I Can't Imagine Anyone Not Loving Mother. She's Absolutely Divine.
Helena
Nate had been displeased when he saw her in the dress. What happened to the other one? It was simple but sharp. It fit the tone. This isn't a state dinner, Helena. Maybe not for you, she had retorted, but your guests treat it like an inaugural gala. They're here to curry favor with you, Nate, and you bloody well know it. You put on a thrift-store blazer and clown around with your polka band as though you think the height of success is being president of the local Chamber of Commerce, but you know how many of the men are sweating in their Tom Ford suits to strike a deal with you – and you enjoy it.
He had been shrugging into said thrift-store blazer, which wasn't a thrift-store blazer at all, and was, in fact, a very expensive off-the-rack jacket from Nordstrom's. He had stared at her reflection in the mirror, his expression clearly saying, Is that what you think? But he had said nothing as he shot out the cuffs of his shirt and wriggled his back against the yoke of the jacket. Finally he had said, It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to put people in the mood to give back. He hadn't waited for her to take a last assessing look at her appearance or fuss about the earrings she was wearing before deciding to leave them in. He had swept past her, seemingly intent on taking all the hosting duties upon himself. He wasn't the door-slamming type, but she would have preferred it to what he said before he had oh-so-softly shut the door behind him. It's not about you. None of this is about you.
Which seemed to sum up their relationship. It wasn't about her, Helena Guinevere Wells, the 42-year-old single mother who worried about her weight and whether she needed to touch up her roots more often, who questioned (only late at night) whether Future Image provided anything of lasting value (or any value) to the world, who feared for the future happiness (not to mention job prospects) of the odd mix of whimsy and hard-edged practicality that was her daughter. Did Nate ever look at the books on her nightstand? (She preferred ones with covers and backs she could fold back and crack and splay; reading e-books at night only added to the incipient crows-feet at the corners of her eyes.) They were books on history, science, politics – weighty matters. So she had stars from reality TV shows as clients, it didn't mean that she mistook The Bachelorette for a modern-day reimagining of Jane Austen. Did he know how often she woke up at night only to stare for half-an-hour or more at their bedroom's cavernous ceiling? Sometimes it was the stirring of a vague anxiety, usually about Christina, that had jerked her awake. At other times she was fighting her way out of a dream in which she had lost something precious, although she never remembered it was.
At the low points in their relationship, she would recall what Gigi had told her about him after she had mentioned that Nate Robinson was looking for a PR firm to manage the fallout from a plant closing. "He's the Corn King, and not because there's hardly a corn field or a product made from corn that he doesn't have a piece of. It's because he's like a monocrop himself, completely uniform and planted on this earth to do one thing."
"Which is?"
"To make money." Gigi had been resting on her side, facing Helena across the expanse of her very big bed. "He'll find you attractive, and he'll want more from you than a clean-up of the mess the announcement of the plant closing made. He's been at loose ends since his divorce; it's been painful to watch him try to act like a player. You could put him out of his misery and become the second Mrs. Nate Robinson. Your future would be secure, even if he insists on a pre-nup. The contacts you'll make, the business he'll throw your way –"
"I'm hardly that cold-blooded," Helena had interrupted, although this post-relationship benefit that she and Gigi occasionally extended to each other, initiated by nothing more than proximity and opportunity, did little to confirm the existence of deeper feelings. "I liked to be wooed."
"If you'd told me that earlier, I would have exerted myself more," Gigi had laughed as she took in Helena's sour face. "I don't know what you expected to find out here in the heartland, but you didn't get it, and you've been searching for something to replace it ever since. You may not fall madly in love with him, but Nate's not the type to miss it much. He's –"
"Corn, yes, I understand," Helena had said acerbically. "And you know so much about him because . . . ." She had raised her eyebrows suggestively.
"Because my job is to get Larry to talk corn." Gigi had wagged a finger. "Nate Robinson will not be something we share in the biblical sense, although I definitely want to convert him to my side politically." Suddenly sighing and shaking her head, the gloriously mussed hair just as gloriously falling back into place, she had said, "Forget everything I've said. Just do the job and don't go out to dinner with him. It'll never work because you, I hate to say it, are a romantic deep down, and he's not."
