Chapter 1 #5
She sighed as she read her other emails, and went back to designing the next collection, due on the runway in January.
Tommy hadn’t been home for Thanksgiving in four years, and had only come for Christmas twice.
After thirty-four years dedicated to her family, it was slowly unraveling in spite of her, and this was only the beginning.
It was the hardest thing she had ever faced, while pretending to her son that it was fine and didn’t bother her.
Not seeing much of them bothered her a lot.
If nothing else, being the parent to adult children, especially married ones, required that you be gracious, and never say a word about how much it hurt to let them go.
She knew they would never understand it until they had adult children of their own, which was years away.
Dominique suspected that if she and Bill were married, the impact of her children growing up and moving away would be less acute.
With their limited time together, because of his own family and wife, she had spent every moment of her spare time with her children, and was unusually close to them as a result, so it hurt her all the more once they had lives of their own and she saw less of them.
Tommy’s decision to stay in the west after going to college and graduate school there had been the hardest blow, and then he married someone so different that Dominique couldn’t relate to her.
Marlene had grown up in Las Vegas, was from a broken family with two derelict parents, and had landed in L.A.
at nineteen, hoping to be discovered as an actress.
Her starring role now was as Tommy’s wife, and at thirty-five she was two years older than he was.
She had nothing in common with her mother-in-law nor with his sisters.
He loved his life in L.A., and the whole California culture, and the subculture he worked in, closely related to Hollywood, as his company produced films for their streaming platform.
It was far from the world he had grown up in.
He had good values and strong principles, and was a good husband and father.
Dominique was proud of him, but it was difficult to think of his marriage as his finest achievement.
Marlene was a survivor and had grown up in a hard world.
Her father had been a blackjack dealer in a casino before he started writing bad checks.
And her mother had been a showgirl, or worse, who had lost her looks early to alcohol and drugs.
She had been sober off and on for a few years now.
Tommy paid for a nice house for her in Beverly Hills, and Marlene kept a close eye on her, and on her younger sister, Tiffany, who had been in and out of trouble too.
Marlene was the success story in the bunch.
She was a survivor, and Tommy admired what a decent person she was after all she’d been through growing up, but it didn’t change the fact for Dominique that Marlene was half naked nearly every time she saw her and had spent more time as a cocktail waitress than an actress, and that Tommy spent more time with her ragtag family than his own much nicer one.
He had his hands full with his needy, demanding, unemployed in-laws, and Marlene was unfailingly loyal to them, and eager to share her good fortune with them.
Other than her spectacular body, Dominique couldn’t see what she brought to the table or how she kept Tommy’s interest. He had a soft spot for the underdog in every situation, and wanted to cure all the ills in the world.
It was one of his more endearing features, but Dominique was sad that he hadn’t married someone more suitable.
Marlene always seemed tough to her, she had to be, to survive her childhood and the years before she met Tommy.
Dominique wanted more for him, but she realized it wasn’t her choice to make.
Felicity’s boyfriend Taylor came from a more familiar world, although she didn’t like his family any better than Marlene’s.
At least Marlene’s were honest and had no pretensions.
The rare times she saw them, someone was always going into or coming out of rehab, which they considered a normal occurrence.
Tommy was always paying for fancy rehabs for them, which never seemed to work, or not for long.
Taylor’s family had all the pretensions Marlene’s didn’t, and none of them had ever gone to rehab, that Dominique knew of.
They were shameless snobs, with blue blood and a small fortune from long ago that had dwindled over generations.
They were always talking about who had money and who didn’t, were enthralled with all the people in Newport who had “cottages” and big fortunes, and were fascinated by who had made their debut and who hadn’t.
They were convinced that the only people with any merit were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose relatives had come over on the Mayflower, all of which bored Dominique intensely.
They looked down their noses at anything or anyone European, except the British royal family.
They thought France was a shocking, immoral, libertine country, and they had had a field day when they learned that Dominique’s mother and father weren’t married and that Marie-Aurélie had been his mistress.
They imagined her to be a dancer at the Folies Bergère, or a prostitute.
They were incredibly insular and old-fashioned, and Dominique found them dreary, and she thought Taylor had some kind of misguided superiority complex as a result, always telling Felicity what she should and shouldn’t be doing, shouldn’t be saying, and telling her how to run her life.
And much more alarming, Felicity didn’t seem to mind it, which upset Dominique.
She knew that her oldest daughter had ideas and opinions, but she never voiced them around Taylor, and was willing to behave in the docile, meek way he expected.
His mother had strong opinions she wasn’t too shy to express, but he wanted Felicity to do whatever he said.
To Dominique, it seemed like some form of extreme narcissism, which genuinely concerned her.
He showed no interest in Felicity’s career as an artist, nor acknowledged how good her paintings were.
He treated it like a hobby. His own job was far from impressive, at thirty-seven, at a minor investment firm on Wall Street, and Dominique worried that if they ever married, he would expect Felicity to support him.
She would have liked to see more energy and ambition on his part, and fewer pompous pretensions, but Felicity didn’t seem to mind any of it.
Marlene’s exuberant vulgarity was almost refreshing by comparison.