Chapter 7
The annual Houston Symphony benefit at the Wortham Theater Center was, Halston explained to Aurora over breakfast the morning of the gala, the type of thing his family had attended for thirty-seven consecutive years and the type of thing he had personally skipped for the last three.
He was attending it this year only because Mason had told them in plain English that the optics of attending it together were worth more than two months of legal maneuvering.
“Optics,” Aurora said, in the same tone she would have used to read out a grocery list.
“Optics.”
“Got it.”
“Aurora.”
“I said I got it.”
He looked at her across the breakfast table. He did not push. He went back to his espresso.
Imari, who had been listening to the entire exchange while eating cinnamon toast with the Axolotl propped against the sugar bowl, looked from one of them to the other and announced, “Aunt Rory should wear the gold one.”
Aurora stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth.
“Which gold one, sweet pea?”
“The one Miss Yvette hung on the door of your closet. The shiny one. Mr. Halston’s going to fall over.”
“Squirt,” Halston said. “Your Aunt Rory is going to wear whatever your Aunt Rory wants to wear, and if she wears the gold one, you and I will both fall over. That is just a fact.”
Imari nodded, satisfied, and ate the rest of her cinnamon toast.
Yvette, dropping a small dish of cut fruit at Imari's elbow. As she paused Aurora felt her hand brush once across her shoulder blades like a benediction.
The gold one.
Yvette had bought it for her in River Oaks.
She had walked into the dressing room at the boutique, taken the three dresses Aurora had picked out of her arms, walked them all back to the rack, and returned with a single floor-length gold silk gown with a halter neck, a low back, and a small slit at the calf.
Chère, you are trying this on, now turn around and do not argue with me.
Aurora had not argued. She had cried a little, looking at herself in the mirror
*****
That evening, Aurora came down the wide marble staircase of the Iverson estate in the gold halter gown.
Her natural curls were swept up off the back of her neck in a soft loose chignon that Yvette had pinned for her in her room, two long spiraled tendrils she had pulled out at her temples to frame her face. Her grandmother's gold cross around her neck. The gold ring on her left hand.
Imari, watching from the bottom of the staircase in her pajamas, looked up at Aurora coming down the steps. Halston stood two feet behind her in a black tuxedo, his black hair combed back.
“Aunt Rory,” Imari said, in a small, awed voice that Halston would remember for the rest of his life, “you look like a star.”
Halston could not have responded to that if his life depended on it.
Aurora reached the bottom of the stairs, bent down and kissed Imari on the forehead.
“Be good for Miss Yvette, sweet pea.”
“I will.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, Aunt Rory.”
Aurora straightened up. She turned to her husband who had been a captain of industry for five consecutive years and who had not, in that time, ever stood in a foyer dumbstruck, looked at her in the gold halter gown and said, very quietly:
“Aurora.”
That was all he said. Just her name.
Yvette, who had stationed herself in the doorway of the foyer with Imari's hand in hers, could not hide her smile.
*****
The Wortham was packed. Houston in formal wear. River Oaks money, Memorial money, gallery donors, foundation board members, three United States senators, two former mayors, and a discreet but visible row of photographers along the carpet by the gala entrance.
Halston had told her, in the car on the way in, that there would be photographers.
He had told her to walk in slowly, to let him hold her elbow, to smile politely but not widely, and not to say a single word to anyone with a recording device.
He had told her she could squeeze his arm if she felt overwhelmed and they would walk away.
What he had not told her was that his palm would settle on her bare back the moment they stepped out of the car.
She felt his hand like she felt her own pulse.
He spread his fingers very slightly, the heel of his hand at the base of her spine and his fingertips reaching up almost to the wing of her shoulder blade, possessive, steady and very, very deliberate.
The line of his palm was warm. The slim white scar on it was rough against her skin through the open back of the gown.
She walked into the Wortham with her chin up and her gold ring catching every flashbulb.
The wife of an oil man in River Oaks turned to her companion and audibly said who is she, and Aurora, listening, smiled to herself.
She had not realized she had wanted to be the woman they whispered about until she was being whispered about.
