When she moved into the kitchen, her father was sitting at the breakfast table.
NINETEEN
It was the day before Thanksgiving, and it was the art collection. That was why Mina had been summoned, if you could classify the razor-polite conversation she’d had with Isabel earlier that afternoon as being summoned.
Her morning had begun with promise, when she’d gathered her household staff in the kitchen to explain that two other couples, no children, had been invited for Thanksgiving dinner, and that it was very important everything be finished, or at the very least doing something fragrant in the oven, by the time the guests arrived for cocktails. Everyone had understood right away what needed to be done, and all morning long the ground floor of the house hummed, like choreographed traffic zipping through midtown. But Mina herself sat in the breakfast nook, without much to do. She watched the traffic from a high floor, behind glass.
She’d taken the latest issue of Vanity Fair in there, hoping to hide from Cecia, her head housekeeper. Despite her genuine intentions, to read about the Colombian hostages, she’d been paging through a photo spread on England’s future princess when Isabel’s name showed up on her phone.
“Happy early Thanksgiving.”
“You too,” Mina had said. She’d moved into the den for the call; she didn’t like the way Cecia had looked at her when the phone fizzed on the marble counter. They clearly didn’t want Mina yammering in the kitchen while they all tried to get the house ready, which was laughable and offensive except that Mina took their unspoken point. She darted now back into the kitchen, cradling the phone between her ear and her neck, and avoided Cecia’s eye as she withdrew a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a bowl of grapes from the refrigerator. She returned to the den.
“You’re having people at yours, right?” Isabel said. Mina had the distinct impression they were treading water, but she wasn’t sure why.
“Yes,” Mina said, “and I’ve delegated so well that I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing right now.” She decided to embellish, for Isabel’s benefit. “Everywhere I turn, it seems like I’m underfoot. I think Cecia wants me to go to a movie or something, and just stay out of the way until tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, that’s how you know you’ve done your prep right,” Isabel said, and though Mina had been trying to portray herself as a buffoon so that Isabel might feel more comfortable confiding in her, of course—as always—they had ended up with Isabel soothing Mina, rather than the alternative.
Eventually, the conversation came to a point: it was the paintings. A woman would be coming by, from Sotheby’s. Beatrice North.
“I’ll come over, Isabel. I’m happy to drop by. She sounds horrendous.”
Of course, Isabel had chided her for that, but then Mina had known she would. Beatrice was just the top in her field, Mina, don’t be catty. But she needed Mina to say it, to dislike Beatrice North, didn’t she? Isabel couldn’t. She didn’t have that capital to squander, not right now.
This was how she kept you near her, Mina thought. This was why you endured the constant reminders that you were dull compared to her, that you didn’t have her depth or her skin or her marriage. That you didn’t sparkle, couldn’t, when you stood beside her. This was how she kept you as her friend, regardless. She let you see the things she couldn’t do, had never been allowed to do in either family, the one she’d inherited or the one she’d chosen, crafted. She let you see that she wanted to say something, but couldn’t, and you got to say it for her, and she let you feel the value of it. She made you essential, in some small way, so that you knew you weren’t as disposable as you felt. Mina knew there must have been other girls who did this for a younger Isabel, at Smith, in the city before she was married. But Mina was the one who did it for her now.
She’d waited for Isabel to say it, to ask. The house continued to buzz. Somewhere above her head, a door closed. The women in the kitchen spoke to one another with effortless urgency, their Spanish clicking and rolling past Mina’s ears. She didn’t speak the language.
“That might be helpful,” Isabel had said finally.
