The After Party Read online

  She smiled, gave an elaborate shrug, kissed me on the cheek. I could smell her coconut tanning oil.

  “Did you even take a shower?” I asked. “A bath?”

  She shrugged again. Her eyes were unfocused, like she’d been in the sun too long.

  “What’s the point?” she asked, and walked past me into the house, dropping her shoes—Ferragamos—onto the hardwood floor of the foyer.

  I made her sit at my vanity and, mindful of Darlene’s ponytail comment, fixed her hair into a French twist. I applied a little powder to her forehead but skipped the rouge because her cheeks were already red.

  “If you stay out in the sun too long,” I said, “you’ll turn into a lobster.”

  Joan ignored me, fiddled with a diamond bracelet Furlow had given her when she’d turned twenty-three.

  Joan’s parents still lived in Joan’s childhood home, Evergreen, her father in his eighties and losing his mind, Mary his faithful companion turned caretaker.

  “Sit still,” I murmured as I filled in Joan’s brows with pencil. These days, Joan only tolerated makeup when I applied it. I knew her face better than my own: the mole at her right temple that was somehow pretty instead of distracting; the sharp cheekbones; the faint scattering of freckles on her forehead that emerged only in the summertime.

  “Did you hear about Daisy Mintz?” she asked.

  Of course I had. Daisy Mintz, née Dillingworth, had caused quite a stir in River Oaks three summers ago when she’d left to marry a Jew from New York. Her parents had disowned her, briefly; apparently the Mintz fortune had soothed their outrage. Just last week I’d heard from our friend Ciela that Daisy was asking for a divorce. Mr. Mintz had been unfaithful, which was a story as old as time itself. Older. I couldn’t help but be bored by it.

  “What did she expect? She chose glitz and glamour and money. A stranger, practically. And it all fell apart.” Joan said nothing. “Anyway, it sounds nasty,” I continued. “He wants the child to stay with him. Ridiculous,” I murmured, as I smoothed a dot of foundation onto her chin. “Children belong with their mothers.”

  “She’s going to get a lot of money,” Joan said abruptly. “Tons.”

  “And?” We all had a lot of money. “That child’s going to grow up with parents who hate each other. What did she want with him?”

  “Maybe she loved him.”

  “Maybe she was being shortsighted,” I countered.

  “Oh, Cee,” Joan said, “don’t be such a yawn.” Her voice was easy; I wasn’t offended. I was a yawn, between the two of us. I didn’t mind.

  “I might be boring, but at least my life’s not a wreck.”

  “Daisy Dillingworth Mintz,” she said. “Stranded on the great island of Manhattan.”

  “You’re flushed,” I said, feeling her forehead with the back of my hand.

  “Am I? Must be the weather. It feels like the sun came out just for me.”

  “Maybe it did,” I said, and Joan smiled, and there was such an understanding between us, such a feeling of grace.

  It went without saying that summer was Joan’s favorite season. She loved to swim, to dive, to do anything that involved water. The rest of us wilted a little bit in the heat, even though we were used to Houston’s climes, but Joan seemed made for it.

  “She got to see the world,” Joan said, and at first I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Daisy,” she said, impatiently. “She got to do whatever she wanted for three years.”

  “I hope she fit a lifetime into them.”

  • • •

  The Shamrock Hotel was wildcatter Glenn McCarthy’s green baby. Sixty-three shades to be exact: green carpet, green chairs, green tablecloths, green curtains. Green uniforms. The hotel sat next to the Texas Medical Center, which Monroe Dunaway Anderson had founded and bequeathed nineteen million dollars to in his will. It was like that, in Houston: there was money everywhere, and some people did very good things with it, like Mr. Anderson, and some people built glamorous, foolish structures, like Mr. McCarthy. Mr. Anderson helped more people than Mr. McCarthy, certainly, but where did we have more fun?

