“—And don’t be afraid to give a compliment. There’s a story underneath or behind every hat or brooch a lady wears. Dress the greens there only at the last minute! But never speak in a way that forces a guest to indulge your interests—Blue Point? Kumamoto? To indulge the tastes of others you must reveal no tastes of your own. I hope the eggs, over there, are underpoached to account for the heat of the sun? Madame is a forbidden address. It’s old-fashioned! Fruit should not be next to salmon tartare. Try not to fret if a guest takes out some frustration on you. It may not be pleasant, but you are a repository. George? Young miss, please set yourself to extracting those Brazil nuts from the mix. No one ever wants a Brazil nut. Perhaps the cheese is oozing out of the figs and overpowering the surrounding dishes because someone’s put that plate in the sunniest spot on the table? Find and use the shade! When the boat turns, find it again. For the vegetarians—should tomato consommé be next to carpaccio? We shall all be clean, clean and invisible, yes? Invisible, but you must watch with an intimacy that allows you to foresee each desire. Try to abstain from using the restroom—edible flowers? Is this a luau? Javier, toss—yes, overboard is fine—smile, I’m teasing—but if you must use the restroom take a clean towel so that if anyone sees you going in, they will assume you are improving it for their benefit. Bartenders, we will not serve anything with a straw. Mr. Antonopoulos. I am glad to see we no longer have the scuffed-shoe problem of our last engagement. I know there is a tendency to let off steam when you think you are amongst yourselves. I am not a fool. This is absolutely forbidden. It is always possible we are being heard or seen without our knowledge. This is good life-advice, dears, not just for today.”
Well, George thinks, that’s one point she’s got right. He can tell she’s finished and rejoins her, sewing on the warm smile that says, What’s that?—his hands amiably pocketed, his chin and eyebrows up like a birder on a walk full of ordinary sparrows.
Thank you, the staff says. They disband to their stations. Javier nods in the direction of the shore. The first load of guests is shuttling over from the dock.
2
Iris’s dog is first out of the shuttle, which bounces against the starboard of the Matador as it’s tethered for ascent. He’s part Akita or mastiff, an unlikely red—dried blood or old iron, with a long, solemn face, the flesh drawn toward the jowls and loosening around the neck as if tied with butcher’s string. He has big mutt paws, long, yellow teeth. Barrel ribs, and the kind of attenuated belly that tapers and disappears into the top of the hindquarters. Tie-dyed by the devil, Esme said when she first saw 3D. A strange name for such a serious creature.
George respects but does not like the dog. His frank gaze, his dark eyes, unnerve George. The dog has known Iris longer than George has known Iris, has witnessed versions of her that will forever remain unknown to George. There she is, he thinks, when he looks into 3D’s face. Younger, hotter, a million moving pictures of Iris suspended in the spinning web of dumb-dog neurotransmission, forever doing whatever 3D watched her do from the threshold of her darkened bedroom door. Her past is the vaulted property of 3D. Though dogs, George knows, can’t tell time, at least not the way men can.
3D scrabbles up the metal stairs and pushes past George, who is standing at the top, smiling and waving over the water.
“Champagne?” he calls. “Wet shoes? Everyone’s shoes stay dry?”
“My feet got wet, and so did 3D’s, but he doesn’t care, and neither do I,” Iris says, her voice low and full of cheer, the dog racing back down to accompany her as she climbs the stairs, a little after the rest. Her wedding ring scrapes against his cheek in greeting, an old habit, turning the stone toward the palm. Why? he once asked. To keep it safe, she’d said, and shrugged, disappearing behind the golden curtain of her hair. Lucky is the man whose greatest rival is a dog.
Today, Iris has gathered her hair into a mussed knot at her nape. Her mouth is bright. To George, she lifts her fine, crescent brows—brows so light she seems to him always to be wearing a hopeful, open expression, wakeful, unwritten—to ask, How shit has your day been so far? He answers, with an eye roll, Shit, and once again all is well. She shakes her head quickly—Don’t tell me now. To stop his laugh, she raises her voice to the guests collecting around them.
