“Well, you must think it could be something,” he said, sounding almost angry for the first time. “It got you to this bar. You’re sitting across from me right now.”
She waited, and said nothing.
“Madison, I’ve done my homework. I’m not flying blind here. I’ve got some really media-savvy people on board. This world is changing—just look at Facebook in the past two years. Just look at Twitter.”
He pointed at her phone, which she’d taken out and placed on the table beside her.
“You’re too young to understand this, but when that was new, if you’d told me that in a few years I’d have that option but also the option of an iPhone? It would have blown my mind.”
“Great,” she said.
“I’d be happy for you to just keep thinking about it,” he said.
“I don’t know anything about his bank,” she said. “If you think I’m some expert on what happened at Weiss, you’re wrong.”
He hesitated before seeming to reach some decision within himself.
“Not what I’m interested in. Other people are doing plenty of other—there are big questions about the earnings report Weiss announced last summer, for starters. And about their overall accounting techniques. But I’m not interested in investigating fraud, and I’m bringing all of this up right now not to upset you, but to prove that to you. I could care less whether your father knew about what was going on at that place. I could care less what was or wasn’t illegal. That’s not what I want to write about.”
She stared down at her phone.
“I’m interested in you,” he said. “Not the bank, not him. What you think of him.”
SHE LEFT THE BAR ALONE, assuming that Gabriel Scott Lazarus, with his three names, would settle their tab. It had grown dark during the brief time she’d been at that table with him, and it was still so cold, for late March. The golden light from the bar washed squares of the sidewalk in its warmth. And when she looked up, preparing herself to negotiate the various ways she could get home, where surely no one had even noticed her absence, Lily was standing right in the middle of one of those squares.
When Madison looked back over her shoulder, as if to disavow the bar behind her, the people in it, she couldn’t believe how cozy it looked from out here.
She turned back to Lily.
“You followed me? From Connecticut?”
“Madison, what’s going on?”
“I’m going to miss my train,” Madison said, and began to busy herself with her scarf, her gloves, checking that she had everything still in her purse.
“Believe me,” Lily began. “Believe me when I say that I’m telling you this because I love you, not because I’m looking to get you grounded, or anything like that.”
“Please,” Madison said.
“This is not a good idea,” Lily said. “Not like this.”
“How did you even know I was here? Did you follow me?”
“This is not a good idea,” she repeated. “You’re young, Madison, to understand this.”
Madison laughed, taking pleasure in doing it right in Lily’s face. As she pushed past, she heard Lily cursing under her breath, shit, shit. Madison put her arm up for a cab.
“Madison,” and then Lily had one hand on Madison’s arm, bringing it slowly back down toward their bodies. “I can drive you back. I won’t tell her you were here. But I need you to—I need you to tell me why you wanted to talk to him.”
Madison opened her mouth and gulped the cold air, air so fresh and brisk it seemed to have weight to it. She kept gasping it in, feeling more confident with each second that she wouldn’t start to cry. She knew that if she just turned back to Lily, she would be hugged, brought in close, her hair stroked.
“I can probably help,” Lily said. “You think you already know what I’m going to say. But you might not. I might agree with you, Madison. I might agree with you. Just try me.”
FORTY
Let’s try this one,” Jake said. “This one looks nice.”
Amanda and her father turned into the small boutique just off the Avenue. It was a “concept store,” an idea she’d only heard of for the first time from Zoë Barker, of all people, at that hellish Halloween party.
They were, improbably, in search of a hostess gift for Suzanne Welsh, as they would be attending her museum benefit that night.
Amanda had no more interest than her parents did in that night’s partygoing. But after seeing Madison the previous weekend, Amanda felt like maybe her presence could be important, a stabilizing force of some kind. Something was bound to happen, tonight, the first time Bob went back out into Greenwich. The water would be bloody within minutes. Bob would have to make something happen, just so he had some say in what that something would be.
That was the thought that kept coming to her, the certainty of some sort of drama, and she told herself that her desire to be there for Madison was just that, for Madison. It was nothing like the TV news, nothing like the Observer and its recent, renewed obsession with Bob’s whereabouts. Nothing like her father’s “professional” interest in what had happened at Weiss.
In town, they’d wandered aimlessly into and out of the storefronts that Amanda always thought of as their town mascots. Every store was set up to cater to the same airy, dreamed-of woman. They wanted you to see it each time you walked in: what you’d look like at a beach resort, walking from your cabana to the pool, or what you’d look like on your husband’s colleague’s British country estate, fox hounds nipping at your boot-clad heels. But no, Amanda reminded herself, most of Greenwich wouldn’t have to imagine some aspirational woman. They’d already established themselves as that woman; these stores were only here to reassure them that they wouldn’t lose their grip on her, whoever she actually was.
Amanda trailed her father through the store until he stopped at an antique wooden hutch cabinet littered with votive candles and other tiny, faux-vintage baubles. He looked over at her, helpless.
“A candle is probably fine,” Amanda said. “We can have them wrap it so it looks more, whatever. Extravagant.”
