Small Plates (13 page)

A Tale of Two Cities
. Not her copy, if she'd ever had one. She hadn't read it since high school. This one had a fancy binding, leather embossed with gold. Where had Geoff picked it up? But it wasn't a book at all! It was a fake one sold for hiding valuables with a compartment carved from the pages in the middle! She'd have fun teasing him about this. Especially since what he'd hidden was his spare set of keys. What was with men and their keys? Why did they need so many? She had two—car and house. Period.

Geoff's spares were on the same kind of key ring that was in his pocket right now. A simple loop from Tiffany with small knobs on each end, nothing dangling except the keys. It was so like him to put these spares in the fake book. Very precise. Very safe. Her spare house key had been in one of the planters by the front stoop until she'd happened to mention it to him. The next day he'd presented her with a fake rock, suggesting she put it
behind
the house.

Felicity worked her way to Mann, Marquis, Melville, Mitford, called it quits at Morrison, put on a jacket, and went to look for signs of spring. As she left the house she was slightly disappointed that the hiding place hadn't revealed anything more interesting. Like love letters—although did she really want to find any of those? She'd tossed everything from her own past when she'd moved out of her apartment, and it had felt great. Nothing for a future tenant to stumble across. Once when she was finishing staging an apartment going on the market, she had found a leather bag containing handcuffs and a small whip stuffed in the bottom of the owner's majolica umbrella stand. It had creeped her out more than a bit, and she'd put it back, then doused herself liberally with Purell.

She was rewarded for making the effort to leave the house. The snowdrops were up in the rear of the back garden, a mass of them peeking through the snow. Next year she'd show little not-named-Brendan.

T
wo weeks later Geoff was away again and Felicity found a wad of cash in what looked like a can of WD-40 on a shelf in the basement near his workbench. She'd gone to get a hammer to hang some framed vintage Mother Goose illustrations from the local thrift store. She wasn't superstitious and neither was Geoff, so the baby's room was almost ready—the walls pale green like the crocus shoots coming up now, a toile frieze of Mother Goose characters along the top. The prints were a find.

All Geoff's hammers hung outlined on a Peg-Board, so there was no mistaking where each belonged. She grabbed a small one and went to find the Plexiglas box with picture hooks. Reaching for it, she knocked the can of lubricant off. Geoff had this sort of thing organized too, like the books. Alphabetized within a category. For a moment Felicity hoped the inevitable disarray a baby—and child—meant wouldn't be too hard for the dad. As quickly as the thought entered her mind, it vanished. Geoff was over the moon about the baby—especially the prospect of teaching a son how to fly-fish, a passion of his, indulged with a yearly trip to Montana with a group of like-minded men.

She picked up the can. It was very light. She'd tell him he needed more. Then she noticed that the label said “WD-20” and the container had a screw top. Another hiding place! She opened it and almost laughed aloud. An enormous wad of bills was tightly rolled and filled the interior. She didn't want to disturb it, but she could see Ben Franklin's face. A friend had told her that after 9/11, when it had been impossible to get to ATMs or banks, a lot of people in the New York area hid cash in their homes. It made her feel very secure to think that Geoff was looking out for his family.

I
f I was sure my skin would look like yours, I'd get pregnant tomorrow,” Adele said.

Felicity was having a ladies lunch with Adele and Lucy, friends from her design days, at Robert, the Museum of Arts and Design's restaurant overlooking Columbus Circle. Adele had beautiful skin, the result of periodic trips to Canyon Ranch as well as Georgette Klinger in the city—the day it reopened was probably still circled in red on Adele's calendar. The last thing she wanted was a baby. She and her husband, Henry, traveled the world shopping for their clients and lived an admittedly hedonistic, childfree life.

“You know you don't mean that,” Felicity said.

“She's right, though,” Lucy said. “You do look wonderful, and I'm not sure it's only due to that Madonna glow. Marriage agrees with you. And how could you miss, with someone like Geoff? You two make an ideal couple.”

“I don't know how ideal we are, but we
are
happy. I thought I'd miss working and maybe I will someday, but not now. I'm just enjoying being Sadie, Sadie Married Lady.”

