Chapter 1
On a gray November day, Dominique Dupont sat looking out the window of her office
on Fifty-Seventh Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, on the forty-fifth floor, with a
splendid view of Manhattan. She was the founder and designer of Dupont Designs, now
in its thirty-fourth year. She designed the most beautiful, most expensive wedding gowns
in the bridal business. They were sold all over the world, in the finest stores, at
breathtaking prices. Her bridal gowns were considered almost as fine as haute couture
gowns in Paris, where she had trained. She had been scribbling sketches of bridal
gowns since she was five years old. She had been obsessed with brides as a child.
There was an even more rarefied echelon of her designs, called Platinum Label.
Presidents’ daughters and royals had been ordering her gowns for years, with special
designs created just for them by Dominique herself.
Tall, blond, and unfailingly chic, she had a good head for business as well as real
talent as a designer. Her financial advisors had helped her set up licensing agreements
for high-end china, crystal, and linens, luxury items relating to brides and weddings,
which were extremely lucrative. And she had written several coffee table books about
her most beautiful brides, her most lavish weddings, and her most exquisite table
settings and flower arrangements. Dominique Dupont was synonymous with luxury and
flawless taste, and the most elegant weddings.
She had just turned sixty, and didn’t like it, but she didn’t look her age. She took
ballet and yoga classes, and had the same figure she’d had at thirty. She was divorced,
with three adult children, Tommy, Felicity, and Violet. Originally French, she had the
faintest trace of an accent, although she spoke English fluently. Her mother,
MarieAurélie de Palme, was the only daughter of impoverished French aristocrats, and was
exceptionally beautiful. At twenty-four, after a brief modeling career in Paris, Marie-
Aurélie had become the acknowledged mistress of a famous French financier, Armand
Dupont, and as was still a common occurrence in France, Dominique’s father had
remained in an unhappy marriage and had had mistresses for years. There were those
among the most staunchly elite people of French high society who did not receive
Dominique’s mother, but for the most part, Marie-Aurélie and Armand were accepted as
a couple, and welcomed by almost all of Paris society. Official mistresses were no
longer considered scandalous. Marie-Aurélie had been a well-brought-up young woman
from a respectable aristocratic family with no money. Her father was a banker and her
mother didn’t work. Her parents were outraged by their daughter’s choice of lifestyle
when she became Armand’s mistress. She was with him because she loved him, not for
the money, or what he gave her. Her parents shunned her for the rest of their lives,
although she was their only child. They refused to see her or speak to her and were
ashamed of her, which was painful for her, and brought her even closer to Armand.
Marie-Aurélie was an enchanting young woman, deeply happy with the man she
loved, who adored her and was a loving, kind, generous partner. He lavished affection
on her and showered her with gifts. She had a lifestyle she wouldn’t have had
otherwise, in a beautiful hôtel particulier he bought for her on the rue de Grenelle in the
7th arrondissement. They lived there quite openly, while Armand’s wife turned a blind
eye, as she always had.
Dominique was born a year after they met, when Marie-Aurélie was twenty-five and
Armand was sixty-five. They weren’t married, and he didn’t divorce for her. He had
three older sons from his marriage, and Dominique was the joy of his life. He was a
wonderful father, and acknowledged her legally at birth. She bore his name, and her
three much older half brothers didn’t approve of her, particularly when she inherited her
fair share, a quarter of their father’s fortune. They were still alive, two in their late
seventies now. Dominique’s oldest brother, Tristan, was eighty-two. She hadn’t seen
them since their father’s funeral forty-seven years before, when Dominique was
thirteen. Two of them, Alexandre and Tristan, still lived in Paris, and the youngest,
Grégoire, in Bordeaux, where he ran a famous winery he had inherited from his mother.
Armand had a vast fortune and had provided for Dominique handsomely when she was
born, as well as for her mother. Marie-Aurélie was set for life and treated with respect
for all of her years with him, although they never married. Armand had told her right
from the beginning that he would never divorce. As staunch Catholics, no one in his
family had ever divorced. Marie-Aurélie was eighty-five now, and still lived in the
house Armand had bought her years before, filled with beautiful paintings he had given
her for special occasions, Degas, Monet, Corot. She was an important donor to the arts,
and had acquired great knowledge on the subject.
