I reserved a table at Le Cirque, and a small suite upstairs at the Mayfair as well. I couldn’t be sure how Alexis would answer me, but it seemed wise to have a place ready, should bedding her be part of the evening. I had always avoided trading in futures, but this once it seemed reasonable.
By the middle of the week leading up to the Sunday that would tell my fate, I had everything ready. It remained only to await the event, and to prepare Mr. Theo’s engagement dinner.
In fact, I fully expected Alexis to turn me down. There are, however, many ways of declining, and many of those are postponements. She would decline, I would persist, and, with luck, eventually…
I opened the door on Wednesday morning to bring in the mail but found instead Miss Sarah, seated on the stoop, her dark head bent into her hands, her suitcase on the sidewalk. She looked up at me and her face was wet, as if she had just come in from the rain, although the sun shone on her. I looked more carefully. She was weeping. “Miss Sarah. Let me bring your suitcase in,” I said. “Excuse me, Mrs. Wycliffe.”
She preceded me into the house. “The suitcase goes upstairs, Gregor. To my room. And it’s Miss Sarah.”
I had to make up the bed, open the windows to freshen the air, and be sure the bathroom was properly supplied. By the time I got back downstairs, she was in the kitchen. The kettle was on the stove and she had a teapot out and a cup. “I’m looking for honey.”
“I’ll do that, miss,” I offered. “Would you like something to eat with your tea?”
She fidgeted with the teapot, with the cup and saucer, with the spoon. She wore a short black skirt and a black long-sleeved leotard. She wore a gold band on her left hand. “I’m not hungry.”
She took the top off the kettle. Looked in. Replaced the top. She moved the teapot around on the counter. And sighed. And squared her shoulders. And turned around to tell me. “I’ve left him.”
“Oh?” It didn’t seem kind to say that I’d guessed as much.
“I packed up everything that’s mine, and he’ll never have to know I was ever there.” She was resolute and brave.
“Ah,” I said.
“I thought”—her voice quivered, and she controlled it—“he loved me.”
“Ah,” I said, and the kettle whistled. She looked helplessly at it. I guided her to a chair and prepared the tea. She was weeping again, so I tactfully ignored her, except to put the box of tissues near to hand.
By the time the tea had steeped and her cup was poured, she had blown her nose and was ready to explain.
“He said, he thought I was good and pure and beautiful, but now he knows I’m a liar and a cheat. When I told him. Who I was. This morning, because I didn’t want to lie to him. I didn’t want to live a lie. He hadn’t even looked at the marriage license. He could have looked at it if he wanted to know, after I signed it. He asked me if I was really a dancer and I had to tell the truth. I couldn’t lie to him. So he walked out.”
“This morning?”
She nodded.
“Wasn’t he going to work?”
“Just walked out, without saying anything, and he didn’t come back and he hasn’t called. He said I never loved him because you don’t lie to someone you love. What does a lie matter, if you love someone? Love matters, that’s what matters.”
I went to the phone and pushed the button that would connect me to Mr. Theo’s office.
“I tried to tell him,” and tears were once again running down her cheeks. “I tried, but he wouldn’t believe me. If I didn’t love him, I wouldn’t care enough to lie to him. He said that was just the kind of argument he’d expect me to use.” She pulled out tissues.
“I wonder if you might come home, sir,” I asked. “Miss Sarah is here, in some distress.”
“He’s spoiled everything,” Miss Sarah wailed.
Mr. Theo apparently heard that. “I’m on my way.”
“We were like Romeo and Juliet,” she cried, “but he never loved me.”
“Your brother is on his way, miss,” I promised her.
That stopped her tears. “Theo’s why Brad hates me. I don’t want to see Theo. I don’t want him to come here.”
“This is his house,” I reminded her gently. “He is your brother.”
“But he doesn’t understand. Nobody understands.” She lifted her face. “I could learn how to dance. I could become a dancer.”
“If I may say something?” I asked her.
“As long as you don’t tell me you told me so.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” I told her, “did not live happily ever after.”
It was the wrong thing, absolutely wrong. Her expression crumpled into misery, her face fell forward onto the table, and she sobbed.
Miss Sarah moped and wept for most of that day and the next, until eventually she arrived at sorrow, with an occasional backsliding into misery. I put her to work and by Saturday morning we were an efficient couple, I forming pâte à choux for profiteroles, she chopping onions and carrots and celery for the base on which I would roast veal.
