Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10
CAROLINE
It was one of those warm New York nights when the air zinged with possibility, and the sounds from the streets fanned the feeling that the world would leave without you if you didn’t hurry up.
When I first moved here, the sounds were the first things I fell in love with.
There was always someone honking, chucking trash, or cussing out slow walkers. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was alive. The only noises in Woodville, my hometown in Aotearoa New Zealand, were birds, or—if you were near the one main street, imaginatively called Main Street—cars.
I stabbed my cocktail pick at my ice, chasing cubes around the glass to distract me from the beautiful woman on the other side of the room who was laughing at something Chase had said.
“Chase, you’re outrageous!” She giggled.
No, he wasn’t. Chase was very, very rageous. Even now he was looking around the room, seemingly worried that his date’s teasing was going to draw people’s attention. It hadn’t. Only mine, and I’d been watching them way before that.
Green-eyed monster, thy name is… Teddy.
When I’d swanned in, fashionably late, Chase and his date were already at the bar. (Of course, he arrived exactly at the time specified on the invite.) Chase hadn’t acknowledged me in any way; his attention was on his date, who was telling everyone about a terrarium workshop she wanted Chase to do with her. That was fine. I could get a drink and bide my time until the right moment for a spectacle emerged. I wasn’t bugged by their plans for an intimate and unique little date. I was the spoiled Bircher oil heiress.
“What’s your motivation?” Lyssa had asked before I left the apartment.
I paused at the door. “My career, Lyss. You know, everything I’ve been working for, for the last ten years?”
She started to say something, but I was feeling defensive. “Burlesque isn’t just what I do, Lyssa. It’s who I am. I’ve made so many sacrifices to be here—moving away from my family, working awful jobs. I’m not going back to Woodville to work at the café. I won’t.” I exhaled. “Gerard’s money will mean Dad will be able to pay everything off and hire better baristas than me anyway. I never get the milk right.”
“Care, I know that. You’ve only said it a hundred times. I meant what’s your motivation as Teddy . You should know.”
“Oh. Make a fool out of my ex by flirting with his brother?”
“Tale old as time.” Lyssa nodded approvingly. “Make sure you bring the attitude.”
I adopted a bored, haughty stare. “This caviar doesn’t taste like beluga! Bring me another!”
I’d met plenty of awful rich people at burlesque shows. They ordered Bollinger to impress their table but ‘forgot’ to tip their waitress. That was the kind of human garbage I was modeling Teddy on .
“Perfect.” Lyssa approved. “Happy scamming.”
Lueur, the upscale lounge bar, felt like stepping back in time to a clandestine speakeasy, so it was fitting that the party had a 1920s murder mystery theme.
There were leather armchairs clustered around tables with hazy lamps where people would linger until the small hours, swapping secrets. Behind the marble bar, the wall of liquor was backlit, so beams of light shone through the bottles and cast colorful reflections onto the main floor. The atmosphere was underscored by chatter, popping champagne corks, and the efficient hustle of the waitstaff. Actors milled about the floor, swapping conversation and clues with guests.
I was draped in one of the overstuffed armchairs, not listening as one of the actors monologued about a murder most foul. I probably should have started my scandalmongering (a five-dollar word!) already, but I couldn’t stop watching Chase and the terrarium woman.
As I watched, she started fanning her face the way someone did when they felt a sneeze coming. Chase, ever attentive, immediately procured a napkin.
I wasn’t jealous.
Jealousy was for insecure people, not me. I had confidence coming out my butt! I was just miffed Chase’s date had been invited here on her own merit and didn’t have to answer to people calling her the wrong name all the time, that’s all.
Fine, I was jealous.
When Mike and I were kids, we had an electric flyswatter that we used to zap each other with, as a game. You’d be minding your own business, pulling plums off the tree in the backyard or something, then, bam, you’d get a few volts to the back of the calf and spend the rest of the day limping around looking for revenge.
I needed to imagine Mike swinging that electric swatter at me anytime I did something that was out of character for Teddy. Like getting jealous because men I had no shot with had brought beautiful, funny, and charming dates. Zap .
“Teddy!”
My stomach dipped and I looked up and saw Sonya Barlow. She was the curator at the gallery I’d harangued Joe at and a central member of this social set. She’d gone to school with Teddy, and knew Chase well enough to give him my address when he’d asked.
Involuntarily, I patted my hair. My real hair. Emboldened by tonight’s costume party theme, I’d left the itchy wig at home. Frankly, I couldn’t act like a siren with a head that itched like it was home to a bunch of horny fire ants. I was regretting that now. I could have done with the added protection of a wig, horny ants or no.
“Sonya!” I greeted in my best Teddy voice. “Nice to see you. You look great.”
“Teddy motherfucking Bircher. In the flesh.” The elegant white woman folded her long limbs into the chair next to me. She looked like a fancy praying mantis. In a good way.
Sonya nodded at my minidress. “Nice dress.”
“Naeem Khan,” I replied, just like Lyssa had instructed.
The slinky black number I’d worn to debut as Teddy was a result of walking into Bergdorf’s and choosing the least-Caroline dress I saw, and charging it to Gerard. My usual aesthetic was pink-on-pink and lots of faux fur, so I thought I’d done well, but Lyssa screwed up her face and told me that un-styled black garment said imposter, not heiress. When she learned I needed another outfit for Greta’s murder mystery, she’d plucked Gerard’s charge card from my fingers and expressed this gold minidress, styling it with tan stay-ups and layered jewels. The dress clung to every inch of my body, with champagne beads that swished around my legs when I walked, making me look like a luxe Diana Dors.