"Someday," Helena had said mock-threateningly, "someday I'll see you half-arsed about a young twit, Gigi, and I'll remind you of how low the once-majestic Giselle Fourier has fallen, and I'll laugh at you in your shame."
There had been another shake of Gigi's head, this time a signal that she was tired of the subject, and her eyes had a calculating light that had nothing to do with Nate Robinson. "Someday you may be laughing at my shame, but right now, I'm going to make you beg."
Tempted to fan herself with her hand even though she was recalling a moment from 18 months ago, Helena credited Gigi with being right, in the end, about one thing. Nate was, oftentimes dismayingly, single-minded. When she had been the focus of his interest, she had naturally found it flattering. He had rented out restaurants and movie theaters for their dates, sent her flowers every day for a month, and repeatedly tried to engage with the one Wells female who refused to be impressed. Despite her professed desire to be wooed, his dogged efforts weren't what had won Helena over, nor had he displayed such talents in the bedroom that she had been overwhelmed by lust. His appreciation of her as a businesswoman had won, if not her heart, then the part of her that yearned to be acknowledged for being good at something worthwhile. Being capable of smoking prodigious amounts of weed and scoring with every attractive undergraduate who crossed her path had been achievements of a sort and she had taken a perverse pride in being able to squander time and energy that she knew she could put to better use, but she when she, finally, had stopped being an undergraduate herself, it became harder and harder for her to deny that she was anchorless, floating from distraction to distraction. She had been 27 when, finding herself broke and abandoned by her latest paramour (who had absconded with her cash and credit cards) in the Seychelles, she had placed an emergency call to Charles. He had wired her a ticket home and then offered her a job at his fledgling public relations firm. She had been grateful and, beyond being grateful, she had applied herself, possibly for the first time in her life. She was good at the work. She instinctively understood, in a way Charles couldn't, that projecting a positive image was as much or more about convincing others that weaknesses were strengths, that bad outcomes were the best possible results, and, in Nate Robinson's case, that plant closures were opportunities for growth. How else could she have made a straight-arrow, straight A student fall in love with a chronic underachiever who was allergic to monogamy, if she hadn't argued that the breadth of her experience (so many wrong turns, so many forgettable one-night stands) was what made her appreciate her beloved all the more?
She had used the same tactic on the little community of Fern (ridiculous name), which had been home to an aging corn processing plant (one that turned corn inedible for human consumption into the filler found in cheap brands of pet food) that Nate intended to close because a much larger plant he owned in Mexico could do the same processing more efficiently and with even fewer employees. Shutting down a plant considered the life blood of a small town was bound to generate bad press, but small towns were dying across the state for much the same reason, and Nate's public relations staff had believed there would be a couple of weeks of disapproving editorials and angry letters to the editor in print and online media but nothing more. Moreover, they assured him that the generous post-employment benefits he intended to provide (and he would provide them, he was informed) would lessen the outrage. But those "consummate professionals" had overlooked the fact that it was an election year and that one of the state's congressmen came from Fern.
He lost no time castigating Nate as a member of the liberal elite (although Nate's record was solidly Republican) whose allegiance wasn't to the U.S. but the E.U. and whose plants and farms routinely relied on the labor provided by illegal immigrants (there was likely some truth to that). The congressman canvassed his district with a rotating line-up of soon-to-be-unemployed Fern residents (their crying tow-headed offspring were a TV ratings godsend), and though his re-election was more the result of voter inertia than full-throated support, Nate believed, with justification, that his reputation in his home state had suffered a blow.
Helena hadn't marched into his boardroom with binders stuffed with studies and opinion polls and a bevy of assistants trailing her. For one thing, she didn't have any assistants and, for another, she didn't believe in spending money, especially her money, on information that wouldn't be read. Instead she drove to Fern, paid for a room at the local motel, and then stayed for the better part of the week, touring the plant, talking with the local businessmen and area farmers, and eating her meals at the town diner. When she left Fern, she was almost 10 pounds heavier, even more skeptical about the long-term survival of rural America, but in possession of a plan.
