“She wants you to protect her,” Lily said.
Isabel smiled, but Lily didn’t know if that meant they were in agreement or not.
“Maybe,” Isabel said. “Maybe she wants to force my hand.”
An hour after that, the phone rang, and Isabel answered it. She spoke to someone for a few seconds, then hung up.
“They’re at the gate,” she said.
FORTY-SEVEN
Isabel knew that if she was wrong, then yes, later, she’d look like a monster. But she was doing the best she could with the information she had. People assumed that because she did not smother her daughter, they were not close. But she knew her daughter pretty damn well. And she felt certain that Madison would come home that night.
The impossible thought, that she might not, burned like a flame in the back of her mind, kept Isabel’s white fury stoked and searching. Because if Madison didn’t come back, it was because of Bob. Proximate cause, ultimate cause. Every kind of cause there was. If anything went any more wrong tonight, it was her husband’s fault, and Isabel couldn’t look directly at whatever that meant. She couldn’t look directly at what she’d do to him.
She’d seen Madison’s face, in that ballroom. As she heard that woman, Jim’s lewd insinuations. Madison’s face had crumpled just the way it used to when she was an infant, her beautiful, untrammeled skin wrinkling in on itself like the stone of a peach. She’d been ugly, exposed, in that moment. She was still, in so many ways, exactly like her father.
It all happens so slowly, Isabel thought. Every individual step is so insignificant as it happens. All the times her husband had told her what their life would be like, and she’d taken a stand. Or she thought she had. Balanced what she thought were gracious concessions with what she knew were principled refusals. When he told her they weren’t going to be like anyone else on the Street. That the men who worked for him would be held to different standards.
(She saw, now, that she had never asked, different how?)
The life your parents chose for themselves, babe, the life we used to talk about at the beginning, that won’t always fit. Can’t always be tailored to fit the life I have in mind for us now, Iz. The things your parents choose to display, the things they choose to keep close to their vests. That’s fine for them, but things change, people change. Money has changed. It means something different now, can’t you see that? Just trust me.
She’d let him tear down the old house; she’d let him buy that new apartment before they’d even put the old one on the market. “Let him,” as if she had any say. All he wanted when he asked her permission to do something was the reassurance that it wouldn’t be held against him. And all she’d asked in return, the one thing she’d ever asked from him, was that he not do anything in his own life, away from her, that would jeopardize their life here. This fucking backwater, this land of women with whom she had not a single thing in common.
Or so she’d always thought.
It had felt smart, to make sure that the other women out here knew they weren’t really her friends. It had seemed wiser to know, from the start, that these people were not rooting for her. But she couldn’t say, just now, what that wisdom was. What she’d gained from that distance, these past few months. She’d leveraged so much in her marriage against . . . what? The bet had been so big, when she married him, so big that it dwarfed caution, made it feel inconceivable that she’d ever be punished for taking that risk. She hadn’t left so much of Isabel Berkeley behind that it seemed plausible the new Isabel, this new married person she’d decided to be, could ever end up on the wrong side of fortune. Not really on the wrong side, not in the final tally.
That was his real transgression. He’d taken all the steps that led her to a room tonight in which Jim McGinniss could stand up in front of Isabel’s own child and call her husband a man who cheated on his wife. The fact that he’d allowed that meant that Bob had called her every tactic—every single thing she assumed he’d married her for—into question.
It was funny, she thought, but she’d never imagined the others would look anything like Erica Leary. She’d imagined many women in residence at the old apartment, women who were rounder, or louder. Darker hair, maybe, or more doting. Younger than her, without question. But never really a small, harsher version of herself.
She could feel Lily watching her from the other side of the kitchen. Isabel was sitting at the breakfast nook, running her hands over the table’s surface. She fought the urge to lay her cheek down to that precious reclaimed wood, its knots and slants. She crossed her arms over her stomach instead, digging her elbows into her flesh. She held the pose until the pain passed. Lily looked away.
Madison had been so little, the first time. The weekend Isabel drove out to Shelter by herself, with her baby daughter. They’d taken his car out of the garage in the city; this was before the boys, just after they’d bought in Greenwich but before she moved out full-time. It was still early in the season, too early for the summer people to be out in full force, and besides, Shelter Island had been quieter in the nineties. Everyone who was there in April was someone like Isabel’s mother, someone whose forebears had bought the house decades earlier.
She took the ferry and parked the car. She carried Madison into the house, surprising her mother, who was baking. Her mother was delighted; she held Isabel’s hand for a moment to express her pleasure. There was the usual clucking over the baby. And then Isabel told her mother about the envelope that had come to the apartment.
It had been addressed to him, but something caught her eye, some aspect of the thick cream-colored paper, the feminine lettering, the Audrey Hepburn stamp. The photographs were tucked inside, so careless and unadorned in their intimacy. Explicit pictures, but goofy ones. Silly, for lack of a better word. The woman’s handwriting on the sheet of paper so much more vicious and jagged than the loops and swirls on the envelope itself.