Gilded Age (25 page)

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

“Because it doesn’t matter.”

It was then that Cinco reached us after making his way around the side of his house with my crying son in his arms.

“He needs a change, I think,” Cinco said, unloading Henry into my arms. “Ummm, just tell me where the diapers are,” he said, trying to cover, realizing he’d interrupted something tense.

“I’ll get his stuff,” Jim said, and walked off toward the house to fetch the baby’s bag.

“You okay?” Cinco asked, looking at me.

I nuzzled Henry into my neck, which quieted him. I felt like I’d been punched in the throat, like I might throw up right there. “No, I don’t think I am.” Tears came to my eyes as I sniffed and blinked.

Cinco cocked his head, looking at me. “Sometimes it’s an adjustment, you know. Babies and stuff.” He waved a hand at us. “So I hear.”

I looked at him over the baby’s head. He thought I was upset because of some postpartum adjustment period. “Jim kissed Ellie,” I said. It was out before I considered what I was doing. I needed to say it out loud. In retrospect Cinco was the perfect person to tell—he wouldn’t judge Jim, and he wouldn’t want to see me hurt. Looking back, I suppose that was the moment when we left the past, the moment when he became my friend.

His eyes got wide for a second and then were covered, almost instantly, by his innate calm. “Yeah,” he said.

“You knew about this?” Tears slipped down my face then, and I quickly wiped them away.

“No,” he said, backing up a step at my tone. “It’s just now that you said it, I can see it.”

“Can see Jim kissing Ellie?” I gulped air, trying to get control of myself. I didn’t want to be seen crying at Cinco’s party.

“Can see Ellie kissing Jim,” he said resolutely.

My first impulse was to blame myself. I stood there silently berating myself. I’d ignored Jim, it’s true, in the last months of my pregnancy and after the baby was born. What did I expect?

“What?” Cinco said, eyebrows raising as he watched me silently implode. “You’ve got to know she’s capable of something like this.”

“I’ve been friends with her a long time.”

“Me too,” he said. “That’s Ellie. It’s what she does. Frankly when I saw them together at the club, I thought you were a little naïve for allowing it.”

“I don’t allow things with Jim. That’s not how we work.”

“Of course you could have stopped it. Then he told me you encouraged it. Approved.”

“I thought it made me look generous.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “She’s jealous of you.”

“Ellie? She doesn’t want this.” I jostled the baby. “She never has.” I frowned.

“She doesn’t want what you have,” he said. “But
you
want what you have. You’re happy.” Here he paused. “She wants that.” Upset though I was, I noted Cinco’s clear reading of Ellie and her intentions. I’d never have to worry about her messing with him.

“She’d never be happy with Jim.”

Cinco shook his head. “And from what I’ve seen, I don’t think Jim would be happy without you.”

Jim returned with the diaper bag and took Henry from me, checking my face. “I’ll change him in the back of the car, and then I want to go.” He looked at Cinco. “Thanks for having us,” he said, extending a hand around the baby.

Cinco shook his hand. “Anytime. Come back and we’ll put him on the rope swing when he’s big enough.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said.

“He’s a good guy,” Cinco said, watching Jim’s back as he walked up the field. “Go easy on him. No conditions—remember?”

“You convinced me I was wrong about that. Now you get to say ‘I told you so.’”

“Wouldn’t.” He snorted. “Maybe you were the one who was right about conditions. Maybe all my choices were made for me a long time ago. Except one.” His voice trailed off, and we turned to see his wife coming toward us—a smile on her face. He took her hand when she got to us. As always, she clung to him, silent and contained. But I saw
something different this time. I saw that Cinco allowed this, encouraged it, and most of all that he’d chosen it. Whatever it looked like to me, Cinco Van Alstyne had known exactly what he was doing when he’d chosen his wife.

We downshifted then into all the polite good-byes we’d practiced at cotillions. Corrine ignored my tear-streaked face. They walked partway up the field with me to where Jim had already strapped Henry in the car seat and was waiting with the engine running.

