Beautiful Day

MARGOT

Back up in her bedroom, Margot riffled through the cocktail purse she had taken to the Galley on Thursday night. Ellie was passed out cold on the bed, still in her dress and the silly paper plate hat, although she had shed her sandals, so that Margot could see the black bottoms of her daughter’s feet. As badly as Margot needed to find what she was looking for, she could not resist any of her children when they were sleeping. She hovered over Ellie, marveling at the perfect features of her face and the flawlessness of her skin. When she bent down to kiss Ellie’s lips, she smelled frosting. Probably, Ellie had had nothing to eat tonight but frosting. Margot carefully removed the hat so that the paper plate would not be crushed by Ellie’s nighttime thrashings. She pulled the bedsheets up to Ellie’s chin.

She thought, Go to hell, Edge Desvesnes. This is the real thing right here.

Griff’s card was exactly where she thought it would be, tucked in her cocktail purse next to her dead phone. Unable to help herself, Margot pressed the phone’s buttons, hoping it would spring back to life, the way certain human beings had been known to do, even after being declared dead.

But no. The phone was torched, fried, useless. Somewhere in its now-silent plastic-and-metal depths lurked the two unread messages from Edge. Which would have said something like Please call me. I need to speak to you about this weekend.

Margot was caught in a wave of sadness that nearly pulled her under. Fifteen months of her life, wasted, all that energy squandered on someone who was never in the game to begin with. A part of her yearned to lie down next to Ellie and cry herself to sleep. Rosalie is a better match for me. The New Year’s Eve party. While Edge and Rosalie were kissing at that party, Margot was picking popcorn kernels out of her teeth, watching the ball drop on TV. All those nights when Margot had waited for Edge to respond to her texts, moving from room to room in her apartment, thinking that maybe it was her phone’s cell reception that was the problem, Rosalie and Edge were at the office “working together” on the shitshow Cranbrook case. Twenty-eight years old. Sexy gravelly voice.

Margot pinched Griff’s business card between two fingers. She had to do this.

There were two phones in the house. One was hanging on the wall in the kitchen. One was on the nightstand in the master bedroom. This was a holdover from Margot’s teen years. When Margot and Kevin and Nick were teenagers, they were forced to make all plans on the phone in the kitchen, right smack in the middle of the action, where everyone could hear. Margot had preferred talking to her friends or boyfriends in the privacy of her parents’ bedroom, though this was frowned upon. The phone in her parents’ bedroom was basically only there to serve as a late-night hotline. The police called to say that they had broken up a party at Dionis and had a Carmichael child in custody (Nick). A daughter called to say she’d be late for curfew (Margot). A son’s girlfriend called to see if he was home because it was late and she hadn’t heard from him (Beanie).

Now that the master bedroom was occupied by Doug and Pauline, that phone was really off-limits, so Margot had no choice but to call Griff from the phone in the kitchen. It was as mortifying as it had been as a teenager. The kitchen was filled with catering staff, who were all trying to clean up while simultaneously preparing the late-night offerings for the after-party: potato chips and dip, pretzels with honey mustard, pigs in a blanket, White Castle burgers, and the fixings for s’mores, which would be cooked over the bonfire in the backyard, which Roger and his crew were now setting up beyond the proposal bench, at the edge of the bluff. Under the tent, the band played “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Buttercup.” Margot was sure most guests were still lighting up the dance floor-but for her, this wedding was over.

She dialed Griff’s number and plugged her ear. She could barely hear the phone ringing. She thought she heard Griff answer, but after a second or two, she realized she’d gotten his voice mail. His recording was talking to her.

She hung up the phone. She had bumped into Griff so many times by accident that she hadn’t anticipated having a problem finding him.

When she dialed again, he picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Griff?” she said. “It’s Margot.”

“Who?” he said.

“Margot,” she said, feeling like an imbecile. “Margot Carmichael.”

“Oh,” he said. “Hold on.” Margot could hear bar noises-music, and people laughing. He was probably sitting at the Boarding House, talking to some sexy blond advertising executive, telling her he missed having someone to talk to at night, someone to tell the stupid stuff. Since he didn’t believe in love anymore, anyone would do.

Suddenly Griff’s voice was clear and strong. “Hey?” he said. “Margot?”

“Hi,” she said.

“Sorry, I just had to step out. What’s up?”

Margot said, “Where are you? Are you someplace I could meet you?”

“I’m at the Boarding House,” he said.

Margot and her perfect instincts. She was probably right about the blonde, as well. “Are you busy? I don’t want to interrupt.”

“Not busy,” Griff said. “Nothing to interrupt.”

Margot felt a surge of relief and something sort of like happiness, even though what she was about to do was going to suck eggs.

