The Engagements
Page 20
She missed New York, and her work. She missed the bustling crowds of strangers that for years she had wanted to escape, each one of them thinking his or her own intentions were the most urgent and essential. She still went to protests in the city, and signed every online petition, and donated as much money as they could afford—more than that, sometimes—though it wasn’t the same as having her hands in it the way she once did.
She was even more upset, more unsatisfied, more troubled about the state of the world than she had been before, perhaps because now she played no substantial role in changing it. Life in the country was peaceful, but there were too many stretches of time to think. At night, she dreamed of the people whose causes she had abandoned. It was one thing not to know about the evil in the world. But it was something altogether worse to know full well, and do nothing.
She tried to remind herself that she adored the country in some ways. The pace of life was different here; there were things she had intended to do in Brooklyn that now she actually did. She cooked dinners and wrote thank-you notes and gardened. She read a lot and did simple home-improvement projects that in the past she would have asked the super to handle.
The stone house was built in 1793, and it still had its original ceiling beams. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom with a copper tub upstairs, and downstairs, a cozy reading room, a living room where they watched TV at night, and an updated kitchen with a fireplace. They had four and a half acres, bordered by a creek in the back, with an actual chicken coop and a stone smokehouse that Dan used as his studio. He was happier here than she had ever seen him.
May called the place “more like a vacation retreat than someone’s actual home,” which Kate knew was not intended as a compliment.
Her sister lived in the suburbs. She had been a stay-at-home mom since her second son was born. May had resented their mother for working. It seemed she wanted to do the total opposite of what they had grown up with, in an attempt to end up with the opposite result of their parents’ life. Kate wasn’t sure it worked that way. Now, all May ever talked about were things—her SUV, the kids’ toys, her new kitchen appliances.
In recent years, she had started watching a lot of Fox News. At one family dinner, she drank too many glasses of pinot noir and went on a thirty-minute tirade about how suspicious it was that President Obama refused to make his long-form birth certificate public. The worst part of it was that May hadn’t even developed her hateful views on her own. She had just adopted her husband’s politics along with his interest in skiing and his love of the Miami Dolphins.
Kate pulled into the parking lot of the Birchland Inn, where Jeff and Toby were staying in a suite with a fireplace and, Jeff had reported by text message earlier that morning, the biggest bed they had ever seen. They had chosen to stay here because it was the first place they had been on vacation together, ten years earlier.
Jeffrey had brought Ava’s dress from the city. Kate told him she’d pick it up before ten. She was twenty minutes late, but Toby and Jeff didn’t seem bothered.
They were sitting in white wicker chairs on the inn’s expansive porch when she arrived, drinking coffee and looking out over the wide front lawn. Jeff was thirty-five and six foot two, with movie-star good looks and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. Toby was several inches shorter, eight years older, and completely bald, but also handsome in his way. They dressed alike, in crisp, expensive sweaters and button-down shirts. She thought that they must share some designer moisturizer, since they both had the same perfect skin. Today, they were almost glowing. There was an excited, joyful energy around them.
“You two are the calmest about-to-be-married people I’ve ever seen,” she said, hugging them hello.
“We had apple-smoked sausage and blueberry pancakes for breakfast,” Jeff said. “And this granola parfait with clotted cream. We’re in heaven.”
“Plus, we have two more hours until my mother gets here,” Toby said. “At which point we’ll just start mainlining vodka.”
She laughed. Her aunt Abigail and uncle Dennis had been caught off guard when Jeffrey came out of the closet his junior year at Vanderbilt. He had written Kate a letter telling her the news. They’re so upset, he wrote. They feel I’ve betrayed them. I hope this won’t change things between us, too. I hope you won’t feel as though I’ve kept a secret from you all these years. Or maybe, knowing you, you already had a hunch …
Kate had known her cousin was gay since she knew there was such a thing as homosexuality. She sent him back a postcard, on which she wrote, I love you, Jeff. I’m proud of you. And yes, I had a hunch.
Abigail (her mother’s sister) and Dennis took a long time to come around. Jeff had played baseball in high school. He took the homecoming queen to the prom. They couldn’t understand how their All-American Boy would now be something entirely different.
“I’m not prejudiced, I just worry that this will make his life so much harder than it needs to be,” Abigail said, more or less the same thing Kate’s own mother had said when she went on two dates with a black guy at UVM.
For the longest time, Jeff never introduced them to anyone he was dating. But then Toby came along. Now Dennis called Toby to talk about sports, and Abigail referred to them both as her sons. It amazed Kate that the human heart could be unlocked in this way, that tolerance and even love could sprout up where both had seemed impossible.
Toby’s parents were evangelical Christians. He had never told them he was gay. They had met Jeff plenty of times, but they referred to him as Toby’s roommate.
“Why they think a forty-two-year-old film development executive would need a roommate is beyond me, but people believe what they want to believe,” Jeffrey had said once.
The wedding announcement shocked them. Kate thought that on some level they must have realized their son was gay. But maybe there was a difference between knowing it, and having to acknowledge it. Toby’s mother had cried. His father refused to come up from Alabama for the wedding, so she was coming alone.
