But he couldn’t feel large, not shaking Bob’s hand in the receiving line. It was easy to roll your eyes at Bob from afar, easy to refer to Weiss guys as thugs, not the smartest, not the most dapper. Harder to do when presented with the man himself.
Lily had wanted to tell this man something, that night, something about what she’d learned about how not to feel small in this house. But comforting him wasn’t her job, and besides it was annoying that he had broken down in front of her. Assumed she was nobody, underestimated her.
She’d found a security guy to wait with him outside while they brought his car around. She knew that this had been true, during her time in this house: that she had become more exacting, less willing to shield other people from their own exposed flaws. It was so easy, when you lived in it, to learn the behavior.
Isabel has never underestimated you, she thought now. She’s basically given you free license over the lives of her children for the past three months. And today you watched Madison get on a train and didn’t do anything because, what? You’re sick of seeing her mother ignore her? If her mother didn’t ignore her so much, you’d be out of a job.
“Come on,” Jackson said, still kissing her neck. “Tell me. The guy tried to feel you up?”
“Sure. Yes. What else would you expect. These people are awful, right? Is that what you want to hear? They’re clowns. All of them, equally.”
“Not clowns,” Jackson said. “But maybe criminals. You’re going to see this, Lil. Sooner or later.”
She pushed Jackson away from her and hopped down from the counter. She wanted to feel her feet on the floor. This was crazy, this whole idea. He needed to go.
“This is my fault,” she said, “I don’t blame you, but this is it. You got to come in and make fun of my job and roll your eyes at their house. I’m taking you back to the station, okay? You got what you came for.”
But he was already wandering into the pantry, crying out with glee. The longer he stayed in here, the bolder he seemed to get. He wasn’t whispering anymore. They had to leave. This was crazy; this was asking to be fired, begging for it.
And then, as if conjured by her fear, Bob walked into the kitchen.
He had on gray sweatpants and a blue hoodie, a sweatshirt she recognized from a past year’s firm retreat. He was wearing his glasses, so he couldn’t actually be going out for a jog, but otherwise he carried nothing, just his keys. He came into the room and then stopped.
“Lily,” he said, “hello.”
“Hi,” she said. “Can I get you something?”
“I thought I heard someone here with you, and I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know we had company.”
“We don’t, I just—I ran into a friend, who’s in town for the day, and I’ve got an hour still before the boys need to be picked up, so we’re going to grab coffee in town. I just stopped by to—he needed something to eat.”
“Fantastic,” Bob said. “I’m heading out for a jog, myself.”
Jackson emerged from the pantry with a bottle of red wine. No one said anything; Lily did not mention Bob’s spectacles, and he did not look directly at the bottle in Jackson’s hand.
“You have quite a collection,” Jackson sputtered. Bob gave him a discreet nod, maybe simply an acknowledgment that he’d spoken. Lily saw it happen, saw Jackson’s resolve weakening. She saw the way he stood up straighter when this man graced him with that gesture of approval.
“He’s a big oenophile,” Lily said, inexplicably even to herself. What, exactly, would she do if Bob turned to Jackson and started grilling him on wine? “He just wanted to take a look.”
“Sure, sure,” Bob said. “Are you a friend from the city?”
“Yes,” Jackson said.
“An old family friend,” she lied. Bob looked out the window, down the hill toward the front gate, and smiled.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you might give Lily and myself just a moment alone? Just some business to talk over.”
She could feel Jackson’s eyes on her, his uncertainty, but she didn’t look over at him.
“Of course,” he said. He set the bottle down on the wooden table and walked back out to the foyer. Bob turned to her, crossing his arms over his thick chest in a way that made them look undersized, as if they strained to span the width of his body.
“I really am sorry,” she began, but he cut her off.
“How is everything with you?” he said. “I don’t want you to think I haven’t appreciated that we’ve been asking a great deal more. From you. But how is your family? Are you getting in to see them?”
She nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“And your father? I know it’s been an unpleasant season. In Manhattan.”
“He works for the MTA,” she said. “And they’re in Brooklyn, actually. Carroll Gardens.”
“That’s right. I did know that. Me too, you know. Different part of Brooklyn, I mean, but me too.”
“I know.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just crossed to the sink. He flipped the garbage disposal for a moment, and the sudden keening of the gnashing blades startled her. Even though she had watched him walk to the sink, had watched his hand reach for the switch.
“Do you think that makes us tougher, in the end?” he said. “Do you think you’re as disciplined as you are, I mean, because he’s so unimpressed by the choices you’ve made? Your father, I mean. I’ve always gathered he wishes you were in law school, or something. Or at least still living close by.”
She was too surprised to speak. She had never, in eight years, discussed her father with Bob D’Amico.
“I mean, he probably thinks this isn’t a real job. I know something about that,” he continued. “You’ve met my mother, I think. A few times.”
Lily nodded.
“They sit there waiting. They find your choices frivolous, and so then if the slightest thing goes wrong—and things go wrong for everyone, lawyers and doctors, too, we know that. But as soon as we have any understandable misfortune, they clap their hands and back away and say, oh, of course. I told you it would. That’s what your father would say, if something went wrong for you, yes?”
