Mrs. by Caitlin Macy

Author:Caitlin Macy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Gwen Hogan lingered in the no-man’s-land that surrounded the grand piano, trying to locate Dan without making it obvious. She found him, with his back to the starkly high windows, regaling Jim Truscott with stories from court. Jim was a partner at Weinrib, Lewis and Dan’s sometime opposing counsel. While Gwen hung back, Jim’s wife, Tanya, elegant in a belted, color-blocked wool dress and pumps, joined them and the three continued to talk and laugh, Dan occasionally tapping Tanya or Jim’s arm to make a point. Tanya looked skeptically bemused, as if to say, These men!—as if, Gwen thought, worrying about cramping her husband’s style had never crossed her mind. Ironically, Gwen always had to bribe and beg Dan to go with her to school events, Dan having made it clear that empty socializing with people not their friends was beneath him; he had white-collar criminals to jail. A year ago, at the Gundersons’, he had spent the entire party huddled in a back hallway on the phone with DiNapoli and Gerry, arranging an early-morning approach in Rumson, while she blushed and kept excusing herself to no one in particular to go to the bathroom, eventually hiding in there, studying the wallpaper, which depicted Versailles, and marveling yet again at people who had paper hand towels printed with their initials on them for one-time use. But get him off his phone, and her husband loved a party. Only a sense of this not being his crowd, she felt, kept Dan in check at these functions, while she, feeling she should let him shine, clung to the walls and halls, marking the time in five-minute increments. Acutely self-conscious now, having already downed two club sodas, she eyed the pianist, who was just returning after a break, but he was scowling forbiddingly, as if the one thing he counted on at a party like this was that he wouldn’t have to speak to the guests. Gwen instinctively drifted toward the waiters and bartenders, though, in striking up a conversation or two over the past few years at events such as these, she’d been reminded that she had no more in common with these young men and women than with the St. Timothy’s parents; they were ambitious, vivacious, graceful creatures—dancers and actors, who, like uptown saleswomen, didn’t tend to notice Gwen lingering hopefully in their presence. (She had a particularly hard time getting served in shops that catered to women. Department stores were such a trial that she had a repeated fantasy of raising a bullhorn to her lips and announcing, “I have money and am prepared to pay for purchases!” Minnie Curtis, Gwen felt, who had just arrived and was laughing on the stairs with Jessica Kaplan, the yoga teacher, and Jessica’s husband, would know how to manage shopgirls.)

Their host, Ron Stein, led a group of parents away from the drinks table toward a painful-looking metal sculpture, all acute angles and rusting nails. As the now-healthy-size crowd parted to let them through, Gwen spotted Philippa Lye.

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