“And never offered to pay for the cleaning,” Anne said. “It cost me four hundred dollars to have that cushion reupholstered.” She raised her eyebrows, and Lyon crossed the name off the list.
When the main course came, they moved on to the additions: new clients, new friends, new spouses, the parents of Jenn’s new friends. A new neighbor in Southampton, a writer whose third book had been a surprise bestseller, the model who had been tapped to represent Gillian’s new line of anti-aging products (only in her late twenties and already retired from the runway), a schoolmate of Lyon’s who had just moved from London to New York.
“Do you think we’ll still be giving this party thirty years from now?” asked Anne.
“As long as I’ve got the strength to open a champagne bottle,” said Lyon. “I picture you exactly the same, with a pack of grandchildren.”
“How many grandchildren?”
“Three,” Lyon said. “Two girls and one boy.”
Anne gave him a sad smile. “Only three?”
“Darling,” Lyon said, “not tonight, we’re having such a lovely time.” Anne wanted another child, and another after that. Lyon wanted no more children.
When the second bottle of wine arrived, the cuts began. A couple who had argued publicly for three years in a row. A man who had taken out a vial of cocaine right in front of the building’s grandfatherly elevator operator. Various ex-wives and ex-husbands. Anne and Lyon had a two-year rule about divorces: they never took sides publicly, and they continued to invite both halves of the couple for two years following a messy divorce.
At the end of two years, a decision was made. Which one had they managed to stay friends with? Which one had invited them to a party or a weekend in the country? Which one still did business with Lyon? Which one still did charity work with Anne?
Almost always, it was the man who stayed on the list. The women just seemed to drift away. They moved up to Woodstock and fell in love with carpenters. They went to Europe and found younger men. They resettled in California and discovered yoga. They moved back to their hometowns and got jobs with the local newspapers. A few stayed in New York. They got new haircuts and redecorated their bedrooms. Anne saw them for lunch, but rarely in the evenings.
They were finished by the time the coffee arrived.
“I was thinking, maybe we could scale back a bit this year,” Lyon said. “On the little things that no one really notices.”
“Such as?”
“We don’t necessarily have to serve top-shelf liquor all night long.”
“Lyon, liquor is the one thing everybody does notice.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll think of something. This party has gotten so expensive.”
“I thought we were having a good year,” Anne said.
“We are, we are, a fabulous year. But we’ve got a huge tax bill coming in, and don’t forget the balloon payment on the mortgage.”
“I thought we set that money aside in August,” Anne said. She remembered Lyon calling their stockbroker from Southampton. A stock he had bought the year before had tripled in value. Lyon had given the broker orders to sell and then put the money aside to cover the balloon payment. They had gone out to dinner to celebrate, and taken along four friends, and ordered several bottles of expensive wine. Anne could still picture Lyon laying eight crisp new hundred-dollar bills on the black-and-white-checked tablecloth.
“We did, but then something else came up. An incredible opportunity, this little electronics firm I heard about. We just have to sit tight for a few months.”
Anne wanted to know more but was afraid to ask. Years ago she had almost lost him over money. Whenever the subject of money came up, his mouth tightened, and Anne changed the subject.
When she was younger, she believed that love conquered all and that marriages failed only when the love ran out. But their love for each other had run out long ago, and still their marriage hummed along comfortably in second gear.
She couldn’t point to anything in particular. It had happened gradually over the years, with every affair Lyon had, with every long absence. She stopped waiting up for him to come home from the airport. He stopped showing up with flowers.
Sometimes she wondered whether people still whispered about it. It had happened so many years ago, but in New York no one ever forgot where your money came from.
Originally the money had all been Anne’s. She had invested her Gillian earnings in the stock market and had a brilliant run of luck. Lyon was making a decent living as a writer, enough to be comfortable, but not nearly enough to take on a wife and family. Anne desperately wanted to marry him, but she knew he would be too proud to live on his wife’s earnings.