“Any chance, George, you packed an extra pair of shoes for me? You forgot? Don’t anybody ask this guy to be useful before noon, am I right? I’m taking mine off. Let’s make a shoe pile. Hey, look! I’ve started a trend.”
* * *
CeCe arranges herself in a canvas lounge chair in the middle of the boat. The weather is complying, the sun high on the horizon and a crisp early-summer breeze fluttering the sails. She doesn’t understand why so many are going around with bare feet, and at lunchtime, but the roll of the collective voice is right. The cause will net a good number of contributions, beyond what her guests have already pledged. The ocean view is behind her and an iced plate of shrimp has been placed on the stool beside her knee. She has chosen her place carefully. With any luck they won’t see she isn’t standing too often, isn’t moving around. Has anyone noticed? They come to her in such an orderly fashion. She wonders if they are looking at her too carefully, too long. And then they look away.
She’ll never tell them, never, not a one. She’s told no one beyond her household. Multiple system atrophy, a name too straightforward to say out loud. She would have preferred a more abstrusely titled affliction. Something named after the doctor who discovered it, like, say, MSA’s symptomatic cousin Parkinson’s. Something that might allow her to minimize her disease’s exact evil. Parkinson’s—her initial, incorrect diagnosis. No, she won’t endure the look of horror. Or, that greater horror, sympathy. She’d appreciated it when the doctors began abbreviating it to MSA; by some aural dyslexia, MSA puts her mind to NASA and rocket launches, which allows her to feel hopeful about innovation and progress and the human endeavor. At least she doesn’t have PSP, progressive supranuclear palsy, another early candidate, ruled out due to her lucidity of mind—PSP taking the inner life along with the body. With MSA, she might make it five years. With PSP she’d already be mindless as a jellyfish washed onto a rock, dead before the tide.
No, no one’s staring at her. It’s only the way people look at each other at parties. Here is Mr. Holbrook, to update her on his most recent work in the Assembly. The Conrads join them and the subject changes to the problem of children texting each other ungrammatical cruelties during school. Soon enough three of her favorite people are beside her: Annie Mason, the director of the Somner Fund, twenty years her junior, steady and sharp; Annie’s assistant, a young man built like a mechanical pencil, from Louisville; and the foundation’s head of programs, Clifton Franks. Her favorite people, not because they are her friends, but because they are, as Clifton once nonsensically said, her octopus of righteousness—it was the seventies when he said it—doing the work of which Cecilia is proud. The fund’s endowment is modest compared to the likes of the Fords’ or the Rockefellers’. But she’s made sure over the years that her contributions are brave, offer seed money, risk supporting fledgling efforts. If Cecilia Somner gives her approval to a cause, other donors follow. It is for this reason she’s worked so long to keep her name alive, to keep the table set.
“My heroes,” she says, watching George circle the crowd, “what wonderful work you’ve done this quarter!” For the forty years she’s had her foundation, she’s visited each organization they fund, but this last year, after her diagnosis, they’ve plotted, quietly, what she will only refer to as her transition; now her transition is more or less complete. “Annie,” CeCe says, “I want you to go talk to the Turners about that museum in the Bronx. Two thousand eight, remember? I think they might be of use.” They leave her to find the Turners. She watches one of George’s guests, Robert Barrow-Wood—or is it Woods?—follow Iris through the crowd, calling, “Iris, come look at this!” Pathetic. She watches Iris’s vivid face as she turns and strides across the deck—a longer
step, more graceful, than her son’s, the red dog trailing behind. The guests watch Iris pass, a point of which Iris seems unaware. That she brought the dog with her today—beyond belief.
A foursome of local widows descend upon CeCe, invite her to join them on a January trip to Nice. “Old broads abroad, we’re calling it,” they say, slapping their white shorts. CeCe hears Iris laugh and the man Barrow-Woods shouting, “I love you, you liar!” The devil mutt comes over and jaws a shrimp off CeCe’s plate and trots away. Ambassador Thompson, retired, interrupts the widows to ask if the boat is set up for skeet shooting. One of the Turners’ children, Dill, not yet back to college, says, “Does that mean this boat has guns? Did that dog take your lunch?”
