Beautiful Stranger (17 page)

As they made their way back to the party, Sam thought about how amazing it was that Anna could put things in perspective for her. Why was she herself making everything so complicated when it really didn’t have to—

If it was possible to stop midthought, then that is exactly what Sam did.

Directly across the densely packed room, over by the wall-to-wall glass window that fronted on Sixty-eighth Street, she saw a young woman hug Eduardo. Long, dark glossy hair, burnished copper skin and deep-set eyes, curvaceous body thinly covered in a pale blue, off-the-shoulder taffeta gown cut down to the small of her magnificent tawny back.

No
. It couldn’t be. Sam had been so sure it was only her own paranoia that had led her to think …

Only there she was. Hugging Eduardo.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

But by the time Sam crossed the room to Eduardo—dodging around the gray-haired, distinguished-looking president of Peru in his presidential sash, and the president’s entourage—her fiancé was entirely alone. In fact, Eduardo grinned broadly when he saw her, and even took her hand.

What would Anna do? Anna would stay cool. So cool.

“What was Gisella doing here?” Sam asked, trying not to add the words
That Bitch
to her name.

“Who?”

What nerve. Sam shook her Bumble and bumble blown-out hair off her face. “Do you know more than one girl named Gisella?”

“You mean Gisella Santa Maria?”

“Yes,” Sam replied easily.

“Gisella wasn’t here.”

“Oh, come on, Eduardo. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I
saw
her. She was hugging you!”

“Or maybe you just think all Peruvian women look alike,” he teased with a twinkle in his eye. “They are about to serve dinner downstairs. The finest Peruvian meal you’ll ever eat. Better even than my cooking. Shall we?” He offered her his arm.

She took it, but she was not at all convinced. She was almost positive that Eduardo was lying to her. And she could not for the life of her figure out why.

Sophisticated Laughter of the Upper Ten Percent

“L
adies and gentlemen, look to your right.”

Anna dutifully turned to her right. Sitting on the folding chair next to her was a hirsute guy—bushy red hair on his head along with a thick, wiry beard, and flip-flops on his feet. He wore black pants and a white shirt flecked with hot pink and black paint. She noticed that his thatch of hair traveled into the collar of his shirt, both in front and in back. She wondered idly if it mingled with chest and back hair in a sort of pelt. It was an odd thing to wonder, but then, she was feeling particularly odd at that moment.

“And now, to your left.”

Anna turned again. To her left was a girl so slender and pale she was nearly opaque. Her face was tightly pinched, with close-cropped, boyish dark hair, and she wore red tights under black walking shorts and layers of baggy tops, which had to have been designed to disguise her alarming boniness. Anna peeked at her seatmates’ name tags. The guy had a first and last name of so many syllables that it barely fit on the tag. The young woman’s name was Abernathy Hathaway-Birch. Anna guessed she came from an East Coast WASP family of the type with which she herself was all too familiar. Who else would name their daughter Abernathy?

All around the room—an impressive, wood-paneled meeting area in the venerable Yale Club in New York City—incoming freshmen from the New York metropolitan area were doing the same thing, following the instructions of the Yale dean of students, a slightly built thirty something man in wire-rimmed glasses with short brown hair, who wore a light brown sport coat over a white Oxford shirt and navy blue tie. Anna would have bet anything that he was wearing corduroy pants, though an official Yale podium blocked the view.

“Okay.” The dean began in the confident voice of a man who was used to being treated with respect. “I don’t want to scare you, but statistics prove the following: one out of three of Yale’s entering students end up married to each other. So the person to your left or right could end up as your husband or wife. Or, since we’re in the twenty-first century, it might not be going too far to say perhaps both.”

There were chuckles around the room, the sophisticated laughter of the upper ten percent. It was laughter that Anna knew well; the laughter of the living room when her mother held dinner parties, the laughter she heard in her AP classes at Trinity when a teacher made a clever joke. It was laughter she hadn’t heard in eight months, since she’d moved to California. Not that the West Coast didn’t have its own brand of elitism, because it definitely did. But somehow she couldn’t help but feel it seemed too trivial to seem important. She didn’t
care
how much Universal or Paramount was paying Angelina or Meg for her next movie, or whose boobs were real and whose weren’t.

