She fled to the bathroom, probably not quickly enough. Both Bambi and Linda knew the telltale signs of Rachel on the verge of tears. Michelle didn’t notice. She was the center of attention. She hadn’t changed that much.
Only maybe she had. Ten minutes later, she waddled into the bath-not the downstairs powder room, where most guests would have gone, but the one attached to the master suite, an overly marbled retreat that Rachel secretly thought tacky-and said “Oh!” as if she didn’t expect to find Rachel there. Then, sitting on the toilet after yanking down her pants: “I have to pee all the time now. I wet myself at Superfresh yesterday.”
“A sneeze?”
“Not even. It just gave way. It was like”-Michelle thought-“like a flat roof collapsing after water had been pooling on it for a really long time.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“Oh, it was. I’ll probably never shop there again. Actually, I don’t. I usually go to Whole Foods, but Hamish went Scottish after he saw the prices last time.”
It was one of Hamish’s tics that he was wonderfully extravagant-until he wasn’t. He himself described his pulling back as “going Scottish.” There was not, as far as Rachel knew, a complementary Iranian strain, although it was his mother whom Hamish resembled physically. She was gorgeous, so gorgeous that it seemed as if Hamish Senior couldn’t quite believe his good luck. Hamish’s mother looked if she couldn’t believe it, either.
Or maybe Rachel was just projecting. She had never quite recovered from her first mother-in-law, and Hamish’s mother had that same queenly demeanor. She would have been a formidable opponent if they lived close by. But Michelle’s luck held-her mother-in-law lived in London.
Michelle pulled up her pants. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you.”
That was so unexpected that Rachel began to cry in earnest. “I don’t envy you anything-”
“No, you don’t. And I’ve envied you so much. You have no idea, Rachel.”
“You mean Linda and me.”
“Mainly you. Yes, Linda and you knew Daddy, have real memories of him, and enjoyed the princess phase, whereas I only knew the garret part. Lord, how I hated that movie.”
Rachel smiled at the reference to Sara Crewe in The Little Princess, the Shirley Temple film that Great-Aunt Harriet had thoughtlessly insisted they watch on the old Picture for a Sunday Afternoon, saying all children loved Shirley Temple. Aunt Harriet really was a bitch.
“But you’re good, Rachel,” Michelle continued. “And you’re Mother’s favorite.”
“Oh, no. Mama doesn’t have favorites.”
“Of course she does. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love each of us, and each in a special way. And she’s always been good about loving us as we are, not making comparisons. But you’re the family star. The good grades, the niceness. Wanting to fix everything and everyone. Rachel-would you wait here for me? I’ll be right back.”
It was such a strange request that Rachel couldn’t deny it. But “right back” was a longish span of time, given the size of the house and Michelle’s slowed gait. By the time she returned, Rachel had gone through all the cabinets, if only to prove she wasn’t the nice one. The contents were uninteresting, although she longed to know what Michelle paid for her face creams, a brand completely unfamiliar to Rachel.
Michelle had a glass of champagne in her hand and a cloth napkin full of cookies.
“Oh, I’m fine,” Rachel said with a wave.
“It’s for me,” Michelle said. “The baby’s cooked, after all, one glass won’t hurt, but Hamish would freak. You can have a cookie, though.”
“Thanks,” Rachel said wryly.
“Everyone tells you everything, don’t they?”
“Not really.”
“Mama does. And Linda. Everyone confides in you.”
“I’m a good listener, I guess.”
“You scared me. About the evil eye, Rachel. That was a terrible thing to say.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” Said formally, in a new tone. The old Michelle had neither given nor accepted apologies. “It’s not your fault. I’m scared because-I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve any of this.” She gestured, careful not to spill a drop of the outlaw champagne.
“Of course you deserve to be happy, Michelle. You’ve never really been.”
“I thought I was. Rachel-I had an affair. With a married man. For a while. I broke it off, about three months before I met Hamish, if you can believe it, but it was a horrible thing to do.”
“I know.”
“You know? How could you know? Do others know? Who it was, I mean? You don’t know that, do you? Because he was-well, he was well known. By Baltimore standards.”
“No, no-I didn’t know who. And I wasn’t sure he was married. But I knew you were having an affair with someone. You were secretive, you claimed not to be dating at all. You haven’t been without a boyfriend since you were twelve. I figured it was someone you couldn’t talk about.”
“Did you talk about it? With Mother or Linda?”
“Linda. Not Mother.”
“And what did Linda say?”
“She said you had to be free to make your own mistakes.”
“Boy, was I. The thing is, Rachel, that’s not the only thing. Remember Adam Gelman’s wedding?”
“Sure.” Rachel was remembering something else, how Michelle had disappeared that night. Was her lover there then? Who could it have been? Oh, Lord, what if she had carried on an affair with Adam? Younger than her by a bit, but he had had a crush on Michelle most of his life. Or maybe Alec, but why be secretive about Alec?
“My lover”-Michelle made a face-“what an icky word. It makes it sound so, I don’t know, grand and sordid at the same time. And it was really just sordid. Awful. But he gave me gifts.”
“The coat,” Rachel said. “The watch.”
“And the car, the one I said was part of my package at that tech company. It was a gift, not a lease.”
“Wow.” Rachel wasn’t sure what such a car cost, but she thought it was probably as much as she made some years.
“So, at the wedding, this friend of Adam’s tried to ask me out and I turned him down. I wasn’t very nice about it, but I was in a bad mood. I was upset, about the relationship I was in; I didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings.”
Rachel couldn’t help thinking: You never cared about anyone else’s feelings, not then.
“So I was kind of rude to him. Anyway, it turned out that he was an IRS agent. And he opened a file on me.”
“That can’t be legal.”
“Doesn’t matter. He did some research-he found out my salary, found out what things cost. The coat, the car, the watch. He called me and said he believed that there was money, hidden money, from Daddy and he was going to investigate Mama.”
“He wouldn’t have found anything.” Rachel was sure of that, at least.
“No, but he said he would make sure it leaked to the newspapers, that he knew how to do that without leaving a trace. He made me come see him.”
“Did you go?”
“Yes, but with Bert Gelman. And-well, he had to know. Bert, I mean. About the lover. Because it turns out that the man I was seeing-some of the things he did were illegal. He should have paid a gift tax on some of the presents he gave me. But there was no way I was going to tell the IRS who he was, no matter how much they threatened me.”
“So what happened?”
“They dropped it, quite abruptly. Bert turned it around on the guy, filed a complaint that he was using his office for a private vendetta, and the guy got reassigned. Bert told me it wasn’t hard to show there was no money, not from Papa. Barry Speers.”