Big Summer Page 9

  “The Cavanaugh Corporation purchased the skyscraper at the corner of Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue two years ago, the crown jewel of its real-estate portfolio… blah blah blah… two major tenants have departed, one more on its way out… What’s an LTV ratio?”

  “Loan to value,” Darshi said crisply. “You want your rents covering as large a percentage of the building’s price as possible. Theirs are not.”

  “And distressed debt? That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s not. Basically, the company paid way too much money for the property, and now they can’t sell it or rent it.” She gave me a pointed look. “I’ve heard banks won’t lend to them any longer. If Drue’s offering to compensate her bridesmaids, I hope she got a good rate.”

  I inhaled, curling my toes into the soles of my shoes, mustering the arguments I’d rehearsed in my head. “Do you believe that people can change?”

  “People? Yes. Drue? No. Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh isn’t ‘people.’ She’s always been exactly what she was. Exactly what she is.” Darshi went to the door to pick up her laptop and her bag, trailing the scent of coconut conditioner behind her. Her sweatpants swished as she walked. I followed after her, and Bingo trailed after me.

  “You don’t even want to give her a chance? You don’t want to be the bigger person?” The stiff line of Darshi’s shoulders, plus her silence, gave me her answer. “Look, I’m not denying that she’s been awful. But if you’d seen her…”

  Darshi turned, arm extended, one small hand held out, palm flat; a traffic cop insisting on stop. “I know Drue,” she said. “I’ve known her longer than you have. She was my friend first.” Her voice was quiet. She sounded calm and eminently reasonable as she sat down on the couch, tugging the cuffs of her sweatshirt down over her wrists. “I know her, and I know you. You are susceptible to Drue Cavanaugh. She’s your Kryptonite.” Darshi’s voice was dangerously soft. “And you might be hashtag-strong-woman on the Internet. Even in real life, sometimes. But mark my words. She’s going to hurt you. And I’m done with being her first runner-up. If she fucks you over again, I won’t hang around to pick up the pieces.”

  That was when I knew how seriously she was taking this. I could curse casually, could let out a loud “Motherfucker” if my hot glue gun burned my fingers or a hearty “Goddamnit” when I found my freshly dry-cleaned cashmere wrap in Bingo’s dog bed. Not Darshi.

  “She won’t.” I was promising myself as much as Darshi. “I won’t let her.”

  Darshi took off her glasses, breathed on one lens, and began rubbing it clean with her sleeve.

  “I mean, maybe Drue hasn’t changed, but I have. I’m not the same as I was in high school. Right?”

  Darshi exhaled onto the other lens.

  “Right?” I asked again. Before she could answer, or say that I was wrong, I began to make the case. “I’m more confident. I’m more secure. I’m more comfortable in my own skin. And that’s not all just faked for Instagram.” Just considerably amplified. “I know who I am, and I know what I want. I’m not going to be—”

  “Ensorcelled?” Darshi said without looking up. “Beguiled?”

  “Used,” I said.

  Darshi gave me a long, level look before putting her glasses on, hooking each earpiece precisely over its corresponding ear. I wondered what she was worried about: if it was Drue hurting me again, or if it was Drue taking me away from her.

  “Hey,” I said, keeping my own voice gentle. “Look. I didn’t listen to you the first time you tried to warn me. I’m listening to you now.”

  Darshi didn’t respond.

  “Just because I’m doing this, it doesn’t mean I’m going to forget what she did. And, really, if I can forgive her, that’s kind of a gift I’m giving to myself, right? Isn’t that what people say?”

  Darshi frowned. “Which people are these?”

  I shrugged, hearing Drue’s voice in my head. I don’t know? My therapist? Oprah? “Just people. And look,” I said, “there are worse things than spending a weekend around a bunch of hot groomsmen. You realize that of all the sex I’ve had, most of it was with Wan Ron?”

  Darshi smiled a little at my ex-boyfriend’s name, the way I hoped she would, before her face closed up. She tugged at her sleeves again and picked up her mug. Without looking at me, she said, “You do whatever you want. On your head be it.”

