“I’m sorry,” she said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking he’s either smarter than anyone’s given him credit for,” Tom said, “or he’s a total fucking idiot. They still haven’t announced whether there will be any indictments. And who knows, they might hold off on that. It’ll be another year even before the examiner releases the report on the bankruptcy. He should be doing what Jim McGinniss has done, go so far underground that no one’s even sure he’s still alive.”
“It’s just Greenwich,” Mina said. “He’s been to a million of these things. They both have.”
“But he shouldn’t be going anywhere,” Tom said. “He should be holed up in that eyesore of theirs out in Sun Valley. He shouldn’t be escorting his perfect wife, who’s done absolutely nothing to deserve this, to Suzanne Welsh’s backyard clambake like they’re in the same boat as the rest of us. What is anyone even going to talk about with him? He’s been the ghost of Christmas Past all winter. He’s been letting her run interference for him.”
Mina tried to hold on to her sympathy, her warmth. She tried to feel it within her, to sense its fragility the way she could feel her anniversary diamonds when she wore them, light beneath her fingertips but heavy, solid, across her sternum. (“Since odds are we won’t make it to our seventy-fifth,” Tom had said when he gave them to her, then insisted he’d been referring to heart disease, not divorce or infidelity, when she burst into tears.)
But she couldn’t. She tried not to focus on the one small part where he’d complimented Isabel, the place where she’d felt his throat constrict beneath her. But she was out of practice, maybe, and coming unexpectedly as it did, this rage, it tingled her limbs until she had to move.
She stood up from the bed and walked away from her husband.
“Well, then we’d better get there early,” she said.
“Why?”
“He’ll need some friendly faces.”
“And someone nominated me? You know I can’t stand that guy.”
They watched each other for a moment, and for the tenth, twentieth, hundredth time that year, she saw her husband make the decision not to ask her how she spent her afternoons, or when she’d last seen Isabel.
“Please get up and get dressed,” she said. “It’s not exactly a clambake.”
FORTY-THREE
Lily had been waiting in the foyer with the boys for almost fifteen minutes. Madison was in the kitchen with a towel thrown around her shoulders like a cashmere wrap, cautiously eating a grapefruit. The adults hadn’t yet shown themselves.
“Why does Madison get to have a snack?” Luke asked.
“Sweetie,” Lily said. “We’ve been over this. You’d make a huge mess. Madison’s older.”
Luke sank to a low step, propping his elbows on his knees, his entire body deflated by the denial of his request. Lily looked nervously, for the third time in as many minutes, up toward the second floor. Isabel’s instructions were to have the twins ready a half hour ago. Here they were, with their gel-tamed hair and their matching tuxedos, their mint green pocket squares, and she could see that all they wanted was for their mother to come coo over their handsomeness.
Matteo walked to the staircase, too, and sat down beside Luke.
And then Isabel was rushing down the stairs in a floor-length black dress, her hand coasting along the banister. She saw the boys and clapped her hands, then turned to Lily.
“Have you seen him?”
Lily shook her head.
“Madison?”
“Kitchen.”
Isabel passed into the kitchen without another word, and moments later Madison came out again. She walked down the hallway to her father’s study. Her face, despite Lily’s efforts, was impossible to read. Since their conversation on the way home from the city, the conversation about Gabe, Madison had provided no clues at all.
The boys were standing now at the foot of the staircase, turning from Lily to their mother and waiting to be told the plan. They’d inched closer so that, even though they weren’t holding hands, their shoulders and arms were pressed together. Lily wanted to cross to them, but she knew that her portion of the evening was fading out, that Isabel and Madison were in charge now. Her services were no longer needed. From now on, it was the D’Amico hour.
Moments later, as if he’d just been waiting for his daughter to fetch him, Bob was coming down the hallway, also clapping his hands, calling for the twins and dropping to one knee to let them tackle him.