The Maserati

A
s she was walking through the wet field, wiping her eyes, Ellie saw Randy Leforte locking his Maserati and walking around it, heading to the party. Gone was the sharp tailoring, the flashy watch. He was wearing Nantucket Reds, new with a sharp crease; a blindingly white broadcloth shirt; and a needlepoint belt, no doubt bought online and made in China.

“Randy,” she called, sniffing and hoping her eyes weren’t too red.

He looked up with a smile on his face that became fixed once he saw who was calling him.

“Ellie,” he said formally as she got closer. “How are you?”

“Will you do me a favor?” she asked.

Randy looked taken aback. “I thought you didn’t want my favors.”

“Take me for a ride,” she said. “Right now.”

“I just got here.”

“Please,” she said. “Not long. The party will still be here when you get back.”

Leforte watched her for a moment and then walked around and unlocked the passenger side of his car. “Where to?”

“Anywhere. I don’t care,” she said, lowering herself into the curvy passenger seat.

He started up the heavy engine, and they bumped across the soggy field to the gravel farm lane. Here was ease, she thought. She wasn’t troubled by the car’s excesses—the outrageous curves and shiny steel.

She felt bad for kissing Jim. But being enfolded in luxury softened her self-criticism. A hug, a kiss on the cheek, a kiss on the mouth—it was still in the realm of sociability. Though she’d admit there’d been nothing polite about those kisses. What a flaming mess it would have been had things gone farther. But they hadn’t. When she’d come out of the house just now, Jim had been there and seen the tears in her eyes and given her a hug. It was all very sweet, very chaste, very friendly. At the end of the lane, Leforte turned onto a paved two-lane country road and let the car go, tires squealing. Ellie leaned back and smiled. “Nice,” she said.

“Seemed like you could use it,” he said with his foot on the gas. The car rocketed forward.

“I suppose.” Ellie dug around in one of her pockets for her crumpled pack of cigarettes.

“Please,” Leforte said, knowing what she was looking for. “The leather.”

“Smoke and leather go together.”

“No.” He shook his head. “It just smells stale.”

She got a cigarette out anyway and, unable to locate her lighter, she reached for the car lighter and found it empty.

Leforte just shook his head.

“So how’ve you been?” Ellie asked, putting the smoke back in the pack and the pack in his door well.

He eyed her. “You’re asking me how’ve I been?”

She nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “Good. I’ve been doing a lot of work for the art museum recently.”

“Work?”

“Volunteering. Well, fund-raising actually. It’s part of getting the foundation up and running.”

Ellie was impressed, though she shouldn’t have been surprised. Leforte didn’t have the money he had because he was stupid. The art museum was a shrewd move. You couldn’t get more respectable than that in Cleveland, with a board full of heavy hitters with which to rub elbows.

She’d always suspected Leforte might be malleable, certainly a quick study. Already he was modifying himself, making himself more acceptable, and there wasn’t even a wife pulling the strings. Perhaps it was all that appealing ambition.

“So you found someone to fill that position and get the foundation up and running?” Ellie asked, leaning back farther in the seat and watching the fields, hay and barley just sprouting, edged by tulip trees in bud.

“Not really,” Leforte said. “I’m actually doing it all myself. It’s a huge job though.” He sped up. Ellie could tell he was embarrassed.

Ellie just nodded. It confirmed what she had been thinking. Leforte created that make-work foundation job to keep her in his pocket. It confirmed she’d been right to turn it down.

“The work’s important,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Art is. I’m a big fan.”

Ellie smiled and was about to remark on his previous support of the orchestra when she thought better of making a dig at him. She realized then that there were worse things than the Randy Lefortes of the world. If she were with him, in a few years no one would even remember those billboards with his face on them.

“You know,” she said sleepily, “you once asked me something.”

He raised an eyebrow but kept his eyes on the road. Silence enveloped the car, and she realized that he was not going to make this easy for her.

“About us,” she continued, but he was still quiet. “Being together.” Was it just her or did she see his jaw tighten?

He was silent still. The car maintained a steady speed. He was listening to her flail.

“And it caught me off guard at the time and I’ve been thinking about it a lot—”

“Have you?” he cut her off.

“Course,” she said.

