Gilded Age (20 page)

Love (I can’t believe I’m reduced to doing this all over e-mail),

E

• • • • •

To: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

From: William Selden ([email protected])

Re: Misreading

I had no idea you were seeing/sleeping with Randy Leforte. Are you still?

• • • • •

To: William Selden ([email protected])

From: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

Re: You’re pissed at me?!?!

I had no idea you were seeing/sleeping with Diana Dorset. Are you still?

• • • • •

To: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

From: William Selden ([email protected])

Re: Confusion

I’m not. It was over a long time ago. And you know that. Is that why you were seeing Randy, and Gus Trenor for that matter? To get back at me? That sounds like I’m mad and I’m not. It’s just that I realized that we come at the world in two different ways, El. I should have seen that more clearly earlier on. The night of the museum thing just made me see that we’re very, very different people. I see that now. You’ve always been wild, Ellie. And I’m kind of, well, I’m kind of not.
But I do wish you the best, truly—
William

Selden’s e-mails left her fuming. His suggestion that she’d sneak around with married Gus Trenor offended her. He should have known her better than that. And it was the height of hypocrisy to call her out on it when he’d been seeing Diana Dorset, who was married. That he was upset about Randy was ridiculous too—the double standard, alive and well in a modern man. She wasn’t raised in a convent and neither was he for that matter—raised in a monastery, that is. She’d heard rumors that Selden had been seeing one of his students.

Seriously, this was the twenty-first century, not a hundred years ago. She’d been married, for crying in a bucket. He’d had innumerable girlfriends, so who the hell did he think he was judging her? Sending her those crap e-mails.

She’d thought twice about firing off angry e-mails to him. Her mother’s admonishments came back to her, as they often did at the strangest times.

“Anger isn’t pretty,” her mother would tell her, rinsing dishes in the sink. “Avoid it when you can, and when you can’t, fake it. Nothing is uglier than a wrathful woman.”

But Ellie couldn’t just let him leave and say nothing. She thought briefly about flying to Paris to find him and make him listen to her but decided she couldn’t. It was just too clingy, too desperate. And Ellie had been taught to never appear desperate.

“Always remain self-sufficient,” her mother had told her one hot summer afternoon as they drove in her mother’s stifling red Saab to make a deposit at the bank. Ellie’s ears had perked up. Most of her mother’s advice regarded insulating her looks from decay and complex techniques for keeping a man guessing. “Always keep a bank account, a credit card, and a car in your own name.”

Ellie had looked at her questioningly.

“You never know when they might come in handy,” she said as they parked, and her mother snapped her purse shut with a tidy click of the ball-snap closure.

Now Ellie leaned back in the old slatted chair at her mother’s breakfast table rereading Selden’s e-mails and getting progressively more angry. No, she wouldn’t go begging after him. She took a swig of Grey Goose out of the glass next to her. Selden just proved himself to be the same as any of them, judging her against his suburban morals. She’d honestly thought he was different, thought he adhered to a different set of principles guiding his life. But when it came right down to it, he’d shown his inherited conventional view of women and sex. It didn’t escape her notice that he likely thought no less of Gus or Randy for that matter, though he’d never liked them to start. Being involved with Ellie didn’t lower them in his eyes.

Selden’s conventionality probably applied to his views of marriage as well. He probably expected dinner every night at six o’clock, wouldn’t want to smell cleaning fumes when he got home, would refuse to eat leftovers. She’d heard friends complaining about their husbands doing these exact things. When Ellie had been married to Alex, he’d had enough money to hire someone to take care of all of
that, rendering moot any conflict between them over housekeeping. But at the time she’d wondered why her friends didn’t just tell their husbands where they could go. But now she kind of got it. Some men were that conventional, and you didn’t change a man once you’d married him. If Alex had taught her anything, he’d taught her that.

Her computer dinged.

• • • • •

To: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

From: Randall Leforte, Esq.([email protected])

Subject: Get together?

Was wondering if you’re free on Friday for a quick drink after work? Have a business proposal for you.

