“If you really need me to, I will. It’s just that I hate to cancel on Tom at the last minute. But I can tell him I’m not feeling well. He’ll understand.”
The two had done this dance a half dozen times before. As long as Laila showed an earnest willingness to throw over anyone for Nora, she would usually be given a reprieve.
“Oh, just go,” Nora said with a sigh.
Laila curled forward and put her head in Nora’s lap. “I just can’t wait for tomorrow!” she said, trying to turn her cousin’s mind to something other than her disappointment. The next night all of them—Leo, Nora, and Liberty, along with Tom and Laila—were going to a party at Capitale, a benefit for a charity called Earth Love.
“Yes, that will be fun.”
“I almost wish I could stay home tonight just so we could plan our outfits!” Laila was aware that she was laying it on a little thick now.
“Oh, go,” Nora said, at last cracking a smile. “Poor Tom.”
“Dear God,” Tom had said when he came into the monstrous pink bathroom the next evening to find Laila there, still only halfway through her preparations, though they were running late for dinner, “what are you wearing?” She’d told him they could go to dinner before the benefit but that she had to get ready with Nora; it was their tradition!
She had on a sparkling green bustier that presented her spectacular cleavage in all of its glory. Her legs, sheathed in sheer stockings, were covered by a wispy skirt made of pieces of tulle and feathers. She’d been sitting in the living room with curlers in her hair for the previous hour: it was now teased back away from her face, and she was securing it with jeweled hairpins and yet more feathers. Nora and Leo had delighted in helping her. They thought the whole idea was hilarious and loved the idea of their cousin’s becoming a downtown eccentric.
Her date looked her polar opposite. Tom’s wardrobe suited him well enough—a collection of shirts and blazers in conservative colors from Thomas Pink and Hugo Boss, which he wore with dark jeans or trousers—but it was decidedly dull and made him look older than his thirty-seven years. He was less than enthused about going to the party in the first place, and now there was the fresh hell of his much younger girlfriend dressed like a circus performer.
“Do you like it?” Laila trilled. “I’m the Green Fairy!”
Tom looked perplexed. In the vivid light of the bathroom, Tom suddenly appeared pale and tired. Laila pushed the thought away: he was only acting like a grumpy old man; he wasn’t actually one.
“Is it a costume party?”
“It’s a theme party. Green!”
“Couldn’t you have just worn a green dress? How about the one with the spaghetti straps? I love you in that dress,” he said hopefully.
“What fun would that be? Anyway, I spent all day on this outfit. I thought you would appreciate it! The Green Fairy was a muse, and you’re always saying that I’m your muse.”
“Well, Green Fairy really just means absinthe, which obviously the bohemians associated with the muse, but . . .” At this Laila gave him such a look that he trailed off. “It’s just a little much, is all.”
“That’s the point, Captain Pedantic,” Laila said, getting irritated. She turned back to the mirror and started vigorously applying a shimmering topcoat of powder to her face.
“Oh, Tom!” Nora chimed in now. “Don’t be such a wet blanket! She looks spectacular.”
“Don’t be mad at me,” he said, coming up behind her and putting his arms around her waist. “You look amazing, I wasn’t trying to be critical.”
“She’ll be the talk of the party,” Leo said with a canny smile.
“It’s not that,” Tom stammered, clearly feeling like the maligned adult in a room full of children. Laila had known he’d hate her outfit, as it was so important to him to be taken seriously. It added to her fun to see how far she could push him.
“You just think I’m ridiculous.” She affected a moody pout.
“Laila, you know that’s not true,” he said.
“Well, it doesn’t always feel that way,” she said, frowning. She affixed a pair of giant black-and-green false eyelashes to her eyelids and turned around, her fairy drag now complete. “I feel like you don’t take me seriously.”
She brushed by him in a cloud of perfumed glitter and slipped into a sparkling pair of green four-inch heels; she’d already owned these and had imagined the outfit around them.
“But I do!” he protested.
