that very moment? Danielle knows there have to be thousands upon thousands. Women who would compromise their marriages and self-respect for a night alone with him.
To have that kind of appeal—she can’t really imagine it. What did a person do with all of that power? How could it not change you? And so often, it seemed, for the worse?
“Elise Connor?” Danielle asks, but she knows this is exactly who they mean.
“Yes,” says Renn. He can’t suppress his smile. “The one and only.”
Will is pretending to watch the musicians onstage, tuning out his father and everyone else at the table. Danielle feels something hot and corrosive spilling into her stomach. Her girlfriends, some jealous, some well-meaning, told her to be cautious when she started dating Will. He had to know a lot of famous actresses, didn’t he? Wasn’t it likely that he had dated some of them? Despite how pretty she is, how could Danielle realistically expect to compete? She might own a profitable business, one that she had started all by herself, but she wasn’t famous, not even close. She was, sorry to say, an ordinary person. Will was not. At least this was what she had thought at first, but after a month or so of dating him, she knew that Will’s ordinariness, as he perceived it, was in danger of permanently embittering him.
“Are you seeing her, Dad?” asks Anna, crunching a piece of ice from her water glass. Her pale green eyes are rimmed with thick lashes that Danielle has always envied and admired.
Renn takes a few seconds to reply. “I suppose I am, but please keep that between you and me.” He smiles at Danielle. “And you and me.”
Even in the weak light cast by their table’s tiny lamp, Danielle can see that Will’s face is flushed. If he weren’t so upset, he would look very handsome, certainly a little mysterious, but he has spent most of his life watching his father. She suspects that he is used to being affably tolerated by his father’s associates or else ignored, and although it is something that most people are forced to accept as an elemental fact of their lives, she guesses that it is harder for the family members, the lesser planets, forced to orbit the famous, greedily glowing sun in their midst.
Does she stay with Will because she wants to play some role, no matter how minor, in his father’s life, or is it that Will reminds her of her ex-husband, Joe? Both he and Joe are men angry at the world, at other men who seem to have more than they do. Reading an article in a grocery-store magazine the previous week, Danielle had found herself staring at the page, unaware that the checkout line was advancing. The psychologist who had written the article argued that anger was the number-one social disease in the Western world, but hardly anyone bothered to acknowledge it. They would rather, the psychologist said, worry about quasi-abstractions like terrorist attacks or meteor strikes or alien invasions because these improbable disasters did not require the same painful self-examination that confronting one’s anger did.
Noticing her expression, Will makes an effort to smile and reaches for her hand. Even though she doesn’t pull away, she keeps her hand inert. She feels Renn and Anna watching them.
Anna says, “How long have you and Elise been together?”
Renn glances at his son. Danielle sees, in that half second, his contrition and his triumph. “I don’t know, seven or eight weeks, maybe?”
Will stiffens next to her but says nothing.
“Are you guys serious?” Anna asks.
Her father laughs. “I don’t know. Maybe. That might be nice.”
Anna smiles. “ ‘That might be nice.’ That’s all you’ll say?”
Renn nods. “For now, yes.”
“She’s twenty-four, Dad,” says Will. “How could it possibly be serious? For her, if not for you?”
The waiter, a blond man in a white shirt and black tie, has materialized behind Anna, interrupting the injured silence that follows Will’s question. Renn forces a smile and orders champagne cocktails for the table. Danielle is certain that Renn believes himself to be in love with Elise, and she feels an aggressive stab of jealousy. Anna looks at her from across the table, commiserating, it seems, over Will’s confrontational behavior. Her solicitousness embarrasses Danielle.
When the waiter leaves, Danielle excuses herself and goes to the bathroom, unable to sit and listen to how Renn will respond to Will’s questions about Elise, a woman younger than Renn’s own daughter.
In the bathroom, her face is noticeably drawn