ISABEL TOLD THE WHOLE STORY that night, while she braided Madison’s hair. She always did, once Madison convinced her to start; it was, after all, a favorite in their family. Every family wants to feel inevitable.
He came into the club one night, celebrating with his coworkers. He tried to get her mother to sit down with them, stay for a glass of champagne, and she told him off. Her exact words were never part of the story, but the point was that she spoke to him in a way that no other woman did. She called him a junior analyst, even though he was a good twelve years her senior. She put him in his place.
Then, to apologize, he held out a single, crisp, hundred-dollar bill. And Isabel threw it back in his face.
He found her, later, after she’d stormed off. He begged her to go out with him.
She was perfectly polite in her refusal, of course, she didn’t bare her teeth. But he came back three times a week, for a month, having called management to find out the nights she worked. He told her that he could learn a lot from someone like her. He told her he needed reading recommendations. He kept coming back until she said yes to dinner.
MADISON LOVED THE DETAILS of this story for many reasons, but she especially loved that one tactic of her father’s. Because he never read for pleasure. Anything that might shed light on the markets, sure. Earnings reports, diversity memos, whatever intel on the firm or its competitors that Jim McGinniss, his second in command and best friend coming up through the ranks, saw fit to funnel onto his desk. During the Russian crisis in ’98, anything and everything about post-Wall Russia that he could get his hands on. But nothing irrelevant. Not for him the camouflaged meanings of fiction, the artificial tidiness of biography.
She thought often of her parents’ story during that September after she turned fifteen, during the shell-shocked year that followed. At first, when it all happened, people were expecting a scene. They wanted his howling at the perceived injustice brought out into the open—for on the day that it happened, quite publicly, he’d been vocal enough for them all to know that he considered himself one of the victims, too. They wanted the brash man they’d all tolerated for so long to turn, finally, on himself. They were afraid of, and so eagerly awaited, screaming and yelling, King Lear ranting beneath a white tent on a moonlit Greenwich lawn.
In this, her father never obliged.
NO ONE KNOWS what is lost at the moment it slips away. What you feel, then, is really fear. There is the inkling of what is to come, and the fear of that future pain leaves you paralyzed. Madison would come to understand, that year, that when Isabel had looked down at the crisp bill in the darkened club where she’d taken a job to spite her own father, she couldn’t have seen the paths that closed themselves to her, right then, in that moment. She could have paused to examine the brutish, pleasingly handsome man before her and still known nothing more of the women she would not become, the lives she would not choose. She could only see the details, could not see the fragmented whole that it was all leading her toward. And for this past limitation, this necessary blindness, Madison felt for her mother only tenderness, only shared regret.
MADISON HAD LOOKED, a few times, trying to find pictures of the club online—her father had once mentioned red velvet couches that fit together to form swirling S shapes. But it was as if the place had evaporated once it closed, only a few years after her parents met there. She could find no trace of it, only casual mentions in magazine articles about the excesses of the eighties.
In the year after her father’s implosion, she could think only of what she didn’t know about that story. She could close her eyes and imagine her parents, could watch them find each other. But she could never hear the dialogue, not the crucial parts, and the story came to seem, for the first time, like only the pieces of a failed mosaic. It was incomplete; it belonged to the world she had known before that September, those fortified, moonlit lawns behind Greenwich houses. So full, verdant and cool, their stringed instruments, their tinkling glass. The lights in the trees.
But the pieces told her nothing, gave her no inside information. And she wanted it to be like that moment at Gran’s cocktail party, in the kitchen, when she saw her mother’s hand on her father’s skin, saw his unused fist, knew something—she could not say what—about the invisible strings between them, the web she’d been living in all her life.
Wasn’t she, after all, the only real insider? Didn’t she live in a house, each day, with some versions of the two people in this story?
I
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To the plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
—Wallace Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things”
If you haven’t discovered your role, you’re the villain today. So you have to act like the villain today.
—Representative John Mica to Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers, during congressional hearings
ONE
The summer before, they spent August at the house on Shelter Island.
“Bob,” Isabel said one morning at breakfast, holding her teacup in front of her face. “Could you put that away, please?”
She stared pointedly at the BlackBerry sitting beside his coffee cup. They were all there, Madison and the twins, eating breakfast in the formal dining room. Madison had assumed that this year, the first summer without Gran, they might finally be liberated from her old rules and habits. But that hadn’t happened. On some days, if they swam in the pool, they were allowed to eat lunch at the outside table, beneath the poplars Grandpop had taken such pride in showing to first-time visitors. But that was it, their only real casual indulgence.
Madison poured her own cup of coffee and immediately burned her tongue. She had been training herself this summer to drink it black, like her father. She didn’t love the taste of coffee itself, but somehow she loved to drink it black. It felt like you were toughing it out, sucking it down anyway not for the pleasure but for the other benefits.
“What?” her father replied, still peering down the table at her mother.
“Vacation,” Isabel said.
“I’m aware,” he said, “that we are on vacation. I’m aware we’re at your parents’ house. I was wondering if you’d repeat the first thing you said.”