Interstitial #8
“You heard me. Why’s it all black-and-white for you, no questions, no equivocation, no doubts about who you are and how you’ve
set up your life?”
Of the barbs they’ve been tossing back and forth—tonight, for sure, but also, more quietly, maybe all week—this is the one
that hits. Natalie can almost see it land, and when it does Jordan’s eyes fill, then the tears spill over.
“Jordan!” says Natalie, moving to get a box of tissues from the counter and slide it toward her. “Oh my god, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to make you cry! What is it?”
“I’m not certain at all,” says Jordan. “About anything.”
Natalie is an idiot: in the excitement of seeing Simone, in the shock at Mae’s revelation, she had forgotten what Jordan said
at the bar: You aren’t the only one with things going on.
Natalie gets them clean glasses and fills them with ice water. She sits beside her sister. “Tell me,” she says. “Tell me,
Jordan.”
It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and Jordan was invited to go with Bernadette to a party all the way out in Sagaponack,
at the home of a VIP client. We won’t say who. You’d know the name, and, had Bernadette not worked her magic, you’d know a
lot of other stuff about this person too.
Jordan was invited as Bernadette’s plus-one. Typically Bernadette’s husband, Jed, would serve as Bernadette’s plus-one, but
Jed and the two children (ages nine and seven) were visiting Jed’s parents in South Carolina, as they do twice a year, whether
they like it or not. (Bernadette doesn’t like it. Too much downtime, and Jed’s mother gets offended when Bernadette checks
her phone during meals.)
Despite these constrictions, Bernadette was supposed to go with the family. Then she got the invitation to Sagaponack. In
their business there are some parties you just don’t turn down, no matter who is waiting for you on the golf course at Wild
Dunes. So she called Jordan and enlisted her. A car would come for her at three o’clock. Dress for success, Bernadette told
her.
Jordan chose a white pantsuit. She felt like a suffragette.
“They’re better off without me,” Bernadette confesssed to Jordan in the town car, as though they were continuing a conversation they had begun earlier. It took Jordan a moment to realize Bernadette meant her husband and children. “Jed’s mom thinks I’m A Lot.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” said Jordan. It was probably true. Bernadette is A Lot. But that’s why she’s so good at her job. Like Tom Petty, she won’t back down; like Destiny’s Child, she’s a survivor.
Bernadette is forty-six; she looks thirty-five and acts, alternately, twenty-four and fifty-seven. Depending on the situation.
She has the sort of long, thin legs that look good in a tennis skirt, brown eyes set just a smidge too close together, and
lips you keep looking at because you can’t decide if she uses filler or not. (Jordan still doesn’t know, but her money is
on yes.)
She started her firm at thirty and plans to sell it when she’s fifty, at which point she will “sit on a beach, doing nothing.”
There’s no way the “doing nothing” thing is going to happen, Jordan knows. Bernadette is incapable of this. She barely sleeps,
scarcely eats, completes a forty-five-minute Peloton bike workout every morning before sunrise.
For the first hour plus change of the drive, they were on the Long Island Expressway and there wasn’t much to look at except
expressway, so when Bernadette picked up her phone, Jordan set her thoughts free to roam and wander. The invitation to Sagaponack
was a big deal. The last time Bernadette brought someone from the firm as her plus-one was five years ago, when she invited
Jordan’s former coworker, Michael, to a Christmas party on the Upper West Side. Michael had three too many peppermint martinis
and invited one of their clients to engage in a push-up contest with him. He didn’t even have the good grace to let the client
win, and this is why Michael is Jordan’s former coworker and not her current coworker.
Jordan resolved she would self-monitor her drinking in Sagaponack.
One cocktail or two glasses of champagne.
No showing off. No push-up contests, not even a plank contest. (She would definitely win a plank contest, unless The Rock himself was at this party, which, come to think of it, was not out of the question.)
Except for Sheila in accounting, Jordan was the person who had worked for Bernadette the longest. Bernadette considered Jordan
her right-hand man. Woman. She trusted Jordan with tasks she wouldn’t dream of delegating to the younger and greener Tom or
Caitlin or Irina, and Jordan had become Bernadette’s first call when Bernadette herself receives a call.
