“Mina,” Isabel said, “you must have me confused with Suzanne Welsh. I don’t care what those women say about me. I don’t—”
“No, I don’t think that’s true,” Mina said. “I think you care very much. And we’re not in the staging area anymore, Isabel. They’re going to move on either way, whether we give them their cue or not.”
Isabel tilted her head, as if Mina’s voice were reaching her from a distance.
“We?” she said. Mina ignored it, the pain of Isabel’s tone. This was no time for hurt feelings, for polite deferral to Isabel’s imperiousness.
“You have to go to Suzanne’s party next week, for the museum. I know you don’t want to, but you still have to.”
“Mina, please. We’ve already planned on it.”
“Good, then. Good. You know as well as I do—you know better than I do, Isabel. The boys have another ten years, Jesus, ten, before they’ll go away to school. And Madison still has to live here. It’s been more than three months since Christmas.”
Isabel recoiled at the mention of Christmas; you could almost see the skin at her temples begin to vibrate.
“And we said, at the time, we said that her little rebellion could have been so much worse. Didn’t we?” Mina continued. “If someone had seen her, spoken to her? It’s sheer luck that it didn’t happen then and that it hasn’t happened since, Isabel. You have to start playing along, even if he still won’t. You have to go out, and you have to protect them.”
Isabel didn’t say anything for so long that Mina thought this might be it, that she might finally have spent everything she had in the bank here.
“We’re getting wine with dinner,” Isabel said finally, and Mina felt herself deflate with success.
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s my treat. I’ll call Tom to drive us home if we have to. Or we’ll get a car. Have it meet us around the corner from the restaurant.”
IT WAS LATE, the end of their main course, before Isabel said anything that pierced the veneer of mild conversation about their daughters. They made another brief mention of Suzanne’s benefit the following week, but this was only natural, since the museum was near the restaurant. They laughed a lot, and Isabel sat relaxed in her chair. The dining room at L’Escale was full of women they both knew, but no one spoke to them except the ma?tre d’. He brought over a complimentary bottle to express his great chagrin at having so offended them in the past that they’d withheld their presence from him all winter, then seemed belatedly to realize his error in calling attention to that fact, and quickly retreated. Isabel didn’t flinch.
“It’s not even the house itself that bothers me,” Isabel said, unprompted, after their plates had been cleared. She did not lean in, or give any bodily clues that she had lowered her voice to a loud whisper.
“I mean, I have no respect for the house, but I don’t care enough to spend time judging someone else’s criteria for happiness. It’s the reluctance to commit to it once you have it. It’s just what you said about today—insisting that it’s not done to build herself up. When you build a dome around your swimming pool, how can you possibly say you aren’t showing off?”
“Sure,” Mina said.
“But I don’t know,” Isabel said. “I know in her mind I’m below her on the ladder, Brad’s hedge fund trumps Bob being a lifer at an investment bank. I know she’s the ringleader of the women who think that way. I always knew. So I never avoided any small opportunity to twist the blade, you know? I always asked after his first wife, whenever I saw him, if she was standing there. I’d always make sure to reintroduce her to Bob every time they met, like I was worried he’d forget which wife it was. You know, you remember Brad’s wife Alexandra, little Carter’s stepmother. It seemed like a small way to keep myself entertained. It didn’t seem so terrible, at the time.”
Mina was feeling much calmer now, a whole dinner away from those women. She saw now that she’d done the right thing. She’d told Isabel what she needed to hear, and Alexandra’s little party had just been the final flourish she needed to drive the point home. But things weren’t quite as dire as they’d seemed. They never were.
Well, she supposed, sometimes they were. She thought of poor Bob, of how slow he’d been to act. She felt real sympathy for him, for the first time in months. Of course he’d assumed the whole thing wouldn’t actually collapse; when in their adult lives had that ever happened? He was only playing the odds. He’d done the best he could, in some ways.
“Isabel,” Mina said, “I don’t think this will last. People are just afraid right now. It wasn’t just you and Bob. You should have heard the way they were talking about poor John Briggs. As if his fund folding will give them any sort of insurance that their own lives won’t change. People will move on, once they feel safe. They won’t care what’s happening to you.”
She saw, for one brief moment, that this was not quite what Isabel wanted, either: to pass into irrelevance. She actually cared, still. But then Isabel composed herself, returned her face to still reflection, like the glassy surface of an unoccupied lake.
“Maybe,” she said. “I once worked with a girl, though—this was in Manhattan, around the time I met Bob—and she dated this reporter who’d been with a paper in San Francisco in the early eighties. He was a little bit older than us. And he made his name, really, with this series of pieces he was writing early on, at the very beginning of the whole thing, in 1981, I think.”
“The beginning of what?” Mina said, but then she knew. “Oh. AIDS?”
“Right, exactly. He was there for the whole beginning, and it was so mismanaged I guess those first few years, it took them so long to do anything about it, and everyone who was a spectator, all the journalists who cared to cover it, they could see how bad it would get.”
“Denise had a friend,” Mina said. “From high school. He moved out there after we graduated, and then he was dead, and I remember, just. You repeat the story endlessly, to everyone you meet. A twenty-four-year-old just died of this rare form of cancer. You keep saying it out loud as if you’ll learn something new, get smarter about it.”
“Yes,” Isabel said softly. “That’s exactly what you do.” She picked up her wineglass and held it for a moment without drinking.
“I’m sorry,” Mina said. “I interrupted you.”
“No, it was just—this man, he had this story about all the infighting. He said there was an editor of a small local paper who’d spoken out against the gay community, I forget the whole story, insulted some of the local gay leaders, and thirty-six of them signed a letter to the publisher calling for him to be fired. The editor, I mean. And he printed up that list, the people who’d signed the letter, and kept it above his desk. And every time another one of them got sick and died, he’d take a red pen and draw a line through that name. This was even years and years later.”
Mina said nothing at first.