“Gay or straight, the wedding becomes about everyone else, not just the people getting married,” Jeff said now.
“Is that the word on the message boards?” Kate teased him, though she knew he was right. At May’s wedding, her parents had been seated side by side in the front row, as if this blessed event might temporarily nullify all bad things—their mutual hatred, their bitter divorce. The sight of it was unbelievably odd. She wondered how her stepmother felt, separated from her husband’s first wife by only the man himself.
“So? Where are the rings?” Jeff said. “I can’t wait to see the finished product.”
“Oh, did you want me to bring them here?”
She was a terrible liar. She could feel her heartbeat speed up. “I thought you wanted me to bring them straight to the Fairmount tonight.”
To her great surprise, Jeff just shrugged. “That’s fine.”
“Do you want some coffee?” Toby asked.
“No thanks, I’ll let you two be,” she said. “But first: I came to see a man about a dress.”
Toby got to his feet. “I’ll get it. You guys chat for a minute. Sit.”
Kate sat.
“So, how are the rings?” Jeff said.
“They’re nice.”
“Not too mob boss?”
“Nah.”
“Good. I got kind of carried away. I know that’s probably hard to believe.”
“What did they cost, out of curiosity? Sorry, is that a rude question?”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “Fourteen thousand.”
“Fourteen thousand dollars for two rings?” she spat out. She couldn’t help it.
“No,” Jeff said. He took a sip of coffee. “Fourteen thousand apiece. Those stones are over a carat each. The rings were handmade.”
Kate thought she might throw up. Why had Jeff involved her in this in the first place, when he knew she was entirely inept?
“It’s a beautiful day for a wedding,” she said.
“Impressive. So. Are you nervous?”
He smiled. “I’ve been bridal bipolar for months, as you know. When I found out we got our dream photographer, I seriously felt like I was high on Ecstasy.”
“I remember.”
“But then sometimes I’d think about the expense, and about how fast it will all go by, and then I’d be so down. Today I’m just excited. I guess that’s the upside of getting married later in life. On the day of, you don’t sweat the small stuff.”
“You make it sound like you’re sixty.”
“We’ve been waiting a long time, that’s all,” he said. “I’m glad we waited to do it in our own state. Getting married anyplace but New York would just feel weird.”
Ten months earlier, Governor Cuomo had finally made same-sex marriage legal in New York. Hearing the news at home on the couch, Toby and Jeff had proposed to one another. One month later, on July 24, the marriages began. Clerk’s offices all over the state opened to issue licenses, even though it was a Sunday. At Borough Hall, free cake and champagne were served. Outside the city clerk’s office downtown, every time a newly married couple emerged from the building a huge crowd would applaud, blow bubbles, and toss confetti in the air.
People wanted to marry as soon as possible because the opportunity might suddenly disappear as it had in so many other states. Seven years earlier, several of their close friends had been issued marriage licenses in San Francisco, only to have the state supreme court rule their marriages void five months later.
Kate had stood by her cousin at a dozen demonstrations over the years, fighting to get him a right that she wasn’t sure was even worth having. She wished people would protest in the opposite direction—fight to do away with marriage altogether—but she knew that was too much to expect.
Toby wanted to get married on the first day possible, but Jeff wanted a real wedding, the sort that took months to plan.
Toby returned with the dress now, a pale pink powder puff of a thing, with layer upon layer of taffeta in the skirt and tiny white silk rosebuds around the waist.
“The kid better not have had a growth spurt,” Jeff said. “Otherwise I’m going down to the country store and snatching the first beautiful toddler who will fit into this.”
Kate turned to Toby. “Are you sure you want to marry this guy?”
Toby had a huge, ridiculous grin on his face.
“It’s so beautiful out here,” he said. “So peaceful.”
“The night before last there was a big kerfuffle outside our bedroom window when some kid beat up a tourist,” Jeff said. “We didn’t get any sleep at all.”
“In Chelsea?” she said.
“It was nothing. And for that, they sent four fire engines. Can you imagine?”
“You could move out here,” she said, though she knew they never would. The country wasn’t for everyone. She wasn’t even sure it was for her.
“I love it here, but not to live,” Jeff said. “It’s too quiet. At night, I start to think that every creaking floorboard is Dick and Perry coming to murder me.”
Toby took his hand. “You know us. Rooftop cocktails are about as outdoorsy as we get.”
A blue station wagon pulled slowly up the street, and turned into the driveway of the inn.
“That’s the minister,” Jeff said. “He’s stopping by to run through our vows with us.”
Kate almost made a comment about the fact that she had never heard the word minister, or any other remotely religious term, come out of her cousin’s mouth in all the years she’d known him. But she resisted, knowing that this was just another part of the marriage carnival.
May had a minister at her wedding, too. Their mother was raised Protestant, their father Jewish, but they didn’t have any religion growing up. Kate had been raised without any talk whatsoever of God. In middle school, when she asked her mother if she believed, Mona had cocked her head to the side and said, “I don’t really know. Sometimes. Sort of.” Her father had simply answered, “No.”
