Perfect Lies (3 page)

“I’m so happy for you!” she had cried, hugging Lark to her. But her joy was weighted with a sadness that she couldn’t immediately identify. “Is Ethan thrilled?”

“Oh, of course,” Lark told her. “He’s sure it’s going to be a boy. But I know we’re going to have another girl…. I can always tell.”

During Lark’s pregnancy with Fern, Meg felt her depression deepening, and finally faced up to what was really bothering her: This time, experiencing a birth and having a child through Lark was not enough for Meg. She wanted a baby—no, more—a good man and a family of her own. Typically, as soon as she identified a problem, she started to search for a solution. And, as usual, she welcomed her younger sister into the process. With Lark’s eager advice, Meg began to look around for an established, successful alpha male with whom to build a long-term relationship and, she hoped, a family. What she discovered, as had the multitude of single thirty-something women before her, was that once one seriously started to hunt for a man, the older, marriageable ones had pretty much become an endangered species.

There was the magazine senior editor who looked like Clint Eastwood, but who had the emotional maturity of Pee Wee Herman.

There was the television producer who, though recently divorced, spent most of his evenings with Meg talking longingly about his ex-wife and two kids.

And there was the sportscaster who advertised himself as single and available but who was not only married, Meg discovered, but appeared to have a girlfriend in every Major League city in the country.

“Ears as big as what?” Lark asked when Meg replayed for her yet another disastrous evening—this time a blind date, the cousin of a client who had been billed as “adorable.”

“Saucers. And not espresso either.”

“Doesn’t that supposedly indicate that something else is big as well?”

“No, baby, I think that’s the hands. Or feet. In any case, believe me, it was not worth sticking around to find out.”

And then Meg met Paul Stokes, and her long losing streak seemed to have finally come to an end.

“I know I always say this, but he sounds perfect for you,” Lark told her during one of their almost daily phone conversations. Ethan made fun of them for talking so much—"like teenagers, for chrissakes.” Lark, like every other happily married woman Meg knew, kept pushing her sister toward conjugal commitment, but she was as choosy about the potential mate as Meg was. “'Lawyer. Millionaire. Philanthropist.
Divorced’
—I like that last attribute the best,” Lark had said, reading from the
Wall Street Journal
profile on Paul that Meg had somewhat proudly sent her.

Yes, things were going very well until Paul invited her to the annual corporate dinner of Straithorne, Riddick, and Cowles, the firm at which he was a managing partner. Black tie at one of New York’s top restaurants. She’d been treated with bland courtesy by the men who small-talked her about the fashion industry and with almost rude curiosity by the women, almost all of them full-time wives, wanting to know where to find Donna Karan wholesale. But then, over coffee and cigars (Meg was tempted to ask for one as a joke because the whole evening seemed so humorless), the talk veered suddenly to police brutality and Meg heard Paul say something about “the liberal press stirring up trouble yet again.”

Nobody seemed to find the comment offensive. Not the woman next to her who smiled sweetly at Meg and asked her how much she’d paid for the lavender strapless Scaasi she was wearing. Nor any of the men who nodded sagely into their tobacco smoke and pointedly ignored Meg’s angry retort.

“The fact is they shot a totally innocent young man who, not coincidentally, happened to be black!”

“Meg, I forgot to tell you—no liberal flag-waving at Partners’ Dinners,” Paul had told her with an apologetic laugh and a “When will they ever learn?” shrug to his colleagues. In the taxi afterward, it had taken exactly ten seconds for her to tell Paul what a bigoted ass he was and for him to tell her what a loudmouthed, bleeding-heart cunt she was. She asked to be let out at the nearest corner—Madison and Fifty-ninth. She was so angry that she walked all the way up to her co-op at Eighty-sixth and Riverside in her three-inch black velour Susan Bennis heels. The next morning, her toes were in tatters, but her heart was intact.

She was not exactly in a party frame of mind the following night for the opening of Ethan’s exhibition at the Hannah Judson Gallery in Chelsea. Ethan was pumped up with excitement about his first Manhattan showing and, Meg decided, would probably have enough enthusiasm for everyone. It didn’t help her mood that she had promised Lark she would be bringing Paul Stokes with her to the event. She wasn’t sorry that she’d kissed the son of a bitch good-bye, but at the same time she wasn’t looking forward to disappointing Lark again.

