Georgiana looked up at him with a start, while he pretended to study his sandwich with an innocent expression.
“No. It’s actually about our plans to provide free nose jobs to the poor debutantes of Monaco,” she replied.
Brady let out a surprised bark of laughter and Georgiana smiled.
“Pretty funny,” he said. “So, how was your weekend? What did you get up to?”
“Played tennis, went out with some friends, nothing wild. How about you?”
“Well, it was kind of a bust. I was supposed to get together with some college friends and go out Saturday, but at the last minute my buddy sprained his ankle, so I ended up spending the evening with him at urgent care trying to get an X-ray.”
“Oh, that stinks.”
“Yeah, I was really looking forward to a night out.” He looked at her meaningfully. “At the Long Island Bar.”
“I like that place,” Georgiana murmured.
“Yeah.” He shook his head slightly. “Where do you play tennis?”
They spent the next twenty minutes talking about sports in the city—which public courts checked your Parks Department tennis pass, the supervisor at the Fort Greene courts who would save you a spot if you brought him a bacon, egg, and cheese. They talked about Brady’s basketball league, a bunch of guys who sometimes got so carried away that they threw elbows and had to go back to work as partners at white-shoe law firms with black eyes.
They had both finished their sandwiches and reluctantly crumpled up their paper napkins when a nearby meeting let out, and a pair of double doors opened and the room suddenly filled with colleagues marching back to their desks. Brady cocked his head and smiled before scooting out his chair. “See you around.” He scooped up her trash along with his own and headed off down to the first floor, as Georgiana floated back to her tiny maid’s room office, unsure whether she’d be able to write another word of the newsletter or would spend the next three hours staring out the window and replaying every single thing they had said and feeling her face get warm with pleasure over and over again.
THREE
Darley
Darley’s children were obsessed with death. They were five and six, and everyone said this was developmentally normal, but Darley secretly worried it meant they were tortured souls who would get face tattoos as teenagers. It was late afternoon, and they were at the Brooklyn Bridge playground, near the slides. Darley had found a sunny spot on the stone steps and was half watching her children run and half scrolling on her phone, filling up her cart for an online grocery order. Some of the kids’ classmates were there too, with their nannies, and the adults had nodded at one another, but instead of chatting they had all happily retreated into their little glowing screens.
The children had been trying to climb up the twenty-foot slide, all five of them in a line, boosting one another in a rare show of cooperation. Poppy was the ringleader, bossing the other children in her tiny, shrill voice, sounding more seagull than human, and Darley wondered briefly if it was wrong to hate the sound of a child’s voice. She focused on her phone, methodically shopping for dinner items—salmon for herself, mac and cheese for the kids, pork chops for Malcolm. She was debating the likelihood of Hatcher eating chicken that had been touched by rosemary when she noticed the children had all congregated under the slide. They seemed to be looking at something, and she watched as Poppy went to the edge of the playground to grab a long stick and run it back to the group. The afternoon was warm, and she smelled the ocean. The river was just on the other side of the trees, and Darley could hear the ferries blowing their mournful horns, could hear birdsong, and felt sweet contentment. There were days in New York when she was desperate to escape, desperate for the beach, for a garden, for a glassy lake, but then there were days like today when the leafy park felt perfect, when she wondered how she could ever contemplate any other life.
Suddenly Poppy was upon her, Hatcher right behind. “Mommy, can you fix it?” she asked. She was holding something for Darley in her outstretched arms, and it took several seconds for Darley to register what it was she had. Was it a sweater? Was it a paper bag? Was it? . . . It was a pigeon. And the pigeon was dead.
* * *
—
That night Darley’s mother came to dinner along with Georgiana, Cord, and Sasha. As Darley poured the wine, Poppy sat straight in her chair, a chicken nugget speared on her fork, and announced to the table, “Mommy was not pleased with me today.”
“Why, Poppy, dear? What happened?” her mother asked, ready to jump to Poppy’s defense.
“I found a pigeon under the slide at the playground and I picked it up. I don’t know if a dog bit it or if it had a sickness, but it died.”
The table was momentarily silent. “What did you do with it?” her mother asked, aghast.
“Mommy took it and put it in the recycling,” Poppy said sadly, gnawing on the nugget like she was eating a candied apple on a stick.
“The recycling? You didn’t just put it in the garbage?” Sasha asked with alarm.
“Of course I put it in the garbage. Then we came home, and I boiled her hands, and I am never letting the children out of the house again,” announced Darley, filling her wineglass to the rim. That was the thing about Sasha; she could always be counted on to say the most annoying thing in any given situation. It was a talent, really.
* * *
—
After dinner, her mother and siblings left, and Darley gave Poppy and Hatcher a long soak in the tub. She made it the bubbliest bubble bath, squirting as much soap in the water as she could without risking the children getting UTIs or eye pain. She scrubbed their hair until it squeaked and then toweled them off and slicked lotion on their legs and backs before sending them off to find their pajamas. Malcolm was working late, and so she read to both kids in her bed, book after book about tooth fairies and trolls, magic school buses and treehouses. They were still young enough to frequently be confused about the differences between real and pretend. They both believed in magic, and Darley was often torn about when she should intervene with the truth and when she should let them dream. Hatcher had been asking her lately to build him a shrinking machine, so they spent long afternoons taping together cardboard boxes and drawing on buttons and knobs, but the play sessions always ended with him inconsolable, devastated that the machines never really shrunk anything. Poppy talked about the tooth fairy incessantly, counting the days until she would lose her first tooth. Darley had once arbitrarily told her daughter that she would lose her first tooth when she was seven, and Poppy had taken it as gospel, outraged at the unfairness when a classmate lost a tooth at five and a half. When Poppy asked what the tooth fairy did with all the teeth, Darley had lied quickly, saying that the fairy gave them to babies who needed teeth, and this started a long and convoluted series of falsehoods about how the fairy got the teeth in their tiny mouths and how that was probably the reason babies were so fussy all the time.
After Darley finished the fourth book, she walked the children to their room and tucked them into bed. As she helped pull the sheet up under Poppy’s chin, her daughter looked at her, suddenly wide awake. “Mommy, what happens when you die?”
“Well, honey, it’s like we always talk about. We don’t really know what happens after we die, but in some ways, we stay part of the world forever. Our bodies go into the ground and become part of the earth, and then plants and grass and flowers grow, and we become part of those plants and maybe an animal comes by and eats those plants and we become part of those animals and it goes on like that forever.” Darley stroked Poppy’s hair off her forehead and watched her child frowning lightly in concentration.