Then Came You Read online

  Even when my father was technically attached, it didn’t stop other women from trying. There would be a hand that lingered on his forearm, a cheek kiss that ended up grazing his lips, a business card with a cell phone number scribbled on it, pressed into his palm at the end of a night. My father had resisted them all, the waitresses and the young divorcees and the actress-slash-models… which was why it made no sense that he’d fall for this hard-edged, new-nosed, fake-named “India,” who was no more in her thirties than I was the winner of America’s Next Top Model.

  “Are you worried she’s going to spend our inheritance?” Tommy asked, spinning the wheel of his lighter.

  “It’s not about the money,” I said, ignoring the twinge I felt at the thought of this stranger squandering what should have been mine. I had a trust fund, worth ten million dollars, that I’d be able to access on my twenty-first birthday, which was coming in two months. My father had already told me he’d buy me an apartment after I graduated, in whatever city I ended up working. Needless to say, I had no student loans. I’d most likely get a job that offered health insurance, and I’d inherited all the clothes, shoes, furs, and jewelry that my mother hadn’t sold before decamping to New Mexico. Even if my father married some grasping bitch (unlikely) and didn’t sign a prenup (even more unlikely), my brothers and I would be fine. I knew, for example, that my dad had already set up a trust for Trey’s daughter, Violet, and that he’d bought new amps for Dirty Birdy, which specialized in thrash-metal covers of female singer-songwriter ballads.

  I ground my cigarette under my heel. “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing. This woman just thinks she can waltz on in here and have. .” I waved my hands out at the lawn, which rolled, lush and green, down a gentle slope to the ocean. “… all of this, and she didn’t earn any of it.”

  “Well, when you think about it,” Tommy said, “we didn’t exactly earn any of it, either.”

  “We survived Mom and Dad,” I reminded him. I’d given the matter of what we were and were not owed considerable thought. . sometimes while I was walking into what passed for downtown Poughkeepsie so my roommates wouldn’t see me being picked up by a driver.

  “I think we need to give her a chance,” said Tommy.

  “Do we have a choice?” I inquired, and Trey, who’d been looking at his BlackBerry again, shook his head and said, “We do not.”

  I sighed. Tommy finished his cigarette. Trey put his telephone back in his pocket. “Dad knows enough to be careful.”

  I didn’t answer. My brothers had both been away at school when my mom had left. I’d been the only one home. What happened to my dad hadn’t been dramatic. . he’d just gotten quieter and quieter, more and more pale. Prior to my mother’s departure, he was rarely home before eight o’clock at night, but, after she left, he started returning at five, then four, then three in the afternoon, locking the bedroom door behind him, saying that he needed a nap. My mother had left in September. By Christmas he’d stopped sleeping. He’d take his naps, then sit up all night by the windows, not eating, not drinking, not talking. I’d ask him, over and over, if he was all right, if he wanted anything. He’d shake his head, trying for a smile, unable to manage more than a few words. I’d talked about therapists; I’d mentioned antidepressants — half the kids I knew had been on some kind of medication for something at some point in their lives. I’d called my brothers, who’d told me — brusquely, in Trey’s case, kindly, in Tommy’s — that Dad would be fine, that this was just something he had to get through. Easy for them to say. They weren’t the ones who saw him frozen in an armchair, underneath a de Kooning on one wall and a Picasso etching on another, not noticing the art, or the sunsets over the park. They didn’t see the way his pants sagged around his shrinking waistline and flapped around his diminished legs, or the silvery stubble glinting on his chin.

  One dark day in February, I came home from choir practice and found every dish in the kitchen smashed and my father shin-deep in the shards of china and porcelain. My parents had had half a dozen sets of dishes, and the mess was considerable. My father stood there, blinking, a dish with a blue bunny painted in its center in his hand. When I ran to him, I could feel the jagged edges of shattered bowls and plates and coffee cups biting at my ankles, ripping at my tights. “Daddy?”

