Mina decided to return the conversation to their daughters.
“It’s hard, no? Sixteen isn’t so young, but it’s hard to internalize that. That it’s no longer in her best interest for me to drive up there and curl up with her on her bed and let her cry. You know, she was drawn to this girl, who turned out to be smashingly unstable, and now she has to suffer those consequences. Consequences are what we’re supposed to teach them, right? So they don’t just sink into all of this for the rest of their lives?”
She cast one hand through the air, including the house and the pool and the glimmering slope of the lawn in the gesture.
“Well, you know what I’m talking about. Madison’s a sophomore, I’m sure you feel it, too.”
Isabel responded with a smile, if it could even be classified as such. Her skin looked like a porcelain teacup that upon close inspection would yield up its faint web of cracks.
This impression was troubling all on its own. Mina had known Isabel for years, since the girls were small—although the girls had never been friends, not by their own choice. But Mina would say that she was as close to Isabel, certainly, as anyone else in town. Yet each time she came into this house she fought the fear that something was awry on her own person. Lipstick gathering and mixing with spit at the corners of her mouth, her blowout beginning to frizz with sweat just where her temple met her ear.
Because Isabel projected not perfection so much as uniformity. Her body, her hair, her tawny skin and the deceptive, unguarded clarity of her large blue eyes—it all met the eye like some sort of rivetless instrument. You couldn’t see the joints, the creases, the tiny flaws that must be visible each morning before she was offered up to the outside world. Believe me, Mina, Tom always said. Nothing going on beneath the waist. Beneath the neck! Bob can keep her. And then he’d smack Mina’s ass and grab her, exposing the soft part of her neck so that he could kiss her there. The sorts of unapologetic intimacies you were supposed to have the freedom to enjoy when you’d shipped your daughter off to boarding school.
Of course Tom would want to sleep with Isabel, in a world without consequence. This was not even a question. But really he was talking about her posture, about the way she held herself apart even when she was sitting in her own living room, as though the pool and the cars and probably the house in Sun Valley and definitely the jet—as though they all stank, ever so slightly, of something unsavory. What he meant was that he preferred his own wife, plucked from one of the lesser districts of Long Island and touched up and reprogrammed for Greenwich life and the occasional appearance in Manhattan. He preferred Mina, a woman reconstituted just like most of the other wives, to someone whose opinion might actually make his palms sweat.
She tried not to let these things bother her. Isabel was her best friend.
“Look,” she said, “I fold, okay? I didn’t come over to congratulate myself on the fact that my daughter’s healthier than her neurotic roommate. I came to see if you need anything.”
“We’re fine, Mina. Truly.”
“Isabel, I don’t know much, but I do know that Tom has been working—so far as I can tell—quite literally around the clock for a week. So I assume Bob has been in hell.”
Isabel laughed: a small, bitter sound. “That seems a safe assumption, yes.”
“Have you spoken to him today?”
“No.”
“Well, how did he sound yesterday?”
“You’d have to ask someone who spoke to him yesterday, Min.”
“You two didn’t talk?”
“Well, he’s got his secretary—I don’t know—running interference, so I haven’t had the opportunity.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t mean it,” Mina said, shivering at the scorn in Isabel’s voice, as if she herself were the secretary in question. “I’m sure she’s just frightened.”
“That assumes she even knows where he is at any given moment,” Isabel said. “For all I know he’s in some bunker somewhere. She might not even actually be lying.”
“You really think it’s that bad?”
With a quick, unexpected motion, Isabel removed her sunglasses and tossed them down, letting them clatter on the table.
“What are we doing here, Mina? I assume you’ve been watching all the same cable news shows I’ve been watching. I’m sure you have every single piece of information I have, so why are you even asking me the questions? Hasn’t everyone already decided?”
They sat in silence and Mina watched one single basil leaf, now fully drenched, begin its fluttering descent to the bottom of her glass.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I wasn’t being insincere. I didn’t know you hadn’t heard from him.”
“Well,” Isabel said, fanning her hands out in an inclusive, welcoming gesture that encompassed the pool and the entire deck around them, even the woods at their backs. “Now you know.”
“You know,” Mina began, cautious, “that this is all mysterious to me. I understand that Weiss is in trouble. But if anyone can power through that, it’s Bob, right? What does he say about it?”
“You’re not listening to me. I don’t know. He hasn’t told me anything.”
“I don’t mean this week. I mean what has he been saying. The summer, and everything.”
Isabel looked at her, her eyes settling on Mina’s face as if she’d just noticed there was a second person at the table.
“Mina,” she said, “my husband has not, in any significant way, told me anything about his bank for months and months. I swear to you.”
The late-summer humidity hung in the air beyond the house, a palpable weight pressing down on the afternoon. Somewhere, beyond the trees, Mina heard an industrial lawn mower. She imagined it moving across an indulgent expanse of green, leaving neat trails of exposed, cut grass in its wake. This was the sound of the afternoon, one of the sounds that, together, mapped her adult life as a wife, a mother, a woman inside her house in Connecticut. A woman waiting for her family to come home.
“Okay,” she said. “But from what I’ve seen—I mean, they’re still looking for a buyer, right? I mean it’s much more likely that he’ll sell the bank than that they’ll just let it—I mean, bankruptcy would be a big decision to make. The government will step in, right?”