This is not to say that all was perfect in Bernadette-land. Bernadette could be a bully. Jordan had heard her on the phone
with her nanny, her chiropractor, her eyelash esthetician, even her own husband, speaking in a tone any of the Shipman girls
would have been roundly scolded for had they ever dared to introduce it with anyone.
There were times when Bernadette’s response to a crisis was so aggressive that even Jordan, who had never been known for her
soft touch, balked. And yet! Bernadette was no longer simply a rising star in the field. She was the star, and she had risen.
Rolodexes don’t exist anymore—they’ve never existed in Jordan’s professional life, though she’s seen them in movies—but if
they did, Bernadette’s card would have prime placement on more desktops than you could count.
They exited onto the two-lane Sunrise Highway, and traffic began to build. Who were all these people, heading to different
parts of the Hamptons on day three of the holiday weekend? Bernadette and Jordan were traveling with the parasites, the hangers-on,
the day-trippers.
The start of the summer instilled in Jordan a sudden, intense longing for the summers of her youth. There were summers when
she played the brat, of course, when she longed to be back in Lenox, working at Tanglewood with her friends, waitressing at
the Pittsfield Country Club, but there were many more summers when there was no place else in the world she’d rather be than
Ruby on Rye.
“We’re going to be fucking late,” said Bernadette, and with a wallop Jordan came back to the present. Jordan thought she saw the driver’s ears twitch. She thought that maybe she saw his soul twitch.
Did Jordan ever have second thoughts about having tied her cart to such a—well, to use a euphemism—powerful horse? Were there
times when she thought that Bernadette’s moral compass may have skewed slightly off, and did that frighten her? Perhaps. But
not so many times that she needed to worry about it. It was the nature of the crisis communications business to come out swinging,
to react quickly, to move fast so that you controlled the narrative. If Bernadette wasn’t who she was, she wouldn’t be so
good at doing what she does.
They arrived.
When their car pulled up to the house, joining the other vehicles that were variously parked or letting people out, Jordan
tried not to gape openly. But in her mind, very quietly, she gaped. Lenox had its share of beautiful homes, of course it did,
and so did Rye, and Jordan had lived in Manhattan long enough that this was not her first trip to the Hamptons, but, wow,
this house was something else altogether. It must have been worth thirty million dollars. The front was entirely glass. Visible
inside and perfectly lit to show off every straight line, every geometric cube of furniture, was a winding, floating staircase.
She cast a subtle glance at Bernadette to see if she was equally impressed, but Bernadette was once again looking at her phone
and barely seemed to have noticed that they were here.
“Whoa,” Jordan said experimentally.
Bernadette glanced up and says, “I heard this house has seventeen bathrooms. Does that seem excessive to you?” She didn’t
wait for Jordan’s answer (which is, of course, yes—how could there be any other?), but slid out of the car.
She said not one word to the driver, so Jordan thanked him, because if there was one thing her mother taught her, and there were many more than one, it was that you always thank a person who has done something for you, whether or not they have been paid to do it.
In the perfect light of an early summer evening, they followed the curvy path that led around the house and toward the sounds
of the party. Jordan imagined that with a drone’s-eye view the paths would spell out something like WE’RE IMPORTANT AND WE HAVE A LOT OF MONEY, HOW ABOUT YOU?
Nothing felt off yet.
On the endless, Gatsby-like lawn, the party, like the interior of the house, looked as artfully arranged as a stage set. Beautiful
people in beautiful clothes. Flutes of champagne, a string quartet dressed in red, white, and blue, and playing all the holiday
favorites. Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein. A raw bar, of course. There was always a raw bar, the rawer the better. Lanterns
floating in the pristine rectangular pool, servers moving around as unobtrusively as moths. Much of the outdoor furniture
was built into the patio itself, and around the pool are at least thirty lounge chairs, so fancy that they didn’t even have
frames.
Bernadette took a flute of champagne from a server, downed its contents, then took another before Jordan had even had two
sips of hers. The server, who reminded Jordan of Mae, young, with creamy skin and bright eyes, averted her gaze as though
Bernadette was undressing in front of her. Jordan imagined that you saw all sorts of things working at parties like this.
Designer drugs, high-end hookers, wild infidelities. The bigger the stock portfolio, she has learned, the bigger the taste
for risk, and the stronger the feeling that you’ll skate away from your transgressions.
“I’ve got to go say hello to someone,” said Bernadette, and just like that Jordan was alone in the crowd. She should have