The Golden Boy, page 10
“I told you it would rain on Friday, didn’t I, Mrs. Hopkins?”
“Yes, Kelly, you did.”
“The prediction was rain, I said. Rain on Friday.”
“Hmm.”
“It’ll rain all weekend now. Maybe all next week too.”
“Hmm.”
“Well, we have to have rain once in a while. If we didn’t get rain, it’d get really dry.”
“Right.”
“Do you want me to clean out both powder rooms, Mrs. Hopkins?”
“Yes, Kelly.”
“Oh! Before I forget. You should get the tap fixed in the bar sink. It’s leaking.”
“I know.”
“It’s not too bad yet, but you know.”
“Hmm.”
“Better to get things fixed early, I always say, before they get worse, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you want the white guest towels in both powder rooms?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You sure you don’t want some green ones in the hall powder room?”
“Just the white ones, thanks.”
“The green ones look nice in there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about a mixture? Some green, some white.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t like green towels?”
“Oh, for crapsakes, Kelly! Just the white ones, please! White towels in both powder rooms,” she said, but there was no answer because Agnes had snapped and Kelly was offended.
There was a time when Agnes Hopkins was known for the fast and furious turnover of her household help, and in recent years she had tried to change this. And while it would always be difficult for her to deal with people from backgrounds similar to her own, she was determined to try. She had been the wife of a successful man for most of her life, but the Kellys of the world were a constant reminder that had she not married Stafford Hopkins, she would, in all likelihood, have been a Kelly herself. And that bothered her. Now, with a real Kelly slamming the vacuum cleaner around in the background too close to the vulnerable edges of the Oushak rugs, Agnes knew she would have to do something quickly to make amends.
“The white ones are better for company, that’s all, Kelly,” she said, and she tried to keep her voice friendly and light, but there was no response. “They’re so fresh looking,” she added. But still there was no response.
Agnes turned to smile at Kelly, who responded by giving Agnes what she hoped was a cool shrug of disinterest. She would not be bought off so easily. Not with a fake smile and a few smarmy words. Not when Mrs. Rich Bitch Hopkins was so nasty to her about her whoop-de-doo white towels.
“Hmm,” said Kelly.
Well, that’s it then, Agnes thought grimly.
Kelly would have to go—and the sooner the better. To hell with Cheryl Sasson and her toxic son and Stafford’s bloody foursome with Jim. Agnes would call the housekeeping agency on Monday and request somebody new, and that would be the end of this sullen woman who talked too much from Day Fucking One and never once folded the cabana towels the way she was told. But Agnes would not aggravate the situation by pushing Kelly too far just yet. No. Agnes would remain calm and pretend she hadn’t noticed any lack of respect in Kelly’s response. There was no point in firing her on the spot in any event. Not with the kitchen, two powder rooms, and the great room floor still left to do before the caterers arrived.
“How do you think my table looks, Kelly?” she asked, knowing Kelly would be humanly incapable of withholding an opinion so directly solicited. Kelly hesitated, then sauntered over to the dining room table where she stood, arms folded, studying the long table so beautifully set with the pale-ivory linens and gleaming porcelain.
“Aren’t the flowers gorgeous?” Agnes said.
She had had to dismantle the extravagant floral arrangements delivered earlier, and it had taken her most of the morning to do so. They were too tropically aggressive, she felt, to match the bleak mood of the day, though the sound and smell of rain were not without some appeal. The Kapalua florist was hideously expensive, and everyone said she was a flower genius, but there was something offensive about the profusion of flowers stuffed into the arrangements and Agnes didn’t like them. Smaller bunches of flowers, she decided, would cast an elegant, low-key look to the table and help create an interior atmosphere more in keeping with the rain.
“What do you think of these?” she had asked Stafford when the flowers arrived.
“What do I think?” he answered.
“Yes. What do you think?”
“About the flowers?”
“Yes. What do you think about the flowers?”
“Don’t you like them?”
“Stafford, please stop asking me a question every time I ask you one. Do you like all these flowers?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t know, Agnes.” And he left the room and her and the flowers and went back down the hall and up the hidden stairs to his office.
“Fine,” she said, but she said this quietly and after he left.
She would be patient with him, because he had been so upset about the letter and the children and God knows what else and there was no point in upsetting him further. It took a lot to derange a man like Stafford, and Agnes knew it would take him months to get over the memory of himself breaking down at their polished concrete kitchen island. Prodding him now would only delay the process, and she did not have the same desire to prolong his suffering she once had. She would be kind to him, and they would carry on with their lives on Maui as if nothing remarkable had happened. She would leave him alone and let him recover in his own time. And she would deal with the flowers herself.
She loved pulling the blooms free from their spongy base, laying them out on damp tea towels to sort through and recut. The Maui house had a massive glass cabinet recessed into the wall that separated the dining room from the bar area, and that was where her many beautiful plates, her glassware and crystal, and her most expensive vases were kept. Agnes treasured her collection and rarely let anyone else handle it. She decided she needed something really unusual for the flowers, and that would involve careful consideration of the dining room table.
