Chapter 18 #4
When Emily returned, wearing fresh clothes, Violet was gone. Jack sat on the floor next to Connor, zooming the plane around him. Connor giggled and reached for the plane, which Jack lifted too high for him to catch.
“Where’s Violet?” Emily said.
“She said she had to go.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Jack swooped the plane down again, and this time let Connor catch it.
“Did you say something to her?”
“I asked if she had any performances coming up. I said I hoped Connor would play the piano one day. That’s it. Then she left.”
Connor, the plane in his hands, looked between his parents.
Emily said, “It’s not like Violet to leave without saying goodbye.”
Jack shrugged. “I guess she remembered something she had to do.”
But it took a while for Violet to answer Emily’s text thanking her for the visit, and whenever Emily invited her over to the apartment, Violet always had a reason she couldn’t come.
White hydrangeas sat on Emily’s lap as she listened to Violet play. She had seen on Facebook that Violet was performing Liszt at a recital hall in Midtown. Emily wasn’t invited but surely anybody could come. The announcement had been public.
Violet’s long fingers slowed, then sank into the keys. Applause scattered across the hall. The tissue paper wrapped around the flowers crinkled beneath Emily’s grip. As people began leaving the hall, she went to Violet to congratulate her. “Oh,” Violet said when she saw her.
“I hope it’s okay that I came.”
Violet was polite. “Of course.”
“Could we get a drink?”
“My parents are here,” Violet said. “We have dinner plans.”
“Will you please tell me what happened?”
Violet said that Jack had told her that he hoped that Connor would play the piano, so she suggested that he start young.
“I want him to play like you,” Jack said.
People often expressed some version of this to Violet.
She understood it. After all, she wished that she could play like Martha Argerich.
But she reminded Jack that it was difficult to reach her level.
Few could. Jack insisted that all it took was enough practice and the right teachers.
“You can be his teacher,” he said. When she replied that she didn’t teach little children, Jack offered to pay whatever she wanted, adding, “Come on, I know you need the money.”
She asked Emily, “What did you tell Jack about my background?”
Violet’s parents were diplomats. Violet, their only child, had been born in Geneva and had lived nowhere for longer than a few years.
She grew up knowing multiple languages and had studied with world-class pianists.
She never talked about money, but it was easy to guess that she didn’t need it.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Emily said.
“Maybe you should have, since he thinks I need his charity. I know I shouldn’t be mad at you.
You didn’t say it. But you married someone who did.
We both know why he did. I’ve got to go, Emily.
My parents are waiting.” She didn’t offer to introduce them.
“Thanks for coming.” She hesitated, then said, “Call me, okay?”
Emily was partway home before she realized that she still held the flowers.
Jack touched the hydrangeas, which stood in a vase on the dining table. “Pretty. Did you have a nice time?”
“You offended Violet.”
“What? No, I didn’t.”
Emily repeated what Violet had said.
“What’s the problem?” said Jack.
“You acted like her talent could be bought off the shelf.”
“I gave her a compliment.”
“You treated her like she was poor. You wouldn’t have done that if she were white.”
“Wait a minute. This is not a race thing. I would have offered to pay anybody for teaching Connor. Her being Black had nothing to do with it.”
“She didn’t invent this.”
“Maybe she’s offended, but that doesn’t mean I did anything wrong. She’s probably sensitive to this sort of thing. She must have had some bad experiences in the past. It’s nice of you to want to protect her.”
“I’m not trying to protect her, I’m trying to make you see.”
“There is nothing to see. You’re twisting yourself into knots over nothing. Call her and I’ll explain.”
Emily, who during the course of this conversation had alternated between doubting what she believed and disliking herself for that doubt, knew one thing for certain: Jack’s explanation would make things worse. She didn’t call Violet.
Jack invited a fellow partner at his hedge fund over for dinner.
He meticulously planned the courses and ordered the freshest ingredients for delivery.
“I really want David to like this rack of lamb,” he told Emily while she kept him company in the kitchen.
He refilled her glass of rosé. “You’re going to love his wife.
Jocelyn is smart and pretty and always says and does the exact right thing. ”
The dinner was a success. Jocelyn’s smooth social grace had a lot to do with how she asked many questions and listened to the answers.
This let Jocelyn keep herself at a distance, but she never gave the impression that she was hiding something, only waiting for the right moment to share, with the right person, which made Emily want to be that person.
Jocelyn was also an animated storyteller.
She could command an audience and sprinkled a story with enough details to give her listeners the sense that they had been there with her.
She described a long drive to the Hamptons the previous weekend, bumper-to-bumper traffic.
A rabbit ran in the field by the side of the road.