There was a string quartet, champagne and a silent auction.
There were three speeches she did not listen to, long tables of women in floor-length gowns who were measuring her by the inch, and Aurora made polite small talk with some of them.
She said the words my husband eleven times in the first ninety minutes, and Halston, every time he heard her say it, was drawn back to her like there was nothing else more pleasing to his ears.
They had to dance.
It was the thing Aurora had been dreading since she had read the schedule in the limo. The chairmen always opened the floor. The patrons followed. The Iversons had occupied the second highest tier of patronage for thirty-seven years, which meant they were the second couple onto the floor.
Halston offered her his hand.
Aurora took it.
He led her out onto the polished marble. He turned to her, set his right hand at the small of her back, and took her right hand with his left. He stepped into her, very smoothly, and the band, playing a slow string-heavy arrangement of an old standard Aurora half-knew, gave her something to follow.
They had not danced together since they were children.
There had been one Saturday at the estate when she was twelve and he was thirteen, and Yvette had been trying to teach her how to waltz for the cotillion at the Episcopal school, and Halston had walked into the music room and silently taken Aurora's hand and danced her around the parquet for forty-five minutes while Yvette played records.
Aurora had not, since that afternoon, ever forgotten how he led.
He led her now. The same way.
He pulled her in slightly closer than the protocol allowed.
Slightly. Just enough. She felt the heat of him through the black cotton of his jacket.
She felt the very faint cedar smell of him; with the slight smoky undertone of whatever cologne he had put on in his dressing room two doors from hers.
She felt his hands splay flat against her bare back.
She put her own hand on his shoulder and had to remind herself to breathe.
“Aurora,” he said softly, near her ear, in the public voice of a husband whispering the appropriate things into his wife's hair for the cameras. The voice broke, very slightly, on the Aurora.
“Don't.”
“I have not said anything.”
“You broke on my name.”
“Aurora.”
“You did it again.”
He pulled back a quarter inch. He looked at her face. His eyes had gone very dark. Aurora couldn’t help but look at his mouth.
“You look,” he said, very quietly, “like a dream.”
Aurora's whole body forgot how to dance.
He caught her. He kept her moving. He covered the half-step she had missed so smoothly that not one of the eight hundred people watching them could have seen it.
He did not look away from her face.
“Halston.”
“I'm sorry. I know we are not supposed to. I'm sorry, Aurora.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“All right.”
The music ended. He let her go very slowly. The ballroom came back into focus piece by piece, the champagne, the auction tables and the photographers with their cameras now lowered politely, two more couples now stepping onto the floor.
*****
The drive back down the coast road from Houston to Pinewood Hollow took forty-five minutes to get back to the back of the black town car. The bay was dark on their left, with the moon coming and going through the live oaks.
Halston did not say anything the entire way. He sat against the door of the back seat with his head turned slightly toward the window, his bow tie loosened, the fingers of his right hand resting in the gap between them on the leather seat like an offering.
Aurora, halfway home, slid her own hand across the gap and laid it on top of his.
He did not move.
She did not look at his face.
He turned his hand over slowly under hers and laced his fingers through hers. They rode the last twenty-three miles of the coast road that way without one word, two adults in evening wear holding hands like teenagers in the back of a car that smelled of leather and very expensive cologne.
The estate was quiet when they came in. Imari was asleep upstairs. Yvette had left her bedroom light on at the end of the staff corridor.
Halston walked Aurora through the vast mansion.
He stopped at the closed double doors of the library at the back of the house.
Theodore’s old library.
Aurora had not been in this room since she was nine years old, when her mother had let her dust the lower bookshelves while Ayanna polished the desk. She did not particularly want to go in now.
“Why are we here?” she said.
“Because I want to show you something. And then we'll go.”
He opened the doors.
The library had been remodeled. The heavy oak paneling Theodore had loved had been stripped and painted a soft warm white.
The desk and chairs were new. There were two reading lamps, a fireplace that had been re-tiled in pale Carrara.
The wall opposite the fireplace held seven framed pieces of art, hung in a careful asymmetric grouping.
The piece in the center was a watercolor.