“Which may be exactly the point,” Curtis said, winking. “A gardener for him, and a gardener for her.”
Jerry rolled his eyes. “Curtis, don’t be evil. So, Annie, do you have any gossip for us? Bring back any juicy tidbits from Manhattan?”
“Nothing much,” Anne said. “I had lunch with Stella, that’s about it. Heard about all the parties I’m not invited to anymore. I’m sort of dreading the summer.”
“Not me, I can’t wait,” Curtis said. “I have seventeen weddings to do, and every one of them is pull-out-the-stops. Ka-ching, ka-ching! It was so slow this winter, I nearly lost my mind.”
“I’m the one who lost my mind,” Jerry said. “Having you around the house all the time.”
The phone rang, and Curtis went to get it. Jerry poured another inch of cognac into Anne’s glass. “And how is the dating scene?”
“What dating scene? Anyway, it’s too soon.”
“Bitch!” Curtis cried from the kitchen. “You total bitch!” When he came back in, his face was bright red. “Can you believe it? I’m meeting with Mrs. Lightman on Monday about her daughter’s wedding, and Oona was supposed to have all the sketches ready, and she just called to say she’s gotten a job offer in Los Angeles and she’s quitting on me.”
“That’s what you get for hiring someone with a name like Oona,” Jerry said.
“Don’t joke. I’m sunk. This is a five-hundred-thousand-dollar wedding, and I don’t have a single thing ready to show. I’m sunk, utterly sunk.”
“You can tap-dance with the best of them, darling.”
“It’s a theme wedding. South of France. And now I have thirty-six hours to pull it together.”
“Hey, I have an idea,” Jerry said. “Annie has given some pretty spectacular parties over the years. Maybe she can help out.”
Curtis turned to Anne. “Oh my God,” he said. “How do you say ‘perfect’ in French?”
“Parfait,” said Anne.
“So, imagine this is your party, what would you do?” he asked.
“We never gave theme parties. We always thought, I mean, Lyon thought … you know. They’re so …”
“Vulgar?” Curtis said. “You can say it, I won’t be offended. Okay, then: your party, if you had a zillion dollars to spend and you wanted to make sure every penny of it showed.”
“Let’s see. Jenn’s old music teacher in the city is from Paris—she and a few of her friends play parties on the weekends. It’s a delightful little group with an accordion and a singer who sounds just like Edith Piaf. For the right amount of money I bet they’d love to come out and play.”
“Sacré bleu! Now keep going,” said Curtis.
“No fair,” said Anne. “You invited me here for a nice dinner and now you’re trying to put me to work.”
“Annie, darling, I’m in a jam and I need you to help. How can you say no?”
“Non,” she said in her flawless accent.
“You have no choice, you have to help. That’s what friends do.” He got out a notebook and a fresh bottle of wine. They spent the next two hours making plans.
The meeting with Mrs. Lightman and her daughter was a success. They loved Curtis’s sketches, and they loved all of Anne’s last-minute ideas: decorating the altar with lavender-scented candles, getting seat cushions in eight different mix-and-match fabrics from Pierre Deux, buying antique toy sailboats to float in the swimming pool.
“You’re a genius,” Curtis whispered to her in the car on the way home. “Come work for me this summer. They adored you. All my clients are going to adore you.”
“Some of those clients used to be my friends. Wouldn’t it be awkward?”
“Awkward for who? Not for me.”
“Okay, awkward for them.”
“Maybe twenty years ago, but these days divorced women are expected to work. They buy their houses from divorced women. They buy their art from divorced women. It’s no different from being an interior decorator, really.”
“Okay, then. Awkward for me.”
“Don’t be so old-fashioned. And by the way, these parties are a wonderful way to meet eligible straight men. There’s always an uncle or a business partner lurking around. I’m promising you dozens of rich, eligible, good-looking heterosexuals. How can you turn me down? Even if you get this advertising job, it doesn’t start until September. I can pay you in cash. These clients of mine, it’s almost all about new money, they’re dreadfully insecure and when they get a load of you, well, it will be just like today. You put them at ease in a way that I can’t. They trust you.”
