Coming Out
Luke was in tears. Lorelai stood by completely emotionless, her hands on her hips, fluttering Rory's feathered fan behind her hip.
"Am I going to have to call someone?" she asked, keeping an eye on the pulsating vein in his forehead.
"Oh yeah, yeah," he replied, wiping tears from his eyes. "Call the people organizing this thing and beg them to let you do it too. I'll pay good money to see you flapping that ostrich wing around."
"You are now uninvited!" she huffed as she waved the fan in Luke's face.
Luke grasped her hips and pulled her to him as he slowly began to breathe again.
"Too late," he chortled. "Rory already sent me an invitation. It's even addressed to Luke Danes plus one. Should I take a date?"
"Who? Babette? Miss Patty? I'd love to see them at this soiree."
Luke shook his head. "Maybe I'll ask your mother to introduce me to a few nice girls."
Lorelai moved to the kitchen, grabbed a couple of beers and returned to find Luke opening a slender white box. "What's this?" he asked.
"Dean's gloves. Everyone wears gloves at these events. Rory's are over-the-elbow satin." She smirked at him as he slid a glove on his hand.
"Hey, these are nice, real leather. Is it deerskin?" Luke fondled the butter-soft leather as it eased itself over his slender fingers. "Too bad they're white. These would be great for hunting. Nice fingertip feel."
"I'll ask Dean to save them for you. You can go polar bear hunting in winter with white gloves," she teased. He rolled his eyes in response.
"How much does this thing cost anyway? It's like a meat market, only the chickens are dressed up in satin and lace." Luke peeled the glove off his hand and laid it back in the box.
"It's costing us nothing," said Lorelai calmly. "Emily's the one who wants it, so Rory is doing it all her way and Emily is paying the bills." She plopped down on the sofa next to Luke, who had begun flipping channels, bored with the fancy costumes and society talk.
Lorelai busied herself putting the various items back in their boxes and bags as she continued explaining the debutante ball to Luke.
"For starters, Mom paid $10,000 for the table we're going to sit at. That at least includes dinner and an open bar. Rory's dress was another thousand, and the gear like the feathered fan, gloves, shoes, et cetera was several hundred more. Dean's tails rental was a couple of hundred. Christopher claimed he still fit in the tails he used fifteen years ago, but I don't believe him, but he has to pay for that himself."
Luke hit the mute button and he turned to look at Lorelai struggling to fit the fan into its bag. He held the bag open so she could slide the fan into it. "Christopher's going? What's he doing there? When was the last time he went to anything of Rory's?"
Suddenly Luke wasn't enjoying mocking the ball anymore. His smug, caustically satiric mood dissipated, knowing that Lorelai would be on edge that evening, constantly trying to predict which flaky thing Christopher was going to do next. Not that Luke was jealous, or concerned, or hated Christopher, or anything like that. Nope. None of that was true. It was just that Luke had been looking forward to an evening of mocking the high society rituals, and Christopher was, well, he was Christopher.
He squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to figure out what to do. This was a time to play it cool; don't let Lorelai know that this bugged him. He looked down at the remote still in his hands, trying to distract himself by wondering how many deadly germs were on this piece of plastic that he was damn sure never got washed.
Lorelai casually explained, not noticing the head of steam building up inside of Luke. "Well, sure, he's her dad. First she gets escorted down the stairs by her father, which is the virtual offering of the virginal sacrifice for bidding. At the bottom of the stairs, her name is announced and she's handed over to the pretend highest bidder, which would be Dean in this case."
"And you? What's the mother's job here?" Luke rolled his eyes again and continued his pathetic attempt to be nonchalant about Christopher being at the debutante ball.
"I am going to be carefully monitoring the bar, taste testing the martinis and making sure no one is sexually harassed," nodded Lorelai wisely, with an impish sideways glance as she watched Luke squirm.
