Thursday, November 24, 2016 — Greenwich, Connecticut
* * *
My mother saw it before I took off my coat.
I walked through the front door of the house in Greenwich — the house I’d grown up in, the colonial on Round Hill Road with the circular driveway and the copper beeches and the slate roof my father had replaced twice because he believed in maintaining things properly — and my mother was in the foyer with a glass of Sancerre and a cream Loro Piana turtleneck and her pearl earrings and the expression she wore when she was hosting, which was the expression of a woman who’d been trained from birth to make forty people feel welcome while managing a kitchen staff of three and a husband who disappeared into his study at every opportunity.
“Eliana.” She kissed my cheek.
Stepped back.
Looked at my face.
The look lasted four seconds.
I counted.
“What are you doing differently?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Your skin.
It’s—” She searched for the word.
My mother, Caroline Price Roth, graduate of Miss Porter’s and Smith, board member of the New York Botanical Garden and the Greenwich Historical Society, a woman who had never been at a loss for a word in her life, searched for the word.
“Luminous,” she said.
“You look luminous.”
I took off my coat.
I was wearing a cream Khaite cashmere crewneck — oversized, dropped shoulder, the fabric heavy and luxurious — tucked into high-waisted Theory trousers in chocolate brown.
The crewneck was intentionally loose, but my breasts — DD, firm, high — gave the cashmere a shape that an oversized sweater was not supposed to have.
The fabric draped over the upper curve and fell away, and the drape itself was a kind of statement: the sweater was loose and the body underneath it was not.
Camel suede Jimmy Choo ankle boots, eighty millimetres.
My hair down, thick and heavy, the honey-gold catching the foyer’s warm lighting.
Diamond studs.
The gold chain.
No other jewellery, no makeup except a thin line on my lashes and a sheer gloss that was barely there and that I was wearing only out of habit, because my lips didn’t need gloss anymore — they were full and pink and naturally flushed, the capillary response visible in the colour.
“You look beautiful, darling,” my mother said, in the tone that meant I’ve noticed something specific and I’m choosing to be general because we have guests.
The house was full.
Thanksgiving at the Roths was twenty-four people — my parents, my brother David and his wife Sarah and their two children, my aunt Helen and her husband, three couples from the club, and a rotating cast of strays whom my mother collected the way some women collected art: interesting people without somewhere to go who could be counted on to behave at dinner and leave by ten.
I moved through the rooms.
The living room, the library, the sun porch that my mother had converted into a bar for large parties.
I said hello to my aunt Helen, who looked at my chest and then at my face and said nothing.
I said hello to the Morrisons, who’d lived next door for twenty years and who asked about my fund and my apartment and whether I was seeing anyone, in that order, because in Greenwich the hierarchy of a woman’s life was career, real estate, man.
David found me in the library.
My brother was thirty-two, tall, dark-haired where I was blonde, built like my father — narrow shoulders, long legs, the body of a man who rowed at Princeton and now ran three miles every morning before his shift at NewYork-Presbyterian, where he was a second-year surgical resident.
He was holding a bourbon and wearing a navy blazer over a white oxford and he looked tired because he was always tired because surgery residency was a machine designed to produce exhaustion.
“Eli.” He kissed my forehead.
“You look good.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I mean—” He stepped back.
Looked at me the way a doctor looks at a patient, which was the way David had looked at everything since medical school.
“You look really good.
Your skin is…
I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an idiot.”
“Try.”
“You look like you’re twenty-one.”
I laughed.
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“I know how old you are.
That’s why I’m saying it.
You look seven years younger than the last time I saw you, and the last time I saw you was four weeks ago.” He sipped his bourbon.
“Are you doing something?”
“New skincare.”
“What kind?”
“The kind I can’t discuss yet.”
He gave me the David look — the look that was half brother, half clinician, the look that said I’m going to remember this and bring it up later when you’re less guarded.
“Your breasts are bigger,” he said.
Quietly, because we were in the library and the Morrisons were fifteen feet away.
“David.”
“I’m a surgeon.
I notice changes in anatomy.
Don’t be weird about it.”
“Don’t comment on your sister’s breasts at Thanksgiving.”
He smiled.
The smile was genuine and warm and entirely too perceptive.
“Just tell me it’s not implants.”
“It’s not implants.”
“Then what is it.”
“A very good bra.”
“That’s not a bra.
That’s—” He stopped.
Shook his head.
“Never mind.
Whatever it is, it’s working.
You look incredible.”
Dinner was at the long table in the dining room — the mahogany table my grandmother had shipped from England, seats twenty-four, the crystal and the Wedgwood and the silver that came out twice a year.
I sat between my father and the Morrison’s son, who was twenty-six and in private equity and who spent the entire meal looking at my chest when he thought I wasn’t watching.
I was watching.
I was always watching.
The transformation had sharpened something in my perception — not a physical change, nothing supernatural, just the awareness that comes with occupying a body that draws attention.
When your skin catches every light in the room and your breasts fill a cashmere sweater in a way that makes a twenty-six-year-old private equity associate forget his table manners, you become aware of every eye, every glance, every involuntary trajectory of male attention.
My father, Richard Roth, said grace.
My father was sixty-one, silver-haired, tall, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs who’d retired at fifty-five to manage his own money and sit on boards and read history books in the study I wasn’t allowed to enter until I was twelve.
He was a quiet man with a precise mind and the kind of authority that came from having been right about money for thirty years.
After dinner, he found me in the kitchen.
“You’re working on something,” he said.
Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Something big.”
“Yes.”
“Is it the reason you look different?”
I stopped loading the dishwasher.
My father didn’t notice skincare.
My father didn’t notice my hair or my clothes or whether I was wearing makeup.
My father noticed money, markets, and the expression on my face when I was working on a deal that excited me.
“The two are related,” I said.
He nodded.
The Richard Roth nod — a single, downward motion that meant I’ve heard you and I’m choosing not to press.
“When you’re ready to discuss it, I’m available.”
“I know.”
“Is the other person reliable?”
I looked at him.
My father had asked one question and meant three: Is the person honest?
Is the person capable?
Is the person going to protect my daughter?
“Yes,” I said.
“To all of it.”
He nodded again.
Poured himself a scotch.
Left the kitchen.
I finished loading the dishwasher and stood at the kitchen window and looked at the back garden — the copper beeches bare, the lawn brown, the pool covered for winter, the greenhouse lit at the far end where my mother kept orchids alive through January.
I thought about Lukas.
I didn’t know where he was tonight — didn’t know if he was alone, if he had family, if he’d ever had family.
I knew almost nothing about his past.
I knew the products, the lab, the vision, the ladder.
I didn’t know the man.
But I knew his voice on the phone two days ago.
Because I want you to be certain.
Not about the business.
About everything.
Everything.
I opened my phone and sent him a text: Happy Thanksgiving.
His reply, three minutes later: I don’t celebrate.
I typed: Everyone celebrates something.
No reply.
I put my phone away and went back to the living room and let my mother pour me wine and sat on the sofa with my legs folded and my cashmere sweater warm and my breasts full and my skin catching the firelight and my family around me, and I thought about a man who didn’t celebrate and a ring on his left hand and the way he’d said everything at a sushi counter in a voice that had made the word sound like a door opening.
Nine days.