Beautiful Day (42 page)

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.