Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
M.O.M.
ELAINE CROMWELL FRISCO
Tidy. That’s how Elaine Cromwell Frisco characterized Barry Bonavico’s divorce from his recent wife.
He signed the papers on a spacious travertine balcony overlooking Lake Como in the Italian countryside while Elaine poured him a glass of champagne.
It took all of three months, some sensible urging, and a sizable sum of money to get his wife gone, but Elaine got it done. Per usual.
Still, thank God for prenups. They served husbands and mistresses alike. Like a swift kick to the ass with a generous tip, of which she was not fond of giving. Out with the frumpy, in with the glamorous.
Elaine sat up in her usual med spa chair, which she visited early every other Tuesday, and stared at her reflection, examining the effects of her latest cosmetic injection to her forehead and upper cheeks.
Even the faintest sign of wrinkles would result in zero tip, so she strained hard to find any hint of an error.
Everything about aging was awful, except the privilege to do so.
Alas, her skin looked smooth, dewy, and taut. She sighed and reached for her wallet.
She would celebrate her sixty-fifth birthday later this year but never admitted her true age to anyone, not even her children, and was often assumed to be in her early fifties. This was one of the many reasons she managed to snag one of the most eligible bachelors in Los Angeles, Barry Bonavico.
Well, eligible might have been a stretch, but opportunities don’t just fall into your lap, now do they? Women like Elaine Cromwell Frisco created them.
After a chance meeting at a glitzy charity auction held at the Getty Museum on a spring night in Los Angeles, Elaine surmised that Barry Bonavico had been in a loveless marriage for years and was clearly in need of someone who could properly complement his intelligence and his aspirations.
Barry was a brilliant financier and founder of a hedge fund that, he explained, nearly took down a small Eastern European country last year.
Just a kerfuffle, he said. Still ironing out all the details but he would come out unscathed, he said.
His next move, naturally, was politics. Elaine nibbled on the olive in her Grey Goose martini as he spoke.
Filthy rich, morally malleable, and rapaciously ambitious.
Elaine knew the right man when she saw him.
After engaging in spirited banter over climate change, the theories of Ayn Rand, and why Istanbul was unquestionably the most interesting city in the world, Barry Bonavico gave her a rakish smile and invited her to sit at his table for dinner.
By the end of the third course, before the rhubarb mousse was served, Barry had quietly suggested they fly to Paris that night.
She had a go-bag in her car. Complete with a pair of knee-high calf leather Louboutin boots and Chanel makeup. One can never be too ready.
It wasn’t Elaine’s fault that his dowdy wife in her sack dress had all the charisma of a wet potato chip.
Every time Elaine looked over at her, she was yawning or wiping crab dip off her face.
When Elaine engaged her in conversation and judged her hair (she had a bob cut, for God’s sake), she found her to be overly effusive, only dimly aware of current events, and so demure her words sounded more like a declawed cat purring in her ear than a billionaire’s wife.
There was no spark of challenge, no edge to this boring woman.
She was a walking version of a throw pillow.
Barry clearly deserved better. Someone who would shine like a sophisticated jewel on his arm, a relentless and charismatic supporter of his deeds, a perfect senator’s wife. A role Elaine Cromwell Frisco was born for.
Sharply unlike the station to which Elaine was born into: a blue-collar neighborhood outside of Detroit to a single, unwed mother who struggled to pay the phone company and the electric bill at the same time.
When her father walked out on them, he was in such a hurry, he left the car running.
He gave her mother a check for a thousand dollars, a rushed and shame-filled excuse, and the best advice Elaine ever got.
He’d bent down, took her chin in his fingers, and stared into her blue eyes.
He gave a disdainful look at the cramped, shabby trailer and whispered, “Blue collar begets blue collar, Lainey. Do better.” He walked out to the car and didn’t look back once.
She understood the assignment.
Fueled by hatred and desperation, Elaine vowed to make herself immune to the disease of destitution.
She detested her situation. She felt as if there had been some cosmic mix-up when she was a baby and had been given to the wrong woman at the hospital.
She felt certain she was destined to be part of a more affluent family, like her father’s family who, in their thundering silence, had communicated they wanted no part of this mess. The mess, presumably, was her.
She loved her mother but judged her as weak and toothless.
She never fought for them, even when she could have; even when she should have.
Anger turned to resentment as Elaine watched with detached pity as the stress of perpetual poverty took its toll on her mother’s natural beauty, frayed her nerves, and fueled her addiction to cigarettes, cheap wine, and bad men.
A woman without means was powerless in this world, left to the beasts of fate.
If Elaine wanted a different life, she would have to fight for every inch of it.
Luckily, she was sharp, resourceful, observant, and devoid of the kind of sentimentality that rendered other women powerless.
Elaine was not a people pleaser, but she could charm.
