“They’ll allow it,” he repeated. It was always this that she remembered most, when she thought about meeting her husband. He had wanted to keep her at that table. He hadn’t wanted her to leave.
“What do you want to bet that if we buy the most expensive bottle you’ve got, they let us kidnap the hostess.”
He used that word. Kidnap. And she saw him realize, almost as soon as he did, that he’d touched something beneath her skin, something that would react as surely as a reflex.
The club continued its eruptions all around them. She looked him right in the eye.
“Oh, you’re so right. You’re the first man in history to come in here and spend a lot of money. Do you think—I mean, maybe they’ll send me home with you, right? All in a day’s work. All because some junior analyst gets paid an ungodly amount of money to pretend that his gambling addiction is an asset.”
But then he pushed further. He held out the bill. She could see that he regretted it too late, that first impulse: to spur her on, to agitate. That was, maybe, the one thing that had changed most about him, once they were married. He’d stopped second-guessing himself; he didn’t need to anymore.
But somehow, when he held out that crisp hundred, fresh from the ATM, he’d seen that she was second-guessing herself. He’d seen how terrified she was to be there, in that club, however well she understood the men streaming in and out. He’d seen that she was there because she was waiting for someone besides her father to tell her what to do with herself. He’d seen that she was skittish, in a perpetual state of both confidence and unease, like a purebred horse sent out into the unblinkered world. And he’d come after her.
The end to the story, as they always told it to the kids, was that she’d thrown the bill back in his face. In retrospect, that made for a good final flourish. But in reality, it hadn’t felt like triumph. It had been totally unsatisfying. Throwing a thin piece of paper is difficult, and it had just fluttered in the air between them. It was no slap to the cheek, no drink in his face.
For her, the story wasn’t ever about her telling him off, embarrassing him in front of his friends. For her, the important part was that he’d held out the bill and then seen that it was a mistake, seen the part of her that shivered and retreated. That he’d seen, in that moment, that their fears might combine to form some worthy weapon, the two of them together.
ISABEL TOOK HER PERFUME and applied it just as her mother had taught her, a spritz to each side of the neck, beneath the chin, and a final one to the crook of an elbow. It took an effort that was almost physical in shape and strain, as it had all year, to keep her thoughts from wandering out to the staircase, down the dark hallway to his study. To the room he’d chosen over this one, up here.
She’d considered looking for him when she came in this afternoon, knocking on his door. But whenever she tried, he wasn’t in there. And the twins had seen her knocking on Bob’s door, the last time. She’d turned and they’d been at the end of the hallway, holding hands, waiting to see.
She stood up and walked into the closet. It was just dinner in town, a restaurant they’d been to a thousand times; it hardly mattered what she wore. She knelt down, tucking her feet beneath her, and looked at all of the clothes. She reached up and let her fingers trail across the fabrics, the delicate swishing sounds bathing her ears. This was the corner where she kept skirts and suits—the materials thicker, sturdier, than, say, the evening gowns, with their supple fabrics touching one another like skin on skin.
It was funny, she thought: her parents had driven the same cars around Westport for decades at a time, the leak in Georgetown that warped the floorboard near the kitchen door had been left untouched until the day her mother died in that house. But her mother had taught Isabel never to skimp on her wardrobe. Her mother had always called her clothing “camouflage.” It was one of those things Isabel hadn’t registered as a quirk, not until she was in high school and heard other girls talking about their mothers.
She’d thought about that a few years later, after they moved to D.C. They sold the house in Westport while she was at Smith, not even mentioning it on the phone until it was in escrow. A few weeks after the move, her father took her along to New Haven for the weekend of his fortieth class reunion. Dinner at Mory’s, the genteel seediness of the coffee stains on lace tablecloths and the wood-paneled rooms and the silver chalice full of champagne and Guinness that was passed around as they each took a gulp, while the rest of the party sang the song and banged their fists on the thick, unsteady wood table. When it was her turn, when her father’s friends had already begun pawing her hand between courses, she thought of her mother, who hadn’t been invited that weekend.
Some daughters would have run to the bathroom, shuddered at the powdery softness of the men’s hands. This had not been an option for her, not a Berkeley daughter. She remained at the table, laughed when one of the men gave the silver cup a jaunty shove as she drank from it.
Her mother had always talked as if strength was a matter only of how you acted in front of other people, as if camouflage was all you needed. As if it was only self-doubt or hesitation that could leave you shaken.
But look at me, Isabel thought, her arms up above her, fingertips trailing the hems of her dresses. I never had a single doubt as to whether I belonged anywhere. That was supposed to be Bob; he was the one who had to bluff, when we first met.
She took one suit between her fingers, touched the nubbly wool to her cheek. I am an orphan, she thought. I have no sisters, I have no mother anymore. My father is gone. If this is the apocalypse, who cares how much canned food we’ve got. I have no tribe. Any freedom that comes from this, it’s come too late. I have no other options now, and there’s no fucking freedom in that.
She looked up at the suits above her, the business attire for the woman who did not have a job. She felt certain her work at MoMA required more intellectual energy than most women gave to their full-time jobs, but if she didn’t need it, then it wasn’t a job. There was a simple rubric, there.
