Conspiracy Theory(19)

Charlotte made a signal in the air, just as Tony was looking up. She saw him freeze momentarily, then lean toward Bennis’s foreign-looking friend, then straighten up again. He did not look happy, but Charlotte did not much care if he was happy. He came toward her.

“Well?” he said, drawing up next to the buffet table.

“Let’s go out to the foyer for a moment,” Charlotte said. “I do think it would be in better taste if we didn’t have full-blown arguments in the middle of the ballroom with Bennis Hannaford and her pet Italian for an audience.”

“He’s not an Italian,” Tony said patiently. “He was born right here in Philadelphia. He graduated from Penn. And from the Harvard Business School. Which is what we were talking about, before you decided to drag me away for no purpose.”

Charlotte was moving, slowly but inexorably. When they got to the ballroom door, she edged into the foyer and watched Tony edge with her. “He’s some kind of foreigner,” Charlotte said, “and not the right kind, either, and you know it. He looks Jewish.”

“He looks like Harrison Ford, who is about as Jewish as New England boiled dinner. And I’d lay off the nonsense about who’s Jewish. These days, it’s likely to get you into a lot of trouble, and not with the journalists, either. It would be a fairly intelligent idea if you didn’t offend the people at Goldman, Sachs. What’s all this about, Charlotte?”

Charlotte opened the front door and went out. It was freezing cold out there, and her gown was both backless and strapless, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t have stood being in that stuffy house one more moment. She felt as if she were suffocating to death.

“There’s nobody from Goldman, Sachs here,” she said, looking down at the lights stretched along the edges of the drive to guide the cars. A man from the caterers was walking along the edge of the walkway, wearing white tie and tails and white gloves, to open the car doors as they came up. There would be somebody around to park the cars too. Nobody was coming in yet. The invitations said eight, but nobody would show up exactly on time, because nobody ever did. This was the part of the evening she always hated most. She wished people would grow up. All this not wanting to be the first to arrive. It was behavior unworthy of ten-year-olds.

“Charlotte?” Tony said.

“I just had to get out of the damned house. Look, there’s a car. Maybe it’s one of your people from Goldman, Sachs. I’ve got a headache. If he isn’t Italian, what is he?”

“I told you. He’s American. He was born in—”

“Philadelphia. God, I hate Bennis Hannaford. I always did. Everybody always did. She was always such a—”

“I always thought she was very beautiful.”

“I’ll bet anything you want she’s shacking up with him,” Charlotte said. “It’s just the kind of thing she would do. She was in People magazine, did I tell you that? As if she were some hopped-up pop star pushing a record.”

“She was a novelist pushing a book.”

“She’s not a novelist. She’s not like Jonathan Franzen or Anne Tyler. She writes—well, I don’t know what you call them. Pulp. About elves.”

“Fantasy,” Tony said.

The car that had been coming down the drive pulled to a stop at the curb. The man in the white gloves leaped forward to open the door in the back closest to the curb. If the car had been an ordinary sedan, driven by whoever owned it, the car-parking man would have come out to take the keys, but it was a limousine—rented, Charlotte could tell from the license plate—and the driver would take it wherever it had to go. The man who stepped out onto the drive was heavyset and tired-looking. The woman who followed him was tired-looking too, but so thin it seemed as if there was nothing at all between her skin and bone. Tony frowned. This was Henry and Delia Cavender. Tony hated them.

“Charlotte,” Delia Cavender said, pecking at the air the way she’d seen somebody do in a movie once. Maybe she was reading the novels of Dominick Dunne. Charlotte pasted a smile on her face and did her best.

“Delia, what a wonderful jacket. You’re the first ones here, except of course for Bennis and her gentleman friend. Henry, you look wonderful.”

“Henry,” Tony said.

“Tony,” Henry said.

Charlotte could not, for the life of her, remember what Henry worked at. He was some kind of lawyer, but she didn’t remember what kind. It was like it was in that Hamilton cartoon. Everybody was a lawyer.

Another car was coming down the drive, and right behind it there were two more.