Chapter 6
Chapter Six
A ria insisted on going to Manhattan on her own.
She was tired of her mother looking at her like she was a bird with a broken wing, hobbling around, looking for a ledge to jump off.
Thaddeus was gone—he’d been gone for an entire week by the time she left—and Aria had to find a way forward.
With Thaddeus’s email permission, she’d found someone to sublet the house in Nantucket, a mother, father, and toddler not so much older than Aria and Thaddeus.
She’d packed up the belongings she needed, put the rest in storage, and driven off for Greenwich Village.
When Aria reached Greenwich Village, she found the city teeming with life.
Beautifully dressed city dwellers roamed the sidewalks, their haircuts asymmetrical and interesting, their outfits like something out of her mother’s Vogue .
If Aria was going to fit in here, she knew she needed to get a new wardrobe.
She needed to re-assess her “island vibe” and become someone different.
But that was what Dorothy wanted her to do.
She wanted Aria to stop with the heartbreak routine and find a new “self.”
Dorothy had given Aria a key to the apartment.
In Aria’s hand, the golden key looked like something ancient and noble, as though it were meant to open an old treasure chest. Aria entered the brownstone.
It was like she entered another era of Dorothy’s life—a life neither she nor her mother knew anything about.
It looked like the apartment had been frozen in time.
The decor was out of the 1950s, maybe, and the sofas were hideous.
Monstera plants grew delicious green leaves that reflected green-tinted sunlight on the hardwood floor.
There was no sign of technology—no internet and no phone—which gave Aria pause.
She’d be staying here for a while to refurbish everything, giving it a refined and modern edge, and for that, she’d need internet.
For now, she guessed she’d use her data plan.
She sat on the harsh dark-brown sofa and rested her hands on her thighs. There were moments in life that felt particularly lonely. Here, so far from her mother and so far from Thaddeus, she felt like an island.
Before she went back to the car to collect her things, Aria allowed herself a moment on Thaddeus’s social media.
There, he’d been posting videos and photos of his first week in London.
In one, he was drinking at a pub called the Red Lion.
In another, he had his arms slung over the shoulders of two people who must be his new classmates.
One was a woman, which Aria told herself didn’t matter.
But it did matter. Her heart seized. She threw her phone to the far end of the sofa and wondered how in the world she could manage this project on her own.
She refused to call her mother to come save her.
That evening, Aria met up with an old friend from college, a twenty-three-year-old investment banker named Gina, who made Aria feel like a dummy.
When they met at the Greenwich Village bar not far from Dorothy’s apartment, Gina spat out a list of questions at Aria, as though Aria were at a job interview wherein Gina was trying to decide whether she was friendship material.
When she learned that Aria was doing interior design for Dorothy Wagner, her eyes brightened.
“Dorothy Wagner? Is she the wife of Philip Wagner?” she asked.
Aria realized that Dorothy hadn’t mentioned her late husband’s name. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Okay,” Gina said delicately. “Let me put it this way. Does Dorothy Wagner have exorbitant wealth?”
Aria tried to laugh. “Who doesn’t in this city?”
“Come on.” Gina pulled out the latest iPhone and googled Philip Wagner.
The burnt-orange cocktail she’d ordered glowed in the low-hanging and exposed light bulbs, which seemed to indicate that the bar she’d chosen was cool and modern.
As an interior designer, Aria had utilized the exposed light bulb thing several times, but she sometimes found it cheap.
To her and to Hilary, it was a fad, something their clients would want removed soon.
“Here we go,” Gina said, turning her phone around to show a late-nineties photograph of Philip Wagner and a much younger version of Dorothy, dressed immaculately, all in black. The photograph was sepia-toned, proof that it hadn’t aged well before it had been scanned onto the internet.
The first thought Aria had was that Philip Wagner looked mean.
“That’s her, all right,” Aria said finally.
Gina beamed. “You have got to show me her apartment. I bet it’s insane.”
“It’s really out of date,” Aria said. “I have a lot of work to do. When I asked her how many weeks she wanted to book me for, she threw up her hands and was like, do whatever you need to do.”
“Wow. More money than God.” Gina wet her lips. She looked as though she wanted to use Aria for something, as though she sought to manipulate her and use her as a tool.
“You probably don’t know anything about the Wagners,” Gina said.