But as the laughter continued, Anna realized that this kind of elitism—the intellectual, sophisticated, it-takes-an-education-to-understand-the-context kind of snobbery—had colored her thinking for her entire life. It was the water in which she swam. But now that she’d been out of it for months, in the designer-clad shark-infested waters of Beverly Hills, coming back to it didn’t feel quite like home.

The California club Anna had just found kind of silly. But this particular club—the properly bred, old-school New Englander club, made her feel sort of sad. It was all about intellectual sparring, and nothing at all about who people really were.

Anna noticed Abernathy’s eyes flit nervously around the room. Then she turned toward Anna. “Ancient civilizations,” she declared. “And I’m never getting married. You?”

It took Anna a beat to figure out how these two statements might relate. When she realized they didn’t, she said, “I’m probably going to be an English major.”

Abernathy scowled. “I couldn’t care less about your major. Where are you on marriage?”

What kind of a question was that? She’d known this girl for what, three point two seconds, and she was asking about her stance on marriage?

“It’s … been popular for a few millennia of recorded history,” Anna replied. She figured that a joke was the best way to respond.

“Dodging the question,” Abernathy said. “You’ll never last at Yale. Next.” She turned away.

Whoa. What was that about?

Fortunately, the dean of students was engaging and distracting enough to hold Anna’s attention. This mixer—he used the old-fashioned term to describe it—would be an opportunity for students to get to know one another and some of the faculty before official freshman orientation began in two and a half weeks up in New Haven.

“Some of you will be able to meet your roommates tonight,” the dean went on. “There’s a list posted by the bar that you can check; it also has your dorm assignments in the event that you didn’t receive the orientation packet. Of course, if you didn’t, you’ve already called the admissions office at least five times. You’re coming to Yale, after all.”

Again, the two hundred or so New York-area freshmen laughed at the joke at their own expense; the laugh of the few, the proud, the overachieving. Anna wondered whether the same jokes were being made at the Yale cocktail parties that were simultaneously taking place in Boston, New Haven, and Washington, D.C., this same night … and whether Logan was hearing a variation on the theme at his own Harvard event just a few blocks away.

Anna had thought long and hard about what to wear tonight. “We are what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut, one of the few popular writers she enjoyed reading, and whose recent death she’d mourned, had said this, and it had stuck with her. Clothing in Los Angeles was all about the sizzle and not necessarily the steak. Appearance was everything. Looking hot, hip, and trendy was considered a worthy goal. In New York, Anna and her friends had treated fashion differently. No one put anywhere near the same effort into looking rich that they did in Los Angeles, where designer tags were a badge of honor. This protective coloration was stated in ancient khakis and triple-ply cashmere sweaters with frayed hems or holes in the elbows. Dressing down
was
dressing up. Even to a cocktail party or a gallery opening, people generally wore something simple and black.

She sighed at her own predictability. She wore a perfectly cut black Chanel skirt that fell to just below the knee, and a House of Hsu white silk boat-neck shirt with tiny pearl buttons down the side. She’d had it made on a trip to London years ago with her mother and her sister, Susan (who had been between rehab stints, as Anna recalled), by one of the best silk couture houses in the world.

The Yale Club was located in midtown, across from Grand Central Station, and was more like an extension of the university in New York City than a clubhouse. The twenty-three-story building had been recently renovated to the tune of ten million dollars, and contained a number of restaurants, guest rooms for club members visiting from out of town, banquet facilities, and a spectacular library, as well as squash courts and a small gym. In addition to the reception, there was a classical guitar recital taking place in another of the function rooms, plus a cocktail party for French-speaking alumni in the rooftop garden.

The reception had opened with speakers, some of whom had been engaging. A well-known historian on the faculty gave a preview of his upcoming book about the Civil War. A composer played a new sonata she’d written on a Steinway grand. And a past star of
Saturday Night Live
who’d graduated from Yale drew a standing ovation for a politically charged address where he took a liberal number of very funny shots at the current White House occupants.