“There’s a lot I don’t know.”
“I agree. But you’ve got style, and you’ve got those glorious cheekbones, and you have just the right pedigree. Everything else can be taught. Please. As a favor to me.”
They had pulled up in front of Anne’s house. The shutters needed repainting, and the hot-water heater was on its last legs. At Southampton prices, the money from the sale of the earrings would go only so far.
“All right,” Anne said. “Promise me it will be fun.”
“It will be fun, and crazy, and sometimes impossibly busy. You’ve never really seen me when I’m cranky.”
“Curtis, you’re cranky all the time.”
“And that’s just one of the many reasons you love me,” he said.
She kissed him on the cheek. “Love you to bits,” she said.
In May, the town began to hum in anticipation of the summer season. All around Main Street, trucks delivered heavy cardboard cartons filled with additional inventory for summer visitors. Restaurants extended their hours. Window boxes began to bloom.
Anne felt like a young girl watching her older sister get ready for a party, a party Anne wasn’t invited to. She was starting to see what the summer would be like. Curtis had hung four panels of blackboard on one wall of his office and chalked out a calendar that was five feet high and twenty feet long. The parties and weddings he had been hired to plan were written in thick yellow chalk. Work that had been contracted to someone else was written in green chalk. Work that was still up for grabs was in pink. And in white chalk: every social event he had heard about—family barbecues, golf tournaments, cocktail parties, fund-raisers—anything that might generate a last-minute telephone call for a bartender or a few platters of canapés.
It was ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, and Anne was alone in the office, staring at the blackboard. She had been invited to only one party, the annual clambake that Stella and Arthur gave in early August. She had gotten a few invitations to fund-raisers; the envelopes had all been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Lyon Burke,” with labels spat out by a computer that hadn’t been updated in years. Anne had learned to throw these away as soon as they arrived. The days of writing a five-hundred-dollar check for a cocktail party in support of endangered species were over.
The hotel commercials had fallen through. Anne had had a terrific audition, only to find out two days later that the entire campaign was being canceled. Each time she was rejected, it was a little harder to rebound. She was beginning to feel like an endangered species herself.
It wasn’t just the money. She had been sleeping alone for almost five months now. At first it had felt delicious: the clean sheets, the mound of pillows all her own, waking up at dawn to utter quiet, the long private cup of coffee after Jenn left for school. For the first time in her life, she read the entire newspaper every day, every section in order, every word of every section. She was fascinated by exactly the kinds of articles she used to skim over—war stories from Eastern Europe, news of economic collapse in Latin America, debates over tax initiatives in Washington. But there was no one her age to talk about any of it with. At night, after Jenn went to bed, she felt herself turning into the lonely college girl she had been at nineteen, the girl who spent all evening in the library, all day in classes. The girl who loaded up her dinner tray with the same dinner every evening (a slice of bread, three slices of cheese, a bowl of salad, and a piece of fru
it) and sat at the same cafeteria table with the same three girls, night after night.
Curtis and Jerry kept telling her it was time to get out there and date, and she kept replying that she wasn’t ready yet, but of course that wasn’t the truth of it. No one had asked her out. No one even flirted with her. Everything her single friends had complained to her about was turning out to be true.
Not that she had ever really dated to begin with. In high school, everyone went around in groups. One chilly night in tenth grade she had found herself sitting next to a boy at a football game, and he had taken her hand and squeezed, and she had squeezed back, and suddenly they were a couple. He was from a fine Yankee family (bankers and lawyers and four generations at Dartmouth), and she was from a finer Yankee family (the money mostly gone, but the breeding flawless all the way back to the 1600s), and everyone just assumed they would marry and settle down in one of the big clapboard houses in town. Willie liked to kiss a lot, and sometimes after a beer or two he would slide his hand up under her sweater.
