Once More With Feeling

“Richards guides Elisabeth through this
seductive women’s daydream with skill, humor, and an iron
morality.”

---
Publisher’s Weekly

“This perceptive story is sure to tap into
the fantasies of readers who wonder what life would have been like
if they had a chance to be someone else.”

---
Library Journal

“Multi-talented author Emilie Richards has
charted a bold new course with this unusual and very distinctive
novel.”

---
Romantic Times Book Review

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.

Sometime during the restless eternity of
Thursday night, Elisabeth Whitfield dreamed that Owen, her husband
of twenty-five years, was having an affair. She woke up Friday
morning, as she had every morning for the past month, afraid it
wasn't a dream at all. As Friday afternoon waned she completed
preparations for the dinner party that might give her the proof she
needed.

Elisabeth's parties were always elegant,
tasteful, and ultimately forgettable, too much like their hostess
to be truly memorable. She had learned to give a party from her
mother Katherine Brookshire Vanderhoff, who had insisted that God
and the American flag came in a poor third and fourth behind an
eternally pleasant expression and a flair with canapés. She had
learned to choose wines and menus, caterers and florists. She had
learned how to set a congenial atmosphere.

But she had never learned to like any of
it.

This afternoon Elisabeth was enjoying the
fine art of hostessing even less than usual. Weeks before, when she
had seen the party only as a chance to socialize with old friends,
she had rashly decided to hire younger, fashionable, and totally
unfamiliar staff. Now, with her enthusiasm at an historically low
ebb, she was paying the price.

The new caterer, a sleek young redhead in
Ralph Lauren khaki, had furtively examined every visible room of
the Whitfield residence as she and her assistant marched in and out
carrying platters and equipment Elisabeth's own kitchen had not
yielded the proper number of copper bowls and marble pastry slabs.
She had carefully evaluated the neoclassical furniture, Owen's
prized collection of Barbizon landscapes, the octagonal skylights
and the white granite floor of the entrance hall.

"You have an absolutely spectacular home,"
the caterer pronounced at last, when Elisabeth's kitchen no longer
looked as if it belonged to her.

Elisabeth acknowledged the compliment with
the smile she had learned from her mother. "It's kind of you to say
so."

"I've catered parties all over the Gold
Coast, and I've never seen anything quite like this. Everything's .
. . perfect." The young woman dragged out the last word like a
feline with an exceptional vocabulary.

"My husband is the architect."

"I know."

Elisabeth suspected that the caterer also
knew what clients Owen had designed for, the international
competitions he had won, and his income to the nearest hundred
thousand. She obviously had her sights set on more than the
kitchens of Long Island.

The florist was new, as well. The old man
who had faithfully provided Elizabeth with pastel tulips in the
spring and pastel chrysanthemums in the fall had died quietly at
Christmas, knee deep in pink and white poinsettas. Rick
With-No-Last Name, his ponytailed and fashionable replacement, was
a different breed entirely.

Elisabeth found the young man in the first
floor powder room, assembling an arrangment of leafless twigs and
excrement-hued cinnamon fern in three upturned rolls of toilet
paper. As she watched he stood back to observe what he'd done, then
leaned forward and artistically unwound a foot of one of the rolls
and draped it over the edge of the counter.

It was good toilet paper. Elisabeth had to
give him that much. A squeezable roll of ecological white. He
turned and grinned infectiously. "Sm. . .oking!"

Blinded by white teeth and shining
expectations, she lowered her eyes and found an arrangement of
brightly colored bowl brushes in a stainless steel urinal on the
floor beside the commode. The brushes were interspersed with long
stems of bottlebrush buckeye.

"I can't wait to see what you'll do in the
dining room." She added a gentle, vaguely regretful warning. "Just
remember, there are going to be some terribly staid old fogies here
tonight. And there are only so many Nassau County paramedics on
call at any given moment."

He laughed conspiratorally. "I thought an
aquatic theme since you're serving fish . . ."

She pictured mermaids impaled on skewers and
belly-up dolphins with arugula and radicchio in what passed for
their navels. "Remember the first arrangment you did as a very
young man. That's what I want."

"Can't do it. I didn't bring my skulls
today."

Elisabeth could see that this conversation,
like too many aspects of her life, had spun out of control. Rick
had quickly guessed the truth about the woman who had hired him.
She was the eternal peacemaker, a doormat who would always back
down rather than cause a fight. She was so nauseatingly gracious,
so intrinsically diplomatic, that one time or another every charity
on Long Island had asked her to oversee a fund-raiser.

She was a woman on whom a man could easily
cheat, assured that she would be too dignified to call the matter
to his attention.

She swept methodically through the rest of
the house to consult with the cleaning crew, examine the linens and
reprimand Owen's bookend golden retrievers, who lolled on a
Savonnerie carpet and refused to move as much as a tail for
Georgina, the gray-haired matron in a fifties housedress who was
attempting to vacuum around them.

Today Elisabeth found no comfort in familiar
rituals. She probably needed hormones. She definitely needed a
drink.

Instead, upstairs in the master suite bath
she fished aspirin from a plastic vial and swallowed it without
water. In the mirror with a museum-quality gilded frame, she saw an
ash-blond, forty-something woman with a serene expression and pale
blue eyes that were as untroubled as the May sky.