The table was very long and narrow and designed specifically for the dining room, which was one of the few important rooms in the house that didn’t open directly onto the lanai. A private dining room, everyone agreed when planning the house, would allow for greater formality without sacrificing architectural integrity. Windows ran the length of the room, but they looked east and across the hills. On fine days, the view was beautiful, but with steady rain and low cloud cover, there was a flatness to the light, and it was better to lower the bamboo linen shades.
“Luxurious, masculine, and spare,” the designers had said, which had prompted Agnes to demand a built-in glass cabinet for her china collection.
“But it’s all wrong for the room,” they told her. “It’s an aesthetic interruption.”
“Well, it’s my dining room,” she had replied, “and I want to see my stuff in it.”
From this cabinet, Agnes selected twelve white bowls made from porcelain so fragile, it could be broken by the pressure of her fingers. In each shallow bowl she placed two or three flowers, lilies and pale orchids, cut to float freely. But was it too busy? she wondered. A table could move from simple to silly in the blink of an eye, and Agnes knew a poorly set table would not pass unnoticed by her friends. Should she add a sprig of eucalyptus to each bowl? Would the fragrance overpower or refresh?
After much deliberation, Agnes decided she was on the right track. The flowers worked. They were, in fact, quite beautiful and unusual, and the bowls looked stunning. The china was perfect, the silver gleamed, and the antique Danish frosted-crystal water goblets were just plain fabulous. Candles ran down the center of the table, each in a tiny dish spun from liquid glass by an artist in Los Angeles whose work was attracting some of the best shoppers in the city. Agnes knew the light would be lovely and soft when these candles were lit. It would illuminate her guests without challenging the work of anybody’s plastic surgeon.
“Well, Kelly?” she repeated, as if she were genuinely interested in the response. “How do you like the flowers?”
“They’re kind of dull, don’t you think?”
“Dull?”
“Yeah. You know, dull—bland. I mean, personally, I like color. I’m not afraid of color. I’d have something red,” she said, and she leaned forward and tapped the center of the table with a long, red fingernail. “Right there. Now, that would look good. A big bouquet of red flowers in the middle there. You’d have to get rid of some of those cereal bowls, though.”
“Right. Well, thank you, Kelly. I think that’s all for today.”
“I haven’t finished the rest of the rooms.”
“They’ll be fine. Oh, and Kelly?”
“What?”
“Make sure you shut the gate on your way out.”
Stafford’s calm retreat from Agnes and the ongoing activities of their household had done little to comfort him, but the thought of being petted and praised into some happier state right now made him feel vaguely sick. The news about Bobby’s grandchildren had dredged up unwelcome memories, and while he would try not to dwell on them, he knew they were unlikely to fade without some defensive maneuvering on his part. Agnes was right, of course. They couldn’t start collecting orphans at their age, no matter the circumstances. Agnes was clearly not cut out for motherhood, and on the few occasions he even thought about Callie anymore, it depressed him for days. They had been terrible parents, disconnected from everything except their mutual need to forget the past. And it was too late to do anything about it. It was too late for them and too late for Callie. He could stand at the gate and rage, or he could be rational and go on. The decision was his to make and he was determined to make it as a free man, not the boyhood victim of a few painful memories.
He would focus instead, he decided, on two things in the coming months that would buy him the time he needed until the inner walls of his life could be rebuilt. He would get serious about Aristotle. There would be no more pretense about the thesis and academia. Philosophy books had piled up around him and he had not read them with the kind of attention required to fool anyone who knew something about the subject. Knowing things in half measure bothered Stafford, and while it was easy to fool people who didn’t matter, it was impossible to fool people who did. The study of philosophy at a meaningful level would become the purpose of his life and he would not allow himself to be distracted by other matters. Philosophy would protect him, and it would occupy his thoughts, if not his dreams.
He would, however, stick by Agnes, and he would stop punishing her for being one of the few human beings on the face of the Earth who suspected how fragile he had become. She was a difficult woman in many ways, but she did not deserve to have her future rearranged by the misfortunes of others. Agnes had suffered enough, and if she had become a woman obsessed by the details of their munificent lifestyle, he was hardly in a position to judge.
We drank, he thought, from the same well.
He had played the sophist, but he had not lived it. The houses and holidays, and all the fine things they did and the wonderful things they owned, had given him as much pleasure as they had Agnes. He could drink his morning tea from a cheap cup, but he slept like a prince and he had no inclination to abandon his lifestyle now in pursuit of penury, having experienced it so thoroughly in his youth. The problem was that his shameful longing for happiness continued to complicate the intellectual clarity he needed to function, but none of that had anything to do with money. That money didn’t buy happiness was a hope held only by the middle class, who would always crave something to feel smug about. Stafford did not expect his money to buy happiness and he wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t. No, he would not allow himself to become a victim of sentiment and guilt, unraveled like a ball of twine for everyone to see. He had been married to the same strange woman for most of his life and he would remain married to her for the rest of it. She had, after all, literally thrown herself into the ocean to save him, and if she wanted to have a few shallow friends over for a nice evening, what was so wrong with that?