  “On my head be it,” I repeated. Darshi got to her feet, walked to her bedroom, and closed the door almost noiselessly behind her. Bingo, who’d seated herself at my feet, looked up hopefully, perhaps sensing that the conversation had come to its end and that, to signal its conclusion, I might be willing to part with a rawhide Busy Stick, or an Alpine Yum-Yum. Her stump of a tail made a shushing noise on the floor as it wagged.

  “Come on,” I said. I was reaching for the treat box when Darshi’s door swung open.

  “And keep her away from me,” she said, speaking each word distinctly, her voice hard. “You can do whatever you want. But I can’t make any guarantees for my own behavior if I ever have to see Drue Cavanaugh’s face again.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “You won’t. I promise.”

  For a moment, she stayed silent. “Can I ask you something?” she finally said.

  “Sure.”

  She went quiet again, silent for so long I wasn’t sure she was going to ask anything. “Was it worth it?” she finally said.

  Was it worth it? In the years we’d lived together, Darshi had asked very little about Drue, and I hadn’t offered any information, figuring that she didn’t want to know. Obviously, I’d been wrong. A part of her did want to know the details, to hear what I’d had that she’d missed. The obvious answer would have been a hearty “No, it wasn’t worth it,” a firm headshake, an apologetic smile, a loud and inclusive lament about how badly Drue had treated me and how foolish and shallow I’d been and how Darshi was my true best friend.

  But that wouldn’t have been honest. And if Darshi wanted to know the truth, I had to give it to her.

  “Not always,” I said. “Not even most of the time. Not when she was ignoring me, or when I knew she was making me do her dirty work. Or, you know, humiliating me online.” I winced, remembering how I’d worn an unfortunate sweater, fluffy and white, and how Drue had posted a picture of me next to a picture of a llama. What are you so mad about? she’d asked when I’d called her up and demanded she take it down. It’s funny! Can’t you take a joke?

  “But sometimes…” I remembered the day senior year that Drue had decreed Ferris Bueller Memorial Day. We’d watched the movie the night before, and when it was over, Drue had looked at me, smiling the smile that promised adventure and trouble. “We are going to do that,” she’d said.

  “Do what? Cut school?”

  “Cut school and do whatever we want.”

  “I’m not getting on a parade float.” No need, my poisoned mind whispered. You’re practically the size of one already.

  “Maybe we can just go to a parade. If I can find one.” Drue was already working her phone.

  “So which one of us is Sloane?” Drue was between boyfriends, which meant that there were two or three boys, at Lathrop and elsewhere, who were in contention for the job. I, of course, had never even been kissed. Wan Ron was still years away.

  “No Sloane,” said Drue. She rested her phone on her chest and smiled at me. “No boys. Just the two of us.”

  I’d called my parents to ask permission to spend the night at Drue’s, and in the morning, after Drue had headed off to Lathrop, I called them again to say that I’d caught a cold and that I was going to stay in the guest room and drink Abigay’s chicken soup.

  “Feel better,” said my mom. I felt a pinch of guilt for deceiving her, overshadowed by my excitement at the prospect of an adventure with my friend.

  An hour later, I used the Cavanaugh landline to call the front office, pretending to be Mrs. Cavanaugh, whose Upper East Side lockjaw Drue and I had both long since mastered.

&n
bsp; “Drue’s great-aunt Eleanor has passed,” I informed the receptionist. “Our driver will collect Drue at ten o’clock in front of the school.”

  Instead of questions, I’d gotten a gulped “Yes, ma’am.” I was sure that the entire staff knew about Drue’s family’s history with, and generosity to, the Lathrop School. Luckily, none of them seemed to know anything about the health of her great-aunts. At nine-forty-five, I’d hopped in a car—I’d called for an SUV in case anyone was watching—and collected Drue on the sidewalk. “Why couldn’t we both have just pretended to be sick?” I asked.

  “Oh, we could have,” she said, “but that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the movie.”

