The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Dedication
For my family: my parents, Roger and Theresa;
my sister, Laura; and my brothers, Richard and Tony—
who all love nothing more than a good story, well told.
There was always this dichotomy: what to keep up, what to change.
—WILLIAM TREVOR, “THE PIANO TUNER’S WIVES”
That’s how I knew this story would break my heart
When you wrote it
That’s how I knew this story would break my heart
—AIMEE MANN, THE FORGOTTEN ARM
PROLOGUE
As the rest of the guests wandered the deck of the beach club under an early-evening midsummer sky, taking pinched, appraising sips of their cocktails to gauge if the bartenders were using the top-shelf stuff and balancing tiny crab cakes on paper napkins while saying appropriate things about how they’d really lucked out with the weather because the humidity would be back tomorrow, or murmuring inappropriate things about the bride’s snug satin dress, wondering if the spilling cleavage was due to bad tailoring or poor taste (a look as their own daughters might say) or an unexpected weight gain, winking and making tired jokes about exchanging toasters for diapers, Leo Plumb left his cousin’s wedding with one of the waitresses.
Leo had been avoiding his wife, Victoria, who was barely speaking to him and his sister Beatrice who wouldn’t stop speaking to him—rambling on and on about getting together for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. In July. Leo hadn’t spent a holiday with his family in twenty years, since the mid-‘90s if he was remembering correctly; he wasn’t in the mood to start now.
Cranked and on the hunt for the rumored empty outdoor bar, Leo first spotted Matilda Rodriguez carrying a tray of champagne glasses. She moved through the crowd with a lambent glow—partly because the setting sun was bathing the eastern end of Long Island an indecent pink, partly because of the truly excellent cocaine wreaking havoc with Leo’s synapses. The bubbles rising and falling on Matilda’s tray felt like an ecstatic summons, an invitation meant just for him. Her sturdy black hair was pulled away from the wide planes of her face into a serviceable knot; she was all inky eyes and full red lips. Leo watched the elegant weave of her hips as she threaded her way through the wedding guests, the now-empty tray held high above her head like a torch. He grabbed a martini from a passing waiter and followed her through the swinging stainless-steel doors into the kitchen.
IT WOULD SEEM TO MATILDA (nineteen, aspiring singer, diffident waitress) that one minute she’d been passing champagne to seventy-five members of the extended Plumb family and their closest friends and the next she was barreling toward the Long Island Sound in Leo’s brand-new leased Porsche, her hand down the front of his too-tight linen trousers, the fat of her thumb inexpertly working the underside of his penis.
Matilda had resisted when Leo first pulled her into a side pantry, his fingers cuffing her wrists while he pelted her with questions: Who are you? Where did you come from? What else do you do? Are you a model? An actress? Do you know you’re beautiful?
Matilda knew what Leo wanted; she was propositioned at these events all the time, but usually by much younger men—or ludicrously older men, ancient—with their arsenal of lame pickup lines and vaguely bigoted attempts at flattery. (She was constantly being called J. Lo in spite of looking nothing like her; her parents were Mexican, not Puerto Rican.) Even in this moneyed crowd, Leo was unreasonably handsome, a word she was quite certain she’d never employed for someone whose attention she was almost enjoying. She might think hot, she might think cute or maybe even gorgeous, but handsome? The boys she knew hadn’t grown into handsome yet. Matilda found herself staring up at Leo’s face trying to determine which variables added up to handsome. Like her, he had dark eyes, dark hair, a strong brow. But where his features were angular and sharp, hers were round and soft. On television he would play someone distinguished—a surgeon maybe, and she would be the terminally ill patient begging for a cure.