So she had arranged to loan him money in secret. She loaned a large sum of money to a friend, who in turned loaned it to Lyon, and it was with this money that Lyon bought his share in the agency and made himself rich. The angriest she had ever seen Lyon was the day he discovered that his seed money had come from her. By then they were already married and Anne was pregnant with Jenn.
Lyon paid her back, but their marriage was never the same. On some level she had bought him, bought herself a husband the way other women buy a new face or a new car. After he wrote her the last check, they never really talked about money again. Lyon took care of the finances, and once a year she signed their joint tax return. She had credit cards, and a modest savings account that covered the mortgage for the Southampton house, and a checking account into which Lyon deposited three thousand dollars a month.
It wasn’t love that made a marriage go. It was money. Sometimes when they were watching a movie together and the couple on screen declared passionate love for each other, they both had to turn away. Anne would reach for an emery board, Lyon would reach for his drink.
The waiter brought over the check. Lyon folded the guest list into his coat pocket.
“We don’t have to give this party,” Anne said. “We can go to London instead. Or even just to Southampton if you like. A quiet family Christmas would be just fine with me.”
“Nonsense,” Lyon said. “It isn’t anything like that.” He reached for her hand and kissed her on the cheek. “Nothing you need to worry about. Don’t frown, it will give you lines.”
She smiled, though of course that gave you lines, too.
She looked around the restaurant. Friends waved from a far table. Wherever Anne and Lyon went, people knew them, people noticed them. They were a fabulous New York couple. They had a fabulous New York apartment where they gave fabulous New York parties. Maybe there were couples with happier marriages, couples who still loved each other the way they had on their wedding day.
But Anne thought of everyone she knew, she thought of every one of the two hundred people on the piece of paper in Lyon’s pocket, and she couldn’t name a single one.
And then came the telephone call that turned everything upside down.
Anne was lingering in the bathtub, even though the water was cooling. Lyon had just left for the office, and the maid was clearing the breakfast dishes. The caterers would arrive at ten, the florist at eleven. At noon two people from the salon would come by to do her hair and nails. It was a perk from her Gillian Girl days that she had come to rely on, even though it cost a fortune; she loved private service, especially on a busy day like this.
New Year’s Eve! In twelve hours the apartment would be packed and noisy. Anne practiced the deep breathing she had learned in yoga class and tried to ignore the ringing telephone.
The maid knocked on the bathroom door. Anne’s lawyer was calling, and he said it was urgent.
The lawyer sounded nervous. Had Anne signed the papers yet? The documents needed to be signed and notarized before the end of the year in order to avoid a big tax payment. Was she planning to come by the office and drop them off? Had Lyon explained everything to her? Did she have any questions?
“Howard, forgive me,” Anne said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Ther
e was a long pause where neither of them spoke. Anne stood in her bedroom, shivering against the cold. She counted her wet footprints in the thick green carpeting: two, four, six, eight. She listened to Howard inhaling at the other end of the line.
“Perhaps I had better come by. I can be there in an hour.”
“Just tell me,” Anne said. “It’s bad news, isn’t it?”
The money was gone. Lyon had taken too many risks in the stock market, and they had taken a tremendous loss in the October crash. There was a huge mortgage payment due in January on the Fifth Avenue apartment, and the only way to cover it was to dip into Jenn’s trust fund.
“I don’t understand. I thought we were having a great year,” Anne said. She remembered their trip to the Hamptons over the long Thanksgiving weekend. The signs of the stock market crash were everywhere. Abandoned construction sites where people had run out of the money needed to finish their houses. “For Sale” signs on land that had been bought with confidence just a few months earlier. Properties with untended lawns and ragged landscaping where the owners could no longer afford a gardening service. Why hadn’t Lyon said anything?
