Happily Ever After (37 page)

“Why are you being like this?” She gazed at him, her eyes
full of tears, which she willed away. She wouldn’t cry in front of him. “I don’t have a drink problem! I like a drink, but who doesn’t?”

“I think you depend on it,” Tom said.

“Well, that’s crap,” she said. “Look, Tom, I’m going now, because this is a rubbish afternoon now and you need some time to… never mind. See you whenever.”

“Go home then.” Tom gritted his teeth, as if it was painful to speak. “Go home and if you don’t have an issue with it, don’t have a drink tonight. Shouldn’t be that hard, should it? If you really don’t have a problem.”

She stared at him. “I really don’t understand you,” she said. “I thought you were different. I thought you weren’t like… like Rory. I thought we were friends.”

“Things change,” he said. He held her gaze for a brief, intense moment. “That’s why I’m saying this now. I think you don’t like me much now anyway, so I might as well just burn my boats.”

“See you, Tom,” Elle said. She turned away, and walked up the steps towards the station, leaving the river and the sunshine behind her. Memories started flashing in front of her tired eyes. She thought of her mother’s yellowish, angry face, of how she had had to mop up her vomit more times than she could remember, of the time she was at her drunkest when she hit her husband, slap across the face, and he, furious, hit her back, and they just carried on hitting each other. The time when she backed the car into the Dundys’ fence, and Elle had to come and collect her, waiting for the bus to come for forty-five minutes, her mother’s head lolling from side to side as she whispered, “I so sorry, Ellie, I sorry, stupid me. Stupid me.”

You don’t know what a drink problem looks like, Tom Scott,
she said to herself as she reached the end of the path. She hadn’t even said good-bye to him, hadn’t hugged him, told him
how much these last few weeks had meant to her, how much she was going to miss him, how she’d thought that maybe… No. She shook her head, turned, and took one last look at the river, where she’d spent such happy times this summer. It was over. Perhaps he was right. The summer was nearly over. Autumn was coming, she knew it, and everything was going to be different.

Where could she ever begin to attack a fortress like New York? She didn’t even want to. She only wanted to stay there until she herself was part of it, one of those well-groomed, well-attended women, and she half realized that was a fantasy too.

Rona Jaffe,
The Best of Everything

“
I BOOKED THIS
place because I know you hate uptown,” said Mike, shaking his napkin over his lap. “It’s a two-week wait for a table, don’t you like it?”

“Of course I do,” Elle said. She checked the strap of her pale-rose shift dress. “It’s lovely, Mike, honestly. Just a little—grown-up. You know me.”

Mike waved to someone over her shoulder. “I don’t know you, no.” Mike liked to take a question literally. “It’s been three months, and I still don’t feel I understand you.” Two glasses of champagne were placed on the table. “That’s why I wanted to ask you something tonight,” he said, raising one glass. “Would you consider going exclusive with me?”

Elle shook her hair behind her shoulders, feeling it brush the bare skin on her tanned back. The windows were open onto the road, and a warm May breeze wafted through the restaurant. This was New York at its best, why she loved it here, why she never wanted to leave.

This May the city seemed especially perfect to her. She and Mike would walk back from Soho through the warm streets to her apartment in Perry Street, maybe stop off for a drink at her favorite bar on West 4th… Maybe she’d even get him to stay over, they’d had sex only a few times since they’d got together. Mike was a gentleman, which Elle found disappointing, because he’d been great in bed.

Marc, however,
wasn’t
a gentleman. Maybe she could call him if Mike didn’t stay. Elle shook her head. It would sound so
bad were she to say it aloud. It was wrong to call your neighbor over for sex, especially your bi neighbor who worked in the same office as you. But since she’d discovered this American dating thing—you basically went out with who you wanted, and you had to have a proper chat to determine that you were seeing each other exclusively—Elle was reluctant to give it up. She’d come late to the dating game. And she liked the fact that, here, she was good at it. She was good at lots of things here.

Now she raised her glass and took a sip, buying time. “Exclusive? Er—wow.” Mike looked at her gravely. “Look, Mike,” Elle said, knowing she owed him a proper answer, “I don’t want to date hundreds of other people, it’s not that. It’s just—I’m not very good at relationships. Putting a label on things scares me.”

“You’re nearly thirty,” Mike said.

Elle waited for him to expound on this:
You’re nearly thirty, grow up,
or
You’re nearly thirty, you’re really old, everyone else is getting married
. But he was silent. “Well, I know,” she answered, not sure how to respond. “But—can’t we just keep it as it is?” He looked questioningly at her. “If it goes well, we’ll know it, won’t we?” Americans were so precise, that was one of the things she loved about them, but this was a downside. They liked a label; she didn’t.

Mike sighed. “Of course, that’s fine,” he said, though it didn’t sound entirely fine to him. He looked at his watch. “We should order.” Immediately, a waiter stepped over. This was another of the things Elle loved about New York. There was no one working in a London restaurant, it seemed, whose job it was to be merely a waiter. They were all anxious to let you know they were psychology students or out-of-work actors, as if being a waiter was beneath them. That drove Elle, with her newly acquired zeal for the work ethic, insane. Elle blinked and studied the menu, remembering that she had to call her mother, when she got home. Had to, but it was so hard to
remember to do the things you ought to when it was warm, with the lights of the Village calling her and the last of the blossom lingering on the trees.

When they’d ordered, Mike leaned forward and took her hand. “I’m sorry if I was being persistent,” he said. “Maybe I’m being a jerk. I like you, that’s all. I want to spend more time with you.”

Elle scanned his face, his sweet, serious face, and squeezed his hand with both of hers. “I do too,” she said. “It’s my problem. I want to give you a get-out clause. While I’m back in England you might meet some hot Park Avenue Princess and stop wanting to slum it downtown with me. I’m just saying.”