“I love to spoil him,” she says. To change the subject she asks, “And who are we?” as she reaches out to muss the head of a passing child, who swivels in alarm. She looks into the faces of the child’s parents, and into an adjacent group of guests. In this way, with her eyes and her hand, she dismisses the widows and the ambassador and brings this new group to her, mostly Bakers. Mrs. Baker leans down to kiss her, saying, “CeCe, don’t you look beautiful today!”
She does not look beautiful. No, what she looks like now is a squirrel monkey. Her head, one day, tiny under the elegant fringe of silver and honey-colored hair. Her green eyes, muddier, shrunk into the sockets. Unchanged are her high but flattened cheekbones that, while not in fashion in her youth, were geometrical under her eyes, the eyes close together but bright and captivating. Along with her fair hair and her stark, Cleopatra eyebrows, she turned heads, the black and the blond of her, her face an assemblage of unlikely contrasts that she embellished with large, precious stones. She’d never been beautiful. But she was remarkable, and glad to not be counted in the limp category of pretty. The elegant force of her had once made her appear taller than her five feet five inches. Now she seems shorter, short. Gone is the glow of the skin but unchanged is her long, precise nose and tight nostril, as if drawn in perpetual inhalation. Her hair is blown out straight, cut expensively below the chin with a demure flip, pushed impatiently and tidily behind her ears, gold at the temples, not the high-voltage blond of some of her contemporaries—but that toy-monkey face beneath! Can it belong to her?
To mask her irritation at Mrs. Baker’s flattery, she musters some of her own. “Talk about beautiful. This year I can see your honeysuckle from a mile away!” There’s no denying the Baker garden is a mess. She turns to Mr. Lewis, and they laugh about the disparity in age and attractiveness between himself and his wife, whom they wave to while they speak. CeCe kisses Nan Porter, whom she’s known since their sophomore year at Vassar, from the days when every afternoon they were required to attend tea wearing white gloves and pearls. She says, “Give it a rest, today, Nan,” and Nan says, “Give what a rest?” and they too have a laugh.
Forty-five years before, CeCe was thirty, sitting up on the rail of a smaller boat, her silk collar fluttering in the breeze. Walter Minch—a stranger twenty years her senior—grabbed her shoulders and leaned her backward over the sea. Stranger, curio, husband, enemy, stranger once again, father to Patricia, father to George. Walter, the third and last man she ever had relations with on a beach, but who was the first? That pocket-eyed manufacturer of Italian cars, always mentioning the time after the war he drank absinthe with Picasso in Vallauris. Halfway up the cliff of a chalky Dover beach, she’d put her hand on his spine and they looked at the long shadows and no one was in sight, no one at all. How boring this party would have been to her younger self. How the line where the ocean meets the sky—now or then, how it remains the same. The face of the man who met Picasso slips back into the black chamber of forgetting. The voice of Wickie Randall eddies in. Wickie, who always wants to know what things are made of, is asking what the boat is made of. Someone says it’s teak. Yes, CeCe enjoyed getting ready for the party more than she’s enjoying the party. This, the part of sliding again and again into the right tone of voice, she does as a starling reiterates a snatch of music. She could do it in her sleep.
“Well, hi, look at you,” says a woman CeCe doesn’t recognize, all in black, hanging over the rail in front of her. “I don’t feel great either. So hot. Worst idea, martinis.”
CeCe looks deeply at the side of George’s head. Her guests are, as Walter would have said, getting hot under the beak—sauced, washed, squiffed. George turns and backs politely out of a conversation to join them. If nothing else, she’s raised her son to weave in and out of chatter as well as she.
“Julia, hello! You know my mother? Hey, did I tell you Iris and I had this boat for our honeymoon? You won’t believe its history. Oil guy used it as a floating brothel in the eighties. Port of Los Angeles. Mirror and shag, stem to stern. All restored, obviously. I’ll show you the stateroom. It has the most amazing bathroom, marble and nautical gargoyles jutting out of the walls. You’ll hate it, come on.”
“Yuck,” the woman says. “Gargoyle.”
