18.
I got it into my stupid head to tell Will at Dad’s Pave the Way benefit a few days later. I didn’t know what I’d say or how I’d say it, but I thought a gorgeous candlelit ballroom would help romanticize the whole thing and make him see things my way, even though I wasn’t sure what my way was. I’d found an old forest-green suede tunic of Mom’s and dressed it up with long beads and a black chain belt that hid my stomach and showed off my arms.
“That is so Fiona,” Vanessa said when I tried it on for her that afternoon. “I’m so having a visual of Fiona with her bangs and her huge black leather bag, walking around in that a few years ago. God, she has the best clothes.”
“It’s okay, right?” I asked, tugging at the sides and cinching the chain belt around the narrowest part of my waist, which at that point was up around my rib cage. I looked up and caught Vanessa staring up at my bulging stomach.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, still staring. “You haven’t told him yet, have you?”
“No,” I said. “Check out my scarf.” I gestured to the balled-up crochet project still on my bedside table. “It’s coming out lopsided. What am I doing wrong?”
She looked at me long and hard and I braced myself for a lecture. She’d been silent on the subject and I, of course, never brought it up, so it was hard to know what she was thinking. She just rolled over and grabbed the scarf while I quickly pulled the dress over my shoulders.
I was the first one to arrive at the hotel that night. I was watching a guy in the lobby jewelry shop take coral necklaces out of the window boxes when Will slid through the revolving door, eyes darting around. He spotted me and walked across the lobby.
“Hey.” He gave me a nervous kiss. “You look great.”
“So do you,” I said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, looking at me like I was crazy. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Why are you answering my question with a question?” I said.
“What, does that bother you?”
“Does it bother me?” I asked.
“Does it bother you?” he repeated.
“Shut up.”
“No, you shut up,” he said.
“No, you.”
Dad came up the steps behind us. I was sure he’d heard Will tell me to shut up.
“Hello, kids,” Dad said. His tux was blacker than Will’s. I’d thought black was black, one shade. “Good to see you again, Will.” Will missed a beat before shaking Dad’s outstretched hand.
“You too, Ted.”
“Where’s Elizabeth?” Dad’s eyes started darting around the room like Will’s, and I thought maybe it was a survival thing men did when they were nervous. Elizabeth Ransom was Dad’s friend from growing up on Charter Island. I didn’t think they’d ever done it, but I wasn’t positive.
I shook my head. “We just got here.”
I wished Will would say “Thanks for inviting me,” or “What does Pave the Way do, exactly, Mr. Galehouse?” But he just stood there, his tux accentuating the broadness of his shoulders.
“Are you speaking tonight?” I asked Dad, putting my arm through Will’s.
“Naw, no,” Dad grumbled. He waved to an older couple, lowering his head as they walked by. “Harry’s speaking. I don’t do it unless there’s a gun at my head.”
Will smiled appreciatively.
Elizabeth blew in. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she called from across the lobby. “I’ve just had the afternoon from hell. Corky chewed up the Pearsons’ baby ball. I had to stop at Mary Arnold and have one messengered over, of all things.”
“Do us all a favor, Lizzie, lose the yippy little sausage,” Dad said, kissing her on both cheeks.
“Nevah,” she cackled.
Elizabeth was a decorator and had gotten Dad his living room furniture. Big brown leather stuff with buttons, and a couple of stripy-wood end tables that struck me as very him: unadventurously tasteful, directly linked to the great outdoors. He wouldn’t let her do anything else with his apartment. He said she was too expensive.
“How are we all this lovely evening?” she asked, gathering her diaphanous wrap around her, and before anyone could answer, said, “Shall we mingle with the masses?”
Dad put his hand on the small of Elizabeth’s back and guided her to the elevators, alerting me to the fact that Elizabeth’s ass was half the size of mine. The ballroom upstairs was a patchwork of sumptuous black fabric—chiffon, gabardine, taffeta—all swishing around over the gaudy, Saudi-palace carpet. Will and I were the youngest ones there. I hoped we stuck out in only a cool, sexy way.
“Can I get everyone drinks?” Will asked, his voice fading into the din.
