“That’s it,” the other woman said. She held a pair of pleated silk pants the color of gold in her hands; she kept turning them as if to catch the light, then tilting her head in mock consideration. Mina tried to remember the husband’s name. He was a senior vice president at Lazard, a mediocrity, someone who had been there for years without much to show for it. The guys from Lazard always looked so miserable. The place was stuck in the Stone Age, or more specifically in Paris circa 1976. Same difference.
“People talk about—well, about us, as if we just won it at the craps table in Vegas,” Lazard Wife continued. “And I think we all know how far that is from the truth.”
“Yes!” Alexandra’s head bobbed. Her neck was strangely thick, Mina noticed, much thicker than you’d expect from the fine blond hair and the delicate fingers. “I just . . . we built this house as a place to spend time with our children, our friends, our grandchildren. We built it to have a place for future memories to happen. I don’t see what’s so worthy of attack, honestly.”
Alexandra trailed off, and Suzanne, wearing a pair of sunglasses and clasping a jeweled cuff around her wrist like a vise, looked up in alarm. Oh, Mina thought. We’ve let too much time go by. We’re supposed to speak up to agree.
“Of course not!” Suzanne said, complying. “And it just seems unfair and, frankly, I don’t know. Shortsighted, I guess. The fact that one man is reckless, not good at his job . . . to act like everyone else, just by virtue of living in the same town, is just as bad as he is. I just don’t get that at all.”
Her eyes darted to Mina every few seconds, and then the final bit of understanding snapped into place. Mina felt it cleanly, like that last moment when you’re baking and you slide the spatula beneath the cake and it comes away from the pan as its whole, uncrumbled self. She wasn’t here because they wanted to know what was going on with Isabel. It wasn’t just another installment of the dress at Saks, the concerned glances in Whole Foods. They no longer cared if she let them in, and they hadn’t learned anything. No woman in the room had reconsidered shit about her own life.
They just wanted Mina to know this: if she didn’t make up her mind the right way, they were going to make sure that she was the next one left out. The grace period had ended. They were coming out of their foxholes.
“Oh, I agree,” Alexandra said, gratified. “I think Bob D’Amico is a fool. But my husband is not Bob D’Amico.”
Mina felt a smothered admiration for the way Alexandra said this without even glancing in her direction, without softening her tone or wincing in apology.
“You know it won’t stop with him,” Lazard Wife said, holding her wineglass up in the air by its stem. “Steven says that John Briggs is hanging on by a thread. Not even a thread. He says it’s a matter of time before, you know.” She slashed her non-wine hand through the air just in front of her own throat.
“God, I can’t imagine,” Alexandra said, and Mina saw that this was why the woman had brought it up, to give Alexandra an unobtrusive chance to insist on this. Even though all they were fucking doing, any one of them in this room, was imagining it quite clearly. They’d all jockeyed, hoping to sit near Alexandra’s place on the floor, so that when she leaned back she’d have to prop her elbow against their knees. Just so they could reassure her, yes, yes. You can’t imagine. We can’t imagine.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Alexandra said. “Everyone’s been saying that about John’s fund, and about Rhombus Equity, too, but it’s all just rumors. I think we’ve seen the worst of it.”
“Well, and the problem is that so often people don’t know anything about it,” Lazard Wife said. “But it won’t stop them from adding their commentary. I mean, whatever happened at Weiss—and of course we still don’t know exactly what that was—but it’s hardly the same as the Madoff situation. And you know they just talk about it, like, Greenwich. In the same breath, as if any of these are the same things.”
“I think I should take both pieces,” Suzanne said to one of the young women; she had drifted back over to that side of the room. They were looking down at a piece of black velvet, at the diamond and ruby brooches strewn across its expanse. “They’re just so different, in their ways. Whichever one I leave behind, that will be the one I have a sudden need for, right? Isn’t that always the way.”
“Buy them all!” Alexandra catcalled, before turning back to Mina. She’d edged along the floor to be closer to her.