If Fern's workforce was too old, too small, and too expensive to support long term (i.e., employer contribution 401(k)s, health care, a living wage) then treat it like the charity case it was, she had counseled him. He could use his foundation to provide grants to those who had visions of revitalizing the area and scholarships to regional colleges and technical schools for those who wanted to learn new job skills. If he wanted to limit his investment, he could partner with government programs and persuade the state's other titans to invest in "family friendly Fern." He could also reach out to the congressman determined to paint Nate Robinson as an enemy of the people and turn him into an ally. First, she counseled, ask him what he thought should be done for Fern and then make a very sizeable donation to his campaign chest. In the end, it wasn't a matter of whether anything worked, it was letting himself be seen doing something. Hope was both the cheapest and most lethal drug on the planet.
Nate hadn't been entirely convinced by her argument, but he was tired of seeing his name in print, preceded and/or followed by a string of expletives, and he especially didn't like the cold shoulder he had been receiving in his own hometown. He had also liked her, liked her brutal analysis of Fern's prospects and even of him, liked the extra ten pounds on her. The late nights spent on rehabilitating his image had included dinners and shoulder massages and, once the shoulder massages began, the late nights had inevitably turned into overnights. The two of them had taken up occupancy in the middle ground that had utter indifference and arse-over-teakettle in love as its poles when, some six months after she had made her pitch to him, they began to see results from the course of action she had proposed. The shuttered plant had been repurposed to house the offices of the start-ups that had received seed money from his foundation. Some of the farms affected by the plant closing were going organic as the result of a new line being promoted by the Robinson companies – boutique organic pet food. Others had been sold to a group of investors determined to make Fern the epicenter of motocross in the Midwest. Of course, about half the population of the county had left to find work elsewhere, but the point was – and Helena had stabbed her finger into Nate's hairy chest for emphasis – the point was that Fern looked like it was on the comeback trail. He had never made love to her so passionately before or since as he had that night. Not only was Fern supporting the illusion of revitalization, he was actually making a small profit off his efforts, mainly from the tax breaks, but profit was profit.
That had been the high point of their relationship. He had seen what he wanted to see in her, and if she hadn't been dating Nate, if, more to the point, she had been teaching a class on spin, on manipulating public perception, she would have called that moment a shining example of professional success (without, naturally, any explicit reference to how Nate had chosen to express his admiration of her in that moment). But she was dating him, and while Helena Wells, Future Image's second-in-command could turn her back on Fern and congratulate herself on a job well done, Helena Wells, human being, had had a harder time of it. Two years after the plant closing, Fern continued to struggle. She could tell herself that economic and demographic trends were difficult to reverse, and she could say, without much defensiveness, that she had mitigated the severity of the blow; some of the start-ups still survived, while the epicenter of motocross had recently been selected as the site of a major competition. Yet Fern continued to shrink. She knew because she regularly donated money to the town's fundraising drives, which ranged from building a city park to purchasing a new furnace for the elementary school – and because she was the sole financial support for a website promoting investment in the town called Keep Fern Flourishing, which was, even kindly put, a gross exaggeration.
For Nate, what was out of the news was out of mind. She suspected that in a few years he would no longer remember there had been a plant in Fern, let alone that he had decided to close it. When Fern ceased to be important to him, it had ceased to exist. It wasn't a promising sign.
Christina
She had wanted Maddie to bring Remy with her for the night, but both her mom and Myka had vetoed the idea. Her mom called Remy a "mess" and "barely housetrained," claiming that two 11-year-old girls could wreak sufficient havoc by themselves on Nate's party. Myka had been nicer, worrying, according to Maddie, that introducing Remy to a strange house with a lot of people would stress her out. Christina could understand that point of view; she didn't feel at ease in Nate's house, and she had been living in it since June. She loved Remy; she didn't want to upset her.
Even Maddie thought it was weird that she had become attached so quickly to Remy, but Remy could flop down on the ground with her and just be. Few humans would do that. When she and her mom had gone to Myka's house (the first time – not the horrible second time when she had seen Gigi and Myka kissing), she and Remy had run around the yard, and when she had gotten tired and plopped down on the ground and wondered as ants cruised up and down the blades of crabgrass if the ants were ever curious about her, Remy had sprawled next to her, her head on her paws, content to stay where they were for a million years probably. Christina wanted to be able to do that, sit and not have a thought in her head for a million years. Because her head was so full of images that weren't fun, that didn't make her want to draw them – it was filled with images of Nate, Nate and her mom, and now Gigi and Myka. Nate in a powder-blue tuxedo with an awful ruffled shirt and her mom in a wedding gown, Gigi and Myka holding hands and giving each other moony looks. She was having nightmares in which she was one of her mom's bridesmaids or, even more disturbing, in which she was trying to bust into a church and screaming "Gigi! Myka! No!" but no one heard her.
