All Is Vanity (37 page)

L

I’d wanted to go to the senior prom ever since seventh grade when I’d seen the pictures in Lottie’s high school yearbook. The king and queen, the hokey theme, the corsage pin that ruined the bodice of the dress, the photos of me with my embarrassed date in his Easter-egg-colored tuxedo standing in front of the fireplace; I wanted it all. When the time came, I also particularly wanted to wear a dress I’d been working on as an advanced home ec project, a short, shiny, even somewhat ruffly, disco-influenced shift in midnight blue silk that I was sure would make me feel like those girls who pressed their shoulders and the sole of one foot against a locker, while chatting casually with certain boys.

Margaret scoffed at the prom. By the end of sophomore year, she was merely cheerfully condescending to finish high school. She was, however, willing to coach me. When Craig Whitehead asked me to go with him, she advised me to turn him down. Not without
provocation, I admit. I am ashamed to say that I cried when I told her about his offer. Craig and I had tracked along in the same math classes since freshman year, swapping pencils and test prep questions. He kept his pressed blue oxford-cloth shirts buttoned at the wrist and his hair parted and combed, never charmingly disheveled. I was not so shallow as to care overmuch about looks, but Craig wasn’t particularly handsome. He laughed at my witticisms but did not have many of his own and his undisguised diligent application to schoolwork barely earned him B’s. All in all, he had nothing to recommend him but relentless decency, a quality I didn’t value in a prom date. I was flattered but also appalled to discover that he’d secretly admired me since my braces had come off.

“It’s a waste of a prom,” Margaret agreed. “And it’s going to cost him a bundle for the tickets and the tux, not to mention the dinner before and the breakfast after. It’s really not fair to let him go through with all of that if you’re not happy to go with him.”

“And the wrist corsage,” I said. This was how I’d determined to avoid the damaging pinholes.

“Whom do you want to go with?” Margaret asked.

This was a difficult question, since by my senior year, all the boys I’d admired from afar had graduated. After much consultation and listings of pros and cons, we chose a boy in Margaret’s history class whom neither of us knew very well. He was universally liked without being wildly, and unattainably, popular, had performed in an amusing skit in the fall variety show and ran track. Some athletic skill, we agreed, was a plus, as long as he wasn’t a “jock.” Margaret could vouch for his intelligence, at least in the realm of AP U.S. history, and he wore hightop Converse All Stars, which were definitely not “in” at the time, a pleasing stylistic quirk.

“You should choose the person you want to go with,” Margaret said. “Why do boys get to do all the asking?”

He turned me down. He had a girlfriend at another school. They were going to her prom. That’s what he told me anyway, which was a lot nicer than what I’d told Craig, which was that I just couldn’t bring myself to like him “that way.”

Craig and I ended up going to a party Margaret had on prom night, along with a weird mix of people too cool for the prom and people who couldn’t get dates.

“This is better anyway, isn’t it?” she said to me more than once that night.

But to me, in fact, it wasn’t. And I never did get to wear that shift.

“
YOU WIN SOME; YOU LOSE SOME
,” my father said. “That’s the game of life.” In Genslen’s third trial, overweight mice who’d been dosed with the drug began to experience patchy baldness. The stock had plummeted.

“It may come back,” my father said. “After all, you lose some; you win some.”

“That depends,” my mother said into the extension, “on what you lose. Get it, Margaret?”

I suspected they’d already rehearsed this jolly repartee several times with their friends.

“Anyway,” my mother went on, returning to her usual, practical vein, “that money was all on paper.”

“It was a nice chunk of paper, though,” my father said.

My father could afford to be wistful. As Warren had told me, only a small percentage of his portfolio had been invested in the stock.

The same could not be said for Letty. I waited a few days, but when she didn’t call me, I phoned her from my cubicle. Her answering machine advised me to try her cell phone. I’d not been aware that Letty owned a cell phone.

“J. Peabody and Associates, Letitia speaking.”

“Letty?”