“I’m coming down there,” Margot said. “I’m at my house, I’m leaving now.”

“No,” Griff said. “I’ll come to you.”

“I’ll come to you,” Margot said. “I’m leaving right this second.” She heard the oven timer beep, and one of the caterers moved her gently aside so he could slide out a hotel pan of fragrant sweet-and-spicy pecans. When Margot and Jenna had pored over the after-party menu selection, Margot had imagined herself sitting around the fire pit with her sister and her brothers, munching on those yummy pecans and washing them back with an ice cold Cisco brew from the keg. She had imagined the guitar player singing “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” She had imagined a peaceful ending to a drama-free wedding. She had not imagined anything like what was now happening, but oh, well. Margot hung up the phone and took a handful of warm pecans for the road.

She bumped into Griff on Main Street. Margot thought, Men never listen! I said I would come to him! But it was nice to have someone meet her halfway for a change.

He grinned. “Nice dress,” he said.

She was still wearing the grasshopper green. She should have changed, she realized-but after she told him what she had to tell him, it wasn’t going to matter what she was wearing.

He touched her arm. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“Can we sit?” she said.

“Sure,” he said. He led her to the bench in front of Mitchell’s Book Corner. The shopwindows up and down the street were lit, but there were only a few pedestrians out, and the occasional taxi rumbling up the cobblestones, taking people home to their beds, Margot supposed, or to the Chicken Box to dance.

She said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Okay,” he said.

When Griff had first come into Miller-Sawtooth as a candidate for the head of product development at Tricom, the applicant pool had been unparalleled by anything Margot could remember seeing in her whole career. The slate she had compiled was all Princeton undergrad and Harvard Business School; everyone was a potential superstar. Margot had overseen all the interviews; she had been the one, along with the associate principal, Bev Callahan, and with occasional consult from Harry Fry, the firm’s managing partner, to winnow the group down to five, and then to three candidates, which she sent to Tricom.

Griff had looked good. He had fourteen years’ experience at a comparable company called the Masterson Group, although with an unexpected, abrupt departure. He had attended the University of Maryland as an undergrad, then Wharton, and there had been a curious gap-when, he explained, he’d spent two years on the PGA tour. All of this was very good, including the gap-Harry Fry loved golfers, and Griff told a charmingly self-effacing story about rooming with Matt Kuchar and Steve Stricker and the hazing he’d had to endure. (They had made him drink warm beer that they’d run through the dishwasher.) Griff presented very well in person. The whole room was nodding at Griff, eating his words up. Harry had loved him, Bev had loved him, Margot had loved him.

Margot was known as a shrewd reader of résumés. In his first interview, she had said, “You mention here that you were homecoming king at Maryland?”

“Yeah,” Griff said. “I was.”

“That’s so cool,” Bev Callahan said. “Was that, like, voted on?”

“Voted on, yes,” Griff said. “Secret ballot. Juniors and seniors eligible, so chances were about one in eight thousand.”

“Wow!” Bev had said. Bev, Margot knew, had been on the kick line in high school, and although she was a very serious professional, she was prone to this kind of gushing.

Margot put a check mark next to “Homecoming King.” And after that first interview, she called Griff and told him to strike it from his résumé.

“It makes you sound shallow,” she said.

“I wasn’t sure,” Griff said. “I figured it would either be something fun to talk about in the interview, or it would make me look like a tool.”

“The latter,” Margot said. “Get rid of it.”

The other front-runner for the job was a man named Seth LeBreux, who came from New Orleans-Tulane, LSU Business School. Seth had a Cajun accent that everyone loved, and he’d been with BellSouth for a decade and had pulled New Orleans through post-Katrina hell. He left BellSouth in 2007, however, and invested in a trio of restaurants in the French Quarter that had failed. And so, he said, he decided it was time to give up the gumbo and go back to IT.

Seth LeBreux was Edge’s nephew.

Margot didn’t know this, however, until Edge took her to dinner at Picholine. At that dinner, she and Edge had been seated in an intimate, cozy corner of the restaurant. Immediately when they sat down, champagne appeared. He then ordered house-made burrata cheese with heirloom tomatoes, and a wild mushroom risotto. He knew his way around the menu; Terrance Brennan was a friend, he said.

When Edge had invited Margot to dinner a few days earlier, he’d told her that he wanted her to spend the night with him. She couldn’t believe it. She had checked back with him twice. You’re sure?

Of course, he said.

Margot had gotten Kitty, her afternoon babysitter, to spend the night with the kids.

During the first course of dinner, Edge held her hand. At one point, he leaned over and gave her a long, lingering kiss. In public! Every sexual and romantic cliché happened at once-Margot swooned, her stomach dropped, her knees turned to water.