  We went to the Guggenheim and had lunch at the fancy restaurant, where we’d planned on peeking at the reservation book and impersonating another guest, as Ferris had done, but it turned out that the reservation book was an iPad, impossible to see. Drue’s parents had a Jacuzzi-style tub big enough to host a bridge foursome, but instead of going back to her place, Drue had decreed we’d end our day at Elizabeth Arden, where I’d had my first massage and my first facial. We’d put on robes and spent an hour in the Relaxation Room, gossiping and laughing, sipping cups of peppermint tea while our feet soaked in bowls of warm, rose-petal-dotted water. Drue told me the story of her great-aunt Letitia, whose beloved toy poodle had expired during a visit to the Cavanaughs’ home over Christmas. “Aunt Letitia was completely beside herself. We told her we’d take care of it, but none of the vets in the city were answering their phones. My dad wanted to wrap Jasper up in a trash bag and throw him down the trash chute, but my mother wouldn’t let him.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Trip was home from college, so we borrowed his cooler, and we filled it with ice, so that Jasper wouldn’t, you know, start to decompose.” Her nose had wrinkled cutely at the thought. “We were just going to keep him there until the vets opened up. Which would have been fine, except my stupid brother’s buddies came to take Trip to some party, and they didn’t notice that the cooler was full of dead toy poodle and not beer. They were halfway to the Hamptons before they figured it out.”

  I smiled, remembering that story. I was still smiling when I looked into Darshi’s suspicious face. “Sometimes it was amazing.”

  Darshi’s eyes seemed to soften. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I always thought it would be.”

  Chapter Six

  “Daphne!”

  I plastered a smile on my face and turned in the direction of the broad-shouldered fellow with the surfer’s tan and the petite brunette by his side. Drue and Stuart’s engagement party had started twenty minutes previously. The guest of honor had collected me at the Snitzers’ at the end of my workday, and so far, the two of us hadn’t made it more than five feet past the front door. I gave my hands a quick wipe on my skirt as the couple came barreling toward me. I was wearing my Jane dress and a pair of black suede sandals that had added inches to my height and were already making my feet ache. Drue, in a dress of glittering silver paillettes that made her look like a moonbeam with limbs and a face, was behind me, delivering a stream of whispered, champagne-scented commentary into my ear.

  “Okay, so that’s my brother, the practice pancake, and his wife, Caitlin, who’s too good for him.” Drue stopped talking the instant her brother made it into earshot and hugged her sister-in-law. I vaguely remembered meeting Trip, whom I’d seen just in passing at the Cavanaughs’ apartment, but he seemed to remember me.

  “Great to see you,” he said, hugging me, as his wife said, “I can’t wait to get out to the Cape!”

  “I’ve never been, but I’m excited to see it,” I said. It had been less than a month since Drue’s reappearance, but she hadn’t wasted any time reintegrating me into her life, featuring me on her social media, or pressing me into maid-of-honor duties. So far, there’d been a bridal brunch, a dinner at Indochine with the groom and his parents, and three separate celebratory cocktail parties, culminating with this one, which Drue and Stuart were hosting in their brand-new penthouse apartment in the neighborhood that had once been Spanish Harlem and had just started to be called Carnegie Hill.

  I’d barely had time to take a breath and smooth my dress before a tiny elderly man with a bald head and teeth too white and too regular to be anything but dentures tottered toward us.

  “Uncle Mel,” Trip whispered, taking over Drue’s duties. “He’s… ah, Drue, how would you describe Mel?”

  “A pervert,” said Drue, then turned her dazzling smile at Uncle Mel, who said, “Now, who is this beautiful young lady?” before wrapping his arms around my waist and burying his face between my breasts.

  Drue giggled. Trip snickered. I shot them both a dirty look, then looked down helplessly at the tanned, age-spotted dome of Mel’s head.

  “This is Daphne,” Drue said, putting her hand on his shoulder and gently but firmly extracting him from my person. “My best friend from Lathrop and my maid of honor.”

  “Daphne. A pleasure,” said Mel, giving my breasts another longing look and extending his hand.

  When he was gone I managed a breath, and a sip of my seltzer, before the next wave of friends and relations crashed over me. I met, in short order, an aunt and an uncle and their children, two Harvard friends, and a colleague from the Cavanaugh Corporation.

  “You okay?” Drue asked when they’d gone. She wore a wide gold cuff bracelet on her right wrist; pearl and diamond earrings hung from her ears. Her hair hung in a sheet of shimmering bronze and gold that fell halfway down her back, and her makeup was dramatic, with shimmery gold eye shadow and highlighter glinting at her cheek and brow.

