Good Little Wives

by Abby Drake

  They were at Calabrese the day after Kitty’s arraignment. They sat in a private spot in a corner as Caroline had requested.

  “It’s our fault, isn’t it?” Bridget said before Kitty arrived.

  “That Kitty killed her husband?” Caroline asked. A hint of disdain laced her voice, as if to ask how Bridget could entertain such a thought.

  “That Kitty allegedly killed Vincent,” Dana corrected.

  “Why on earth is it our fault?” Caroline asked.

  “Because we are dégout snobs,” Bridget continued. “Kitty was our friend, and when Vincent dumped her, we all did, too.”

  Caroline made no comment.

  Dana didn’t, either. It had, after all, been only yesterday that she’d reminded herself that they were, indeed, snobs. Instead of commenting, she looked around the restaurant. It was decorated in red and green, Italian colors. The tables were dressed up with Chianti bottles whose necks wore long shawls of candle wax. The walls displayed harbor scenes that looked as if they’d been painted by number.

  All in all, the place was tacky enough to minimize the number of patrons who might recognize them. Besides, they were in Tarrytown.

  Bridget was right, Dana thought. They were dégout snobs.

  Caroline selected wine and told the waiter they’d wait for the rest of their party to order their food.

  “And now Kitty’s late,” Bridget added, eyes scanning the room. The women of New Falls never were late, no matter how small the event. They might be snobs, but they were not prima donnas, at least not about time.

  “I asked her to be here at one,” Caroline said. “I wanted to speak with both of you before she arrived.”

  You spoke with both of us—sort of—on the phone yesterday, Dana wanted to say. But she supposed the wine and the setting were part of Caroline’s plan. She always, after all, had a plan. It was how she was able to successfully juggle so many boards of directors.

  “I’ve located an attorney for Kitty,” she said, hand sliding into her Gucci daytime bag and extracting a business card. “Paul Tobin,” she said. “He’s in White Plains. She has an appointment Monday at eleven.”

  There were two things that Dana found disturbing: first, that Caroline hadn’t “located” a Manhattan lawyer; second, that she handed the card to her.

  She tried handing it back. “I think you should give this to Kitty yourself,” Dana said. Caroline had been a good friend over the years—well, as good a friend as a New Falls wife could be—but lately she’d begun to irritate Dana. The charities, the agendas, the quest for perfection…God, was Caroline ever not perfect? Then Dana’s eyes moved to Caroline’s lips. She couldn’t hold back a tiny smile.

  “I can’t stay for lunch,” Caroline said. “In fact, the truth is, I can’t be any part of this. I’ve secured Mr. Tobin and paid his retainer. But that’s all I can do on Kitty’s behalf.”

  Dana’s smile waned. She had paid a retainer?

  “How generous of you,” Bridget said before Dana could ask what on earth had motivated Caroline to pay thousands of dollars to help a friend that she’d written off.

  The wine arrived; Caroline stood up. “Enjoy your lunch,” she said, adjusting Gucci on her shoulder. “The waiter has been instructed to put it on my card. And by the way,” she added with a cool grin through those lips, “Please tell Kitty not to call me again.”

  It was a great exit line, so that’s what she did.

  Dana’s husband came home that night, two days ahead of schedule.

  She was back on the love seat, feet propped on the coffee table, mulling over the lunch where no one had ended up eating or even drinking. She was thinking about Bridget and Kitty and odd Caroline, when Steven walked through the door.

  “Is fifty-eight too young to retire?” He dropped his suitcase on the floor and flopped on the love seat across from her.

  Of all her friends’ husbands, Steven had retained his looks best of all. He’d never been a Hollywood type, never chiseled and schmiseled and drop-dead Redford or Pitt. But Steven was tall and straight-backed with startling cobalt eyes and good cheekbones and a slightly receding hairline that, along with his wire-framed glasses, made him look sincere. Sincere was a good thing for a man who specialized in mergers and acquisitions.

  He was not the sort of man a woman might murder.

