Gilded Age (26 page)

Leforte raised an eyebrow.

“I hear you’re representing Gus Trenor,” Ellie said, trying to change the subject away from the texts. Having Leforte advising Betsy Dorset made her nervous, like they were a team or something.

Leforte shook his head sadly. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not? Biggest case of the year. Getting him off would be a coup. And I thought Gus was your friend.” Ellie remembered Gus as one of Leforte’s earliest champions. Though the reason for Gus’s
friendship wasn’t mere altruism; perhaps he’d known he’d need Leforte’s skills in this way.

“I find I’m starting to like Cleveland more and more.” He sighed and looked toward her.

“I thought you were ready for New York.”

“It’s growing on me here. Cinco Van Alstyne invited me out to fish in the river behind the house last week. It made me start thinking I could be comfortable here.”

Ellie knew what he was saying. With certain choices he could guarantee his position, securely ensconced in a cozy world where everyone welcomed him, where the board of the museum were his best friends, where Betsy Dorset, who’d previously ribbed him, was indebted to him. He knew it’d be a mistake to represent Gus; everyone would hate him for it if he won, and he’d be ruined professionally if he lost. But more importantly, having Ellie by his side as his wife could make things infinitely easier for him.

“But I can’t marry a woman who’s in love with another man.” Leforte had been talking for a while and Ellie finally focused in. It was as if he’d been reading her mind.

“I’m not.”

“You are. There’s no other explanation for why you won’t use those texts to your advantage.”

“For one, it won’t work.”

“Well, it’s true that they won’t really be scared of you with just the texts unless you have something behind you.” He leaned close to her across the car’s console. “Someone with means behind him would scare the shit out of the Dorsets. Holding the evidence of the affair and not making a stink about it—couple that with announcing our engagement, and they’d be groveling to be in your good graces. But one without the other, I’m not sure they’d succumb so easily. Without the money, it’s too easy for them to undermine you by spreading gossip to discredit you. Without the texts, perhaps they wouldn’t feel so welcoming just on the basis of my fortune. But combine the two …” He blew out a breath. “I’m giving away money all around town.”

“How much did you have to give the museum?” Ellie asked, knowing her question was sharp, but she hated where Leforte was going with all this.

Leforte looked at her, holding her eye for a beat. “Less than I’d have to give you to get what I want.”

Ellie was silent, stung.

He continued. “It’s one thing to get everyone back in line. But you have to keep them there. And a good-looking woman like you, it’s only going to get worse if you don’t marry. There’ll only be more wives who don’t want you taking their husbands to squash tournaments.” He rolled his eyes. “I told you, I listen to the gossip, but I don’t believe it all.”

Leforte’s view of her situation was straightforward, she had to admit that, and his solution seemed harmless—a private understanding between everyone involved, no different than a transfer of property or revising a boundary line.

“Why do you want to do all this?” she asked.

“Because I feel comfortable with you. You’re like me. And you’d be able to smooth things for me in a way I can’t, just like I can smooth things for you in a way you can’t.” He leaned across her to the glove box and opened it, pulling out a small stack of papers. He handed them to her. “Think about it.”

“She gave them to you?”

“I told her I’d take care of it. I think she wants to pretend she’s never seen them. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if copies are stashed away in a Dorset safety-deposit box downtown in case there’s ever a divorce. Really she should be thanking you.”

Ellie shifted away from him then, thinking back to their afternoon at the Ritz. When she had some distance from him, it sounded like a simple enough thing to marry an attractive, rich man she didn’t love. Perhaps he was right and they were two sides of the same coin. But sitting in the car with him, with the actual proposal in her lap, she couldn’t imagine spending her life with this man and his starkly transactional view of the world. What else would be negotiated, bargained for—a man capable of blackmailing anyone, even her.

“But it won’t work if you love someone else. I mean, you would grow to love me, but not if you’re still pining for him,” he was saying, and he stopped and looked at her. In that moment he must have known how unlikely his suit was. “Frankly I’ll be damned if I see where he ever protected you or took care of you the way I’m offering to.”