“I truly do not understand why we are going tonight,” her father said. “This seems, to me, beyond foolish.”
He peered at the box, trying to see if he could pop it open without breaking its gold-stickered seal.
“You’re nervous,” she said. “Because we haven’t seen him all year.”
“I don’t think it’s wise for us to be in the same place,” her father said, doffing his glasses and chewing on an end.
“Dad, you could have run into him anytime. All winter. You live in the same town. I mean, why do any of this if you actually care what he thinks?”
“I do not,” her father said. “I do not care what that man thinks. Not one bit.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Amanda, you—I mean, I know you were angry with me initially, that I did not consult you before that first column. But please tell me that all this time later, you understand. The tragedy here is not the loss of Bob’s good name, Amanda. Please tell me you understand that.”
“I’m not stupid,” she said.
“Then act like someone who isn’t,” her father said. “Bob is not the victim. The victims are people who have never even heard his name, whatever its value. You know that.”
She nodded, once.
“Tell me you aren’t going to get into this with him tonight?”
“Of course not. If there’s any unpleasantness, it’ll be painful for you. That’s why I’m worried about tonight. For you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. We mustn’t do anything to make this difficult for me.”
Her father held the box with the candle in both hands, letting his arms sag as if he was carrying something much heavier.
“I know it’s been a rough year,” he said. “You know how I know that? Because you have become absolutely vicious on this topic. The way you speak to me, about this, it’s gotten quite ugly. I thought I was getting through to you, just
now. I thought we were communicating. All year I’ve thought, if I can just make my daughter understand who’s at fault here, then I’ve done my job as a parent. But I see that, in this respect, I’ve failed.”
He began to turn away, then had one final thought.
“You wanted to go to this damn thing. So we’re going. And I’m paying for the privilege. So I’d watch your tone.”
He walked back to the cash register, offering the young salesgirl a tired, still-boyish smile. She laughed at something he said, reaching out to take his credit card between her index and middle fingers.
They should just do it, Amanda thought. That’s what she would tell Madison, tonight. Just give the stuff to the “reporter,” who didn’t sound all that legitimate, honestly. Just give it to him, let it be his problem from now on. Nothing bad would actually happen. There was no way Madison had enough information, enough power, to cause any actual harm.
Either way, somebody—Madison’s father or her own—would have to stand up in public and say those words: I was wrong. I made a mistake.
That’s what’s been missing so far this year, Amanda thought. That’ll ease things up around here. That might make this the kind of place I can imagine staying in for another two years without putting my head in the oven.
She’d read that phrase recently, in English, studying Sylvia Plath as part of the spring poetry unit. She knew it wasn’t literal; Sylvia had just shut herself in the kitchen and tucked towels between doors and floor. It wasn’t in particularly good taste, either, to invoke suicide as linguistic flourish. They’d sat through countless school assemblies, all their lives, about how hurtful casual wordplay could be, how easy it was to rub your own cavalier attitudes like salt into the wounds of others.
But the phrase itself was just so tempting, so appealing on the tongue. And the image itself, the idea that someone could just kneel down and put her face into the heat. There was something undeniably memorable, romantic even, about that.
Her father came up behind her again.
“What are you thinking about?” he said. Amanda decided not to lie.
“Sylvia Plath.”
“Jesus,” he moaned, rolling his eyes.
“You know she put her head in the oven.”
“Everyone knows that. That, trust me, is the only reason she’s famous.”
“Hardly,” Amanda said.
FORTY-ONE
On the night of the Welsh party, Madison went into her mother’s bathroom to watch her get ready. This was not something she’d ever done as a child; there was no echo of past routine, no remembered tenderness in the act itself to make the evening any easier. But still she did it, walked across the second floor and into her mother’s part of the house.
Isabel leaned forward at the waist, her face thrust toward the mirrored cabinet above her sink. She was still wearing only her bra and a half-slip. Two cabinet doors had been left open, the mirrored sides facing each other. When Isabel tilted her head back and leaned forward, her neck and breasts floating toward the mirrors, her reflection repeated into infinity. Dozens and dozens of identical Isabel faces springing forward and receding into some illusory horizontal distance, in the unreachable depths of the green glass.
Madison sat down at the vanity.
“You’ll wrinkle your dress,” Isabel said without turning to look. The dress had been waiting on Madison’s bed when she came in from school that afternoon. It was floor length, silk that poured over her hip bones and pooled at her feet like water, bile green in some lights, yellow gold in others. When she’d found it spread across her taut white bedspread, it reminded her of a half-healed bruise.
Madison stood up again, without comment.
“Oh, go ahead,” Isabel said smoothly, drawing down her bottom lid to apply a thin line of eyeliner to its inner rim. “What do we care if we show up wrinkled for Suzanne Welsh.”
They cared very much; this was the first night the entire family, all five of them, would be going out together, as a team, since the summer. But Madison knew what her mother was doing, knew that sometimes you just say things to fill the air, to shield each one of you from the other’s scrutiny. She nodded.
“Is Dad ready?”
