relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?
It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it; and there on the other side was Kitsey, looking at me with the amused, gooseberry-gray eyes.
We had fun together. We got on. It was her first summer in the city, “my whole life, ever”—the house in Maine was closed tight, Uncle Harry and the cousins had gone up to Canada to the Îles de la Madeleine—“and, I’m a bit at loose ends here with Mum, and—oh, please, do something with me. Won’t you please go out to the beach with me this weekend?” So on the weekends we went out to East Hampton, where we stayed in the house of friends of hers who were summering in France; and during the week we met downtown after I got off work, drinking tepid wine in sidewalk cafés, deserted Tribeca evenings with fever-hot sidewalks and hot wind from the subway grates blowing sparks from the end of my cigarette. Movie theaters were always cool, and the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. Two afternoons a week—hatted, gloved, in Jack Purcells and tidy skirts, sprayed head to toe with medical-grade sunblock (for she, like Andy, was allergic to the sun) she drove out on her own to Shinnecock or Maidstone in her black Mini Cooper which had been specially fitted in the back to hold a set of golf clubs. Unlike Andy she chattered and fluttered, laughed nervously and at her own jokes, with a ghost of her father’s scattered energies but without the disengaged quality, the irony. You could have powdered her and drawn a beauty mark on her face and she might have been a lady-in-waiting at Versailles with her white skin and pink cheeks, her stammering gaiety. She wore tiny linen shift dresses, country and city, accessorized by vintage crocodile bags of Gaga’s, and kept her name and address taped inside the crucifyingly high Christian Louboutins she teetered around in (“Hurty-hurty shoes!”) in case she kicked them off to dance or swim and forgot where she’d left them: silver shoes, embroidered shoes, ribboned and pointy-toed, a thousand dollars a pair. “Meanypants!” she shouted down the stairwell when—three a.m., three sheets to the wind on rum and Coke—I finally staggered down to catch a cab because I had to work the next day.
She was the one who had asked me to marry. On our way to a party. Chanel No. 19, baby blue dress. We’d stepped out on Park Avenue—both a little looped from cocktails upstairs—and the street lights had snapped on the moment we stepped out the door and we’d stopped dead and looked at each other: did we do that? The moment was so funny we both began laughing hysterically—it was like the light was pouring off us, like we could power up Park Avenue. And when Kitsey seized my hand and said: “You know what I think we should do, Theo?” I knew exactly what she was going to say.
“Should we?”
“Yes, please! Don’t you think? I think it would make Mum so happy.”
We hadn’t even firmed up the date. It kept getting changed, due to the availability of the church, the availability of certain indispensable members of the party, someone else’s cup race or due date or whatever. Hence, how the wedding seemed to be gearing up into quite such a big deal—guest list of many hundreds, cost of many thousands, costumed and choreographed like a Broadway show—how this wedding seemed to be spiraling into quite such a production I wasn’t quite sure. Sometimes, I knew, the mother of the bride got blamed for out-of-control weddings but in this case anyway you couldn’t pin the rap on Mrs. Barbour, who could scarcely be prised from her room and the embroidery basket, who never took phone calls and never accepted invitations and never even went to the hairdresser any more, she who had once had her hair done every other day without fail, a standing eleven a.m. appointment before lunching out.
“Won’t Mum be pleased?” Kitsey had whispered, jabbing me in the rib with her sharp little elbow as we were hurrying back to Mrs. Barbour’s room. And the memory of Mrs.