It was more than an hour later-after several glasses of Malbec and entrées of day boat lobster for her and suckling pig for him-that Edge cleared his throat and brought up the subject of Seth LeBreux, his nephew, his sister’s only child, a good kid, a kid Edge had looked out for since his sister’s husband died in Vietnam in 1974. A kid who was like a son to Edge. And Seth had had such a hard time with his restaurant ventures, why he’d ever left BellSouth no one could say except that Seth had a dream of running a restaurant empire, maybe he’d watched too much Emeril, who knew, but it hadn’t worked out for him. He’d lost his shirt.

Edge had been the one to encourage Seth to come north. Start over in New York.

Seth LeBreux, Edge said again, in conclusion, as if Margot might have missed his name the first time.

Margot had held a bite of butter-poached lobster suspended over her plate.

She said, her voice barely a whisper, “Edge, you know I can’t…”

And he said, “Oh, I know, I know, I’m not asking you for anything. I would never do that. He just mentioned Miller-Sawtooth, and I wondered if he’d encountered you, and he said-”

“Yes,” Margot said. “Yes, that’s my placement. Tricom.”

“So,” Edge said.

Margot had set her food down, unable to eat anything else. Edge poured her another glass of Malbec. He said, “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I feel like an ass. Can we forget I mentioned it?”

Yes, Margot agreed this was for the best. She excused herself for the ladies’ room, where she spent a good, long time staring at herself in the mirror, trying to convince herself to walk right out of the restaurant. Fuck Edge Desvesnes. Margot wasn’t a moron; she saw what he was doing. Seth LeBreux had that Cajun accent-quite frankly, that was the best thing going for him, that and his tear-jerking stories about post-Katrina, which to Margot had sounded a bit too crafted. He was one of the top three candidates, but he was also, in Margot’s mind, the maverick. He’d been out of the industry for six years, and a string of failed restaurants didn’t say much about his management skills or his imaginative problem solving.

Walk out the door, Margot thought. She felt like a suckling pig, one that had been spit-roasted to Edge’s liking. He had set her up. Get in a cab, go home, change your phone number.

But she was too weak. She went back to the table, drank her wine and then a glass of port with the apricot tarte tatin that Edge ordered for them to share, and when she slid into the back of a taxi, it was with Edge. They sped uptown to his apartment, and there Edge took his time with her. It was, by far, the best lovemaking of their relationship; it was almost as if he hadn’t been trying before. Later, he brought her a robe and a glass of ice water, and he rubbed her back until she fell asleep.

In the morning, she was up and out, but she felt like the issue of Seth LeBreux needed addressing, so she said, as she kissed Edge good-bye at the door, “It’s in the client’s hands now, but I’ll see what I can do for Seth.”

“Thank you, Margot,” Edge said. “You don’t know what it would mean to me.”

Margot didn’t explain all of this to Griff, however. What she said was: “The guy I was dating, a man I thought I was falling in love with… his nephew was a competing candidate for that Tricom job.”

Griff stared at her levelly. She loved the complexity of his eyes, but she couldn’t let herself get distracted.

She said, “Tricom loved you, you know they loved you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I thought I was in. I thought it was fit and finish. I thought I was their guy. And then out of nowhere… I got signed off.”

Margot said, “I threw you under the bus so that Seth would get the job.”

Griff said, “You’re kidding.”

“Oh, God,” Margot said. “I wish I was.”

The final slate of three for the Tricom job had been Griff, Seth, and a woman named Nanette Kim. Nanette Kim was phenomenally brilliant (Georgetown, Harvard Business School, fifteen years at AT&T, she had a ten out of ten on her handshake, she was a woman, and she was Asian). Margot couldn’t not send her. But Margot also knew that Drew Carver, the CEO of Tricom, was as chauvinistic a human being as had ever been born, and Margot knew the new hire was going to be a man. It would be Griff or Seth.

Drew and his team at Tricom were leaning toward Griff, and Margot couldn’t blame them. Seth wasn’t going to win on his own merits; she was going to have to cut Griff down.

Margot had thought Drew might have concerns about Griff’s abrupt departure from the Masterson Group. Griff had been adamant in only saying it was for “personal reasons.” He didn’t want Drew or anyone at Tricom to know about his wife’s affair or the baby. Margot had been prepared to explain the situation to Drew sotto voce if the issue arose. But Drew had been content with “personal reasons.”

However, in the final phone call, the one where Margot suspected Drew would be offering the job to Griff, Drew said, “I do have some concerns that maybe this guy lacks gravitas. The golfing, the partying. Maybe the frat boy in him is a bit too pronounced.”

Margot had been shocked by this statement. Drew Carver, like Harry Fry, was known to love the golfers, the partiers, the fraternity presidents, the captains of the hockey team. Drew Carver was giving Margot an opening. She could slip right through to the dark side undetected.

