CHAPTER FOUR
The Hurley Foundation gala has been on the calendar since February, back when my life made sense, back when the biggest threat on the horizon was Genevieve’s annual audit of the seating plan.
It’s in Milan, in a palazzo on Via Borgonuovo, with frescoed ceilings and candlelight and four hundred of Europe’s most moisturized people raising money for children’s hospitals, which is the one cause even billionaires can’t weasel out of.
Troy’s foundation built the surgical wing.
There is a plaque. I have stood in front of the plaque at three of these things, in three different dresses, feeling three escalating versions of the same fraud, the girl from above the bakery whose mother put keys in the freezer, holding champagne she doesn’t drink among people who summer as a verb.
This year I will be the one in the green dress, ten weeks pregnant, dizzy from the smell of the florist’s van, with a husband who keeps touching my back like it’s made of glass and a houseguest who watches me the way appraisers watch a painting they suspect is a forgery.
Lina zips me into the dress and stands back and, in a shocking breach of protocol, hugs me.
“Tonight you are the most beautiful woman in Milan,” she announces. “The rest of them, pfft.” She makes a gesture that needs no translation, then a worse one that she aims generally toward Estelle’s room.
“You can’t see her room from here.”
“I aim with my heart.”
In the car, Troy and Estelle talk permits. I sit on the other side of Troy with my ginger candies and watch the lake go dark beyond the glass, and I practice breathing the way Dr. Ferretti taught me, in through the nose, out like you’re fogging a window.
I’ve met Dr. Ferretti twice now, a brisk, wonderful woman with a practice above a shoe shop in Milan and zero tolerance for nonsense. I keep her card in my purse like a talisman, proof that somewhere in this city there is one medical professional whose opinion of me is based on actually meeting me.
“You’re quiet,” Troy says, covering my hand with his. His palm is warm. His eyes are on Estelle’s spreadsheet.
“Carsick,” I say.
“Since when are you carsick?”
“Since approximately six weeks ago, detective.”
That gets him off the spreadsheet. He grins, kisses my temple, and for a moment we’re us again, the two people from the osteria, the boat, the bedroom with the tie.
Then Estelle says, “The Benedettis will want the numbers tonight, T, both of them,” and he goes back to the screen, and I go back to the window.
The palazzo is lit like a wedding. There’s a red carpet, and a line of photographers. I do the thing I’ve trained four years to do, which is to stand at Troy Hurley’s side and smile like the cameras are a warm bath.
It used to terrify me, this part. Now it’s muscle memory. Shoulders back, chin down, find the light, pretend the dress cost what it cost.
Troy’s hand is on my back. Estelle is on his other side in a column of ivory silk, and I watch three photographers’ lenses swing to her like she’s the wife, and I keep smiling, because that is the job tonight, smiling, smiling like everything is fine, fine, fine.
Inside, the ceiling is a fresco of some saint ascending and I wish I could join him.
The evening goes the way these evenings go.
Speeches. Champagne towers. The plaque again, unveiled this time, Troy’s name and Genevieve’s name in bronze, and Genevieve beside the podium in champagne satin, radiant with reflected glory accepting applause for generosity that other people’s money made possible.
She introduces Estelle to the Benedettis as “practically my daughter.” I am introduced to the Benedettis as “Troy’s wife.” I have a name. I checked this morning. It was on my passport.
I’m fine for an hour or two. I am charming to a duchess, I am witty to a surgeon, I eat half a bread roll in a bathroom stall like a raccoon because the smell of the fish course turns my stomach, and I am fine.
At one point Troy finds me by the chocolate fountain and puts his mouth to my ear and says, “Next year there’ll be three of us at this thing.
I’ll be the one holding the baby, looking smug,” and it’s so exactly the right thing, so precisely the osteria man, that I have to go stand by a window and compose myself like a Victorian governess.
I collect these moments now, I realize. I’m hoarding them.
A woman hoarding evidence that her marriage exists, that it is healthy.
It’s the heat that gets me. Four hundred people and four hundred candles and a fresco ceiling pressing down, and my body, which has spent ten weeks running a construction site in secret, simply files for bankruptcy.
It starts in my fingertips, a pins-and-needles fizz, and then the sound of the room goes strange, underwater, like someone’s turned the gala down to make a phone call.
Air, I think. Get air.
I make it to the terrace doors. I actually make it, I’m proud of that, the cold night on my face, the stone balustrade under my hands. And then the stone tilts, and the night tilts, and the last thing I see clearly is the fresco saint through the doorway, still ascending—the show-off.
I come back to the world in pieces. Stone under my cheek. A man’s voice, a stranger’s, saying “signora, signora.” Someone’s jacket under my head. My own heartbeat, hammering, indignant, alive.
I know the exact moment Troy arrives because the crowd does that thing crowds do, the parting, the murmur, and then his hands are on me and his face is over mine and for one pure second his fear is naked and total and it is the most loved I have felt in weeks.
“Liz. Liz, can you hear me? What happened, did you eat, is it the—” He stops himself before the word baby, checks the crowd, lowers his voice. “Is it the pregnancy?”