The food arrived. Felicity found that she was hungry all the time but wasn't putting on too much baby weight, so had ordered
frites
with her steak—she'd craved this kind of big, juicy protein from the start. Her friends had both ordered entrée salads and left the breadbasket untouched.

Lucy took one
frite
from Felicity's plate. “I do plan to get pregnant. Forget the glow. I just want to be able to eat carbs! I'll be thirty in June, so the clock is ticking.”

“Oh, don't wait!” Felicity said. “Think of the playdates we could have together.”

Adele shook her head. “Isn't that what nannies are for?”

“Geoff suggested we get a nanny, especially for the first months, but I don't want anyone else sharing my baby, and he understood. I think he feels the same way. He didn't want a nanny who would live in.”

After talking about the Milan Furniture Fair—both women had been there in April—and some good dish about people they knew in common, Felicity told them about Geoff's hiding places.

“I was going to tell him I'd discovered them, but let him keep his little secrets.”

“I think it's adorable,” Lucy said. “Besides, all couples have stashes like this. I always have a bag of M and M's tucked away in my Tampax box.”

Adele nodded in agreement. “I had an aunt who used to keep ten-dollar bills in between her good china. Service for twelve—the whole shebang, dinner, salad, luncheon, and dessert plates. She left it to my mother, and when we went to pack it up, there was almost five hundred bucks!”

“You're always reading about people who buy things at auction and find money,” Felicity said. “Although sadly I never did.” She almost added “and after I married Geoff, I didn't have to worry about money.” His knack for predicting the next big thing in his area of expertise—pharmaceuticals—provided her with a standard of living she had never imagined attaining.

“True confessions—now that we know about your M and M habit, Lucy. I've never been able to get rid of the letters my first boyfriend sent me,” Adele said. “We went to different colleges and thought our love would last forever. I really don't have to hide them—Henry wouldn't care—but they're in an empty muesli box, he hates the stuff, in one of the kitchen cabinets. I read them about once a year to remind me of my much younger, much different self.” She gave a slight sigh.

Felicity reached across the table and patted her hand. “I think it's dear. And we know you're a total softie under that highly polished exterior.”

T
hree weeks later on a sweltering foretaste of summer, Felicity found a third hiding place. Although she wasn't sure it counted, since it wasn't disguised as something else. The cleaners had come, and as usual everything was slightly off-kilter. She was putting Geoff's Florentine leather jewelry box back in place when she thought she'd better open it and make sure nothing had shifted—he wouldn't appreciate the contents askew. He kept the gold pocket watch that had belonged to his great-grandfather and his cuff links in it. He favored French cuffs, which she found delightful. The first gift she'd given him was a pair of vintage ones from Georg Jensen. She realigned the cuff links in the holder on the top tray and lifted it to check the watch and fob in the bottom. When she replaced the tray she noticed that the box was much deeper than the two compartments. She took the top velvet-lined tray out again and removed the watch pieces as well, then shook the box gently. A slight rattle. There was another compartment and something was in it. Turning the box over, she noticed a tiny brass button, flush with the leather. She pushed it. Nothing. She pulled it and, voilà, another compartment was released—narrower than the others. There were more cuff links inside plus several gold coins in thin plastic cases.

Felicity was beginning to think of all this as a kind of scavenger hunt. It was like her favorite book from childhood,
The Secret Garden,
except the secrets were all in her house! The cuff links—gifts from old flames? He'd told her he'd started wearing cuff links at Harvard as an undergraduate—“I was terribly affected”—and Geoff wasn't the type to sell things on eBay. These, and the coins, were obviously too valuable to toss—hence another hiding place. Could her husband be any more fascinating? She put everything back exactly as it had been and, thinking of Adele's muesli hidey-hole, went downstairs to the kitchen. The thrill of the chase!

