* * *
The morning Darley saw Malcolm’s text, still weak and possibly delirious from the stomach flu, her first instinct was denial. There must be some mistake. Nobody would fire Malcolm. She took a shower, dried her hair, cleaned the bathroom, and opened the windows to get rid of any sick smell. She dressed neatly in a navy tank dress, pinched her sallow cheeks, and went out to the kitchen to thank Soon-ja for everything she’d done. Soon-ja made her dry toast and tea, setting it all out on a pretty place mat with a tiny bud vase. As Darley crunched and sipped, they talked quietly about the kids, about the apartment. Darley’s mind was spinning, but she wouldn’t say a word to Malcolm’s mother. She needed to know the whole story first, needed to speak to her husband. She would wait until Malcolm was home so they could talk about it in person. But the fact was, Malcolm was the child of Asian immigrants in the old boys’ club that was banking, and while Darley didn’t know exactly what had happened, she couldn’t stop thinking about his friend Brice and feeling a knot in her stomach.
* * *
—
The previous summer, on a warm Saturday in July, Darley and Malcolm had piled the kids in the car and driven out to an exclusive golf club in Greenwich, Connecticut. For six months, Malcolm had been working back and forth between New York and London, and he had become close friends with another managing director in the Mergers and Acquisitions team, an American named Brice MacDougal, who lived in Greenwich. Brice was also married and had children around the same age, and so, on one of the rare stretches where they were both home, he and Malcolm had made plans to get their families together.
Darley hadn’t been to this golf club before and was immediately startled by how green and manicured everything looked. The suburbs certainly had their appeal. Malcolm had driven the car through stone gates along neat green fairways, long stretches of rolling hills dotted with the occasional golf cart. They parked and Brice met them in front of the dining room and led them out to the pool, where his blond wife was attending to two children in matching light-pink swimsuits.
Darley wasn’t much of a golfer, so she and Brice’s wife had planned to go swimming with the kids while the men played, all meeting up for lunch afterward. The pool was basically empty aside from a few teenagers hanging around the other end, so the kids could splash and scream without disturbing anyone, and Darley had felt herself relax. Brice’s wife was friendly, and once Darley realized she didn’t work either, she was able to enjoy herself. As they stood in the waist-deep water fixing leaky goggles and throwing dive sharks, they chatted about how much their husbands had been gone, how desperately they were looking forward to sending the kids to sleepaway camp, the relative merits of city and country living. Darley hated to admit it, but she had started feeling inadequate around women her age who were managing both kids and careers. It made her feel like she needed to explain herself, to justify spending all that time and money on grad school. With stay-at-home moms it was easier.
When it was time for lunch, Darley had hauled her kids into the pool dressing rooms to change them into dry clothes—a dress-code mandated polo shirt tucked into shorts for Hatcher and a sundress and sandals for Poppy. She herself had a flowy blue-and-white dress that made her feel like she was on vacation in Greece.
They met Malcolm and Brice outside the dining room, where they had staked out a table on the deck under a striped awning. A waiter handed them all oversize menus and Brice talked them through the best choices—the lobster roll, the salmon burger, the BLT with avocado. As they chatted, Darley looked around and felt a strong sense of well-being. The deck was crowded with happy people eating lunch. Yes, they were all in club attire—collared shirts tucked into pants, and yes, they were mostly men—it was a golf club after all—but as she studied the crowd, she realized why it looked so different to her. So many of the faces at the lunch tables were Black, so many of their shirts fruit-punch pink and lime-green. It stood in stark contrast to lunchtime at their various New York clubs, where most of the time the only Black or Brown faces were those of the servers. Was Greenwich just a more progressive place than Brooklyn Heights?
The children all drank lemonade out of cups with plastic straws, they demolished all their French fries and mostly ignored their hamburgers, Darley sipped a glass of white wine, and Brice told them all a funny story about walking into the wrong hotel room in London and accidentally catching their boss in his towel. （How could a key card work for a different room? It terrified Darley to imagine it.）
There was a new analyst on their team at work, a twenty-two-year-old named Chuck Vanderbeer, who was also a member of the country club. Brice had been there the first time Chuck came to see the golf course. There had been an accident the previous summer—an older gentleman had suffered a heart attack at the wheel of his Volvo and crashed his car into the dining room, where it burst into flames and injured three people. Since then, the club had decided it was unsafe to have cars quite so close to the building, so they had blocked that part of the driveway with a chain and asked members to park in the lot and walk the fifty paces to the entrance along the stone path. When Chuck Vanderbeer arrived in a black SUV, his driver paused by the gate, climbed out of the car, removed the chain, and drove Chuck right up to the door. And yet, somehow, he was still voted in by the membership committee. His family was so well connected he had at least seven sponsors in the club.
At the bank he had quickly distinguished himself, not with his work, but by nicknaming himself the “Rock Star” and arranging lunches with all the division heads—Malcolm’s and Brice’s bosses. Rumor had it that he’d been thrown out of Deerfield for setting off fireworks, but his father, a big shot in private equity, still got him into Dartmouth. The thing was, the kid was a complete zero. He left a deal book on a plane—an offense that would render anyone else unceremoniously fired, and he was barely reprimanded. He took an Ambien on a flight and was still visibly drunk from it when they walked into their meeting in Dubai. Malcolm had once caught Chuck staring at himself in the mirror of the men’s room, smoothing his hair and smiling like a psychopath.
Brice and Malcolm agreed the kid was a total liability and hated that they were saddled with him on the team. They were stuck in the middle of a nepotism sandwich, their bosses pleased to have a Vanderbeer on the roster, but privately happy not to manage him directly.
Darley had laughed at Brice’s stories and ordered a second drink. It was the perfect Saturday afternoon, a million times more fun than most gatherings with her husband’s colleagues, and it made her hopeful. Maybe they could spend more time together with Brice’s family. Maybe they could even consider moving out to Greenwich. She wondered if she had been wearing blinders, always feeling like Brooklyn was the best home for them, like Brooklyn was more liberal and diverse than the suburbs.
They were finishing lunch when a microphone squealed and a sunburned man in a pale-yellow polo took the stage. “Good afternoon, golfers. We’re about to get going with the brief program here in just a few minutes.”
“Oh, sorry guys,” Brice apologized. “It’s going to be annoying to listen to this. Maybe we can finish up and go hang out by the pool for a bit.”