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“And that’s why you love me,” she replied easily.
“Oh, is that why?” asked Luisa, but she was laughing.
“I knew there had to be a reason,” I said, but I was laughing, too.
A gust of frosty air rose up from the Bay just then, and we all shivered in our lightweight summer dresses. “We should get back to the party,” I said. “It’s freezing out here, and Peter’s probably wondering where I am.”
“And Ben’s probably wondering where you are, Hilary,” said Luisa pointedly.
“Probably,” said Hilary, but the mischievous smile was still there. “More importantly, I promised Iggie a dance.”
2
T he Forrests’ house was a three-story Victorian, painted pale yellow with glossy white gingerbread trim. It looked a lot like the house in Party of Five, which was rumored to be nearby—not that Peter or his parents had any idea what I was talking about when I asked. Still, I’d found myself half-expecting to run into Bailey or Charlie ever since we’d arrived the previous day, and Hilary and I debated the relative merits of the Salinger men on the walk back to the party. “Don’t forget Griffin,” she said. “Not a Salinger, but still hot.”
“As if I could forget Griffin,” I said.
“Who could forget Griffin?” said Luisa, but she was teasing us—she’d never seen even a single Party of Five episode. Except for college and law school, she’d lived most of her life on another continent, privy only to a sadly limited selection of high-quality American television. This didn’t bother her—I guessed it was hard to miss something unless you knew what you were missing, and sometimes I thought being culturally illiterate might have its advantages. I worried about the amount of space TV characters and plotlines occupied in my brain, not to mention the lyrics from eighties pop songs, especially when I was unable to remember other very basic things, like pretty much everything I learned in high school.
The party was in full swing when we slipped back in through the side door, with people chatting and mingling as they balanced drinks and plates of food from the buffet in the dining room. Peter and I hadn’t yet set a date for the wedding, but his parents had insisted on throwing us an engagement party in his hometown, particularly since we would likely get married in Ohio, where I grew up, or in New York, where we lived. Their idea of a “little” party was turning out to be good practice for a big wedding—they had a wide circle of friends, and over a hundred of them were here tonight. This didn’t even include the friends Peter and I had invited or the members of my family the Forrests had urged to make the trip west.
Fortunately, nobody seemed to have noticed our brief absence. Peter’s grandmother and my grandmother were exactly where they’d been fifteen minutes ago, seated together in the den and poring over old photo albums, each probably calculating whose family had more dominant genes, and Peter’s parents were busily introducing my parents to their friends. No mediation on my part seemed necessary, but there was too much fodder for embarrassment lurking in my childhood for me to be entirely comfortable with extended interfamily mingling.
We made our way to the rear of the house, where French doors opened out onto the deck and yard. A tent and a temporary dance floor had been spread over the grass and a band played a mix of songs from both the elder Forrests’ generation and our own. Either way, most of the “younger set,” as Susan Forrest put it, seemed to have gravitated toward the music. That might also have had something to do with the fact that the line at the bar was shorter here.
I paused at the top of the stairs leading down from the deck, scanning the crowd before locating Peter’s sandy head on the far side of the dance floor. Even after nearly a year together, my heart still did a little flip whenever I saw him across a room. Luisa and Hilary volunteered to bring me a drink, and I went to join him where he stood talking with a man and woman I didn’t know.
“Hey,” he said, leaning down to kiss me. “I’ve been looking for you. There are a couple of old friends from college I want you to meet. Rachel, this is Caroline Vail.”
The woman, an athletic-looking blonde with a kittenish face, clasped my hand in hers. “Call me Caro—everyone does. I’ve heard so much about you, I feel as if I know you already.” I was surprised she’d heard so much about me since I’d never heard a thing about her, but I smiled and said hello.
“And this is Alex Cutler.”
Alex was West Coast preppie, dressed in khakis, a navy blazer, and a button-down shirt open at the collar. His brown hair was cut short, and his blue eyes were friendly behind round, wire-rimmed glasses. “So you’re the woman who convinced Peter to cross over to the dark side,” he said.
“He means New York,” Peter said. “People out here have a hard time understanding why anyone would live anywhere else.”
Hilary appeared at my side with a wineglass in one hand and a martini glass in the other. She passed me the wine as Peter introduced her to Caro and Alex.
“You know, Hil, these two might be able to help with the article you were telling me about,” he told her. “Caro runs a public-relations agency that works with start-ups in the Bay area, and Alex is a venture capitalist in Palo Alto.”
“I’m working on a magazine piece about the newest wave of Internet companies and whether they’re for real or if it’s all just another bubble,” Hilary explained. “Some of these start-ups seem like nothing but hype.”
Caro laughed. “Well, I’m in the business of generating hype, but I like to think there’s substance behind some of it.”
“There’d better be, since I’m in the business of funding it,” said Alex.
“These two know everyone,” Peter assured Hilary. “We were all at Stanford together, and a lot of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their financial backers are Stanford alumni.”
“Peter and I were even frat brothers,” said Alex.
This was also the first I’d heard about Peter being in a fraternity, and it was a hard mental picture to draw—I’d never thought of him as the beer-pong type. “Were there beanies and paddling?” I asked. “Or just making pledges drink until they puked?”