“Margaret?” Her voice sounded distant, but I attributed that to the technology.

“Where are you? Who are you? Who is J. Peabody?”

“That’s Jeanette.” Her voice slipped away from the receiver. “The light is green! Drive, lady, drive!” Letty, I realized with a mild ping of alarm, had become her own enemy, the woman on the cell phone in the SUV. “Didn’t I tell you?” she said to me again. “I’m working for her now. I’m an events consultant.”

She had not told me. This omission hurt, although I deserved it for the part I’d played in the Genslen debacle, a subject we both seemed to be avoiding. “So now you’re a professional party thrower?” I meant it as a joke but not an altogether kind one. Letty, however, was always generously slow to take offense.

“Associate events consultant, with a concentration in the philanthropic sector. I’m not exactly sure what that is yet, but it sounds like something an interesting person might be, doesn’t it? Essentially, I now have a career, because Jeanette liked my party. She said that I, and I quote, ‘provided an environment of heightened awareness and pleasure.’ ”

“Sounds risqué.”

“It’s apparently a prerequisite for the successful associate events consultant. Also, she just got a contract with the Otis to do this big medieval-themed Valentine’s Day benefit for the illuminated manuscript collection, and she said it would be helpful to have someone connected with the museum—even by marriage—on her team. Mostly I’m running errands so far, which, I have to say, is one of my most practiced skills. This morning I had to be at the flower market at five and now I’m making the rounds of a bunch of fabric stores to collect swatches, so Jeanette can choose one for the indoor tent she’s planning for the Center for Democratic Change’s Christmas Kickoff. Oh, and here’s an irony you’ll enjoy—I’m keeping the books. Apparently, Jeanette remembers that I was a whiz at budgeting when we shared an apartment,” Her laugh had a bitter edge I tried to ignore.

“Were you?”

“Sure. So much for a shower curtain. So much for the communal half-and-half. It was easy back when we thought we were clever and chic for using a flowered sheet as a tablecloth. This kind of budget, though, is entirely different. You’d be shocked at how much these people spend on things like nasturtiums for salads. It’s kind of sickening. Meanwhile, we’re going to miss a house payment next week,” she said with false brightness. “That’s how well I’m doing with my own budget.”

Genslen could be avoided no longer.

“Letty,” I said, “I’m so sorry about the stock. It was a really dumb idea.”

I’d intended to say much more. My words could not replace her money, but I’d hoped we could at least talk the incident
through, chew it down, until we felt comfortable with each other again. Her call waiting, however, muscled between my sentences and my call waiting leapt in between “dumb” and “idea.”

“Margaret, I have to go. That’s probably Jeanette. She hates it when she gets voice mail.” She severed our connection without waiting for my response.

My call was from Simon. This time he wasn’t even bothering to visit my cubicle.

“So is the Donaldson OK?”

The Donaldson? I stirred the papers on my desk with my free hand. I’d not looked at the piece since the day he’d given it to me nor searched other magazines to see if it had been published before, as he’d asked, but Simon would certainly be annoyed if I said I needed more time. I’d already been late in faxing edited manuscripts to authors and mailing checks, and I knew my tardiness was becoming exasperating.

“I haven’t seen anything like it,” I said, truthfully, vowing to make a thorough check that evening.

“Great! Then we’ll run it.” And he, too, hung up without saying goodbye.

Late that night, Letty began communicating with me again, for which I was grateful.

Margaret
,

This job, I assume, will eventually pay fairly well, although we haven’t, as yet, discussed firm figures. But for the first few months, it turns out I’ll have to spend money to do it. People tell me this is normal. Meeting with clients, for instance, requires a whole new wardrobe. Jeanette hasn’t quite said this in so many words, but she’s offered to spend a day shopping with me. Also, I’ll have to get a full-time sitter for Ivy, some
one with a driver’s license who can pick Noah up from preschool at noon and Hunter at 2:30 and Marlo at 4:00, unless she plays soccer, in which case, 5:30. Maybe I should get a chauffeur and a sitter. Tomorrow, I’m interviewing Jeanette’s nanny’s sister, Ofelia. Jeanette supplies Carmelina with a car. As she says, “Then I know she’s not driving around in some clunker without seat belts that’s ready to break down at every intersection.” Actually, she said “some old Tercel”—I’m pretty sure this was just coincidence though
.