  “I’m fine,” I said, smoothing my hair and looking around. Mr. Cavanaugh was at the bar, talking to some other middle-aged men in dark suits, and Mrs. Cavanaugh had drifted to the windows that looked out at the northernmost end of Central Park. All night, I had watched the two of them make their way through the apartment, artfully crisscrossing the space without ever coming near each other. “How are things between them?” I’d asked Drue in the Uber on our way home from the Indochine dinner. She’d pursed her lips, then immediately unpursed them before she could damage her lipstick, but I saw her leg bob up and down as her toe tapped on the car’s floor. “I think they’ve just kind of decided to live separate lives and make appearances together when they have to.”

  Delightful, I’d thought, picturing my parents, the way my mother would pull a cold beer out of the refrigerator when she heard the elevator doors slide open, so that she could hand it to my father the instant he walked through the door; and the way my dad would settle my mom’s feet in his lap when they watched the British police procedurals they both liked. I pictured them dancing together in the kitchen, swaying to old R&B, my father’s arms around my mom’s waist, her cheek resting on his shoulder. The two of them hadn’t spent a night apart, they liked to say, since the night I was born, when my mom sent my father home from the hospital to get his last good night’s sleep.

  “So, do you think I’ll get a chance to actually talk to the man of the hour?” I asked Drue, who stood on her tiptoes to look at the crowd. It hadn’t happened so far. Even with all of the cocktail parties, the most Stuart and I had done was exchange pleasantries.

  “I don’t see him right now,” Drue said. “Oh, but there’s Corina Bailey! Let’s go say hi.”

  “Wait, what?” Corina, as I and the viewing public well knew, was Stuart’s former fiancée, the one to whom he’d proposed on TV, in a season finale that five million viewers had watched. Corina was the one he’d dumped to be with Drue. The last I’d heard, via US Weekly’s website, a heartbroken Corina was trying to make a go of it as a celebrity DJ in LA (of course, on US Weekly’s website, every newly single person was heartbroken). “You invited Stuart’s ex to the party?”

  “And to the wedding.” At my shocked expression, Drue looked even more pleased with herself than she usually did. “We’re all adults, Daphne. Stuart and Corina went t
hrough a very intense experience together. They’re still friends.”

  “Wow.” I pressed my fingertips to my temples, then spread them wide, miming an explosion. “Mind, blown. So is Corina the same as she was on TV?”

  Drue made a scoffing sound. “Not even close. For one thing, I think she actually can talk like a grown-up, if she wants to. For another…” She paused, considering. “Well. She isn’t what people think. And she’s definitely not my friend. But if she shows up, it’s a story. People magazine will probably write something. They might use a picture, too.”

  “Got it.” I put my glass down on a table by the door, next to a Chinese bowl with a blue-and-white pattern that was probably a costly and pedigreed antique. A caterer immediately materialized to whisk the glass away. I could hear music from the jazz trio in the next room, the clink of cutlery, the slosh of ice and booze in shakers, the cries of “Gordy! Great to see you, man!” and “Marcus! How long has it been!” I heard backs being slapped and lips forming air kisses; I could smell cremini arancini and stuffed figs wrapped in bacon and the butternut squash soup being served in shot glasses, with a dollop of crème fraîche and a sprinkling of chives. The smells should have been delicious, but I was so nervous that they made my stomach turn.

  Just then, a pair of male hands covered Drue’s eyes. She squealed “Stuart!” and turned around. There was Stuart Lowe, even more handsome (if slightly shorter) in person than he was on TV. Drue gave him a long kiss, to cheers, and the clinking of glasses and whoops, and a few guys yelling “Get a room!” When he let her go, he gave me a much more perfunctory hug and a dazzling smile. “Daphne. Great to see you again.”

  Stuart Lowe wore a dark-gray suit with a subtle chalk stripe, a white shirt, and a blue and orange tie. His cuffs were monogrammed, his cuff links were gold, and his teeth were the same color as the teeth of every reality TV show contestant I’d ever seen, a shade I’d come to think of as Television White. He had one arm draped over Drue’s shoulder, and she was gazing up at him with a look of melting adoration that struck me as showy, a suspicion that was strengthened when she pulled out her phone, stretched out her arm, and snapped a selfie of the two of them.