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention this before,” Margot said. “But now that you bring it up…”

“Yes?” Drew said.

“In his original résumé, he listed that he had been voted homecoming king at Maryland. And I thought the same thing, Drew. I thought, What kind of person lists that as an achievement on a professional résumé twenty years after the fact? I told him to strike it, and he did, but the fact that he chose to list it initially shows questionable judgment, I think. I mean, really, homecoming king?”

“Oh,” Drew said. There was a long pause, then he said, “Yes. Thank you for letting me know.”

And with those words, Margot knew that Griff was out and Seth was, most likely, in. She could call Edge that very night and tell him that she’d worked her magic. She had single-handedly landed Seth LeBreux a job he didn’t deserve.

“You were the better candidate,” Margot said. “And I stole that job from you.”

“You did,” Griff said. “You did. God, I can’t believe it.”

“I did,” Margot said. “Professionally, it was abominable. I hate myself for it.”

Griff tented his hands and bowed his head. “Jesus,” he said. A string of seconds passed, then he said, “And you did it for some guy? Some guy you thought you were falling in love with?”

“Yes,” Margot whispered.

“You know what that makes you?” he asked.

“A tool,” she said. “It makes me a tool.”

Griff stood up and stared at the brick facade of the Pacific National Bank. Nantucket was an old place; no doubt endless dramas had taken place on Main Street, countless treacheries, and here was one more. What Margot had done was monumentally bad. Bad, bad, bad.

“I liked you,” Griff said. “I wanted to be impressive and win that job for you. And then, when I got signed off and you weren’t the one who did it, I was relieved. Because I didn’t want to have to see you after I’d been cut.”

“I didn’t do the signing off because I couldn’t face you,” Margot said. She had made Bev do the signing off for Griff, and Bev hadn’t wanted to do it, either. She had been incredulous that Tricom passed over Griff. She kept saying, It just doesn’t make sense.

“So the other guy got hired, then?” Griff said.

“No, actually,” Margot said. “They hired Nanette Kim. She lasted six weeks, then declared that Tricom was a hostile workplace for women and minorities. I tried to come back to you-I did, Griff-but you had already signed with Blankstar.”

Griff nodded. “Nice,” he said. He turned and started walking down the street. “I’ll see you around, Margot.”

Margot squeezed her hands together and watched his figure recede down the street. She was dying to follow him; she was scrambling for the words that would make him forgive her. But those words didn’t exist. He had made one small tactical error-he had given Margot something to ridicule-and Margot had turned it into a deal breaker to advance her own romantic agenda.

If Griff wanted to, he could call Miller-Sawtooth and speak to Harry Fry and relay the details of their conversation. Margot wouldn’t get fired, but she might get disciplined. She almost wanted Griff to call, she wanted to be punished, she wanted him to get even-but she knew he wouldn’t. He was too good a guy. And he had just done the exact thing she’d feared and walked out of her life, which felt like punishment enough.

Margot rose from the bench. Her feet, in her dyed-to-match pumps, were aching, and she slid the shoes off. Some nights had good karma and some nights were cursed, and this night had been cursed from the beginning.

The whole weekend had been cursed. Margot, with her perfect instincts, had been right to dread it.

As she turned the corner onto Orange Street, she saw a figure walking toward her-a man, alone, and she filled with dread. Not possible. But yes.

He called out, “Margot?”

She knew she should walk past him, but he stopped, and instinctively she did, too.

“Have you seen Rosalie?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Your father kicked us out of the wedding,” Edge said. “Rosalie was mortified. She doesn’t get it, and I can’t explain it to her. She thinks Doug kicked us out because he doesn’t approve of her and me.”

“Oh,” Margot said. She was close enough to Edge to smell him. He was wearing Aventus; she would know the scent anywhere. Margot couldn’t believe it. He was wearing the scent she’d bought for him-finally!-but he was wearing it for Rosalie. Edge was a cheese rat, but Margot was too worn out to fight with him. “Why don’t you just tell Rosalie the truth?” she said. “Tell her about me.”

“I can’t,” he said. “She’ll leave me. Of course, after tonight, she might leave me anyway.” He gave Margot a weak smile, and Margot was surprised that he didn’t seem more concerned, but that was how Edge was with women-easy come, easy go. If Rosalie left, he would meet someone else, perhaps someone even younger and more inappropriate, whom he would marry and then divorce. Margot was fortunate to have escaped getting in any deeper. In her head she knew this, and she wondered if someday her heart might follow.

“See you, Edge,” she said. She leaned in and gave John Edgar Desvesnes III, her fifty-nine-year-old sometime lover, a kiss good-bye, which really was exactly that, and then she walked barefoot up the street toward home.