"What?" he exploded. "Her father's there before the presentation, Dean's there afterward, and that's not enough to protect her?" He stood up, hopped over Lorelai's outstretched legs and began pacing.
"What kind of society do they think they can call 'high society' when the kids are at risk even when the parents are present, and the grandparents, and god know who else?"
He bent down and looked at Lorelai with wild eyes, then straightened and began waving his arms, not hearing her as she quietly called, "Luke."
"It's all those trust fund babies, isn't it? They get a pile of money from grandpa and think they're invincible! Then they start trolling for perfectly innocent kids like Rory, wanting to do who knows what!"
"Luke!" she called loudly enough to break into his rant. She giggled at him.
"Why are you laughing?" he grumbled. "This is not funny!"
"I'm not worried about Rory, it's you I have to protect."
"Me?! Whaddya mean, me? I can take care of myself." He pulled himself up to his full height and thumped on his chest.
Lorelai stood up and hugged him, patting his chest gently. "I know, babe. It's just that while all those daddies are upstairs escorting their daughters, the mommies and trophy stepmommies are hanging out at the bar looking for strapping young men to distract them. I have to protect you from them!" She giggled again.
"I can take care of myself," he complained.
"Let's see. I bet after fifteen minutes with Cricket, Muffy and Zoe, you'll be hiding behind my very elegant skirts."
"Cricket? Full-grown adults really name their children Cricket?"
She took him by the hand, soothingly rubbing his arm as she sat him back down in front of the TV. "It'll be all right, honey. Let's watch some Sportscenter and see what the guys in the tight baseball pants were doing today. We don't have to worry about Cricket or Muffy for a while."
Flipping the channel to Sportscenter, the first words out of the announcer's mouth were, "Welcome to the cricket semi-finals. Who's going home with the big prize today?" He groaned as Lorelai laughed out loud.
"You won't believe what was going on in there!" Luke exclaimed as he exited the men's lounge at the debutante ball venue.
"Seeing as you took longer changing into your suit than I did creating all this sophistication and elegance," she swept her arm along her body, from the black leather bust strap to the midnight blue satin sheath with the thigh-high slit, "there better not have been anything weird going on," chided Lorelai.
Luke gave her a brief glance before continuing. "You look nice," he tossed off. "I feel like I went back to the time I was eight years old and my grandmother took me to Hartford to buy my mother a birthday present. We went to this huge department store, and they had a bathroom just like this one! There was a guy in there whose job was to hand out towels to dry my hands. It might have been the same guy today because oh my god was he old. I haven't seen a bathroom like that in twenty years." As a smile broke across his face, Lorelai could see the sparkle of an excited young boy in his eyes.
"Well, look at you," she chuckled. "I was sure you were about to launch into a rant of monumental proportions against the wasteful living of the rich."
"Of course, that goes without saying," he shrugged.
"But you can't resist saying it anyway, right?" she mocked his penchant for ranting.
"The whole idea of coming out is a throwback to a time when women were used as pawns in a conspiracy to hold the wealth of the nation in a few white men's hands. Mothers made a pretense of parading their daughters around as if they were going to be able to choose their husbands, but the fathers were actually doing back room deals to ensure the best political alliances, then sending their sons to the right girl to seal the deal!"
Girls and their fathers were moving up the stairs to organize the presentation of the debutantes. Luke began waving his arms as he went deeper into his rant, echoing the sentiments Lorelai had expressed several days before. Lorelai grabbed his arms to restrain him as she giggled.
"But today it's an even bigger waste of time! Smart, clever girls like Rory are parading around just to make some snooty, status-obsessed relative happy. It costs a fortune to get everything set up, only to watch the debutantes flapping fans while the speaker lists of the names, as if they were some sort of elite that still had actual power."
He abruptly stopped talking as he noticed Emily approaching; with any luck he hadn't been speaking too loudly.
"Lorelai, Luke, you made it," said Emily calmly.
