Chapter Eleven #2
“Interesting,” Berty said. He fished out the lime from his empty lemonade and squirted it into the glass. “I’m lined up to do another musical next. I know she’s got stems.” He gestured toward the water, his mouth parting beneath his salt-streaked mustache. “But what about pipes?”
Truman cleared his throat. Albert Boyle was crass, and his mother would have hated him.
But Truman liked how gritty he was, another outlier who had clawed his way up into a society that he didn’t quite fit into.
They were under no illusions that the women who surrounded them now would have given them a second look if not for their bank accounts and their powerful sway behind the scenes.
In that way, he felt a fondness toward Albert.
He was scrappy. He was a fighter. And Truman still felt an affinity for the underdog; still remembered the scratching, searing hunger of what it felt like to be one.
“She can sing,” Truman said with confidence. “She’s got talents you can’t imagine.”
“Oh, I can imagine,” Albert said, giving Truman a long look. And Truman gave an equally long thought about striking him; but instead, he let it rest. He knew Albert wouldn’t dare touch Clementine.
The mafia wasn’t the only one who could put out a hit.
Albert picked through the nuts, digging to the very bottom of the dish, and sucked the salt from his fingers. “How’s Mabel? You keeping her happy and quiet?”
Truman snorted. “Come, now, you know she’s never been either of those.”
He had loved her once, back when everything was young and desperate.
She had been an actress trying to make it on the stage.
He liked to go and watch her, to see the rest of the crowd take her in with their eyes, and know that he was the one she was going home with.
She could make the audience laugh, but they were children looking at a toy through an outside window, and he got the real thing.
She pushed boundaries, had mad ideas like breaking into the Museum of Natural History at night to touch the stuffed grizzlies before the alarm caught them.
She had a thrilling streak and a wicked sense of humor.
And if Truman’s mother would have hated Albert Boyle, she would have rolled over in her grave and back again over Mabel.
“You’ve got a good thing going here,” Albert said. “Lotte’s fine with the occasional dalliance, but she would have gouged out my eyes if I had a regular piece on the side.”
Truman grunted. He tried to remember Mabel on their wedding day.
She’d worn a simple white muslin dress she’d sewn with shells to look like pearls, and a gardenia behind her ear.
It had been early days, before he’d paid back his father’s loan and the paper had taken off, before his shrewd investments in rail, steel, and tobacco had skyrocketed.
She had been there when he made his first dollar; and when she wasn’t scheming or hollering, she had looked at him like she believed in him. The way his mother used to.
And then one day along the way, she had started to hate him, and he her. He couldn’t pinpoint when, any more than he could the exact moment he had fallen in love with her. A hundred moments, scattering seeds that they had each cultivated until they became something more.
Berty looked around for a maid to replenish his empty glass. “You ever consider cutting the cord?”
Truman knew he had put to words what everyone else was thinking, when they asked politely after Mabel—or, more tellingly, didn’t ask after her at all. Why hadn’t they divorced, when everyone knew the marriage was over?
“She wants too much,” Truman said, and it was a version of the truth.
A year ago, he’d visited her in New York.
The marriage was long over, and he’d considered divorce, but Mabel was better controlled under his thumb, and it kept Clementine from angling for more.
He’d slept in his separate bedroom in the penthouse suite.
They’d gone together to the society dinners she treasured, and he had put on a tuxedo and taken her to the opera; and afterward, she’d thrown a porcelain dish at his head and tried to get half of his fortune.
“I’ve been with you since the beginning,” she’d said, and if her words could have carved into his skin, they would have.
“Yes, but I’ve done all the work since then, my dear.”
“I deserve half.”
He’d choked on his drink. “Not on your life, Mabel,” he’d said.
“I could ruin you,” she said.
She couldn’t. And he knew, without a doubt, she wouldn’t.
They were tied to one another, for better or worse.
If she’d tried to divorce him on her own, a judge would side with him over the fortune, and the rest of polite society would side with him for all future social occasions.
And then, when he was still considering how much of his fortune he was willing to part with, his priorities had changed.
It was no longer about money and wooing Hollywood and dignitaries.
He’d set his sights higher. He was dreaming of politics again.
And he wouldn’t accede to a divorce at all.
“You just mean to humiliate me and give me an allowance,” she had said, her eyes flashing. “Like some sort of kept woman. Without freedom, or love.”
For the briefest moment, he had pictured her that day on their wedding, with the flower tucked behind her ear, looking up at him with those lit green eyes.
“You have always been able to walk away,” he said.
“Instead, I think fur stoles and lunches at L’Aiglon mean more to you than freedom, or love. ”
He had left that night and gotten a lift to his private plane, had his personal things shipped back later. When they came, they smelled like her perfume. And, in Mabel’s way of giving him the figurative finger, she had slipped in a matchbook from L’Aiglon.
He watched Clementine swimming in the pool. Her delighted laughter, her long strokes cutting through the aquamarine water. He’d decided the sacrifice was worth it, to put up with Mabel for a little while longer to pursue this final dream. But would he give up Clementine, if push came to shove?
He leaned against the marble balcony. “Who are you thinking of for the male lead?” Truman asked Berty. He set his empty glass down, and another round of lemonades and spiced nuts instantly appeared, as if by magic.
“You,” Berty said. He guffawed and popped a handful of the nuts into his mouth. “I’m not sure. Can Beau Remington sing? I’ve got my eye on him.”
Truman raised his eyebrows. That made two of them.
Normally, Beaumont’s decline of the invitation to Enchanted Hill would have irked Truman as an unforgivable slight.
But instead, what he had felt was relief.
He instantly zeroed in on that emotion, examining it, alone in his study, when he walked along the aisles of his newspapers.
He didn’t discount his gut feelings. They had led him the right way before, and he had learned not to ignore them.
Clementine splashed in the pool, catching sight of him. “Are you coming down?” she called. She was young, and happy, and she glittered in the water, as if she were a well of sunlight.
Meanwhile, the very sound of Mabel’s voice had begun to grate against his nerves like the teeth of a metal comb.
He saw the wrinkles in her skin, the hateful way her mouth twisted.
And she saw all his failures and worst secrets, the ugliest sides of him he tried to forget.
They had seen one another naked down to their cores, more rotten than they wanted to admit, and they were ashamed.
It became easier, then, to simply wish she didn’t exist. To stop seeing the mirror she held up to him, and instead find something more beautiful to look at.