
r out there all alone. He’s probably holed up in their apartment with some twenty-three-year-old who takes turns between tonguing his balls and pouring vodka over his chest and telling him he did nothing wrong. Men are shit.”
“All right,” Mina said, her mind already darting ahead. She’d gotten a strange phone call from Suzanne Welsh, something about lunch later, but first she had to stop by to see Isabel. She tried again to decide whether she should take food or magazines or only Xanax.
“YOU KNOW, MINA, I hadn’t even thought of doing this today, but since we’re out! It’ll just take one quick second, and then I’ll run you right home.”
Suzanne Welsh stood in the street beside her car, pivoting twice before reaching into the backseat and pulling out a large bag. She clicked her key fob four times before rejoining Mina on the sidewalk.
The bag seemed to indicate some errand to run at Saks Fifth Avenue, where they’d parked, but Mina remained baffled—as she had all afternoon—as to why on earth Suzanne had been so insistent they have lunch today.
Technically speaking, she and Suzanne were friendly. Wyatt was older than Jaime, though, so they’d never had much reason to deal with each other vis-à-vis their kids. Suzanne’s husband had once worked with Bob D’Amico in some capacity, until Brad left to start his own fund, and so—despite Isabel’s contempt for the woman’s constant monitoring of every aesthetic, culinary, or social decision made by every single one of her peers—the Welshes were nominally included in many of Isabel’s larger-scale events.
And it was true that, despite Suzanne’s best efforts to conceal her discomfort, she came from a world much more like Mina’s old life than Isabel’s. Her father had made money, gobs of money. A department store he’d founded in Brooklyn, a beach house when Suzanne was a teenager, no doubt a small trust fund by the time she married Bill. But that had all only been cemented when Suzanne was a child, too recent to feel safe, and she was still ruled by a girlish terror Mina recognized all too well. That she was the only woman in town, maybe, who hadn’t figured out yet how she was supposed to act while she spent her money.
Suzanne was above all petrified by Isabel, and this, too, Mina understood. Despite her exasperation every time she got one of Suzanne’s famous rambling phone calls, ostensibly social but ultimately because she wanted to ask Mina whether she knew where Isabel bought Madison’s shoes, or if she knew whether Madison’s most recent Disney costume had been homemade. Despite the tiring charade of these phone calls, the presumptuous nerve of sucking up hours of Mina’s day just because she existed in close proximity to Isabel—despite all that, Mina understood Suzanne, in a way.
But this, Mina would not call it a friendship. They rarely met for lunch alone. She’d had the thought that Wyatt might be applying early to Princeton, and that Suzanne might be angling for some sort of advice or even—could she be this brazen, though?—a recommendation from Tom. But this theory had been squelched over lunch, when Suzanne complained at length about the brusque treatment they’d received from the alumni development officer assigned to Bill on their recent weekend visit to Dartmouth. They were preparing for a big ask, something on the level of a new squash center, and apparently Suzanne had expected a thicker red carpet for the visit.
Besides, Mina thought now, Tom wasn’t even that active an alum. If Suzanne wanted an ally, she would have known she had better options.
Isabel’s name hadn’t so much as haunted the fringes of any of Suzanne’s inane stories. Which was just as well.
Mina followed her new gal pal into the store. Suzanne moved with purpose through the ground-floor displays—perfume counters, jewelry cases, fur-lined hats—all patrolled by middle-aged women in black suits who stood with their hands clasped in front of their bodies and had applied their foundation and their lipstick with too little care. Mina saw the way each woman leaned her torso forward as Suzanne passed; an afternoon torpor had settled over Saks, and until the very last possible second, they each hoped she might be the one commission to free them from it.
They arrived at a counter buried back in a deep, silence-cushioned corner of the second floor, the evening department. A woman whose cheekbones could have cut steak rose to greet Suzanne, removing the glasses that hung from a beaded string around her neck.
“Deborah,” Suzanne said, “I know I’m a bit earlier than we’d said.”
“Don’t mention it,” Deborah replied. Mina smiled at the thick Queens accent. If only we had a sign, she thought, something we could all flash one another in solidarity. Girls who don’t belong here.
Suzanne slid a large, wrapped box from the shopping bag.
“As I said on the phone,” she said, “I’m really just so sorry to be doing this. You can’t imagine.” Her voice was low but carefully modulated so it seemed a casual decision to be speaking this way.