Lily shook her head, not in response, just a bewildered reflex. She had gathered, over the years, that Concetta didn’t think he had a “real job,” but it sounded like garden-variety fussing from a woman whose primary form of communication had always been complaint. She’d never thought, really, that his mother was waiting for him to fail.
Bob rattled his keys with finality, and Lily knew he was preparing to leave.
“I don’t mean to pry, Lily,” he said. “Not in the slightest. But I don’t want you to think it escapes my attention. How tirelessly you—how much you give us. And you are, in many important ways, alone. That’s why we’ve brought you so close to us. As you know, my wife is not one to befriend many people. But you are family, to us. You are as essential to this household as I am. I hope you know that, but more importantly, I want you to know that I know it.”
Still she couldn’t speak. She stood, in the middle of his kitchen, and nodded, mute. But then, this seemed the response he’d expected.
“I see how well you look after my children,” he said, with finality. Then he cleared his throat and smiled more substantially. It was the glad-handing public smile she recognized, with none of the smoky distance he’d had on his face just moments earlier. She saw now that he had a manila folder in his other hand, held low and close to his body, against his thigh.
“It looks like it might rain,” Lily told him. “You might want to save the jog for the morning.”
“We’ll see,” Bob said. “I’ll take my chances. It was nice meeting your friend. I’ll leave you both to it. Help yourself to the wine, too.”
He moved toward the mud room, pausing beside her to lower his hand to her shoulder.
“Pretend I was never here,” he said. “We very nearly missed each other, didn’t we?” And then he was gone.
Jackson r
eappeared as soon as the side door slammed. They moved together to the big window and watched him as he strolled down the drive, breaking into a light jog only as he disappeared behind the crest of the hill. But the security guys are down there, she thought. If he’s meeting someone else, they’d have to pick him up farther away. Not in front of the house.
He’d just been trying to say something nice, something thoughtful. Maybe he was changing. He could, right? After something like this? He’d looked healthier, she thought, his skin once again had its nutty glow, no longer ashen and crusted, stale with stubble. But he must have a plan. He’d kept it from them, but he had a strategy. He hadn’t really been leaving Isabel all alone, here.
She could choose to see it this way. She might not be wrong.
“Where is he going?” Jackson said. Lily felt that if she spoke, her voice would be only a croak. “He usually let you raid the wine rack?”
She knew they’d been given permission, and in exchange for something, but for what?
She took Jackson’s hand, and they, too, left through the mud room. She knew now that she’d let her boyfriend stay. Later, they’d fuck.
TWENTY-SEVEN
As they jammed themselves into the darkened chamber between Stone Street behind them and the bar’s inner door before them, Madison could already hear all the small noises you sometimes caught in brief shots as you passed the bars on upper Third, just north of the old apartment. That acrid smell she’d learned to identify as she got older, the smell of spilled beer mixed with old sweat. She smelled liquor at home, all the time, but stale beer didn’t smell anything like day-old whiskey, whether on the floor or on someone’s breath. Alcohol was all around her, and always had been, but bars were new.
Zoë surged ahead, her hips liquid through the muggy mass of bodies. There was a redness to the lighting, just as Madison had been led to expect from bars in every movie she’d ever seen. The bartenders were all tall women with sculpted arms, wearing modest black tank tops that still managed to look entirely lascivious on their bodies. The men—and the room was filled almost entirely with men—looked like they had been steadily wilting since 6 A.M. that morning. They all wore their hair parted, slicked back with product. Their combs had left razor-sharp paths along their scalps, so that their hair rebelled only at the napes of their necks. The slight flip to its ends let you know that they’d much prefer letting it flow free, preferably while sitting on the deck of someone’s boat with a cooler of Bud heavy.
Bud heavy, she thought, the memory bobbing unexpectedly to the surface, had been Grandpop’s favorite.
They all had bodies that had clearly been bulked and toned in service of some courtly sport, years earlier, but were beginning slowly to go slack. They all had a softness to their cheeks that was not baby fat but its older twin, the sort of fat that makes its debut about eight years after baby fat has departed for good. Many of them turned at the sudden influx of frozen air to watch the three girls enter the bar.
Madison felt the heat of their gazes on her cheeks, her hair, the exposed part of her collarbone. Miraculously, Zoë had already found an empty bar table at the back of the room.
“There’s no bouncer?”
“I told you,” Zoë said. “I’ve never been carded at a place like this. They don’t care, we’re girls.”
“They’ll probably card us at the bar,” Allie said, smiling apologetically for the correction. “We’re just still on the early side, for a bouncer.”
“Well,” Zoë said. “Yeah. But they don’t have the time to care. Look at this place. Plus, I told you—the IDs belonged to my cousin and her friends. They aren’t even fake.”
Madison perched on a high bar stool, its seat upholstered in blood-colored leather.
“Should we go up to the bar?” she yelled in the general direction of Zoë’s ear.
“We don’t want to lose this table,” Zoë said with a shrug. “If we wait, someone will bring drinks over.”
