Once More With Feeling (3 page)

"Tell me the guest list again?" Owen dropped
his towel in the middle of the floor and strolled stark naked into
his state- of-the-art closet, which was equipped with everything
except a live valet.

Owen naked, even when Elisabeth's mood was
grim, made her swallow involuntarily. "The Molnars. The Adamsons. I
ousted the Bloombergs to make room for Grant . . . and Anna." For a
moment she didn't think he'd heard her, then his head popped out of
the closet. He flashed her the same grin that twenty-six years ago
had sent her heart plummeting straight to her toes.

"I was listening," he said. "Who else?"

"Just the O'Keefes."

He rolled his eyes and disappeared
again.

"I like them," Elisabeth said--and despite
his pretended disapproval, she knew Owen did, too. "Marg is so 'old
money' she can say or do anything she wants."

"Is that why she showed up at our last
dinner party in bedroom slippers? Her money's so old no one would
take it at the shoe store?"

"One slipper. She'd just had her toe
operated on."

"And since when does Grant get invitations
to our parties?"

Since she had decided to watch Owen with
Anna Jacquard and see if her suspicions had any foundation.
Elisabeth kept her voice light. "Since Anna did. She and Grant are
last-minute substitutions for the Considines, who had to leave town
unexpectedly. I called them both at the beginning of the week. Anna
was only too glad to help out, but I had to bribe Grant."

"With what?"

"The keys to the beach house next weekend
for God knows what reason." She absolutely adored her son and
refused to think what he might be planning to do at their
Amagansett summer cottage--and with whom.

Owen stepped out of the closet with dark
suit pants unzipped low on his hips and his white shirt unbuttoned.
He was fumbling with a gold cuff link. "Are we having this party
because you want to, Bess? Or is it a check on the social
scorecard?"

She was surprised he had asked. Owen was
usually oblivious to those kinds of subtleties. "A bit of both. I
thought it might be a pleasant way to take care of some of our
obligations."

"Thought? Past tense?"

"It should be fun."

He raised a brow, but he fumbled on in
silence. Elisabeth didn't volunteer to help him. That past weekend
she had heard a well-known psychologist lecture on the dangers of
codependency. The psychologist had described his patients at
length. They had all sounded entirely too much like her.

Owen fastened the cuff link at last and
started on the opposite wrist. They had been married so long that
Elisabeth could chart every mole and scar on his body. She knew the
number of hairs on his chest and the precise way he clipped his
toenails. He liked his shirts with starch--he claimed that in a
former life he had been a particularly penitent monk--and he
favored ties that the upwardly mobile dared not wear. Nothing about
Owen Whitfield was surprising, but everything was seductive.

He caught her staring at him. His eyes
gleamed brighter. "Well, do you like what you see?"

What she saw was a middle-aged man with the
raw-boned build of his Slavic peasant ancestors and dark hair that
was fast turning silver. The skin around his brown eyes was
crinkled from too many squints and too many smiles, but he would no
more visit a plastic surgeon than live out the last of his days on
a Palm Springs golf course.

So far Owen had avoided the curses of too
many men his age. His hair was still thick, his waistline trim. He
had yet to consider that his charms might have diminished, and he
was right. He was still so attractive, in fact, that Elisabeth
suspected that even her closest friends might be tempted to have an
affair with him if he crooked his little finger. To her knowledge,
he had never crooked for any of them.

But he may very well have crooked for
Anna.

She didn't allow that thought to show. "I've
always liked looking at you. Show me a woman who doesn't."

He smiled, but didn't deny it. "We should
spend more time together. I've been neglecting you."

"Dogs and children can be neglected. Not
adults. You're not responsible to me for a certain number of hours
a year."

"What if I'd like to be?"

She was anything but flattered. As usual
lately, he had missed the point. "I'd rather not be an entry in
your appointment book." She slid off the bed. "I've got to finish
dressing."