He never formally proposed. They came home for Thanksgiving weekend freshman year (Willie from Dartmouth, Anne from Radcliffe), and on Saturday night, after an evening at the movies with friends, he drove her down a wide side street and pointed to a large Victorian house with a wraparound porch. It belonged to one of his uncles, a man whose children had all settled elsewhere, in Boston and Providence and beyond.
“I want us to live in a house like that,” Willie said, coasting to a stop. Anne could still remember the sounds of leaves being crushed beneath the tires, of the car’s engine disengaging, of a dog barking in the distance.
“That’s always been one of my favorite houses,” Anne said. He nodded and pulled out a ring, a not-quite-engagement ring. It had belonged to his grandmother, a small perfect opal surrounded by tiny diamonds.
She had worn the ring all through college. Four years without dates. Not that any of her friends ever went out on anything that remotely resembled an old-fashioned date. They went to parties and danced in a big group and went home with the boys who danced the closest. They stayed in the library till closing and walked home with the boys who played footsie under the table. They went to bars and drank in a group and went to bed with the boys who walked them home.
Willie’s uncle died just before Christmas break of their senior year. They parked in front of the house, and he turned off the headlights. “It’s mine now,” he said. “It’s ours.”
“I want to go to New York,” she said. It just flew out of her mouth. She had never even been to New York, she didn’t even know anyone who lived there—at school, the New York girls were like a group of glamorous aliens, they wore eye makeup and suede boots and smoked cigarettes and lived in apartments off-campus—but as soon as she said it she knew it was true.
Willie cut the engine. His uncle’s house looked so big, and the ring felt so small. They both cried. Willie cried from heartbreak. Anne cried from excitement, from fear. New York was something she had read about in novels, something she had seen in the movies. She would be just like Audrey Hepburn, she would wear elegant little dresses and have romantic adventures with glamorous older men. Or she would be just like Katharine Hepburn, she would wear perfectly cut trousers and stride into a room with authority and grace.
As it turned out, she was just a secretary in a talent agency. People came and went, barely noticing the girls who brought them coffee. And then one day Allen Cooper came in and swept her off to dinner.
“Hungry?” Allen had asked. She’d nodded and hadn’t realized till afterward that he’d been talking about food. He was the sort of man who said “Pick you up at seven” without asking if she were free or telling her exactly where they were going. Anne was pretty sure men like that didn’t exist anymore.
And then there was Lyon. Had they ever gone on a real first date? He was just there, another agent in the office, the good-looking one with the British accent, the man who flirted with everyone. One afternoon she was sitting at her desk, typing a letter, and he came around and stood behind her. He was saying something—telling a story, repeating a joke, she couldn’t remember—and she felt as though all the cells of her body were rearranging themselves in his presence. It was like a science experiment from the third grade: spread the metal filings out across a piece of cardboard, hold the magnet underneath the cardboard, watch the metal rearrange itself in the shape of the magnet.
She couldn’t see him, but she could feel his breath on her neck. He is going to seduce me, she thought, and then a minute later, I am going to let him seduce me. It happened in a hotel room, and afterward, shy and beaming, she wrapped herself in a rented sheet.
And then there was Kevin Gillian. Lyon was in England, he had left the agency and was writing a novel; it seemed he might never come back. Kevin took her to a party and flirted with her gently—he was older, courtly, almost paternal—and she never for a moment considered that it was anything other than a little harmless business socializing. At the end of the party he held her coat for her, and as she slid into it, she felt him lift her hair from underneath her collar and smooth it across her shoulders. When he kissed her, he held her throat with the tips of his fingers.
