All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  It didn’t mean anything, I told myself, the way they were holding each other. My mother loved my father. She loved him. She had screamed, and he had left, but she hadn’t really meant it. I knew she hadn’t meant it. I climbed back into bed.

  In the morning, I woke to see that the storm had ravaged the yard—tree branches littered the back lawn—and had whipped the lake into a placid pane of glass. I got up and padded down the hallway to my parents’ room, looking for my mother, but she wasn’t there. Her bed hadn’t been slept in.

  “I saw the two of you together that night,” I said. “I saw you in the lake. I know that you and my mother . . . you weren’t just friends.”

  Claire leaned back against the sink as if she needed its support to keep upright. “Charlotte,” she said, “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t need to lie to me,” I said. “I’m not going to tell anyone. I just need to know.”

  “The last time I saw your mother was a few days before,” Claire said. “I never came to the house that night.”

  “Just tell me the truth,” I said. “Please. Tell me what you were doing there. Tell me what the pictures meant.”

  “What pictures?” Claire asked.

  “You know,” I said. “I know you know.”

  “Charlotte,” Claire said, “I don’t know what you saw that night—or who you saw—but whoever it was, it wasn’t me.”

  She reached out as if to comfort me, and I took a step back. My hand knocked against a glass on the counter and it fell to the floor and shattered.

  “Charlotte,” Claire said.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  I blindly grabbed my purse from the table and stumbled toward the front door. I was in my car and backing down the driveway before I really registered what was happening.

  Claire was lying; she had to be lying.

  Only, the thing was, I wasn’t so sure she was lying.

  Part Two

  Ten

  Alistair Calloway

  Fall 1996

  Every November, between Halloween and Thanksgiving, my family hosted a charity ball at the Carlyle Hotel. All proceeds went to whatever obscure and ridiculous cause my sister Olivia picked out. One year we raised money for the United States Flora Ethics Committee, which was fighting for a Bill of Rights for plants. Olivia believed that broccoli should have rights, too. The food that year was awful—seven courses of wild-caught herbs and vegetables and chicken, and wine made of grapes that had been “humanely” fermented. Another year, we raised money for prosthetics for three-legged dogs. But the cause du jour was just a front, because there was only one cause the great Calloways had ever really believed in, the only thing that we took great pains to raise awareness of: ourselves.

  As usual, I arrived promptly at eight o’clock, clean-shaven, dressed sharply in a suit, my fiancée Margot Whittaker on my arm. I looked around for my younger brother, Teddy, who wasn’t there. Teddy was, as usual, not prompt, and would probably arrive after the main course had been served, with a thick stubble on his chin, and dressed in some sort of calculatedly inappropriate attire like a Tommy Bahama shirt and flip-flops, despite the weather. Teddy’s eternal quest in life was to push the limits of my father’s patience and my mother’s blind adoration. My father had very little patience to begin with and would have disinherited Teddy years ago if it were not for my mother, but Teddy had yet to bottom out on the depths of her love for him.

  As usual, Eugenia had spared no expense (Eugenia was my mother, and I had always called her Eugenia, even as a child, because she felt the term “mother” prematurely aged her). The pale violet orchids in the centerpieces had been flown in from Bogotá; the wines were from a cellar in Tuscany; the steaks that would be served during the main course had been dry-aged in the finest butcher’s cellar in the city for the past three weeks. And no detail was overlooked. The tablecloths were starched and pressed, the water glasses were set exactly one inch from the tip of the dinner knives; Eugenia had gotten out a ruler to check the measurements herself.

  “Alistair, you look dashing,” Eugenia said, greeting me with a kiss on both cheeks.

  Eugenia had always been coolly indifferent toward me. I think she found it boring that I was always where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do. She didn’t have to scold me, or worry about me, or coddle me like Olivia and Teddy. But I was my father’s favorite. He found Olivia foolish and frivolous and Teddy unruly and rebellious. I was always there, a quick study and duty-bound to prove myself, and so my father put me through the fire again and again and again, molding me into a man whom he’d find worthy of being handed the Calloway legacy one day.