“Just look at Kiki and Jim,” Lazard Wife continued. “I mean, dear God, what do I have in common with those two! I always wondered what she thought about his little, well—his little foibles. That seaplane to commute from Bridgehampton, we know how it looks now, but how good did it look even then? But she would never really do her part, would she? They were so isolated, even though they were just in Manhattan. They certainly never entertained at the Hamptons house.”
She seemed to have directed this last part at Mina, who took a sip from her unfortunate, non-vodka drink.
“I wouldn’t really know even if she had,” she said cautiously. “Goldman and Weiss were never much for cross-pollination.”
“Oh God,” Suzanne chimed in. “Of course. I forgot that when you’re still at one of the banks you have to put up with all their little feuds. God, I bet you’re wishing right about now that Tom had thrown in with a fund a little bit sooner.”
Mina smiled. Suzanne turned back to Alexandra.
“And speaking of, has anyone seen either of the Madoff boys? You know both houses out here were attached to one of the first lawsuits. By the Fairfield County pension fund, if you can even imagine how that must feel. I know it’s not the same thing, but when you hear stories like that, you can’t help but wonder. Isabel must be terrified.”
Again, Alexandra let the moment go by, gracefully, like a ballerina bending at the waist to dip alongside the arc of her extended leg, to brush the floor with her fingertips.
“I think we can all agree that Isabel must be suffering,” she said, her tone vaguely admonitory.
“Oh, yes,” Suzanne trilled, sipping from her freshly topped-off champagne flute. She sat next to Mina and put one hand to her arm, as if eager to remind her that she, herself, had said nothing against Isabel. “She’s such a smart woman. If only he’d listened to her.”
“And it’s only going to get worse,” Alexandra continued. “I mean, I don’t want to go into detail, but once they start really digging into what actually happened in that building . . .”
The other women leaned in.
“This, too, shall pass,” Alexandra said, dramatically abandoning her earlier sentence. “But I have to tell you, I’d be shocked if he doesn’t have to leave town. That is, if he’s even got that option. But I shouldn’t even speculate, that’s bad luck. Well, Mina. You must know what I’m saying. I don’t doubt Goldman has access to all the same information Brad does.”
“Oh,” Mina said, cautioning herself even as she began to feel her pulse in her temples, her jaw. “I agree. I’m sure they’ve all got the same information. I’m sure all the men who hated Bob for so many years because he was so much better than they were at making money—I’m sure they’re all lining up to call him a criminal. I don’t doubt that at all.”
Alexandra said nothing, revealed nothing. She simply stared at Mina, and smiled.
“Well,” she said with an air of finality, unfolding her limbs and standing finally to walk over to the dresses, the jackets, the shoes. “In any case, I do feel bad for her. Really, I do. But she might have to get used to the fact that this isn’t over anytime soon.”
As small talk slowly caught up to them again, Mina knew that she would have to buy a pair of pumps she’d never wear because of their association with this day, this room. She couldn’t be the only woman to leave without buying something. What choice did she have? She wasn’t ready, yet, to storm out of Alexandra Barker’s house, and she’d already said far too much. She was not ready to lash herself to Isabel’s sinking ship, not wit
hout some sort of guarantee, from Isabel. Some honesty to tie them to each other.
SHE CALLED AHEAD as she drove. Lily came to the door and didn’t bother to conceal her contempt, her resentment at Mina’s assumption that it would be permissible to show up with so little warning. Isabel hovered, a white shadow at the top of the darkened staircase.
“You sounded pretty panicked on the phone,” she said. Lily withdrew.
“I was at Alexandra Barker’s house. She hired some women to bring clothes to the house. So they could all keep shopping, but in private. So no one will see them buy anything expensive in public.”
Isabel laughed once, and the sound was terrible. Mina could hear it coming up from deep within her, could hear it scrape and tear its way out of her body.
“Very resourceful,” Isabel said.
“No, it’s not funny. You should have heard them. They were talking about Bob, Isabel, totally out in the open. About whether anyone from Weiss will do jail time. They kept mentioning Bernie Madoff and how it wasn’t really the same thing.”