Marie-Aurélie had been “unofficially” widowed at thirty-eight. She had honored
Armand’s memory since then, still in love with him so many years later. Her mother was
still a young woman in her forties when Dominique had become aware of a discreet
man in her mother’s life, an artist, but Marie-Aurélie had never married him, and he had
eventually given up and married someone else.
Dominique visited her mother in Paris when she could, and spoke to her often. She
was in good health and had all her faculties at eighty-five. She led a quiet life and
appeared socially once in a while, going to the opera and ballet and important museum
events. Armand’s wife had died not long after he did, but Marie-Aurélie was
remembered as his widow, having been seen with Armand most often in their years
together. There had never been any secrecy about their relationship, or their daughter, in
Paris. Most people had long since forgotten that they had never married and that she had
been his mistress and not his wife. And Marie-Aurélie didn’t seem to mind.
All of Armand’s sons were respectable and important. Dominique’s middle half
brother Alexandre had been prime minister. He could probably have been president if
he had run, but he’d chosen not to. He had skeletons in his own closet by then, and opted
for discretion rather than scandal. Dominique heard from Tristan, her oldest brother,
every year at Christmas, although not from the others, who resented her equal portion of
their father’s inheritance even forty-seven years later. They were still angry at her, in
defense of their mother and humiliated by their father’s unabashed pride in his mistress
and love child. Dominique had been aware of their unmarried state and embarrassed by
it growing up.
The fortune she had inherited from her father had allowed her to set up her own
business at a young age. She had gone to the best schools as a young girl, and had
wanted to be a designer of bridal gowns even as a child. She went to New York from
Paris to attend Parsons School of Design, and after she graduated, she went back to
Paris and apprenticed for three years in the haute couture ateliers of Chanel, then
returned to New York at twenty-five to put her business together. After careful research
and planning, she had started the business in New York at twenty-six, without investors,
financing it herself, from her inheritance. By the time she was thirty, Dupont Designs
was a solid success, based on her talent, not her money. Her bridal gowns were
magnificent, and the business had built steadily from there. Dominique had a quiet grace
about her, wasn’t arrogant, and worked very diligently. Her success was well deserved
and hard-earned.
When she got to New York at twenty-five, she sought the financial and investment
advice of an ambitious, well-respected investment advisor on Wall Street, Andrew
Walker. He was older than she, though not as old as her father. He was forty-two years
old, he courted her energetically, and she married him at twenty-six, shortly after she
opened her business. They had a small ceremony attended by her mother, who flew over
from Paris for the wedding, and a few close friends. She had no desire for a big dress
or a showy wedding. She wore one of her own designs, a simple ivory lace dress
inspired by a vintage design from 1925.
Dominique ran Dupont Designs with her husband’s advice and a solid business plan.
A year after she launched her company, she had their first child at twenty-seven, a boy,
Thomas Dupont Walker. She had bought a discreet brownstone house in the East
Seventies when she arrived, where they’d lived when they were married, and where she
still did, long after their divorce. She had married Andrew because he was intelligent,
well-educated, from a good family, and he reminded her of her father. But Andrew was
nothing like Armand. Andrew’s indiscretions were legion, and while she worked hard,
he played hard, collecting new clients for his investment management firm. He wasn’t
after her money. He had his own, although her fortune was far larger than his, but he was
always in hot pursuit of new clients, and his flings and affairs were frequent and
indiscreet. Knowing her history, he had assumed she would tolerate his cheating on her
since her own parents had never married. But her father had been faithful to MarieAurélie.
Andrew never was to Dominique from the earliest days of their marriage. He
found the restrictions of marriage suffocating. He had his first notorious affair months
after they married, when Dominique was pregnant, and his second one right after
Tommy was born. She lost count of his infidelities after that. But marriage was sacred
to her, because of her own history, and she didn’t want to divorce. She tolerated
Andrew’s behavior for as long as she could. Andrew was forty-three when their son
was born, and it became rapidly obvious that he wasn’t cut out to be a husband or a
father. Dominique loved her babies and her business, but Andrew was a severe
disappointment as a husband. He shattered her dreams and his blatant affairs were a
deep humiliation to her.
