Diva (5 page)

Parker was right, Clara realized. What would this stunt do other than convince New York’s literary giants that Clara didn’t deserve to be taken seriously?

He put a hand on her arm. “How about you ditch the yacht and come out with me? There’s a new place called the Chaise Lounge downtown that’s supposed to be the cat’s pajamas.”

“Ah, I see. Your sudden concern for my career is just a way to ask me on another date.” Aside from a near kiss and the
pseudodate that had ended in Gloria’s getting arrested, nothing had happened between them. But that hadn’t been for lack of trying on Parker’s part. Barely a day had gone by since that night at the Opera House without Parker inviting her to some new club or play. Clara always said no.

But why shouldn’t she go out with Parker? Marcus certainly wasn’t waiting around for her, was he? “Tell you what, boss. I’m in. Just give me a second to visit the ladies’.”

Parker gave her his usual self-assured smile. “I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby.”

Even the bathroom in this joint was swanky, with plush couches where girls could rest their sore gams, wide mirrors where they could line up to reapply their lipstick and gossip about hemlines, and sinks made of the finest marble.

Clara was really feeling her liquor tonight. It took an embarrassing amount of time to fish her lipstick out of her silver clutch—good thing no one was around to see. Once her lips were ruby red once again, she searched in her bag for something to blot with …

 … and retrieved a card she’d been carrying around for the past two weeks.

The pleasure of your company
is requested at the marriage of
Anastasia Juliet Rijn …

There was a photograph in the invitation. That must have cost a pretty penny—but then, the Eastman family had
many pretty pennies to spend on things like engagement photos.

Marcus’s betrothed, Anastasia, was a remarkably pretty girl with delicate bone structure and large pale eyes. She looked about as interesting as an ankle-length skirt. Clara couldn’t guess the girl’s hair color from the black-and-white photo—only that it wasn’t blond like her own. Standing next to his bride-to-be and looking happier than Clara had seen him since he’d moved to New York was Marcus. Had he ever looked so delighted with Clara, even in the beginning?

Clara folded the invitation in half and raised it to her mouth. Even though she hadn’t had it for long, it was creased and worn. She looked up at herself in the mirror. Even hours into her evening, she still looked flawless and sexy. Maybe she wasn’t the prissy debutante in the photograph, but who would want to be? She’d never been that girl, good as she’d been at pretending back in Chicago. Instead, she was a flapper, which was a hell of a lot more interesting.

So she didn’t have Marcus anymore. So what?

She crumpled the invitation and threw it in the trash.

“Out with the old,” she slurred.

LORRAINE

Bills, bills, bills, and a reminder of her next dentist appointment—how could a woman as deliciously intriguing as Lorraine accumulate such a dull pile of mail?

She really needed to send out a change of address notice. Lorraine was a Barnard girl now, and had moved from Greenwich Village to Morningside Heights; her friends and admirers needed to know where she was so that they could reach her at a moment’s notice. What if she missed an invitation to a fabulous party or a moonlight stroll with some of the Columbia boys? For all Lorraine knew, she had already received dozens of these invites, only for them to be lost on the long, arduous journey uptown.

But the most exciting letters in this stack were the regular
correspondence from Lorraine’s parents. And those might as well have been addressed “To Whom It May Concern.”

Your father and I went to Minnie Wilmington’s
engagement party this weekend. She’s had the hardwood
floors varnished. They look lovely
.

Lorraine fished the check out, crumpled up the letter, and ripped open the next.

Your father and I played golf with the Marlowes
yesterday afternoon. It was a temperate day. A bit
windy, though
.

There were another seven letters in the stack. Her mother carried on a fairly entertaining social life, or so Lorraine had thought—how could she make it sound so utterly dreadful? Finally Lorraine just tore open each envelope, pocketed the checks, and left the letters on the bench beside her. Maybe some aspiring writer would find them and use them to write the world’s most boring novel.

Lorraine planned to write her memoirs one day, but they would be
fascinating
. How could they not be? If there was one good thing about all the trials she’d been through, it was that they made it impossible for anyone to say that Lorraine’s life had been dull.

She took a break from sorting, picked up the latest issue of
Vogue
, and tried to compose her face so that she’d look
alluring
and
inviting
and like a budding socialite. It was unseasonably warm for September, and Lorraine felt perfectly comfortable in her pale brown chiffon blouse and ivory flared skirt. An ivory cloche hat with a brown cloth flower rested on her short, dark bob. Lorraine would admit that her heels were a little high for running from class to class, but they looked sensational.

Besides, Lorraine didn’t have class for another two hours. Plenty of time to hobble there. For the moment she sat on a bench on Columbia’s campus, directly across the quad from Philosophy Hall. Magnolia trees dotted the campus, and their blossoms sailed onto the grassy sward in the light breeze. Cobbled walks crisscrossed the quad, and a fountain gently burbled in the distance.

The buildings on campus were old, but not old like Lorraine’s dreadful aunt Mildred’s collection of antique, rusty teapots. The buildings and statues here seemed old in a
mature
way, as if generations of knowledge had been infused into their very foundations over time. Lorraine could imagine the professors trying to gently hammer that same knowledge into the minds of their disinterested students. She watched the students now, the handsome young men in sweaters and knickers tossing a football, while others sat on picnic blankets and entertained equally attractive young ladies.

These boys weren’t focused. What they
really
needed were appropriate wives who would help motivate them. Women like Lorraine.

She sighed. She had been surprised by how much she enjoyed her classes at Barnard, but she still wished she could go to school
here
. It was only just across the street, but Barnard felt miles away from Columbia’s dashing young men.