Beautiful women were his work. He ran a cosmetics empire—makeup, perfume, hair care, a dozen different product lines—and installed Anne as his princess. She traveled with him, she modeled for him, she entertained for him. Their sex was not passionate, but it was enthusiastic and varied. He liked to keep the lights on and watch her move. He would not rest until she had come twice. It is what it is, Anne thought. He made her very rich, and he cared for her as much as she cared for him: just enough to keep it going, just enough to keep both of them from looking elsewhere.
And then Lyon came back. Now that it was over, now that it was years later and she could barely remember the heat of their first years together, Anne tallied it up on one hand. Four men. She had only ever kissed four men, had slept with only two, had never been on one real date.
I am totally unequipped, she thought now, looking at Curtis’s wide blackboard. She sat at her desk and let her head drop onto her folded arms, and her eyes filled with tears. The years when men sought her out, the years of being pursued and seduced, the years of letting the world come to her, they were all over now. She was single, and she was lonely, and she had no idea how to make things different.
Curtis came in, carrying a bag of croissants and fresh coffee.
“Annie!” he cried. “I have just done the most awful, wonderful thing. You are going to kill me, but you have to kiss me first.”
She lifted her head and smiled. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“I’ve fixed you up on a date! A blind date! With the most delicious man. He’s a banker, he used to be married to my cousin Camille, you know, horrible Camille with the fake teeth. He lives in Connecticut, and he does something terribly important for one of those terribly famous investment firms. Long story short: He’s in New York for a few days and he called to see if I wanted to have dinner, and I told him that unfortunately I was way too busy but could I send a stand-in.”
“Curtis, you didn’t.”
“Oh Annie, I did. Listen, this one is a catch. And he’s totally available. So call Miss Gretchen because you’ve got a big date tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow?”
“He’s only in town for three days. Oh, this is so exciting. You must promise me that you won’t move to Connecticut until the summer is over. I need you at least through Labor Day.”
“Curtis, I haven’t even met him yet. And, I don’t know. A blind date. I’ve never been on a blind date.”
“Annie darling, there are countries, entire continents, where people get blind married. So I think you can handle one blind date. Think of it as practice.”
“Tell me more about him.”
“What do you need to know? Isn’t it enough that I approve of him? His name is Bill Carter, and he has a good job and a full head of hair and about four hundred
women chasing after him. You’re not supposed to be giving me a hard time. You’re supposed to be down on your knees, saying, ‘Thank you, Curtis, I’m so grateful to you, Curtis.’ ”
“I’m so grateful to you, Curtis.”
“Promise me you’ll wear that little blue suit with the gold buttons.”
“I promise.” She smiled. “A date. I hope I can remember what to do.”
“It’s like riding a bicycle, except you get to wear lipstick. Oh, this has put me in such a good mood.”
“It’s sort of scary to watch. I think you’re even more excited about this than I am.”
“I’m delirious with glee! I can’t wait!”
“Oh Curtis. It’s just a blind date. It may not work out. Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Honey, this is going to be even more fun for me than it is for you. You get to go on a date, but I get to do something better.” He lifted a croissant and slowly twisted it apart, smiling like an old-time movie villain. “I get to tell Camille. I get to call her up tomorrow night and tell her that her ex-husband is dating Anne Welles, the former Gillian Girl!”
Neely sat in front of the vanity, flossing her back teeth. She hated flossing. It was unbelievable to her that here in the most expensive hotel in New York City, a place where you could call someone to do practically anything and everything, she still had to floss her own teeth. You paid someone to wash your hair, you paid someone to tweeze your eyebrows, you paid someone to bring your meals and walk your dogs, but flossing was something you still had to do yourself.
She could hear Dave gargling in the bathroom. Good old Dave. They had been seeing each other for nearly a year, and it had gotten boring months ago, but he was too good for her career to let go of just yet. He took her to all the right parties, and her picture was in the papers all the time now. She had recorded the theme song for the new James Bond movie that was scheduled for release in a couple of weeks, which guaranteed she’d be back on the radio all summer long.
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