“I think I’m ready for you to take me back now,” Ellie said, cutting off his rising anger.

Leforte started up the car and revved the engine.

They drove back in silence, the drive back much shorter as Leforte sped.

As the landscape blurred by, Ellie wondered at the state of Randall Leforte’s heart. Could this really be what he was looking for? A social pawn and companion in getting ahead, a partner for regular sex, as well as a civilizing influence? She wondered if his heart had ever been moved. After this afternoon she doubted that was even possible.

When they arrived back in the Van Alstynes’ field, Leforte dropped her at her car. The low buzz of conversations from the party drifted over the fields to them.

“Thanks,” she said.

He dismissed her with a curt nod and revved the engine while he pulled forward, parked, got out, and headed for the party without looking back at her.

Ellie watched him walk into the dark front hall of the Van Alstyne house. Then she found her little red car in the field. It was time to drive home again, alone. She looked forward to the sleeping pill she’d take when she got there. Looked forward to those few woozy moments before she slipped under and everything went black.

The Shaker Lakes

I
n the days after Cinco’s party, I’d taken to bundling the baby in the stroller and taking long aimless walks around the Shaker Lakes for whole afternoons at a time, my head in a fog.

I know a double standard when I see one. And I never thought I’d be a woman scorned, but ask a woman with a cheating husband who she blames and nine times out of ten she blames the other woman, not the man. The instinct to give the man you love a pass is strong. Blame the man and everything you believed—your vows, your love, your life—is cast in doubt. It’s easier to blame the other woman, whose motivations lie outside your relationship. I’d always thought it was so antifeminist, so retro, so woman hating. But now I understood why the other woman took the rap: because you still loved the man. How much more do you want to forgive him than her, a stranger?

But Ellie wasn’t a stranger to me. She was one of my oldest friends. That she’d done this to me made it hurt more. How could she? I kept running through all the times she’d complimented Jim on how thoughtful he was, how kind; she’d admitted to checking out his ass.
How could I not have seen this coming? I berated myself for suggesting he take her to the club.

I’d believed Jim when he said that it had only been a kiss and nothing more. Maybe I was gullible, but he seemed sincere when he assured me. I believed that if something more had happened I would have felt it, like the aftershocks of a seismic quake shaking our marriage. I’d felt that kiss, and that’s why I dragged the truth out of him.

And finally there was the question of what I was going to do. I mean, what would you do? Throw your husband out? For kissing someone? Forget the whole thing and put it behind you? Could you really? And here I was with a tiny baby. I didn’t have the strength to storm out over a kiss right then. But would I ever trust him again?

What about Ellie? There was no question of her being the baby’s godmother now.

So I wandered around the lakes each day. Luckily Henry loved his stroller and took long naps while I walked and tried to leave self-pity and disillusionment behind me. Migrating birds were coming up from the South and stopping in the lakes on their way to Canada.

I was in my fog one day when I saw Viola Trenor jogging toward me in her sensible exercise wear. She was covering ground fast, running flat-out really. It wasn’t until she was almost in front of me that she saw me, and I could hear loud music coming from her earbuds—thrash metal. She stopped and touched her little MP3 player, turning it off.

“Don’t let me stop you,” I said. “You were motoring.”

She smiled, trying to catch her breath. “P. G. says I’ll be in the best shape of my life if I keep this up.”

I was about to ask her if she was getting ready for the wedding, trying to look her best, but I bit back the words. Mere vanity would never make Viola run like that.

“How’ve you been?”

She shrugged. “Distracted. Thanks for the flowers.”

I’d sent her a posy of violets after the shower as a thank-you. “Of course. You’re amazing to have done that with the wedding planning
and everything else going on …” I trailed off, trying to give her a way around the painful topic of her brother.

