Matthew had millions and millions of dollars. Now that Bess was out of the picture, there was nobody and nothing for him to spend it on. It couldn’t hurt to ask. She vacillated between this train of thought and the fear that indeed it
could
hurt to ask: Matthew could flip out, call her a vulture. She hadn’t spoken to him in twelve years, she had called him out of the blue and asked him to play a free concert, and he had said yes. Wasn’t he doing her enough of a favor? She would pay him back, with interest, but to this he might respond that he wasn’t a bank, and he wasn’t a loan shark. He had, once upon a time, been her friend, but he didn’t appreciate being preyed upon now.
In this vein, she had talked herself out of calling several times.
But now it was dark, it was quiet, she had had some drinks, and she had enunciated a promise that could not be denied. She dialed Matthew’s number.
“¿Hola?”
“Matthew? It’s Claire. Claire Danner.”
“Buenas noches, chica. I knew it was you because you’re the only person who still calls me Matthew. Other than my mother.”
“Am I?”
“You are. How are you? It must be the middle of the night there.”
“It is,” Claire said. He sounded sober. This was a good thing. Sober at nine thirty at night. Home, and not out at the clubs, drinking, or carousing with seventeen-year-olds to take his mind off Bess. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No, no,” he said. “I was just lying on the sofa with my Berlitz.”
“Which language?”
“Spanish. You can never know enough Spanish. And Portuguese. You may think the two languages sound alike, but they are in fact quite different.”
“You got a D in Spanish,” Claire said. “What’s the deal?”
“Gives me something to do. Keeps me out of trouble. I’m shooting air baskets, grabbing at straws. I don’t know what I’m doing. Well, I’m coming to see you. Six weeks!”
“I can’t wait. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
Claire swallowed. “Listen, I called because I have the world’s biggest favor to ask you.”
“The answer is yes, whatever it is.”
“I need to borrow twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Silence.
Oh, God!
Claire thought.
“I got myself into a real mess with this gala. I’m the cochair and my other cochair is a very wealthy woman named Isabelle French. And she has managed to bully me into taking a twenty-five-thousand-dollar table for the gala. And I don’t have twenty-five thousand dollars, and I can’t even broach the possibility with my husband or he will kill me. So I ran through all these other options, and the one that seemed the least painful was to borrow the money from you. But I’ll pay you back. I swear.”
Silence.
Oh, God!
Claire thought. Had he hung up? What if he didn’t play the gala at all now? The possibility had not occurred to her until this very second.
“Matthew?”
“I’m looking for my checkbook.”
“You are? You mean you’ll lend it to me?”
“Well, we can call it a loan, but to paraphrase my favorite ex-wife, if you send me a check, I’ll rip it up.”
“But Matthew . . .”
“Claire, relax. It’s just money.”
“Right, but it’s a lot of money.”
“Do you remember when we were kids,” he said, “and your grandmother sent you a hundred bucks for your birthday?”
Claire racked her brain. A check from her grandmother? Sixteenth birthday? Was that what he was talking about?
“Yes.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I . . . we . . . got our ears pierced.”
“Right. You paid for me to get my ear pierced, and you paid extra for a diamond stud. You told me I would never be a proper rock star unless I had a diamond stud. And you bought yourself fourteen-karat studs, which were cheaper.”
“Yes,” Claire said. She actually did remember this: driving to the mall in Rio Grande and sitting in a chair at the Piercing Pagoda. They convalesced in Sweet Jane’s kitchen, both of them holding ice cubes to their earlobes, trying not to cry.
“How many times did you give me five bucks so I could put gas in the Volkswagen?”
“Yeah, but that was only five bucks.”
“How many times did you pay for Kettle Korn or Slushees? How many times did you pay for beer?”
“You had a job. You paid sometimes, too.”
“You paid for dinner before the prom.”
“My father gave me the money.”
“But what I’m saying is, when I didn’t have it, you paid for me, no questions asked. You gave me everything you had. There was no line drawn between what was yours and what was mine.” He paused. “I’d like it if things could still be that way. So I’m going to write this check, and I don’t want to hear about you paying me back.”