She’d been out by the pool when Mina arrived, wrapped in a teal blue cashmere blanket, the boatneck of her loose-fitting black shirt severe against her pronounced collarbone. She looked even thinner than when Mina had seen her last, in October, but something had clicked back into place. What had been so uncamouflaged in those early weeks was once again monitored, what had been submerged, murky, was once again held at the surface. Watching Isabel by herself on the blustery November afternoon, drying leaves whirling at her ankles like skittish pets, Mina knew why they hadn’t seen each other. She saw that their one icy phone call, right after the congressional hearings three weeks earlier, hadn’t been a momentary lapse in their closeness. They were going to return, now, to their usual distance. Oh, he’s absolutely fine, Isabel had said. Most of the unpleasantness is well behind him, I think. He’s looking like himself again.
Still, she was the one Isabel had called today.
Beatrice North was, it had to be said, just as horrendous as Mina had predicted. Wherever Isabel was graceful in spite of her sharpness, her reserve, Beatrice North was simply hard-edged. Her dark hair was drawn back from her face in a ponytail so smooth and severe it was easy to forget it was her hair, her dress and matching jacket expensive and anonymous so you could imagine fifteen more identical outfits hanging in the walk-in that was surely the pride of her quiet studio in the East Seventies. She held a sleek leather portfolio close to her chest, as if it contained state secrets.
She was a trespasser, but Isabel had invited her in. She’d sanctioned it, as if that mattered. Or was it Bob’s idea, Mina wondered. Was he the one insisting they circle the wagons?
What a funny metaphor; she wondered what could possibly have brought that phrase to mind. Why did people say that? As if even Los Angeles, the edge of everything, had any actual pioneers left. As if any vague chiming of misfortune’s arrival could ever return them to the raw-boned, wind-bitten women who had preceded them, pushed a beleaguered path across all the old landscapes. Circling the wagons. How silly.
They walked from room to room, pausing before each work, and when they returned to the downstairs hallway, Beatrice craned her neck in the direction of Bob’s door.
“That’s my husband’s study,” Isabel said coolly. “There’s nothing of interest there.”
“We’ll have to sit down and go through the listing together in more detail, of course,” Beatrice replied, not losing so much as a blink. “I’d like to say we could have these in the lineup for a March date. If you’re interested in moving that quickly.”
“I am,” Isabel said. “I think that would be best.”
Mina let herself drift, almost as if she were just shifting her weight to her left leg, a bit closer to Isabel. At the same time Beatrice North seemed to shift to her right, and the unfortunate effect of both women moving slightly at the same time was to make it seem that the three of them were circling one another. It felt absurd, an accident of choreography, but still Mina felt the hair on her arms stiffen.
Beatrice North smiled, stretching her painted lips across her face in an expression that seemed to reveal some wound, involve some painful denuding.
“I should have everything I need,” she said. “I really am so pleased you’ve gone with our house.”
“Well, it was really a matter of the time frame,” Isabel said. “That, and the guarantee.”
“Of course. And you know, it’s so rare that you see someone who works so closely with MoMA gravitate toward drawings rather than contemporary painting or sculpture. It’s really quite unique, this collection. We can see a whole story, a history really, unfolding. There’s a whole trajectory of cause and effect there. We can sell it that way. That’s the narrative for the auction, I mean.”
“Well, that’s good,” Isabel said. “I’m glad you have a narrative.”
Mina looked at Isabel, at the slight
puckering of her chin, and she saw that Isabel couldn’t bring herself to make the woman leave.
“I understand that discretion is going to be—that this is a private matter, insofar as it can be kept that way,” Beatrice continued. Blood-red fingernails curled around her portfolio, holding it against her hip.
“Well,” Isabel said, “I’m sure you’ll get a big splash when it’s announced, whether you like it or not. But I don’t expect that to fall within your purview. I don’t expect it would matter, actually, even if we tried. Of course I’ve been selling things for years, but no one’s ever shown any interest.”
“That’s the nature of the beast,” said Beatrice North.
OUT BY THE POOL, later, it was clear to Mina that they had at most another ten minutes before the rain came. It seemed silly that they were outside at all, but after Madison barged in with Lily and Beatrice took a hint and let herself be sent on her way, Isabel had insisted they come out here. Mina hadn’t been sure she shouldn’t follow Beatrice out, but Isabel had touched her arm, so brief and light it felt almost secret, conspiratorial, and so she had stayed.