They kept separate bedrooms for those nights
when he arrived home late and didn't want to disturb her, but more
and more often, even on the rare occasions when he was home, they
slept apart. He had moved his clothes into this room a year ago.
Now there was a bookcase beside the bed packed with Tom Clancy
novels, architectural tomes, and volumes of obscure Polish poetry.
Her clothes--and life--were across the hall.

He stopped her before she got to the door.
"Let me rephrase. I miss you."

His brown eyes seemed sincere, but she
wondered how many seconds it would be before his thoughts turned
back to the thousand and one details of a successful man's day and
away from his undemanding wife.

"I'm delighted," she said. "We'll have to
see what we can do about it."

He stroked one practiced finger along her
cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. "There'll be time after the
party to make a start. Just don't encourage Grant to stay
around."

She didn't quite meet his eyes. "I'll boot
him out the door."

She thought about their exchange as she
stepped into a navy dress with a crisp white Chanel jacket and
later, when she adjusted the downstairs lighting so that it was
subtle enough to complement the women's makeup. Owen was an
enthusiastic, inventive lover, and sex had held their marriage
together in the early days when they were learning to live
together. They had even managed to find time for each other when
Grant was a baby and Owen's future was anything but assured. But if
they made love tonight, it would be the first time in a month.

At least for her.

"What shall I do?"

Owen's words startled her. Elisabeth had
grown so used to his absence that his presence in the house, in her
life, was almost a surprise.

She continued fiddling with a table lamp and
didn't turn. "There's nothing, really. I thought we'd have coffee
in here after dinner. Be sure nobody bunches up over in that
corner." She waved toward a small, private conversational grouping
of wing chairs at the opposite end of the living room.

"And how do I stop them?"

"Open the closest window. Create a
draft."

He rested his hands on her shoulders. "Is
that one of those things the blue-blooded instinctively know?"

She couldn't pretend she was something she
was not. As a child Elisabeth had learned the fine art of fitting
into society. She could gracefully wend her way through a party
tent on the lawn of any East Hampton mansion. She could converse at
length with the Four Hundred's brightest butterflies and never
utter a meaningful word. She was known in the exclusive circles in
which she moved to be a "brick," or a "rock ," ironically suitable
for a woman who had allowed her architect husband to design her
narrow world.

"It's one of those things the wives of
successful men learn by paying close attention to the wives of
other successful men," she said with inbred tact.

"You've never needed to pay attention to
anyone. You were born for this."

"I'd like to think I was born for a bit
more." Her words were clipped. The sentiment behind them was
lengthy.

His thumbs began a slow massage, exactly
where tension had tied her shoulder muscles into knots. "Don't
disparage yourself. You make everyone comfortable. You have such a
knack for it. I've never met anyone who so completely puts others
at ease. You're a sensational hostess."

She didn't know how to tell Owen that he was
making everything worse. There had to be more to life than knowing
what wines to serve and how loud to set the volume on the sound
system. Gypsy Dugan came to mind. Gypsy could probably entertain
the entire United Nations in a South Bronx tenement, serve root
beer with prime rib, play Eminem at top volume, and by the next day
no one would remember.

But they would remember her.

The doorbell rang and the comforting fingers
stilled. "Georgina stayed for the evening. She'll get it," she
reminded Owen.

"I guess I'm supposed to station myself
somewhere and wait."

"Mom?" Grant's voice drifted in just ahead
of him. He appeared in the doorway. "Bet you're spraying the
lightbulbs with White Linen."

Owen corralled their son in a huge bear hug
before Elisabeth could move. At twenty-four Grant was six-foot,
slender but solid, with shoulders that were broad enough to take
his father's playful abuse. His hair was the pale brown of his
eyes, and the strong slash of his cheekbones were a carbon copy of
Owen's.

Grant broke away from his father, embraced
Elisabeth, and kissed her cheek. "The house looks wonderful. I like
what you did in the entrance hall."

She squeezed her eyelids shut in
resignation. "Oh God. That was the florist. I forgot to look. What
did he do?"

"You'll see. Am I the first one here?"

"You are," Owen said. "Were you hoping to
get an early start on the hors d'oeuvres?"