  He gave me a wavering smile. “I. . well. That felt better. That felt pretty good.” Together, we swept up the mess, filling a dozen garbage bags with the wreckage. Things improved after that. By spring, he was, as he put it, “stepping out,” whistling as I attached cuff links to the starched cuffs of his shirt, taking women to the benefits and balls my mother used to dread.

  I picked up my cigarette butt and slipped it in my pocket, a thief removing the evidence, while I wondered about India’s strategy: whether she could get my dad to marry her, whether she was young enough to seal the deal by getting pregnant. I would watch. I would wait. I would do what I could to keep my father safe. India struck me as a formidable enemy and the money meant that the stakes were high. . but I was my father’s daughter, and I loved him very much.

  INDIA

  You’ve been spotting, hon?” the nurse asked.

  I nodded mutely. Spotting was what I’d told my obstetrician on the telephone that morning, spotting was what I’d written on the forms in the office that afternoon, but I was actually bleeding, not spotting. After three failed in vitro attempts, I knew the difference.

  “Let’s take a look. Lean back, now. Deep breath.” I shut my eyes as she pushed the ultrasound probe inside me. Marcus squeezed my hand, and I thought how this office was the one place, maybe one of only a few in the world, where it didn’t matter what he was, that he’d sold his first business at twenty-five and started his own hedge fund at the age of thirty-one and now, twenty-six years later, had hundreds of millions of dollars and clients all over the world. Here, we were just another infertile couple, a little desperate, no longer young, flipping through limp magazines in the waiting room, hoping that we’d win the prize.

  I knew, though, even before I looked at the screen, that it hadn’t happened this time. It was just like the previous two rounds: a positive pregnancy test, then rejoicing, even though I knew it was too soon. A few days later, a blood test had confirmed the pregnancy but revealed a low hCG count. hCG, as I’d learned, was human chorionic growth hormone, the stuff that shows up in your blood and lets you know that the embryo’s developing. The level’s supposed to double every forty-eight hours. In my case, that had never happened. The hCG number would rise, then stall, and then start dropping. A week or ten days later, the bleeding would start and I’d come to this office for an ultrasound, the crooks of my arms bruised from blood draws, and the doctor would tell me what I already knew: that there was a fertilized egg that had started to grow and then stopped. There was no heartbeat. You lose. Again. Blighted ovum, the Internet called it, though my doctor had never used those words, or any words that sounded like they assigned blame.

  “I’m sorry, hon,” said the nurse. I’d seen her before, a no-nonsense lady in her fifties with short hair dyed blond and kind eyes. “Doctor will be right in.”

  She pulled out the probe, pressed a pad against me, and left me and Marcus alone. It was sunny outside the windows, a perfect May morning, the whole city in bloom, from the daffodils in the planters in the median on Fifth Avenue to the trees in Central Park. “Shit,” I said, and shut my eyes. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

  “Oh, babe,” said Marcus. He leaned forward to kiss my cheek, letting me feel the warmth of his skin and smell the cedar and vetiver in his cologne. He was crying a little. Perversely, that made me feel better, like I hadn’t forced him to do this. Marcus was in his late fifties, with three grown children, all of them out of the house and reasonably self-sufficient. He would have been well within his rights to tell me he was done with babies. But he hadn’t. Marcus loved me. He wanted me to have everything I wanted. “We can try again next month, if Dreiser says it’s
all right.”

  Dreiser was Dr. Theodore Dreiser of Harvard and Columbia, acknowledged by New York magazine and everyone else who mattered as the top reproductive specialist in the city. I shook my head.

  “No more.”

  “Listen. You don’t have to make up your mind right now. We’ll get some lunch, you can have a glass of wine.”

  I smiled. These days, the only times I drank were after doctors’ visits such as these. . or after the D and C that would follow. Then I pulled the cotton gown down over my bare knees (tanned, hairless, absolutely jiggle-free, looking better than they had when I was a teenager) and sat up. “I’m not getting any younger.” This was true. I might have had the body of a woman in her twenties — I certainly worked hard enough at it — but I was forty-three years old, even if Marcus thought I was thirty-eight. “I don’t think we’ve got any more time to waste.”