A chilled bottle of white wine, unseasonable though it was, sat in an ice bucket on the table between them. Lily brought it out without being asked, at least that Mina had seen. There was something new between Isabel and the nanny, some unrehearsed choreography now existing between the needs of one and the duties of the other.
“Are you sure you want white?” Mina said when Lily appeared with the bottle, and Isabel had waved a hand in the air, leaving it unclear who was being waved away. The wine remained.
Mina waited a few minutes before she asked anything.
“Weren’t you afraid he’d wander out and come across that woman?” This was a gamble. She’d guessed where and how Bob was spending his days, but it was just that: a guess.
“I’m not afraid of him,” Isabel said, her black sunglasses confronting Mina head-on.
“No, I know.”
“He’s out. He’s been out all afternoon.”
Of course, Mina thought. He might have come home, unexpectedly, but then she had me here with her.
“I don’t know where he goes,” Isabel said, and Mina saw that it was her role, here, to acknowledge this honesty by changing the subject.
“Do you really think you’ll sell all of it?”
“If they want it,” Isabel said.
“But not—not all of it, right?”
“Isn’t it in poor taste?” Isabel said, a harsh, flat tone creeping into her voice. She picked up her wineglass and drained it. “Isn’t that the point, now? I’m not allowed any of it?” She nibbled her bottom lip with great fervor for a few moments. “He asked me to hang on to Madison’s painting, if we can.”
“The Picasso,” Mina said, thinking of the painting that hung at the end of Madison’s bedroom hallway and then wishing she hadn’t identified it quite so quickly. She knew the story well, that he’d bought it shortly after he made CEO, as a present for his daughter. But Isabel didn’t so much as look away from the pool, the surface of which had held her gaze for their entire conversation.
“The Picasso,” she said. “There’s that Newman drawing, the study for one of the zips. The one he gave me when he proposed. He didn’t ask after that one, however.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Mina said, afraid that her own pity, for Isabel, would be written clear across her face either way.
“You know I started that first year or two,” Isabel continued. “When we were first married. People were so dismissive of drawings. Obviously he wasn’t CEO yet, but still. And they knew my father, too. They could never believe I was in the meeting to see about buying just drawings. You can’t imagine how many times I heard that. ‘Just the drawings?’”
Mina tried to hold herself very still, looking out at the pool with Isabel, watching the outlines of the trees beyond where they sat, coming into stark relief against the darkening sky.
“But it wasn’t because that was what I could afford,” Isabel said. “Or it wasn’t just about that. I love those drawings. You can see the whole process. You can see how the man’s mind worked. You can see him putting together the thing that will make him a success, everything he had to do to get there. Only the things he needed.”
“They’re beautiful.”
Isabel shrugged.
“Some people don’t think so,” she said. “But those were mine.” She wrapped herself more tightly in the blanket and let her head rest back against the chair. Mina imagined she’d closed her eyes.
“Madison loves that painting,” Isabel said. “You should have seen her when we took her to Madrid. She stood in front of Guernica with him for a half hour, and he explained it all to her. They took so long I left and waited for them on a bench on the plaza outside.”
Mina knew then that it hadn’t been Bob’s idea, the auction. It wasn’t Bob who knew to stay a few steps ahead of whatever would be written about them. He was going to leave it all to her. Isabel had tried to hide away for a while, to refuse to leave the house and enter the world. She’d tried to force his hand, but it hadn’t worked. He’d won, he always would in the end, and now Isabel had to be in charge. She had no other choice.
“You know what’s next, Min.”