Anne hung up and spent the next hour poring through files in Lyon’s study. There it was, in brokerage and bank statements going back to the beginning of the year. Lyon had methodically sold off their blue-chip holdings and invested in riskier stocks. In the first half of the year they had seen enormous gains, and with each month Lyon grew more daring, dipping into their savings accounts and buying more stock on margin. Then, in October, it all fell apart.
Anne looked at their November statements. She scanned their portfolio for the sturdy, conservative stocks she had brought into the marriage. All that remained of the stocks she had bought with her Gillian Girl earnings was less than five thousand dollars of AT&T.
She took out a calculator and did the arithmetic. There was her inheritance from her mother and her aunt Amy, which had been put into a trust fund for Jenn. There was the house in Southampton, which in four months they would own free and clear. There was the apartment on Fifth Avenue, which still carried a big mortgage. There was Lyon’s share of the agency, which could be converted to cash only if he sold out his interest to his partners. Paintings, jewelry, a couple of fur coats, the nice Persian carpets, some very good furniture: even at market prices, these wouldn’t fetch enough to keep them going.
Anne thought back to the nights Lyon had been tense at the dinner table, to the hushed telephone conversations he held behind closed doors. She had assumed he had a new girlfriend, and she had never asked him whether anything was wrong.
But everything was wrong. They were broke. They were ruined. And in less than ten hours, everyone they knew would be coming over to wish them a happy New Year.
It was a marvelous party. Not even midnight, and already people were dancing. In the dining room, furniture had been pushed back against the walls, and an old Junior Walker song was playing. Lyon was holding court in the living room, telling stories from his early days on Broadway. In the kitchen, the caterers were packing up the remains of dinner and laying out dozens of rented champagne flutes on silver-toned serving platters.
By the time Lyon had come home, the party staff had arrived and Anne was busy checking on details. They hadn’t had a moment alone all night, which was just fine with her. She hadn’t decided what she wanted to say or do. She hadn’t signed the papers. She supposed Lyon would want to sell the house in Southampton, her beautiful house, and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing it.
Anne wandered from room to room, chatting with guests. The party was more crowded than usual; who were all these people she didn’t know? She felt her problems following behind her, like a little shadow she didn’t have to look at or even really think about. Ah, Valium. Drug of valor. She had tucked four yellow tablets into the cuff of her glittery silver sweater before the first guest arrived, just before the maid had gone around to all the medicine cabinets, packing the pharmaceuticals into a shoebox that was now hidden under the bed.
In the study, four women with European accents were discussing the difference between Americans and the French.
“But American mothers tell their daughters nothing about marriage,” someone was saying. “American girls think marriage is all about orgasms!”
“American girls are not very practical, which is why they are always so disappointed.”
“American girls are practical, but about other things.”
“Such as?”
“Shoes and underwear. You see them wearing running shoes right on Madison Avenue! And then the cotton underwear, the white cotton underwear!” Everyone laughed.
“But I’m serious. My American niece, she has no idea how to choose a husband. They sent her to Princeton, where there are plenty of nice rich boys from good families. Did she find a husband? No, of course not. And did my sister-in-law ever encourage her? No, of course not. So now the girl is thirty, and she lives in a little apartment on Third Avenue with three cats. Hopeless!”
Anne went into the bathroom and unfolded the cuff of her sweater. Fabulous, how small pills were now, how much easier they were to hide. The pills had little V-shaped holes in the middle, and the first time Anne had seen one she had mistaken the hole for a heart. Just like me, she thought now, something small with its heart cut out.
In the guest bedroom, Stella was comforting a woman who looked as if she had just finished having a good cry. Stella patted the bed beside her and offered Anne a cigarette.
“He’s a shit,” said Stella. “It’s really that simple. You could go into therapy for ten years if you wanted, but I’m telling you in the end that’s all it is. It’s not your fault. You married an asshole.”
“I’m forty-five!” Marianne said. She turned to Anne. “I hope you never turn forty-five. You have no idea what it’s like. No one warns you.”