Dan believed in God. She liked that about him. Hopefully Ava would inherit his good manners and his good nature and his faith that things generally made sense, even if you weren’t sure how. Dan grew up in Kansas City. She thought his midwestern roots had a lot to do with his outlook on life, though he hated it when anyone spoke in generalizations about people from the Midwest, which they did all the time in New York. When he said Kansas City, they either asked if he’d grown up on a farm or made some reference to The Wizard of Oz.
Kate stood up. “I’ll let you lovebirds be,” she said. “Call me if you need anything.”
Jeff rose to hug her goodbye. “Thanks for coming over. See you in eight hours. At my wedding.”
He raised his eyebrows twice in glee.
He deserved a better friend here, someone who would squeal and jump up and down. But Kate was doing the best she could. They both knew it.
On the ride home, she thought about lasting love, the sort that Jeff and Toby surely had. For many years after her parents’ divorce, she didn’t have a grasp on what normal was—even after she met Dan, any little argument terrified her, making her wonder if it might be enough to ruin them.
The world seemed so full of warnings about the fact that love could never endure—time flying by, relationships turning sour—but the warnings were like a DANGER: FALLING ROCKS sign on a dark highway at night. You were already there in the middle of it. What were you going to do now, stop driving?
Kate had once asked her happily married boss the secret to a good marriage. Ellen and her husband seemed to genuinely enjoy each other after twenty years together.
“Men are happy if you serve them dinner. It can be Chinese takeout six nights a week, as long as you put it on a plate and hand it to him,” Ellen said. “The cooking is really beside the point.”
“That’s it?”
“Mmm, yeah, pretty much. I pour the ketchup or soy sauce or whatever. I use a lot of ramekins. Do you know what those are?”
“No.”
“I recommend finding out.”
Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status, and success … A woman can easily feel that diamonds are “vulgar” and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry.
—1970s study commissioned by De Beers
There are many reasons why men decide to give their wives diamond jewelry. When a man is truly motivated by warm sentiment, he likes to feel reassured and encouraged. When his reasons are less than lofty, he likes to give himself a lofty rationale.
—N. W. Ayer, Annual Report to De Beers, 1966–67
1968
On the morning of her fifty-third birthday, Frances picked up the telephone in her office on the tenth floor of the Ayer building.
“Frances,” he said when she answered. “It’s Paul Darrow.”
“Paul? You’re calling from downstairs?”
“I didn’t want to come up there and see anyone. I just need to speak to you.”
“All right.”
She wondered for a moment if he had found out it was her birthday and was calling with good tidings. Dorothy Dignam had a tradition of sending her yellow roses each year, but since Dorothy’s retirement in 1960, Frances never expected anyone at work to remember.
She lit a cigarette and took a drag.
“Have you seen the new diamond ads that Warner Shelly’s taking to South Africa?” Paul whispered.
“There are no new ads,” she said.
“Yes there are. They’re phasing us out, Frances.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Come to my office,” he said, and hung up.
“Honestly,” she muttered, but she rose from her seat and took the elevator down one floor to see what the fuss was about.
The two of them had always been partners on the De Beers ads. He crea
ted the art and she wrote all the copy. Yet they rarely interacted. She had been in his office only a handful of times.
Paul sat at his desk, puffing away on a cigar, his eyes blinking even faster than usual.
He held a piece of paper aloft between thumb and finger, gingerly, as if it were garbage.
“I found this.”
Frances took it from him.
It was a finished advertisement. A photograph of a diamond in a box of Cracker Jack. Casual, whimsical, impermanent. The antithesis of everything she had created.
Prize surprise, she read. Diamonds sculpted to fit a finger and look anything but dowager. Because diamonds aren’t any one period, style, or fashion anymore. Diamonds aren’t even off-limits to those with a not-so-big budget. They’re for any lady. To wear any time she wants to feel special. A diamond is for now.
“What the hell is it?” she said.
“Don’t ask me.”
She felt uneasy.
So much had changed in the past few years. She now reported to a twenty-nine-year-old woman. A youngster named Jeremy Pudney who had married an Oppenheimer was now in charge of the internal marketing team at De Beers, and he was always after something new and fresh and young. Frances had taken each development in stride, tried to be cheerful, and still this was the result.
She turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Paul asked.
“To get Gerry Lauck on the phone.”
Gerry Lauck Senior had retired a year earlier and been replaced by his son of the same name. The son was a carbon copy of his dad in some ways—he had played on the golf team at Yale, and had the same sad smile. He was only a few years younger than Frances, but after having worked with his father for so long she saw him as practically a child. Just then, she longed for the original.
Back in her office, she dialed and asked the secretary to put her through. When he came on the line, she said bluntly, “It’s Frances Gerety. Would you care to tell me what’s going on with De Beers?”
“Frances, that’s right,” he stammered. “I have some good news. I guess I forgot to mention it.”