“No, nothing like that,” said Peter, smiling and shaking his head. “It was just a bunch of guys hanging out. Not exactly Animal House. ”
Maybe the band caught his words, because a moment later they launched into the Isley Brothers’ version of “Shout.” The dance floor, sparsely occupied before, started to fill. And that’s when Iggie made his move.
“Hey there, homeys,” said his reedy voice from behind me. I’d greeted him earlier, but he’d arrived at the same time as a number of other guests, and I hadn’t been able to do more than say hello and hastily introduce him to Peter. Now I had the opportunity to better take in his attire, and it was interesting, to say the least. The Google guys, despite their multiple billions, had adopted a spare sartorial uniform that depended heavily on black T-shirts. Iggie, however, was staking out a more fashion-forward look, one that owed more to Versace than Banana Republic and involved a lot of purple velvet. I’d always thought velvet was a no-no in June, but maybe Iggie knew something I didn’t. And even if Iggie hadn’t been an old friend, he was still a potential client, which went a long way toward helping me overlook any questionable fashion statements.
“Hi, Iggie,” I said. “Having a good time?”
“The Igster always has a good time,” he said.
I was glad I wasn’t taking a sip of my drink, because white wine spurting out of my nose wasn’t the image I wanted Peter’s friends to take away from the evening. Peter made a choking noise that I knew was his way of trying not to laugh.
“Iggie, have you met Caroline Vail and Alex Cutler?” I asked.
“Sure. We’re like this.” He held up two fingers to indicate just how close they all were, and Caro and Alex smiled and nodded in agreement, but Iggie clearly wasn’t interested in talking to them or to Peter and me—he had a very different agenda. “Ready for that dance, Hilarita?”
When we were in college, Iggie had hit on Hilary with a single-minded perseverance that was staggering when you considered most of the time she didn’t pay him enough attention to notice he was hitting on her. But even without the imminent certainty of a billion-dollar bank account, Iggie had been sufficiently self-confident to keep trying. Now he appeared to be picking up where he’d left off, and tonight Hilary had an agenda of her own.
She drained the rest of her martini and handed me the empty glass. “Let’s do it,” she said, allowing Iggie to lead her onto the dance floor.
“‘The Igster’?” Peter said as soon as they were out of earshot. This time I was taking a sip of my drink, but I managed to swallow without incident. “Who does he think he is? Elmo?”
“That’s new since college,” I said. “He never used to refer to himself in the third-person, and definitely not as ‘the Igster.’”
“He’s famous for it out here,” said Alex, an expression of bemused tolerance on his face. “Or maybe notorious would be a better way to put it.”
“I handle public relations for Igobe,” said Caro, her own expression equally bemused. “And I’ve tried to give Iggie some tips on things like wardrobe and assigning nicknames to himself and others, but he likes to do things his way.”
“And except for the wardrobe and the nicknames, his way is usually right,” said Alex. “Which is why I put money into his company. My firm is Igobe’s biggest outside shareholder. I even helped him with his business plan back when he was just getting started.”
“So that’s how you two know him?” I asked. “Alex, you invested in his company, and Caro, you do his company’s PR?”
They nodded in unison, and I wondered if they were a couple. It was hard to tell from their body language, and there’d been nothing in Peter’s introduction to indicate one way or the other, but they shared a similar outdoorsy look, as if they spent a lot of time doing healthy things, like eating trail mix and training for triathlons.
Caro glanced toward the dance floor. “Oh,” she said, wincing. “I’ve tried to give Iggie some tips on dancing, too, but that doesn’t seem to have helped much, either.”
We all turned to look. The band had reached the slowed-down, writhing-on-the-floor part of “Shout,” but only Iggie felt it necessary to actually writhe on the floor. Hilary stood watching, her head cocked to one side and her expression unreadable, a rarity for her.
“The Igster seems to have a thing for Hilary,” said Peter. “Is it requited?”
“I hope not, especially since she’s supposed to be dating someone else right now,” I said. “I think she’s just trying to hit him up for an interview for her story. She said she was thinking of making Iggie and Igobe the focus. Although, it could be useful to have a friend who was married to a billionaire.”
“I wonder what ever happened to Iggie’s first wife,” said Alex. “She must be kicking herself for bailing before the payoff.”
“Iggie was married?” I asked in disbelief.
Caro smiled at my reaction, revealing perfect white teeth. “There’s a lid for every pot.”
“Who was his lid? Or pot?” My contact with Iggie had been limited since college, picking up only recently with the discussions about my firm potentially handling his company’s IPO, but I was still surprised to have missed an entire marriage, and it was hard to imagine anybody willing to put up with Iggie long enough to marry him.
“Believe it or not, her name was Biggie,” said Alex.
“Did she call herself the Bigster?” asked Peter.
Alex chuckled, but Caro shook her head. “It was a nickname—probably left over from not being able to say Elizabeth, or something like that, when she was little.”
“Or maybe Iggie made it up. Either way, it fit,” said Alex.
Caro leaned forward and lowered her voice as if she were imparting classified information. “Unfortunately, Biggie was a little on the heavy side.” She smoothed the pink silk sheath she was wearing over her own trim hips.
