“It’s so good of you,” some woman said to Suzanne. “So generous, really. I sort of almost feel like this is the first time I’ve really been out of the house in months. We all needed this. It’s tradition!”
“Of course, this year more than ever,” another woman said. Mina could not remember either woman’s name. She couldn’t remember coming over here. Tom had left her alone shortly after they arrived, promised to be back soon with a glass of wine. Mina felt a sense of paying dues, fussing over Suzanne now to avoid trouble later. But what trouble was that? The worst that would happen was probably that some small gesture of hers would offend Tom, that she’d find herself thrown back into the car a few hours early, driven home alongside a husband in a white fury.
“The timing just couldn’t be better. Everyone’s happy to finally be here,” Suzanne said. “It’s been a touchy winter, no? Don’t get me wrong—I can understand some of it. I mean, I hardly even feel I belong in a house like this, sometimes. It’s all Bill! But what can you do?”
“Well, you’re hardly Brad and Alexandra,” another woman agreed, stretching her lips as she spoke and raising her eyebrows in that nice-lady-pantomime of a whisper, of actual discretion. “I don’t see a house for the Zamboni anywhere on your property.”
“Oh!” Suzanne said, putting one hand to her chest and dipping her contorted smile toward her champagne glass. This chick must be a newcomer, Mina thought. Alexandra Barker might pop up at her shoulder any minute. And once she did, any casual observer might mistake her for the party’s hostess rather than Suzanne. Disapproving talk of the Barkers was strictly verboten in groups this large.
Mina could feel her nausea up in her throat now, tightening her jaw. Every day of her life thus far had depended on keeping two distinct and self-sustaining places clear in her brain, two places to put the data and details of the world around her. But now it was all bleeding over, barriers had been breached, and she didn’t feel safe showing her face in public when she no longer knew what she might be accidentally giving away. What she might be trading, without realizing she’d agreed to a trade.
Many of these other women were like Mina, had grown up in places that were nothing like this, but they’d forgotten it so fast. They’d blinked, and then suddenly they were women who deserved this, who could talk to Isabel D’Amico and pretend they understood her. The only thing that remained of their old selves was the survival instinct, the willingness to claw another woman out of the way.
Where was her husband? Mina looked over her shoulder. For a moment she saw him, champagne flutes in his hands, talking to another man whose face she couldn’t see. He definitely saw her; he met her eye and then shook his head once, with finality.
Suzanne was greeting a new arrival, a much younger woman and her surely sweaty-palmed husband, probably a new hire somewhere, maybe even Brad Barker’s fund. The woman Mina didn’t know had drifted away from their group, moving slowly and as if without intent toward the bar. She was talking now to some other blonde, very put together, more hard-edged and in a low-cut gown. Just a little too much weight carried through her haunches to really pull it off nicely. Maybe someone in from the city for the night, some Carnegie Hill second wife? But she looked familiar, actually. Mina wished for her glasses, but she hadn’t worn them out in public since she was twenty-six.
The party was gathering steam, now. What had been a few clusters of tinkling small talk was now the rhythmic churning of festive noise. People were moving on to the third glass of wine; it was flowing in them, heating their blood, reminding them that there was no point in being here if they were only going to act like this was a funeral. Women were permitting themselves to laugh, regretting it when their voices grew too shrill but not regretting the impulse itself. It reminded Mina, with the dark blue trees at the party’s edge, the lights strung through them, of one of the books she’d read as an undergraduate. When she’d moved to the city, everything had been too fraught with the potential for disaster to leave time for reading. And even once her life had taken a shape it wasn’t likely to lose, she hadn’t gone back to novels. She’d spent these last twenty years just trying to keep her balance. Her life wasn’t busy, maybe, but it was demanding.
She sighed, feeling the pain of exhaustion even in her fingernails. And then she saw Isabel, standing with Bob and Madison at a table at the edge of the lawn. Isabel already had a glass in her hand; she was leaning, slightly, to catch something Bob whispered in her ear. She was laughing.
How had they done this? How, when everyone on this lawn was just waiting for them to arrive, had they managed to shuffle themselves into the crowd like cards lost in a deck?
Mina checked that Tom was still facing away from her, that he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of Isabel, before she walked over to their table. Just before she was within shouting distance, Bob looked up and grinned. He put his arms in the air, probably for a hug, but he looked like a drunk wind-up toy. She stopped, almost wondered if she shouldn’t approach them. But then that was absurd, he’d already seen her, he was flailing for her. She smiled back at him.
There was laughter behind her again. But this time it was unnatural, synchronized, as if the crowd had begun, as one creature, to roar.
MADISON WAS LOOKING FOR CHIP. She hadn’t texted him since she’d left his house; it seemed like it would be desperate, maybe. But now, here she was, totally not desperate, but with no way to prepare herself if he should materialize next to her with a pilfered drink from an unattended tray. She wasn’t even sure he was back from Florida yet.
As she stood with her parents at a bar table, she tried to imagine some options for what to say to Chip if he should appear before them. But she could only think of his hands on her shoulders that afternoon on the couch, the way he’d pushed down on the crown of her head.
If I had any nerve, she thought, I would have let that man kiss me, that poor guy at the bar in December. Poor, balding Hugh. I would have practiced on him, and then the Chip situation wouldn’t have been such a complete disaster.
“Ground control to Major Tom,” her father said. “Hello in there.” He snapped his fingers in the air just in front of Madison’s face. She tried not to blush; it wasn’t like he could read her mind, not yet. She smiled and sipped from her water glass.