“What, is Mom still getting dressed? We’ve gotta get this show on the road!” he yelled meaningfully, looking up at the staircase.
Isabel came out of the kitchen and looked first at him, then at her daughter. No one was looking at Lily anymore. Certainly not the twins, who were tugging at their father’s tie with gusto.
“Boys, enough,” Isabel said, crossing the room to her husband, the skirt of her dress purring as she moved. She held out one hand to her husband, then pulled at his tie with three sharp motions, tucking it back properly beneath the jacket.
Before they’d finished, Madison was at the front door. Lily took Luke’s hand, put her fingers to the back of Matteo’s neck, but Madison was already beckoning them forward to the car waiting outside. Her parents followed her lead.
FORTY-FOUR
Madison had been to parties like this one before. She’d been to so many parties like this one. Parties where her mother or father was a guest of honor, parties where they’d been in some integral way involved with the event’s planning. She’d seen them speak on the stage at the main level of the Intrepid or in the lobby of MoMA, for actual charities, things that were a much bigger deal than this little party at Suzanne Welsh’s house. And still, as the town car crested the top of Wyatt’s front drive, circled the fountain, waited in the line of Range Rovers and Jags and the occasional black town car like theirs, Madison held one wrist with her other hand to keep it from twittering, anxious, in her lap.
The car glided into place. The attendant, a man her father’s age, was suddenly looming at the window.
“We could have just driven ourselves this year,” Isabel said.
“This is important,” her father replied, and Madison saw that this was only the most recent in what must have been a series of barbed exchanges. She saw that these had been resolved not through some harmonious arrival at agreement; they’d just been dropped in attrition, merely abandoned. But wasn’t her father still sleeping downstairs in his study? So when were these minor skirmishes taking place?
The man outside was pulling the door open. He peered into the car, his neck tilted like a jack-in-the-box, then reeled back to urge them forward, to the house.
And then Isabel was gone, already facing the rest of the night with her back to her husband and daughter. She adjusted her stole, then extended a hand for each of the boys. Madison didn’t know why her mother had chosen that wrap to wear. It was too heavy for the breezy night, and her mother’s arms jutted out from the fur at extreme angles, like the legs of a spider.
The twins walked alongside Isabel, flanking her. Only Madison was left behind. Her father clutched her arm, just above the elbow.
“What is the point in coming out here tonight if we’re going to slink in like gate-crashers? Right, Mad?”
She could smell the Laphroaig on his breath and fought a brief spasm of irritation that he hadn’t wanted to talk to her before the party, have a drink alone together.
She winked at her father, and he kissed the top of her head. They followed the rest of their family.
She glanced back once, just before they were swallowed up by the maw of the front door, the house, its second fountain. There was a small, familiar blond woman climbing out of a limousine, two cars behind theirs in the queue. Madison felt her father’s hand stutter against her back, felt him recoil if only for a second, and that was how she knew that he had seen the woman, too. Even if later she would want so badly to tell herself that he’d had no warning.
/> MINA KEPT THINKING that the house was different. There was a new addition off the old living room, new landscaping. A waterfall, for God’s sake. It all had to be new; surely she would have noticed it, last year. But then, it was so hard to say what this evening would have felt like a year ago.
“It’s so good of you,” some woman said to Suzanne. “So generous, really. I sort of almost feel like this is the first time I’ve really been out of the house in months. We all needed this. It’s tradition!”
“Of course, this year more than ever,” another woman said. Mina could not remember either woman’s name. She couldn’t remember coming over here. Tom had left her alone shortly after they arrived, promised to be back soon with a glass of wine. Mina felt a sense of paying dues, fussing over Suzanne now to avoid trouble later. But what trouble was that? The worst that would happen was probably that some small gesture of hers would offend Tom, that she’d find herself thrown back into the car a few hours early, driven home alongside a husband in a white fury.
