Gilded Age (19 page)

As Selden was heading off to the bar, Randy Leforte circled back around to us. He greeted Ellie with a stiff little bow and a curt nod for me. He complimented Ellie on her “performance” and quickly moved off.

“So, I take it you’re not seeing him anymore.”

“Oh, he’s mad as hell at me.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I turned him down. He wanted to marry me.”

I watched Leforte’s retreating back with alarm. Underneath his stiffness I’d detected a sense of injustice, like a child punished for something he hadn’t done. And I wondered then if Leforte had told Selden other things besides the rumors about Gus.

But I was a little bewildered at Ellie’s rejection of his proposal too. For the older I get, the more I realize that I too, like Selden, am a product of the pragmatic Midwest. With Leforte’s money and Ellie’s chic, they’d rule Cleveland. Ellie had to know that, and it surprised me that it didn’t matter to her. She could tone down his clothes and redirect the interests away from exotic cars and overpriced liquor to land in the country and philanthropy. Marriage to
Leforte was not something she would have passed up so easily just a few months ago.

“Who needs him?” she asked, as if reading my thoughts.

“You know, he’s not bad looking.”

“I think so too,” she said, tilting her head, as if admiring one of the paintings that surrounded us on the walls. “But there’s nothing there. I tried. I swear.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I slept with him, and it just wasn’t …”

“Good?”

“He knows what he’s doing. But there was just no …”

“Heat?”

“Very unsentimental.”

I made a little grimace. “Paint-by-numbers sex?”

“I guess I’m old-fashioned, but I need a few sweet nothings in the ear.”

“Such a girl,” I teased, but I agreed. Sweet nothings or not, if she didn’t love him, or think she loved him, if for only one night, it just turned into “insert tab A in slot B,” didn’t it?

“Besides, I’m going to be able to support myself. Gus is working out all these fabulous investments for me. Between that and William’s salary, we’ll be fine.”

“What do you mean William’s salary?”

“I mean two people could make a life on that, plus what I have if I manage it well.”

I was stunned. “You and Selden for real?”

“For real,” she said with a smile and a nauseating giggle.

I paused for a second.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing.” I shook my head, but I was alarmed. Hadn’t she seen the look on Selden’s face just now? He struck me as a man who’d had his vision permanently readjusted, and she was planning their life together.

Ellie waved me off, annoyed, I knew, and walked across the room,
where she inserted herself into a conversation with a museum curator and a local restaurant critic.

I watched her charm them—their smiles widening, the writer leaning in as if he smelled something delicious, the curator twinkling at her comments. Ellie could charm anyone, it was true. But I didn’t think mere charm would help her now with Selden. It seemed his feelings had undergone a tectonic shift this evening, and you didn’t shift a man back easily, especially one like Selden.

The After-Party

E
llie stood in the middle of the swirling party talking to what had to be the two most boring men in town and wondered, as she had in similar circumstances, what the hell she was doing there. She’d liked the idea of the tableaux when the museum approached her. Here was something a little artsy, a little creative. She’d thought her pose might cause a
petite scandale
—just a small delicious amount. But now that she was the spectacle for the evening, frankly, she was finding it tiresome—men talking to her chest, blushing, stammering, or flirting ham-handedly. She’d wanted to entice one man—Selden—the one who’d seemed disgusted. She decided another glass of champagne was in order.

She watched William Selden out of the corner of her eye. He was the last person she’d thought would be provincial about her pose, but there was no ignoring his dismissal of her just now. She’d miscalculated. Based on Diana’s tawdry text, Ellie thought that maybe Selden went in for exhibitionism, a little voyeurism. And if that was the case, Ellie could do sexting one better. She should have known better, should have known that Diana wasn’t smooth enough to calculate
what Selden liked and then give him a little more to lure him back. Ellie should have seen Diana’s message for what it was—a desperate and probably drunken attempt to find something, anything, to get his attention. Straight-up amateur. Ellie sighed.