Laila imagined he was more used to academic types: mousy women who carried canvas bags from the Strand in lieu of purses. These women populated the endless readings Tom took her to.
“Maybe I should just change; this was a silly idea.”
This was met with vehement protests from the twins.
“No, no. You do look spectacular. What do I know?” Tom pleaded.
“Let’s just go to dinner,” she said as though her mood had now been ruined. She whispered to the twins as they left that she wished she was going to dinner with them instead.
“At least we’re eating on the Lower East Side,” Tom said as he helped her into the cab. “Your outfit probably won’t even stand out.”
She gave him a weak smile.
Laila pouted through dinner, pushing her salmon tartare around and woundedly sipping her Pinot Gris. She’d really thought dating someone like Tom would be more fun, that he’d have more imagination. But she brightened immediately when they arrived at Capitale, the magnificent venue where the party was being held. She’d never actually been inside, but it seemed like the kind of place where Caligula might have thrown a party if he’d lived in present-day Manhattan. There was a lot of fanfare at the doorway, and clusters of glittering people crowded the red carpet and the tall step-and-repeat banner that featured the Earth Love logo.
“Jesus Christ,” Tom said, his voice full of dread. But Laila felt a charge run up her spine.
It was an hour into the party when Laila crossed paths with Simon Beauchamp for the first time. Tom was deep in conversation with Liberty, who looked nearly as relieved to be talking to him as he was to her. Laila knew that her cousin had been going to parties like this since she was a teenager and found them utterly boring; she showed up and was polite, and that was all. Unable to bear their shoptalk any longer, Laila had gone off to look for the twins and avail herself of the gloriously well-appointed open bar—they were serving Veuve Clicquot, her newly discovered favorite—and get away from Tom, who was dampening her spirits just by existing that evening.
“Dear God,” said a man approaching Laila at the bar. She immediately recognized him as the party’s billionaire British philanthropist host, Simon Beauchamp. He was tall with thick, gray hair that surrounded his face in tight curls, “I must have had too much to drink already. I am hallucinating a beautiful green fairy. You had better cut me off, Frank.” The bartender smiled at him, pouring the cocktail he’d been shaking into a delicate frosted martini glass.
“Unless you’re seeing more than one of her, I think you’re safe,” the bartender replied. “She appears to be real. Another glass of champagne, Green Fairy?”
“Yes, please,” Laila said coyly, batting her heavy false lashes at him.
“She speaks!” Simon said, closing the gap between them effortlessly, like a shark. “Does she also have a name?”
He was at least fifty, but he was surprisingly alluring. He radiated power.
“Laila Lawrence,” she said, giving him her hand, which he kissed—to her delight.
“Lawrence? As in Ben and Petra Lawrence?” he said, showing his age by the Lawrences his mind immediately pulled up.
“My aunt and uncle.”
“Are you having fun, my dear? I would daresay so, judging by your outfit.”
“Oh, this?” she asked, running her fingers through the feathers of her skirt. “I just love getting dressed up. When you think about it, as a woman, I’m practically in costume half the time anyway. I put on a fancy dress and high heels a
nd makeup, and spend an hour on my hair. What is that if not a costume?”
He laughed and tapped a finger against the rim of his martini glass, as though he couldn’t decide whether she was joking or in earnest.
“I’m sure you look just as beautiful without all the makeup.”
“You’ve never seen me first thing in the morning.”
“Chance would be a fine thing.”
She blushed.
“So you’re an aspiring actress? Model?”
“Actually, I work with my cousin Liberty at a literary agency.” She smiled. She knew that literary work functioned as a sort of class shorthand, that people would automatically assume she’d been to an Ivy League school and a prep school before that. They would assume that she was a proper Lawrence.
“Ah yes, I know of your cousin as well, of course. Good for you. She’s a smarty, that one. You’ll learn a lot from her.” Laila could see the admiration in his eyes. Just then, someone Simon knew tapped him on the shoulder and diverted him.
“Excuse me, Ms. Lawrence. Enjoy yourself tonight.”
