Chapter 7 #2
The agenda said breakfast would begin at 8:00 AM exactly, and at 7:55, Mo was still the last person to arrive in the formal dining room.
Unlike the night before, sunshine streamed through the windows facing the front of the estate, illuminating intricate floral wallpaper.
She imagined this room on a tour route now that she saw it in the daylight.
As if to set that thought even more firmly, she noticed velvet stanchions and poles near the wall.
After saying good morning, she helped herself to the spread of breakfast treats on a wine-red table runner in the middle of the long, reclaimed-wood table.
“Are there any tour groups coming through today?” Mo asked as she seated herself.
Estelle shook her head. “Oh no. I try to limit those to weekdays and one Saturday a month. The things people do on tours sometimes. They seem surprised that someone lives here! Can you imagine someone tromping in and out of your house, poking around?”
Mo laughed. “I think there’s barely room in my apartment to tromp, let alone poke.” Then, without meaning to, she caught Wes’s glance. Why. Why did he have to be here? “Anyway, yes, I bet that’s annoying.”
Estelle’s plate featured a delicate grapefruit half and piece of buttered toast, and Gary had a large sunny pile of scrambled eggs with mixed fruit. The group ate in companionable silence, except that Wes kept looking at Mo.
Mo focused on anything except Wes, including the fact that this breakfast dish was nicer than any place setting in her parents’ house.
She wanted to ask suddenly if it had been used by E.
J. Morgan herself but was cowed by the idea of being compared to a tromping tourist. She used tiny silver tongs to put a pain au chocolat on her plate alongside a grapefruit half.
Mo picked up her spoon and managed only to squirt herself in the eye on the first attempt. Wes handed her a serrated spoon from his setting. “Try this.” When she gave him a look, he said, “I haven’t used it.”
Mo cut into the grapefruit with this perfectly made tool and scooped a triangle into her mouth.
The bright sourness was mixed with something lovely—the top had been broiled with brown sugar and had a crunch to it like the cr è me br ? l é e last night.
“Forgive me for not knowing the spoon etiquette.”
“There’s a whole semester in utensils if you attend boarding school,” Wes said with a straight face. He stood and retrieved another grapefruit spoon from the end of the table. “Butter knives have their own week.”
“Well, at my public, non-boarding school, butter had its own week, so I guess we’re even.
” Mo took a bite of the pain au chocolat and a sip of dark coffee.
The mixture was heaven, and she let it soothe the snark from her.
She would not snipe at Wesley Spencer, at least not in mixed company.
She turned back to Estelle. “Have you ever seen a butter sculpture?”
“No,” Estelle said, seeming to rouse herself. Mo had noticed this trick about Estelle last night—her delight in what Maureen took for granted back home. “Have you carved butter?”
“Oh, no,” Mo said. “But the Iowa State Fair has had a butter cow since the early 1900s, and we went to see it every year I was growing up. And I love that they have different butter sculptures every fair to go with it—famous characters from Peanuts or Star Trek or Sesame Street . I remember one of Da Vinci’s Last Supper . ”
“And they say Iowa doesn’t have culture,” Wes said.
“It’s butter, not yogurt,” Mo said, before she could stop herself. A pun was better than slamming him for his coastal elitism.
Estelle chuckled, like they’d planned an Abbott and Costello routine for her.
Wes narrowed his eyes. “Butter sculptures. That’s—interesting.” His tone made interesting sound like he meant disgusting. “And do you … eat the butter after? I mean, what happens to all that butter?”
“Yes, Wes. I personally eat an entire cow of butter. They bring a semi to my house and drop it on the lawn.”
Estelle chuckled harder and looked at Gary, who laughed too. “Oh my,” he said.
Wes made a sour expression, which annoyingly didn’t make him less handsome. “What do they do with it.”
“ They reuse most of it,” Mo said. “It goes into cold storage and gets recarved. For years and years, I’m pretty sure.”
Wes took a sip of coffee. If sips of coffee could be judgmental, his was.
Had she kissed this asshole? Who was he to judge someone else’s art?
Just seeing Wes in Mo’s peripheral was making her uneasy, and that uneasiness doubled when Gary broke the momentary silence.
“Are you feeling better this morning, Maureen?”
She swallowed a mouthful of burning-hot coffee, trying not to choke.
She didn’t remember seeing anyone except Wes last night, and she had the embarrassing sense of wishing she had seen more of Wes.
She had even dreamt of him—wearing his soft gray coat but nothing underneath.
She was sure that was her subconscious trying to sabotage her. “I’m fine, thank you.”
That set off another round of stares around the table. After a second, Wes picked up his manuscript from beside him. “So, opening pages?”
Angie cleared Estelle’s plate, and Gary produced a tiny notepad and gold pen. Estelle took them and smiled. “I’m ready,” she said.
Wes offered to read first. Mo didn’t realize how much she had been looking forward to hearing his adaptation until he flipped open the front cover.
She wanted to know, without a doubt, that hers was better.
She couldn’t wait to discount his place here this weekend as preferential treatment, pure and simple.
The way he’d said boarding school like it was nothing.
The way he had worked within the system, literally with Estelle, for years.
She was ready to reply to him with cool confidence that his adaptation was interesting .
Despite her readiness to hate his book, her body reacted, tightening, as she saw his face change in preparation to read, his brown eyes scanning the words in front of him.
He was nervous. He took a sip of water and began.
His adaptation started at the party where Eliza and Clive met but was told from Clive’s perspective.
Mo fell into the rhythm of his words easily—too easily for her comfort.
She wanted to keep emotional distance, but it was hard not to get lost in the words.
His opening chapter was resplendent with 1920s charm.
Clive adjusted his spats and ran a hand over the beading of Eliza’s dress as they stood in line for punch at the party.
And when he spilled some on himself—sometimes called the twentieth century’s first meet-cute—she took him into the kitchen at the party and tended to him.
The moment, recast through Clive’s eyes, probed the tender domesticity of this action from a character who was obviously so independent, and showed why he wanted her so much.
In Mo’s readings of the original scene, this desire felt almost predatory—Clive’s eyes on Liza’s as she patted at his jacket with club soda—but Wes took a different tact.
He wrote something tender in Clive’s gaze.
As someone who had read the whole book so many times, it was hard for Mo to think about the scene differently, but he managed to frame the interaction as fresh.
The way the light caught Eliza’s sleek bob, the smell of lilac in the air.
When Wes finished, he took a deep drink of coffee.
Mo did the same, realizing it had gotten cold while she listened.
He was a good reader, confident and expressive.
Maureen wasn’t quite so confident in her speaking voice, but she knew her voice on the page—and of the character—would come through.
She waited for Estelle to give some sort of signal that it was her turn.
Estelle finally looked up from the notepad on which she had been taking copious notes and smiled. “Go ahead, Maureen.”
After a steadying breath, Mo began. “ ‘Liza didn’t have many friends, but the friends she had were also named a form of Elizabeth—Lizzy, Beth, Ellie—and the many forms an Elizabeth could take made her hopeful that she too could take a new form as easily as adopting a new name. As easy as changing her clothes. As easy as rolling her crop top off in a stranger’s bathroom to put on a new shirt and pretend that this party, this next party, would be the one that would change her life. ’ ”
Mo kept reading, steadier with the first paragraph behind her.
She’d centered her narrative in the early aughts.
The post-9/11, halfway-through-the-endless-war period was defined by McMansions and “We are the 99 percent” rallies on the streets of New York.
For Mo, Eliza’s counterculture appeal wasn’t limited to the flapper era.
Mo pictured Eliza as a sheltered girl shot-putted into the real world for the first time, struggling.