Ellie had been hanging out with Selden for over two weeks. There’d been kissing, and she’d spent a chaste and deliciously restful night asleep in his bed. Neither of them wanted to rush this. Selden was hesitant around her. Was he unsure of himself, or intimidated, or did he have her up on a pedestal? She’d decided that tonight she’d jump down off that pedestal and give him a little encouragement. And so she’d kept her pose a secret, thinking he’d be surprised, turned on. She’d have a whole room of men at her feet, literally, and then she’d make it known she only wanted him. Okay, so maybe the wink was taking it a little far, but she’d wanted to get the message across. She’d thought it would get him hot, that tonight would end in his bed, both of them excited by her display, their attraction acknowledged and consummated. But his reaction? As tightly wound and convention bound as any of them, despite his licking booze off her like an oversexed frat boy, his binding her wrist, his insistence that pleasure was what mattered. She watched him leave—without her—out a side door and knew he wasn’t coming back.

“Bastard,” she breathed, so that the director leaned in closer over her chest.

“Sorry?” he said, blushing.

Gus Trenor, in a thick pink silk tie, broke into her conversation then, winking at the curator and shaking hands with the writer.

“Star of the evening,” he said to Ellie as the other two men drifted away.

Ellie sighed, and Gus exchanged Ellie’s empty glass with a full glass of champagne off a passing tray.

“Better?” he said, nodding at her. “You caused quite the sensation.” He smiled down on her as if looking at a favorite child.

“It’s not hard in Cleveland, is it?”

Gus laughed. “No, I suppose not.”

They surveyed the room, which was slowly emptying.

“Are you going to the after-party?” Gus asked Ellie.

“I don’t have a ride.”

“Don’t you?”

“He left.”

“Selden?”

“How did you know?”

Gus laughed again and downed the rest of his champagne. “You must think I’m an idiot. His mouth was practically hanging open—like he wanted to hang you on his wall.”

It mollified Ellie somewhat to hear that she’d had some effect on Selden. She scanned the room, looking for what, she didn’t know. Diana Dorset was busy at the back of the room, talking to the head caterer.

“Come with me,” Gus said, leaning in close. “I’ll take you to the party. It’s bound to be more interesting than this.”

He bundled her into her grandmother’s fur, and they headed for the car.

“Where’s Julia?” Ellie asked, looking around the parking lot.

“She’ll meet us there.”

Gus started up his German sedan, and they glided out of the museum parking lot into the night. The streets were freshly plowed from a recent snow. The gray mounds on either side of the streets were covered with a new white dusting. They passed Wade Oval and then the fine arts garden hung in the silver and white of snow and ice under a dotting of streetlights, and then Gus made a sharp right, cutting through the Case Western university campus.

She leaned back in the heated seat, the windows fogging from their breath and the cold. So what if someone saw her leaving the party with Gus Trenor alone? It felt good to have him driving her in his luxurious, heavy car, not knowing where she was going. To relinquish responsibility for the moment was leather-scented bliss.

They pulled up in front of a new row of condominiums in Little Italy. Gus parked in front and got out.

“Julia’s meeting us?” she asked.

Gus bounced up the unshoveled stairs, jingling keys in his hand.

“The party is here?” she asked again, following his footsteps through the snow, the hem of her costume peeking out from her coat and trailing behind her.

Gus opened the door and ushered her inside. “I wanted to show you this first.”

He flicked on the light and she was standing in a modern two-story space with pale bare floors, hushed and chill. “Why?” she asked, hugging her coat tightly around her.

“A good investment for you,” Gus said. “I told you I’d been checking out real estate. This neighborhood is only going to go up. But you’ll have to act fast on this little place. It’s not even on the market yet.”

It was straight out of her imagination, a little place on Murray Hill, close to the university and to Little Italy. She could see the mix of Noguchi and Gustavian in these spare rooms, though she didn’t think Selden’s Arts and Crafts pieces would mix well. Selden. She’d managed to forget him for a moment.

She walked into the living room—a full wall of windows with a view of downtown Cleveland. Gus turned on the lights. “No, no, turn them off,” she said. “Look at that view.”

