The Darlings (20 page)

THURSDAY, 12:56 P.M.

T
here were already four cars in the driveway. Paul wondered if they were the last ones to arrive. Adrian and Lily's black Porsche Cayenne was parked at the apex of the curved drive, blocking everyone else. The front door of the house was ajar. When Bacall heard the rumbling of the gravel beneath the tires, he burst out through it, barking happily and wagging his tail like a windshield wiper. It felt like a standard-issue late fall day. Paul pulled to a stop just behind Adrian and Lily's car, trying to keep his eye on Bacall, who was skirting the edges of the drive. King sat up and pressed his dappled paws against the window, panting in anticipation.

“We're here, honey,” Merrill said. She spoke in the singsong voice she used when addressing the dog, but it was halfhearted. “Are you excited?”

King let out a yelp as Merrill opened the door and set him down on the drive. Steam rose from his nostrils and his feet crunched on the ice-crusted grass. He and Bacall went about sniffing each other while Paul and Merrill got out and stretched. The air was colder out here than it was in Manhattan; clean and bracing. Paul shivered through his wool sweater. It wouldn't be a pleasant weekend, but it still felt momentarily nice to be out of the city.

The house had taken on that stark New England quality that shingled houses do in the fall. Ines's prized window boxes stood empty; in the summer they overflowed with pink geraniums. The house's façade was an aged nut-brown. Though the Darlings had built the house in 2001, it was traditionally designed, fading seamlessly into the Island's patchwork of farmhouses and saltboxes. At the back of the house was a small formal English garden, the hedges of which were clipped neatly into a rectangular maze. They were covered now to protect them during the winter.

The house was, as ever, eerily perfect. The outside had white-trimmed gambrels and a porch that caught the breeze just so. The footpaths were constructed out of brick, eaten away at the corners, the colors as varied as the back of a tabby cat and faded by the sun. Inside, the house had all the trappings of a family estate. Ines favored old silver for meals, the kind that was supposed to be passed down, never purchased, and was slightly worn around the handles. A painting of Carter's grandfather hung on the library wall; across from it was a framed car company's stock certificate that supposedly bore his signature. Everything that could be personalized or monogrammed or customized was: the crisp white sheets, the soft blue towels, the L.L.Bean canvas bags that were lugged everywhere, from the beach to the golf course to the farmer's market. Yet there was something manufactured about it, as though Ines had opened the pages of
Architectural Digest
and said, “Give me this.”

All of the heirlooms and old photos were from Carter's side of the family; his stories were the family's communal history. Paul never once heard Ines speak about her childhood in Brazil. Paul knew all about the summers in Quogue, the cousins back in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the winter recesses from boarding school. He knew that Charlie Darling had been an equestrian and an expert marksman, that Eleanor had had a tent for her debutante ball that had been made entirely of white roses. Once, when she was drunk, Merrill told Paul that a lot of her father's stories were embellished. “They were never really all that well off,” she whispered, after her father finished a story about childhood Christmases in Palm Beach. “My grandfather was just a showman. Dad is, too, I guess.”

You were with them or you weren't. Paul and Merrill spent every weekend at the Darlings' house in the summer, and every holiday. After they were married, it was often said to Paul that “he was a Darling now.” He was glad about it; he wanted nothing more than for his wife's family to accept him. Still, it felt a little strange, as though he had joined a preexisting family instead of beginning one of his own. Sometimes, less now than in the beginning, Paul wondered how Patricia and Katie felt about his relationship with the Darlings. He tried not to have an ego about it—his family was in North Carolina after all, and the Darlings were here—but there were moments when he was troubled by it.

And then there was the issue of the name. At their engagement party, Adrian had jokingly asked Paul if he was going to take her name after they were married.

“No, but I'm keeping my own,” Merrill had replied before he could answer. She turned to Paul. “Lily goes by Lily Darling Patterson, but only socially,” she added, as though that bolstered her cause.

“Socially? As opposed to what?” Paul said, sounding snarkier than he intended. Merrill raised a quick eyebrow in Adrian's direction, a reprimand and a warning.

“Professionally,” she said coolly. Conversation over.

“How do you feel about that?” Adrian asked, winking at Paul.

“Just fine,” he said, but felt his face flush with embarrassment. “I'm going to get a refill,” he said and nodded toward the bar.

As Paul walked away, he heard Adrian say to Merrill, “You girls have to maintain your brand equity, huh?” They both laughed. It felt like a slight, though Paul knew it wasn't meant as one. It was a joke, nothing more.

It had never occurred to Paul that his wife wouldn't want to be Mrs. Ross. “Why didn't you tell me?” he asked her later, clumsily, after too much scotch.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I just thought you'd understand.”

They unpacked the car in silence, the wind stirring up the leaves along the edges of the drive. Eventually, Adrian appeared at the door, Sam Adams in hand. He whistled at Bacall and both dogs bounded into the house. Paul was momentarily irked by the fact that his dog responded so willingly to Adrian's whistle, and then felt childish for caring.

“Welcome, kids,” Adrian said. He meandered down to the car to give Merrill a hug. “Need a hand?”

“Looks like you guys just got here,” Paul nodded his head toward the open trunk of Adrian's car.

“Yeah, we got a late start. Because of the Morty thing. Lily's a little shaken up.” Adrian's throat sounded dry, as if he had been up talking late into the night. On first glance Adrian was his usual, relaxed self: hands stuffed in his pockets, errant shirttail emerging from the waistband of his corduroys, a page from the J. Crew catalog. But Paul knew Adrian well enough to sense a heavy chord in his voice. The men locked eyes. For a moment, Adrian looked older than Paul had ever seen him.

