Elin Hilderbrand - Beautiful Day

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.

Margot had thought Drew might have concerns about Griff’s abrupt departure from the Masterson Group. Griff had been adamant in only saying it was for “personal reasons.” He didn’t want Drew or anyone at Tricom to know about his wife’s affair or the baby. Margot had been prepared to explain the situation to Drew sotto voce if the issue arose. But Drew had been content with “personal reasons.”

However, in the final phone call, the one where Margot suspected Drew would be offering the job to Griff, Drew said, “I do have some concerns that maybe this guy lacks gravitas. The golfing, the partying. Maybe the frat boy in him is a bit too pronounced.”

Margot had been shocked by this statement. Drew Carver, like Harry Fry, was known to love the golfers, the partiers, the fraternity presidents, the captains of the hockey team. Drew Carver was giving Margot an opening. She could slip right through to the dark side undetected.

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention this before,” Margot said. “But now that you bring it up…”

“Yes?” Drew said.

“In his original résumé, he listed that he had been voted homecoming king at Maryland. And I thought the same thing, Drew. I thought, What kind of person lists that as an achievement on a professional résumé twenty years after the fact? I told him to strike it, and he did, but the fact that he chose to list it initially shows questionable judgment, I think. I mean, really, homecoming king?”

“Oh,” Drew said. There was a long pause, then he said, “Yes. Thank you for letting me know.”

And with those words, Margot knew that Griff was out and Seth was, most likely, in. She could call Edge that very night and tell him that she’d worked her magic. She had single-handedly landed Seth LeBreux a job he didn’t deserve.

“You were the better candidate,” Margot said. “And I stole that job from you.”

“You did,” Griff said. “You did. God, I can’t believe it.”

“I did,” Margot said. “Professionally, it was abominable. I hate myself for it.”

Griff tented his hands and bowed his head. “Jesus,” he said. A string of seconds passed, then he said, “And you did it for some guy? Some guy you thought you were falling in love with?”

“Yes,” Margot whispered.

“You know what that makes you?” he asked.

“A tool,” she said. “It makes me a tool.”

Griff stood up and stared at the brick facade of the Pacific National Bank. Nantucket was an old place; no doubt endless dramas had taken place on Main Street, countless treacheries, and here was one more. What Margot had done was monumentally bad. Bad, bad, bad.

“I liked you,” Griff said. “I wanted to be impressive and win that job for you. And then, when I got signed off and you weren’t the one who did it, I was relieved. Because I didn’t want to have to see you after I’d been cut.”

“I didn’t do the signing off because I couldn’t face you,” Margot said. She had made Bev do the signing off for Griff, and Bev hadn’t wanted to do it, either. She had been incredulous that Tricom passed over Griff. She kept saying, It just doesn’t make sense.

“So the other guy got hired, then?” Griff said.

“No, actually,” Margot said. “They hired Nanette Kim. She lasted six weeks, then declared that Tricom was a hostile workplace for women and minorities. I tried to come back to you-I did, Griff-but you had already signed with Blankstar.”

Griff nodded. “Nice,” he said. He turned and started walking down the street. “I’ll see you around, Margot.”

Margot squeezed her hands together and watched his figure recede down the street. She was dying to follow him; she was scrambling for the words that would make him forgive her. But those words didn’t exist. He had made one small tactical error-he had given Margot something to ridicule-and Margot had turned it into a deal breaker to advance her own romantic agenda.

If Griff wanted to, he could call Miller-Sawtooth and speak to Harry Fry and relay the details of their conversation. Margot wouldn’t get fired, but she might get disciplined. She almost wanted Griff to call, she wanted to be punished, she wanted him to get even-but she knew he wouldn’t. He was too good a guy. And he had just done the exact thing she’d feared and walked out of her life, which felt like punishment enough.

Margot rose from the bench. Her feet, in her dyed-to-match pumps, were aching, and she slid the shoes off. Some nights had good karma and some nights were cursed, and this night had been cursed from the beginning.

The whole weekend had been cursed. Margot, with her perfect instincts, had been right to dread it.

As she turned the corner onto Orange Street, she saw a figure walking toward her-a man, alone, and she filled with dread. Not possible. But yes.

He called out, “Margot?”

She knew she should walk past him, but he stopped, and instinctively she did, too.

“Have you seen Rosalie?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Your father kicked us out of the wedding,” Edge said. “Rosalie was mortified. She doesn’t get it, and I can’t explain it to her. She thinks Doug kicked us out because he doesn’t approve of her and me.”

“Oh,” Margot said. She was close enough to Edge to smell him. He was wearing Aventus; she would know the scent anywhere. Margot couldn’t believe it. He was wearing the scent she’d bought for him-finally!-but he was wearing it for Rosalie. Edge was a cheese rat, but Margot was too worn out to fight with him. “Why don’t you just tell Rosalie the truth?” she said. “Tell her about me.”

“I can’t,” he said. “She’ll leave me. Of course, after tonight, she might leave me anyway.” He gave Margot a weak smile, and Margot was surprised that he didn’t seem more concerned, but that was how Edge was with women-easy come, easy go. If Rosalie left, he would meet someone else, perhaps someone even younger and more inappropriate, whom he would marry and then divorce. Margot was fortunate to have escaped getting in any deeper. In her head she knew this, and she wondered if someday her heart might follow.

“See you, Edge,” she said. She leaned in and gave John Edgar Desvesnes III, her fifty-nine-year-old sometime lover, a kiss good-bye, which really was exactly that, and then she walked barefoot up the street toward home.

The Video

Back when Daddy and I were married, there was no such thing as videotaping a wedding. Some people we knew did home movies, but my mother thought this was in poor taste. I haven’t often agreed with my mother, but I am tempted to here. Do I love the idea of some guy with a video camera following your every move over the course of your wedding weekend? Not really. Do I think you’ll ever pull the video out to watch with Intelligent, Sensitive Groom-to-Be on your anniversary, or inflict it on friends? No, I don’t. But there is a part of me now, as I’m lying in bed and I feel my body and mind slipping away, that would love nothing more than to have the chance to watch my wedding again.

I would love to see how young Daddy and I look.

And how happy.

He found Pauline lying in bed reading the Notebook. She was still in the cinnamon-colored dress, although she’d kicked off her shoes. She was on top of the covers on Doug’s side of the bed, and she was crying.

Doug had noticed Pauline missing after the throwing of the bouquet, but at that point, the traditional portion of the festivities was winding down, and many of Doug’s friends and Beth’s cousins were leaving, and Doug had to put in face time to say good-bye and remind everyone about the brunch in the morning. The band was still playing-Etta James’s “At Last,” and Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” These songs were thorns in Doug’s side. He couldn’t very well dance to them with Pauline, and yet he most certainly owed Pauline a dance. He hadn’t danced with her once all night.