When Merritt turns to see Greer, she gasps in surprise. Then she hurries to wipe away her tears. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just… the excitement.”
“It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?” Greer says. She feels a wave of maternal concern for this girl who is neither getting married like Celeste nor pregnant like Abby. But still, the freedom! Greer wants to encourage Merritt to savor her freedom because soon enough, certainly, it will be gone.
“Come, let’s get you a drink,” Greer says. She beckons Merritt forward, thinking she will lead the girl back out to the party and find Chloe-with-the-champagne. Surely Merritt’s sadness is nothing a little Veuve Clicquot can’t fix.
“I’m fine,” Merritt says, sniffing and trying to collect herself. “I’ll be out shortly. I need the ladies’ room. I should fix my face. But thank you.”
Greer gives the girl a smile. “Very well. I’m on a mission to find my husband anyway. He seems to have disappeared.” She turns to leave but not before catching the glint of a silver ring on Merritt’s thumb.
So it’s true, Greer thinks. All the fashionable girls are wearing them now.
Monday, October 24, 2016
CELESTE
Two days after giving Benji her direct line at the zoo, he calls—not to put her in touch with his friend who may or may not want to bring groups of foreign executives to the zoo but to ask her out to dinner. He wants to take her to the Russian Tea Room on Friday night.
“They’ve redone it since the eighties,” he says. “It’s supposed to be over the top now. Do you like caviar?”
“Um…” Celeste says. She has never had caviar, not only because it’s expensive but also because she has seen sacs of fish eggs floating in aquarium water and… no, thank you.
“Or we could go down to the East Village and eat at Madame Vo’s? It’s Vietnamese. Would you prefer Vietnamese?”
Celeste nearly hangs up the phone. She chastises herself for giving this guy her number. He’s an alien species—or, more likely, she’s the alien. He’s used to beautiful, sophisticated women like Jules, who probably grew up with caviar packed in her lunchbox. Celeste’s rent on East One Hundredth Street is a bit of a stretch, so she rarely goes out to eat. Occasionally, she will meet Merritt for brunch or dinner. Many times, if Merritt is photographed eating at the restaurant or if she posts photos of the food online at #eatingfortheinsta, the meal will be comped. Usually, however, dinner for Celeste is the salad bar at the corner bodega or takeout from the cafeteria at the zoo and, yes, Celeste does know how pathetic that is, but only because Merritt has told her.
“Vietnamese sounds great!” Celeste says, manufacturing as much enthusiasm as she can about a cuisine she knows nothing about.
“Okay, Madame Vo’s it is, then,” Benji says. “I’ll come pick you up?”
“Pick me up?” Celeste says. Her block—which is too far north to properly qualify as the Upper East Side, though too far south to be called Harlem—is relatively safe but neither sexy nor fetching. There’s a laundromat, the bodega, a pet groomer.
“Or we can meet there?” Benji says. “It’s on East Tenth Street.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Celeste says, relieved.
“Eight o’clock?” Benji says.
“Sounds good,” Celeste says, and she hangs up the phone to call Merritt.
First, Merritt screams, You have a date!
Celeste’s face contorts into an expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. She does have a date, and it feels good, because normally, when Celeste and Merritt talk, the only person who has exciting news, or news of any kind, is Merritt. Merritt’s romantic life is so populated that Celeste has a hard time keeping the men straight. Presently, Merritt is dating Robbie, who’s the daytime bartender at the Breslin on Twenty-Ninth Street. He’s tall and pale with bulging biceps and an Irish accent. What’s not to love about Robbie? Celeste wondered after Merritt dragged Celeste down to a Saturday lunch at the Breslin so she could meet him. Why didn’t Merritt stay with him?
For one, Merritt said, Robbie was an aspiring actor. He was constantly going on auditions, and Merritt felt it was only a matter of time before he was cast in a TV pilot that got picked up, at which point he’d move to the West Coast. It wasn’t a good idea to get too attached to anyone not firmly rooted in New York, Merritt said. However, Celeste knew that Merritt was afraid to commit because of a truly heinous situation she’d found herself in the year before she and Celeste met.
The man’s name was Travis Darling. Travis and his wife, Cordelia, owned a PR firm called Brightstreet where Merritt had worked right out of college. She had been handpicked for her job as publicity associate from a pool of over a thousand applicants, and both Travis and Cordelia saw Merritt as a rising PR star, the next Lynn Goldsmith. Merritt’s life had become completely intertwined with the lives of the Darlings. She accompanied them to dinner at least once a week; she hung out at their brownstone on West Eighty-Third Street; she went skiing with them in Stowe and joined them for beach weekends in Bridgehampton.