  “Margot, dear,” Eugenia said, “you’re here.”

  Eugenia was severely disappointed that I had chosen to marry a girl who was not pretty, flighty, or rich. In short, that I had not chosen someone more like her. And she was annoyed that I had given Margot the family ring: an eighteen-carat flawless emerald-cut canary diamond, flanked by two half-moon-cut diamonds on a platinum band. The ring had belonged to my grandmother. My mother had her eye on it for Teddy, but my grandmother had bequeathed it to me in her will, and I had given it to Margot. Ever since, my mother had been a complete bitch to Margot, hoping to scare her off, and Margot always responded with a smile, not retreating an inch.

  “Eugenia, it’s lovely to see you,” Margot said without a hint of sarcasm. “You must tell me who you’re wearing. That dress is stunning.”

  “Oh, I would, dear,” Eugenia responded to Margot, and I knew then that the reply would not be nice, because “dear” was not a term of endearment with Eugenia. Whenever I heard my mother say this I heard “pond scum” or “white trash” in its place, because that’s what she really meant, but those weren’t terms one could use in polite company. “But you probably wouldn’t be familiar, since you’re not knowledgeable about fashion. Your dress is tolerable. Did Alistair pick that out for you?”

  “Yes, it was a gift,” Margot said.

  “It’s Versace,” I said. “From their fall line. I thought you would approve.”

  “Maybe on a different frame,” Eugenia said, eyeing Margot up and down while she took a sip from her wineglass. “Yes, a different frame would elevate it.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but Margot put her hand on my arm.

  “I’m parched,” Margot said. “Let’s get a drink, shall we? It was a pleasure talking to you, Eugenia. We’ll catch up more later.”

  My mother smiled wanly at us as Margot steered me across the room.

  “You let her get to you,” Margot whispered disapprovingly to me.

  “How can you not let her get to you?” I whispered back.

  Margot shrugged. “Because I have nothing to gain from that. And it’s amusing to me. It’s a little game I’m playing. The nastier she is, the sweeter I’ll be. I’ll break her down eventually. One day, she’ll leave me her shares in the Calloway Group, and I’ll know I’ve won. I’m going to make that bitch love me.”

  “Eugenia doesn’t love anybody—except herself and Teddy.”

  “Yeah, how do you think Teddy managed that exactly?” Margot asked, taking two wineglasses from the tray proffered by a waiter and handing me one.

  “He’s a wounded little bird,” I said, taking the glass. “He’s broken, and so Eugenia feels the need to fix him.”

  “Interesting,” Margot said, and I could practically see the gears clicking in her head as she formulated some plan. “I never thought weakness could be perceived as desirable. I can use that.”

  I took a sip from my wineglass and glanced at my fiancée. Margot was a mosaic of strong, distinctive features all warring with one another for prominence: a tall forehead, a sharp chin, high cheekbones. If she’d had only one of these features she might have been quite striking, but the effect of all of them together was that they washed each other out, making her rather plain.

  Plain girls have always interested m
e more than pretty girls. Pretty girls have never had to work for anything, but the plain ones, they’ve been working at everything their whole lives. They’ve had to make people notice them. They’ve had to work at being funny, or being smart, or being daring. The pretty ones, they just sit there and smile at you and are either so damn nice and so damn agreeable all the time that you want to pull them aside and tell them some ugly truth to wipe that stupid smile off their faces, or they’re so damn disagreeable and hard to please that you want to knock them around a little bit, remind them that they bruise and break just as easily as anybody else.

  Margot was smart. That was the thing she had chosen to work at. And not just book smart—though she was that, too. She was in her first year of medical school at Columbia. But she was also street-smart. She was ambitious, and cunning, and manipulative as hell. In truth, I was 99 percent sure Margot was a sociopath, or at the very least, she displayed strong sociopathic tendencies. That was one of the things that connected me most to her. I had been raised by a sociopath (my father) and a narcissist (my mother), so at the very least, it felt familiar.