“You don’t look forty-five,” Anne said, “Really, not at all.”
“Well, I am. Do you know any forty-five-year-old single women? Do you have any idea what it’s like? I’ll be dating grandfathers with bad breath and potbellies. You know what I am? I’m some old geezer’s third-wife material.”
Stella shook her head. “You’re getting all worked up. You told me years ago you wanted a divorce.”
“That was years ago, when everything was different! And I should have left him years ago. I knew someday he’d have a fucking midlife crisis and dump me, I don’t know why I waited. I could have left him when I was still in my early thirties. I’d be remarried by now, I’d have found some nice guy and had a couple of children and started over.”
“Men,” Stella said.
“Men,” Marianne said.
“Men,” said Anne.
“They think life is nothing but a big game,” Stella said.
“And they make the rules,” Marianne said.
And then they go and break them all, Anne thought.
In the hallway, a handsome man with brown hair and a gray mustache grabbed her by the elbow. “You still owe me a dance from last year,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten.”
Anne smiled, trying to remember which woman he had arrived with. Keith ran the news division at one of the networks and had a house in Sag Harbor. Every year he brought a different date to the party, and every year he flirted with Anne.
“Yes,” she said. “But first I have to peek in on my daughter.” Jenn was sleeping calmly through the noise, one hand tucked under her pillow.
One more pill. There were all sorts of new things out now, but she still preferred Valium. It was the Grace Kelly of sedatives: both modern and classic at once.
It was three A.M. before the party really thinned out. Unless one lived within walking distance or had a private car, getting home would be a chore; there were never enough taxis on New Year’s Eve. At four there were still six guests left. Arthur and Stella, collapsed against the sofa cushions. A young couple they knew from Southampton, two lawyers who could not stop talking about t
heir new apartment on Riverside Drive. A woman named Pamela, whom Lyon had been flirting with all night—at one point they had gone out together to buy cigarettes and not come back for half an hour—but Anne was too tired to care. And someone named Gregory, who seemed to be Pamela’s date and was annoyingly peppy, considering the hour.
Anne brought out coffee. They gossiped about the party … who had danced, who hadn’t, who had gotten too drunk, who was wearing clothes just a little too sexy … and picked at leftover cookies. Arthur dozed off and began to snore lightly.
“Well,” Stella said. “This was the best party ever, and now it’s time to go home.”
Everyone stood up. Stella and Arthur had a car waiting downstairs; did anyone need a ride? They discussed the geography of who lived where. Stella and Arthur were headed to the San Remo in the West Seventies, yes, they’d be happy to give a ride to the couple on Riverside in the Eighties. Pamela’s date also lived on the Upper West Side, and yes, there was room for him, but of course he had to see Pamela home to her apartment off Gramercy Park, in the opposite direction.
Anne cleared the coffee cups, and when she returned to the living room a plan had been made, and people were pulling on their coats. Lyon had a coat on, too: the five West Siders would pack themselves into one limousine, and Lyon would see Pamela into a taxi.
Goodbye! Goodbye! Happy New Year! Happy New Year! Anne was in her pajamas within minutes. She sat on her bed and smoked a cigarette. It was delicious to be alone, and she suddenly wasn’t one bit tired.
She reached under the bed for the shoeboxes full of things the maid had hidden there, because you never really knew about guests, even your friends: the pills, the better jewelry, the zippered leather case with their passports and credit cards.
She laid the jewelry across her pillow. Most of the pieces represented something she and Lyon had celebrated together: a Tony Award, a movie deal, a stock split, a big client signed. All of Lyon’s biggest triumphs were recorded here, in gold and platinum and precious stones.
Some of it, she knew, was what Stella called “guilt baubles”—those seemingly spontaneous “no special occasion” gifts that had perhaps marked the end of a complicated affair. Anne had always wondered whether husbands regretted these later: how much harder it was for a man to forget a mistress when his wife wore a glittery reminder around her wrist.