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device

She was surprised he’d written. He’d not taken her refusing him well. And he was so stiff and weird at the benefit, she didn’t think he’d want to be friends. But apparently the Persuader didn’t give up that easily. She hit “Reply,” knowing that somewhere out there his BlackBerry would vibrate and he’d read her message instantly. He wasn’t able to resist that toy. It was another thing that oddly appealed to her. He was kind of powerless against his petty addictions.

• • • • •

To: Randall Leforte ([email protected])

From: Ellie ([email protected])

Re: Get together?

Am intrigued. Three o’clock at the Ritz tomorrow?

E

Why not three o’clock? she thought. It was his favorite time, wasn’t it?

The Aftermath

T
he first week of March I gave birth to a healthy nine-pound baby boy we named Henry. Jim and I brought him home, and I immersed myself in those initial weeks of baby care. Stalled labor had ended in a Cesarean section, and so I hobbled through those first few days in a haze of pain pills and exhaustion. It amazed me that the doctor advised against eating blue cheese while I was pregnant for fear of some bacteria harming Henry but sent me home with a generous supply of OxyContin. I managed nursing after a few tearful nights when neither the baby nor I knew what we were doing. Jim ran the most effective blockade of visitors save my mother and the few people who dropped off casserole dinners, which allowed me to exist in a cozy cocoon with the new baby. I put the pain pills away in the medicine cabinet as I healed. A huge spray of pale lavender roses, their color almost silver, was delivered from Cinco Van Alstyne. Cards came in the mail by the handful.

The smell of my baby’s head and the sleeping smiles and the tiny fingernails so enraptured and fascinated me, and the sleepless nights and the nursing and the constant rocking so exhausted me, that I
existed almost solely in the baby cocoon for a good six weeks, sending only thank-you notes out into the world.

Jim tried to coax me out. He wanted me to go watch his club’s annual squash tournament—a black-tie event where the members watched professional players competing for a sizable purse. But the thought of entrusting Henry to some new sitter so I could attend in a too-tight cocktail dress—I had lost weight but there was still a lot of work to do—and watch grown men chase a little ball? I passed. But in appreciation of my husband’s constant tending of Henry and me, I encouraged him to go and suggested he take Ellie. Despite, or because of, the tableau, having Ellie on his arm would make Jim seem cool and make me seem magnanimous.

For three days after the tournament Ellie called and left messages with increasing frequency. When I called her back, she asked to see the baby right away, and so we decided she’d come the next day.

I felt self-conscious about seeing her with my belly still looking like it had a batch of risen bread dough sitting on it and dark circles shading my eyes. I showered and attempted makeup in an effort to feel a little less frumpy when Ellie showed up.

She arrived wearing enormous sunglasses. She took them off and revealed under-eye circles darker than mine. She’d lost weight, and her dry hair was raked back in a sloppy ponytail that revealed an inch of undyed roots dotted with gray hairs. I tried not to stare. As much as Ellie displayed a just-rolled-out-of-bed sexiness in her style of dress, she was always perfectly groomed.

Henry was napping, and we peeked in the nursery. Ellie cooed distractedly and pronounced him beautiful. It wasn’t until we were sitting downstairs with peppermint tea and the baby monitor light blinking that the real purpose of her visit became clear.

“I suppose you’ve heard what happened.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t heard anything. I’ve been in the land of baby.”

“So? You can still hear stuff,” she said, sharp.

“I’m exhausted. I don’t return phone calls,” I said, appeasing
her. I’d been feeling guilty about my inability to do anything but take care of the baby. Silly of me, but I know women, maybe you know them too, who jump in and swim a week after giving birth—whipping up dinner with the baby in a sling, jogging with the baby rolling in a stroller while they exercise the pounds off. I was overwhelmed, triumphant if I made it out of pajamas into real clothes by the time Jim got home. “I only called you back because you left eighty messages.”

“I left four.”

I smiled. “I’m saying I’m out of it.”

She sat cross-legged on my couch with her shoes off and constantly jiggled one foot, distracting me. She was studying my face, worrying a chapped spot on her bottom lip, and I thought that whatever gossip was going around must have been bad.