“Champagne?” I asked Dad. “C’mon, one glass.”
“One glass,” Dad said. “Lizzie?”
“White wine, please. Emma!” she called to a woman a few heads away. “That wasn’t your show—Diane’s? Where the lights fell down on the stage?”
Emma shook her head solemnly.
“Thank God!” Elizabeth yelled, a little softer but with exaggerated emphasis. “I read that and thought, Oh my God, I hope that wasn’t her show.”
If she’d said “I hope that wasn’t Emma’s show,” instead of “her show,” it would have come out sounding nicer. Elizabeth reminded me of Mom a little, the way you couldn’t always tell whether she was on your side or not.
Will stepped over to the bar a few feet away. I heard him say “Can I get a white wine …” and saw Dad wince. He was always on me to say “May I please have” instead of “Can I get.”
“It’s vulgar, Thea,” he’d say. “The kids who work for me say it all the time too. Their breakfast orders in the morning make my head hurt. ‘Can I get an egg and cheese?’ You all need to be reprogrammed. It’s basic English.” At least I did it too, and people at work. Not just Will.
Will came back with Dad’s seltzer with lime and Elizabeth’s wine, then my champagne and a beer for himself, which he drank out of the bottle. The four of us stood in an awkward huddle.
“Teddy tells me you’re at Columbia,” Elizabeth said to Will.
“Yeah.” Will nodded uncomfortably. I saw Dad look away.
“That’s a wonderful school. My nephew just finished up there.”
“So who are we sitting with?” I asked, molding my cocktail napkin around the base of my flute. “Work people?”
“Mostly, yes, and some friends of Harry’s,” Dad said.
A woman wearing a polka-dot dress and green glasses was talking near me. “Bruno, my youngest, loves the ladies,” she said, her tall husband nodding in agreement. “He likes to escort them down the steps of his preschool and bid them good afternoon.”
We found our table, close to the stage. Elizabeth put her tiny handbag, shaped like a turtle and covered in rhinestones, next to Dad’s chair, and another couple quickly parked themselves on his other side. The other free seats were across the table, so any further Dad-Will bonding wasn’t in the cards. We spent the night talking to a pale, pudgy Australian guy who worked for Dad. “I love this city,” he kept saying, as though trying to convince himself. “I love the Upper West Side.”
Mostly we snuck out into the atrium for drinks, our first trip right after the salads. We ducked behind a big pillar decorated with fake orange lilies, our buzzes escalating at the same time in a whirling rush.
He leaned toward me and winked. “You are the fairest of them all, milady. Ma’am. Your Honor.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, fluttering my eyelids. I kissed him, noticing how every angle of his body inspired a crazy-making, lustful lurch inside me. I wanted to step into him. Just get in him and live in there. I leaned against the pillar, cold against my bare back.
“You know, I love you so much,” Will whispered, brushing his lips across mine just like he did when we had sex. Even then I knew that chances were, I loved him more. Will was drunk. It reminded me of when I was younger and Dad had scrawled the words I love you more than you can dream on the back of a picture of me in our living room one night when he was bombed out of his mind. I’d come home from school and found it, next to an ashtray filled with butts, the table sticky with beer from the previous night’s all-nighter. I had crossed it out, making deep, pissed-off Bic-pen indentations into the cardboard. I remember thinking he could only bring himself to love me when he was shit-faced.
Still, I loved hearing Will say he loved me, over and over.
“Will, I have to tell you something,” I said.
“What,” he said, kissing my neck and pulling the chain around my waist.
“I’m still pregnant. I didn’t go through with it, that day I was supposed to. I couldn’t.”
He looked at me and his body seemed to lurch backward in slow motion.
“I didn’t mean to hide it,” I said. “It’s hard for me to explain.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. I tried to find a trace of something I could recognize, in his eyes, in his expression, but his face reflected back only the worst—that I’d done something very wrong by not telling him.
Someone had made an announcement I didn’t hear and everyone started to file back into the dining room.
“I’m out of here,” Will said. He started for the elevators, then kicked open the fire-exit door and let it slam behind him before I had a chance to call his name.