Deciding that all she really needed to do was put in a quick appearance, she worked until past seven o’clock and took a taxi downtown from the office. When she arrived at the Hannah Judson gallery at Eighteenth Street and Twelfth Avenue that evening she was still mentally rehearsing just how she was going to explain things to her sister. She knew that she’d built Paul Stokes up in Lark’s mind, as she had in her own. That she’d been so wrong about him revealed a serious flaw in her judgment, as well as an all-too-obvious eagerness to,
this
time, make a relationship work. She had always enjoyed her role as the older, wiser sister, the dispenser of advice, the woman of the world. Now, Meg worried that Lark was starting to guess how fragile her ego could be when it came to men. Worse, she dreaded the thought that her younger sister might actually start to pity her.

She wasn’t thinking about Ethan at all.

A
t first she actually didn’t recognize the man, dressed all in black, with the thick gray-streaked blond hair and Hollywood-style stubble of beard. He stood on the far side of the dimly lit and now nearly empty gallery, holding an Ethan McGowan original white-wine glass in his right hand. His left arm moved abruptly from the waist of the tall, platinum-haired woman standing next to him and he waved eagerly to someone. To her. What had she been thinking? It was Ethan, of course. She threaded her way toward them through the forest of black aluminum pedestals displaying Ethan’s primary-colored contortions of blown glass.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.” When Ethan kissed her on the forehead as he always did, she realized why he looked so different. He wasn’t wearing his round, rimless Lennon-style eyeglasses, without which he was basically blind. Obviously he’d switched to contacts at the same time he’d shaved his thick beard to get the younger-looking sandpaper affair he sported. Well, he definitely looked hipper if that was what he wanted. Meg was tempted to laugh and call him on this obvious bit of vanity. But this show of his “art pieces,” as he proudly called them, meant so damned much to him. Despite her irritation—after all, it was ridiculous for such an already good-looking man to preen—she kept her mouth shut.

“Sorry. It’s been one of those days. I was lucky to—” She’d been glancing around the two-room gallery. There were less than a dozen people left. “Where’s Lark? And the girls?”

“Fern’s sick again. Lark decided they should all stay home.”

“Damn,” Meg said, thinking first of herself. She’d been looking forward to having Brook and Phoebe stay with her. Ethan, Lark, and the baby Fern were to stay at the Windsor. They rarely came down to the city from Red River because of Lark’s feelings about the pollution and noise in Manhattan. But whenever Meg was able to get the two older girls to herself, they had an hilarious free-for-all. Meg delighted in indulging them with the Big Macs and Disney videos they were forbidden at home.

“But Fern’s okay?” Meg added.

“Of course. You know Lark.” Ethan smiled and shrugged. Yes, they both knew Lark. The original mother hen. Squawking with alarm at the least sign of danger to her chicks. Especially the youngest. Meg returned Ethan’s conspiratorial smile, thinking that he’d been right about the beard. He had a good strong jaw line and chin.

“Hannah, this is my sister-in-law, Meg Hardwick.” Ethan took a step back so that Meg now faced the woman whose waist Ethan had been holding when Meg first arrived.

The woman’s appearance gave her pause. Although Meg knew she herself was considered beautiful, she also knew that a lot of her allure was the result of hard work, an excellent fashion sense, and utter self-confidence. She started with what God had given her—a rather typical, fair-haired American prettiness—and augmented it with every trick known to woman. It took a good two hours every other week for Manuel to maintain her hair’s deceptively casual, honey-colored look. A daily forty-minute work-out had become a form of religion. And so accustomed was she to seeing herself in full-court makeup, that she was often surprised to notice how wan and insignificant she looked in the mornings when her face was bare.

Hannah, on the other hand, though easily ten years Meg’s senior, was to the real thing. She was innately, hauntingly beautiful, with almond-shaped eyes and high, rounded cheekbones. Her hair, a shock of silver cut short against her skull, emphasized the expressiveness of her brows and the extraordinary sea green of her irises. Her long, athletic body was tailored in a severely cut black wool suit, the top two buttons left open to offer glimpses of the delicate apricot-colored lace of her camisole. If there was one flaw, it was her mouth. Her lips were thin and flat, and she did nothing to disguise the fact.