She couldn't tell Maddie about her nightmares. Although Maddie said she was still in on the plan, she didn't act like it. To be fair, their plan had been so battered by unpredictable events that Christina couldn't say with certainty what it was anymore. Even so, Maddie had been less than outraged at the news that her mother was dating Gigi and not absolutely convinced that they were wrong for each other. In fact, she had offered that Gigi was "pretty nice" and "a lot better than Michelle." Maddie's wavering devotion to their cause was what had made Christina look forward to the possibility that Remy might be allowed to come too. Remy's solid, furry, doggy-thereness at the foot of her bed would banish the nightmares. Maddie's Kindle-reading into the wee hours of the night would not.
Right now she didn't know where Maddie was. She suspected that Maddie was hovering at the back of the "ballroom" on the first floor (which wasn't a ballroom at all but two adjoining rooms temporarily emptied of their furniture) or at the head of the staircase and peering down into the foyer, watching Nate's guests in their fancy dresses and suits flow in and out of the house. She could also be on the terrace, which was strung with lights because that's where everyone would be later when it was time for Nate to give his big stupid speech and for him and her mom to dance to his stupid polka band. There was a huge white tent set up on the back lawn and that was where the polka band would play.
She and Maddie weren't imprisoned on the second floor, but her mom had urged them to occupy themselves in her art room or watch movies in the basement theater instead of "gawping" at the guests. If they had to sneak peeks, they needed to be discreet and, above all, they needed to behave. Her mom had said it several times to them but her mom had mainly been looking at her and not Maddie as she said it. Christina would have much preferred to hear her mom say "gawping" over and over, it sounded more interesting than "behave."
"Hey," Maddie said breathlessly, running into the bedroom, "my mom and Gigi are here. You ought to see them."
Christina put down her iPad. There hadn't been any interesting dog pictures on Instagram, anyway. When she got her dog – that was the least she was going to demand if her mom and Nate actually got married – she was going to teach it how to pose . . . and paint. "You're just going to tell me that Gigi's beautiful and your mom looks like a dork. It's what you've been worrying about since you got here." Myka hadn't looked party-ready when she had dropped Maddie off earlier in the day. Her hair had been loosely held back by a scrunchy and she had been wearing paint-splattered jeans and an old football jersey. She had looked like a typical mom on a Saturday afternoon.
"Come see them."
Christina followed her downstairs. The foyer was still filling with guests, and she zigged between one set of overdressed men and women, their conversation as hard and bright as the women's jewelry, and zagged between another, equally as shiny with the glow of money. Maddie disappeared behind a group clustering like a school of fish around one of the catering staff offering flutes of champagne only to bob to the surface several feet away in the hangar-like space of the adhoc ballroom. Christina caught up with her without bumping into too many people; she hadn't sent anyone to the floor, not even intentionally, but the noise, which seemed to fill her ears like water the way jumping into the pool did without the same promise of fun, was becoming oppressive. It was making her chest feel tight, and while it was also driving all thoughts about Nate and her mom from her head, the "Wonderful to see you's" and "You look beautiful's" weren't nearly as comforting as Remy's snuffles and muted woofs. Suddenly Maddie's hand was on her arm, and she was point to the center of the room. "There."
That Gigi was at the center of the center wasn't a surprise. Her mom said that Gigi could walk into a McDonald's like it was the after party on opening night. She wasn't one of those women who were being told they were gorgeous because they had spent a lot of money on their dress. She was gorgeous. The hair that wasn't blond or brown but could be whatever color it chose because it was her hair glinted silver and gold and bronze in a wave that swept around her neck and spilled over one shoulder. The dress was simple, black; that was all it had to be. It didn't have to disguise imperfections and it didn't have to announce how expensive it was. Christina took in all of this in a single glance. Gigi wasn't the surprise, Gigi could only be Gigi. Myka, on the other hand was . . . .