“I’m distracted with Gus.” Typical Viola; she shied away from nothing. “He’s been living up in Ellicottville, but the court made him come back. He can’t leave the state. I’ve been staying with him at the house in town. He begged me because Julia’s still up in New York, and he can’t stand to be alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. I wondered how hard this was for someone as principled as Viola. She loved her brother, sure. But if he was guilty, and certainly in the papers and the court of public opinion he was, could she set scruple aside for him? I’d thought she would be unyielding, but it made me like her even more that she seemed to make an exception for her brother.

“How’s P. G.?” I asked, hoping to lighten her mood.

“He’s glad we have an excuse for a small wedding now.”

I nodded, not knowing how to address this.

“He’s at an artifact show in New Mexico. We’re thinking of having the wedding in Boston. I think it’ll be very small, like in his living room, just family.”

I nodded again.

“At least that was the way we both initially wanted it, but everyone talked us out of it. We can’t really see what difference it makes now.”

“Vi.” I was going to offer sympathy. “I’m sorry about—”

But she held up her hands; recent days must have given her a hair trigger for pity. “Please, can we talk about something else?”

She leaned down and looked at the baby then, still sleeping in his shaded stroller. A genuine smile crossed her face.

“He’s getting big, not like an infant now but an actual little baby.”

She cooed, and I tried to be mercifully short in relating Henry’s news.

She straightened up then and looked at me. “You know, I ran into Ellie the other day.”

She said this warily with a sideways glance, and I was again shown
the small circumference of the Cleveland that I lived in. She already knew about the kiss.

“How’s she?” I asked.

“Frankly, I’m worried about her.”

This annoyed me—that Viola should be worried about the person causing me anguish. But Viola went on. “She came down to Dress for Success the other day. To meet the women.” Here she smiled. “You would not believe how good she was with them.” It was on my tongue to say no, I wouldn’t, but actually I could see it. Ellie always had a gift for cheering people.

“She looked at résumés and talked to anyone about their aspirations. It was touching, really.”

Viola’s eyes clouded over at the memory. “But she looked awful. She’d clearly tried to wear the chicest thing she owned, but her clothes just hang off her now. She didn’t have a stitch of makeup on, which is fine, you know. But her skin looked gray. And she reeked of smoke. She even tried to light one while she was with us, but I stopped her.”

“I think she’s going through a rough patch,” I said, and then realized that I sounded exactly like Diana Dorset.

“Yes, but the disturbing part is that after Ellie left, the director of placement, the one who gets jobs for all my girls, came up to me. She told me that Ellie quietly snuck into her office at the end. My director had a clear sense that Ellie was trying to see if we might have a job for her.”

“Like she wants to start volunteering?”

“Maybe that was it and my director got the tone of the conversation wrong, but she seemed to think that Ellie needed a paying job. Like she thought maybe we could help her find employment.”

“Surely not,” I said.

“Gus wiped her out,” Viola said in a whisper. “I feel like I should help her.”

“It can’t be that bad,” I said.

“She gave Gus her entire divorce settlement to manage.” Viola shook her head, watching a flock of geese take flight off the lake.
“Right now it kind of kills me to even be in the same room with him. But he’s my brother—you know?”

I didn’t, as I didn’t have siblings, but I couldn’t imagine a less sympathetic brother than Gus. Viola was really too kind.

The thought of her brother put a frown back on her face. She put the earbuds back in her ears and smiled at me. “I should continue,” she said. “But I think we’re going to offer her something in connection with the nonprofit. Some sort of development position. Ellie’s always good with people.”

I nodded.

“Looking forward to the baptism,” she said.

I had yet to plan any of it, and it was only a few weeks away.

She ran off then, strong and direct, with a cacophony of music in her ears.

I strolled the baby down the hill to Cedar Fairmount to pick up groceries for dinner. A uniquely midwestern type of cheerfulness must have motivated the Van Sweringen brothers to create a faux Tudor village in the 1920s in the same town as some of the largest steelyards in the nation.

I was in the produce section, wondering if the hothouse tomatoes would be hard as rocks even after I’d cooked them, when someone leaned over my shoulder.

“William Selden,” I said, looking up at him. “
Quelle surprise.
”