“Please,” Deborah said, “that’s not necessary.” She tugged at the box’s gleaming ribbon.
“It hasn’t been touched,” Suzanne said, a flash of something, like a knife blade turned under a bright sun, in her voice. “I think it’s obvious it hasn’t been unwrapped.”
“Of course,” Deborah replied, and her voice coated the knife in soothing syrup. “I have to inspect the dress, but it’s quite clear you haven’t touched it. It’s for your security as much as for ours.”
Nonsensical though it was, this seemed to mollify Suzanne. She glanced down at her BlackBerry and typed something with her thumbs for a moment, then let out a sudden clucking sound with her teeth and tongue.
“I just hate to be doing this.”
“It’s no trouble at all, as I told you when we spoke this morning.”
“Well, I mean, I feel terrible for your inconvenience, of course, but really I meant for me! Just look at it.”
“It’s a beautiful dress,” the woman said. The water-smooth fabric emerged from the box in folds, a swollen purple. The three of them looked down at it for a moment. Deborah the saleswoman had yet to express any curiosity about Mina’s presence.
“It just seems inappropriate,” Suzanne said. “God knows what this event will be like, coming when it does, it’s just such awkward timing. But it just seemed—I don’t know, really. Wiser. Does that sound so silly to you? God, it must.”
Her eyes moved briefly to Mina’s, then away.
Deborah smiled in such a way that she committed herself to absolutely nothing, then craned her neck over her keyboard, one hand still on the dress.
“Why are you returning it?” Mina said, careful to keep her own voice level, not to raise it any higher than Suzanne’s. “You seem crazy about it.”
“Well, I did discuss it with Bill,” Suzanne said, leaning in so that their three bowed heads formed a tiny triangle. “I know some others have tried to do this in secret, without telling their husbands. But I just couldn’t do that. I know secrecy works for some marriages . . .”
Her eyes flickered in a way Suzanne probably imagined to be just barely perceptible, but which in fact could have been a frame from a cartoon.
“But I just felt I had to tell Bill.”
“Tell him what?”
“Well, you know, we just discussed whether it was appropriate. A new dress for the Robin Hood event next month. He thought—you know, it would be good to seem like a team player. Wear something from last season.”
“Suzanne, I’m here.”
The deeper voice came up behind them, from the direction of the escalator, and Suzanne’s head whipped around on her neck. Her face flinched, a rictus of greeting and pleased surprise.
“Oh,” she said. She turned back to the saleswoman. “Of course you know—”
“Hi, Deborah,” Alexandra Barker said. Mina marveled, not for the first time, at the lime green bow that drew Alexandra’s hair back from her face.
“And I’m Mina,” she said, trying to make eye contact with Deborah, who did not seem to hear her.
“So nice to see you,” Deborah replied to Alexandra, evidently unfazed.
&n
bsp; “I told her this was the way to go, and that she could just come to you directly,” Alexandra continued.
“Of course,” Deborah said. The glasses were back on and she was typing furiously at her computer.
“Mina,” Alexandra said, “so nice to see you. I was so sorry to miss lunch.”
Mina said a quick and dirty prayer of gratitude.
“Oh, that would have been nice,” she purred.
“I suppose Suzanne has told you all about this.”
“Well,” Mina said. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Tell us, Deborah,” Suzanne said, seemingly disoriented by the fact that Mina and Alexandra were now both here, though surely she had engineered the entire meeting. Or was it possible Alexandra had surprised her? But what would be the purpose of that? “We aren’t the first ladies in here this week with buyer’s remorse, are we?”
Deborah smiled without looking away from her screen. It became suddenly imperative, in Mina’s mind, that this saleswoman know she was not really friends with Suzanne Welsh. How to communicate this?
“Well, she can’t say, obviously,” Alexandra said, wandering away from the counter and lifting the hem of a dress to hold it up to her face, inspect the stitching. “But believe me, Suzy, you’re hardly the only one. I spoke to my sister this morning—they’re still on Seventy-Sixth—and she was at Bergdorf the other day and said it was a complete mob scene. People couldn’t get the stuff off their hands fast enough. She stopped by Loro Piana on her way home, too, and she had to sit there for twenty minutes before there was even a salesperson free to help her.”
“Other women are doing this?” Mina had decided in that moment to remain silent, to try to catch Deborah’s eye or, barring that, perhaps launch herself far away from this store. But her curiosity got the best of her, she couldn’t help herself.