White Ivy(86)

“I don’t feel well,” said Gideon. He placed one hand on his stomach, took a step back, and puked his dinner all over her patent leather Ralph Li-Ping stilettos.



* * *




THE NEXT MORNING, Gideon was in poor shape. He apologized profusely for his poor behavior, insisting that he would buy her the same pair of shoes when they got back to Boston, as she had thrown out the ones he’d puked over—the smell had been too offensive to pack into her carry-on. Then he choked down two Advils with a bottle of Perrier and slept the entire flight home.

After landing at Logan, he kissed her goodbye and took a cab straight to the office, as if in penance. Ivy waited until his cab rounded the corner before hopping in her own cab. “Astor Towers, please. On the corner of Summer and Hawley.” She turned on her phone and called Roux.

She thought he would pick up on the first ring, having waited breathlessly all week for her call, but in fact, her call went twice to voicemail and she almost told the cabdriver to change destination before he finally picked up on her third try.

“Where were you?” he snapped.

“Hawaii.”

“You don’t have time to go on a trip with me but you have time to fly to fucking Hawaii?”

“I’m coming over,” she said.

Tendrils of clouds drooped from the sky like shaggy gray sheep. From her cab window, she saw a woman in an arctic winter coat walking beside a teenager in a cropped jean jacket. March and April in Boston was a strange in-between time when people fell sick, dogs barked furiously at the sky, one day it was sunny and hot and the next, a blizzard was coming. She checked her phone’s calendar. Sixty-nine days.

“Here’s fine.” She got out at the florist shop two blocks from Astor Towers. With great care, she selected one stem after another, the owner stating the names of each flower as if they were the names of her children: freesia, lisianthus, white spray chrysanthemums, pennycress, eucalyptus, pittosporum.

“Sixty-nine eighty-six, please.”

Ivy pulled out a hundred from her wallet. It was Roux’s money, the money she’d stolen from him, which would now be used to buy his own consolation flowers.

He opened the door before she even rang the doorbell. “I saw you coming into the building,” he said wanly, a cigarette stub hanging from his cracked lips. Brushing past him, she smelled the familiar rank odor of a hangover, and something foreign and fragrant. Roux was shirtless and wearing, of all things, blue hospital scrubs for pants, the ends of the cotton drawstrings hanging down to his thighs.

“Where’d you get those?”

He glanced down. “The hospital.”

“You were in the hospital?”

“No.”

“Then whose are they?”

He shrugged.

Then Ivy understood the reason for his odd, disheveled manner. She’d thought the strange fragrance came from the flowers but now she realized the scent wasn’t one bit floral but entirely synthetic and distinctly female, like the smell of a department store makeup counter.

“Wild night?” she said.

“Why haven’t you been answering my calls?”

“What’s her name?”

He refused to answer.

“I guess you didn’t ask. And here I was going to console you.” She thrust the bouquet at him. He didn’t take it. “Let’s stop this, Roux,” she said. “It’s not fun anymore. I’m getting married in sixty-nine days. You’ve obviously moved on as well. Let’s call a spade a spade.”

He eyed her with bleary exhaustion. “Calm down.”

“I am calm.” She placed the flowers on his coffee table and went to the kitchen to fill a vase with water. He followed her.

“I was drunk last night.”

“You’re always drunk.”

“I don’t want to fight this early in the morning.”

“It’s not a fight. It’s goodbye.”

He opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice, drinking it in large gulps with a little bit trickling down the corners of his mouth.

She couldn’t believe she had ever found this man attractive.

“I mean it,” she said. “I never want to see or hear from you again. It’s over. I came here to tell you that in person. For the sake of our friendship.”

He wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “Our friendship? We’re back to that? When are you going to stop lying—”

“You knew I was marrying Gideon—”

“I thought you would leave him!”

Ivy opened her mouth, closed it. “When have I ever said that?” she said finally.

“Last summer. At the Speyers’ house.”

“That was before I was engaged.”

“You came to me a month later. You couldn’t stay away. You hate your life. You bitch about the Speyers, about their goody-goody friends. You wanted me to save you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ivy snapped. “I’ve never asked you for anything besides sex. I thought we were in agreement about that part.”

He eyed her compassionately. “You’re punishing me. For the other day.”

She denied this with an impatient toss of her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. I was always going to end things with you before my wedding.” She could tell by Roux’s glazed obstinance that she wasn’t getting through to him. Never does a woman lie in a more cunning way than when she tells the truth to a man who doesn’t believe her. Frustrated, she turned on the tap and began filling the vase with water.