Blue-Eyed Devil

I first saw him at my brother’s wedding, at the back of the reception tent. He stood with the insolent, loose-jointed slouch of someone who’d rather spend his time in a pool hall. Although he was well dressed, it was obvious he didn’t make his living sitting behind a desk. No amount of Armani tailoring could soften that build — big framed and rugged — like a roughneck or a bull rider. His long fingers, clasped gently around a champagne flute, could have snapped the crystal stem with ease.

I knew from a glance that he was a good ol’ boy, able to hunt, play football and poker, and hold his liquor. Not my type. I was interested in something more.

Even so, he was a compelling figure. He was good-looking, handsome if you overlooked the crook in a nose that had once been broken. His dark brown hair, as thick and lustrous as mink fur, was cut in short layers. But it was the eyes that seized my attention, blue even at a distance, a volatile color you could never forget once you’d seen it. It gave me a little shock when his head mined and he stared right at me.

I turned away immediately, embarrassed to have been caught staring. But awareness continued to spread over my skin, a heat so insistent that I knew he was still looking. I drank my champagne in fast swallows, letting the arid fizz soothe my nerves. Only then did I risk another glance.

Those blue eyes glinted with an uncivilized suggestion. A faint smile was tucked in one corner of his wide mouth. Definitely wouldn’t want to be alone in a room with that guy, I thought. His gaze moved downward in a lazy inspection, returned to my face, and he gave me one of those respectful nods that Texan men had raised to an art form.

I deliberately turned away, giving full attention to my boyfriend, Nick. We watched the newlyweds dance, their faces close. I stood on my toes to whisper in Nick’s ear. “Our turn next.”

His arm slid around me. “We’ll see what your father has to say about it.”

Nick was going to ask Dad for permission to marry me, a tradition I thought was old-fashioned and unnecessary. But my boyfriend was being stubborn.

“What if he doesn’t approve?” I asked. Given our family history, of me rarely doing anything that warranted parental approval, it was a distinct possibility.

“We’ll get married anyway.” Drawing back a little, Nick grinned down at me. “Still, I’d like to convince him I’m not such a bad deal.”

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” I snuggled into the familiar crook of Nick’s arm. I thought it was a miracle that someone could love me the way he did. No other man, no matter how good-looking, could ever interest me.

Smiling, I looked to the side one more time, wondering if the blue eyed guy was still there, I wasn’t sure why I was so relieved that he was gone.

My brother Gage had insisted on a small wedding ceremony. Only handful of people had been allowed inside the tiny Houston chapel, which had once been used by Spanish settlers in the seven-teen hundreds. The service had been short and beautiful, the air suffused with a hushed tenderness you could feel down to the soles of your feet.

The reception, by contrast, was a circus.

It was held at the Travis family mansion in River Oaks, an exclusive Houston community where people told a lot more to their accountants than their ministers. Since Gage was the first of the Travis offspring to get married, my father was going to use the occasion to impress the world. Or at least Texas, which in Dad’s view was the part of the world most worth impressing. Like many Texans, my father firmly believed if our state hadn’t been annexed back in 1845, we probably would have ended up in charge of North America.

So in light of the family reputation and the fact that the eyes of Texas would be upon us, Dad had hired a renowned wedding planner and given her a four-word instruction: “The checkbook is open.”

As all creation knew, it was a big checkbook.

My father, Churchill Travis, was a famous “market wizard,” having created an international energy index fund that had nearly doubled in its first decade. The index included oil and gas producers, pipelines, alternative energy sources, and coal, represented by fifteen countries. While I was growing up, I never saw much of Dad — he was always in some far off place like Singapore, New Zealand, or Japan. Often he went to D.C. to have lunch with the Federal Reserve chairman, or to New York to be a roundtable commentator on some financial show. Having breakfast with my father had meant turning on
CNN
and watching him analyze the market while we ate our toaster waffles.

With his full-bodied voice and outsized personality, Dad had always seemed big to me. It was only in my teens that I came to realize he was a physically small man, a bantam who ruled the yard. He had contempt for softness, and he worried that his four children — Gage, Jack, Joe, and me — were being spoiled. So when he was around, he took it upon himself to give us doses of reality, like spoonfuls of bitter medicine.

When my mother, Ava, was still alive, she was an annual co-chair of the Texas Book Festival and went for smoke breaks with Kinky Friedman. She was glamorous and had the best legs of any woman in River Oaks, and gave the best dinner parties. As they said in those days, she was as fine as Dr Pepper on tap. After meeting her, men would tell Dad what a lucky bastard he was, and that pleased him to no end. She was more than he deserved, he announced on more than one occasion. And then he would give a sneaky laugh, because he always thought he deserved more than he deserved.

Seven hundred guests had been invited to the reception, but at least a thousand had shown up. People milled inside the mansion and out to the enormous white tent, which was webbed with millions of tiny white fairy lights and blanketed with white and pink orchids. The humid warmth of the spring evening brought out the pillowy-sweet fragrance of the flowers.

Inside the air-conditioned house, a main buffet room was divided by a thirty-two-foot long ice bar laden with all kinds of shellfish.

There were twelve ice sculptures, one of them formed around a champagne fountain, another featuring a vodka fountain studded with pockets of caviar. White-gloved waiters filled frosted crystal cylinders with biting-cold vodka, and ladled caviar onto tiny sour cream blinis and pickled quail eggs.

The hot buffet tables featured tureens of lobster bisque, chafing dishes filled with slices of pecan-smoked tenderloin, grilled ahi tuna, and at least thirty other entrees. I’d been to many parties and events in Houston, but I had never seen so much food in one place in my life.