He smiled, and that was it. Laila stood there for a moment more, drinking champagne and feeling deflated. A billionaire had been flirting with her; it must count for something somehow. A check mark on some version of Becoming a New Yorker bingo?
She saw him only once more that night. He came to wish her goodnight when he was making his rounds to leave the party and slipped her a cocktail napkin with his phone number printed in his neat script. Well, there, she thought. She had no idea what she’d do with it but was delighted nonetheless.
Everything that Laila had known about the Lawrence family prior to her parents’ death had come from her mother’s rare revelations over the years. When she was young, they lived in a lovely four-bedroom colonial a few blocks away from the lakeshore that seemed, in Laila’s youth, to circumscribe her mother’s entire existence. Betsy had grown up in a different part of town, one of three children of a single mother. A life in Grosse Pointe, Laila imagined, might have been more than enough for her had she never met Gregory Lawrence, never gone to New York after graduation, never seen what else was out there. Her reminiscences would always begin the same way: “Laila, did I ever tell you about when we lived in New York?” Normally this was after two or three glasses of the Chardonnay that was always on hand in their fridge. Betsy would be cooking, waiting for Gregory who was always later returning from work than he said he’d be. He might have left his father behind in New York—but he could not leave his inherited obsession with work. Laila would be sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework.
As her memories of the couple’s two years there grew more remote, they seemed to become only more potent in Betsy’s imagination: the vivid juxtaposition of the crime-ridden lower part of the city with the gleaming Upper East Side where the Lawrences lived. Ben had already left his second wife for Petra: “She was so classy,” Betsy would say when she treated Laila to these little trips down memory lane. “So elegant. It’s a whole different way of living there. None of the ladies did any of their own cooking or cleaning; we would go to these huge houses in the Hamptons.” Nary a mention of Liberty, whom she must have met. Why not tell Laila about her? Did she imagine she was somehow protecting her?
These conversations would always stop abruptly when the great clattering of the garage door signaled Gregory’s return home.
Laila wondered what her mother would think of Tom. Betsy had told her not to settle for Nathan—which was probably half the reason she’d married him right after her death, just to spite her. When they had first begun dating Betsy had said, “Nathan is a lovely man, but with your looks, you could do better.”
Betsy often spoke this way of Laila’s looks, as though they were a thing separate from her entirely, something that Betsy had handed down to her and that she now had a responsibility to use properly. The irony that Betsy had ruined her own looks seemed not to occur to her. Though she loomed for Laila as a cautionary tale.
After her father’s death, Laila and her mother had managed, though in retrospect, Laila wasn’t sure how, since her mother never really worked. She would have ideas for oddball moneymaking ventures—selling makeup or knives—and constantly spoke of getting her real-estate license, an idea that never materialized. These ideas were as ephemeral as the diets Betsy was forever pledging to go on. Laila suspected that her mother had fallen a little in love with the idea of being an impoverished widow, whittling away at what her husband had left behind, until it was tapped out. The result was that there wasn’t a dime left for Laila when she died. Nor had she been groomed to be self-sufficient, in the modern sense. She’d only been taught an outmoded version of womanhood—one in which her survival depended on her being what others wanted her to be. Laila had become a skilled chameleon, and her repertoire of roles was quite impressive—temptress, good girl, caretaker, ingénue—but these transmogrifications had taken so much effort, there wasn’t much energy left for constructing an identity of her own.
Laila knew how false it was, that beloved American ideal that true reinvention was always possible. She’d seen her mother lose not only her will but her opportunities. She’d once been beautiful, she’d had cards, but she’d played them wrong, and her sad end was the result. But Betsy had left one parting gift—the letters. Whether this was intentional or not, Laila would never know, but she liked to believe it was. Whatever the case, Laila would not let her chances pass her by.
13
* * *
SO IS it Aspen with the parents for Thanksgiving?” Liberty asked Reece, taking care not to trip over Rocket’s leash as he sprang in front of her in pursuit of some irresistible scent at the base of a tree.