  But did they have enough money for him to retire? After today, she was wincingly aware of the parallel between having money and being a dégout snob. She’d never minded being a lighthearted, regular snob, because she’d never really taken it seriously. But now Bridget had made them sound so, well, appalling.

  “Was your trip that exhausting?” Dana asked, then added, “Would you like a drink?” It was, after all, a New Falls wifely duty to honor and serve, even if it only meant bourbon.

  He waved his hand. “No drink. Not tonight.”

  She was grateful she didn’t have to get up off the couch. “You’re early. Does that mean things didn’t go well?”

  Rubbing his hand over his hairline (probably encouraging it to recede all the more), he said, “Actually the deal went fine. Quickly. We wrapped it up in record time.”

  “And now you’re exhausted.”

  “Yeah. I really hate all this traveling lately.”

  “Then retire.”

  He laughed. “And do what?”

  Dana shrugged. “Play golf. Take up sailing. I don’t know. What do other men do?”

  He laughed again, dismissing the notion. “Tell me what you’ve been up to while I was away. You looked rather thoughtful. Is anything wrong?”

  With a giant sigh, Dana told him that Vincent DeLano was dead and Kitty had been arrested and Bridget thought all her friends were snobs and Caroline was acting peculiar.

  “Caroline Meacham has always been peculiar,” Steven said, “so that part’s not news. And you probably are snobs, so what?”

  Dana laughed and poked her foot at his, which was now parked on the coffee table, too. “You didn’t say anything about Vincent and Kitty.”

  “I’m digesting that.”

  “It’s murder, Steven. Not chicken soup.”

  “Speaking of which, what’s for dinner?”

  “Steven!”

  Now it was his turn to sigh. “I could say I’m not surprised. I could say it’s too bad that Kitty has been arrested, but who could blame her?”

  “Blame her? Because of Yolanda?”

  “Yolanda? The hairdresser?” Steven chuckled. “Christ, what about your friend Lauren?”

  Dana blanched. “What? What about Lauren?”

  He rubbed his hairline again. “Didn’t I tell you I saw them?”

  “Saw who?”

  “Them. It was a while ago. Months. Maybe a year. I don’t know. I thought I told you.”

  Dana sat up straight. “Steven,” she said. “Spit it out.”

  “I was meeting Ed Cannon from the UK for drinks. When was that? Was it last summer? Well, whatever. We were going to Harry’s but it was packed. No. It wasn’t summer. It was in the spring. Right around…oh, I know. April fifteenth. Which was why the bar was packed.” He smiled as if he were a genius.

  Dana held herself back from lunging at him.

  “I decided to wait for Ed in the lobby. At the Helmsley, you know?”

  Of course she knew Harry’s Bar was at the Helmsley.

  “That’s when I saw Lauren and Vincent get off the elevator. They were all over each other, like they’d just come from enjoying one of the Helmsley’s fine rooms.”

  If he’d said the earth had cracked open and sucked in Manhattan, it might have made more sense.

  Lauren and Vincent?

  Their Lauren and Kitty’s Vincent?

  Steven pulled his long legs from the table and slowly stood up. “I think I’ll get that drink after all. Do you want anything?”

  But Dana sat mute, too stunned to drink or to move or to breathe.

  If it weren’t for Luc, Bridget would cancel her trip to P
rovence and let Aimée fly home alone. She would go with Kitty and Dana to the appointment with attorney Paul Tobin and help provide backup, the way singers did, her alto to Kitty’s soprano. It was bad enough the women were snobs. At least they could stick together.

  Bridget was so pissed that Caroline had so blatantly blown off Kitty that she would do just about anything to help the poor woman. Except, of course, cancel her trip.

  Back in Aimée’s closet, Bridget began counting and folding sweaters again, wondering why she’d let her daughter accumulate the trappings of the wealthy that she was beginning to hate.

  Of all the women of New Falls, Bridget was the one who knew what it was like to be the outcast, society’s rubbish, the one without money and material stuff.

