“Hi,” Elise tries again.
Tory seems to decide this is not a joke and she should proceed. “So nice to meet you,” she says haltingly.
“I didn’t know who you were!” Elise says. “I mean, Jamey had to tell me you were who you are. You know what I’m trying to say?”
“Um,” Tory says. “I think I do.”
“Well, it’s cool to meet you.”
“Yes. Thanks. Cool to meet you too.”
Tory doesn’t speak in the front seat of the BMW. Jamey knows why.
Jamey tries to ask Elise harmless questions.
“So you had a good day?” he says, looking at her in the rearview.
“We got a shipment of dead angel fish, but that happens.”
Tory’s eyes widen.
“And Lex had pneumonia, we found out, which is why nobody’s seen him recently. But he’s doing good now.”
Jamey doesn’t follow this up either.
“Lex is a friend?” Tory asks Elise and Jamey.
“Not really,” Jamey says.
“He’s not not a friend,” Elise corrects.
“He’s a homeless guy,” Jamey explains, which doesn’t help anything.
“Ah, I see,” Tory says.
At La Maison, the host warmly greets Tory and Jamey, then looks too long at Elise. While the others check coats, she pulls her fur tight.
“So where do you hail from, Elise?” Tory asks as they look at menus by candlelight.
“Do you mean where do I come from? Connecticut.”
“Where in Connecticut.”
“I kind of grew up all over the state.”
“So you’re not from anywhere.”
“Well, Hartford, New London, Bridgeport.”
“What do your parents do?”
Jamey shoots his mother a look, but she won’t make eye contact.
“I was never, like, in touch with my dad. But. My mom’s done every sort of job there is, practically.” Elise tries to laugh.
Tory smiles in a small, controlled way. “I love how you grew up everywhere, and your mother has done everything.”
Elise tries to laugh again, her face damp. “Well, not everything,” she says.
“I guess that’s good,” Tory answers as if they were conspirators. “I’ll have another Stoli,” she says to the waitress with warmth so theatrical it’s actually designed to be understood as insincere.
Jamey orders escargot, and Elise looks at the round plate bubbling with butter.
“Want one? It’s a snail,” he can’t help but add.
“What?!” Elise says, the slug poised on its tiny fork in her hand.
Jamey tries not to smile. “Protein. It’s good for you.”
Elise pops it in her mouth, grimaces as she chews. “Oh my God. Disgusting.”
Tory baby-sips her potage aux pommes, watching.
This is going so badly, Jamey almost wonders if Elise is playing it up.
Tory turns to her son. “Well, James. Perhaps I should have been checking in with you more frequently this semester.”
Tory was never supposed to be a mother.
Her own parents joked that she came out of thin air—two alley cats mated and had a Siamese kitten: Victoria.
She was fourth out of ten kids. From the age of five she said lines along with TV actors.
Tory even wondered if anyone famous had come through their Indiana town around her conception. But she had her dad’s skinny legs, his thin mouth, and the eyes that misled people into thinking she was tender and emotional.
The baby brother, Benji, had a harelip, which the small-town doctor took a crack at fixing. Tory dragged him around like a toy, a stuffed rabbit whose ears were dark from getting teethed on. She played mommy, bossing him with ludicrous affection. It was her first good role.
Having a real baby was different.
The labor lasted thirty-three hours. Alex came from his cousin’s engagement party at Tavern on the Green with scotch on his breath, held her hand as she cried in the hospital bed.
And she cried. (This girl he met at a Beverly Hills party, a seemingly feral seventeen-year-old in flared jeans and gold wedges. The torchlit garden burned around her that first night as she blew cigarette smoke out like opium, daring him.) She roared like a dying tiger till the body slipped from her bloody thighs.
When Jamey was three months old, Bats made Alex go to London for a few weeks to oversee a merger.
Tory, left on her own, stood in the doorway to Jamey’s nursery one night. The hall light lit the infant’s eyelashes. She was supposed to think he was beautiful. He made her hurt, on a cellular level. Tory didn’t realize her cigarette had burned to the filter, or that her cheeks were wet.
Into a Gucci duffel she tossed a nightgown, a pack of smokes, a curling iron, a couple scripts. She never used that curling iron, but felt the bag would be too light without it—this was her logic in the moment.
She didn’t decide on a hotel until she was in the cab.
“The Carlyle,” she said.
A couple hours later, Teddy the doorman got a call from Mrs. Hallock. The Hyde baby’s crying, and—pause—it doesn’t sound like anybody’s at home there. Teddy let himself into the apartment, called Binkie, and rocked the baby in his arms. She was at the Goodyears’ dinner party on Seventy-Seventh Street, and her silver gown crinkled as she made necessary phone calls in their kitchen. Surprise, surprise, her eyes said to Balthazar as she exhaled cigarette smoke.
Weston Briarcliff, a trusted family friend, was dispatched to the Carlyle once it was determined Tory checked in there. A night nurse was hired on the spot. Binkie braced herself for calls from tabloid hacks, but nothing.
And so it went, almost every night. Tory left, checked in to the Carlyle, Weston went to give her a martini and bring her back eventually, but now round-the-clock nurses watched Jamey.
Binkie could handle anything. An Astor, a debutante, a Daughter of the American Revolution, a Southerner, a Northerner, Binkie had bet horses with gangsters and shot doves with diplomats and flirted with presidents. Binkie ruled Palm Beach, a gravelly voiced hostess who remembers you like your Manhattan stirred, and knows you’ll be fired after Christmas bonuses—she probably advised Bats to do it.
She had no sympathy for Tory, who had more trouble having a son than Binkie had losing hers—the first James Balthazar Hyde drowned in a sailing accident in the Bahamas at the age of nineteen.
Binkie took to her bedroom then, corpselike herself in French handmade-lace coverlets, a gin and soda on her bedside table, its ice melted and the lime pulp hanging in the liquid like tadpoles. Pink light through drawn curtains stained Binkie’s friends, who talked to the help since Binkie was silent. She looked at the wallpaper for one week, as if counting fleurs-de-lys, mute. Then she got up and never spoke of that Jamey again.
This afternoon’s sun is high-pitched, the sky as cold as glass. Lex opens the store door partway, sticks in his big, damaged head.
“Elise, can you help me for a second?” he says in his giant booming voice that has the formality of a radio announcer but is warped.