“Oh, look!” Sonya exclaimed suddenly, making me jump. “These are paper.” She picked up a coaster from the small table in front of us and held it up to the light to inspect it. “Look, Teddy! ”
I’d seen cardboard coasters before—who hadn’t? —but I leaned over.
Not for the first time, I thought there was a childlike quality to the superrich. They were delighted by boring, everyday things like cardboard coasters, keeping your coat with you, or placing your own napkin on your lap.
“How quaint,” Sonya said happily and set the coaster back on the table beside her glass.
“So quaint,” I agreed, wondering if I should take my drink off my coaster too. For assimilation. But I couldn’t.
Instead, I watched the condensation slide down Sonya’s glass onto the wood and tried not to think about my dad wiping at beverage rings on the tables in the café.
If this was a test, it was both banal and perfect.
“So, Teddy. Now that you’re back, I’ve been dying to ask. Did you really throw Joe’s grandmother’s ring into the Mediterranean the night you broke things off with him?”
Sonya should be running an intelligence agency, not hawking art.
Luckily, I’d read this story on a gossip blog.
With careful nonchalance I said, “Yes, off the side of a superyacht.”
Sonya laughed, delighted. “Where is Joe, anyway?” She looked around the lounge bar as if he might materialize. “Maybe he heard you were coming and decided to skip?”
“Maybe.”
Probably.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chase’s date show him something on her phone. Probably a terrarium. Earlier, I’d Googled it, and it turned out that a terrarium was a bowl of dirt. Who kept pictures of bowls of dirt on their phone? That was unhinged.
“Teddy, I couldn’t help but notice a certain rapport between you and your ex-fiancé’s half brother,” Sonya said. “Is this a revenge thing? Is that why you’re back?” She twirled her index finger at me and I thought she was going to bop me on the nose. “I remember how you think, you wily girl!”
This was the opening I needed, but I took no pleasure in seizing it.
“Well, you know what they say about getting over someone?—”
Sonya said, “Go to therapy.”
At the same time, I finished, “—fuck his brother.”
“No!” She looked aghast. “Come on! Chase ?”
“What’s wrong with Chase?” I asked, more defensively than I meant to.
Sonya rolled her eyes. “Obviously you’ve never read his blog.”
The mysterious blog! After Gerard had mentioned Chase’s blog, Lyssa and I had typed query after query into Google with no luck. He must have been writing it under another name.
“What’s the deal with this blog?” I asked, careful to appear disinterested even though I was very, very interested.
“He started it after you went to Europe. He publishes anonymously, but of course, we all know it’s him. I tried to warn Fiona—you remember Fiona? She’s Michael Durbois’s daughter—well, she went on a date with him last year even though I told her not to. Chase has his father’s head of hair and, more importantly, majority shares in the Sanford Group, so Fiona is willing to overlook the fact that he’s a huge buzzkill.”
Affront climbed my spine. “I don’t think he’s a buzzkill.”
“You don’t need to lie.” Sonya patted my hand. “As long as you know that the woman who finally lets Chase lock her down will spend the rest of her life faking partnered orgasms. I don’t know about this firsthand”—she anticipated my question—“but I read a few of his blogs, and it’s clear to me the man fucks like a puritan.”
Sonya and I were on very different pages. It was true that Chase had a rigidity to him, but I found that hot. It made me want to press his buttons. He had the air of someone very tightly wound who desperately needed to let loose. ‘ Do you need a reminder to eat your favorite meal? ’ he’d asked at the apartment.
“Is that what all of his posts are about?” I asked Sonya. “Sex?”
“Oh no. It’s an ethics column for men. The Moral Fix . Men write in with their problems and Chase writes back. Because he’s a good boy who always does the right thing. Yawn.”
Horror swept over me, cold as an icy cocktail. Sweet Brigitte Bardot . No wonder my Summer thing hadn’t worked on him, the man was a professional stick in the mud! Trying to scam an ethics blogger was like trying to shortchange a mathematician.
“That’s what Chase does for a living?” I said, unable to fully hide my horror.
Sonya looked at me strangely. “He doesn’t need to make a living, Teddy.” She said living like I would say gonorrhea . “He’s a Sanford. But yes, his blog and his little game shop take up most of his time.”
“So…” I said slowly, “Chase spends all day lecturing people who write to him for help about what he thinks they should have done. Is that right? People who I can only assume don’t have trust funds or generational wealth?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
I was too stunned to answer her. This information shook me to my core.
People who idealized a moral high ground at the expense of everything else, who said they would never do this or never do that, (a) didn’t really know what those things entailed and (b) had never looked at their accounts and seen only overdraft and debt. They didn’t understand that it was a different set of rules to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you weren’t a cishet man, or didn’t have a safety net of familial wealth. It was harder to be taken seriously, harder to protect your personal safety, harder to establish trust and get opportunities… Everything was much, much harder. I knew this firsthand, and I still had a lot of privilege as a white, straight-sized, conventionally attractive woman.
Pearl-clutching, ‘ I would never ,’ or ‘ you should just… ’ people infuriated me. Because what they meant was ‘ I’d rather not ,’ and then they never experienced a circumstance that made them reevaluate. For example, three weeks ago, I would have said I’d never commit identity fraud, and look at me now!
Proving that karma really was what they called her, a deep voice cut in.
“Hope I’m not interrupting.”