Helena
Stunning. Helena felt as she had the first time she had seen Myka, the same sense of being jostled or nudged only to turn around and discover that the clumsy idiot who was treading on her heels wasn't there. What had brought her to a stop was in front of her. Eighteen years ago, she had been walking across campus on a Saturday evening in September on her way to what she had been assured was the nearest convenience store to buy cigarettes. She didn't often smoke cigarettes, but she preferred them to weed when she was feeling low. She hadn't wanted to come to this school. As she had whined to Charles over the phone as she literally threw clothes into a suitcase, being a few credits shy of graduation hadn't been an impediment for many successful people.
"True, but they were using the time they would have spent sitting in classes or studying doing something that furthered their dreams. They didn't waste that time sleeping or screwing someone they had fancied at a party. They had a vision of what they wanted out of life, Helena. What's yours?"
Helena had looked guiltily at her bed, still cooling from the work-out that she and the someone she had fancied at a party the night before had given it. "Can't say yet. It's still coming into focus."
Her vision of her future was no clearer having arrived at this tiny outpost of intellectual freedom and creative expression in the borderlands between the Corn Belt and the Rust Belt. To Helena, it was one big belt of industrial-looking farms and rundown manufacturing plants. The town had looked no more prepossessing on her bus ride from O'Hare, bisected by a river the color of March snow, gray with disturbing streaks of black and yellow. Smoke stacks on one side and, on the other, the college's main administrative building crowning the summit of a hill. It was her last, best hope for completing her degree, for proving that the last six years of her life hadn't been entirely wasted in a fug of weed and sex, unwashed bedding and unwashed partners. She had missed the start of classes by a week, maybe two, having stayed behind in Costa Rica after vagabonding through Central America with friends most of the summer. She had run into another set of friends in San Jose, who had promised her better parties in the resorts near Puntarenas. The parties hadn't disappointed, and it had been all too easy to let the first day of classes and then the next ones slip past until Charles had called. So while the rest of the student body was enjoying a weekend of bands and barbecue, a grand outdoor party before fall arrived in force, she was studying or, more accurately, she was going to smoke and feel sorry for herself with a textbook open but unread on her lap. If the bands played loudly enough, the music might reach her in the off-off campus apartment Charles had found for her.
The party overlapped the main lawn, so uniform a green and so meticulously maintained that it seemed to unroll like a rug, and extended into the streets closest to the campus. Unfortunately, the convenience store was on the other side of the campus, which meant the most direct route would be through the crowds, not around them. Threading her way between dancing students and banquet tables filled with tubs of iced soft drinks, Helena saw people drawing back on either side of her, an undergraduate version of the parting of the Red Sea only she doubted that she was about to be miraculously delivered. Straight ahead of her was a woman dancing as gracelessly as Elaine Benes, as any wallflower teen in a summer movie, as anyone might who had no appreciation of rhythm but took joy in every uncoordinated swing of her hips because who wouldn't want to dance and laugh and unexpectedly kiss someone on a perfectly balanced night like this? The bite of autumn in the breeze was tempered by the lingering warmth of a late summer afternoon. She was leggy, this impossibly bad dancer, the shorts she wore showing off the long lines that tapered to feet hopelessly unable to find the drumming beat of the song.
Helena felt it. It thundered in her rib cage as she continued to stare at the woman dancing so obliviously. The woman's hair was long and wiry, whipping from side to side as she rocked her head, and when her eyes happened to meet Helena's (although Myka always claimed that her eyes had been closed, all the better to "concentrate on the music"), Helena saw past the glasses, the lenses large and thick in dated frames, the child-like streaks of dirt on her face (the dust sent flying from those savagely trampling feet), and saw only the achingly beautiful symmetry of cheeks, nose, mouth. She didn't approach her, didn't speak to her. She didn't have to. Helena would know this woman anywhere. She could not see her again for 40 years, and she would recognize her immediately. She knew this woman the way you knew something gorgeous and illuminating and one of a kind; it banished the shadows from your soul and took up residence in their place. You could never fail to recognize her because you would always carry some part of her, if only the moment of seeing her, with you. Helena turned around. She heard someone call out a name, Myka, but she knew all that she needed to know.
Myka
She hadn't believed herself in the mirror. She knew she could clean up well, but she had never known that she could look –
"Ravishing? Breathtaking?" Gigi had caught her admiring herself.