Lorraine kept a hawk’s eye on Philosophy Hall’s arched doorway. Any moment, Marcus Eastman would walk through it, straight from his French class. After that he would head across campus to physics. Then he would be done with classes for the day, until he went off to calculus tomorrow morning.

Lorraine couldn’t help but feel proud of herself. They’d only been at school a few weeks and she’d managed to memorize Marcus’s entire schedule.

Most days, Lorraine was perfectly situated to bump into Marcus, to listen sympathetically to him as he talked about his difficulties in class, to offer to renew the friendship that had sustained her throughout her high school years. She was there for him, as a true-blue friend should be.

Of course, the two of them hadn’t technically spoken yet. Lorraine had only seen Marcus a handful of times, and whenever he noticed her, he quickly took off in the other direction.

When Lorraine had run into Marcus at the Opera House weeks earlier, he’d given her such hope. There she’d been, heartbroken after her too-perfect bartender beau, her first true love, turned out to be an FBI agent who’d only been using her for information.

But then Marcus showed up. And he’d been
nice
to her!
He even told her she looked good! He’d never done that back in Chicago. Let FBI Hank go off and solve crimes and look ruggedly handsome while doing it. Who cared? Not Lorraine!
She
belonged with someone like Marcus; that was clear. A handsome boy her own age from the same world as she.

But that notion had come crashing down after Gloria told Marcus what Lorraine had
really
been doing at the Opera House. How she’d been helping the gangster Carlito Macharelli trap Gloria and her colored fiancé. After that, Marcus had wanted nothing to do with her.

It wasn’t fair. Didn’t it matter that once Lorraine learned Carlito was planning to
kill
Gloria and Jerome, she’d worked with the FBI to save them? How come no one ever focused on that part? How come no one held Lorraine Dyer up as the heroine of this sordid tale? She’d been lied to, been lost and alone, and then she’d come through and saved her friends from an unsavory end.

That
was the story Clara Knowles should have written up in the
Manhattanite
.

Lorraine would explain everything to Marcus in touching detail when he finally deigned to speak to her. After dating a liar like Clara Knowles for so long, Marcus
had
to understand what it was like to be misled and confused enough to make a few mistakes.

A shadow fell over the cover of
Vogue
and Lorraine looked up, her heart swelling.

But the boy standing in front of her wasn’t Marcus—he was in fact the blond Adonis’s polar opposite. Where Marcus was tan and muscular, Melvin Delacorte was rail thin and pale, with a dusting of freckles over his nose. It was hard to tell what color his eyes were behind his thick, black-framed glasses, only that they were small. His fiery shade of red hair looked beautiful on a girl like Gloria but was completely ridiculous on a boy of nineteen.

Today he was wearing a gray sweater vest, a rumpled button-down, and baggy knickers—but his clothing selection didn’t really matter. No matter what he wore, one truth was evident: Melvin was one of the biggest killjoys Lorraine had ever met.

He was also one of the only friends she’d been able to make at college. At a Columbia-Barnard academic honors dinner early in the semester, Lorraine had been unable to stop poking fun at the stuffy old professors’ outfits. Melvin had been the only student sitting nearby to laugh.

Or maybe he’d just been coughing. His laugh and his cough sounded remarkably similar. But Lorraine loved to talk and Melvin loved to listen. All in all, not a bad arrangement.

Melvin slouched down next to her on the bench. He followed Lorraine’s gaze past the Venetian Well Head to Philosophy Hall. “I see you’re on the watch again,” he observed in the rich, deep voice of a handsomer man.

Lorraine rolled her eyes and went back to shuffling through her mail. “Yes, yes, you know me
so well
,” she said, bristling. But spying the name “Eastman” on the corner of an
envelope sent every other thought straight out of Lorraine’s mind. Could it be a love letter? A heartfelt apology for how Marcus had been avoiding her?

Her spirits plummeted when she noted the letter was from the Eastman family, not Marcus.

Melvin watched her eagerly rip the letter open. “Were you recruited for the Academic Decathlon? Our schools compete together—we could be teammates!”

“What? God, no—Melvin, just stop talking.”

Lorraine pulled the thick folded card from the envelope and opened it. Immediately her eyes were drawn to the black-and-white photograph of Marcus, his golden hair slicked back with pomade. The boy certainly could wear a suit—the pale vest, trousers, and jacket hung beautifully on him. The smile fell off Lorraine’s face as she noticed the classically beautiful woman standing next to him. The girl wore the sort of long, frilly deb dress Lorraine had always despised. Her delicate hand was tucked around Marcus’s arm as if it belonged there, and something lovely and very, very expensive glinted on her finger.

“He’s getting
married
!” Lorraine exclaimed, looking away in shock and horror.

At just that moment, the boy in question walked through the heavy black doors of Philosophy Hall. Instantly he saw her and smiled his widest grin, showing off his perfectly white, gleaming teeth.

Lorraine breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Marcus had
probably sent this fake wedding invitation just to make her jealous. Now he would walk straight over to her, laugh at his elaborate joke, sweep her off her feet, and tell her all was forgiven.

She felt her face break out into a smile as she got to her feet.

“What are you doing?” Melvin asked, but he’d see soon enough.

“Why, hello there, han—”

But Marcus strode past Lorraine and Melvin and onto the quad without a second glance.

He walked straight into the arms of the striking girl from the photo, who’d been waiting behind Lorraine. How had she never noticed this girl before? Could it get any worse? Lorraine wondered.

It could: They kissed in the center of the quad. It went on longer than it should have. Lorraine and Melvin weren’t the only people staring. The couple looked amazing together. The girl’s hair was a rich auburn that shone like mahogany in the sun. Her annoyingly stylish blue belted Patou dress set off her ivory skin beautifully. With Marcus in his casual but refined V-neck sweater and trousers, they could have been models.