Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
Bill’s family met the news of his engagement with surprise.
They hadn’t known he was dating anyone, as in the past he had at least brought his girlfriends to a family gathering before deciding to marry them.
The revelation that his latest betrothed was a twenty-six-year-old Chinese woman brought an additional level of shock and (some thought) sordidness to the matter; there were phone calls made, neglected correspondences reignited.
Letters were sent to lawyers and financial advisers.
Especially panicked were Bill’s two children, Juliet and Theo.
“You know she’s basically our age,” Theo said to Juliet on the phone.
They were twenty-four, fraternal twins. Their mother, Agatha, had divorced Bill when they were nine, after which she’d moved to a townhouse in Pacific Heights.
Theo and Juliet had lived with her during the school week, shuttling down to Palo Alto on weekends.
“I know.” Juliet was in her apartment in Nob Hill, half a mile from her mother’s place.
She had taken a break after college and just begun medical school.
When her father had shared his news, for some reason she’d immediately pictured the cadaver from a recent anatomy lesson.
They had not been allowed into the actual room for the dissection, only observed the gray and withered body from above.
“How do you know?” Theo asked.
“I had lunch with them.”
“When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Classic Theo: always nosing around other people’s business.
He was, however, not the most forthcoming himself.
He was calling from Maine, where from Juliet’s understanding, he was currently sponging off his newest girlfriend, whose family owned a vacation home in Kennebunkport with panoramic ocean views. “You weren’t here,” Juliet said.
“What’s she like?”
“The same as the others. Young. She’s Asian, though. So that’s different. Dad’s branching out, racially at least.”
“Does she speak English?”
“Yes, though not perfectly. She appears sane, but it’s never a sure thing. You know how Dad is.”
Theo did know. There’d been the two wives after their mother, who had been awful enough, but then also the interests before and after and in between.
A British woman named Fanny, a snob with an unusually high forehead who liked to comment on how Theo cut a steak; an extremely angry yoga instructor who, for years after Bill dumped her, continued to write to both Theo and Juliet, holding forth on what she described as Bill’s “flexible relationship with the truth.” When Theo was younger, he had almost admired his father for the profligate dating, but this admiration had long since slid into embarrassment.
Of all the women, there’d been only one Theo liked, a family friend named Gloria.
If Bill were to marry again, Theo hoped it’d be to someone like Gloria—she had no kids of her own (and was part owner of the Toda Group, which operated luxury resorts around the world).
But Bill had only dated Gloria a few months; he claimed he hadn’t felt any spark .
As Theo recalled Gloria’s departure—her disappearance from family lunches, the abrupt cancellation of spring break in Bhutan—Theo’s fury at his father’s irresponsibility, his lack of consideration for his children’s feelings, bubbled into a nasty rage.
“I fucking hate him. I truly, truly hate him!”
Juliet was silent. She regretted having worked Theo up like this.
His outbursts had worsened in recent years, though their mother still insisted on referring to them as his “little whims”—as if the destruction of furniture, a lifetime ban on United Airlines, and three totaled vehicles all constituted a mild personality quirk, like being messy or disliking vegetables.
Theo had nearly been kicked out of Duke for academic nonperformance, until their father had agreed to pay for the renovation of the law center, and last year Theo had been accused by an ex-girlfriend of stalking.
But then Wendy had been a dramatic bitch, Juliet thought.
“Where did they even meet?” Theo’s voice was lower now.
“Stanford.” If only Bill didn’t walk all the time. He’d first started after Juliet and Theo bought him the poodle, which they’d really purchased to give him some companionship other than a woman.
“Is she a student?”
“I think she’s in graduate school.” As if that made things better. One would need quite the extended postdoctoral career, Juliet mused, to make an age-appropriate match for Bill.
At least their own mother had been Bill’s age and his first marriage; Juliet may not have known much about Chinese culture, but she did instinctively grasp the strategic advantage afforded first wives versus subsequent concubines.
Juliet could still picture Evie’s tight little dresses, her hand yanking at the hem as she poured wine while teetering on absurdly high heels—toward the end Bill’s third wife had been desperate to learn all of his favorite dishes, as if the perfect roast potatoes might preserve her position in the house, the house Juliet had grown up in, the great Falling House, and all that came with it.
Nearly all of Bill’s girlfriends had proved disposable, but that was simply the fate of certain women, wasn’t it?
They had nothing else to offer. Juliet glanced at her shelves filled with textbooks.
“He can’t have children with her,” Theo said.
“He doesn’t like kids, remember? He barely liked us.”
“He didn’t have them with Evie,” Theo mused. “And you know she wanted them.”
“Right. So don’t worry. Go make yourself a drink.”
“I can tell when you want to hang up. What are you doing? Probably getting ready for Paul. I hate that name, by the way.”
“What’s wrong with the name Paul?” Juliet studied her nails. “We’re going for Thai.”
“Do you think she knows how to cook Thai? Our future stepmother.”
“I think she’s from Taiwan, not Thailand.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know. Something with the spices, maybe.” There was a honk from the street, and Juliet went to the window. She watched Paul light a cigarette as he sat in his convertible. “Don’t think about it.”
But Theo ranted on: at one point he spat something that sounded like “cunt,” which she found unbearably crass, though likely that was the point.