Myka had lifted her shoulder – the one that wasn't holding up this shimmering, body-molding, I didn't-know-I-had-a-fairy-godmother dress – in embarrassed deprecation. Even though it was holding up her dress, her shoulder, not to mention the collarbone and arm to which it was attached, was bare, as was most of her back. She couldn't remember the last time she had shown this amount of skin in public, and she hadn't been at all sure she was ready for the VIPs at Nate Robinson's gala to be able to count the freckles on her back. Of course, one VIP at Nate's house was intimately acquainted with the freckles on her back, but the less she thought about Helena when she and Gigi were together the better. Feathering that hoydenish shoulder with kisses and then gliding her lips along the length of Myka's collarbone, Gigi had seemed only appreciative of her freckled skin. "You are beautiful. Even when you're being bested in a pool by a group of pre-teen boys."
They had decided to meet in Gigi's downtown apartment before driving to Nate and Helena's home, and though Myka had admired the view of the city that the floor-to-ceiling windows offered, she had been most impressed by Gigi's master suite. To be honest, she had expected a seraglio because an ordinary queen-sized bed with a comforter from Wayfair would be ludicrous and . . . a denial of her talents. The last had crossed Myka's mind unbidden, but if she were to keep being honest, it was generally lurking somewhere in her mind every time she and Gigi were together. The bed was oversized, even for a king, but otherwise her bedroom was more executive boardroom than pleasure palace. The walk-in closet was, unsurprisingly, filled with the kind of clothes that an almost six foot former model would be expected to wear. What was surprising was how meticulously they were organized. Myka had been so happily dizzied by the realization that, if she hadn't been the kind of woman who could carry on an internal debate in the middle of a grocery store about the number of added grams of sugar in one brand of yogurt versus another, she might have asked Gigi to marry her then and there. With a connoisseur's eye, Myka had noted how dresses, skirts, pantsuits, and gowns had been grouped according to the formality of the event to which they would be worn, subdivided by designer or style (Myka wasn't sure which) and then, if she had to guess, by last time worn. In front of one wall was a three-panel mirror, and Myka hadn't tried very hard to banish thoughts of Gigi dressing and undressing in front of it.
The bathroom had the functional necessities of tub, shower, sink, and toilet, but it was fundamentally a salon and staging area combined. Together the bathroom and the bedroom were an operations center in which all the elements needed to transform one Kristen Schneider, a tall, striking, well-built woman "somewhere" in her 40s who exceeded her peers only in that she was somewhat taller than average, somewhat more attractive than average, and somewhat more proportional than average, into Gigi Fourier were collected. "There were dozens of girls like me in high school, sorta tall, sorta blond, sorta cute, and all named Kristen or Kirsten," Gigi had said, a wondering half-smile on her face. "I just wanted to be different more than they did." She had been setting out make-up, brushes, gels, sprays. "Larry was one of my high school teachers. At first I thought he was a dirty old man, although he was younger then than I am now, but he saw that I wanted more out of a life than a teaching degree and a husband with a pick-up truck. In place of head shots, he sent my senior pictures to a friend of his who ran a modeling agency in Chicago." Her smile had turned wry. "And thus a star was born." She had added, "Larry and I, we've spent years looking out for each other. People look at us and see what they will, but he's like a father and big brother both to me. There's no one I'm in interested in or involved with, Myka, except you."
She had set down a small jar to slip her arms around Myka's waist. "I don't think I've told anyone the name on my birth certificate since high school, and I've never explained what Larry and I are to each other. I've never thought it was important before."
Being held this close, seeing and feeling more of Gigi now than she had been permitted, or had permitted herself, as a result of their decision to take things slow, Myka had been very, very tempted to suggest they forget Nate Robinson's charity gala. Gigi in deshabille, free of make-up and of most of her clothes as well, was even more seductive than in full-on Giselle Fourier mode, possibly because seduction was the last thing on her mind. Maybe not the last thing, Gigi's breathing had altered and her thumbs were stroking surprisingly sensitive spots, so Myka was discovering, on her lower back. But Gigi was being honest and, above all, vulnerable, and that, in combination with the level of organization that this room displayed was heady enough for Myka to want to surrender everything, body and soul. She had the crazy impulse to cry out, "Marry me," which hadn't surged through her with such power since she had been with Helena, and, given the haze that was unfocusing Gigi's eyes, equal parts tenderness and desire, Gigi might even had said yes. Instead Myka had suggested weakly, "I guess we should get Cinderella ready for the ball," and, haze clearing, Gigi had just as reluctantly said, "The party, right."