She tried not to spit the words, knowing that she needed to frighten Isabel only a bit, not too much.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because we’re going out, right now. What I said on the phone. We’re going to go have dinner somewhere where a lot of people will see you. You’re going to sit at a table with me and smile and laugh and stop at people’s tables to say hello on our way out of the restaurant.”
“Mina,” Isabel said, “you must have me confused with Suzanne Welsh. I don’t care what those women say about me. I don’t—”
“No, I don’t think that’s true,” Mina said. “I think you care very much. And we’re not in the staging area anymore, Isabel. They’re going to move on either way, whether we give them their cue or not.”
Isabel tilted her head, as if Mina’s voice were reaching her from a distance.
“We?” she said. Mina ignored it, the pain of Isabel’s tone. This was no time for hurt feelings, for polite deferral to Isabel’s imperiousness.
“You have to go to Suzanne’s party next week, for the museum. I know you don’t want to, but you still have to.”
“Mina, please. We’ve already planned on it.”
“Good, then. Good. You know as well as I do—you know better than I do, Isabel. The boys have another ten years, Jesus, ten, before they’ll go away to school. And Madison still has to live here. It’s been more than three months since Christmas.”
Isabel recoiled at the mention of Christmas; you could almost see the skin at her temples begin to vibrate.
“And we said, at the time, we said that her little rebellion could have been so much worse. Didn’t we?” Mina continued. “If someone had seen her, spoken to her? It’s sheer luck that it didn’t happen then and that it hasn’t happened since, Isabel. You have to start playing along, even if he still won’t. You have to go out, and you have to protect them.”
Isabel didn’t say anything for so long that Mina thought this might be it, that she might finally have spent everything she had in the bank here.
“We’re getting wine with dinner,” Isabel said finally, and Mina felt herself deflate with success.
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s my treat. I’ll call Tom to drive us home if we have to. Or we’ll get a car. Have it meet us around the corner from the restaurant.”
IT WAS LATE, the end of their main course, before Isabel said anything that pierced the veneer of mild conversation about their daughters. They made another brief mention of Suzanne’s benefit the following week, but this was only natural, since the museum was near the restaurant. They laughed a lot, and Isabel sat relaxed in her chair. The dining room at L’Escale was full of women they both knew, but no one spoke to them except the maître d’. He brought over a complimentary bottle to express his great chagrin at having so offended them in the past that they’d withheld their presence from him all winter, then seemed belatedly to realize his error in calling attention to that fact, and quickly retreated. Isabel didn’t flinch.
“It’s not even the house itself that bothers me,” Isabel said, unprompted, after their plates had been cleared. She did not lean in, or give any bodily clues that she had lowered her voice to a loud whisper.
“I mean, I have no respect for the house, but I don’t care enough to spend time judging someone else’s criteria for happiness. It’s the reluctance to commit to it once you have it. It’s just what you said about today—insisting that it’s not done to build herself up. When you build a dome around your swimming pool, how can you possibly say you aren’t showing off?”
“Sure,” Mina said.
“But I don’t know,” Isabel said. “I know in her mind I’m below her on the ladder, Brad’s hedge fund trumps Bob being a lifer at an investment bank. I know she’s the ringleader of the women who think that way. I always knew. So I never avoided any small opportunity to twist the blade, you know? I always asked after his first wife, whenever I saw him, if she was standing there. I’d always make sure to reintroduce her to Bob every time they met, like I was worried he’d forget which wife it was. You know, you remember Brad’s wife Alexandra, little Carter’s stepmother. It seemed like a small way to keep myself entertained. It didn’t seem so terrible, at the time.”
Mina was feeling much calmer now, a whole dinner away from those women. She saw now that she’d done the right thing. She’d told Isabel what she needed to hear, and Alexandra’s little party had just been the final flourish she needed to drive the point home. But things weren’t quite as dire as they’d seemed. They never were.