  The rest of the country was worried about the Russians, worried about the Commies in our midst, worried about the Koreans. But Houston’s oil had washed its worries away. This was the place where a wealthy bachelor had bought himself a cheetah and let it live on his patio, swim in his pool; where a crazy widower flew in caviar and flavored vodka once a month for wild soirees where everyone had to speak in a Russian accent; where Silver Dollar Jim West had thrown silver coins from his chauffeur-driven limo, then pulled over to watch the crowds’ mad scramble. The bathroom fixtures at the Petroleum Club were all plated in twenty-four-karat gold. There was a limited supply of gold in the world; it would not regenerate. And Houston had most of it, I was convinced.

  We valeted our car and headed straight to the Shamrock’s Cork Club; Louis, our Irish, gray-haired bartender, was there, and he handed me a flute of champagne, Joan a gin martini, up, and Ray a gin and tonic.

  “Thank you, doll,” Joan said, and Ray slid a coiled roll of money across the bar.

  That night we were all in attendance: the aforementioned Darlene, dressed in a lavender dress with, I had to admit, a beautiful sweetheart neckline; Kenna, Darlene’s best friend, who was very nice and very boring; and Graciela, who went by Ciela. Ciela had been a scandal when she was born, the product of her father’s affair with a beautiful Mexican girl he’d met while working in the oil refineries down in Tampico. His ex-wife had been rewarded for his sin—she’d received the biggest divorce settlement in Texas history. All of this was old news, though. There had been bigger divorce settlements since then, much bigger. It was Texas: everything bigger, all the time.

  Ciela’s father had married the señorita, was still married to the señorita, which perhaps would have been the greater scandal, if he weren’t already so powerful. We all had that in common, save me: powerful fathers. And husbands who would become powerful. And we were going to go there with them.

  Darlene kissed Joan on both cheeks and then turned to me, “Long time no see, Cece,” and then laughed uproariously at the repetition. She was already loaded. “You look like Leslie Lynnton herself,” she said, and even though I looked nothing like Liz Taylor, aside from the dark hair, I was pleased. We’d all seen Giant at least three times, were titillated by the fact that the James Dean character was based on Glenn McCarthy himself, even though we publicly hated Edna Ferber and her portrayal of Texas.

  Ciela, whose hair was now so blond and coiffed she looked as Mexican as Marilyn Monroe, was on the arm of her husband, and Darlene’s and Kenna’s husbands were across the room, smoking. My own husband was at my side; Ray was quiet, a little bit reserved, most comfortable near me. He wasn’t shy, exactly, but he didn’t feel the need to be the center of anything, a rarity in our crowd.

  The night wasn’t full of possibility for us wives, like it used to be, like it still must have been for Joan. Yet the champagne was crisp and cheerful, the men were handsome and strong, and the music buoyed our spirits. I was wearing a beautiful silver dress, strapless, cinched at the waist. (Ray made a good living at Shell but my mother had left her small fortune to me, and because of it I wore astonishing clothes. My one extravagance. My mother had always refused to touch the money, thought my father should earn more. And so it was mine, granted to me in a legacy of bitterness, in lieu of parental attention. I was determined to spend it all.) My wrist was encircled by my fourteenth-birthday present, a delicate diamond watch I only took out when I was feeling hopeful. Later tonight we might venture outside, to the Shamrock’s pool, which happened to be the biggest outdoor pool in the world, built to accommodate waterskiing exhibitions. Joan loved to dive from their high board, said it felt like flying. Or maybe we’d make our way to the Emerald Room, the Shamrock’s nightclub.

  I chatted with Ciela, who had
a daughter, Tina, the same age as Tommy, about whether or not we’d send our children to preschool in the fall (I wouldn’t—I couldn’t imagine throwing Tommy to the wolves like that) as we watched Joan hold court ten feet away, laughing and smiling and acting like it all came so easily to her. Which it did. Ray stood next to me and he watched her, too, and I wondered what he thought of Joan Fortier underneath his unvarying calmness.

  “What do you think she’s saying?” Ciela asked, following my gaze. Her scent was a combination of Chanel No. 5, which all our husbands gave us once a year, on Valentine’s Day, and hair spray. I’m sure I smelled much the same, with a little bit of Tommy’s bubble bath mixed in. Ciela’s husband, JJ, a tall, gregarious man from Lubbock whom I found a little forward, was at the bar, getting a drink.

  Joan was a little too bright, tonight, for my taste. A little wired, a little too close to out of control.