Last night Noah’s school held a benefit auction, a little treat to amuse us after the dessert and coffee portion of a three-hundred-dollar benefit dinner. (We figure that’s fifty bucks for the espresso—but, as I reminded Michael, that coffee only comes to four cents a day over the course of thirty years.) Michael and I managed to sit coolly smiling through the restaurant meals and the light plane rides and the special screenings and the bottles of wine, pretending we were waiting for the next lovely item, or, toward the end, that we’d bought early. But there was no resisting Noah’s own handprint, or “fingerpaint fingers on copier paper,” as Michael put it. Every child had made one. (“Made” is stretching it. I’m the first to laud my children’s art, but it took them all of five seconds to slap their palms in the paint and then onto the paper for this project.) Every set of parents, needless to say, met the outrageously high opening bid when their offspring’s handiwork hit the auction block (and thank God, although not surprisingly, no one bid against us). Yes, we all have fifty more just like them or better at home, not to mention the original hands themselves, but who could bear to give the impression that they did not want their own child’s little print? Whoever came up with this idea is a genius and should use her power for good! I feel sorry for the parents of twins.

I’m trying to talk myself into believing that taking this job with Jeanette is a really good idea. I did enjoy planning that party, and it
was a success. Maybe this is my calling—-providing opportunities for the rich and famous to mingle “in an environment of heightened awareness and pleasure.” After all, someone has to do it. Mostly, though, I’m afraid I’m just weary of the sort of social chagrin I described in my last e-mail. Could that possibly be a good reason?

Certainly, I would have to consider that a good reason, seeing as how I’d sacrificed the last year of my life attempting to vault beyond the reach of social chagrin. But while our goal seemed uncomfortably superficial when presented that starkly, we were really striving for the world’s respect, and this, I knew, was far more than a party trick.

Of course, I don’t blame you for the Genslen. I know it was your idea, but it was my decision, my money. That’s the nature of the stock market. You win some; you lose some, right? If you happen to talk to Michael, though, don’t say anything about it yet, OK?

L

She did blame me, of course. And I blamed myself. Not precisely for Genslen’s fall—I couldn’t have predicted that—but for my despicable sense of excitement now that it had happened. I tried to bury this reaction in my anxiety for Letty, which I also felt quite acutely, but it remained, tingling like the pins and needles of blood rushing to circulate in a limb folded too long. As a novelist—yes, that is how I saw myself now—I even yearned to open the vein of tension she’d exposed in her admonition not to tell Michael. What would happen if the ante were upped, just a bit? If there were, for instance, a bit of a scene between husband and wife, revealing old wounds, deep-seated disappointments, betrayal, and shock?

Lexie, whose very life had the advantage, like my parents’ stock gains, of being “all on paper,” had also been hard hit when the drug in which she’d bought shares exhibited a disturbing tendency to make the bald gain weight. So far, she, too, had not confessed to her husband the full extent of their financial slide.

Lexie accepted a position with a company called Have a Ball. Ten pages and three days of neglected work at
In Your Dreams
later, she’d purchased the wardrobe—heavy on silk blouses—and handed the keys to her Range Rover to a whiz-bang Salvadoran nanny, Miss Carmel, who was willing to drill Spanish verb conjugations with Allie and Sas during the ride to and from school. She had also begun to shop for a sportier, but still substantial, car for her own daily use. Perhaps a Passat. At that point, my manuscript, like an old Tercel, stalled once again. Without Letty’s dispatches about Jeanette, for instance, I couldn’t get a handle on Lexie’s employer, Janet.