White Ivy(70)

“How clever of Tom’s lawyer.”

“Tom’s always protected me. I think it’s made him paranoid all these years. He thinks everyone who didn’t grow up with us is an enemy. It’s hard for him to trust new people and their intentions.” The car stopped at a red light. Ivy felt Gideon’s gaze on her profile but she kept her gaze straight ahead.

“Anyway, it’s no excuse for what he said. I wish… well, we don’t choose our friends based on worthiness.”

“I understand,” said Ivy. That was Gideon, loyal to the last. She’d always thought loyalty necessitated a certain blindness, like religious faith, yet Gideon saw Tom for who he was, and still he chose to defend him. Was that love? She wondered how Gideon would defend her, if the time came. Then, recalling Tom’s and Marybeth’s cold, unsurprised expressions when Gideon announced their engagement, she realized that time had already come and gone. Gideon had just shielded her from it until tonight.

Moments later, she felt warm fingers brushing her cheek. The touch nearly broke her. She quickly turned to face the window and pinched her wrist to keep the tears from falling. By the time they arrived at her house, she’d composed herself. Her street was empty; the gangsters had retired to wherever gangsters retired to on a quiet Tuesday night. Or maybe they were making their rounds around Boston, robbing people and inflicting violence. Silence did not mean peace.

Inside, she checked the mail, drank a glass of water, refilled the vase of Casa Blanca lilies that Andrea’s admirer had delivered to their house, the large star-shaped petals curled outward like a woman’s exposed throat. Finally, she allowed herself to go to her room. She proceeded to slam her pillow onto the mattress in strangled yelps until Andrea came running in alarm, her face dripping sludge from a mud mask. “Go away!” Ivy shrieked at her roommate. “Go away! Go away!” Andrea went.

It was so unfair, Ivy seethed, her anger past the point of tears. Watch your mouth. Of all the things Gideon could have said, he’d chosen that. Probably he’d picked it up from Poppy. Surely Sylvia would have had better retorts in her arsenal. Sylvia, who had stolen Roux’s drawing. Sylvia, who always took what she wanted, who never would have high-fived Tom. Meifeng used to say that men would respect you to the extent that they feared you. But Ivy had basically called herself a random person to Gideon’s best friends. A passerby in his life. Not worth respecting. She’d done it to herself.

It was the first time she seriously entertained the fantasy of breaking off her engagement. The only thing greater than her desire for Gideon was her vanity. Instead, she dug up Roux’s phone number from where she had written it in her planner back at Finn Oaks. A month had passed since they’d slept together. She called and asked him to meet her for drinks. “I want to explain what happened at the cottage,” she said. After a long pause on the line, he agreed.

He chose a bar in a seedy part of town. It was midnight by the time she got there. She remembered the time because she’d checked her phone, pathetically, to see if Gideon had called. She played her old game: if he calls, I’ll go home. He didn’t call. Posters of old bands hung on every inch of the bar’s walls, the wooden surfaces sticky from spilled beer and oil residue in a way that could never be cleaned. Burly men with long beards and steel-toed boots sat alone over their frothing pints of draft beer. The kind of man Roux was when he wasn’t driving his million-dollar Bugatti with its bug antennae lights and dolphin-shaped tail.

Four vodkas later, Ivy couldn’t remember how they’d gotten back to Roux’s condo. She only remembered the feeling of seeing Astor Towers for the first time: a contemptuous admiration. Well done, she wanted to say, but instead, she took off her dress.

That night, on the cusp of a terrible hangover, she was filled with self-loathing. “This is a onetime thing,” she said coldly.

“Sure is,” said Roux.

Six days later, she was back, this time because Gideon had canceled their dinner date after she’d spent the entire afternoon stewing Italian cioppino, all those tight-lipped mussels she’d shucked gone to waste in the garbage, as she hated mussels and Andrea was on another one of her fruit-only diets.

By their third meeting, she didn’t even bother with the pretense that this was a fleeting affair. When she arrived, Roux picked her up by the waist and tossed her down on the bed. When she tried to scamper away, he grabbed ahold of one ankle and bit down on her calf, leaving neat lines of teeth marks on her flesh. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Gideon had had sex. She, who had once been so skilled in drawing a man in with a twitch of her brow, now found herself lying helplessly beside her fiancé in the dark, a chilly breeze blowing through the open window, and the sound of his light breathing in her ear, waiting for sleep to come, was enough to slice her heart into ribbons. Back she went into Roux’s bed… Roux, who spread her limbs out on the bed, admired her naked body and told her: “There’s nothing here to be ashamed of. You’re lovely… here… and here… and here…” Yes, she enjoyed it. She enjoyed every second of it. It was a lowly pleasure, one that left her gasping and exhausted and empty. But what of the soul—that fickle creature that was not so easily satisfied?

During her fifth meeting with Roux, they sat outside on his balcony overlooking the river, smoking and nursing warm whiskeys. That was when he told her about his mother. “Lung cancer,” he said when Ivy asked how Irena Roman had died. When it’d happened, he’d just been released from prison and was working in New Mexico. Ivy spat, “Wait—you were in jail?”