The Insiders (19 page)

“How's Flan?”

“Good,” I said, and left it at that. I wondered where she was, and why she wouldn't tell me. Some people started to dance. Graca drifted up from the table and began to dance in a circle with a few other women. She smiled over at us.

“Isn't she amazing?” Patch said. “We kept meaning to do stuff. Like she should work and I should go to school, and call people, and all that, but we kept forgetting.”

Patch threw his arm around me, and we stood there, drinking wine and just sort of digging on the scene. I felt totally calm and then I realized that I hadn't felt that way in a while, not since my cousin Kelli had come to town.

Then there was a noise at the door, someone knocking really loud and not realizing that the door was unlatched, so it suddenly flew open and banged against the wall with an ugly crunching sound. Randall Oddy came in with Kelli and five guys, who were all smiling and totally focused on
Kelli. She scoped the scene and saw that she knew only me and my people, so she smiled wide, like we hadn't been fighting for days and now she was happy to run into me.

“Jonathan!” Kelli yelled as she came running over to us.

“That's my cousin,” I said to Patch.

“She's … loud,” Patch said. I smiled. Patch wasn't into loudness.

“Hey, who's this?” Kelli asked. As usual, a couple of guys were trailing her. She grinned at Patch and her grin said,
should I be sampling you?

“Oh no you don't,” I said. “You already messed up two of my friends. I don't even want you talking to this one.”

“Hey,” Kelli said. “I'm harmless.”

“No you're not.”

“I'm Patch,” Patch said. And he shook hands with Kelli. He smiled at her. And Kelli smiled back.

“And I'm Graca,” Graca said. Her voice was like hot butter and she rolled her
r
s. She'd stopped dancing and walked over to us. Arno and David and Mickey had all made their way to us, too, and now we all stood there, staring at her.
She was so beautiful. Patch kissed her.

“Do you all want some wine?” Graca asked.

“Yes,” we said. I emptied my glass and she went toward where the kitchen must have been.

“I'm in love,” Patch said. We all nodded at him. We could see why.

“Excuse me,” Kelli said. “I think someone's calling my name.” But nobody paid attention to her, and so she walked away.

“You need to remember to go home,” Mickey said to Patch.

“Not till tomorrow morning.”

“But definitely then,” Arno said. “We'll get you there. It's good to see you, man, we really missed you.”

“But I thought you forgot about me.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “We did for a while. But I'm still really happy to see you now.”

“Okay,” Patch said. He smiled the easy smile that had been keeping him out of trouble since he'd been born.

Toward four in the morning, Graca ran out of wine and I was having trouble keeping everything in focus. Patch hadn't disappeared again, which was a good thing. He was dancing with Graca. And Kelli was dancing with Randall Oddy and Arno was sort of between the two couples, dancing with the model with the tadpole on her shirt.

David came over to where I was sitting at the dinner table. I'd been picking at a plate of olives, and penciling a drawing of Flan on a napkin.

“I'm tired,” David said. “I called my mom and said I was staying at your house. I hope that's not a problem.”

“Nope, so long as she knows that tonight my house is a suite at the Tribeca Grand.”

“She doesn't know that,” David said. “Did your mom sell your apartment?”

“I'm kidding,” I said. “But there is a room in
my mom's name at the Grand. It's probably a suite. We can all crash there.”

“I guess that's cool,” David agreed.

I saw Ezra the driver dance by.

He said, “Hey, you know Kelli? She's cool.”

And I just shook my head and pretended not to hear him. Arno's model was clearly sick for him, and I mean sick. She hung on him like they were lost at sea and he was a life preserver. But he was still looking around for Kelli.

“Jonathan?”

I turned around and it was Fernanda, from Barneys. That girl, she glowed.

I said, “Let's dance.”

She was carrying a highball glass that she must have brought from another party and she was trailed by five or six people who were so well dressed they simply had to be her friends from work.

“You know Graca?” she asked.

