The Drifter(70)

“Teddy’s a man of unwavering loyalty,” said Gavin from the stage, with a barely perceptible slur of his words, collar unbuttoned, holding a microphone in front of the twenty-piece big band onstage. “Once he commits to something, whether it’s the sartorial style of the mid-1980s, or the unbearable music of the, ahem, Grateful Dead, if Teddy decides to love something, he will love it a lot, and he will love it forever. So Melanie, you poor thing, it looks like you’re stuck with this guy for life.”

A wave of “Awwww”s rippled through the crowd. Betsy felt someone’s breath on the back of her neck and a shock ran down her spine.

“Isn’t that cuuute,” said a voice in a harsh whisper, just inches from her ear. She knew who it was before she turned around. “He’s like a game show host in training, right? Do you like buying his vowels?”

“Every day,” Betsy said, cold as ice. She turned to see Caroline crouched beside her seat, wearing a thick pearl choker and a navy silk minidress with tiny cap sleeves. Between the gap in Caroline’s knees—her legs were even thinner than she remembered—Betsy saw the line where the control top of her stockings began. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy had made wearing any kind of tights or pantyhose desperately unchic the year before, and it gave Betsy a quick, competitive pang of delight that Caroline didn’t know this. Betsy smoothed the crepe pencil skirt of her 1960s dress and shifted in the gold bamboo rental chair, which was pressing the stiff, metal zipper uncomfortably against her back. She worried that the fabric still carried the faint scent of thrift store dust and decay. “I thought I might see you here.”

“You know Melanie was my little sister. I held her hair while she puked off of the balcony at a Chi Phi party. We bonded,” Caroline said, in her signature deadpan. Betsy studied her face in the dim light, noticing the faint lines that framed her mouth like parentheses and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks that she hadn’t noticed before. Her eyes were glazed and hollow. Her smile was frozen.

“You’re in New York, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Betsy answered. Betsy must have missed the rest of Gavin’s speech, because the next thing she heard was clapping, and some hoots of approval from Teddy’s fraternity brothers who rushed over and lifted him over their shoulders, threatening to take him out back and throw him in the pool.

Gavin left the stage, and the actual bandleader took his place, cuing his musicians to play “The Way You Look Tonight.” As the first notes were played, the ceiling of the ballroom slowly retracted, revealing the cloud-flecked night sky and a blazing full moon.

“Well look who it is,” said Gavin, nodding to Caroline. She stood up and gave him an awkward hug. Betsy looked at him with pleading eyes.

“Nice speech,” Caroline offered. “Who knew you’d become such a softy?”

“Nah, I’m still tough as nails,” he said, reaching over to take Betsy’s hand. “You made it! Let’s dance.”

On the dance floor, filled with older couples swaying to the music, Betsy put her hand on his shoulder and leaned in close to his ear.

“What the fuck happened to you?” he said through a clenched-tooth smile.

“I took the bus to the airport. There was an accident on the Triborough Bridge and I missed the plane by, like, three minutes. It was a nightmare. I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I know you don’t want to be here,” he said. “But it’s important to me, and to Teddy. Try not to pick a fight with Caroline, OK?”

“Oh, so now I’m picking fights,” she said. “I missed a flight, Gavin. I’m not going to burn the place down.”

Caroline must have had more catching up to do with the 399 other guests, because Betsy avoided her for most of the night without much effort, until the very end. Gavin went to call a cab back to the Chesterfield Hotel for the after-party, and Betsy ducked into the ladies’ room. Caroline was on a tufted bench in the lounge in a gossipy huddle with two women Betsy didn’t recognize.

“Well, we’re heading back to the hotel,” Betsy said as she dried her hands with a small, monogrammed towel. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and you won’t have to hold anybody’s hair tonight.”

Caroline’s friends stared at her blankly.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Caroline asked. She shook her head and squinted her eyes in a pantomime of confusion.

“You know, like at the Chi Phi house,” Betsy said. “What you said earlier about Melanie.”

“Oh, right,” Caroline said, even flatter than before.

There was so much tension between them, Betsy wanted to scream or grab Caroline’s shoulders and shake her, anything to break it.

“So I’m going home to New York tomorrow, but I’ll see you around,” she said.

“Yeah, sure. You’re going home,” Caroline said, mocking her for adopting New York as her native ground, yet another way to reject her and where they came from. “See you around.”

Betsy felt her cheeks burn red as she turned to leave.

“What was that all about?” she heard one of them ask.

“Nothing. She’s just someone I knew a long time ago.”

A FEW MONTHS after the wedding, the gossip about Caroline grew significantly darker. She’d started faking business expenses, going shopping when she claimed to be making the rounds of sales calls. She was missing her sales goals, staying out late, sleeping through appointments, and the slide down the slippery slope ended with a pink slip less than a year into the job. People in Miami said they saw her face on a couple of real estate ads on bus stops around town, and she was selling waterfront condos. In her email, Caroline mentioned that one of her clients, an English banker named Simon, had just closed a deal on a two-bedroom in South Beach. She wanted to keep it professional until the deal closed, but then he called her to say he was coming back to the States for some business in New York and asked her to meet him there.