“He lives far,” I say.
“But it’s a nice drive,” says Timothy, “and Waverly doesn’t commute much. Every so often he has business in the city—”
Timothy slows for a private drive—a strip of pavement winding through a thicket of pines, footlights illuminating the drive like a runway. The drive must be heated, I suppose—slush sticks to the boughs of pines and the ground on either side, but melts into a wet shimmer on the drive.
The pines fall away like a robe to reveal Waverly’s house—built on a bluff overlooking a shallow valley. The house itself looks like a haphazard stack of frosted glass cubes, illuminated. Valet parking’s offered in the turnabout, but Timothy follows the driveway as it dips and curves around the far end of the house. We plunge into an underground garage large enough to accommodate twenty cars, at least.
“Usually this place is empty,” says Timothy.
Timothy circles once before settling for a rear space. His Fiat rattles when he cuts the engine, the sound almost offensive among the silent Maseratis, Porsches and Ferraris filling out the other spaces. A uniformed attendant wipes the slush from Timothy’s car with a white towel, never minding that the Fiat’s a piece of shit. Timothy’s quieter than usual—nervous, maybe.
“Don’t like parties?” I ask him.
“Not much,” he says.
An elevator with a parquet floor lifts us into the glass foyer. The doors slide apart and we’re washed in gold light—the interior of Waverly’s house is like a dream of art deco, the guests in slim-cut tuxes and flapper-style gowns shimmering like precious coins. Waverly’s there to greet us—he’s already flushed pinkish with drink.
“Have you fallen in love with her yet?” he says as he shakes my hand.
“I’m sorry?” I ask.
“Have you fallen in love with Albion?” he says, breath sour with alcohol. “You can’t spend time with her and not fall in love, apparently—”
“Not now,” says Timothy.
“I haven’t,” I try to say, but Timothy’s taken Waverly’s arm and nudges him away from me, separating our conversation.
“Drinks are in the blue room,” says Waverly as we part. “We’ll stream the executions in the Caraway room, I think—”
A hundred or so on the guest list, it looks like, and I’m as exposed in my flannel as I feared I would be. Pathetically underdressed. Timothy’s already abandoned me, disappeared somewhere. Adware profiles hover over each guest, names I recognize from the streams, Elric Broadbent, a presidential adviser, and Michelle Frawley, from Arizona, host of the God and Guns stream. Actresses I recognize from Disney sitcoms and reality-stream girls, Donna from Hello Pussy, season 3, and the guy from Truth or Dare. I ping Gav to see if he recognizes anyone here and he pings that I should watch where I step and be sure to clean my shoes when I leave. Everyone’s wearing those Meecham pins that were popular following Pittsburgh, her profile portrait like a cameo and twin crimson ribbons in the shape of a heart. A bit overwhelming, I suppose, but nothing I haven’t seen before—I’ve been the wallflower at celebrity-studded parties Gavril’s dragged me to, nothing terribly novel about gawking at recognizable faces. Zelda Kuhn, host of Buy, Fuck, Sell is talking with the Republican whip from Texas. Christ, there’s a lot of power gathered here—
I drift to the blue room for a drink, the blue room easy enough to find—a dining hall with expansive walls papered in royal blue damask. I pluck sushi from a passing tray—the waitresses look like they’ve been bused in from a modeling agency rather than a catering company, as much a decoration here as the Louis XIV chairs and oversize landscapes in gilt frames. The dining room table’s been converted into a bar and a waiter pours me a finger of brandy. I swallow quickly, cutting the edge off my anxiety. He pours another. Waverly’s not playing the Gatsby tonight—no melancholia for his lost wife and daughter—he’s practically giddy with his guests, if anything, glad-handing and laughing, already a bit sloppy with drink. Difficult not to notice when he corners one of the waitresses in a dim hallway and kisses her hard enough to force her head against the wall, massaging her breasts through the front of her uniform while she holds a tray of champagne flutes, trying to keep them from spilling.
One of the guests watches me—she’s across the room, leaning against the blue damask, her silk gown the color of cream, her hair dyed a rich Albion-shade of crimson. She sends gentle pings my way. Vaguely familiar, but her profile’s blanked and I can’t quite place her. I’m meant to notice her—I feel she’s like an invitation, if I want her, but I can’t help but feel repelled by the gag. She’s meant to resemble Albion with that red hair—did Waverly do this? Timothy? She knows I’ve noticed her. She accepts a drink from a passing waitress. She leaves the blue room and I’m invited to follow, but I hesitate. I finish off my brandy and go for a refill. The last glance I catch of her is so similar to Albion I’m convincing myself there’s a glitch in the Adware, that maybe there is no woman here, that maybe I’ve spent too much time studying Albion and now I’m hallucinating her.
I leave the blue room and find her—she leads me down a frosted glass hallway lined with black statues of nude women on white pedestals. Another hall—I’ve lost her somewhere in this maze of rooms, the design eighteenth century in style, stuffy despite the sleek modernity of the architecture. Framed photographs are arranged on a decorative mantel—many are of Waverly as a young man, his hair a dark sweep, his eyes the same color as the sea behind him. Most of these pictures were taken on the bow of a sailboat called, of all things, The Daughter of Albion. I can’t quite place the reference—Housman? Tennyson? Scroll through my e-library and search the Norton Anthology—find the poem: Blake, William. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. A few photographs show a woman, Waverly’s wife, I assume but can’t be sure. She’s younger than Waverly, but not by much—handsome rather than beautiful, with a square jaw and chestnut-colored curls. She appears only twice in these pictures, glancing at the camera but never smiling. There aren’t pictures of his children here, no images of the two sons I found listed in the census and none of his daughter. I roam through to another room and find the woman I was following sipping a drink lounging on a settee.
“Forget me already?”
Hearing her voice—Twiggy. “I didn’t recognize you, not with the hair color,” I tell her. “Twiggy, isn’t it? Gavril’s friend, right?”
“That Twiggy’s just a stage name,” she says.
“Your valentine landed me in a heap of trouble. It was heroin, for Christ’s sake. A felony charge. I lost my job. You should have warned me what it was—”
“What’s that you’re drinking?”
“I don’t even know anymore,” I tell her. “Brandy, I think—”