  Having strong sociopathic tendencies was practically a prerequisite to exist in my world. “Normal” people (a.k.a. weak-willed pansies) could talk about how having a conscience was what made us human, but to me, a conscience was a whiny little bitch voice I liked to hit the mute button on. A conscience wasn’t going to run a successful billion-dollar real estate company. It couldn’t make the hard cost-cutting decisions; it couldn’t fire Monica, the single mom with three kids at home, or Jerry, the guy whose wife had stage-three breast cancer, when that’s what was best for the bottom line. A sociopath could smile and ask Monica about her kids in the break room and nod consolingly as Jerry nearly lost his shit recounting how the doctor said the last treatment didn’t take, and then turn around and tell Monica and Jerry that they needed to box up their offices and ship out because they hadn’t been meeting their sales goals and they were trying to run a business here. A sociopath didn’t lose sleep over how Monica was going to pay her kids’ orthodontist bills that month, or how Jerry and his wife were going to manage without health insurance.

  Here it was plain and simple: a conscience would strangle you. Normal people could have their sensitivity and vulnerability and feelings and live their pretty little lives, but that was all they were ever going to be. Normal. Average. And I’d never wanted to be average. I was a Calloway. I wasn’t born and bred and raised to be average. I didn’t see the appeal. I’d had the average beat and starved out of me, and I was better for it, stronger.

  Margot put a hand on my arm. She was staring across the room, back toward the entrance.

  “That little shit,” she said. “What game do you think he’s playing now?”

  I turned and followed her gaze. To my astonishment, there was Teddy. Not only was he practically on time, but he was wearing a suit; his hair was neatly cut and gelled, and on his arm, he had a respectable-looking date: some dark-haired beauty wearing a simple satin off-the-shoulder gown with a sweetheart neckline. Nothing gaudy or loud. Nothing that screamed for attention. So unlike the leggy blond dates in tight, low-cut gowns that Teddy normally brought to family functions.

  “What’s his angle—being all punctual and parading around some boring prude?” Margot asked, narrowing her eyes at Teddy and his date as we watched my mother gleefully embrace them both.

  I downed my wine. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” I said, handing Margot my empty glass.

  I started off across the room toward my brother.

  My deepest fear was that one day Teddy would get his shit together and try to prove himself to our father. That he would somehow weasel his way into managing the Calloway Group even though it had been me busting my balls all these years. It had been me who had graduated first in my class at Knollwood Augustus Prep. It had been me who had graduated summa cum laude from Columbia. Me, again, who had spent every summer interning at the Calloway Group, working my ass off in the mailroom like some nobody, because my father believed in learning the company from the ground up. I had kept my nose to the grindstone all these years, while Teddy had partied and done whatever he damn well pleased. He had gotten thrown out of three boarding schools. My parents had had to buy his way into Princeton, and now that he was there, he spent more of his time drinking and taking lavish trips with his friends than in the classroom. It was all a big joke to him, which was how I preferred it. I didn’t want him to try, because if he did, I knew he had a huge advantage as my mother’s favorite, and that my father would pit us against one another until one of us broke. I was under no delusion that my father favored me for any other reason than that I tried the hardest.

  I found my brother by the hors d’oeuvres table, loading up a small plate.

  “Slow down,” I said. “I know by the time you usually get here, there’s only dessert left, but there are actually seven courses to this thing, so you can pace yourself.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Teddy said.

  “Who’s the skirt?” I asked.

  Teddy peered over his shoulder as he took a bite of his salmon puff.

  “Her name’s Grace,” he said.

  I glanced back at the girl, who was still standing by the entrance with my mother, deep in conversation. Grace. The name suited her. It was soft and old-fashioned and Grace did indeed look like an old-world beauty, quiet and demure. What was someone like that doing with my brother?