“Heat,” I whisper. “I’m fine. I skipped dinner.”
And here is where it happens. Here is the thing I will lie in bed replaying at three in the morning for weeks.
Estelle kneels down beside us, cool hand on my wrist like she’s taking my pulse, though her fingers are nowhere near the vein.
She looks up at the ring of concerned faces, Genevieve among them, and both Benedettis, and a society photographer hovering at the edge of it all with his lens half-raised, unsure if compassion or gossip is the better shot, and Estelle says, in a voice pitched to carry exactly as far as it needs to and not an inch farther:
“She’s been so fragile lately. It’s the second time this month she’s gone down like this.”
The second time.
This month.
There was no first time. I want it entered into the record that I, Aliza Boyd Hurley, have fainted one time in my adult life, and it is this one, currently, on a terrace in Milan, and the record will note that the woman counting my faints has been counting faints that never happened.
“It’s the first time,” I say.
My voice comes out small and slurred, a bad witness in my own defense.
“Shh.” Estelle strokes my wrist. “You’re confused, poor thing. Troy, she fainted at the garden lunch, don’t you remember? I held her head. Genevieve, you were there.”
“I remember it vividly,” Genevieve says, and the terrible thing, the truly Greek-tragedy thing, is that I can see on her face that she does remember it, or has decided to, memory being the most obedient of all her staff.
There was no garden lunch faint. There was a garden lunch. I ate a couple of breadsticks and argued about roses with Genevieve’s gardener (and won).
“Troy,” I say.
And Troy. My Troy, the weather, the man who got on his knees on our bedroom floor. Troy looks at me on the stone, looks at the crowd, looks at the photographer, and I watch it move across his face, I watch it happen in real time, the thing that will cost more than anything Estelle ever says.
He is embarrassed.
Not worried. He was worried a second ago, nakedly, completely. This is the new expression, the one that comes after, when he registers the audience, the Benedettis, the lens.
His jaw tightens. His shoulders square up into the boardroom version of himself, and he starts managing the scene, managing me, hands under my arms, brisk now, efficient.
“She’s fine, she skipped lunch, you know how it is, give us some air, thank you, she’s fine,” steering me up and toward the doors like I’m a PR incident with legs.
He believes it, too. That’s what I think in the car watching Milan slide backward past the glass.
He believes Estelle’s version not because he’s cruel but because believing it costs him nothing, and doubting it would cost him a scene in front of the Benedettis, and Troy Hurley has spent thirty-eight years learning that scenes are the single currency he won’t spend.
Estelle sits across from us, my clutch in her lap, holding my things, ‘being helpful.’
“I have a doctor,” she says, thoughtful, gazing out at the night like the idea just occurred to her, though I would bet my entire toolbox it occurred to her weeks ago and has been sitting ready to roll in a drawer ever since.
“In Zurich. A specialist. Discreet, very sought after, he consults for half the families at tonight’s table.
Dr. Amler. He does a wonderful assessment for women under strain.
Just a check-up, Aliza. For peace of mind. I’d feel so much better.”
“So would I,” Troy says.
I turn and look at him. He is looking straight ahead, at the road, at the deal, at anything but me.
“Troy. I fainted. I’m pregnant. Pregnant women faint in hot rooms. It’s in the pamphlet. There’s a pamphlet.”
“I know,” he says. “It’s just a check-up, Liz. It would put everyone’s mind at rest.”
Everyone’s.
Not his.
He’s careful never to say his.
“My mind is at rest,” I say. “My mind was horizontal on a terrace, yes, but it’s at rest.”
Nobody laughs. Estelle reaches across and pats my knee, and I watch her hand there, cool and pale and patient, and I understand, with a clarity that arrives like a stone through a window, that this is the plan, has always been the plan, not to push me out of my own life but to document me out of it.
Tired. Pale. Fragile. Distracted. Confused. Fainting at garden lunches that exist only in the mouths of other people. She is building a version of me, brick by brick, out of her own voice, and she is doing it in front of witnesses, and the witnesses are nodding, and the bricks are starting to hold.
That night Troy sleeps the sleep of the managed and I sit at my dresser with the ring box on the left side where it lives, and I do what I now do.
I open my phone and I write it down. The faint that happened, and the faint that didn’t.
The garden lunch, dated, with witnesses, Lina, the gardener, the breadsticks.
Estelle’s exact words, second time this month.
The photographer, the flash I saw through the doors as Troy steered me out, someone’s lens catching the billionaire’s wife being carried from his own gala.
That photograph will turn up somewhere. I’m sure of it the way I’m sure of forty seed pearls on a bench mat. Estelle doesn’t waste anything.
Then I put my hand on my stomach, on the tiny tenant who is the reason for all of it and the prize in all of it, and I sit there until the sky goes gray, listening to my husband breathe, wondering at what exact moment between the osteria and this bed the map I gave him became a set of instructions.
Hello, bird, I think.
The bird does not answer. The bird, I am beginning to understand, was only ever visiting.