  “Who knows with Joan,” I said, and took another sip of champagne.

  JJ came up behind Ciela and kissed her cheek. She acted surprised, as if he’d come from nowhere. I smiled, allowed JJ to kiss my hand; then Ray’s arm was around my waist, and he was pulling me toward the floor. Ray would never kiss a woman’s hand. That was one of the things I liked about him: he wasn’t interested in pageantry.

  “Would you care to dance?” he asked, and I smiled, let him lead me to the shiny wooden floor. He put me instantly in a better mood. A four-piece band played something slow; I didn’t recognize the music but that was beside the point. I finished my champagne and deposited the empty flute onto a silver tray balanced on the white-gloved hand of a colored waiter.

  Ray loved to dance. It was the reason he tolerated these nights out. If not for dancing he’d have liked to be at home, sipping a neat scotch, reading one of his presidential biographies. But on the dance floor he was a different man. I felt small in his arms, though I was nearly as tall as Joan, who was five foot eight; but Ray was six foot three and broadly built. I fit neatly into his embrace. I was attractive but not beautiful, and I was honest enough with myself to acknowledge the distinction. I was still slender, but pregnancy had softened my edges, made my face fuller, given me more weight and heft, anchored me to the world. My hair was a fight, eternally swollen by the Texas humidity, but after hot rollers and my weekly salon appointment it tended to frame my face becomingly. My dark brown eyes were my best feature, almond shaped and bright; Ciela had once said they were the envy of us all, and though she had been drunk when she said it, and probably didn’t remember saying it in the first place, I did.

  “This is fun,” I said, and Ray gathered me to him. The Cork Club was filling up, with people we knew and people we didn’t. That was the fun of this place: only the richest and the brightest were granted admission, and you never knew who you’d see.

  The band started playing something fast and Ray twirled me out the length of his arm, and in the second before he brought me back in I saw Joan out of the corner of my eye. Joan, with a man I didn’t recognize. I rested my chin on Ray’s firm shoulder and watched them. Joan had turned her back to the room, which was unlike her. It seemed as if she were hiding her companion.

  The rest of us wanted true love and a husband, and if not true love then a husband would do, but Joan had always been content to spring from one man to the next. The papers adored Joan: she was featured regularly in their gossip columns—the Houston Press’s “The Town Crier,” the Chronicle’s “Gadabout”—usually with a man and a photo. But those men weren’t serious, and they weren’t strangers.

  “Stop watching Joan,” Ray whispered in my ear, and I turned my attention back to him. Joan, if I’m being honest, was a minor tension in our marriage, mainly unspoken.

  “I’ll only look at you for the rest of the night,” I said.

  “Now you’re talking,” Ray said, and twirled me out again onto the floor in response.

  Ray had promised the night we were engaged that he would never leave me. And he had asked I promise the same thing, which I thought was absurd. Men left women; women never left men, not unless they were stupid, and I wasn’t stupid.

  Now he spun me out and grinned a little crookedly, as he did when he’d had a drink, his big hand warm and firm as he caught me again. He continued to watch my face. Ray often surprised me with the things he noticed. He was attentive in a way I’d had to get used to. He could walk into a room and read me in a second. Half a second.

  “Cee,” he said now, “have I lost you?”

  “I’m here,” I said, and leaned in closer to Ray so I could watch my friend without Ray’s noticing. She wasn’t right tonight; I’d known it since this afternoon. I could see the man better now. He was tall and meaty. And he was certainly a stranger. He wasn’t handsome. But handsome didn’t matter to Joan. “I’m like Jesus,” she said one time, when I asked her how she could date men so clearly unsuitable for her. “I love them all.”

  A pair of dancers swung into our path, blocking Joan and her stranger. Ray kissed my cheek and I closed my eyes and I was lost in the music, in the press of bodies, in Ray, for a moment or two.

  When I opened my eyes I was dizzy, but I had a perfect view of the tall man leaving through the door next to the stage, which led through the bowels of the club and hotel, straight to a stairwell; the stairs rose to the Shamrock’s rooms.

  I scanned the club for Joan, and spotted her near the bar, smoking a cigarette, laughing. I was relieved to be wrong.