While the kitchen had been remodeled many times over before they bought the house, the pantry had not. Felicity hadn't wanted to change a thing either, the glass-fronted cabinets for china, the silver safe, the sink—which she used when she arranged flowers, the vases close to hand—and especially the wide shelves for spices, canned goods, and all sorts of other groceries. She regarded them appraisingly. What did Geoff eat that she never touched? Tate & Lyle's Black Treacle and Cap'n Crunch to start. Not together, thankfully. The man did have some taste. She'd tried his treacle on an English muffin—it was his favorite weekend breakfast paired with coddled eggs. One bite had been enough for a lifetime. Very sticky and with a slightly bitter aftertaste despite the sweetness. And as for the cereal, so sweet, her mouth puckered. It had been his go-to comfort food during exams in college and later law school and still was—plain by the handfuls or late at night with milk. “You never have to worry about cooking something for me.”

There were always two or three boxes of the breakfast cereal on hand, and Geoff bought large tins of the British “delicacy” whenever he saw that size for sale. Felicity started with these, hoping for another false bottom. The search proved fruitless, however. No phony fronts, or hidden compartments. No doubloons hidden in the Cap'n's oats and corn. No gems buried in the very thick dark syrup. At least in the one that was opened. The others had a tight seal.

When he got back next week, she intended to relate her adventures, gently teasing this husband of hers, who still obviously had part of a foot in childhood. He and his son could make a secret fort in the backyard, one with a big
NO GIRLS ALLOWED
sign. (Except Mom, she'd add.) They could hide out there and munch cereal.

But the day Geoff was due back, Felicity went into labor. All thoughts of hiding places rapidly vanished, replaced instead with the very visible arrival of Alexander Ashton Wyndham.

“Such a long moniker for such a tiny little boy,” Geoff murmured in his wife's ear, softly stroking the pale down on his son's head as he nursed greedily at his mother's breast. Felicity had been enchanted by the increase in her bosom and planned to nurse long enough to expose plenty of the cleavage she'd never had.

“Too long?” she asked, worrying suddenly at their choice. “Ashton” was her maiden name. “Maybe no middle name, or something short like ‘John'?”

Geoff moved his hand to stroke his wife—and not her head.

“He's a product of the two of us and needs both our names. Plus it sounds good—even with just the initial. Maybe he'll write books. Picture it on a front cover. If there
are
books with covers by the time he's old enough to write one.”

“Or be in one,” Felicity said. She was deliriously happy, and what all her woman friends who had had babies told her was true: once it was over, you couldn't remember the pain, the sweat, the everything. (That is until you went through it again, one had pointed out.) She moved Alexander to her other breast, her nipple popping from his mouth like a champagne cork. As she did she looked at her engagement ring. Arriving in time to go with her to the hospital, Geoff, who thought of everything, had her remove all her jewelry. When he'd brought her rings back, her engagement diamond had been joined by a diamond on either side, because “Now we are three.”

I
n the late spring Geoff had presented Felicity with what he called a “mommy car,” but one he said was for a “very classy mommy”—a Mercedes-Benz GL. Now, months later, she was almost finished packing it with what seemed like an entire department store of baby accoutrements and her own modest bags, leaving room for Geoff's, which he liked to do himself. As a man always on the go, he could pack in a flash. They'd be leaving for the Hamptons shortly after he got home. Alexander was napping. She'd feed him just before they left. His first real car trip!

A girl could get used to this, Felicity thought to herself. Geoff had found a rental on the beach with plenty of privacy and had arranged for someone to come in and leave meals for them as well as clean. A resort vacation without the hassle of being with other people. Just the three of them walking on the beach, reading on the deck—and just the two of them for hours and hours in bed. He was taking a whole two weeks off to make up, he said, for the two weeks he'd had to be away in July.

She looked at her watch—he should be home soon—and consulted the list she'd made. Felicity had always been a list maker. Everything was crossed off except “cameras.”

She got hers and checked the Memory Stick. It was full. She'd been afraid of that. Alexander was already on his way to being the most photographed baby of the year. She wanted to record every expression, every movement. Geoff's camera was the same brand, and he kept extra sticks in the pocket of the camera case, which she kept meaning to do as well. He'd taken the case down and it was next to the bags he'd be packing. She took his camera out and flicked through some of the recent photos he'd taken, getting slightly choked up at the series from last Saturday. He'd shot the three of them at the front door, using the camera's timer and a tripod. He'd told her he wanted to take one in the same spot on the same date every month for the first year and after that every other month—but, he'd laughed at himself, “OCD again—you know it will be every month.”