Beautiful Day(21)

That was how Margot and Edge had ended up together: Ellie and Audrey, both six years old, had taken ballet class at Mme Willette’s studio on Eighty-second and Riverside. Mme Willette’s ballet school was expensive, rigorous, and impossible to get into, but Margot had heard excellent things about it. Mme Willette held her girls to high standards—perfect posture, perfect French pronunciation, not a strand of hair escaping the bun. At the open house, Margot had been captivated by Mme Willette and became determined that Ellie should study with her. She had mastered the admissions game after getting three kids into Ethical Culture Fieldston, and she pursued the prestigious ballet class relentlessly.

Ellie had thrived under Mme Willette’s discipline. She quickly bonded with all the girls in her class, and her favorite ballet friend was a tiny girl with black hair and Asiatic eyes named Audrey. Margot had glimpsed the mother a few times—an elegant, lean woman of indeterminate ethnicity. Ellie begged for a playdate with Audrey, and she claimed that Audrey wanted a playdate with her, but the odd and awkward thing about socializing children in Manhattan was that none of the parents knew each other. And quite frankly, Margot was intimidated by Audrey’s mother. She looked like she lived downtown, although it just as easily could have been Sutton Place. Margot didn’t know if she was a Little Red Schoolhouse mom or a Bank Street mom or a Chapin mom. She might have asked, but she didn’t have the energy, the output, required to forge any new alliances.

And then, one week, Margot went to pick up Ellie from Mme Willette’s—and there, in the foyer, waiting for the class to be let out, was Edge Desvesnes.

“Hi!” Margot had said, her voice containing amazement and confusion. Edge was way out of context here; it was like seeing her dentist at the union   Square Greenmarket, or her childhood minister, Reverend Marlowe, at the hardware store.

Edge had turned to look at her, but she could tell he was having a hard time placing her, as well.

She said, “Margot Carmichael.”

“Oh, my!” he said, and they embraced.

Margot had known Edge Desvesnes since she was a teenager. He and his first wife, Mary Lee, used to come to barbecues at the Carmichael house in Darien. There had been a time when Margot was still in braces and glasses and bad-hair-and-worse-skin when she had a terrible crush on Edge Desvesnes. She remembered once passing hors d’oeuvres at a party that her parents were throwing. After she had served Edge, he had turned to Doug and said, “That’s a beautiful girl you’ve got there, partner. Those eyes.”

And Doug had said, “Don’t I know it.”

Margot had blushed hot and retreated to the kitchen. No one had ever called her “beautiful” before. The boys in Margot’s class were ruthless about her looks. That Mr. Desvesnes, who was cool and funny and cute, had called her “beautiful” was enough to turn Margot’s world upside down.

Beautiful. She had looked at herself in the mirror for months after that, wondering: Am I beautiful? And what had he meant about her eyes?

Margot had seen Edge Desvesnes periodically in the years that followed. He came to dinner to celebrate her parents’ twentieth anniversary, he pulled into the driveway to honk for Doug when they went golfing, he attended Kevin and Beanie’s wedding. Before she ran into him outside the dance class, the last time Margot had seen Edge Desvesnes was at her mother’s funeral. Edge had served as a pallbearer. In Margot’s memory, he had been with a woman, but Margot had been too racked with grief and swarmed by people to notice which woman. She had heard through her father that Edge had divorced, then married, then divorced, then married—but amid the drama of her own life, Margot hadn’t been able to keep up.

Seeing him again so unexpectedly, Margot felt as flushed as she had been at fourteen. She said, “You’re not here for…”

“Waiting for my daughter,” he said.

“Your daughter?” In Margot’s memory, Edge had sons. Two with the first wife, one with the second, or the other way around. Did she remember hearing about a daughter?

“My youngest,” he said. “Audrey.”

Margot said, “Audrey is your daughter? Ellie loves Audrey.” Margot swallowed. She thought of the Indochine beauty. “So your wife…”

“My ex.”

“Oh,” Margot said. “Well, I’ve been meaning to approach her about getting the girls together. I had no idea… I mean, I didn’t know she was your daughter.”

At that moment, the door to the studio opened, and the girls filed out in graceful silence. Ellie reached for the cold water bottle in Margot’s hand. Audrey wrapped her arms around Edge’s waist and squeezed.