Aria admitted she didn’t. In college, she’d always been an artistic type, chasing things that fed her soul rather than the future of her bank account.
“Philip Wagner was a mega-rich investment banker, one of the best,” Gina said. “Because of him, a lot of wealthy New Yorkers got mega-mega rich. He’s like, a textbook example of what every investment banker wants to be.”
“Was it illegal, what he was doing?” Aria asked.
Gina made a face, as though to indicate that “illegality” didn’t matter when you were wealthier than God.
Aria’s stomach turned. She’d forgotten how much she didn’t like Gina.
She imagined what Thaddeus would say about her and imagined that, were they here together, they’d go back home and make fun of her.
Like, doesn’t she have anything else to live for?
Maybe she didn’t. But Gina was the only person she currently knew in the city.
“Does Dorothy talk about him?” Gina asked.
“She mentioned her late husband. That’s about it,” Aria said.
“You know, he had so many lovers,” Gina said conspiratorially. “He dated models and actresses and so on. All through the seventies, eighties, and nineties. All while he had Dorothy at home.”
Aria blinked. Was she supposed to think that was cool or interesting? Was she supposed to find Philip Wagner’s free and easy lifestyle, away from his kind and beautiful and vivacious wife Dorothy, interesting?
“Is that the kind of guy you want to date?” Aria asked after a pause.
Gina threw her head back and laughed outrageously. “I mean, I wouldn’t hate that money. And if there’s money, you can deal with just about anything, can’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Aria said, remembering how Thaddeus had had to scrape and save to get his plane ticket for London. She’d respected how he’d handled money. He’d never had enough of it, but he’d made it stretch. He’d built a life for himself.
Was Aria going to end up with a Philip Wagner, while some other woman was lucky enough to fall in love and stay in love with a Thaddeus? Aria cursed her heart for its bad timing and drank down the rest of her white wine. When the server came by, she ordered another.
Somehow, Gina bullied Aria into taking her back to Dorothy’s apartment that night. Aria used the thick golden key to open the door and led Gina inside, watching her face. Gina rubbed her palms together, standing in the foyer like she was crafting a plan.
“This really is ugly,” she said after a moment. Then she laughed that horrible laugh. “Is there any alcohol?”
Gina began to rummage around the living room and kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, searching. “It’s really clean,” she pointed out. “I guess Dorothy has someone come by and keep it tidy?”
“I guess.” Aria couldn’t believe she’d let Gina come over.
She wanted to curl up in bed and sleep till tomorrow.
A part of her ached, wondering when Dorothy would want a write-up of her plan for the apartment.
In a week? Two? And why had Dorothy thought that Aria would “get away” from her heartache here in the city, when she’d obviously carried her heartache all the way to Greenwich Village with her?
Gina poured them two glasses of what looked like very expensive whiskey. “What should we cheer to?” Gina asked. “To your summer in the city? To your breakup? To you dating people who actually matter in the future of your life?”
Aria had very briefly mentioned her breakup but hadn’t gone into detail about how messed up she was. For all Gina knew, Aria had had a passing fling with someone.
Aria tried out the truth, for a second, just to see how Gina would handle it. “We lived together. Me and Thaddeus. We broke up at our house, like the one we shared for a long time.” So many memories in that house! Aria had let herself believe they’d stay there so much longer.
Gina didn’t flinch. Maybe working in the field she worked in meant faking your emotions, regardless of what you felt on the inside. It wasn’t a life Aria had any interest in.
“Did you think you were going to marry him?” Gina asked. Aria couldn’t tell if she was serious.
Aria said, “Yeah, I did.” It was the truth.
Gina threw her head back and laughed again. “Well,” she said with an ironic shrug, “if there’s anything else we can learn from Philip Wagner, it’s not to trust the sanctity of marriage, huh?” She raised her glass. “Maybe that’s what I’ll cheers to! To never trusting anyone.”
Aria furrowed her brow with alarm. The night had gone off the rails. But before she could make an excuse and get Gina out of there, before she could find a way to the bed that awaited her upstairs, a bed she’d put fresh sheets on earlier this afternoon, her cell phone rang.
It was her mother.
“Honey, are you sitting down?” her mother rasped, fear laced through her voice. “I have something to tell you. It’s serious.”
Aria’s heart pounded. She wasn’t sure how much more anxiety she could take.