I just look at him.
“And I hear congratulations are in order,” he says to Dianna.
“Yeah,” Dianna says, completely unimpressed.
“On your Ally cosmetics contract.”
“Can you believe that?” Dianna says. “Me, selling blue eyeshadow.”
“The Allys are great, great friends of mine. In fact, I’m lunching with Juliette Morganz, Richard Ally’s fiancée, right now.”
“Yeah?” Dianna says, squinting across the room. “You mean that little dark-haired thing?”
Juliette waves eagerly.
“I think I’m supposed to go to their wedding,” Dianna says.
“She’s a very, very good friend of mine as well,” D.W. says.
“Sounds like everyone in this town is a very, very good friend of yours. Maybe I should get to know you better,” Dianna says.
“That,” says D.W., “would be a delight.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Dianna says as D.W. walks away from the table. “That guy looks like something someone dug up from under a rock in Palm Beach,” and I start laughing, even though Palm Beach reminds me of the two-week holiday Hubert and I took after we first got engaged, during which it became apparent to me that we may have had different expectations for our future together. Mine were: Louis Vuitton luggage, my hair always perfectly straight, jeeps in Africa, khaki jodhpurs, white columns set against the blue Caribbean Sea, dry-yellow Tuscan fields, a masked ball in Paris, emerald jewelry, the president, Lear jets, hotel suites, huge beds with white sheets and down pillows, an open roadster, my husband always kissing me, notes in my luggage that said “I love you,” and the wind always blowing through our hair. This is what I got instead: an “exciting” tour of America. Which began in Palm Beach. Where “the glamorous, just-engaged couple” stayed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Brian Masters. Brian Masters (Hubert’s uncle) was a fat old man with moles all over the top of his head, whom I was seated next to at every meal, and who, on the first evening, leaned toward me and whispered, “This family was actually okay until Wesley went out to Hollywood and made all that damn money,” as a black man wearing white cotton gloves served lamb chops. His wife, Lucinda, who spoke with a slight English accent but was actually from, I think, Minnesota, had an odd sort of vagueness about her, and I discovered the reason why after a particularly frustrating game of mixed doubles in which I swore at Hubert and threw down my tennis racket.
“Come with me, Cecelia,” she said quietly, with an odd sort of half smile, and I followed her, still stomping mad, through the house and up to her bathroom, where she closed the door and directed me to sit on a yellow silk-covered stool. “There’s only one way to survive as the wife of a Masters man.”
“But Hubert—”
“His mother was a Masters. And so is he,” she whispered. And I saw with alarm that she was really quite beautiful, and much younger, maybe forty, than she had appeared at first, surrounded by this grand house and faux servants, and I thought, What’s going to happen to me?
“Dolls,” she said, revealing the inside of the medicine cabinet, which contained such an array of prescription bottles I was sure it could rival that of any pharmacist. She removed a brown bottle and handed it to me. “Try these,” she said. “They’re completely harmless. Just like candy. Makes you feel sweet.”
“I don’t need pills,” I said. Which was really rather strange, since I was always a little bit on coke back then and, in fact, had a small vial in my bag which no one knew about and never would, and I said, “My marriage is going to be fine. It’s going to be great.”
“Oh Cecelia,” Lucinda said, handing me the bottle. “Don’t you understand? It isn’t, and it’s never going to be.”
But it wasn’t until the end of our holiday, when we went on that “fishing expedition” in Montana and I was dirty and my hair was frizzy and I was sleeping in a cabin with a scratchy army blanket and getting up at five in the morning and not having any decent place to take a shit, much less a shower, and Hubert and I had hardly anything to say to each other, that I opened the bottle of pills and shook one into my hand. It was small, white, and oval. I took one, then another.
I immediately felt better.
And I continued to feel good; even after we drove twenty miles in the rain to that honky-tonk bar Hubert had found in the guidebook and he danced with that waitress with the frizzy hair and saggy tits (she was only twenty-five) and I consumed six margaritas, I continued to maintain an aura of laissez-faire.
And Hubert was convinced he’d made the right decision in asking me to marry him.
Isn’t that what it’s all about?
“White or yellow?” Dianna asks, and I snap back and say, “What?” and we break out laughing because it seems we are on something like our tenth bellini.
“Xanax,” she says.
“Blue,” I say. “Yellow is for homosexuals.”
“I didn’t even know there was a blue,” she says, putting her hand over her face and laughing at me through her fingers. “Hey, guess what? I ate dog food too. I made Norman eat dog food. Come to think of it, I made Norman do a lot of things.”
“Don’t start crying again,” I say.
“Oh sweet Jesus. Norman. Norman,” she wails. “Why did you have to go and die and leave me a hundred and twenty-three million dollars?”