Lorelai turned swiftly. "Mom! Um, how's it hanging?" she asked clumsily.
Emily took an exasperated breath. "Everything's fine, Lorelai. I just wanted to make sure you knew where our table was before the parading and fan-flapping began." One arched eyebrow told the couple what she had overheard. At that, she turned and moved toward the lobby.
Lorelai looked at Luke, who couldn't look at anything but his own feet at the moment. "That's a whole new range of red for you, honey. Sort of a cross between fire-engine red and jalapeno."
She firmly grasped his elbow, steering him away from Emily.
"She hates me now," he groaned.
"Welcome to the family. The only one of us she likes is Rory." She pushed him down onto a seat at the Gilmore table. "You just sit here. I'll get you a stiff drink and we'll just let this day pass into infamy."
"That bathroom is actually good for the environment," Luke offered weakly, vainly attempting a distracting rant. "It's much better to use cloth towels, and the guy who works there keeps things spotless, so there are fewer chemicals ruining our water systems."
"Yes, Lukey, how about if we save the environment tomorrow, and let Emily have her night tonight, OK?" She patted his arm consolingly and put his ice water in his hand.
He nodded, pondering the mystifying number of forks at his place setting.
Confident that Luke was going to remain stalwartly silent for as long as possible, Lorelai moved to the bar for drinks, and after delivering a scotch and a kiss to Luke, went to find her mother.
She played referee between Emily and Richard until the last second before Rory's presentation actually began, then rushed back to be with her boyfriend and savor each moment for its future mocking potential.
Once Rory had made it safely down the stairs, Lorelai and Luke got up again to watch the dancing and rest of the ceremony. They refreshed their drinks, at which moment Lorelai noticed that her father was pouting out in the anteroom.
"I'll be right back," she whispered, and went to her father.
Luke refreshed his drink and scanned the room. He had the oddest feeling of being watched, but couldn't see who might be watching him. He paused a little closer to the dance floor, and before he knew it, Emily was standing next to him.
He turned red again, then began to stammer an apology, but was quickly cut off by Emily.
"Oh, don't bother, Luke, I know it's all nonsense. Coming out doesn't mean anything at all to a young person like Rory. She's got a wonderful future ahead of her, with a husband and a family, and maybe even a career. This is just something we old biddies do to make ourselves think we're actually helping."
She looked around the room at the inadequate decorations and small group. "It's just not what it used to be," she sighed.
Luke, listening intently, reached out a hand to gently touch her arm in comfort, earning a half-smile from Emily. Neither of them heard the soft click of a digital camera held by an unobtrusive photographer.
Christopher, Lorelai and Richard all approached them at once, Christopher coming from his position back in the dads' room, where the fathers had been greeted with celebratory drinks and cigars.
"How did I do?" Christopher grinned, looking to Lorelai and Emily for approval.
"You should have slid Rory down the banister," quipped Lorelai, wrapping her hand around Luke's elbow. Still a little disconcerted from his moment with Emily, he smiled gratefully down at Lorelai.
"Lorelai!" reproved Emily, "that would have been a disaster!"
She rolled her eyes as she answered, "Just a joke, Mom." A beat later she added, "They should have slid down together."
Christopher laughed his patronizing false laugh while Richard snorted.
"Let's move to the table, shall we?" suggested Emily, having had enough of Lorelai's sarcasm for the moment. "Christopher, where's your date? I thought you said you were bringing a date?"
Luke felt Lorelai stiffen at that statement, and he looked at her with concern.
"There she is," cried Christopher, "I'll get her."
Lorelai squeezed Luke's arm, but didn't look at him until he gasped. She raised her head and followed his look, adding her own gasp.
"Rachel!" they said in unison, their mouths gaping as Rachel took a picture of the whole group before she came within conversation distance.
A/N: a bit of a cliffhanger, just to keep things interesting. I totally loved Lorelai's dress at the ball.