  Marcus, impeccable in his made-to-measure shirt and silk tie, started to answer when the door opened, revealing the doctor, slim and erect in his white coat, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, oversized Roman features, liquid brown eyes, and an expression of consternation. He didn’t like being a loser any more than I did. It meant that New York magazine and the ladies who mattered, the ones who could pay for treatments even after their insurance ran out, might start sending their friends somewhere else. “Guys, I’m so sorry,” he said. Marcus squeezed my hand again. I turned my face toward the wall and finally let the tears come, the ones that had been threatening since the spotting — bleeding — had started.

  I was thirty-seven when I met my husband — thirty-seven as far as he was concerned; forty-two in real life, but if I looked thirty-seven and had ID to prove it, then why tell people I wasn’t? Honesty has its place, and its place is not in the dating world. For the past five years, I’d run my own public-relations shop, a boutique agency with a handful of clients, a mix of reliable-but-boring businesses — a jewelry designer, a chain of magazines — who’d pay their bills on time and rarely need my help in the middle of the night, plus a handful of celebrities who were neither reliable nor boring, who’d pay a minimum of five thousand dollars a month to keep me on retainer and sometimes would require my services in the wee small hours.

  Every day I went to the office dressed in one of the designer suits I’d bought secondhand at Michael’s Consignment on the Upper East Side. I’d wear Manolos and Louboutins — I had two pairs of each, and rotated them every day. My jeweler client lent me necklaces and bracelets and cocktail rings; the makeup line I represented sent over a basket of freebies every month. I bartered with a dentist to get my teeth bleached and traded with a personal trainer and a dermatologist for their services, but I still paid to get my hair highlighted at Frédéric Fekkai, which was insanely costly but a necessary expense, the kind of thing you couldn’t scrimp on. Everyone saw your hair every day and everyone worth knowing would know whether you were paying for those buttery chunks or trying to get the same look at a less-expensive salon or, God forbid, by doing it yourself.

  I had an apartment in the right neighborhood, a one-bedroom walk-up sparsely furnished with the beautiful things I’d saved up and bought with cash: a gorgeously curvy couch upholstered in fawn-colored velvet, a queen-size bed with Frette sheets, a Turkish rug, glowing blue and gold and ruby-red, that I’d admired in a shop window for months before buying.

  Instead of paintings or sculpture, I had an expandable metal pole, an extra-long version of the kind meant to hold a shower curtain, that ran the length of my small living room. The pole held the clothes I’d bought at sample sales or secondhand or saved to pay retail for. The skirts and shirts and dresses, carefully culled and curated — cotton and taffeta, crisp linens, plush velvet, luscious silk — served as a movable, changeable display, hanging just above the low shelves filled with fashion magazines that ran along the wall.

  There was no TV, but there were stacks of scrapbooks that I’d worked on for years, filling the pages with photographs I’d torn from magazines or snipped from the newspaper — pictures of models and socialites attending benefits and balls, pictures of women with three names, at least one of them belonging to an inanimate object or a fruit: the Sykes sisters at charity balls, Loulou de la Falaise presiding over a gala at the Met; Audrey Hepburn at the Oscars, Jackie O. on board the yacht Christina, in her oversized sunglasses, with an Hermès scarf tied beneath her chin. That was all I had by way of decoration, all I wanted. The apartment wasn’t a home as much as a cocoon, a place where I’d crawl in as a caterpillar and emerge lovely and transformed. . and rich, with all the security that piles of money implied.

  I met Marcus at a Starbucks on Fifty-sixth between Sixth and Seventh, across from the Parker Meridien hotel, where I was hosting a party for my jewelry designer. Hearts and Bones was the theme. The tables were draped in blood-red chiffon, and the disc jockey was a skeletal young person who went by the name of Q, who’d flown in from Los Angeles with a sobriety manager. We were serving baby back ribs and molasses-basted chicken wings, Day of the Dead sugar skulls and, for the daring, tiny quail hearts pierced with silver skewers. I was going over the details in my head, waiting in line at the coffee shop for my usual, a tall skinny latte, extra hot, no foam, when Marcus pushed through the glass doors and stopped in the middle of the store. I noticed him as he stood there, rocking back and forth, peering at the menu with his chin raised, oblivious to the disgruntled hipsters and office workers backing up behind him.