Travis had always been Merritt’s champion. He asked questions about Merritt’s personal life, encouraged her interest in fashion; he remembered her college roommates’ names. He sought out her opinion because she was young and had a fresh perspective. He would sometimes rest his hand on her shoulder when he was standing behind her desk, and he forwarded her racy jokes from his personal e-mail. When Merritt was out to dinner with Travis and Cordelia, he would pull out her chair. If they were waiting at the bar to be seated, he would usher her forward with his hand on her back. Merritt noted these things but she didn’t protest. After all, Cordelia was right there.
But then.
It was summer and Merritt was spending a weekend in the Hamptons with the Darlings. On Saturday afternoon, the three of them were lying on the beach when a call came in from a client, a supermodel who had just had an altercation with a flight attendant. Words had been exchanged and a fellow passenger had leaked the story—which cast the supermodel in a very unflattering light—to the press. It was a publicity situation that could easily escalate into a publicity nightmare. Cordelia had to go back to the city to deal with the fallout.
I’ll go with you, Merritt had said. You’ll need help.
I have Sage, Cordelia said. Sage Kennedy was a brand-new hire. Merritt had sensed Sage’s ambition and professional envy immediately; Sage wanted to be the next Merritt. Sage was too young and broke to spend summer weekends away, but now that would work in her favor. When Merritt insisted she was more than happy to go back to the city, Cordelia said, You stay here and enjoy. I’ll see you Monday.
Had Merritt been uneasy about staying in the house with Travis alone? Not really. By that point, Merritt had been working for Brightstreet for three years. If Travis were going to make a pass at her, she figured, it would have happened already.
But late that afternoon, as Merritt was rinsing the sand off her feet at the outdoor hose before going into the house, Travis came up behind her and, without a word, untied the string of her bikini top. Merritt had frozen. She was petrified, she told Celeste, but she’d decided to laugh it off as a prank. She grabbed the strings and started to retie them but Travis stopped her. He took both of her hands, pulled her to him, and started kissing the back of her neck. Into her ear he whispered, I’ve been waiting so long for this.
“I was trapped,” Merritt told Celeste. “I could have pushed him away but I was afraid I’d lose my job. I was afraid he’d tell Cordelia that I was the one who took off my top. So I let it happen. I let it happen.”
The affair lasted seven torturous months. Merritt lived in mortal fear of Cordelia finding out, but Travis assured Merritt there was nothing to worry about. His wife, he said, was frigid and possibly even a lesbian and she wouldn’t have cared even if she did find out.
Deep down, she wanted this to happen, Travis said. One of the reasons she wanted to hire you was that she knew I thought you were hot.
As it turned out, Travis was gravely mistaken about what Cordelia wanted. Cordelia hired a private investigator, who followed both Merritt and Travis, accessed their phone records and text messages, then presented Cordelia with all the proof she needed, including, somehow, 8-by-10 glossies of Merritt and Travis showering together in Merritt’s apartment.
Cordelia had swiftly taken the company from Travis, as well as their investments and their brownstone. She fired Merritt and set out to shred Merritt’s reputation professionally and personally—and by then, Cordelia’s friends were Merritt’s friends. Travis forsook Merritt as well. She called and begged him to tell Cordelia the truth: that he had started the affair and he had given her no choice but to be complicit. Travis had responded to her calls and texts by filing a restraining order against her.
Merritt had been suicidal in the aftermath, she confided to Celeste. On bad days she stared at a bottle of hoarded pills—Valium, Ambien, Xanax. On good days, she looked for jobs in other cities, but it turned out Cordelia’s tentacles reached all the way to Chicago, DC, Atlanta. Merritt didn’t get so much as a callback. Every once in a while Cordelia would text her, and each time Merritt saw Cordelia’s name on her phone’s screen, she thought that maybe, just maybe, Travis had come clean and told Cordelia that the affair had been his fault, that he had coerced Merritt, then basically blackmailed her. But the texts were always the exact opposite of apologies. One said: If I thought I could get away with it, I would kill you.
But then, one miraculous day, Merritt received a text from Sage Kennedy, who, Merritt knew, had summarily taken her position in the company. The text said: Cordelia has sold the brownstone on Eighty-Third Street and is relocating Brightstreet to LA. Thought you would want to know.
At first, Merritt didn’t believe it. She was wary of Sage Kennedy. But when Merritt checked Business Insider, she saw it was true. She wondered if maybe Travis had preyed on Sage Kennedy after Merritt left. She was afraid to ask, though she did text Sage back to thank her for the information. She had, essentially, been set free.