  Her father, after all, had been a French cowboy. Bridget had been raised on the Camargue in southwestern Provence amid the white horses and pink flamingos and the Gypsies who gathered in spring. She’d attended school in Ste. Marie de la Mer—where Mary Magdalene was thought to have landed after Jesus’ crucifixion—where the Petit Rhône meets the Mediterranean Sea, where shellfish were abundant and olives and figs were trucked in from the hills. She’d worshipped in the ninth-century church, rebuilt by the monks into the town’s fortifications.

  It was a lively, safe, healthy place to be raised, even in the sixties and seventies, when the rest of the world seemed to be falling apart with protests and riots and wars.

  When she was eleven, Bridget fell in love with Luc, a cowboy like her father, though he was just thirteen. At seventeen Luc was fighting the black Camargue bulls at the medieval arena in French style, so the bulls were not killed.

  They were meant to be together, Bridget and Luc.

  When he was twenty, they married. When he was twenty-one, and Bridget, nineteen, they had a son, Alain, who they named after her father. When Luc was twenty-four, and Bridget, twenty-two, Luc was gored by a bull. He lost the use of both legs but not of his penis, though his depression was so great, he hardly cared about sex.

  Even a place as idyllic as Ste. Marie de la Mer could not renew Luc’s spirits.

  He wanted her to leave, to take Alain with her, to have a chance at the normal life she deserved.

  But Bridget would not go.

  They had little money; they moved in with her parents; when her mother died, they stayed with her father, and Bridget took care of them all. Alain was the glue that held them together, the charming little boy with his father’s sensitive soul and his grandfather’s name.

  Then, one day after school, five-year-old Alain wandered off through the marshes, perhaps following the wild horses. He was found the next day, drowned in the swamp, his perfect little body already bloated with death.

  The year that followed was a long bad dream, with time passing like the speed-train from Marseilles to Paris, the image out the window too blurred to allow for emotion. The next thing Bridget knew, she was waiting on tables near the Sorbonne, a woman who had lost her child, and whose husband had become bitter and loveless and so she’d divorced him.

  “Life on the Camargue is no life for me now,” she’d said to Luc when she said good-bye. He did not disagree.

  Six years later, when Bridget had already been married to Randall for five, had been living in New Falls among the rich Americans, her father died.

  She returned for the funeral. She seduced Luc; she wanted him back. He said no: He had another wife now, another child. Apparently his depression had lifted.

  She had no pain after that, only a dull, aching loss that never left her, winter, spring, summer, fall. Her life was with Randall, but her heart was not there.

  When Aimée was born, Bridget was determined her daughter would have all the things Bridget had not, that her life would be better than life on the Camargue with the white horses. But as time passed, Luc had not left Bridget’s mind, and last fall she returned to Provence, under the ruse of enrolling her daughter in a French private school.

  She’d seen him then, though not alone. Randall had been with her, after all. She’d introduced Luc as an old family friend, a protégé of her father’s, a cowboy long ago.

  At Christmastime she convinced Randall to let her cross the Atlantic to escort Aimée home. How could she have known Luc was on holiday in Paris?

  Maybe this time, Bridget thought with a smile. Maybe I will see him, and I will tell him I am sick, and then he will come back to me.

  Her daydream was interrupted by her husband’s footsteps across the bedroom carpet. “I thought I’d find you in here,” Randall said. He was shorter than most men and wore a toupee to which his stylist had recently begun adding gray. He had kind eyes and a kind heart and deserved someone better than her. “I heard about Vincent DeLano.”

  Bridget nodded. “C’est terrible,” she said.

  “And Kitty. Your friend.”

  “She did not kill him.”

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “Non.”

  He gestured toward the suitcase. “I will go get her,” he said. “You stay here in New Falls. I suspect Kitty will need you.”

  It took a moment for Bridget to understand what he had said. “What?”

  “I said I will go to France to pick up our daughter. There’s no need to thank me, it’s what I want to do.”

  He turned and left Aimée’s closet, with Bridget still standing, clutching a Ralph Lauren.

  Seven

  The funeral was orchestrated by Premiere Parties, which had done Caroline’s daughter’s engagement festivities and the holiday museum ball.