  “Coffee,” he said, half to himself. “I just want coffee.”

  I could tell, with one quick glance informed by five years’ worth of reading GQ and T Style, that his suit was a two-thousand-dollar Brioni, that his shirt was made-to-measure and his shoes were hand-sewn. He was in his fifties, I figured, but fit, with the tall, broad-shouldered frame of a former football player and an easy, confident stance. He had a high forehead and features a little too small for his wide, round face, a snub nose and deep-set eyes and a rosebud of a mouth. His hair was thick, glossy black, beautifully cut, and even though he was freshly shaved, I could see bluish-black dots of stubble on his cheeks. If he kissed you, you’d know you were kissing a man, not one of these pampered, facialed metrosexuals who could tie scarves better than a Frenchwoman and talk knowledgeably about moisturizers. He had a cleft in his chin and big hands, with black hair on the knuckles and on the inch or two of wrist that I could see. No ring. My mouth went dry as I gave up my place in line and walked over to him. “Small, medium, or large?” I asked, standing close enough to give him a whiff of my perfume, Coco by Chanel, a little sultry for the office but perfect for this occasion. Spotting the Rolex on his wrist, I thanked God that I’d worn it.

  He turned to me with a grateful look. “Large. Black.”

  “Could make a dirty joke here. Won’t do it,” I said.

  “I appreciate your restraint. May I buy you a coffee?”

  “My treat,” I said, and stepped up to the barista, handing her my platinum AmEx card, the one I used for business expenses, ordering my latte and adding, “And one venti house blend for my friend.”

  “Name?” asked the bored girl with tattoos of hyacinths twined around her arms. She would regret them later. I’d had my own tattoo, far nicer work than hers, lasered off the small of my back here in New York three months after my arrival, at considerable pain and expense.

  “Marcus,” he said — half to me, half to her. “Marcus Croft.”

  My brain did a fast Google while the girl scribbled Markus on a cup. Finance, I thought. I’d seen his name in the papers recently — a merger? A divorce? My heart was beating too fast. This was it, the thing I’d been waiting for.

  When the coffee came, I fitted the cups into a cardboard carrier while Marcus watched, impressed. He held the door for me, and together we walked out onto a sidewalk that seemed to have been freshly paved, and strolled across the street, which cleared, magically, just as we stepped off the curb. “Do you work around here?” he asked.

&nbs
p; “Downtown,” I said. “But I’ve got an event here tonight.”

  “Oh, yeah? What kind of event?”

  “A cocktail party for a client. She’s introducing a new line of necklaces made with semiprecious stones. Fun and functional,” I recited from the press release I’d written.

  He frowned, broad forehead creasing. “Is jewelry ever functional?”

  I widened my eyes, feigning shock. “I’m doomed.” I clutched his arm and lowered my voice to a whisper. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “Your secret is safe with me.”

  I laughed, low and throaty. My wrap dress was cut short enough to show off my legs, waxed just a few days before. My hair was freshly colored, and I was wearing one of my client’s pieces, a heart-shaped chunk of amber on a lacy gold chain. I felt good, my muscles warm and loose after my morning run, a six-mile loop through Central Park. It was a day full of promise, one of those perfect New York mornings where the city looked like it had been power-washed, the sky a rich blue, the trees thick with glossy green leaves, a gentle breeze blowing. The taxicabs honking their way up Sixth Avenue glowed golden. The people on the sidewalk were fit and scrubbed and full of purpose. And here I was, alongside the kind of man I’d moved to New York City to meet, my reward after all the pain and expense I’d endured. The apple was hanging from the tree, warm and ripe in my hand. All I had to do was pluck it.