“Oh,” she said. “Jesus.” She thought she might cry, but she was too relieved to cry. “Thank you.”
“Does this twenty-five-thousand-dollar table mean you’ll be sitting up front?”
“Front and center.”
“Good,” Matthew said. “Then it’s worth it.”
When she hung up, it was one in the morning, but Claire felt like it was full daylight, bright and sunny. Her chest cavity, she realized, had been filled with concrete, but now the heaviness was gone and she could breathe. Matthew would send the check in the morning, and Claire would have her $25,000 table. Problem solved.
Should she press her luck? Something was telling her yes. She wasn’t at all tired, and the effects of the alcohol were fading. She pulled a Coke out of the fridge, exchanged her sandals for her clogs, and left the house, quietly, for the hot shop.
She spent a long time looking at the chandelier. Maybe that was the difference. She turned it in her hands, scrutinizing, meditating. Other times when she came into the hot shop, she was in a hurry, stressed, worried: Would she finish today? How long would it take? How many tries? Her forearms were in a constant state of fatigue and ache; the muscles were becoming ropy. But now Claire studied the chandelier, she pictured the arc and dip and twist of the final arm, and she saw how the piece would look, completed.
She pulled it on the first try, as she knew she would. She rolled the gather in the frit, and as she pulled and twisted, the final arm came into being. She pierced it with a steady hand. She held it up—yes, no question about it—then gently set the arm in the annealer. Tomorrow, she would blow out the cups. Piece of cake.
She went back into the house. Quarter to two. Suddenly she was very sleepy. She shed her clothes, washed her face, brushed her teeth, did her ritualized rinsing of the sink basin and wiping of the granite vanity top. Then she fell into bed, feeling light, clean, and empty, as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
O
nce the invitations had been mailed, response cards arrived every day, some bearing credit card numbers, some bearing checks. Gavin kept the checks in a neat pile on his desk, and when he got a stack of ten, he went to the bank to deposit—and skim. Claire dropped off a check for $25,000
.
Gavin could not help mentioning this to Lock.
“Claire took a twenty-five-thousand-dollar table.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
Lock rose from his desk and came over to look at the check, as Gavin knew he would.
“Well, she said she was going to.”
“And she did,” Gavin said.
The influx of money from the gala tickets made Gavin giddy. His stockpile was getting bigger and bigger. He had moved it out of the utensil drawer (in anticipation of his parents’ arrival on August 1) and stuffed it in a green L.L. Bean duffel bag under his bed. It was so much money, he was afraid to count it. And yet he was no longer afraid of getting caught. The letter to the women’s shoe company, as it turned out, had been perfectly fine. (He marveled that he had ever feared otherwise.) His affairs were in order; his trail was covered. Meanwhile, the people all around him were committing indiscretions—first Lock and Claire, and then, the other night, Siobhan Crispin and Edward Melior. He should get out of theft, he thought, and into blackmail.
Isabelle called, now, every day—to see who had responded, who had merely sent donations, who had requested seating with whom.
“Did the Jaspers respond?”
“They did not.”
“What about Cavanaugh?”
“Sent a donation.”
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Isabelle sighed. “They have more money than Beckham. They could have sent ten times that much. But they didn’t—because of me.”
Gavin did not know how to respond. He felt he was growing closer to Isabelle. He felt that perhaps she was calling so often because she wanted to talk to him.
“Did Kimberly Posen respond?”
“Not coming. Sent a donation.”
“Not coming?”
“No,” Gavin said. “But she sent twenty-five hundred.”
This was met with silence. “She used to be my best friend,” Isabelle said. “I’m her daughter’s godmother.”
“Oh.”
“You’re sure she’s not coming?”
“I’ll check again,” he said.
Gavin wanted to make Isabelle happy; he wanted to give her good news. When she next called, he said, “Your friend Dara Kavinsky is a yes and so is Aster Wyatt.”
“Dara is the cellist,” Isabelle said. “And Aster did the invitations. He’s my graphic designer. Why is it the only people who are coming are the people on my payroll?”
As the days passed, Gavin found himself thinking more and more about Isabelle French. She was sexy, he decided, alluring, classy . . . and disillusioned. He was perhaps the only person in the office who realized that everyone Isabelle had personally invited to the gala had said no and sent a donation.