She was expected to bring Bob with her to the next meeting with the lawyers, on Monday morning. Because it was a done deal: she was putting both houses on the market. The new apartment, too. She’d happily get rid of the old apartment, but that one was still in his name. He hadn’t transferred it over to her name, whenever it was, exactly, that he’d done the others. He kept it, maybe for himself.
Maybe his little seclusion back in the fall, his month of anguished silence, was just a performance, too. Maybe it wasn’t this house in her name that had been his lifeboat; maybe he’d wanted his own private lifeboat as well.
So this was what she had ahead of her right now: Mina, dinner, Monday’s meeting, a plan for telling Bob. And then the party at Suzanne’s next weekend. He’d already agreed to that, agreed to put on a tuxedo and leave the house to appear, with her, in public.
She knew what they wanted to hear, the lawyers and the accountants and the consultants. She knew what they wanted to know: Why didn’t she just ask him? Why was she allowing him to leave her like this, alone and waiting?
She reached up to drag herself from her feet, and as she pulled at one of the hangers for support, she knew exactly what would happen. She knew that she’d caught a piece of dress by accident. Between her fingers. She knew it would rip with a satisfying sound, fabric rent from itself. But she was in motion already. She could only watch, as if from another body wholly unassociated with the errant hand. She watched her fist close around the dress, rip it cleanly as she brought herself up off the ground.
Good, she thought. Something, at least, in this room. Something would be damaged when she left.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
THIRTY-FIVE
When you were granted entrance to Brad and Alexandra Barker’s home, after you’d been questioned and verified at the guard gate, you drove for a while before you could even see the house. Mina had been here only a handful of times—the Barkers were, surprisingly, not much for
entertaining on a grand scale, and they’d only once or twice hosted the sorts of parties you’d expect from them.
This house always sent unkind thoughts scrabbling at the corners of Mina’s mind. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly. But ten years ago, when Alexandra bought this house just north of the Merritt and set about renovating it, she seemed determined to show them all how pathetically they’d failed at their own objectives. The house was a parody of their lives, and somehow this reflected poorly on them rather than her.
And of course you drove by it all on your way in, it had been designed this way. A low hedge bordered the driveway on both sides, low enough not to obstruct your view of anything. The tennis court, then the putting greens. Rising like a bubble in the distance, across a vast lawn, the glinting dome that enclosed the swimming pool. Which you could access through an underground passageway, by the way, so when it rained Alexandra could swim beneath the raindrop-spattered glass without even having to dart through the rain itself to get there.
What Mina hated about this house was that it was a house her own mother would absolutely love. And out of sheer joy, not even lurid curiosity.
Her mother had never seen one single point of pause with anything about the life Tom had established for them out here. It had taken Mina longer to acclimate; that whole first year in the house, pregnant with Jaime and waiting for her life to begin, there were so many times she’d held her breath so that she wouldn’t cry. Like holding in a sneeze. By the time you notice yourself changing, Mina thought, you’re already fully ensconced in your final position.
She coasted to a stop at the front entrance.
Alexandra’s e-mail had referred to a vague “afternoon with the girls, just a handful of us.” It had been a stressful few months, the e-mail also said. We thought it might be nice, just to have a relaxing afternoon in private.
It was that final qualification that had Mina on edge. This woman was far from one of her closest friends; they were cordial acquaintances at best. And it would be an unforced error, after that trip to Saks back in October, for Alexandra to corner Mina in hopes of getting some good gossip on Isabel. She’d tried that already, and she’d failed. She’d know better than to overextend.
“Mina, you’re here! Fantastic.” Alexandra answered the door herself, which was the first indication that Mina had perhaps been on the right track when she’d selected a bottle of Perrier Jouet to bring along, something nice rather than opulent. She had taken the code words—“relaxed,” “low key,” “in private”—as clues. Mina almost wanted to offer, as her RSVP card, that she’d snagged this particular bottle on sale at the Trader Joe’s in Stamford.
“Always a treat to come over,” she said instead, as if they did this all the time. She brandished the bottle of champagne before her, holding it high in the air between them.
Alexandra grabbed it and made a great show of examining the label, as if the flowers appliquéd all over the goddamn bottle weren’t decent clues.
“Oh,” she said. “Nice. Very nice.” She winked with her entire face before spinning and beckoning Mina back into the house.
They walked through the main hall before reaching a back parlor that looked out across the grounds. Mina would have assumed it was Alexandra’s office except there were no desks, no bookshelves, just artful groupings of stiff chairs and small cherrywood tables and ottomans. There must have been ten women in the room already.
“You know everyone,” Alexandra said, not asking a question, and she handed the bottle absently to a young woman in a black shift and a severe ponytail who had at some point started following them.
“Could you take care of this, Celine?” The woman—girl, really—nodded and withdrew. Another young woman, this one with darker skin and wearing another black dress that was something decidedly closer to a uniform, stood at a wet bar in one corner of the room.
“Go get a drink!” Alexandra urged. “And just grab a spot anywhere. We’re about ready to start.”