“The timing just couldn’t be better. Everyone’s happy to finally be here,” Suzanne said. “It’s been a touchy winter, no? Don’t get me wrong—I can understand some of it. I mean, I hardly even feel I belong in a house like this, sometimes. It’s all Bill! But what can you do?”
“Well, you’re hardly Brad and Alexandra,” another woman agreed, stretching her lips as she spoke and raising her eyebrows in that nice-lady-pantomime of a whisper, of actual discretion. “I don’t see a house for the Zamboni anywhere on your property.”
“Oh!” Suzanne said, putting one hand to her chest and dipping her contorted smile toward her champagne glass. This chick must be a newcomer, Mina thought. Alexandra Barker might pop up at her shoulder any minute. And once she did, any casual observer might mistake her for the party’s hostess rather than Suzanne. Disapproving talk of the Barkers was strictly verboten in groups this large.
Mina could feel her nausea up in her throat now, tightening her jaw. Every day of her life thus far had depended on keeping two distinct and self-sustaining places clear in her brain, two places to put the data and details of the world around her. But now it was all bleeding over, barriers had been breached, and she didn’t feel safe showing her face in public when she no longer knew what she might be accidentally giving away. What she might be trading, without realizing she’d agreed to a trade.
Many of these other women were like Mina, had grown up in places that were nothing like this, but they’d forgotten it so fast. They’d blinked, and then suddenly they were women who deserved this, who could talk to Isabel D’Amico and pretend they understood her. The only thing that remained of their old selves was the survival instinct, the willingness to claw another woman out of the way.
Where was her husband? Mina looked over her shoulder. For a moment she saw him, champagne flutes in his hands, talking to another man whose face she couldn’t see. He definitely saw her; he met her eye and then shook his head once, with finality.
Suzanne was greeting a new arrival, a much younger woman and her surely sweaty-palmed husband, probably a new hire somewhere, maybe even Brad Barker’s fund. The woman Mina didn’t know had drifted away from their group, moving slowly and as if without intent toward the bar. She was talking now to some other blonde, very put together, more hard-edged and in a low-cut gown. Just a little too much weight carried through her haunches to really pull it off nicely. Maybe someone in from the city for the night, some Carnegie Hill second wife? But she looked familiar, actually. Mina wished for her glasses, but she hadn’t worn them out in public since she was twenty-six.
The party was gathering steam, now. What had been a few clusters of tinkling small talk was now the rhythmic churning of festive noise. People were moving on to the third glass of wine; it was flowing in them, heating their blood, reminding them that there was no point in being here if they were only going to act like this was a funeral. Women were permitting themselves to laugh, regretting it when their voices grew too shrill but not regretting the impulse itself. It reminded Mina, with the dark blue trees at the party’s edge, the lights strung through them, of one of the books she’d read as an undergraduate. When she’d moved to the city, everything had been too fraught with the potential for disaster to leave time for reading. And even once her life had taken a shape it wasn’t likely to lose, she hadn’t gone back to novels. She’d spent these last twenty years just trying to keep her balance. Her life wasn’t busy, maybe, but it was demanding.
She sighed, feeling the pain of exhaustion even in her fingernails. And then she saw Isabel, standing with Bob and Madison at a table at the edge of the lawn. Isabel already had a glass in her hand; she was leaning, slightly, to catch something Bob whispered in her ear. She was laughing.
How had they done this? How, when everyone on this lawn was just waiting for them to arrive, had they managed to shuffle themselves into the crowd like cards lost in a deck?
Mina checked that Tom was still facing away from her, that he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of Isabel, before she walked over to their table. Just before she was within shouting distance, Bob looked up and grinned. He put his arms in the air, probably for a hug, but he looked like a drunk wind-up toy. She stopped, almost wondered if she shouldn’t approach them. But then that was absurd, he’d already seen her, he was flailing for her. She smiled back at him.
There was laughter behind her again. But this time it was unnatural, synchronized, as if the crowd had begun, as one creature, to roar.