A trucker in his cab took off his hat. There was a crash, probably, on the road up ahead.
Traffic slowed, then stopped. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Jocelyn said.
“I called a helicopter and had it land in the field to pick me up.”
Emily was startled that one could simply call a helicopter. “What did you do with your car?”
“What do you mean?”
“You abandoned it in the middle of traffic?”
“Honey, no . I had a driver, of course. I wasn’t going to drive to the Hamptons myself . The driver drove the car to our house.”
Since leaving Ohio, and especially after meeting Jack, Emily had learned a lot about wealth.
She had learned that it could make anything beautiful, even a kitchen sink drain.
It could liberate, like the trust fund that let Elizabeth quit her job and travel.
Wealth was a kindness, one that Emily portioned out into an account for her half sisters’ future college tuition.
That night at dinner, Emily learned that there was always something more to learn.
Money always found new ways to express itself.
“The poor driver,” Emily said. The table went quiet. Jack cleared his throat. “It seems hard,” Emily said, “to be stuck in traffic for no purpose.”
“You’re right,” Jocelyn said. “I was a pampered jerk in a helicopter!” She didn’t sound sorry.
To Jack, she said, “Where did you find her? She’s like a dreamy character in one of those 1950s Technicolor movies.
” To Emily, with fond wonder, she said, “Are you a blond Audrey Hepburn? Are you going to adopt a fawn?”
Jack said, “Emily’s always ready to defend a driver.”
“But there was a purpose,” David said. “We pay him to drive the car. Whether Joss was in the back seat didn’t matter. We needed the extra Porsche that weekend for guests.”
“David, shut up!” Jocelyn said. “You’re missing the point.”
Emily felt a flash of concern for Jocelyn—what would Jack do if Emily snapped at him like that, especially in front of others?— but David, his gaze on his wife’s impatient, lovely face, smiled and shrugged.
Later, after their guests had left, Jack said, “That was a strange thing for you to say.”
“I think it was pretty normal.”
“You have a thing for salt-of-the-earth types, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do.” She shouldn’t have said this, but sometimes her need to monitor herself for Jack’s approval was overshadowed by her dislike of that need.
“Maybe you want to pretend I’m different.” Jack brushed her hair away from her face, a gesture that would have looked affectionate to David and Jocelyn, had they still been in the room. He stared at Emily as if he wanted to dig something out of her. “I bet you’d enjoy that.”
“No.” Jack already seemed like two people—generous, then accusatory; affectionate, then resentful. Emily didn’t want to imagine yet another version of Jack. That version could be worse.
He kissed her cheek. She had said the right thing. She felt like she had won.
She hadn’t, she knew that. She had said what he wanted, but that knowledge didn’t banish the good student inside her that Jack tutored.
She couldn’t help her relief. It ballooned inside her, stretched taut, leaving room for little else.
The relief felt so close to gratitude that Emily couldn’t distinguish the emotions, and therefore became grateful to Jack for forgiving her momentary defiance.
There were two versions of Emily, too: the one who resisted Jack and the one who didn’t.
Emily’s manuscript grew. She developed writing habits.
She wrote in longhand. She liked to write in Connor’s room while he slept, even though she could have used the guest room, which had a desk.
Using paper and pencil made the work more intimate, as though the words were for someone she knew, as had been the many letters she had written to Gen when she was younger.
Gen felt distant now, like a half-finished daydream, as did Emily’s youth.
People often exclaimed over what a young mother she was, only twenty-four—not uncommon back home in Ohio, but in New York City, Emily’s age was astonishing and almost inappropriate, as though she were a child herself. Still, she didn’t feel young.
Most nights, she would leave Jack in their bed, walk softly down the hall, and curl up with a notebook in the rocking chair by Connor’s toddler bed.
Connor’s steady, quiet breath kept her company as her pencil scratched the page.
Sometimes he woke. “Mama?” He pushed himself up.
She stroked his back and told him to go back to sleep.
He lay down again and sighed. Those were her favorite hours of the day: the two of them alone, a pencil in her hand, the sun below the horizon.
She filled one notebook, then another. Soon, several were stacked alongside Connor’s picture books.
One morning, Jack smiled at her from the doorway as she slid another notebook into place. “Sure you don’t want to write in the guest room?” he said. “We can turn it into your office.”
“I like writing here. Anyway, we’ll need the guest room soon for Florencia.”
“Right, of course. We’ll make everything perfect for her visit.
” Jack’s eagerness to please Florencia—and, through her, Emily—made Emily glad she had never told her friend about the upsetting moments in her marriage.
Florencia liked Jack. He liked Florencia.
Emily wanted things to stay that way. The visit had to go well. She wanted everything to be okay.