Ready to start what? Ready to commence their afternoon of insincere small talk? Mina saw Suzanne Welsh sitting in one chair cluster with a champagne flute in her hand. There were no women from Weiss.
“You have anything other than champagne?” she asked the maid who’d been posted to the bar. She knew they weren’t supposed to use that word to one another, but it always gave her perverse pleasure to refer to them as maids, at least inside her own head. It was honest, wasn’t it? Tom didn’t like it, though, either.
“Clear liquids only,” the girl replied, her voice light and somehow sounding like a compliment. “I can offer you champagne, white wine, or perhaps a vodka.”
Clear, of course. What on earth must this girl think of them, of this party, of this room? Mina felt her usual twinge of shame, her longing to tell the staff where she’d grown up, that she was really on their side. But you aren’t, she told herself, you’ve never in your life met a maid who’d consider you now to have a single thing in common with her. She was always having to reteach herself this lesson.
“Can I get you anything?” the girl prompted.
Mina allowed herself to sail away, just for a moment, on the idea that she might start gulping down a straight vodka so early, with so much of this left to wade through.
“White wine,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
A little boy wandered in suddenly, another just behind him, a basketball in his hand. This was Alexandra’s youngest, she realized—she’d forgotten they had a son. It wasn’t clear what he wanted. Maybe just to be around the women; Mina remembered well the allure of adults of the opposite sex, the way their talk seemed constantly to flash signals somewhere above your head. The elusive promise that if only you could unlock what the fathers were talking about, then you might have a fighting chance with the boys your own age.
“Sweetheart,” Alexandra said to him, drawing him to her body with one extended arm, not looking at him. She whispered into his ear. As she spoke, the skin just beyond the peaks of her eyebrows rippled, because this was a face whose anger was necessarily displaced and disjointed, playing over its features with the confusing rhythms of a submerged object seen from above water.
And then the child was gone, immediately, just as if she’d slapped him across his face. He and his friend simply vanished. Mina wondered—not for the first time and not for the last—how much it mattered to Tom, still, that they had never had a boy.
Suzanne Welsh was perched on the quilted lavender arm of her love seat. She smiled at Mina, then tapped one long French-manicured nail lightly against her glass.
“Ladies,” she said, “I know we’re all waiting for the main event, but I would just love to take a moment to thank Alexandra”—she paused indulgently for the chorus of assents—“for knowing that this would be something we’d all need so much right now!”
Everyone drank.
Moments later, Celine returned to the room in all her blond efficiency. Several other cocktail-dress-sheathed women followed in her wake, wheeling two stainless steel clothing racks. Everyone quieted; this was clearly the main attraction. Mina saw now that a space had been cleared at one end of the room, leaving only two fainting couches set at angles, as if facing the group of women for an interview.
Bags were unzipped with fanfare; silks and leathers and furs were draped across the couches. One woman seemed to be in charge of shoes, drawing out endless orange and purple boxes and removing a single python sandal, a single jewel-toned stiletto. She placed each shoe atop its own box and lined them up in rows.
“Oh, and I want to remind everyone that fifteen percent is going to the Equus Foundation!” Alexandra called from her place on the floor. She was curled up beside one of the tea tables, drinking what appeared to be a mimosa. Only fair, Mina thought, for the hostess to get a colored drink. “As if you needed any extra push!”
“She said it’s a friend of her sister’s who’s spent several years putting together her own collection,” Suzanne told Mina. “All the personal shopp
ers at Bergdorf’s hate her. These past few months she’s had a boom in her business. I mean, it’s perfect. I’ve gone into Saks a few times, and last week Bill and I did some shopping in the city, but it feels uncomfortable. This is such a perfect solution. Leave it to Alexandra.”
Everyone else began to gravitate to the women and their wares, asking questions, inquiring after specific pieces Alexandra had gushed about in advance, but Mina remained where she was.
“I can’t decide,” Alexandra said from her spot on the floor, and it was the first time Mina realized that she hadn’t stood and followed the others. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.”
Mina nodded, keeping her expression noncommittal, wondering if it was possible she and Alexandra might actually agree on this.
“I just mean, I know it looks bad if we show up at these places in person,” she said. “I understand no one wants to see me ducking into Hermès.”
As if anyone would recognize you, Mina thought, holding it deliciously in her chest as she nodded, her brow sympathetic.
“But I just think if they get wind of this,” Alexandra said, “it might be even worse. And I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone writes up a snarky trend piece in the Times.”
Someone on the other side of the room squealed over a pair of Louboutins. Mina could see the red soles.
“It’s just so silly, really, at bottom, isn’t it?” Alexandra said. She lifted her palm to the ceiling, waving it in a circle, as if to include the entire room, the entire house, in what she would say next. “I know this is a lot. No one is more grateful for it than I am! I certainly don’t come from this, I know how lucky we are. But Brad works his little butt off for everything we have. It’s not like it’s fallen into our laps.”
Mina tried not to choke at Alexandra’s description of her own background. As if aware of this danger, Suzanne floated back over with another woman, her eyes moving with unease between Alexandra and Mina.
Our Little Racket Page 35