“Nah, I’m going to skip it.” Reece pulled the collar of her coat tighter with her free hand, covering the tiny patch on her collarbone not protected from the November wind by her scarf.
“Really? No skiing this year?”
“If I go up, I won’t get any chance to work on the collection before the end of the year.”
“Wow.” Liberty was impressed with her friend’s sacrifice; she knew she loved trips to Aspen. She would always come back blissed-out from the adrenaline rush of the skiing—or maybe it was the sedative effects of drinking whiskey in the hot tub with some sexy ski instructor.
“Well, come have Thanksgiving with us in Tuxedo; you can’t work the whole time.”
Reece smiled at her. “Can you take on Cameron too? He was going to spend it at home this year as well. And this one,” she said, calling Rocket back from where he was staring down a German shepherd approximately five times his size.
“There’s always room for Rocket.” Liberty knelt down to scratch him behind his ears, his eyes narrowing in ecstasy. “And Cameron too, of course. You know my parents: the more the merrier on holidays.”
Ben and Petra had a habit of packing the vast Tuxedo Park mansion with a wide array of friends and acquaintances. The house belonged to Frederick, but he was rarely in it and insisted that his son go there frequently to make sure the place was shipshape and also to keep an eye on Birdie, who lived nearby. Liberty suspected that their holiday overkill was to distract the father from who was missing—who now, would always be missing—his only brother.
“Well, if you’re sure, then we’d love to.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
In the two months since they’d reunited, Cameron and Liberty had seen each other nearly once a week, or as often as their busy schedules allowed. At first Liberty had thought he was asking her out, and this had filled her with a heady mix of anxiety and desire. She had never been comfortable on dates and generally avoided them. But thus far, Cameron had done nothing more intimate than hug her and kiss her cheek at the beginning and end of every outing. True, he paid for everything, but this was in Cameron’s nature: he wouldn’t let any woman pick up a check; it was an old-fashioned kind of politeness that Liberty felt intellectually ambivalent about but appreciated in practice.
So, what they had begun was a friendship, which was both a relief and an immeasurable disappointment. That lack of overt romantic intention had, however, allowed her to settle a little more fully into her adult self with him. He seemed impressed with all she’d accomplished, with her passion for her work. And he had grown too, of course, from a cocky youth to a man to be reckoned with.
“You have to be nice to Laila, though,” Liberty said, getting back to her feet as the trio forged on out onto the wide stone walkways that lined the shore of Battery Park. It was only 5:00 p.m., but the street lamps were already coming to life, and the sun would soon be gone. The choppy, slate-gray surf crashed against the breakers.
“I am nice to Laila,” Reece said, ignoring her friend’s incredulous look. “Well, I’m not mean to her, anyway.” Things between the two women had not improved. They were polite to each other, but a current of hostility ran between them that Liberty could not decipher.
“Yes, but she feels it nonetheless. She is always asking me why you don’t like her.”
“Okay, well, I will make a genuine effort.”
“Anyway, there will be a lot of us there. It will be the usual intimate dinner for thirty-five or so.”
“Can’t wait,” Reece said.
The Thanksgivings of Laila’s childhood memories were as different from the Lawrences’ catered, cosmopolitan affairs as one might imagine. They were spent with Laila’s mother’s side, which included her grandmother as well as her two aunts, two uncles, and a mess of cousins Laila had very little interest in. Betsy was the baby of the family, and her older sisters, Jennifer and Lisa, had both become devout Christians as adults and used the holiday season as an excuse to initiate long-winded premeal prayers and numerous invitations to church activities.
The New York Lawrences’ Thanksgiving dinner, by contrast, was a coveted invite. Petra made no pretentions about cooking herself, and every year there was a lavish spread of decadent holiday food: the truffled mashed potatoes and the tiny Gruyère mac-and-cheese bites the chef served as appetizers were legendary. The guests brought expensive bottles of wine and cognac to drink by the fire.
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