“I’m not sure, sweetheart.”
Madison looked longingly at the chilled glass of white wine sitting on the sink, where a bar of soap should be.
“Is Lily going to come? To watch the boys?”
“They’re going to eat with us, then she’ll come pick them up as soon as dinner is over. I know they’re excited, and I don’t want to keep them from tonight, especially. It’s important for them to see your dad, out, around other people.”
It’s important for me, too, Madison thought.
Madison strained to hear any signs of life from beyond the door that led to her father’s antechamber. He couldn’t possibly still be downstairs, could he? If he hadn’t started to get dressed, then he wasn’t coming.
He might be hiding out down there. There were suddenly a lot of people in the house tonight. Lena and her girls, bustling all around. Lily cooking something for three nights from now, in the kitchen. It was as if they were getting ready to host the party here, or something. Suddenly, every single one of them needed a reason to keep her hands busy.
When she heard nothing from next door, Madison turned to her mother’s vanity, to the potted creams and glass-sheathed gels and the shiny black square cases that signaled their contents as Chanel eye makeup. She picked one up and held it in the center of her palm. It was so old that the interlocking white C’s had begun to wear out in places. Her mother was always telling her how important it was to throw out your makeup every six months, buy all fresh supplies.
“Why aren’t you doing your makeup over here?” Madison asked, frowning at herself in the bottom-lit vanity mirror. “I thought the whole point was to sit at this thing, isn’t that why it’s called a vanity?”
Her mother stood back now from the cabinet mirror, as if she’d look appreciably different from two steps farther away. She cocked her head at her own reflection.
“It helps,” she said. “To get it right, you almost have to be too close to actually see it. What’s going on? Why are you in here?”
Gabe Lazarus hadn’t so much as mentioned her mother, Madison realized. This hadn’t seemed odd in the moment, in the bar, but now she thought of it. He’d talked about the jobs her father could get, the ways her father’s image could be softened. Cardiac surgeon? Electrical engineer? His voice childish with scorn, then wavering with regret for having pushed her to reveal her own embarrassment.
“Sweetheart? Why are you lurking like a ghost,” Isabel said. “What’s going on?”
Madison sat on the edge of the bathtub. She could say it, if she wanted. She was dying to kneel down under the weight and let her mother shoulder some of it, finally.
“I want to ask you about something,” she said. Her mother was bent over, swirling a thick black brush through face powder. She looked up at Madison now, her eyes such a clear blue in this light that they looked almost deadened, inanimate. Her mother must know. Shouldn’t she? That Madison’s father had confided in her, that Madison knew important things, or at least knew that there were important things unsaid. Which meant that they could discuss the business card Madison had tucked into her evening purse, as carefully as if it were parchment.
“Can it wait? Is it going to be a problem at the party, or can it wait until we’ve gotten through this?”
“It can wait,” Madison said.
Her mother blinked at herself in the mirror, then met Madison’s eye there, in the glass.
“Did your father say something to you?”
“Not really,” Madison said, truthful.
“Well, then, good,” Isabel said. “Remind me tomorrow. Let’s just get through tonight. Smile like we mean it. Right?”
Madison nodded.
“Have you checked in on the boys?”
The twins were still insisting on
sleeping in bed together. Madison tried to recall any time she’d sat with her brothers in recent weeks, actually comforted or reassured them. Done anything more than pull on their earlobes or crack a few jokes that even eight-year-olds must find lame. She blinked the question away, and looked up at her mother.
“Go check on them, Madison. And get your purse together. We need to be downstairs to meet the car in ten minutes.”
FORTY-TWO
Mina stood in her strapless bra and her thigh-highs and her heels, proud of herself that after such a stressful winter she had no need for any sort of control-top anything. She looked down at the butter yellow dress laid across her divan and wondered if it was too late to choose something else, something more muted. Tom came into her closet and whistled. She pretended to ignore him, and he turned away.
“Are you ready?” she asked, following him back out into the bedroom. He flopped onto their bed, the clinking ice in the glass he held answering her question. “I’m serious, Tom. We need to be out of here by seven at the latest.”
Tom pondered this, and instead of turning on the TV, as she’d expected, or even disappearing into his own closet, where he had another TV he could have watched unharried, he stared down at his drink. Clear, so vodka rocks. Which was usually only before the nights he dreaded the most.
“You don’t think he’ll really be there, do you?”
Mina left nothing on her face. She could already feel her lipstick caking at the corners of her mouth.
“I’m sure he will,” she said. “Either he’s there or none of them are.”
He peered up at her, and she saw that this wasn’t the first vodka.
“I don’t want to see that fucking guy,” he said.
She flung down the gown she’d been scrutinizing.
“Fine,” she said. “You don’t want to go?”
“Can we have an adult conversation about this?” he said. “Or do you feel the need to be a smart-ass with me? Can I just admit to you what I’m thinking?”
She went over to him and bopped her hip repeatedly against the side of his leg until he scooted over, clearing a sliver of the bed for her to colonize. She pressed her body against his.
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