White Ivy(79)

Ivy had not planned on inviting Andrea. It was Gideon who’d suggested it. “I think she’d have fun. At the very least there’ll be a ton of single guys. Not to mention they’ll all be newly minted millionaires by next week.” His tone was humorous but not cynical. He didn’t care about newly minted millionaires but understood how a single woman of a marriageable age might value such things. Ivy suppressed her instinctive reluctance and said she would ask her roommate.

Andrea had cut her hair, an elongated bob that fell in feathery waves around her jawbone, and she’d swapped out her shrunken skintight wardrobe for high-waisted trousers, men’s cuffed shirts, black patent leather loafers with tassels. She’d gone to see a color consultant who told her she was a “cool autumn” and should therefore stop wearing light colors and bright patterns. Ivy, according to Andrea, was a “clear spring,” which meant she should avoid black clothing, which happened to make up half of Ivy’s closet. The evening of the party, standing side by side in front of the trifold mirror in Andrea’s room, Ivy told herself that Andrea deserved this night. Andrea’s father had recently had a heart attack and she’d flown back to Toronto to care for him for two weeks; on top of all that, she’d been occasionally sticking her finger down her throat after one of her binges, coming out of the bathroom with a swollen face and bloodshot eyes. Ivy told herself that if she paled tonight beside Andrea, who was ravishing in her high-collared navy jumpsuit, her hair a rippling sheet of taffeta, it didn’t matter because none of it was real; sooner or later, the real Andrea would ooze out of her pristine shell to ruin the beautiful illusion.

When they arrived, the penthouse was already packed with people, squeezed shoulder to shoulder like on the dance floor of a nightclub, with groups of scantily clad women pressing behind Ivy, braying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and men in sweatshirts and sneakers balancing four drinks in their hands. Holding hands, she and Andrea pushed their way across the room to the huge flag etched with the startup’s logo (a prismatic cube) fluttering over their heads like a war banner. The breeze came from massive wind generators stationed in the corners of the suite, blowing white smoke that smelled like watermelon Jolly Ranchers. Gideon had texted that he and the others were under the flag. Ivy found Gideon, Sylvia, and Tom standing around a frosty white cocktail table shaped like a tulip. The surface was hardly big enough to hold even a handful of wineglasses.

“Cute jumpsuit.” Sylvia nodded at Andrea after Gideon introduced everyone. “Very aggressive.”

Andrea decided to take this as a compliment and beamed with friendly eagerness. “You look amazing! That salmon color suits your skin tone perfectly.” She began to regale Sylvia with details about her life-changing appointment with the color consultant. From Sylvia’s impassive eyes, not quite focused on Andrea’s face but somewhere beyond it, Ivy could tell Sylvia wasn’t taking in a single word.

“Andrea’s my violinist friend I told you about,” Ivy injected.

Sylvia smiled blankly.

“She plays for the Boston Symphony Orchestra?”

“Right, I remember you saying something…”

“Sylvia’s friend composed the album I gave you, The Watchmaker,” Ivy said to Andrea.

“Oooh!” said Andrea. “I just loved…”

Ivy turned to Gideon and Tom. “Where’s Marybeth?”

“She couldn’t make it,” said Gideon regretfully.

“She hates these things,” Tom sneered to demonstrate his own concurrent disdain. “I just spent twenty minutes listening to a group of jackasses shit on each other for not ‘thinking big enough’ and wanting to ‘disrupt this’ and ‘do good’ and ‘better humanity.’ All the while, they’re telling these girls how much equity they have in this little venture. In banking, at least people say what they mean: I want to make money. A pile of dogshit money.” He glanced at Gideon’s disapproving frown and his expression softened. “I know, I know—you guys are different. Nonprofit health care… I suppose you’ve resigned yourself to living like a barefoot monk for the rest of your life…”

Beside Tom, Sylvia and Andrea had stopped talking, or, more precisely, Sylvia remained silent and Andrea wasn’t so slow on the uptake that she couldn’t sense another woman’s blatant disinterest. She smiled at Ivy across the cocktail table in a kind of vague, bright way that Ivy knew was nervous dread.

“How’s Jeremy’s documentary coming along?” Ivy asked Sylvia.

“His vision’s expanded,” said Sylvia, drumming her red-manicured fingers on one of the tulip petals. “He’s going to branch out past the startup view and also film larger organizations to see how teams function. He wants to film the Boeing machinists’ strike in Oregon. If he pulls it together in time, the film will debut at the Berlin Film Festival next year.”

“That sounds amazing,” said Andrea.

“He’s brilliant,” Sylvia dismissed. “A true visionary. He does everything deliberately. He doesn’t suffer from the inertia that afflicts the rest of the world. Most people are just sheep masquerading as intelligent beings, waiting to be slaughtered.”

Andrea laughed uncertainly. “You’re so right.”

Tom said, “That sounds just like the pile of dogshit I was talking about.”