Behind the eyes was a fishwife clawing her
way to freedom.

She washed her hands and automatically
massaged lotion over them. At thirty she had been able to pretend
that she would age gracefully. She had dieted and exercised, and
the flat plane of her abdomen had fueled the lie. But now, at
forty-eight, the truth was always in view. Hands with prominent
veins, hips that had blossomed to their full genetic potential,
feet in shoes that were designed primarily for comfort.

The telephone rang, but she ignored it. It
would be Owen's secretary Marsha, checking to see if Elisabeth
needed any last- minute assistance before the party. If there were
errands, Owen wouldn't do them himself, of course. His staff was
motivated to help by personal loyalty and generous salaries. Owen
would smile his warmest smile and extend his hands in a
little-boy-lost gesture. They would respond with whatever was
needed.
Scottish salmon from Fraser Morris? Consider it done,
Mr. Whitfield. Three bottles of Chateau Haut-Brion? I'll make the
calls
.

Owen could design and oversee every detail
of the construction of award-winning houses or entire developments,
but he could not locate a case of Bordeaux if he were standing in a
Paris wine cellar. Everyone understood that.

She had understood it once upon a time.

Elisabeth had one blessed hour before she
had to reassemble the worst of the florist's masterpieces, an hour
before she had to give last-minute instructions to the caterer. She
forced everything out of her mind: the fact that she was growing
older with nothing substantial to show for it, the fact that she
was married to a man who looked at her and didn't see her anymore,
the fact that she was giving an intimate dinner party for her
closest friends and was no longer looking forward to being with any
of them.

The fact that one of her guests might well
be sleeping with her husband.

She did what she had been doing for more
than a year to forget the shackles that bound her to her outwardly
enviable life.

She turned on the television.

On her bed, snuggled against Irish lace
pillows, she watched a familiar crystal globe materialize on the
screen. Once she had counted the globe's facets by taping the
opening of the show, then pausing frame by frame as the globe
turned full circle. There were twenty-four, each with a different
scene reflected on its surface. She knew each image, although the
effect was meant to be subliminal. A soaring eagle, the convertible
that had carried Jack and Jackie Kennedy on their final ride
together, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, Hopi kachina
dancers, Barack and Michelle.

That scene dissolved into the next. A gavel
fell against a polished wood surface, once, twice, three times. And
before the sound could die away, a man began to speak.

"What you are about to hear is the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Elisabeth mouthed the
words in sync with the announcer. As the final truth was uttered, a
woman appeared on the screen.

"Hello. This is
The Whole Truth
, and
I'm Gypsy Dugan."

Before she had married Owen, in the days
when she was still young and filled with confidence and spirit,
Elisabeth had worked in television news, too. She had briefly
tasted the joys that Gypsy probably took for granted, and she had
relished them.

She didn't know when Gypsy Dugan had become
her alterego. She didn't know when the sexy news anchor had begun
to represent all the things that were missing in her own life. She
did know that no one suspected her fascination with the woman or
the show, and that she intended to keep it that way.

She was Elisabeth Whitfield, scion of a
family as old as the thirteen colonies, wife of the revered Owen
Whitfield, mother of a grown, beloved son. She appeared to have
everything, but she was only just discovering how little she had
settled for.

On the screen Gypsy Dugan shook back her
short dark hair. There was nothing warm or sympathetic about her
smile. It was as erotic as an X-rated film and every bit as
cynical. She was Scarlett O'Hara with a mission. No matter how
maudlin the subject matter, how shocking the feature story of the
day, her dimples flirted dangerously with her ripe, full lips. She
was every man's fantasy and every woman's nightmare. She was Gypsy
Dugan.

And she was a living reminder that Elisabeth
Whitfield might have been somebody, too, if she had just tried
harder.

Gypsy waited for the final signal, then she
leaned back in her chair and half listened to the familiar bustle
that characterized the end of another taping. An assistant came to
unhook her mike, someone else gathered the props on the
semicircular desk. No one tried to start a conversation, although
she hardly noticed. Her gaze was riveted on the man standing just
outside the studio lights. If she'd been anyone else, she might
have licked her lips in anticipation. Instead she allowed one
corner of her mouth to turn up. Just the tiniest bit.

He waited until the path was clear, then he
moved toward her, a twentieth century pirate in a Davide Cenci
suit. Charles Casey, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and perpetually in
need of a closer shave. He was
The Whole Truth's
star
reporter and the hottest lover Gypsy had taken in a decade.

"You could have manufactured a tear or two
for the lead-in to the Williston story," he said when he was
towering over her. "I mined the pathos in that one for all it was
worth. Even Gypsy Dugan should squeeze out a tear for the death of
a homeless mother and her two little angels."

Gypsy examined her nails, a supremely
cliched but nonetheless effective signal--besides, she wasn't at
all happy with her latest manicure. "We've got Nan for the teary
segments. She could cry buckets at the grand opening of a shopping
mall."

"But that wasn't Nan's segment."

"No one wants to see me cry, Casey. You know
that's not why they watch the show." She glanced up. "Did you come
here to critique my work? Or did you have something better in
mind?"