“Hello? Are you listening? Hello? ”
“I’m listening.” Juliet could tell something about Joan particularly bothered Theo.
Was it that she was Asian? There was something unseemly; Juliet had felt it in the restaurant, the way they appeared as they walked in.
Joan, so much smaller and younger, hand in hand with Bill; it had reminded Juliet of some of those Vietnam War veterans she encountered while volunteering at the VA.
The American soldiers went and fought in countries they knew little about, and then they came home and brought with them these Asian women, all dark hair and no English.
Inside the hospital the wives were mostly silent, pushing wheelchairs and fetching from their totes containers of food that they fed to their husbands.
Occasionally there would be a loud one, harpyish, screaming in an awful accent: You go move car!
What doctor say? Why you no pay attention to doctor!
Perhaps Joan had come from similarly rotten conditions.
Why else would she want to marry an old guy like Bill…
yes, that made sense. And that could have been Juliet, had fate swerved right instead of left, the same way her life would be different had she been born impoverished.
But Juliet knew in her bones she was the daughter of a wealthy man; any other consideration was merely theoretical.
And so, minutes later, when she hung up the phone, she went out to greet Paul with all the confidence of a woman who has the supreme advantages of money and youth and the conviction that things will always be such a way.
Back in Maine, Theo went downstairs for dinner.
His girlfriend, Charlotte, and her parents were already at the table, and they were the sort to wait for everyone to be seated before eating.
Theo’s mother had once been like this, but after the divorce she’d abandoned such formalities.
He wondered what Agatha would say about Joan.
When he’d told her that Evie was moving out, all Agatha had asked was whether it was Bill who’d ended things.
“Yes,” Theo had confirmed. “Thank God they had a prenup.”
“It’s not polite to talk about money,” Agatha observed. Though, as Theo knew, his mother did care about it quite a lot.
“Is everything okay?” Charlotte asked now, as Theo sat beside her.
Like most of his girlfriends, Charlotte was brunette and slim, and she gazed at Theo with what he liked to believe was worship.
She especially adored certain aspects of him: that he was six-three and had won “best-looking” in high school; that he’d gone to Duke and grown up in a beautiful home in Palo Alto, a masterpiece by the architect Ava Castillo which had once been photographed for Architectural Digest , officially named by Castillo “Falling House.” Charlotte even seemed to like that his parents were divorced, and that he’d split his childhood between Palo Alto and his mother’s place in San Francisco: there was a messy, high-end quality to it that appealed to her.
She had been searching for someone just like him, she’d once said, which seemed to Theo an incredible concession to make in a relationship—it was like telling the other person: I’ll always love you more than you love me.
“I was talking to my sister,” Theo said.
A plate of tri-tip was passed. They’d grilled on the deck just prior: fat steaks and halibut and striped bass from the local market.
Charlotte’s parents, Louis and Barb, ate like this every night.
Theo was certain Charlotte had never eaten a convenience-store burrito alone in the kitchen, washing down the grease with expired milk and repeating the same for breakfast—all while her mother was having an impromptu four-day “overnighter with a friend.”
And yet. The Kincaids assumed Theo was just like them. Functional. Rich. Well, he was, wasn’t he? He’d had a bad run, that’s all. The job at UBS, they hadn’t understood his trading strategy. McKinsey, a bunch of entitled fucks. The table was discussing a vacation to Portugal.
“You’ll come, right?” Charlotte asked. “Oh, Theo, you would love it. The siesta lifestyle.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Theo said. He would call his mother or, better yet, visit her in person when he was back in California.
He would tell her about Joan and ask her to write a check to cover his costs in Europe and rent through the rest of the year.
Theo felt safe that Agatha wouldn’t tell Juliet about his asking for money—he had his own relationship with his mother. As he did with his father.
And so that was Theo and Juliet: Bill’s only children.
There was his ex-wife, Agatha, who spoke to Bill a few times a year, usually about Theo; his second ex-wife, Katrina, to whom he’d been married only three months, after a drunken weekend in Vegas (no one kept in touch with Katrina).
And then Evie, the third wife, to whom he’d been married five years (no one talked to her anymore, either).
There was Bill’s brother, Henry, who had worked with Bill until he moved to Connecticut, where he now lived with his wife, Gillian; there was a sister, Bridget, who lived with her husband, Martin, in Ross.
There was also their youngest sister, Misty (Joan would come to know quite a lot about Misty in future years).
Each of these people was complicated. Each of them thought mostly of themselves.
But in this system of planets there was still the unspoken acknowledgment that Bill was the sun around whom they revolved; he was the oldest, the most successful.
That he’d managed to retain this position amid multiple divorces gave him an air of impermeability—he was the titular “head of the family.” Though there was resentment about this too.
Joan knew none of this when she agreed to marry Bill.
She understood he was wealthy, but only in the manner someone with no experience might envision: no debt and a big mansion and ordering without consideration of price at dinner.
Joan too was thinking mostly about herself, that she was making a choice that would cut her off, likely forever, from the life she had imagined.
She was not marrying a Chinese man but rather a Caucasian one; she was not marrying a young man but instead an older one.
Bill’s family was a minor question, one unknown out of many.
Besides Juliet, Joan had not met them; she would soon.