“I know Patch,” I said. She smiled, as if that made everything okay, and we began a slow dance.

“Hi, Fernanda,” someone said. Kelli.

“Dammit, Kelli!” I yelled. “Your knowing everybody ruins everything for everyone else!”

“Whoa,” Fernanda said. She took a step back.

“Why are you so threatened by it?” Kelli asked.

“Because nobody learns New York in a week,” I said. Well, maybe I spluttered. David, who'd been furiously making out with Amanda, who'd showed up with Liza and Jane, looked up.

“It's destiny,” Kelli said simply.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You turned all my friends against each other and made me lose sight of Patch!”

I immediately whipped around. Patch was nowhere in sight.

“You did it again!” I yelled.

“You're ridiculous,” Kelli said. She turned to Fernanda. “How's Barnard?” she asked.

And Fernanda frowned at me.

“Good. Do you have any additional questions, or did you feel like the tour I gave you was pretty comprehensive?”

“Oh,” I said. I'd been pretty loud. People were looking. Where
was
Patch?

Fernanda smiled gently. She said, “You two do something together?”

“We're cousins,” I said.

“Kissing cousins?”

“Hardly,” I said.

I took Fernanda's hand and drew her toward me. She smelled faintly of Barneys. Or maybe what I loved about Barneys was the smell of her? Who cared? She was near me. I kissed her. Unfortunately, it lasted only about a second, till I felt voices calling my name.

“Did you lose Patch?” Mickey yelled. He was on the other side of the room, arguing with a bunch of Randall Oddy's friends. He could be pretty smart when he wanted to be.

“Did you?” Arno yelled. He was dancing with that model he'd picked up, Elizabetta.

“It's cool,” David said. “He went home to show Flan he's okay. I saw him get in a cab.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Call Flan.”

“No, not right now.”

Fernanda was starting to walk away from me, and I caught up with her.

“You're not seeing me at my best,” I said.

“I hope not,” she said.

“It's been a stressful week,” I said. “I had one of my best friends disappear, and my other friends all had some difficulties and it was really, really hard to keep track of everything. But if I
could just see you some other time …”

“What?”

“You're amazing,” I said.

“You know where to find me.”

“In shoes,” I said. And yeah, I sounded dreamy. She slipped away, and I let her go.

Then the weird thing happened when you're at the party for longer than you're supposed to be, and everything dissolves and it's just a room full of people you don't know very well, who all look kind of sweaty, and you need to run around and gather up your friends as quickly as possible, otherwise you'll end up in a cab alone. And nobody wants that. So I started whispering around about the suite at the Tribeca Grand.

Kelli heard me and said, “That's my suite.” I couldn't totally disagree with her, since if she wanted to stay there, that was cool with me. I wanted her close right up to the moment when she walked onto the tarmac and onto United flight number Make-Things-Normal-Again.

Because the hotel was so close, the four of us and Kelli walked over and checked in. David fell asleep on a big white sharkskin chair. Kelli shared the sofa with Arno, and I listened to them talking about how strongly he felt and she sounded like
she was being kind of patient with him about it. I took the big bed with Mickey, who was passed out before he had his shoes off. Outside, I could see the sun start to rise. I closed my eyes. But Mickey smelled so strongly of alcohol that I had to stuff tissues up my nose.

“Hey, Jonathan.”

“What?” I asked. It was Kelli. She gotten up from the other room and now she was standing over me.

“I know I was a little more than you'd bargained for but I guess … I want to thank you.”

“What for, idiot?” I said. But I sort of smiled up at her. Mickey smelled so bad. I wondered when he ever changed his jumpsuit.

“Thanks for letting me come out with you.”

“Well,” I said.

Kelli sat down at the edge of the bed. Her hair was sticking up in places and her new Helmut Lang pants were stiff, too. But her arms were kind of thin and innocent. She was like that—about the most innocent thing about her were her forearms.