She could manipulate others without feeling the slightest bit of guilt.
She was not ashamed of her ambition, nor did she hide her intelligence from men so they could feel better about themselves.
She knew dirty jokes as well as which fork to use during the oyster course.
She armed herself with knowledge, etiquette, and psychology.
Her powers were only sharpening. She did not feel or understand love and viewed this as a strength.
She learned in college that she was “East Coast pretty,” which meant something between beautiful and plain, helped by her bright eyes, flawless skin, good bones, and straight dark hair. A magnet for the upper-crust boys with family money.
She met George Cromwell, the golden-haired son of an aristocratic family from Boston, while at the University of Michigan on a full scholarship.
Elaine could sense he was in love with her.
For the first time, she saw a clear, well-lit path to the upper echelons of society, to the kind of refined life where money would never be an issue again.
Upon graduation, Elaine and George married is a small ceremony in Nantucket surrounded by his family. Her mother was invited but could not afford to attend, nor did Elaine ask George to foot the bill for her flight. French champagne was served with lobster canapés. It was a happy day.
George was dead three months later, cast off like a human anchor into the North Atlantic from a boating accident.
His family grieved without her. She grieved alone, mourning the guileless boy with the sparkle in his eye, but also the life she could have enjoyed with that fortune.
She gave his ashes to them, they gave her a check, and she kept his name.
The second man Elaine Cromwell married was not a refined aristocrat, but rather an outdoorsman whose family grew wealthy from logging the forests of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan.
They had lumber mills and furniture stores and owned three thousand acres of virgin forest along Lake Michigan.
His name was Hal Frisco and Elaine understood that while his rough edges weren’t exactly what she wanted, his business sense was.
He gave her a ring and within a year, he built her a cradle out of cedar wood.
The day her daughter, Charlotte James Frisco, was born, Elaine came as close to love as she ever could.
Charlotte was Hal’s mother’s name. Elaine looked down at the warm, gurgling bundle in her arms, and pair of blue eyes, the exact same shade as hers, peered back.
She marveled at this miracle, felt the stirrings of an emotion she had never felt before, a feeling that flooded her with warmth and an urge to protect and whispered, “Jamie.”
Having Jamie meant Elaine would officially be considered part of the family and have access to its vast Midwestern wealth. She agreed to have a second child to further secure this position and lo and behold, Hal and Elaine were then blessed with a son, Ripley, heir apparent.
Her work here done, she could finally relax.
It was at that moment Elaine Cromwell Frisco sat in her salon chair and scoffed.
She hadn’t relaxed in forty-one years. Hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the ’80s, a dastardly affliction that started with the birth of her first child, a disquiet that never relented.
The worry, the fretting, the agony of enduring their romantic failings.
It’s no wonder she needed Botox and Juvéderm, a fact she would remind them of the next time she saw them.
Elaine mulled over yesterday’s meeting at Jamie’s house with a sneer on her lip.
How could her children turn out to be so disappointing?
How did they not inherit her grit, her tenacity, her drive?
Maybe it was their generation. Indulging in the fleeting joy of avocado toast and craft beer instead of diligently working toward home ownership.
Jamie had wasted more than a decade in public service as a forensic psychologist, of all things, instead of a more lucrative career like cosmetic dentistry or managing a hedge fund, or better yet marrying a hedge fund manager.
She could literally write the playbook for the latter.
Although Elaine tried to impress the lessons of the world upon Jamie, she realized she was her father’s daughter, incredibly bright, confoundingly stubborn, infused with some intuitive knowledge that she never put to good use.
So, when Elaine learned of Jamie’s near-fatal attack, she knew she could wrench her daughter back onto a more sensible career path coaching C-suite executives.
Surely one of those CEOs was marriage material.
Threats always seemed to work better on Jamie, less so on Rip.
She knew how to get to her. Had always known.
Jamie had a deeply sentimental and tender heart, which explained that scrappy rescue dog of hers.
It reminded Elaine of her own sad, used-up, weak mother.
She did everything she could to toughen Jamie up, so she had a fighting chance.
When Elaine applied the right kind of pressure, Jamie always caved. Yesterday was no different.
Her plan to marry her off to one of her C-suite clients was taking too long.
She inspected her face once more and grudgingly tipped the salon owner.
In three months, she would pull off a perfect wedding in Hawaii, wed the newest shining star in the political landscape, and Elaine Cromwell Frisco would finally reach the stratosphere of society she had so relentlessly desired.
As long as her children didn’t fuck it up for her.
Just then, Elaine Cromwell Frisco heard the most interesting words directed at the woman sitting in the med spa chair right next to her. “Oh, so you’re a matchmaker, how fascinating.”
Elaine’s lip curled into the briefest, tiniest smile. Timing, as always, was on her side.