“A little?” repeated Alex. “A little on the obese side is more like it.” He held his arms out and puffed up his cheeks to indicate that Biggie was a sizable woman. I was still having a hard time adjusting to the idea of Peter in a fraternity, but picturing Alex engaged in raucous male-bonding hijinks was a lot easier.
“She really had a very pretty face underneath all that hair,” said Caro. “And she was supposed to be very bright. But the marriage didn’t last. I think they met when they were in graduate school at Berkeley, and then they worked together at Iggie’s first start-up, the one before Igobe.”
“The one that never really got off the ground,” said Alex.
“Whatever did happen to Biggie?” Caro mused. “I haven’t seen her since the divorce, and that must have been over a year ago. It’s as if she fell right off the planet—just disappeared.”
“Nothing that big could just disappear,” said Alex with another chuckle.
Caro changed the subject then, asking about our plans while we were in town, and I was happy to end the discussion of Iggie’s ex-wife before Alex could make any more cracks about the poor woman’s weight. As far as I was concerned, anyone who’d had the misfortune to be married to Iggie deserved our full sympathy. We chatted a while longer, but guests of honor were supposed to circulate, so Peter and I eventually excused ourselves and circulated, working our way methodically through the crowd of people outside. Then we headed inside, where he abruptly pulled me down a short passageway and into the small laundry room.
“Hi,” he said, wrapping his hands around my waist.
“Hi back,” I said, resting my hands on his shoulders.
“You look really pretty.”
“Thank you. You look really pretty, too.”
“Pretty wasn’t what I was going for, but I’ll take it. Want to make out?”
“Here?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Now?” I asked.
He nodded again.
“Okay.”
We emerged from the laundry room a few minutes later, but not before I’d made Peter promise me I didn’t look as if I’d just been making out with him in the laundry room. “I want to make a good impression,” I said.
“What are you talking about? Everybody already loves you.”
“Even your father?” Charles Forrest had a reserved air about him, and it made me nervous. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.
“Especially my father. He was singing your praises just this afternoon.”
“Seriously? What did he say?” I could always use an ego boost, regardless of my advanced level of emotional maturity.
“He said—what did he say?” Peter ran a hand through his hair, trying to remember the words, and I reached out to smooth the pieces of hair left standing straight up in the wake of his fingers. “I know. He said you were ‘idiosyncractic.’”
My hand dropped to my side. “‘Idiosyncractic?’”
“Sure.”
“‘Idiosyncratic’?” I repeated.
“Uh-huh. Ready to go?”
Idiosyncratic was not normal. In fact, idiosyncratic was pretty much the opposite of normal. It was a blood relative of eccentric, which was practically a euphemism for crazy.
It looked as if I still had a distance to go in convincing the Forrests I could blend gracefully into their normal family.
Back at the party, we ran directly into Ben Lattimer at the bar that had been set up in the living room. He’d exchanged his customary Levi’s for a suit in deference to the occasion, but while he looked as handsome as ever, he seemed somehow deflated. “Have either of you seen Hilary?” he asked.
“Um, I think she might be out back,” I said, wondering why I felt guilty when it was Hilary who was spending most of her evening with someone who wasn’t her boyfriend.
“Thanks. I’ll try to track her down.”
Peter and I watched Ben walk away. Even his broad shoulders seemed to slump. “I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my best friends,” I said, “but Hilary can be a menace. She comes on so strong, but then she leaves men hanging. And Ben’s a nice guy.”
“Ben is a nice guy, but he’s also a grown-up. If things with Hil don’t work out, he’ll get over it. And I know I shouldn’t say this about one of your best friends—and I like her, too—but with her track record, he’d probably be better off without her.”
Ben was a grown-up, and if he and Hilary were, in fact, headed for the rocks, Peter was right—he would get over it and likely be better off. She didn’t seem cut out for long-term relationships, and the longer Ben stayed with her, the more he’d get hurt. But I couldn’t help keeping an eye out for him for the rest of the evening. He was clearly in a vulnerable state, gun notwithstanding.
We caught up to him again an hour later, standing on the deck looking out at the tented dance floor. Hilary and Iggie were still dancing—at least, Hilary was dancing, and Iggie was moving with such frenzied energy that he even managed to hit the beat every so often. Ben stared at them as he sipped from a glass that looked and smelled like straight whisky.
“We were going to get some food,” Peter told him. “Are you hungry?”
“Come join us,” I urged.
“Thanks, but I’m not really in the mood,” Ben said, his eyes not moving from the dance floor.
The band wrapped up a spirited interpretation of “Love Shack” then announced that they would be taking a short break, and Hilary and Iggie left the dance floor and started in our direction. His arm was draped over her shoulders, which couldn’t have been comfortable given their difference in height, but he kept it there anyway.
“Excuse me,” said Ben. I thought he would go to intercept Hilary, but instead he headed back into the house.
“That’s not good,” said Peter.
“I wonder if I should say something to Hil,” I said, watching as she and Iggie made their way through the crowd.
“Have you ever said anything to her that influenced her behavior?”