“Julia’s pissed at me,” she finally said.

I made a face. “I’m sure she’s not.” I fumbled with the tea bag in the pot and retied it to the handle.

“I’m getting bits and pieces back from people, but the night of the museum …”

My discussion with Selden at the benefit flooded up in my mind.

“She thinks something happened with Gus that night,” Ellie was saying.

I poured more tea in my cup and sat back, waiting. But Ellie had stopped.

“Why would she think that?” I asked.

“I left with him, which in retrospect was stupid. I thought he was giving me a ride to the after-party. He took me to this condo. I thought he wanted me to buy it. He made a pass at me.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Now Julia thinks something happened, that we’re having an affair.” She paused, fiddling with her cup and saucer. “Gus has tried talking sense into her, but she doesn’t believe him. Frankly I don’t blame her after all the shit he’s pulled.”

“Doesn’t she know about you and Selden?”

Here Ellie looked down, and I thought I heard her voice waver as she said, “He left to teach at the Sorbonne for a semester. Very short notice. He was gone in less than a week.” She looked out the window. “It was like one day he was here and the next …”

I don’t know why I said what I did next. I guess I was trying to make the best out of the situation. “Well at least you’ll get to visit him in Paris—so romantic.”

“I haven’t talked to him. I’ve been reduced to e-mailing him. I don’t even have his phone number. His cell doesn’t work over there.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned back in the couch, closing her eyes. “Him leaving, plus what Julia’s saying—it looks bad.”

“Who cares how it looks?” I thought about the night of the benefit. “You know, at the museum benefit Selden said something to me.”

“What?” She opened her eyes and looked at me, panicked.

“He seemed a little pissy, and he said he’d been talking to Randy Leforte.”

Ellie groaned and leaned back again, looking at the ceiling. “Randy’s been talking about me all over town too. Or in all the locker rooms in town, I guess. Selden knows about that too. Cleveland is so damn high school.”

She seemed oddly calm given the inferno of gossip raging around her. If it were me, I’d have been panicked. But she voiced perspective, almost as if it were happening to another person, yet she sounded defeated. I sat there in silent solidarity with her, felt bad for her. Cleveland
was
a good bit like high school.

“And the old double standard is alive and well. Is anyone talking about Gus, or Randy for that matter? No. Just about a potential catfight between Julia and me. Nice how nothing ever changes.” Her bitterness did strange things to her mouth, her lips wobbling like it was all a bite too big to swallow.

I realized she was right, of course. “So leave,” I said. “It gets provincial here, you knew that.”

“It’s the same in New York. Alex’s substance abuse gave him a disease, the poor thing. I was just the bitch who cheated on him
when the chips were down. At some point you have to say ‘Fuck it, I don’t care what anyone thinks.’ Tried that too. Although I do care when they’re whispering behind my back at parties, not inviting me places, and in general treating me like I’m diseased and disgraced.”

“Fuck them,” I said.

She snorted. “They wish.”

We both laughed.

I didn’t know how to ask, but I had to know for sure. “El,” I said quietly. “You didn’t, did you?” I had no illusions about Ellie’s lack of scruple. She could convince herself that almost any action she took was justified, and the stories I’d heard about her making passes at other people’s husbands lingered.

She raised her eyebrows.

“With Gus,” I clarified.

She looked at me with utter contempt. “After all I just said, you think I’d sleep with Gus Trenor?”

“No, no,” I said, realizing instantly that I’d offended her.

She sighed. “I can’t believe you’d ask me something like that, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. William believed it. I did not sleep with Gus. But I might as well have in this town. And Randy Leforte was a huge mistake.”

“But he liked you so much. The proposal—”

She shook her head. “I told you at the benefit. I’m not doing that again. We went for drinks though. He had a business deal for me. He wants to start a foundation of all things—with his name on it, of course. Wants me to help him with it.”

“Ells, that’d be great for you.” I was enthused.

She shook her head no. “Can’t even think about it. Of course he won’t actually pay me anything decent—there’s that. But he really just wants to keep me close. Is trying to convince me we’re right for one another. No one tells him no. It’s so pushy.”