Well, she supposed, sometimes they were. She thought of poor Bob, of how slow he’d been to act. She felt real sympathy for him, for the first time in months. Of course he’d assumed the whole thing wouldn’t actually collapse; when in their adult lives had that ever happened? He was only playing the odds. He’d done the best he could, in some ways.
“Isabel,” Mina said, “I don’t think this will last. People are just afraid right now. It wasn’t just you and Bob. You should have heard the way they were talking about poor John Briggs. As if his fund folding will give them any sort of insurance that their own lives won’t change. People will move on, once they feel safe. They won’t care what’s happening to you.”
She saw, for one brief moment, that this was not quite what Isabel wanted, either: to pass into irrelevance. She actually cared, still. But then Isabel composed herself, returned her face to still reflection, like the glassy surface of an unoccupied lake.
“Maybe,” she said. “I once worked with a girl, though—this was in Manhattan, around the time I met Bob—and she dated this reporter who’d been with a paper in San Francisco in the early eighties. He was a little bit older than us. And he made his name, really, with this series of pieces he was writing early on, at the very beginning of the whole thing, in 1981, I think.”
“The beginning of what?” Mina said, but then she knew. “Oh. AIDS?”
“Right, exactly. He was there for the whole beginning, and it was so mismanaged I guess those first few years, it took them so long to do anything about it, and everyone who was a spectator, all the journalists who cared to cover it, they could see how bad it would get.”
“Denise had a friend,” Mina said. “From high school. He moved out there after we graduated, and then he was dead, and I remember, just. You repeat the story endlessly, to everyone you meet. A twenty-four-year-old just died of this rare form of cancer. You keep saying it out loud as if you’ll learn something new, get smarter about it.”
“Yes,” Isabel said softly. “That’s exactly what you do.” She picked up her wineglass and held it for a moment without drinking.
“I’m sorry,” Mina said. “I interrupted you.”
“No, it was just—this man, he had this story about all the infighting. He said there was an editor of a small local paper who’d spoken out against the gay community, I forget the whole story, insulted some of the loca
l gay leaders, and thirty-six of them signed a letter to the publisher calling for him to be fired. The editor, I mean. And he printed up that list, the people who’d signed the letter, and kept it above his desk. And every time another one of them got sick and died, he’d take a red pen and draw a line through that name. This was even years and years later.”
Mina said nothing at first.
“What made you think of that,” she tried then, careful not to betray her surprise, certainly not any dismay.
“I’m not saying my problems are—”
“Of course not,” Mina said. Don’t say more, she thought. Please don’t compare this to that.
She felt the same cramping fear she’d felt that night in December, waiting to find Madison. That Isabel wasn’t reacting as Mina had hoped she might; that all the things she’d always assumed existed so far beneath the surface, in her friend, might not be there.
She didn’t want to watch Isabel retreat further from reality, continue to lick her own wounds. There was a part of her, she knew, that wanted to watch her friend strike back, make him suffer for his mistakes. If you couldn’t do this now, when your husband had humiliated you like this, then when? When would it ever happen?
“I’m just saying, that’s what we are, at bottom,” Isabel continued. “People, I mean ‘we’ as in humans. That’s how we think. And I guarantee you, our names are on that list now.”
Mina wanted to ask her to clarify “our.” She wanted to ask whether that was so wrong, for someone’s name—Bob’s, at the very least—to be on such a list. Someone’s name, after all, needed to be there, when history returned to this time, found that list. But she knew that these questions were too much, even for this moment, porous as it was.
THIRTY-SIX
When Chip came to the door he looked, improbably, as if Madison had just woken him from a deep and isolating nap. He was wearing the shirt she’d come to think of as his trademark ever since the weather had turned from crisp to cold: a blue-and-green-plaid button-down, its sleeves cuffed neatly just below his elbows. She tried to control her gaze, to keep it from wandering to those elbows, to the soft parts of his inner arms where his veins pulsed beneath his skin. She also tried not to be insulted that he wore the shirt with a pair of Harvard sweatpants, their hems frayed, the fabric pilling.
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