Reporters from the Houston Chronicle and Texas Monthly were there to cover the reception, which included guests like the former governor and mayor, a famous TV chef, Hollywood people, and oil people. Everyone was waiting for Gage and Liberty, who had stayed behind at the chapel with the photographer.

Nick was a little dazed. Coming from a respectable middle-class background, this was a shock to his system. I and my fledgling social conscience were embarrassed by the excess. I had changed since going to Wellesley, a women’s college with the motto non ministrari sed ministrare. Not to be served, but to serve. I thought it was a good motto for someone like me to learn.

My family had gently mocked that I was going through a phase. They — especially my father — thought I was a living cliché, a rich girl dabbling in liberal guilt. I dragged my attention back to the long tables “I loud. I had made arrangements for the leftovers to be taken to a number of Houston shelters, which my family had thought was a fine idea. I still fell guilty. A faux liberal, wailing in line for caviar.

“Did you know,” I asked Nick as we went to the vodka fountain, “that you have to sift through the equivalent of a ton of dirt to find a one-carat diamond? So to produce all the diamonds in this room, you’d have to excavate most of Australia.”

Nick pretended to look puzzled. “Last time I checked, it was still there.” He ran his fingertips over my bare shoulder. “Take it easy, Haven. You don’t have to prove anything. I know who you are.”

Although we were both native Texans, we’d found each other in Massachusetts. I had gone to Wellesley and Nick went to Tufts. I’d met him at an around-the-world party that was held in a big rambling house in Cambridge. Each room was designated a different country, featuring a national drink. Vodka in Russia, whiskey in Scotland, and so forth.

Somewhere between South America and Japan, I’d staggered into a dark-haired boy with clear hazel eyes and a self-confident grin. He had a long, sinewy runner’s body and an intellectual look.

To my delight, he spoke with a Texas accent. “Maybe you should take a break from your world tour. At least until you’re steady on your feet.”

“You’re from Houston,” I’d said.

His smile had widened as he heard my accent. “No, ma’am.”

“San Antonio?”

“No.”

“Austin? Amarillo? El Paso?”

“No, no, and thank God, no.”

“Dallas, then,” I said regretfully. “Too had. You’re practically a Yankee.”

Nick had led me outside, where we’d sat on the doorstep and talked in the freezing cold for two hours.

We had fallen in love very fast. I would do anything for Nick, go anywhere with him. I was going to marry him. I would be Mrs. Nicholas Tanner. Haven Travis Tanner. No one was going to stop me.

When I finally had my turn to dance with my father, Al Jarreau was singing “Accentuate the Positive” with silky cheerfulness. Nick had gone to the bar with my brothers Jack and Joe, and he would meet me in the house later.

Nick was the first man I’d ever brought home, the first man I’d ever been in love with. Also the only one I’d ever slept with. I had never dated much. My mother had died of cancer when I was fifteen, and for a couple of years after that I’d been too depressed and guilty even to think about having a love life. And then I’d gone to a women’s college, which was great for my education but not so great for my love life.

It wasn’t just the all-female environment that kept me from having relationships, however. Lots of women went to parties off campus, or met guys while taking extra courses at Harvard or
MIT
. The problem was me. I lacked some essential skill for attracting people, for giving and receiving love easily. It meant too much to me. I seemed to be driving away the people I most wanted. Finally I had realized that getting someone to love you was like trying to coax a bird to perch on your finger . . . it wouldn’t happen unless you stopped trying so hard.

So I’d given up, and as the cliché went, that was when it happened. I met Nick, and we fell in love. He was the one I wanted. That should have been enough for my family. But they hadn’t accepted him. Instead I found myself answering questions they hadn’t even asked, saying things like “I’m really happy,” or “Nick’s majoring in economics,” or “We met at a college party.” Their lack of interest in him, in the history or future of our relationship, aggravated me beyond bearing. It was a judgment in itself, this ominous silence.

“I know, sweetie,” my best friend, Todd, had said when I called to complain. We had known each other since the age of twelve, when his family had moved to River Oaks. Todd’s father, Tim Phelan, was an artist who’d been featured at all the big museums, including MoMA in New York and the Kimbell in Fort Worth.

The Phelans had always mystified the residents of River Oaks. They were vegetarians, the first ones I had ever met. They wore wrinkly hemp garments and Birkenstocks. In a neighborhood where two decorating styles predominated — English Country and Tex-Mediterranean — the Phelans had painted each room of their house a different color, with exotic stripes and swirling designs on the walls.

Most fascinating of all, the Phelans were Buddhist, a word I’d heard even less often than “vegetarian.” When I asked Todd what Buddhists did, he said they spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of reality. Todd and his parents had even invited me to go to a Buddhist temple with them, but to my chagrin, my parents said no. I was a Baptist, Mother said, and Baptists didn’t spend their time thinking about reality.

Todd and I had always been so close that people assumed we were dating. We hadn’t ever been romantically involved, but the feeling between us wasn’t strictly platonic either. I’m not sure either of us could have explained what we were to each other.

Todd was probably the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. He was slim and athletic , with refined features and blond hair, and his eyes the opulent blue green of the ocean in Caribbean travel brochures. And there was a feline quality about him that set him apart from the big shouldered swagger of other Texan men I knew. I had asked Todd once if he was gay, and he had said he didn’t care if someone was a man or a woman, he was more interested in the person’s inside.

“So are you bisexual?” I had asked, and he had laughed at my insistence on a label.

“I guess I’m bipossible,” he had said, and pressed a warm, careless kiss on my lips.

No one knew me or understood me as well as Todd did. He was my confidant, the person who was always on my side even when he wasn’t taking my side.