  “She doesn’t seem like your type,” I said.

  “What? Leggy? Blond? Easy?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That’s the whole point,” Teddy said, popping another salmon puff into his mouth and talking over it as he chewed. “It wouldn’t feel so gratifying if there weren’t any challenge to it.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re still playing that stupid game,” I said. “Bingo for Dingoes?”

  I was annoyed, but also relieved to hear that Teddy’s appearance here, his punctuality, his crisply ironed suit, were all part of a silly game, and one that had nothing to do with me or the Calloway Group.

  “It’s called the Board of Conquests,” Teddy corrected me. “And I’m about to get four in a row.”

  “Is that right? And what box is Grace checking for you?”

  “We’ve added townies to this round,” Teddy said. “I met Grace at the public library.”

  “What in god’s name were you doing in a library?”

  “I got lost,” Teddy said.

  “Every time I’ve convinced myself you’ve gone as low as you can go, you find a way to sink to new depths.”

  Teddy clapped me on the back and smiled. “Well, we’re always trying to outdo ourselves, aren’t we? It’s the Calloway way. Come on, I’ll introduce you. I’ve got this whole ‘heart of gold’ shtick going. You know, I love my family, we’re so close, yadda yadda yadda. You can play the part of doting big brother and help me sell her on it.”

  “Sounds exhausting, and I’m tired,” I said.

  Now that I knew what my brother was up to, I was bored. I had no interest in playing his stupid little games.

  “What if I make it worth your while?” Teddy asked.

  “What were you thinking, exactly?”

  Teddy looked as if he were deep in thought. “Next summer when Dad asks me to intern at the office, I’ll blow him off. I’ve got this friend with a boat off the coast of Uruguay. We’ll be off the grid for two months at least.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your idea of doing me a favor is blowing off a crappy office job to go hang out on a yacht all summer?”

  “Or,” Teddy said, “I could pull Dad aside right now, have a real heart-to-heart. You know, tell him how I’ve really been thinking things through lately and how sorry I am for the way I’ve acted. How I’m going to start taking my classes seriously, and how I’d really like it if I could start learning the ropes at the office.”

  Most of the time, it seemed like Teddy was a complet
e idiot, but then there were moments like this, when I knew it was all just an act, and underneath all the feigned laziness and stupidity, he really was one of us: sharp and shrewd and cutthroat. He was a Calloway through and through.

  “Fine,” I said. “Introduce us.”

  Teddy slung his arm around me and pulled me over to where Grace and Eugenia stood.

  “Grace,” Teddy said, “I’d like you to meet Alistair, my brother. He’s a Columbia alum; he works at the Calloway Group with our father.”

  Grace looked at me. There was something about her that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Her eyes were gray, with swirls of pale yellow. I hadn’t been able to tell what color they were from across the room. But up close, they were stunning.

  “Nice to meet you,” Grace said. “Teddy’s told me so much about you.”

  It took me a moment to realize she had extended her hand in my direction.

  “Oh, right,” I said, and took her hand. It felt so different from the meaty fists I was used to shaking all day at the office. It was small and warm and fragile in my palm, breakable.

  “Alistair, this is Grace Fairchild,” Teddy said. “She’s a painter.”

  “Well, not professionally,” Grace said. “I’ve never actually sold any of my paintings.”

  “A lot of great artists weren’t appreciated initially,” Teddy said. “Van Gogh, for instance, only sold two paintings in his lifetime, and now his work goes for millions. It’s extraordinary, really, how long it can take people to recognize the value of something right in front of them.”

  He slipped his arm around Grace’s slim waist. It bothered me to see how easily he touched her—as if she already belonged to him.

  “Yes, well, Teddy finds a lot of things extraordinary,” I said. “A suit. A clean shave. Showing up on time. But I guess, to be fair, we all found that extraordinary.”