FOUR
Sasha
On birthdays and holidays, special occasions when the wine was flowing, the family would linger over dinner and reminisce, telling stories of bad behavior and shenanigans over the years. Cord would talk about the time he and his high school friends got drunk, then lost, in Paris while they were supposed to be sketching at the Louvre on a class trip. Georgiana would talk about sneaking out after dark down at their club in Florida. They delighted in their flirtations with deviant behavior and cackled away, even when they all knew the stories by heart after dozens of retellings. Sasha loved hearing them, even the ones that were familiar, and she laughed and laughed, but she never contributed her own. She knew better than that. It was because her family stories made their craziest misadventures seem like a night sipping O’Doul’s at math camp.
The truth was, Sasha came from a very wild family. Her cousins were infamous in the small beach town outside Providence where she grew up, and most of them had only avoided mile-long rap sheets because her uncle happened to be the chief of police. For the most part, their antics were met with slaps on the wrist or warnings. But her cousins drunkenly stole Boston Whalers for joyrides, they stayed up all night snorting coke on houseboats in the bay, they crashed weddings at the mansions in Newport, and they claimed to drive better drunk than sober, an assertion countered by their dented fenders and broken fence posts. While Cord may have suffered a broken arm from a ski accident, Sasha’s cousin Brandon suffered a broken arm from falling off a second-floor balcony wasted on Jameson and NoDoz. It was just a different level of bad behavior. On rich people these exploits looked funny, but on Sasha’s family she knew they just looked trashy.
After the disaster that was Sasha’s engagement party—her older brother, Nate, was thrown out of the Explorer’s Club for trying to feed the stuffed polar bear a leg of lamb—she made her father read the entire family the riot act before the wedding, reminding them that their uncle was not the chief of the New York City Police, and that while they should feel free to act like complete buffoons and degenerates in Providence, they would be embarrassing Sasha in front of her new family with that sort of behavior at her wedding. The lecture was greeted with general merriment among her cousins—they loved nothing more than being reminded of outrageous past transgressions—and they proceeded to be utter lunatics at her reception, dismantling a floral arrangement to drink champagne out of a giant vase.
In spite of her family’s behavior （or, truthfully, partially because of it）， Sasha loved her wedding. It was grand, it was elegant, and it was just wild enough to make sure nobody would ever forget it. The celebration was held at the Down Town Association, a private club on Pine Street founded by J. P. Morgan as an all-men’s club for bankers. Cord had lunch there several days a week, and they had attended champagne tastings and lectures there in the evenings—once even an Italian-themed dinner with wine pairings that was so boring Sasha accidentally got hammered on Barolo just to survive. The club was three floors of old-fashioned New York glamour, with sky-blue ceilings, dark wooden railings, a walk-in cigar humidor, and a massive marble barbershop in the back of the men’s room, where they filmed the Jodie Foster movie Inside Man.
Cord and Sasha fed each other cake, he swung her delighted mother around the dance floor （all those cotillion lessons as a boy paid off）， and Sasha gamely tried to keep up with her father-in-law, who led her in a waltz to Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Malcolm and Darley cut loose for once, Malcolm putting his tie around his forehead like a character in Animal House, and when a friend of the family got turned around on his way out of the men’s room and walked in on Cord’s business school roommate feeling up Sasha’s cousin in the barbershop, he laughed and told everyone it was the best party he’d been to in a decade.
Since Cord’s family paid for the wedding （a breach in tradition）， Sasha insisted on paying for the honeymoon. She found a deal online for a resort in Turks and Caicos, a place right on the beach, where every suite had its own hot tub overlooking the ocean. She had briefly fantasized that they might get some kind of royal treatment as honeymooners, upgrades and rose petals on pillows, but when the resort van picked them up at the airport she quickly realized the entire place was full of couples like them. As they planned their wedding Cord had rolled his eyes at the “wedding factories,” complaining about the places that pumped through reception after reception, creating cookie-cutter celebrations that were no more special or individual than a suburban prom. Now she worried he would be turned off by a place that was so clearly a factory extension, but he was happily leafing through the resort booklet, planning tennis matches, bike rides, and dinner reservations.
While they had gone to a zillion friends’ weddings together, they hadn’t actually traveled much, and Sasha quickly realized they had entirely different views of what it meant to be on vacation. For Sasha, vacation meant putting on her swimsuit at dawn, walking to the beach, and moving only to get the occasional cold drink or salty snack. Cord apparently felt that vacation meant moving constantly, like a human Roomba, bouncing from one activity to the next. He chartered a boat to Middle Caicos so they could stomp through dark and gummy caves full of bats. He hired a pilot to take them for a noisy loop above the island in a helicopter. He drove them to the famous conch fritter restaurant and they downed the chewy fried lumps with icy bottles of Turk’s Head beer. On the last full day, Sasha begged Cord for the chance to just lie on the beach, and while he brought a mask and snorkel and explored the tiny reef out beyond the sand, she flopped on a warm towel and did absolutely nothing, letting her mind clear until it felt baked clean by the sun.
They had two bottles of champagne chilling in their suite and meant to drink them before they left. After roasting on the beach until sunset, they made their way back to the room, and on their way they stopped in each of the half dozen hotel pools for a dip. They were taking their final soak in a warm-water pool, an oversize Jacuzzi surrounded by hot pink bougainvillea, when another couple appeared through the flowers. They nodded hello and slipped into the water at the other end. They had just gotten married （of course） and were visiting from Boston. After five days alone, Sasha and Cord were feeling sociable, and soon it was dark and they were having so much fun talking that they invited the other couple back to their suite for drinks. They dripped their way from the giant resort Jacuzzi to the smaller one on the screened-in porch off their bedroom. Cord popped the champagne with a knife, a party trick he’d learned to do with a saber, and they all experienced the rapturous head high that comes from drinking bubbly on an empty stomach with borderline sunstroke. It was somewhere toward the end of the second bottle that the guy from Boston removed his wife’s bikini top and everything got weird. How had Sasha not realized what they had done? They had invited another couple to hang out, drunk and near naked, in their hotel suite and somehow not realized they were initiating a sex party? Cord, who possessed a mastery of handling awkward social situations rivaling that of a foreign diplomat, hastily mentioned dinner reservations, provided the topless wife with a bathrobe, and whisked them out into the warm evening. Alone, Sasha and Cord fell down laughing and swore to tell any friends who asked that they had survived their honeymoon with their marital vows intact, and no one need know more than that.