But Isabel said no more than that, and Mina did not reply. She didn’t know the answer; after all this time, she couldn’t say which things Isabel would mourn the most. She must care about all of it. Isabel couldn’t stand to live here, in this house of all houses, otherwise. But Mina didn’t think they were talking about MoMA or the apartments or sending the kids away, getting them out of Greenwich. Or even Congress, again. It’s something else, she thought. She’s going to say one of the words we don’t say. Prison, foreclosure. Divorce.
It’s our husbands, she thought. The spirit or the letter of their laws. It’s what our lives would look like, suddenly, without them.
There were so many things Isabel might be talking about, and the thought that Mina might reply as if she knew the answer, and be thinking of something that hadn’t yet occurred to Isabel, was a paralyzing one. And so she said nothing, and Isabel didn’t repeat her question. And even though they hadn’t actually discussed any of those more graphic harbingers of misfortune, even though Isabel had confided nothing, it was in this moment that Mina felt closer to her friend than she had in years, since those first years before this house behind them had been built.
After another few minutes of silence, it began to rain.
TWENTY
It seemed to Lily at first that coming home to find that woman in the house, and Mina Dawes swanning around like the mistress of ceremonies, would be a surprise so scattering that they’d lose the afternoon for good. Madison had already been sassy to the point of insolence for the entire ride home from school, despite the early dismissal for Thanksgiving. By the time they reached the house, it seemed like all Lily could hope for just to get Madison upstairs and into her room where she’d have no target but herself.
And then they came home to find Isabel acting as if the past two months had been imagined. Throwing her weight around, acting as if she’d never disappeared, never hidden away upstairs. Giving a tour of the house to a stranger.
It wasn’t good. Lily tried, at first, to convince Madison to sit down in the kitchen for a snack.
“We’ve got fresh strawberries,” she said. “Fruit salad?”
“No thank you,” Madison said. “Don’t you find it a little, like, disgusting, the way we just demand every kind of fruit or vegetable at any time of year? Zoë was just telling me about this. In her bio class, they were talking about genetically modified crops. It’s so pathetic, how we have to have whatever we want and don’t ever even think about the consequences.”
“I could even whip some heavy cream,” Lily continued, undeterred. “You can eat them with cream and brown sugar. We may be able to get them, ugly Americans and sinners that we are, for the rest of the winter, but they’ll be less ju
icy with every batch. I promise you that.”
Madison looked up at her, her face open, unwrapped by pure anxiety.
“Don’t make jokes like that,” Madison said. “I feel like we shouldn’t make jokes like that.”
Lily’s hands twisted with regret, then, at the words she’d chosen: sinful, ugly. She wanted to apologize, but she knew from these past few weeks with Madison that showing this teenage girl her soft underbelly would be a mistake. Even in capitulation, even during a moment of Madison’s own childish fear.
She sat down beside her at the table.
“You don’t have to watch what you say,” she said. “Not in front of me, and certainly not when you’re here at home. I understand you want to be careful when you’re out there, I don’t blame you. But you don’t need to worry when you’re here, okay?”
She could see Madison leaning in toward her, hungry for more. But since the morning of the slap, and again on the night of the Halloween party, Lily felt unsure of when and how Madison might choose to deploy her weapons. She turned away, and pretended not to see the way Madison put one finger to her sternum and held it there just for a second, as if to steady some heirloom left wobbling on its treacherous perch.
Lily washed the strawberries, making as much noise as she could, then told Madison she didn’t have to stay to eat them.
SHE WAS MIDWAY through dinner prep when Jackson called. During her work hours, which he knew he was never supposed to do, and to talk about the holiday weekend, which she’d already made clear she wouldn’t discuss further.
“I hear you,” he said. “I’ve been trying to hear you. But you haven’t been into the city in, like, a month.”
“I don’t think it’s been that long,” Lily said. “And I tried to explain this last night. I don’t want to be gone for the entire weekend, and if I don’t have the actual meal at my mother’s, with my family, you know that will be six months of a soap opera. They’re already furious that I don’t visit more.”
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