She starts to respond to her assistant, but then, taking a deep breath, she stops herself and closes the window, opting instead to cue up her Out of Office.
On the other side of her laptop, next to a vase filled with the hydrangeas that Anka brought when she came to clean yesterday, sits the seating chart for the reception that she and Ollie have been working on. Next to it are the RSVPs that they’ve received, a collection of cards forming a neat, mother-of-pearl stack. Looking at the open places on the chart, she begins to sift through the names, cross-checking them with a spreadsheet of guests that she created nearly six months ago. She remembers when she first started hearing back from the people she and Ollie had invited. Using his letter opener, she sliced apart the envelopes one by one, tallying all the yeses. Once in a while she’d come across a no, and she’d do her best not to frown and to suppress her disappointment. Poppy and Hugo had a cousin’s wedding in Sydney, and while Eloise knew how Poppy felt about a member of her clan hitching up with an antipodean, her aunt would no doubt skewer her if she missed the nuptials. And given that this was the aunt with the house in Lacoste that’s empty for practically fifty-one weeks out of the year, and where Poppy and Hugo and Eloise and Ollie have spent the past four Bastille Days—well. Eloise understood, didn’t she? Yes, she thought to herself, setting Poppy’s card in a separate pile. She did. Life comes up; life happens. While they came few and far between, there were more regrets: Charlotte and Guy would be skiing in Las Le?as, and it’s a trip that Charlotte had “stupidly” booked ages ago; Kristen, a classmate of Eloise’s from Yale, had a memoir being released that week (after reading Around the World in Eighty Days in the wake of a messy breakup, she spent a year traveling the world, trying to find eligible men in foreign cities with untapped dating pools, like Accra and Vilnius. She’s still single) and her publisher and agent were both insisting that she stay in New York (they were 90 percent certain she was a shoo-in for the Today show); an uncle of Ollie’s named Cedric whom Eloise wasn’t aware existed would have adored to come, and was flattered that the couple thought to invite him, but surely Ollie remembered how Cedric felt about traveling, and what atrocity transpired the last time he boarded a train? Nobody wants to see that again, Cedric assured them. Nobody.
As she tackled the pile, she found a steady rhythm for herself, a four-count beat: open, read, smile, log; open, read, smile, log. Soon, the routine became hypnotic, and then, finally, gleefully therapeutic: she considered how all those little envelopes (even the regrets, the tearful excuses) bore evidence of just how much she was loved and appreciated. She gazed at them, scattered across the breakfast table like two hundred warm hugs. Beyond them, her flat glowed with soft morning light, and London pulsed with the same refined excitement that first seduced her six years ago, when she moved here to get a master’s in art history at UCL, and that continues to seduce her now, as she puts the final touches on the seating chart.
How could she not consider herself lucky, privileged? After all, hadn’t that been the reason she decided to take the Mission: Breathe job in the first place? She’d been offered other jobs after grad school, positions that were more in line with the careers of her friends (a development role at the Tate Modern; VP of publicity at one of the big Haymarket firms), but still she’d chosen this, she’d chosen charity. She considered it her responsibility, a sort of noblesse oblige duty of hers to give back. And besides, the parties really were fabulous.
Thinking again of the Daily Mail reporter attempting to defame her efforts with claims of shallowness, she feels a sharp sting. Her blood starts boiling, and she hovers the computer’s mouse over her e-mail, which she’d minimized at the bottom of the screen.
At the last instant, though, she yanks her hand away. To distract herself, she looks at the names of the two remaining guests who, nine days out from the wedding, she’s yet to seat: Donna Wyckoff and Henrique Lafarge. Squinting, she rubs her temples; the riddle of what to do with her parents has been puzzling her ever since she received Henrique’s RSVP (late) two weeks ago, his name scrawled out in fluid, Continental script. Since then, she’s moved them around the seating chart in a dizzying game of hide-and-seek, trying to keep them apart while also contriving scenarios in which they might interact. It’s been infuriating work, though—twice she’s had to reseat an entire table of guests, and last week she was on the verge of revoking her father’s invitation, just to make her own life a little easier.
Fearing that she’s reached the end of her patience, she opts for the most obvious solution: she slams her computer shut and figures she’ll deal with it later.
“Fuck it,” she says, and downs the last dregs of her espresso.
*
At noon she takes the Tube to Canary Warf to meet Ollie for lunch at a bistro on Montgomery Square, a few blocks away from his office at Barclays London headquarters. She waits nearly thirty minutes before bringing up the issue of seating arrangements.
“What if I just sit them next to each other?” she says.
“As in side by side?”
“As in side by side.”
“Huh.” Ollie picks the onions out of his burger and discards them on his bread plate. He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and loosens his tie.
“I mean, they’re my parents. Is it that weird that they’re going to be sitting next to each other?” Eloise looks around for their waiter, who told her five minutes ago that her salad was on the way. “Go ahead and eat,” she says, though she knows he won’t.
“Of course it’s not weird.” He reaches across the table for her hand. “It’s just—I thought you said they didn’t get along all that well.”
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s a horrible idea.”
When she went on her first date with Ollie five years ago, Eloise was hardly speaking to her father herself. Henrique had taken up a third wife, a French soap star two years younger than Eloise, and she couldn’t bear to face the child her father had become. But last year she received word that he’d left the soap star (or perhaps she left him—her father was rather vague on the issue, saying that il etait près de se caser). At first, she had a difficult time believing him: Henrique, ready to settle down? It was like asking Paul to get off his high horse. Yet, over the past twelve months, her faith in her father’s proclaimed need for stability and maturity has grown. He canceled his annual boys’ trip to Biarritz, which was a start, and from what Eloise could gather, more of his weekend nights were now spent reading at home, rather than buying bottles of champagne for women a third his age at some Parisian nightclub.
“Have you told your mum?” Ollie asks.
“To be honest…” Eloise pauses and stirs her iced tea with her straw. “I mean … To be honest, she’s not totally aware that he’s going to be there.”