Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bad bugs bite. Sorel sang with increasing urgency. But if they do … Drums throbbed underneath Sorel’s husky voice. Take off your shoe! Take off your shoe! Bam, bam, bam the drums pounded as Sorel screamed in crescendo. And beat them! Beat them! Beat them! …
Suddenly the penguins in their arctic habitat began barking to one another. Orion rushed to the concrete barrier and saw that the birds, usually so stoic, had begun diving into the water. Molly came along to look, and while Jonathan didn’t bother, Emily joined them, balancing her plate of sushi on the wall.
’Til they’re black and BLUE! Sorel howled, releasing her inner Dylan.
“The song is actually scaring the penguins off their rocks.” Emily laughed a little, imagining what Jess would say, and how she would worry about the birds’ eardrums.
“Maybe if we walk up the ramp it’ll be quieter,” Molly suggested.
“Okay. Soon,” said Orion.
“Meet me up there. I’ll try to get us some food.” Carefully, Molly began ascending the crowded ramp in her high heels.
“Are you all right?” Emily called out to Orion.
He shook his head.
“What is it?”
Sweet Emily, his dear old friend, first crush, first love—what could he say? The time and place were so absurd, with all those bug-eyed fish swimming past, and the oily penguins swimming below. “Nothing.”
But Emily would not take that for an answer, and led him away from the band, past the sushi bar, and raw bar, and the tables serving tapas, to a quieter cove with dark tanks lit by purple phosphorescent fish. “What’s going on?”
He hesitated. “I think you know.”
“I don’t,” she told him.
“Yes, you do.”
“Not from your perspective.”
So of course she did know. That confirmed it. She was only trawling for information. “Do you think it’s fair to ask?”
“Wait,” she said. “Explain.”
She took off her glasses and looked much younger, almost the girl he had once kissed. “Is it true you’re leaving ISIS?”
“Is that what Jonathan told you?”
“Were you considering it?” she pressed, and he knew she wanted to know why.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Good.” She smiled. “I know Jonathan values your opinion.”
Orion murmured, “You know he doesn’t. He values his own opinion.”
“You got along before.”
“I’m like everybody else,” said Orion. “I get along with Jonathan until I cross him.”
“Why do you say that? He likes debate. He likes discussion.”
“Why are you the one talking to me then?” He was upsetting her, but he didn’t care. “Why are you talking to me instead of him?”
“Because I want to understand….”
“What is there to understand, Emily? Jonathan and I aren’t getting along.”
“Why not?”
“That’s not a fair question, and you know it.”
“You look worried.”
“What are you worried about?” he countered. “Why don’t you talk to him?”
She tilted her head slightly, a pensive move that he remembered, along with a slight narrowing of her eyes, as though the world were slightly askew and needed further study. And at that moment Orion realized that she had talked to Jonathan. She had made her inquiries, and whatever he’d said had not satisfied her. Orion wanted to hug her around her shoulders. He wanted to say: I’m worried that Jonathan is a liar. I think he’s willing to sacrifice people for products, and trade quality for profits. And above all, he wanted to say: What about you, Emily? How is he treating you? But he couldn’t ask her this. Some diffidence or shyness or guilt prevented him, and he only said, “I’m sorry.”
“I know he has a temper,” Emily told him, “but he feels he’s given you a lot.”
“Given me!”
She nodded.
Had Jonathan warped Emily as well? Could she care for an ambitious creature like that to the point of admiration? To the vanishing point?
She said, “I’m speaking as your friend.”
“No, I don’t think so. You’re speaking as his friend. And it’s beneath you, Emily. It really is. It’s wrong of you.”
Part Four
Best Offer
October 2000–January 2001
15
This was a strange time, a fairy-tale time. Mel and Barbara moved into a dream house on Pleasant Street, a mansion developers had built on spec just as Richard Bach had feared, right behind his old Colonial. The Millsteins lived there in twenty-one rooms, and they had central air and central vacuuming and bay windows and marble baths. Barbara tiptoed through her new country kitchen, and Mel drove a black Lexus to see Bobby Bruce, the Alexander teacher, who showed Mel where his posture was indeed misaligned. In all his years, Mel had never known he was off-center, and now with strange synchronicity, he discovered the problem just when he could afford to treat it. By the same token, Dave’s temperamental Bentley gave out just as the ISIS lockup ended, and he treated himself to a powder-blue Jaguar.
As it turned out, a windfall came in handy. Aldwin’s parents were celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary, so he rented a villa in the south of France for a family reunion. Sorel’s landlord raised the rent, so she moved out and bought a decrepit worker’s cottage in East Cambridge that she planned to paint purple and restore as a house cum studio. Orion bought his first car, a silver BMW. Jonathan found Emily a ring.
He took Emily shopping on Newbury Street. They spun through Shreve, Crump & Low with its sapphires and china, Cartier with its square-cut gems and gleaming watches. Brodney Antiques & Jewelry was piled with detritus from every decade: old lamps and dusty tea sets, rows of opera glasses and ugly broaches—gold bees with diamond wings, little frogs with ruby eyes. Emily could not find anything she liked. She looked and looked, and Jonathan got hungry waiting, and they went to lunch at L’Espalier where they sat wedged into a corner table in a room adorned with antique mirrors and crystal chandeliers, and they ate a dandelion salad and the smallest sirloin steak Jonathan had ever seen, along with matchstick potatoes.
“These,” Jonathan told Emily, “are exactly the way I always thought matchsticks would taste. Except real matchsticks have sulfur tips, so they’re probably better.”
Emily laughed. “I think they’re good.”
He took her hand in his. “I think you need a ring.”
“We’ll find one eventually.”
She spoke in such a patient voice, and the restaurant with its pillows and silk curtains felt like such an overpriced tea party that he rebelled, jumping to his feet. “Wait here. Have some dessert.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be right back. Get yourself some coffee.”
And he returned to Shreve, Crump & Low, and told the first saleswoman he saw, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Prathima,” she said in a soft voice.
“So, Prathima, what’s the best diamond you have in stock?”
She was really a very small saleslady, delicate and easily affronted in her navy suit. She sat down with Jonathan at a table, as a loan officer might sit down with a client at the bank, and she showed him a chart, and a color portfolio with “Diamonds Are Forever” printed on it, and her voice grew ever softer as she explained the four Cs of diamonds. She pointed to various photographs. “This is our signature series,” she whispered, as if she were in church. “Each diamond is inscribed with a—”
He cut her off. “You do sell real diamonds here, right?”
“Of course.” Prathima looked offended.
“Okay, could you just bring out the most highly rated diamond you have?”