In the best of times, she found this stretch of road draining. It sloped gently up from the train station, toward the library up on West Putnam and the winding residential districts of Greenwich beyond. It was dotted with sidewalk cafés and the kinds of clothing stores that didn’t play pop music at earsplitting levels. Once or twice per block you’d spot a remaining storefront of Ye Olde Greenwich, as Lily thought of the longer-standing businesses like the old pharmacy.
It was a mommy playground, and by midafternoon all the frustrated energies of these underutilized women had them trolling this street in droves. They prowled the boutiques and the juice bars, quaking with everything they had but could not use. The Ivy League educations they’d been allowed to pursue, matriculating when they did, in the wake of feminism’s second wave. The endless pluckings and bleachings and injectings that left them in a perpetual state of both tranquility (no wrinkles) and surprise (unnatural eyebrow arches) but also seemed to extract their sexuality from them as if by syringe. She’d never seen so many beautiful women who seemed to live life at such a distant remove from their own sexiness. An energy built up in their muscles all morning, as they ran on the “her” treadmill alongside the empty “his” model in their home gyms, built up as steadily as lactic acid. And by early afternoon, when it was still too soon to fetch their children from school—a task most of them outsourced, anyway—they ended up here. They steered from Maje to Saks to Lululemon to Starbucks, touching their fingertips to a cashmere sweater or unfolding a pair of boyfriend jeans, wondering if their daughters would mock them if they tried to wear these.
These women did not scare Lily. They actually amazed her at times—the wives of Greenwich were just so exactly what the rest of the world probably thought they were, at least in their outward habits. But for all their peels and shots, their lifts and tucks, they looked perpetually strained, to her, forever terrified that the one detail they’d forgotten to falsify would be the one to give it away. She never knew what “it” was for these women. It couldn’t just be their age, or the subtle cords of animosity that stretched taut between them and their husbands as they lay in bed at night. And yet they had, quite literally, everything else. She’d never understood what they were so afraid of revealing to their colleagues, for that’s what these women were to one another, really. These weren’t friendships; these were mutual agreements to aid and abet one another’s tireless campaigns for unspecified triumphs.
Lily turned from the meter and prepared to cross the street midblock, hoping the unnecessary crossing guard posted at the West Elm intersection wouldn’t scream hoarsely at her insubordination, as he often did. She was headed to Brooks Brothers to pick up the boys’ new suits. For the really big nights, evenings when Bob would be speaking on a dais, there were better options on offer. But for local Greenwich evenings, events with a kids’ table that were more likely to send the twins home with grass stains or ripped elbows, it was always Brooks Brothers.
She was thinking about the boys when she saw Mina Dawes hop out of the silver SL parked across the street, smoothing her skirt as she walked toward the curb where Suzanne Welsh was feeding the meter.
As far as Lily had ever known, these two were friendly. There was no reason to believe that it was strange for Mina to be out with Suzanne Welsh, no reason at all to link their afternoon, with all its normal concerns, to what was going on with Bob. So it was one of those moments when Lily had to remind herself that the one thing she had on these women, maybe more important even than the fact that she was smarter than they were—which she firmly believed she was—was her ability to sniff out a fight, her identification with prey rather than predator.
She walked quickly downhill, then darted across the street as Mina craned her neck over the parking meter. By the time Suzanne returned to the car to withdraw an enormous shopping bag from its backseat, Lily was facing away from them, watching them in the darkened glass windows of the empty space that had once been a theater and was now, supposedly, going to be remodeled as an Apple store.
“It’ll just take one quick second,” Suzanne reassured Mina, who was twisting her left hand with her right, feeling her own wrists as if to seek out the pulse. “And then I can run you right home.”
Suzanne’s voice sounded almost frantic, even more anxious than usual, a bit hoarse. Was it possible she had one of the secret smoking habits? Lily had only ever seen a few of them smoke, and these always furtively, at the side gates to someone else’s home. But they all must once have smoked all the time, to keep their appetites sufficiently strangled. When they were living in the city and waiting for these husbands, scanning the crowds each night at the Surf Club, which was always the place Lily imagined all the younger versions of these women. (She’d heard Mina mention the place once.) They must have all been whippet thin and had the most exquisite dark half-moons under their eyes all the time back then, when they were her age.
She followed them into the store, watched Alexandra Barker arrive to meet them, stood so close to them that it seemed ludicrous they hadn’t noticed her presence. But then Alexandra Barker had always been one of those ninnies who put herself at risk precisely because she thought she was so tough, so terrifying. Lily had often imagined running into this woman in the city, on a crowded sidewalk or the subway—both places Alexandra would surely never be—and leaning into her hard with one hip, sending her careening off on unsteady feet like something cast off across the dirty, uneven ground.
She knew a little bit about that family, the basics. She remembered one time Bob had wandered into the kitchen to sit with his eating children, one of the times he’d been dressed and ready before Isabel. “He had to go out on his own,” he’d said of Brad Barker. He’d been talking to Madison. “Everyone talks about that fund like he’s so smart, he’s such a genius. He had no sense of adventure! He could never take any risks with other people’s money, he was too terrified of making the wrong move when he worked with a bunch of other guys. So he goes out on his own where no one’s watching him. Who gets into this business and doesn’t have the stomach for risk?”
At the time, Lily had credited this to Bob’s bluster, his buried jealousy. Brad Barker was, after all, probably the richest man they knew.
But now, watching Alexandra, Lily was thinking how smart Bob was, in his way. How much Bob and Isabel knew about everyone they’d touched, without ever being seen scrambling for the information.