What would have taken Myka at least an hour, maybe more, if she didn't fudge the time she spent changing her mind, Gigi had been able to accomplish in less than 20 minutes. The hair that Myka had despaired of coaxing or coercing into the upswept work of art that Gigi's stylist had tried to teach her to reproduce, Gigi had simply seemed to command into place, wielding brushes, combs, and pins with a dexterity that rivaled her stylist's. She had applied Myka's make-up just as efficiently, the pads of her fingers lightly, impersonally blending color and disguising blemishes. Standing back from Myka, Gigi had assessed her work, her eyes no longer the soft gray, almost like mist, that they had been a short while ago, but brighter, bluer, and harder, impervious like metal or ice, the manufacturer evaluating his product, the designer his model. Then her lips had curved into a dangerously sexy smile. "I have the most beautiful date in the city." She had led Myka to the mirror in the walk-in closet, and while Myka had pirouetted in front of it, Gigi had dressed and applied her own make-up with an efficiency that didn't speak only to her years as a model but also to the years she had spent preparing herself to stand in front of cameras denying rumors about corruption in the mayor's office.
Now standing beside her, listening to Gigi greet as friends people whom Myka had only encountered through photos in newspapers and on social media, she hugged that dangerously sexy smile and Gigi's accompanying claim that she was the "most beautiful date in the city" to her because she needed them. This party intimidated the hell out of her. Yes, Nate's guests were destroying the planet, but they were literally doing it in style. The very lack of ostentation – the jewelry was discreet, the fashion was discreet, the cosmetic surgery was discreet – spoke to the amount of money that was milling in this one room alone.
After air kissing an older couple and congratulating the man on the completion of a successful merger – "Larry would love it if you could bring those jobs to the city "– Gigi murmured to her, "Take a deep breath because we're going to start working that group of men close to the terrace."
"Which group? There's more than one. They're all crowded around the doors to the terrace like sharks drawn to blood," Myka nervously complained. The men weren't all white or middle-aged, but they all wore the same expression, a mix of boredom, which was mainly affected, and curiosity, which the boredom was supposed to disguise. Some had turned to look back into the room, clearly wanting to see who was watching them, waiting for the light of recognition and the accompanying flash of admiration or envy.
"The one that looks less predatory than the others," Gigi said, a hint of laughter in her voice. "They'll be the ones we work first. If we can get the little ones interested in your pitch, we'll work on the great whites."
"I don't have a pitch. I have a university that's on the verge of chopping the carrels and study tables in the library for firewood. I'm wearing the perfume of desperation," Myka said, her lips twisting into something she feared was closer to an anxious grimace than a smile.
Gigi's hint of laughter threatened to become real. "Don't forget, you have a very close associate of the mayor and likely future governor on your arm, and she smells enticingly of confidence . . . and influence." Her gaze warmed and deepened. "And she would do just about anything you asked."
It would be so easy, looking into those eyes, their silver turned smoky not only by very expertly applied shadow and mascara but also by feelings that Myka wasn't ready to name, so easy to fall . . . .Then she heard it, not a sound so much as a vibration, time, space, the universe separating, pulling apart like a curtain, revealing Helena on the other side. The school of sharks at the terrace had roiled when the doors opened and Helena stepped through. Her dress wasn't just a flare of color among the CEO blues and grays and the similarly conservative palette of their wives, it was a flame, and though the skin the dress exposed was all the more pale, as if the dress were drawing its fire from her, the darkness of her hair and eyes had an added luster. It wasn't too great a stretch of the imagination to believe that she would crumble into a pile of ashes once her dress was removed, and Myka could attest to the fact that if it had been Helena's intention to make a conflagration of the party, she was thoroughly burned.
Once they had become lovers, Helena would tease her about how the spectacle of her dancing had transfixed her. "Couldn't move, darling. I could only stare at you. How could you not feel it?"