The letter, however, and its legal ramifications could not be ignored, and Stafford’s physical presence in the Napanee office of the lawyer handling the Shepherd estate was required. The estate consisted of four children with no money, no parents, and no property of any consequence, but Stafford would ensure the children’s financial needs were met, and he would do this out of genuine concern for them and his own, strangely undiminished, respect for the past.
It had taken him a day and a half to summon up the energy to make the call to Canada, but having done so, the rest of the arrangements fell quickly into place. He would fly to Los Angeles on Saturday and stay overnight at the apartment. He would fly to Toronto the next day, pick up a car, and drive to Kingston. A room had been booked at the Holiday Inn, which had a view of the lake and the island where Bobby Shepherd died.
It would be cold there, even in March, and the water in the harbor would still be frozen but no longer safe to walk on. He would stay one night in Kingston and drive to Napanee the following morning. His meeting with the Shepherds’ lawyer would begin at nine thirty and it was Stafford’s intention to handle the matter with the same expediency that had propelled him to the top of the television business. His flight schedule had been forwarded to the lawyer’s office to convey the brevity of his visit and the importance of having the paperwork ready for signature. He would drive straight back to Toronto after the meeting and he would catch the first flight home to Maui, because there was no reason for him to linger in Ontario.
His overnight bag was packed and in the trunk of his car. He would be up early, hours before Agnes, who would be tired after her party and want to sleep late. He had asked if she wanted to come with him, but only because they both knew she would not. She could visit LA for a few days, he said. It would be a break from Maui, and she could see some friends. Or Callie, he wanted to say but couldn’t.
“No, I don’t want to, Stafford. I don’t feel up to it. But thanks for thinking about me.”
“I always think about you, Agnes,” he said.
The dinner party began at six o’clock with the arrival of Jim and Cheryl Sasson and their houseguests: Jim’s older sister, Linda, and her recently divorced daughter, Jennifer. Cheryl had called a few days earlier to ask Agnes if she could bring the two extras, stressing there was absolutely no pressure from anyone at the Sasson household for Agnes to say yes unless she wanted to. Everyone would understand. Jim’s sister had, however, been a little down in the dumps since her husband’s cancer metastasized, and as if that wasn’t enough, Jennifer’s most recent divorce had gotten so nasty that Jim had to involve his own attorneys to protect the family from further exploitation. It had been an awful mess, but thank God Jim was as tough as he was, because Linda and her daughter were too trusting, and it made Jim mental! It had been Cheryl’s suggestion to fly them over for a week of sun and relaxation on Maui because Cheryl really did feel sorry for them, even if they had brought most of their problems on themselves, and Jim had agreed and even sent the jet to fetch them, but the truth was, he was so fed up with his sister and her silly daughter that Cheryl was exhausted trying to keep the peace and it had only been three days!
Jennifer, it seemed, was a pathetic loser who had married one darn fool after another and, at the sad age of forty-one, was not likely to change. She had started to pack on the pounds too, which both Cheryl and Linda agreed was going to be yet another problem.
“Well, hello there, handsome! Are we the first to arrive? We are! I knew it! Honestly! I told Jim we were early, but you know Jim. We’re all rushing around at the last minute in a panic and there’s Jim sitting in the car honking the horn. He still thinks he’s running the world! Oh, Agnes, the house looks fabulous. What on Earth have you done?”
“Nothing, Cheryl. I haven’t changed a thing.”
“You must be Linda. I’m Stafford.”
“And that’s Jennifer. Jim, introduce your sister and niece to Stafford.”
“You’ve met my sister before, haven’t you, Stafford?”
“No, I don’t think so. Have we met before, Linda?”
“Were you in Phoenix, maybe? We have a place in Phoenix.”
“Phoenix? I haven’t been to Phoenix in years.”
“Our golf club hosts an annual fundraiser for inner-city libraries. We get a lot of support from Hollywood. Jim and Cheryl always fly in for it. Maybe you came with them?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Linda, if he was in Phoenix for a golf tournament, don’t you think he’d remember?”
“Well, I thought maybe he might have come with you and Cheryl sometime, Jim. That’s all I was wondering.”
“We didn’t know them when we lived in Phoenix, Linda. We met them here. On Maui.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. Well then, I guess we couldn’t have met in Phoenix.”
“I’m Jennifer. Thanks for having me.”
“Jennifer’s from Seattle.”
“But she’s moving back to Phoenix.”
“Jennifer’s father hasn’t been well.”
“It must be very difficult.”
“You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Hopkins.”
“Oh heavens. Call me Agnes, dear.”
“Jim, you look like you could use a drink. The bar’s open.”
“I know what you’ve done. You’ve changed the rugs, Agnes.”
“No, really, Cheryl. Not a thing.”