  Lauren arrived at the cemetery in a Marc Jacobs silk sheath with embroidered shrug because the outfit was navy and therefore seemed appropriate. She was glad it was only a graveside service. Vincent, after all, hadn’t been a churchgoer, so Yolanda had spared everyone the pomp and procession.

  In the backseat of the limo Lauren shivered to think Yolanda was the one making such decisions. Yolanda, who, with her youth and her looks and the wiggle in her walk, had stolen Vincent’s attention from her.

  The driver opened the door for Bob, who stepped into the sunlight, buttoned the center button of his gray Jon Green suit, and inhaled the spring air as if it were an outing and they had all day. Lauren held on to her wide-brimmed navy hat, took the driver’s gloved hand, and emerged outside next to her husband.

  “Everyone’s already here,” she whispered, and Bob nodded because it never bothered him to be late to the party, never made him nervous or shy to walk into a room—or in this case, a graveyard—surrounded by others, friends, strangers, everyone. She wondered if that was because he was usually the oldest one there.

  He took Lauren’s elbow and guided her toward the mourners, who, instead of looking at the minister, were now looking at them.

  “Hello,” Bob said quietly here and there. “Hello. How are you?”

  She leaned into his shadow, wishing she’d invented a migraine and refused to come. Even without the bizarre circumstances, Lauren had simply never liked funerals. They were too reminiscent of her angst-driven childhood when the family all gathered for births and for deaths and for milestones in between, which mostly provided a soundstage on which to critique one another, especially her. “She’s too thin,” “She’s too quiet,” “She’s not nearly as smart as Harold, Celia, or Marge,” Aunt Clara would mutter to Aunt Bertie and Aunt Bertie would pass on to Aunt Jane.

  It had been at Lauren’s grandfather’s funeral that Uncle Raymond had fondled her at the back of the hearse, when he’d lured her to peer past the dark velvet drapes that hung, slightly parted, at the rear window. When Lauren leaned down, he swooped in from behind her, clasped his hands around her, and caressed her twelve-year-old buds.

  No wonder she didn’t like funerals.

  Bob led her over the uneven grass to a small opening between Dana and Steven and Caroline and Jack, who stood next to Bridget and Randall. It wasn’t strange, Lauren thought, that they were all there. Most times the people who were gossi
ped about were the ones who didn’t show up. Besides, she realized, it wasn’t as if any of them was crying.

  Across from the metallic blue coffin that held what was left of Vincent DeLano and the deep pit that was poised to swallow him up, dozens of potted lilies were positioned as if it were Easter and resurrection were near. Behind the plants stood Yolanda, draped in layers of frothy black. It would be too much of a farce, Lauren supposed, if Yolanda tripped over the lilies and fell headfirst into the grave.

  Lauren straightened her back and tried to pay attention.

  “Vincent was a devoted father,” the minister began, and all eyes turned toward Kitty’s homely proctologist son, who propped up Yolanda on her right side, and toward the supermodel daughter who flanked her right. Just because the kids were Kitty’s blood, that was apparently no cause for allegiance.

  “He was a wonderful provider,” the reverend continued, though Kitty might have protested if she were in attendance.

  “And he was also proud of his Italian heritage.”

  Italian heritage?

  Lauren sucked in one corner of her lower lip and gently bit down with her teeth.

  “The guys in the high school locker room called me the ‘Italian Stallion,’” Vincent had said to her once. “What do you think? Does it fit?”

  Though they’d both been naked and he had just climaxed, Lauren was embarrassed. Yes, his penis was big. Yes, it was hard, and yes, it had more staying power than Bob’s ever had to her knowledge. But as much as she liked it—indeed, as much as she coveted the very thought of it when she was at home in her bed, eyes closed, feeling herself grow damp way down there—Lauren did not want to talk about it, at least not to Vincent. She would have loved to tell Dana or Bridget or even Caroline at one of their lunches after a glass of wine, but Lauren couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that because, after all, she was married to Bob, and Vincent had still been married to Kitty, and as delicious as her secret was, it just couldn’t be shared.