To CeCe he mouths, You’re welcome, and hurries the woman away.
“You can’t run far on a boat!” CeCe calls, but they do not hear. It is hot. The sun’s directly overhead. The boat rocks beneath her. The guests are no longer eating, but lolling on deck chairs, drinking in a torpor. The servers work the perimeter, sweating. CeCe moves to a new seat with cautious success. She hears Mrs. Baker murmur to Mr. Turner, “I don’t care about gardening,” as a white, folded napkin slides from her knee. Someone asks loudly, “Is anyone getting a signal?” CeCe smiles at a man in a tight straw hat wiping his forehead, saying, “—well, clay’s better for your knees and the bounce of the ball.” What is his name? Iris’s cool face is above her. Iris, nodding, listening to Mrs. Warren tell of her journey through Nepal, as together they pet the dog. Iris, beautiful like an actress in front of a camera, but also beautiful as the camera—blank, lodestar, animal.
“Nepal,” CeCe says. “What fun.”
Iris sits down beside her. “Everyone’s having a great time. Nobody would’ve made a party like this, except you. Are you feeling okay? I get nervous at these things. I try to seventy percent listen, that’s my trick. Do you want me to run around and wake everybody up? Breeze is back, feel it? That’ll help.”
Here is the good-hearted and clever child she never had. Here is the child she hates.
“Do what you like,” she says. “Take the dog with you.”
There is an unexpected grinding noise below. She turns to Iris, but Iris is gone.
“Hallo, anyone home?”
CeCe rises—it’s fine, she’s strong enough for now, a good time for her to stand. She takes hold of the rail and looks down. Four teenage girls in swimsuits sit in a speedboat, its motor fracturing the green mirror of the water. The radio is on, broadcasting a summer song, a man’s voice calling, “All, all, all the million girls go,” followed by a thumping and a scratching and a moaning sound.
“No,” she says. “Nobody’s home.”
“Hey, hi! I’m Clover, the Rhavs’ daughter? Is my mom on board?”
A few of the guests rustle themselves out of their chairs.
“Hi, Mom! Mom, can we come up? We packed this huge picnic basket and we left it on the counter. We haven’t eaten for like a hundred hours.”
“Girls!” Mrs. Rhav hisses, looking at CeCe. “This is an event! You can’t come up in your Skivvies.”
“Can you throw us down a burger or something?”
“We’re starving, Mrs. Rhav!”
“There sure are a lot of you for nobody being home,” the girl in a black bikini mutters. She slides from the front to the backseat, bone-bent as a snake.
“We don’t have hamburgers,” CeCe says.
The Becks’ son joins the crowd. He sticks his arms out over the water, claps the backs of his hands together, and barks like a seal.
“Jeremy, you’re retarded,” Clover shouts up, on beat with the music. “Come down and swim.”
“There’s an idea,” the ambassador says.
&n
bsp; The guests disappear belowdecks and return in their swimsuits. One by one they teeter down the metal steps. George is by CeCe’s side. An appropriately pleading chorus rises from the mouths held above water: “CeCe, it’s warm!”; “Change into your suit!”
She was glad they hadn’t noticed she spent the morning seated. She is glad. And yet how is it they had not seen? Do any of them know her? How can friends so easily fooled be called friends? Either too lively to notice or too unkind to care. And which would she prefer?
“Somners don’t like water!” she calls with firm gaiety. She turns and whispers to George and, with hidden determination, cautiously sits back down.
“But you told me not to change into my suit! Fine, yes, I’ll hurry back.” He hurries back in swim trunks. She watches him descend the steps. He looks up at her, red-faced, and disappears under the water.
* * *
George bobs away from the boat, rejuvenated. He finds he’s in the general vicinity of the girls from the speedboat, an agreeable place to drift.
“Great fucking party,” one says, treading. And another: “That lady’s giving us the stink eye, the one pushed up against the rail.” And then Clover, explaining who CeCe is. Her parents say she’s sick. Really sick, like—she grabs her nose and gurgles and sinks beneath the water, breaking back through smiling and spitting.
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 2