He’d slowed the car now. “You have to know some things have changed,” he said.

“How so?” she asked.

“Or should I say
he’s
changed. Right? That’s why you’re talking about this with me?”

Ellie said nothing.

Leforte continued. “I try not to believe the stories about you. But I saw you with Selden that night at the museum. And now he’s left. It’s clear to me how you felt about him.”

In that one moment Ellie could have kissed Leforte. It was strange, she knew, but she was grateful that someone else had witnessed what she felt. In recent days she’d started to think everyone thought her a cipher.

“I saw you two together, and it looked like it was all done to me. And then the rumor mill cranked up.” Here he smiled at her and eased the car over to the side of the road. “I try not to listen, whether or not I believe what Diana Dorset says.” He pulled over in a shady spot at the base of a hill underneath a buckeye tree that hadn’t yet bloomed and next to a small creek rushing with spring rain runoff.

“I can’t marry you now. You have to understand that. Last year I thought you could do better than me, but I made my play anyway. This year—”

“You think you can,” she said, stopping him.

“Don’t be like that.” He moved toward her as if to kiss her.

She backed up. “What are you doing?”

“I thought you wanted a little more of what you’ve already had.”

“I wanted to pick up where we left off.”

“Impossible,” he said, leaning back. “Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“You use what you have.”

She leaned in close to him again, thinking he meant using her physical assets—that he wanted to be seduced. She was going to kiss him, but this time he was the one who backed off. “No,” he said. “Diana’s texts.”

Ellie’s heart quickened. “How do you know about that?”

“Betsy told me.”

Ellie almost laughed at Leforte’s casual reference to Betsy Dorset, like they were buddies, after her public sniping at him at the orchestra those months ago.

“She and I have become quite close since I’ve been shelling out for the museum,” he said. “She came to see me, wanting to hire me to advise her, though libel and defamation aren’t really my area.”

Ellie furrowed her brow at him.

“Apparently you left copies of a set of texts between her daughter-in-law and William Selden at some luncheon, some baby shower? She asked me to talk to you.”

Ellie’s heart sped. That Betsy had been exploring legal options frightened the hell out of her. Maybe she’d been too hasty letting Betsy know about the texts.

“I told her it’s not my area of expertise. But she wanted advice on how to stop you from making this public, if she could threaten you legally.”

Ellie’s stomach flipped.

“Don’t worry. There’s not much she can do as long as the texts are real. Though I have to say it’s a little shady of Selden to be sharing them with you. What kind of man does that?”

“He didn’t share them,” Ellie said, her mouth suddenly dry. “I kind of found them and forwarded them to myself and made copies.”

It was Leforte’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “So you sort of stole them.”

“It’s not like I stole his phone. He left it with me.” She was berating herself now for her stupidity snooping in Selden’s phone, forwarding the texts, in trying to—trying to what, actually, blackmail Betsy Dorset with them? Her head swam in the heat of the car. Leforte
had turned off the air when he pulled over. That wasn’t who she was. She didn’t blackmail people—especially over something as trivial and petty as her standing in Cleveland.

“Makes the law a little trickier, but in the end I don’t think it changes your situation. If those texts make the rounds on Facebook or whatever, both Diana and Selden will look awful, regardless of how they came to be in your possession. Betsy doesn’t want that.”

Ellie smirked. “No.”

Leforte continued. “It was a fascinating little psychological study, I have to say. Betsy started out concerned for her daughter-in-law—was she unhappy in her marriage? What had driven her to do this? But as we talked it became clear to me that her only real concern was the news being made public and her son being made the subject of gossip. Between you and me, I don’t think she cares a bit for her daughter-in-law.”

Ellie smirked again. “No.”

“She’s afraid of you, though. She doesn’t know what you’re going to do …” His voice trailed off.

“I’m not going to do anything.”

“No?” Leforte was watching her intently. “Why not? Betsy certainly could smooth things out for you. She could make Diana do the same.”

“Because I’m not.”

“Because it’s him,” Leforte said. “Who knew a loser like William Selden would be so irresistible to women?”

“He’s not a loser,” Ellie said.