And then there were—did she dare even think it?—the disappointments. Mostly, they had to do with the incoming freshmen she’d met before the formal program began. So many of them reminded her too much of the kids she’d grown up with, vacationed with, competed against, and partied with. There were even several people she knew, either from Trinity or from East Hampton or Edgartown. Oh sure, there were the few who stood out for one reason or another—the jocks, the math geniuses, the trying-way-too-hard-to-be-goth group, even the freaky hair-all-over guy who’d sat next to her. He probably fared better from his brag sheet than his alumni interview. But mostly, it was the same sandbox in which she’d always lived, with only the best and brightest sand.

Speaking of. She was not thrilled when she spotted a particularly noxious piece of glittering sand by the name of Stevens MacCall Richardson. He was editor of the literary journal at Trinity, and one of the most pompous individuals she’d ever met. Stevens, who looked a little like a young Nicolas Cage, with the same swept-back dark hair, broad shoulders, and prominent teeth, had been running the literary magazine for two years. Once upon a time, at the end of junior year, she’d made the mistake of submitting a short story to him about a scary nor’easter storm she’d experienced as a child on Martha’s Vineyard. It had blown part of the widow’s walk off their nineteenth-century home, and Anna had spent most of the blow cowering in the basement.

To say he hadn’t liked her story was an understatement. The first half of the two thousand words had been marked in more red ink than the balance sheet of Enron in its entirety. The second half was untouched, as if Stevens MacCall (he insisted on being called by both names) had become so irritated by its content, or even worse, so bored, that he’d just given up. Across the top he’d scrawled, “REALLY NOT FOR US,” in bright red caps.

And now, he was going to Yale, most likely to the English department. Gee. Big fun. He had the most annoying habit of saying, “Ah,” after anyone said anything, giving the word an emphasis that implied a profundity Anna never understood. At the moment, he had one khaki-clad leg crossed over the other, hands clasped around his knee, and the most supercilious look on his face as he listened to the admissions dean. Anna could almost hear him saying, “Ah,” and he was clear across the room.

“So we’re pleased to welcome you to your first official Yale experience.” The dean of students was finishing his remarks at the podium. “There’s food, there’s drink, there’s no lack of fascinating people to talk to. You are at the threshold of a wonderful, life-altering adventure. Now’s your chance to get to know each other and to size up the competition. Have fun.”

The audience laughed one more time; then everyone seemed to stand at once to mingle. Oh no. Stevens MacCall was making a beeline straight for her.

“Hello, Anna.” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his Naldini navy blue sports jacket.

“Hello, Stevens.” She simply couldn’t bring herself to call him Stevens MacCall.

“Ah,” he uttered, quite predictably. “So. You’re going to Yale, too.” His voice was as disdainful as ever.

“Yes. Early decision,” she added, which was so petty, she knew, but what the hell. The way he’d dismissed her writing still stung after two years.

“Interesting. Your parents must have donated quite a bit of money. I heard through the grapevine you’d gone all West Coast on us. UCLA or some such.”

“I’ve been living out there, but no, I’m going to Yale.”

“Ah.” He tented his fingers. “You’re not planning on the creative writing program, are you?”

What an asshole. What if she was? What if she had talent and he had simply been too in love with his own prose to see the worth of hers? Anna doubted that was true, but considering the possibility made her feel better.

“Literature, I think,” she replied. She sat back down in her seat, hoping he would go away. He didn’t. Instead, he plopped down next to her. Anna hoped that Abernathy had kept the seat warm for him.

“You’ll be fine, then.” He patted her arm in a patronizing fashion. “Meet your roommate yet?”

“My roommate’s here? I haven’t checked the list.” Anna was startled for no particular reason other than that she hadn’t really thought about it.

“Ah.” Stevens MacCall smiled. “I met her. Lovely girl. Beautiful. Contessa. I’ll be seeing her. Which I suppose means I’ll be seeing you.”

He planned to date her new roommate? Oh dear God. Anna didn’t want to spend any more time in his company than she had to.