MADISON WAS LOOKING FOR CHIP. She hadn’t texted him since she’d left his house; it seemed like it would be desperate, maybe. But now, here she was, totally not desperate, but with no way to prepare herself if he should materialize next to her with a pilfered drink from an unattended tray. She wasn’t even sure he was back from Florida yet.
As she stood with her parents at a bar table, she tried to imagine some options for what to say to Chip if he should appear before them. But she could only think of his hands on her shoulders that afternoon on the couch, the way he’d pushed down on the crown of her head.
If I had any nerve, she thought, I would have let that man kiss me, that poor guy at the bar in December. Poor, balding Hugh. I would have practiced on him, and then the Chip situation wouldn’t have been such a complete disaster.
“Ground control to Major Tom,” her father said. “Hello in there.” He snapped his fingers in the air just in front of Madison’s face. She tried not to blush; it wasn’t like he could read her mind, not yet. She smiled and sipped from her water glass.
So far, things were incredibly normal, more normal than anyone would have dared even to hope. Her mother had gone to the bar while her father remained with Madison; that was the only appreciable difference from routine, other than the fact that her father was drinking wine. It seemed like things could continue to unfurl. They’d be seated with Mina and Tom. Her mother, through some method, would have seen to that. Suzanne wouldn’t have refused that request.
Mina came over to them, and Madison’s father waved. He was making double gestures, everything exaggerated, as if it were being done underwater and so needed twice as much force to achieve its objectives.
“Can we leave yet?” Mina said, pouting theatrically. “Tom abandoned me as soon as we got here. He’s punishing me for making him attend.”
“He’ll be fine once we get some grub.”
“Oh, Bob, how right you are there.”
“Is Jaime home?” Madison said. Mina paused to take a sip of her wine.
“Too much work,” she replied. “She’s cooped up in her dorm room for their whole spring break, can you believe it? Oh, Madison, she would be so thrilled to get an e-mail from you. Or even just a text to say hi. She hasn’t been home since the summer, can you imagine?”
“We haven’t talked in a while,” Madison said. “But I can—I’ll send her an e-mail.”
She was willing to bet that the only homesickness in this situation was the ache always resident within Mina.
But then it meant that the promise cost Madison nothing, it could slip right off her tongue without consequence. If her mother had taught her only one thing, it was how to grant those sorts of promises.
“Have you said hello to Suzanne?” Mina asked Isabel. Bob leaned his head in toward theirs.
“We’re girding our loins,” he said, and Mina threw back her head, laughed. Madison saw her mother’s spine briefly torque, as if stretching a shoulder sore from tennis, before she snapped back to her normal posture.
“Well, you’ll probably get the sanitized greeting,” Mina said. “You should have heard the earful I got. She’s ‘scaled down’ this year because it ‘felt more appropriate.’ She made a speech about how people don’t understand, when they talk downsizing, how many people it takes to keep her house in order and her pool clean. She said that if we scale back, that’s what gets scaled. Those jobs.”
“Well, she may be right, there,” Bob said. “I’m sure she said it for all the wrong reasons, but people who talk about revolutionizing ‘how we live today’ don’t usually understand the first thing about what it would mean.”
Madison saw Amanda and her parents disappear into the crowd near one of the bars. “Mom,” she began, but Isabel set down her wineglass with ostentatious precision, as if afraid she’d break it. She fumbled with the clasp of her clutch, then looked up again.
“What,” Bob said, and turned to follow the path of his wife’s eye.
“Oh,” Mina said. “Oh, God, I should have said something. I saw her but she looks different, no? I couldn’t remember why she looked familiar. She’s put on weight. And her hair, it’s so much longer.”
“Who is that?” Madison said.
They were all looking at a blond woman in the middle of the crowd. She was talking to a short, heavyset man with gray hair, but his face was obscured, at first, by all the other bodies.
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