  Then Joan extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray, dropped her lighter into her satin clutch, and followed the stranger through the door. I wasn’t wrong.

  Life should have shown me by now that I was powerless against Joan. She was a grown woman, a grown woman who was used to getting her way. Nobody had ever told her no: Not her parents, certainly. Not a teacher. Certainly not a man. Joan Fortier did as she liked. I was only her friend.

  Chapter Two

  I was fifteen when my mother died. It was December, nearly Christmas. A week after the funeral, Joan and I were still in my mother’s house, skipping school, sleeping until noon each morning, falling asleep as the sun rose. Joan had already told me I would come to live with the Fortiers at Evergreen. I wanted to, fervently, but I didn’t quite believe her. Joan loved me, and I loved Joan, but Mary and Furlow were not my parents.

  Furlow had come to Texas from Louisiana to make his fortune when he was a young man, and decided to stay. Texas could do that to a person: you came for a visit, then looked up one day and found you’d never left. He’d built Evergreen for Mary’s wedding gift. It was a graceful plantation-style mansion with enormous columns flanking the porch, replete with rocking chairs and black-shuttered windows. He’d named it after his beloved magnolias, which lined the driveway.

  Furlow and Mary wanted me to live with them because I took care of Joan. I had access to places they did not. But I didn’t know that then. Then, it was second nature to follow Joan around at parties, to make sure she met curfew, to cut styles I thought would suit her from Harper’s Bazaar and give them to Mary to order.

  I was asleep in the home I’d known since birth, Joan next to me, lightly snoring (you wouldn’t think a girl like Joan would snore, but she did), when the doorbell rang. At first I thought it was my mother. I sat up in bed, disoriented, my mouth dry from the sweet white wine we’d drunk late into the evening. The line from the song we’d been listening to all fall circled my brain: That’s when I’ll be there always, not for just an hour, not for just a day.

  Of course it wasn’t my mother. My mother was dead.

  “Cece?” Joan sat up beside me. Her voice was slurred from sleep. She rested her warm cheek on my shoulder, and for a moment we were still. The doorbell rang again, but I made no move to stand. There was no one in the world I wanted to see. I just wanted to sit there, with Joan next to me, and forget all the things that awaited me. My mother’s lawyer had been calling to make an appointment. There
were her things—things upon things upon things, Limoges boxes and antique perfume bottles and an endless wardrobe—to sort through. My father, at his permanent room at the Warwick, might as well have been in Switzerland. He was with his mistress, I knew. A woman named Melane, whom he would marry and take to Oklahoma as soon as the ink had dried on my mother’s death certificate. I didn’t blame him, but I didn’t want to see him, either.

  Joan rose at the third chime. “Let me,” she said, and picked up her robe from the floor.

  She returned a moment later with Mary, who surveyed the room, lifted the empty bottle of wine from my bureau, and made a face. Joan, out of Mary’s line of vision, imitated her, and I stifled a laugh.

  Mary was now the secretary of the Junior League; next year, my mother had said, she would be president. My mother didn’t understand Mary Fortier: Mary wasn’t beautiful, didn’t come from money, and yet she was powerful. A woman like Mary didn’t fit into my mother’s worldview. Mary should have been uncertain, full of doubt.

  “It’s time to go,” Mary said. Of course I didn’t call her Mary. After I’d lived in her home for a few weeks she would tell me to call her by her first name, tell me that we no longer needed to stand on ceremony. But the offer didn’t strike me as genuine, so I avoided saying her name at all.

  I sat on the bed like a child and watched them sort through my things, nodded or shook my head when Joan held up a purse, a blouse, a pair of flats.

  “Of course we’ll come back later,” Mary said, “and pack up the rest, but this will do, for now.”

  I knew that I would never come back. Strangers would box up my remaining possessions and bring them to me; everything else, except for the family Bible and my mother’s jewelry, would be sold at an estate sale.

  “Fred’s day off,” Mary said, when she opened the driver’s-side door, which was what she always said when she drove. It might or might not have been true.

  Mary liked to drive, even though it was far more acceptable for a woman of her station to be driven.