Grant manufactured a waif's pathetic smile.
"I live on a teacher's salary, remember? Unless I'm invited to the
homes of the rich and famous, I can only eat dinner on alternate
Wednesdays."

Owen slung his arm over Grant's shoulders.
"Careful what you say or your mother will package up every bite the
guests and the dogs don't eat and send it home with you."

"This is my baby you're talking about,"
Elisabeth said. "No gallows humor, please."

Although Owen and Grant were both joking,
there was a kernel of truth to their exchange. Grant's existence
was hardly hand-to-mouth, but he rarely had money to spare. He
taught English in a public high school in the Bronx, where security
guards routinely roamed the hallways and the only poetry his
students were familiar with was spray-painted on subway walls. In
his second year on staff he had moved into the neighborhood so that
he could be available to his students after classes.

"Hi, am I too early?"

Elisabeth looked up to see Anna. Georgina
had obviously let her in before she rang the bell. Elisabeth's
welcoming smile was as automatic as the stab of betrayal she felt.
"Of course not."

She watched Owen abandon his son and move
toward Anna.

Anna Jacquard had begun working for Owen one
year ago. She was thirty-two, with dark hair and eyes, a milkmaid
complexion and a restless, artistic temperament that drew men to
her like honeybees to the lone lily in a field of daisies. Tonight
she was dressed in velvet leggings and a silk tunic she had
probably dyed herself. Her hair hung in an unfashionably long braid
that was so perfect a choice, strangers stopped her on the street
and warned her not to cut it.

Owen took her hands in his. There was a
pause before they greeted each other, as if they were assessing
changes, accumulating memories--despite the fact that they had seen
each other only hours ago at the office. Owen bent his head and
brushed his lips against her cheeks. Her eyelids lowered in
something longer than a blink. She seemed to hold her breath, to
savor . . .

"Elisabeth . . ."

Elisabeth realized that Anna was coming
toward her now. Owen's greeting, which had probably taken only
seconds, had ended. But Elisabeth still felt it like a tangled knot
inside her. Anna extended her hands to Elisabeth as she had to
Owen, but the expression in her eyes wasn't nearly as warm. "The
house looks lovely. And the flowers in the entrance are inspired.
Is that your handiwork?"

"It's most decidedly not." Elisabeth
squeezed Anna's hands, then dropped them quickly. "Thank you for
coming on such short notice. We're always glad to have you
here."

The last was a lie. Once upon a time
Elisabeth had been happy to have Anna here. Hiring Anna Jacquard
had been a coup for Owen. She was a supremely talented architect
who had begun the career climb in a prestigious Dallas firm. But
Owen had seen one of Anna's designs at a convention, and he had
been completely enchanted. There was a similarity in the way that
they thought about space, about light and angles and working in
harmony with nature. He had made a point of seeking her out, and,
just a month later, of making her an offer that was too good to
pass up.

And one month ago Elisabeth had begun to
wonder what other offers Owen had made her.

"I love coming here." Anna had a subtle
smile, one that didn't light up her face so much as highlight its
finer points. "You are the perfect hostess."

Elisabeth had a vision of those words as her
epitaph, chiseled on a white granite crypt that looked
astonishingly like this house. She murmured some properly insincere
words of gratitude.

The doorbell rang again, and the remainder
of the guests arrived in closely spaced groups of two. Anna and
Grant wandered toward the library, where drinks were going to be
served. Elisabeth and Owen went to the entrance hall, where Rick
had filled a corner with calla lilies and oddly sculpted coral
under tulle that billowed convincingly each time the door
opened.

She tried to put the intimacy of Owen and
Anna's greeting out of her mind as she greeted Marguerite and
Seamus O'Keefe.

"We are obviously having something that
swims for dinner," Marguerite said, pointing to the
arrangement.

Elisabeth kissed Marguerite's cheek. "I'd
hate to think what he might have done if I'd been serving venison.
I'm afraid he would have given us his personal rendition of the
death scene from Bambi."