Yet she hadn't. She had felt only the music and the release of the tension she had been feeling since the beginning of the semester. She had spent all summer working in her father's bookstore, which was slowly surrendering to the crushing force of the Barnes & Nobles and Borders of the world, and in the concession stand of a downtown art house during the evenings, longing for school to start. Having taken all the core courses, she could concentrate on her major (Humanities with an English Literature emphasis) and she would take with her all the cast-offs, ancient editions of Thackeray and Dickens and James and Melville, that her father threw into a box marked Myka's Library. Reading to her heart's content wasn't the only thing she was looking forward to. Chained to the concession stand, she hadn't been able to shut out the sounds of the endless orgasms escaping through the theater's doors. Was there no film made anymore in which people just talked? Preferably not about sex? It wasn't that she was a prude, well, she was, but the groans and the cries sounded disturbingly unfeigned, and it reminded her, in a painfully urgent way, of her other goal for her junior year, to pursue the relationship she had just embarked on with Christopher when the spring semester ended. He was smart and nerdy and looked a little like Luke Perry, if Dylan were a computer science major with only a dash of brooding and not an ounce of rebellion. They had done no more than kiss outside her dorm for a few minutes the night before her parents arrived to drive her the hundreds of miles back home. She was hoping that the kisses, which, in her limited experience, were pretty good, were a harbinger of better and more pleasurable things to come. Her sole sexual experience to date, a furtive series of late nights with a lacrosse player embarrassed to be seen with her in public, had been both illuminating and dispiriting.
So much promise . . . thoroughly crushed. The classes she had been anticipated taking that fall had been restructured and reassigned among the faculty over the summer. Instead of taking courses that would have required her to devour nineteenth century novels, she was stuck with Romantic poetry and Renaissance writers (not including Shakespeare). She would have suffered her disappointment better had she been able to further her education sentimentale, but, alas, Christopher had taken up with someone else during the break, a junior attending another school, and he had made it plain to Myka that they could be only friends. She had planned to spend the weekend burying herself in The Brothers Karamazov, but her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend had talked her into attending the party and, once there, after a few shots of a Student Life Department-provided soft drink surreptitiously mixed with something that hadn't been provided, or approved, by the Student Life Department, they had talked her into dancing.
She hadn't thought about the party, in fact, couldn't recall the party with much clarity, when the Wednesday following it, a woman, her black hair sleekly, silkily fringing the shoulders of a shirt that looked like it had been kicked under a bed before she put it on, slouched into the seat next to her. The woman whispered loudly, "What class is this?"
"'Anglophone Literature During the Romantic Era,'" Myka said primly. The woman's dark eyes were angled above high cheekbones. Some might have said they had a naturally inquisitive cast, but Myka thought their angle lent her an expression that was more skeptical, even ironic, than inquisitive, which wasn't undercut by the amused look the woman was giving her. Myka heard herself say in a conspiratorial whisper, "Basically it's a class on the Romantic poets."
"'I'm certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.'" The woman shrugged. "Keats is part of my birthright."
Myka was forced to admit, if only to herself, that hearing Keats quoted with an English accent gave her a rush, even if the woman had been trying too hard to produce an effect. Smiling as if she knew her entrance had worked its magic, the woman introduced herself as Helena Wells. As Myka introduced herself in turn, she realized two things, Helena Wells wasn't enrolled in the class and she already knew her name. Which strongly suggested that the only reason Helena Wells was in this classroom at all was because of her. Which, in turn, should have made her feel stalked rather than charmed, but Myka wasn't scared, she was intrigued, and that led her to her third realization, she already liked Helena Wells.
Maddie
There they were, Gigi, her mom, and Helena, smiling at each other and chatting, although Maddie felt there was something a little too tight about their smiles. They were beautiful, each in her own way, even her mom. Gigi was wearing her black dress as if she went to work every day in something figure-hugging with a short skirt. She wasn't teetering at all on really, really high heels. She wore them with the same comfort that her mom wore her Teva sandals. Helena, Helena was dramatic-looking in her blood red dress, but she had given Maddie a big wink earlier in the evening, as if she, too, couldn't believe that any of this was supposed to be taken seriously. Her mom, though, her mom didn't look at all like the woman who would routinely embarrass her by saying "I'm Maddie's mom" or "That's my daughter Maddie." This woman wouldn't be caught dead in a flannel nightshirt and fuzzy slippers on weekend mornings, and she wouldn't cry and get all red-faced with her nose seeming three times too big for her face when she watched shows like Emergency Vet and The Zoo. This woman was much too cool and elegant for that. Maddie hadn't known until now that a Bering could be a swan.