“Ah, yes … The beautiful Hardwick sisters,” Hannah’s handshake was strong to the point of pain, her voice plummy with lockjaw snobbishness:
Haaaawdwick.

“You make us sound like a song-and-dance team,” Meg said, laughing.

“Well from what Ethan tells me you two
could
do just about anything. I’ve heard of your agency. Philip Jonas is a dear friend of mine.”

Meg’s biggest and most demanding account was Jonas Sportswear.
You’re not really dressed unless you’re in a Jonas.
She’d met the multimillionaire chairman Philip Jonas only twice in the five years she’d handled the account, and both times he’d been dismissive to the point of being rude.

“Brilliant mind,” Meg said, her standard comment for people impossible to work with.

“Oh, Jonas is full of crap. But he does know how to pick talent. He has some wonderful designers. And I think your work is just extraordinary.”

“Why, thanks.” Meg responded well to flattery, even when she felt—as in this case—that it was condescending and possibly insincere. She noticed that the gallery was empty now except for the wait staff, who were starting to clean up. “I’m sorry I ended up being so late,” Meg apologized, though it occurred to her that perhaps the crowd had left a little early.

“How did the opening go?” she asked, turning to Ethan. The contacts gave his eyes a startling blueness.

“Great. At least, that’s what Hannah was telling me when you came in. I sold only two pieces.”

“Sales are not the point,” Hannah said. “Notice is. And just about everyone of value was here. The
Times.
The
Voice. Paper.
By representing you, I’ve told them you’re important. Someone to watch. Even if they don’t understand your work—even if they don’t particularly like it—they’ll have to
notice
it.And once your name’s in the right kind of print, sales follow. Cause and effect. Not to worry, darling.”

“I’m not worried, Hannah, believe me. This has been the most amazing night of my life. I suppose I should attempt to be more sophisticated and urbane about it, but screw that. Just to see them all out there, finally…”

Ah, his sculptures. They were crafted from blown glass in what seemed to Meg an endless and arduous process of turning and firing, cooling and shaping. Ethan made his living selling the table glasses and paperweights that he and his assistants Clint and Janine Lindbergh turned out every morning in the Red River studio. But his heart and soul went into the sculptures—free-form masses of swirling glass that he worked on every afternoon. He’d been at it for more than a decade now, honing his style, perfecting techniques, mastering the problems of pigmentation and balance. Meg was vaguely aware that over the past three years Ethan felt he’d made some kind of breakthrough. That the pieces he turned out were—as far as the process would allow—everything he wanted them to be.

Once, years ago, when Ethan had first got the studio up and running, Meg endured one of his ardent dissertations on glassblowing—how it all begins with the biscuit-shaped piece of colorless crystal, called a gob, which is flamed and transferred to the blowing rod, or pontil, and then placed in one of the gas-fired furnaces and periodically removed to be turned, tempered, blown, and shaped. What happened next depended on what was being made—water tumblers, paperweights, wineglasses, or (and of course this was what Ethan really cared about) a section of one of Ethan’s flamework sculptures.

“Glass is totally unforgiving and limiting,” Ethan had explained. “One mistake—one crack or fissure—and days of planning and work can go down the drain. But that’s what makes it exciting as well. The limits. The demands. I mean, you can do any fucking thing you want with oil or acrylic, stone, wood. But glass—it’s molten, mercurial, dangerous.”

Meg would never admit this to another soul, but she thought Ethan’s sculptures were hideous. If anything, they reminded her of those long, thin, colored balloons, twisted into shapes that were supposed to resemble schnauzers or giraffes, that were handed out at county fairs and children’s parties. Except that Ethan’s pieces were larger, grosser, and made of glass. That anyone would actually want to display them—let alone buy one—was beyond Meg’s comprehension. But then so was the work of Basquiat and Clemente, not to mention practically the whole school of abstract expressionism. Meg knew she was no judge of modern art—she could only assume that Ethan’s work fell roughly into that category—so she’d learned long ago to keep her unvarnished opinions to herself.

Ethan had walked over to one of his pieces—a towering mass of oranges and reds that looked to Meg vaguely like a giant torch.