“All men are like that,” James said wisely. “I never tell my wife I love her, either.”
“But you’re married,” Lola protested. “She knows you love her.”
“It’s complicated,” James said, sitting back on the couch and crossing one leg over the other. “It’s always complicated between men and women.”
“But the other night,” Lola began. “You and your wife—you seem so happy together.”
“We have our moments,” James said, although at that moment, he couldn’t remember any. He recrossed his legs, hoping she couldn’t see his hard-on.
“Well,” she said, jumping up, “I’ve got to meet Philip.”
James stood reluctantly. Was the visit over so soon? And just when he thought he was making progress.
“Thank you for bringing me your book,” she said. “I’ll start reading it this afternoon. And I’ll let you know what I think.”
“Great,” James said, thrilled that she wanted to see him again.
At the door, he attempted to kiss her on the cheek. It was an awkward moment, and she turned her head away, so his kiss landed somewhere in her hair. Overcome by the sensation of her hair on his face, he took a step backward, tripping on the corner of the rug.
“Are you okay?” she asked, grabbing his arm.
He adjusted his glasses. “I’m fine.” He smiled.
“See you soon.” She waved and closed the door, then turned back into the apartment. It was cute the way James Gooch was so obviously interested in her. Naturally, she didn’t return his feelings, but James was the kind of man who might do anything she wanted. And he was a bestselling author. He might come in very handy in the future.
Meanwhile, James stood waiting for the elevator, feeling his descending hard-on poke against his pants. Philip Oakland was a fool, he thought fiercely, thinking of Lola’s breasts. Poor kid, she probably had no idea what she was getting into.
On the floor above, Annalisa Rice placed a large red stamp on the corner of an envelope and passed it to her neighbor. Six women, including Connie Brewer, sat around her dining room table, stuffing envelopes for the King David charity ball. The King David Foundation was the Brewers’ personal charity, and had grown from a dinner party at a Wall Street restaurant into a multimedia extravaganza held in the Armory. All the new Wall Streeters wanted to know Sandy Brewer, wanted to rub shoulders with him and do business, and were willing to pay the price by supporting his cause. Connie had asked Annalisa to be a cochair. The requirements were simple: She had to buy two tables at fifty thousand dollars each—for which Paul had happily written a check—and be involved in the planning.
Annalisa had thrown herself into the work with the same passion she’d brought to being a lawyer. She’d studied the financials—last year, the event had raised thirty million dollars, an extraordinary amount, and this year they hoped to raise five million dollars more. She went to tastings and examined floral arrangements, went over lists of invitees, and sat through hours of committee meetings. The work wasn’t exciting, but it gave her a purpose beyond the apartment and kept her mind off Paul. Ever since the trip to China, where Paul and Sandy had done business during the day while Connie and Annalisa were driven around in a chauffeured Mercedes with a guide who took them on tours of temples and museums, Paul had become increasingly secretive and withdrawn. When he was home, he spent most of his time in his office on lengthy phone calls or making graphs on his computer. He refused to discuss his business, saying only that he and Sandy were on the verge of doing a groundbreaking deal with the Chinese that would change the international stock market and make them billions of dollars.
“What do you know about this China deal?” Annalisa asked Connie one afternoon when they were first back in New York.
“I stopped asking those questions a long time ago,” Connie said, flipping open her tiny laptop. “Sandy tried to explain it a few times, and I gave up.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, not knowing what your husband really does?” Annalisa asked.
“No,” Connie replied, studying a list of names for the benefit.
“What if it’s illegal?” Annalisa said. She didn’t know why this thought crossed her mind.
“Sandy would never do anything illegal. And neither would Paul. He’s your husband, Annalisa. You love him, and he’s wonderful.”
Spending so much time with Connie had given Annalisa a new perspective on her character. Connie was naively romantic, a simple optimist who admired her husband and believed she could get everything she wanted with sugar as opposed to vinegar. She took Sandy’s money for granted, as if she’d never considered what life would be like if she had less. Her attitude was due, Annalisa discovered, not to arrogance but to a lack of complexity. From the age of six, Connie’s life had been dedicated to one thing—dance—and having become a professional dancer at eighteen, she’d never finished high school. Connie wasn’t dumb, but she knew everything by rote. When it came to analysis, she was lost, like a child who has memorized the names of the states but can’t picture where they are in relation to one another.
Having the stronger personality, Annalisa had quickly come to dominate Connie, who seemed to accept Annalisa’s alpha status as a given. She made sure Annalisa was invited to lunches and the nightly cocktail parties in boutiques; she gave her the names of the people who would come to her house to cut and style her hair and perform waxing, manicures, and pedicures—“so you don’t have to be seen in public with that tissue between your toes,” Connie said—and even highlighting. Connie was obsessed with her own image and assumed Annalisa was as well, printing out photographs of Annalisa from the society websites she checked every morning. “There was a great picture of you in Women’s Wear Daily today,” Connie would crow with childish excitement. Or “I saw the best pictures of us from the perfume launch last night.” Then she would dutifully ask if Annalisa wanted her to messenger the prints to her apartment. “It’s okay, Connie, I can look them up myself,” Annalisa would say. Nevertheless, two hours later, the doorman would buzz and an envelope would be delivered upstairs. Annalisa would look at the photos and put them in a drawer. “Do you really care about these things?” she’d asked Connie one day.
“Of course,” Connie had said. “Don’t you?”
“Not really,” Annalisa said. Connie looked hurt, and Annalisa felt bad, having inadvertently dismissed one of Connie’s great pleasures in life. And Connie took such pride in the fact that Annalisa was her friend, boasting to the other women about how Annalisa had written a scholarly book in college and appeared on Charlie Rose, how Annalisa had met the president, and how she had worked in Washington. In turn, Annalisa had become protective of Connie’s feelings. Connie was such a tiny thing, reminding Annalisa of a fairy with her small bones and graceful hands. She loved everything sparkly and pretty and pink and was always nipping into Harry Winston or Lalaounis. Displaying her recent jewelry acquisitions, she would insist that Annalisa try on a yellow diamond ring or a necklace of colored sapphires, pressing Annalisa to borrow the piece.
“No,” Annalisa always said firmly, handing the jewelry back. “I’m not going to walk around wearing a ring worth half a million dollars. What if something happened?”
“But it’s insured,” Connie would say, as if insurance mitigated one from all responsibility.
Now, sitting in he
r dining room in her grand penthouse apartment, stuffing envelopes with Connie and the other women on the committee, Annalisa glanced around and realized they were like children working on a craft project. She placed another stamp on another envelope as the women chitchatted about the things women always talked about—their children and their husbands, their homes, clothes, hair, a piece of gossip from the night before—the only difference being the scale of their lives. One woman was debating sending her daughter to boarding school in Switzerland; another was building a house on a private island in the Caribbean and was urging the other women to do the same “so they could all be together.” Then one of the women brought up the story in the latest W that had dominated the conversation of this clique for the past three weeks. The story had been a roundup of possible socialites who might take the place of the legendary Mrs. Houghton, and Annalisa had been named third in the running. The story was complimentary, describing Annalisa as the “flame-haired beauty from Washington who had taken New York by storm,” but Annalisa found it embarrassing. Every time she went out, someone mentioned it, and the story had increased her visibility so that when she appeared at an event, the photographers shouted her name, insisting that she stop and pose and turn. It was harmless, but it freaked Paul out.