“Sorry if I screwed up your life and made you lose track of your friend.”

“I guess it's not really your fault,” I said.
“Except for the part where you nearly totally destroyed all my friends' relationships.”

“Kelli?” Arno said.

Kelli smiled at me. “He said he'd cry unless I held him tight.”

“You're the first girl who ever said no to him.”

“Shut up,” Arno said.

“I say no to everybody,” Kelli said.

“Except me,” David said, and smiled in his sleep.

Kelli stood up then, and through the curtains, the city had begun to glow behind her. Then, just as I was falling off for a much-needed few hours of sleep, I heard Kelli go back over and lie down next to Arno.

“You're a pain in the ass,” Arno said.

“You're worse, rich boy,” Kelli said.

And then they went on and began arguing in that way that inevitably means you're going to fool around, and pretty seriously, too, if nobody stops you, which I certainly wasn't going to, because I was asleep by then, and the bed was comfortable. And if two people who were sort of made for each other but didn't really like each other at all were going to get into something serious, who was I to stop them?

The croissants were golden and flaky, and their hot pastry smell washed over everything. At the table in the downstairs dining room, just off the kitchen, sat five Floods: Frederick and his wife, Fiona, Flan, February, and Patch, who had his eyes closed and was still listening to music from the night before.

“How was St. Lucia?” Flan said to her mom. Flan was wearing her riding clothes, including her brown velvet helmet with the chin strap done up. They'd asked her repeatedly to take it off, but she said she liked to be prepared, because she planned to go riding with a special someone. She wouldn't say who that was.

“What?” Fiona Flood asked.

“Weren't you there?”

Fiona shot a look at her husband. Frederick was slathering a croissant with butter.

“Have some croissant with your butter?” Fiona asked, and frowned. “I was there, yes. For a few days, for a much-needed rest from your father.”

“Doesn't anyone want to hear about how my job is going?” February asked. She'd come in from her night two hours before, at eight in the morning, but the elder Floods had been out in the garden, discussing what to do with the rosebushes. Retrench or pare back?

“What about it?” Frederick said.

“It sucks,” February said.

“This orange juice is fantastic,” Patch said. It was all he could think of to say. It wasn't that he didn't like his family, he just didn't get them. Even his little sister Flan was slowly getting lost on him. She made a pouty face all the time, and it was confusing that she'd gotten so good-looking and was only in eighth grade.

He sipped the juice, which was fresh. The scrambled eggs had bits of salmon and chive flecked through them. Patch ate quietly, with his head down.

“We may be headed back up to Greenwich, midweek,” Frederick said.

Flan stared down at her plate and adjusted her helmet. She helped herself to more eggs. Of course February was only drinking coffee, black.

“How's Zed doing?” Fiona asked.

But nobody said anything, because nobody really knew.

“This is the best coffee,” Patch said as he sipped at it. He didn't like to drink a lot of coffee, because he
didn't like to be that awake, but he couldn't think of what else to say. During the silence that followed, the entire family began to stare at him. He looked at his plate.

“What?” Patch said. He smiled at them, his crinkly smile that made everybody feel good and got them to leave him alone at the same time.

“How's Mickey?” his mother asked. “I think we're seeing the Pardos tomorrow night or the next for the symphony. Anything special we should know about?”

“Yes, how are your friends?” Frederick asked. Then he seemed to remember something, and got up and went back to the kitchen.

“Well,” Patch said. “Um. I think they had a tough week.”

“Why?”

“Um.” Patch looked at the hem of his khakis, at the freckles on his arm. He smiled. He thought,
Graca
. He wanted to see her, and desire washed over him. He'd told her he'd see her later, but what had he meant? He needed to see her now. He wondered how to do it.

“Mickey broke his arm,” Flan said.

“He slipped on some stairs at school,” February said. Both his sisters were staring at Patch, slight grins on their faces.

“What about Zed?” Frederick said on his way back
into the room.