White Ivy(29)

She remained standing to talk to him; a disgruntled Mathéo was forced to turn his attention to the couple to the right of him.

“It’s been what—since middle school?”

“You’re right,” said Ivy, steering them toward the corner of the room where they wouldn’t be interrupted.

“Sylvia says you’re Arabella’s teacher?”

“Yes! What a small world!”

She and Gideon quickly established the rest of their mutual acquaintances: Arabella’s parents, Gideon’s parents, Sylvia, of course (Ivy recounted the surprising encounter with Sylvia, only she made it seem as if the recognition were mutual), and they reminisced lightly about their Grove days before entering more recent years. Ivy dropped the name of her college and Gideon said in surprise, “You were so close! I was a stone’s throw away at Harvard—”

“Really? I can’t believe I didn’t see you at any house parties—”

“Which ones?”

“Oh—mostly Currier—”

“I was in Eliot—”

“Eliot had terrible parties.”

“The most terrible—I threw some of them.”

“What about you?” she asked after their chuckles died down. “Where have your adventures taken you?”

In an unpretentious tone, Gideon told her he’d spent two years working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative before going back for his master’s degree in California; now he was working on creating a smart thermometer to track how diseases spread. Ivy already knew all of this. After running into Sylvia, she’d looked up everything on the Speyers—family trees, graduation photos, wedding invitations, the article about the Whitaker newspaper conglomerate of which Poppy Caroline Whitaker Speyer was a 0.43 percent shareholder, Ted Speyer’s retirement from office, and even an invitation for a christening party some distant Speyer had uploaded on a Word document. That’s how she knew the details Gideon wasn’t supplying—he got his master’s at Stanford, he’d been named one of Forbes 30 under 30 two years in a row.

“I’ve always wanted to live in California,” she said, careful not to mention Stanford.

“Oh, you should, it’s certainly relaxed there.” His tone hinted he wasn’t necessarily a fan of relaxed. “But I’m glad to be back. The old crowd’s mostly stuck around. We’re all huge Celtics fans so we catch the home games together whenever we have time.”

Ivy thought he would now invite her to hang out with “the old crowd,” but instead his eyes flickered across the room and then his hand was on her shoulder; he was excusing himself to go say hello to a friend. She barely had time to call out “Right—see you later” before he was gone, talking to an older-looking brunette in a moss-green dress.

The important thing, Ivy felt, was not to take his departure personally. Unlike Daniel, men like Gideon preferred their women unruffled, mysterious, independent from themselves; he and his girlfriend would be like two planets orbiting around a common sun, which was work. Daniel hadn’t been ambitious at all, she reflected.

At dinner, she chose a seat on the opposite end of the table from Gideon. The man in the bowler hat sat beside her. He said his name was Nicolas. He was a photographer. When she asked of what, his sneer was so condescending she wondered how his ego managed to fit inside his hat. “Of life,” he said. Then, perhaps realizing they would have to make conversation for the rest of the meal, he softened his tone.

“How do you know Sylvia?” he asked.

“I just met her,” said Ivy.

He nodded. “Me too.”

The salmon-pink place mats were set, the ivory linen perfectly ironed, the candles lit, the music lowered. The bread basket made its way down the table. Ivy tore into a poppy seed roll. She felt her stomach gurgling as the warm yeast slid down her throat; she realized she was more than halfway to drunk.

Sylvia served a white fish cooked in some lemony sauce with potatoes and tiny sprigs of parsley; the lamb came next, a perfect medium rare, the pink juices seeping into the fluffy couscous. The dinner conversation flowed without direction or context, like a whirlpool into which random stories and name-dropping were tossed and churned and spit out into an altogether different story, the more obscure, the better. Every gathering deals in its own social currency, and in this particular crowd, it was one’s capacity to be interesting. By the time the chocolate mousse and coffee were served, Ivy was so full she could feel the acid rise up in the back of her throat.

All this time, Gideon didn’t look at her.

Just before midnight, they all squeezed onto the balcony. Ivy tried to push toward Gideon, to at least make eye contact, but his back was to her. They counted down to the new year. Booms erupted across the city, a simultaneous explosion of fireworks so bright it lit the night sky a sapphire blue. They passed around a joint, then another. Gideon, Ivy noticed, did not partake.

Back inside, Nicolas began spouting his vehement opinions on the growth of online platforms selling mass-produced art prints (horrible, commerce, demeaning art). Someone lifted their head off the plant tendrils on the floor and said, “Dude. Shut the fuck up.” It was the thought that’d been running through Ivy’s head all evening and she laughed until her eyes were blurry with tears. She could feel Sylvia’s gaze, cool and judgmental, removed from them all in her gorgeous superiority. But when she looked over, Sylvia was gyrating in her armchair with her eyes closed, snapping her fingers in double time, seemingly immersed in the music. Ivy stood up to go out on the balcony with a small group for a smoke break. She heard Gideon say to the brunette: “I hate the smell of cigarettes.” She excused herself to the bathroom.