And for once, she wasn’t glossing over the truth.
The three guys who came over weren’t all the same age; one of them seemed to have some sort of vague supervisory role in relation to the other two. He wore a wedding ring and was much quieter than his friends, periodically scanning his gaze over their heads, looking like he had hopes of levitating his way out of the conversation.
“You three look thirsty.” One man had spoken first, when they slid over. This one was named Jack. He looked strong, his forearms bulbous like bowling pins. She liked the way his broad shoulders seemed to strain his dress shirt to its limit, but the rest of him seemed the wrong shape for a suit, his torso crammed uncomfortably into his pants.
“You also look a bit lost,” said the other young one. His name was Craig. He was thinner, taller, like someone who’d only just graduated from being gangly. Unlike Jack, he still wore his suit jacket. Craig’s hair was longer than Jack’s, parted and tamed with some sort of product, but for the first few minutes he kept brushing it back from his face and sighing.
The married one, Hugh, was the one to take their orders. Madison didn’t want a beer, but when they asked the girls to pick their poisons, Zoë immediately insisted that they’d all have whatever “you boys” were having. Did that even work? Madison wondered. Wouldn’t we seem older if we all had our own drink orders?
As she drank, she told herself stories about them. Craig was the smoother talker, the better banker. Jack wasn’t as smart, came from a more blue-collar background, was relying on becoming a good old boy as soon as possible if he wanted to advance. Her father would take him seriously; Jack was a guy who would get very good at golf, knowing it would help. She imagined that Craig liked Jack’s bluster and Jack liked Craig’s effortless comfort, the way he moved through their world like a knife cutting through cake.
The most noteworthy part of their time at the bar, she would tell herself later, was that she learned how wonderfully easy it was to tell lies if you strung them all together like buttery pearls on a necklace. Letting them fall in line, gain strength from their proximity to one another. You started with a big one and then followed it with several small ones to make the big one feel real, then as soon as it was truly established, added another big one. She could not believe how well it worked, the high you felt when you did it well, the way it filled you with the intoxicating desire to tell another, and another.
“Juniors,” Zoë was saying. “We’re at Yale,” and here she indicated Madison and herself, “and Allison is at Trinity.”
“See,” Jack said, trying and failing to draw Hugh’s focus back to the table. “I told you they were twenty-one.”
Allie tittered over the rim of her pint glass.
“You girls all from Connecticut?”
“Oh, God no,” Zoë said. “Los Angeles.”
Madison couldn’t look away; she had the bizarre sensation, ushered along by the beer, that Zoë was rewriting her own life for her, that when they were done here this would all be true. She would be from Los Angeles, not Greenwich. Her father would run a studio, not an investment bank. She would be whoever other people said she was, but instead of the people who usually performed that function, it would be Zoë and Allie who’d decide for her.
“So what are you doing down here six days before Christmas?” Craig teased. “If I were you I’d fly home as soon as December hit.”
Zoë reached out to rest her fingers on the back of his hand. She told him about their mutual friend, an enormous Christmas bash at her place a few hours north, just over the Connecticut border. How they’d all gone a few years in a row, how when they were up there they had no cell service and it was so amazing, but on Sundays you had to drive over into New York if you wanted to buy alcohol.
“I still can’t believe that’s law over there,” Jack said. “The first time I visited a buddy in Stamford, that blew my mind.”
Jack was from Missouri.
“There’s a law in Connecticut that more than five women living in a house together constitute
s a brothel,” Zoë continued. “So there are no actual sorority houses at Yale. Isn’t that sad?”
Madison tried to remember if she’d known there was a law in Connecticut that prohibited buying alcohol on a Sunday. It seemed like something her father would have mentioned, many times.
“Yes,” Craig replied. “That, guys, is tragic.”
The room had gotten louder. Somehow, the underlying din was always male—deep voices rumbling past one another like tectonic plates shifting beneath their feet. The shrieks that punctuated those rumblings, the reaction sounds, were always women.
Hugh returned with three drinks, a second round only for the girls. Madison had asked for vodka this time.
“Ladies,” he said. “This has been a pleasure. But we’re actually late,” and here he paused heavily to look at Jack, “for a client dinner. So you’ll have to enjoy this round for us.”
“Hugh!” Craig yelped, for the first time showing a rowdy streak that might match him more logically with Jack. “One more round!”
“Take a look, girls,” Jack said, joining in. “This is what comes of marriage. He’s got to catch the train to the ’burbs. He’s got the wife waiting for him. There’s a drip in the kitchen, the sink needs fixing. He can’t be drinking away his Friday night with three California girls.”
Hugh mumbled something about a glass of water, and began moving back toward the bar, his progress coming in waves—a wall of bodies would crush him, then something would give and he’d surge forward. Madison watched him move away from them. She took the straw out of her highball glass and gulped the drink.
“Let me tell you guys a little secret,” Craig said. “He’s twice as hammered as either one of us. He’s probably been drunk since lunch.”
When she left the table, the last thing Madison heard was Jack explaining something to Allie.
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