“He’s been neutralized,” Nico said. She looked at the top of Seymour’s head and felt an emotion resembling love. “I’m going to buy you a tie. To wear to the premiere tonight.”
“I’ve got plenty of ties. You don’t need to do that.”
“I want to,” she said, thinking, “Seymour, I love you. But I’m not in love with you.” For a moment, she tried to imagine being in love with Seymour, but somehow, it just didn’t fit. “I’ll take Katrina to school today,” she said suddenly. “And I might have to go back to the office after the premiere, so I’ll send a car for you that you can keep all evening.” She stood and picked up her plate. Seymour looked up and smiled nonchalantly. “Have a good day,” he said. “I want to make arrangements to see some of these town houses this weekend. Can you do it on Saturday afternoon?”
“Sure,” she said. She went out of the room, suspecting that if she had been “in love” with Seymour, their lives would have been much messier.
* * *
IT WAS COLD OUTSIDE that day; twenty-four degrees, and it was only December first! The air had a white expectancy, as if something wonderful were about to happen. At the bottom of the steps, idling at the curb, was Nico’s new car and driver. When she’d been the editor in chief of Bonfire, she’d used town cars, but now as the CEO and president of Verner publishing, the company had leased a car for her (pretty much any car of her choice, as long as it was brand new—that was for insurance purposes) with a driver who was on twenty-four-hour call. When she got old, she thought, when she was seventy or eighty—decades away, but not that far; the decades could go so quickly now—she would look back and think, “I had my own car and driver once. A silver BMW 760Li Sedan with a dove-gray interior. The driver’s name was Dimitri and he had shiny black hair that was like patent leather.” Or perhaps, at seventy or eighty, she would be a grande old dame, still rich, still good-looking, and maybe still working like V
ictor Matrick, and driving around in her old silver BMW like those fabulous women you saw at the ballet luncheon and still having her good friends. How wonderful it would be to say “We’ve known each other for nearly fifty years.” How wonderful it would be to always have your life.
She went down the steps and got into the car. It was toasty warm. “Good morning Mrs. O’Neilly,” Dimitri said heartily, with his old-world charm. He was Greek and handsome, married with two children nearly in college, and he lived across the river in New Jersey. There was something about Dimitri (the fact that he’d been born in another country, perhaps) that always made her think of him as being middle-aged and older than she, but she suspected he was actually younger.
“Good morning, Dimitri,” she said warmly. “We have to wait for a minute. My daughter is coming. We’re going to drop her off at school.”
“Very good. I am always happy to see Miss Katrina,” Dimitri said, nodding enthusiastically, and in a few seconds, Katrina came out of the town house, tripping lightly down the stairs. She was wearing a white wool coat with toggle buttons that Seymour had picked out for her, and on her head was a huge fluffy white hat, that Nico hadn’t seen before.
“Hello!” Katrina exclaimed, jumping onto the backseat and filling the car with the magical freshness of youth.
“Is that a new hat?” Nico asked.
Katrina shrugged. “Victory sent it to the house yesterday. I think it was for you, but I knew you wouldn’t wear it ’cause you wouldn’t want to mess up your hair. So I took it. You don’t mind, do you, Mommy?”
“Of course not,” Nico said. “It looks stunning on you.”
“It’s terribly bling and hip-hop and sophisticated too, don’t you think? Sort of like Audrey Hepburn,” Katrina said, turning her head from side to side in order for Nico to appreciate the full effect. “Do you think it will snow today?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It feels like it, doesn’t it? I hope it does. I hope it’s the first day of snow. Everyone loves it so—it makes people happy.”
“And miserable later,” Nico laughed.
“But it’s the first snow that matters. It’s a reminder that it can snow, after all.”
Yes . . . yes, Nico thought, nodding at her daughter. Thank goodness for the first snow, it was a reminder—no matter how old you became and how much you’d seen, things could still be new if you were willing to believe they still mattered.
Katrina suddenly turned to her, frowning. “Mother?” she asked, rubbing the top of the leather on the console between them. “You and Daddy are . . . happy, aren’t you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”
She shrugged. “It’s just that . . . someone said they saw a blind item . . .” She lowered her voice, glancing at the back of Dimitri’s head. “In the Post. It made it sound like . . . like you were having an affair.”
For a second, the world was collapsing around her, the bare black trees in the sidewalk toppling into the street, the pretty redbrick town houses crumbling in front of her eyes. “A blind item?” she asked.
“You know, Mother. They do them all the time in Page Six. They don’t say the name, but it sounded like you.”
“Did you see it?” Nico asked evenly, the world beginning to right itself.
“Someone showed it to me at school. A couple of days ago.”
“I never saw it,” Nico said reassuringly, as if the fact that she hadn’t seen it must mean that it wasn’t true. “Those blind items could be anyone. They’re probably completely made up.”
“It said the woman was having an affair with a ‘hot male model who was eager to trade in his underwear for boy-toy status.’ ”
“That’s just ridiculous, Kat,” she said, not wanting to sound too defensive. Why had Kat memorized that line? she wondered. And what were children doing reading the New York Post, and especially Page Six? But of course, all the kids her age were obsessed with status and gossip.