I did feel sorry for her. She was so young, and the young man was little older. I could see why certain societies married young women to older, more patient men; even though it established patterns for which all women were still paying the price, there was something to be said for it. Unless the society could learn to do better by its young men, unless society could come to see how little it makes of its men. Women, at least, are trying to look out for themselves.
“You mustn’t cry like that, Miss Sarah,” I said.
“How am I supposed to cry?”
“Your mother will be sure to think there’s something wrong.”
“There is something wrong. Everything’s wrong.”
“Yes, miss,” I said. “But if you don’t want your parents to know, if you don’t want everyone to know, you’re going to have to do a better job of pretending.”
“I know.” She took another carrot to hack at and hacked energetically. “I will try. Mornings are the worst, because it’s so…sad. I’m twenty and I’ve been happy for three weeks, and now it’s over. That’s sad, isn’t it? I’m never going to be happy again.” She scraped carrot chunks into a waiting bowl and took up celery. “I wish I’d never met him, I really do. He said he never wanted to see me again. How could he say that?”
Mr. Theo entered on the question. “How could who say what?” One look at his sister answered him. “Oh. Brad again. Never mind, Sarah, you’ll forget him.”
“Never.”
“I don’t know what you saw in him anyway. He’s a stick and a prude and not nearly good enough for you. Is everything set for tonight, Gregor?” Mr. Theo was dressed for a game of tennis. He picked up a celery stalk and munched on it.
“At least Brad’s not a—a womanizer. You wouldn’t find Brad getting phone calls from women who won’t leave their names.”
Mr. Theo turned her around by the shoulders. “What phone calls?”
“While you were out with your fiancée.” Miss Sarah purred, a kitten imitating a cat, “The Voice.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did. Mr. Bear.” Anger at least distracted her from her own sorrows. “It’s sickening, Theo. I have half a mind to tell.”
“Don’t even think of it, Sarah.”
“Anyway, I don’t think The Voice believed that I’m your sister.”
“And I bet you did everything you could to convince her.”
“Well honestly, Theo,” Miss Sarah pointed out, “she sounds…You know what she sounds like.”
I put the laden tray into the oven and set the timer.
“At least she’s no hypocrite,” he said.
It was a genuine brother-sister spat, the kind of fight you could only have with a brother or sister, saying the kinds of things you would only say to a brother or sister. If you said them to anyone else, it would be the end of the relationship. For the first time in fifteen years, I found myself thinking longingly of family life.
“And just what do you mean by that?” Miss Sarah demanded.
“You know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean. I mean calling a spade a spade. I mean calling it lust, Sarah. Not dressing it up and calling it love, marriage. Then sighing and weeping and doing this great tragedy act when it goes bad. You can mess up your own life, but don’t go messing around in mine.” He strode out of the room. We heard the front door slam.
“But he isn’t being fair to her, is he, Gregor?”
I didn’t see that it mattered but didn’t say so.
“I don’t know why she’s marrying him anyway. She’s awfully nice, and Theo’s—he can be a bully.”
“Perhaps she loves him,” I suggested.
“I don’t think so. I think it’s more a matter of getting so old that it’s now or never for her. He won’t be faithful.”
“Perhaps that isn’t what matters to her,” I said. “Besides, maybe he will.”
“I’d die if I thought Brad—” She gulped, and started again. “But that’s what men do, isn’t it. Instead of crying all morning, they sleep around. He hasn’t called, and he could figure out where I am. So he doesn’t love me. Theo’s right. He never did.”
She was reducing herself to tears again. I’d never been an older brother before, but I thought that since she needed one, I ought to attempt it.
“Try to see it as he must, Miss Sarah. Imagine how humiliating it would be if you came to the rescue and rode off with the little goose girl—only to discover that she had never needed your help at all, and wasn’t even a goose girl. Some people don’t like being laughed at, miss.”
“But I didn’t laugh,” she protested. “What am I going to do, Gregor?”
“First, finish the vegetables, so I can start them browning. Then, spend the afternoon getting pretty, for dinner. It’s a dinner with your brother’s fiancée and her parents, and your parents, where you’re going to be young and carefree, and nobody will suspect how you really feel.”
“I think I’ll wear black.”
“Wear yellow,” I advised, “or something flowery, floating, or a bright blue. Remember, it’s a masquerade. The masquerade is that you are young and irresponsible and silly.”
I’d captured her imagination. “I’ll try. I don’t think I can do that though.”