“A view like that will hold its value.”

She walked over to the window and stood, touching the freezing glass. There was the whole city laid out before her in blinking lights—the Terminal Tower, the steelyards, the lake. Below in the street was a car she thought she recognized as it slipped past in the night on the tire tracks in the snow left by previous cars. And then she felt Gus Trenor behind her, and she froze. He seemed to wait just a moment, and then his arms were around her waist and his mouth was next to her neck, then kissing her ear with a loud wet smack that echoed in her head. She jumped, squirmed, and tried to remove his hands.

“Now, wait,” he said into her ear. “I thought you liked me.”

She twisted so that she was facing him. “Gus—”

“I like you.” He lunged forward, again trying to kiss her. “You seem to like me.”

“But Julia …,” she said, brandishing the first thing she thought would bring him to his senses. In her panic she instantly realized that the situation was dangerous on multiple levels—her good friend’s husband, her money manager, her old family friend—on every level, really. And would she tell Julia that Gus made a pass at her and suffer ostracism when Julia turned a blind eye? Or not tell and look guilty by omission and have Julia imagining the worst when she eventually found out? You could never keep anything a secret in Cleveland.

“Julia’s frigid. You’re her friend, I thought you knew.”

Ellie continued squirming until she was out of his grasp and on the other side of the room. “I think you have the wrong idea about things.”

“I don’t think I
do
have the wrong idea about things. I think you know how I feel about you. And you were willing to let me finance you because you knew I liked you. And I was okay with it. I thought it might lead somewhere eventually. But after seeing you up there onstage tonight, I thought, I’ve got to get me some of that.” Here he made a step toward her, but she backed up. “I’ve always had a thing for you.”

Ellie started edging her way around the room toward the front door. “Of course I’m flattered, and you’ve been a really good friend to me—”

“I could be an even better one. And unlike Leforte, I don’t kiss and tell.”

This stopped Ellie.

“Yes, he’s been talking,” Gus said, moving closer to her. “Locker-room chitchat now that he’s been waived into the club to play squash. The man’s a jackass. You should be more discreet, El. Choose more carefully. Frankly I was a little disappointed. Now, I … I can be really discreet.” He reached out for her arm.

This time she went straight for the door. She fumbled only a minute with the lock and then fell on the doorstep with a gulping of cold night air. She ran down the steps, snow spilling in her shoes, her thin costume slipping off her shoulders inside her coat as she looked up and down the wintry street for a cab. The air felt delicious—safe and unbound. Seeing no cars and no people, she guessed at the lateness of the hour and saw a man—there was something familiar in the outline of his overcoat—turn from the opposite corner and disappear down a snowy side street.

The E-mails

To: William Selden ([email protected])

From: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

Subject: Your ribbon

You left without saying good-bye. I hope this old e-mail address gets to you as I have no other way of getting through. Your cell says the voice mail is full. I was wearing your ribbon in the tableau. Steven freaked out, said it ruined the authenticity. But I insisted. Did you see it? I’d send the ribbon back to you, but I don’t have your address. If you want it, let me know where you are …

E

• • • • •

To: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

From: William Selden ([email protected])

Re: Leaving

I’m sorry I had to leave so quickly. The offer demanded it, and I was packing for a day and then on the plane the next. The
dean was a nightmare about covering my classes, but when he heard it was the Sorbonne and I’d be back, he made it easier for me. You don’t need to send me a ribbon, or anything else. I have no claims on you and never did. I get that now.

Best—

WS

• • • • •

To: William Selden ([email protected])

From: Eleanor Hart ([email protected])

Re: Claims

If this is all going to go to shit over e-mail and you won’t even call me or tell me where you are then you should at least know some things. It wasn’t about claims on people. Didn’t you tell me that? A meeting of souls? A kinship of spirit? How could I misread everything so completely?

    I think I love you. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone else. I’d come and find you now, if only I felt you wanted me to. Do you want me to?

Did it ever occur to you that I maybe needed something from you?