“I'll go find her,” Merrill said.

“Everybody's in the kitchen, except Carter. He's at the Penzells', I think.”

Merrill nodded and disappeared into the house without acknowledging Paul. Not wanting to follow her, he took their suitcases to their bedroom.

Upstairs, Paul began to unpack his suitcase and then closed his eyes for a moment, succumbing to a bone-deep fatigue. He knew he needed to go say hello to the family; he was simply delaying the inevitable. But once he left the bedroom, the weekend would begin in earnest. That overwhelming thought kept him pinned down to the bed.

There was no real need to unpack, anyway. Closed suitcases left on luggage racks at Beech House were silently and miraculously unpacked by Veronica, the housekeeper, the clothes withdrawn, steamed, and hung neatly in rows. Like many details about the Darlings, Paul found this practice unsettling. It created a strangely intimate association with Veronica. She folded his undershirts; she placed his spy novel by the bedside and his Dopp kit on the bathroom counter; she left his work files untouched in his duffel, as if to say that
some things, work things, are still private here
. But they weren't, really. She touched his toothbrush and saw his condoms under the sink. It seemed inequitable, a streaming one-way channel of information. He didn't even know her last name. Some days, it felt to Paul as though the staff knew the Darlings better than the family knew themselves.

He was hanging a button-down in the closet when a voice behind him said, “You don't need to do that. Veronica's here today.”

Merrill was slouched against the doorjamb in a manner that was simultaneously alluring and standoffish. Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest.

“Hi,” Paul said. “I was beginning to worry you were never going to speak to me again.” Paul realized that she hadn't spoken directly to him since the Milk Pail, a farm off the Montauk Highway in Water Mill where they sometimes picked apples and pumpkins in the fall. When they had pulled into the parking lot, Merrill was sitting tight-lipped; her face a mask of tears and anger. They had wordlessly picked up two pies and a dozen cinnamon donuts and a jug of cider: their agreed-upon offering to the Thanksgiving table.

She proffered a taut smile, but didn't budge from her post at the door. A look crossed her face as if she wanted to say something, but thought better of it, and bit her tongue. “Why would you say that?” she said instead.

They stood looking at each other.

“I haven't heard a peep out of you since the Milk Pail.”

“Dad loves those donuts. I'm glad we stopped.”

“Everyone loves those donuts.”

“Are you coming downstairs? The football game's on in the den. Veronica will unpack you.”

“Are we not going to finish the conversation from the car? I'd like to talk before I see your dad.”

Merrill sighed, a heavy guttural sigh, her whole body wilting beneath the weight of it. Shutting the door behind her, she went to lie across the bed. Horizontal, her face took on a smooth, blank expression. Her eyes blinked up at the ceiling. They faded in color when she was tired or when she cried, more silver than blue.

“You dropped a lot of information on me,” she said finally. “I'm not trying to ignore you, but I need a little time to process everything.”

“That's fair. That's understandable.”

“I'm not angry with you,” she said, though he hadn't suggested that she was.

“I hope not. Did you read the e-mails?”

“Yes. It's not that I don't understand your concern.”

“But?”

“But nothing.” Her voice was calm, but Paul could tell she was suppressing her anger.

“Look,” she said and sat up. “I'm just never going to tell you, yes, go talk to the SEC about my dad's company. You'll ruin him. You know that. And I have zero confidence that it would save you, either. It's like walking directly into a lion's den.”

Paul shifted away from her on the bed and they both stared at the walls, robin's-egg blue and cream striped like everything else in the room. The stripes hurt his eyes if he looked too long at them.

There had always been a nascent fear in Paul that when it came down to it, Merrill might choose her family over him. He had never said this, of course, though they had danced around it countless times, during stupid fights about scheduling or the Hamptons house or whether she would ever move out of New York. Some of the fights were real and others weren't. He thought he had gotten over it, after six years of marriage. But it held him now so tightly in a vice grip, he thought his heart might explode.

“Merrill,” he said. “What choice do I have? Sit and wait for them to come for me? I lied to the SEC. That's a pretty big fucking deal.”

She was silent. The edge of her thumb was in her mouth and she bit at the nail.

“It wasn't lying,” she said quietly. “You were just saying what the firm told you to say. People do that all the time.”

“Don't you get it?
We never asked RCM who their counterparties were
. I wasn't outright lying, maybe, but I wasn't being honest, either. I shouldn't have been out there saying, ‘We're on top of it; they're all triple-A rated or better.' All that shit. We were all lying to our investors when we said it to them and I lied to David when I said it to him. And the worst part is, I put it in a fucking e-mail. So now they have me. Don't you see that? Now they have me if they want me.”

Merrill got up off the bed, and Paul was seized by the fear that she was leaving. Instead, she crossed the room and picked up the folder atop his suitcase. He watched as she reread the e-mail, the one he had read a million times since the day before, the one where he gave David Levin the party line about counterparties, and then told him to fuck off, basically. To stop asking questions. He hadn't thought he was lying when he sent it. That was the scariest part to him, how easily it had slipped off his fingertips. The e-mail, he could see now, read with such arrogant dismissiveness that Paul could hardly believe that he had written it. He felt as though he were reading a stranger's e-mail, some cocky prick who worked at a hedge fund, the kind who ended up at his wife's office shortly before being indicted for misconduct. That wasn't him. At least he had never thought that was him.

Merrill put the e-mail back in the folder. She sat back down on the bed, the folder in her hand. He reached for her thigh. It felt tense and cold beneath his palm. He hated himself for losing his temper with her, and for cursing, which she hated.