“Never,” Mike said. “I’ve met them all, and they’re all awful. I’m going to miss you.”

“Don’t you actually
know
someone called Bitsy?” Elle said. “I thought people called Bitsy only existed in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels.”

Mike’s gentle smile turned into a grin. “Elle, she’s eighty-four, I don’t think it counts. Anyway, don’t you know someone called Libby? Isn’t that the same?”

“That cow? That’s entirely different and you know not to mention her name to me.” She grinned back at him, happily, because she loved it when he showed some spark, took the piss out of her. That was the thing she missed most, here. On the table, her month-old BlackBerry flashed red and her eyes flicked instantly towards it. “Oh—” she began, then stopped. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll check it later.”

Mike said, shaking his head, “Wow. They sure do get a good day’s work out of you at that place. You put me to shame.”

Mike was a hedge fund manager. Elle had never heard of them when she’d met him at a launch in February for a book about the economic miracle of Wall Street. He’d been at Yale with the author, and was the only one of the Brooks Brothers
American Psycho
frat-boy look-alikes to break free from the pack. He’d introduced himself to Elle and her boss Caryn, who were chatting in the corner about the latest drama with their biggest author, Elizabeth Forsyte, and when he’d appeared by their sides and said, “Ladies, may I join you?” Caryn had given him a swift appraisal, knocked back the rest of her martini, and said, “Hey, Prince Charming. You’re just in time. I’m off.”

Only, because she was more Queens than Park Avenue Princess, she said “orrwff.”

And Mike had stepped back and said, in his mild, polite way, “What a shame. May I see you to a cab?”

“No, thank you,” Caryn had replied, looking at him suspiciously. “I think I can make it to the sidewalk from here. Tell you what, I’ll yell if I need assistance.”

He’d smiled and nodded, and Elle had liked him even then, for the way he managed to be polite but not stuffy. Well, maybe a little stuffy, but his heart was in the right place.

Mike had an apartment on the Upper East Side, with a view of Central Park: down a side street—he wasn’t Brooke Astor—but you could still see the park. Back in the mists of time his father had done something with whaling, Elle couldn’t work out what or whether it was a good or bad thing; she kept meaning to Google him and find out, because that was what you did now, Google what you wanted more information on, that hot new restaurant, that sudden bestselling author who’d come out of nowhere and of whom you should have heard, the bit of Americana you didn’t understand, and the source of the vast wealth of your date. The result of Mike’s vast wealth was that his family had a house in the Hamptons, a ski chalet in Telluride, an island in the Stockholm archipelago—and Mike had one of those jobs that would only make him richer. He was bright, he worked hard, and he deserved to do well, but Elle found it strange, the calm, scientific way in which the Nordstroms accumulated
money, having never had much herself, even now. She supposed that, one day, it would be all be passed down to Mike, his wife, and their future pack of little Nordstroms. It was interesting that not once had she even vaguely considered that might be her. Married to a millionaire, just like a MyHeart heroine.

She smiled at him now. “I’ll look at it later. I was waiting to hear from an author.”

“Check the email,” Mike said patiently. “It’s fine.”

“Sorry. Thanks a lot. I’ll be one second,” Elle said. She opened her messages. Sure enough, it was the email she’d been praying for, from Elizabeth Forsyte.

My dearest Elle,

My most heartfelt thanks to you for the care and attention you have taken over getting this cover right.
The Lord of Misrule
is to me a very special story, one that I hope will bring my readers even more pleasure. I have been so very worried by the turn of events the jacket was taking, but now that you have been so gracious—that British charm again!—and the heart above my name has been removed, I have no hesitation in saying that we should go to press with this version, and God Speed us all the way to #1 on the lists!

Your friend,

Elizabeth Forsyte

Post script: Euphemia and Brunswick send you their thanks and love too, for releasing their story to the world.

Elle blinked: all Elizabeth Forsyte’s emails were sent in tiny calligraphic script, on a lurid pink background decorated with Georgian pillars and other architectural features. It was so high-res that her emails frequently crashed the computer of
whomever at Bookprint US she’d contacted, but no one would ever have dared to point this out to her.
No one
said no to Elizabeth Forsyte. When you sold 600,000 hardbacks, and twice as many paperbacks, you could send child porn or videos of animal torture over the Internet to your publishers and they’d think very carefully before raising it as an issue.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, it’s great news,” Elle said. Quickly she forwarded the email on to Caryn and Sidney, the overall MD.

We are GO, she wrote. We can print tomorrow.

“Done. I promise.” Elle put the BlackBerry in her bag and leaned back in her chair. Mike sighed.

“That woman,” Mike said. “I sometimes think if she said, ‘I want you to eat fifteen raw eggs and ride the roller coaster at Coney Island,’ you’d do it.”

“Yes, I would,” Elle said simply. “You know what it’s like. It’s business, and she’s my biggest client. I wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for her.”

“She’s lucky to have you work with her,” Mike said loyally.

Elle shook her head. “No, absolutely not. Without her I’d be a nobody back in London.”

“I know that’s not true,” Mike said, smiling at her. “You crazy girl.”

She closed her eyes briefly, as outside the new leaves juddered lightly in the breeze. She knew she’d never get him to understand. The waiter arrived, with a green salad for her and a soup for him. “Cheers,” Elle said, exhilaration sweeping over her; she couldn’t wait to be in work tomorrow to discuss it with Caryn, hear if Sidney was pleased. “Hurrah, this is a great evening.”

“Have a wonderful trip back to England,” Mike said, clinking his glass against hers. “Don’t stay there. Come back soon.”