“I never needed you. And especially not for your money. Frankly, Lyne, your money is not that interesting.”
“And yours is?” Lyne said, refusing to take her seriously. “Are you saying that your money is more interesting than my money?”
“It’s more interesting to me,” she said sulkily. She squirmed in her seat. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. It is about the money. I don’t want to be with a man who has as much money as you do. Because it’s all about you. You keep trying to drag me into your world, when I’m perfectly happy with the world I’ve made for myself.”
“Well,” Lyne said. “I don’t really know how to respond to that.”
“Look,” she said, trying to explain. “It’s like this. Your life is like a big Broadway show. And my life is like a smaller, off-Broadway show. It might not be as big, but it’s my show, and it’s just as interesting as your show. Us trying to be together is like trying to combine the two shows. There’s only one result: the little show will get eaten up and absorbed by the big show. The big show might be happy, but the little show would be miserable. The little show wouldn’t be able to live with itself . . .”
“I thought you were a fashion designer,” Lyne said, grinning.
She smiled sarcastically. Would the man ever give up? “I know you know what I’m saying . . .”
“What I’m hearing is that you seem to think I’m a Broadway show. You’ve got to speak plain English to me, babe. I’m the guy who doesn’t get subtleties, remember?”
He patted her hand triumphantly. Lyne’s stubborn inability to sense other people’s feelings was something she’d berated him about the week before, and now he was trying to be clever and turn it around on her.
“The problem is, how can I be a successful woman when I’m with an even more successful man?” she asked. “I can’t. It’s like my success doesn’t count.”
“Is that what this is about?” Lyne asked, smirking. “I thought that was what all you women wanted. Being with a man who was more successful than you are. Isn’t that what this whole big stink for women has been about for the last twenty years? Successful women who can’t find men because there aren’t enough men who are more successful than they are, and the few who are, don’t want to be with them? Isn’t the big complaint that most successful guys want to be with bimbos? So considering all that, you ought to be happy, kiddo. You grabbed the brass ring, and the brass ring is named Lyne Bennett.”
The gall of the man! she thought, looking at him, outraged. “That thinking is so early nineties, Lyne. I don’t know any successful women who think like that. Most of the successful women I know want to be with men who are less successful . . .”
“So they can boss them around?”
“No. Because they don’t want to be bossed.” She sat back in the seat. “It’s an unavoidable fact that the person who has the most money in the relationship has the control.”
“That may be,” Lyne said, “but if they’re a decent person, they never let the other person know.”
She looked at him, startled. For all his swagger, there were moments when Lyne had unexpected flashes of decency. Maybe she did judge him too harshly . . . after all, it wasn’t his fault he was rich. It wasn’t necessarily a personality flaw.
“I hear what you’re saying,” he said. “You want me to come into your world. So why don’t you take me up to that house in the country you’re always talking about.”
“Okay, I will,” she said. “But my whole house is about the size of your living room. Probably smaller.”
“Are you saying that I’m a snob?” Lyne asked with pretend horror.
“I’m saying you’ll probably be bored out of your skull. There’s nothing there—you can’t even get decent cheese.”
“Funny,” he said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t planning to go for the cheese.”
Taking Lyne to her country house was a scenario Victory had been hoping to avoid. Her little cottage, not much bigger than 1,500 square feet, was her sanctuary, located in a remote hamlet in northern Connecticut that boasted a bakery, a post office, a general store, and a gas station. It wasn’t the least bit glamorous; there were no parties to go to, not even a decent restaurant within miles. But that’s what she liked about it. When she went to the country, she wore old clothing and glasses, and sometimes wouldn’t wash her hair for days. She looked at bugs and studied birds through a pair of binoculars, consulting a field guide on the different kinds of woodpeckers. The house sat in the middle of nine acres, and had a tiny pool and a pond. At night, she would listen to the throaty mating call of frogs. It could be, she imagined, intensely boring, but she was never bored there. Who could be, with all that nature around? But would Lyne Bennett understand that? Not likely. He would come in wearing one of his thousand-dollar Etro cashmere sweaters, and he would ruin it all.
But maybe, she thought, that was the solution. Lyne would see the real Victory, and he wouldn’t be interested anymore.
Lyne wanted Bumpy to drive them up on Friday night, but Victory refused. “We’re going in my car, and I’m driving.”
Lyne looked slightly shocked when she pulled up in front of his building in her PT Cruiser, but he didn’t say anything, instead making a great show of fastening his seat belt and pushing the seat back, as if bracing himself for the ride ahead. “So I guess if you sell your company, you’ll probably buy another car,” he said pointedly.
“I thought about it,” she said, pulling out into the traffic, “but I’m a pretty practical person at heart. I mean, a car is really about vanity, isn’t it? It’s not an investment—it depreciates as soon as you drive it off the lot. You can’t sell a car for what you paid for it, like jewelry or furniture or rugs.”
“My little mogul,” Lyne said, grasping onto the dashboard as she swerved through traffic.
“I like to keep in touch with what’s important.”
“All women do, don’t they? It’s one of those boring rules about being a woman. Why not keep in touch with what’s frivolous?”
“That’s why I have you,” she said.