It’s because of my divorce,
Isabelle said.
It’s like a disease: people are afraid they’ll catch it. I hate being single.
Was this a clue for Gavin to ask her out? She had been so nice to him at the invitation stuffing. She had seated him next to her, she had touched the back of his hand in a way that sent a shiver up his arm—and at one point she had nudged him with her foot under the table. Gavin had ended up being the last to leave. There was a full moon, and Isabelle invited him to walk outside to see her moon garden. She had a circular plot planted with night-blooming white flowers—evening primrose, she said, and four-o’clocks—which were waxy and luminous in the moonlight. And she had a “moon fountain”—a sphere made of honey onyx, a little bigger than a bowling ball, that glowed from within as water trickled over it and made it spin. The moon garden was the kind of magical place that Gavin was hoping to discover in his travels. He was in awe; to his embarrassment, he’d teared up. Isabelle was holding his arm—she was wearing heels in the grass and they’d both had a lot to drink—and he wondered if he should kiss her. But in the end he’d been too intimidated. A woman with enough aesthetic imagination (and money) to create a moon garden (she’d designed the fountain herself, she said) was beyond him.
Now, of course, he regretted his cowardly decision, and he wondered if he would ever summon the balls to ask Isabelle out. He entertained a fantasy where he bedded Isabelle French. (At her house, because he could never in a million years take Isabelle to his parents’ house. Or maybe he could—before the first of August—and pretend it was his. Would she buy this?) He and Isabelle could become lovers; he would not need the duffel bag full of money because she would support him. But here his enthusiasm waned. Despite his lack of ambition, he did not want to be a kept man. And so he returned to the notion of grabbing a fistful of cash out of the duffel bag and taking Isabelle for a romantic dinner at the Chanticleer, then seducing her. Cut.
The escalating flirtation with Isabelle made the incessant ringing of the phone more palatable. But the calls were mostly from teenagers, asking how to get Max West tickets. In the beginning, Gavin took great pleasure in saying, “This isn’t Madison Square Garden, you know. It’s a charity benefit. The tickets are a thousand dollars apiece.”
Gasp. “A thousand dollars?”
“Yes,” Gavin said. “Would you like to buy a pair?”
Click.
Now, however, he had tired of that song and dance; it made him feel like Scrooge or the Grinch, announcing such an outlandish price, quashing hopes. Then there were calls from the tent people, the tables-and-chairs people, the underwriters (how much signage, where, for how long?), the production people (lights, speakers, ferry reservations, would the crew house have a grill?), and the caterer, Genevieve, whose purpose in calling, it seemed, was merely to double-triple-check that she still had the job. (Perhaps the rumors of Siobhan and Edward’s being together had made it farther afield.) Gavin was single-handedly piecing together the gala. He secured ferry reservations for the enormous truck that was bringing over the tent; he confirmed that there would be housing, meals—and a grill!—for the production crew; he got the alcohol permit from the town. He tried to talk Isabelle off the ledge.
“The van Dykes are a yes,” Gavin said. “Do you know them?”
“No,” Isabelle said. “They must be friends of Claire’s.”
Gavin, pointedly, did not keep any notes. With each phone call, he became more and more indispensable. Claire was effusive.
God, thank you, Gavin, what would we do without you? You deserve a raise! In September, when this is over, I’m going to bring it up at a board meeting. I’m going to tell them what an enormous help you’ve been. I could not do all this myself—I simply do not have the time.
Daphne called. Since discovering Lock and Claire in the office, back in April, Gavin had done his best to keep his conversations with Daphne short and to the point.
Oh, hi, Daphne, would you like to speak to Lock? He just stepped out. I’ll tell him you called!
Gavin could not gossip with the woman while keeping a huge secret from her himself. He had limits. He even, at times, experienced guilt. Daphne had no idea about her husband’s infidelity, or rather, she had every idea but she had identified the wrong target. Was it cruel keeping the news of Lock and Claire from her, or was it kind? Gavin chose kind. He was old enough now, mature enough, sophisticated enough, to realize that really, what you didn’t know—what you might never know—couldn’t hurt you.