She had three babies in five years, and divorced Andrew in six. Thomas was rapidly
followed by two daughters, Felicity and Violet. Dominique worked even harder at her
wedding dress business after the divorce, and was a talented designer with a strong
work ethic.
She didn’t have time for romance or dating in the early years of establishing her
business when her children were small. Andrew hardly saw them, and had no interest in
them. She was thirty-two when she got divorced, and had little time for a social life,
building the bridal empire she was known for now, and outstripping her competitors,
while still paying close attention to her children.
A dozen years had flown by since her divorce, when she met William Smith. He was
the attorney for her business. She was forty-four when they met, and Bill was forty-six,
brilliant, vital, serious, kind, with children of his own, devoted to his family, with a
marriage that had never worked. She and Bill fell in love, which came as a surprise to
both of them. They struggled with what to do about it. Dominique had never wanted to
be in the same situation as her mother, a married man’s mistress, and this wasn’t France.
They were extremely discreet, but they fell into an affair, deeply in love, and carved out
time with each other whenever they could. They had long since settled into spending
two nights a week together. When her children were younger, Dominique and Bill spent
the night at a hotel, leaving her children with a nanny. Now that the children were grown
up and gone, Bill stayed at her apartment, and her children never knew. He was a
successful attorney, head of his own law firm, and advised her in all her business
dealings. She never pressured him to divorce. Over the years, their children had grown
up and he was still married. The affair had continued for sixteen years. It wasn’t what
Dominique had planned for her life, but it met their emotional needs at the time, and
seemed like enough. His wife pointedly ignored what she suspected and preferred to
stay married to a man who didn’t love her and whom she didn’t love, rather than rebuild
her life. She liked the status of being married, not the man. Bill was sixty-two now, and
he and Dominique still thought they might live together one day, but the right time had
never come. Bill’s youngest son had just left for college and had been only two years
old when they met. Hers were old enough to get to know him and were attached to him
as a reliable and warm constant and a close affectionate family friend they liked. He
was the only father figure in their life.
Andrew, her ex-husband, was seventy-six now, still chasing young women, and as
disengaged from his children as he always had been. They were adults now and he had
never been there for them. He was still working as an investment advisor, and still
constantly involved with women less than half his age. He was in good health and full
of energy. He only dated women the age of his children or younger. Dominique wasn’t
close to him, and didn’t respect him. She hadn’t since the divorce or even before. She
loved and respected Bill, after sixteen years. And she understood her mother better
now, although her situation with Dominique’s father had been more shocking and more
public but also less complicated, since they had been so open about their relationship
and it was more socially acceptable in France than in the U.S. Dominique and Bill had
kept their relationship hidden for sixteen years, except with close friends, and her
children suspected but still weren’t sure if they were lovers or just friends. What they
shared privately, and the deep feelings they had for each other, satisfied both of them
most of the time. It seemed a little late now for him to divorce in his sixties. His
marriage had been an emotional wasteland forever, but their lives were entwined. His
wife stayed at their Connecticut home most of the time, and had her own life and
friends, and he worked in the city and spent nights with Dominique during the week
when he could, now that the children had grown up. For years they tried to figure out
what to do about it. In the end, they did nothing. He stayed married, and they met in
secret for stolen moments. It was far from ideal, but their attempts to break off their
relationship never worked. They loved each other, so the relationship had lasted for
sixteen years, with all its weaknesses and strengths.
Her mother asked her frequently if she was happy, when they saw each other, and
Dominique always said she was, and most of the time it was true, although not always.
Legally and in fact, Bill belonged to someone else, and it bothered her at times, but at
the same time, she had freedom and independence to run her life and business as she
chose to, which she might not have had if she and Bill were married. And she worked
hard. Her children were well aware of Bill as a good friend and liked him. He was a
more reliable presence than their own father, the only man close to them. His own
children didn’t know about the affair, out of respect for his wife. They thought
Dominique was a client of his law firm, and a friend. They had no idea of how much
Dominique meant to him, but her children suspected that there was more between them
than they admitted. Somehow Dominique and Bill had gone from year to year loving
each other in secret, and she had accepted what he could give her, however limited their
time together. They saw each other once or twice a week. She no longer expected him to
leave his wife and marry her. She had given up that hope years before and told herself it
didn’t matter to her. And most of the time she thought it was true. The subject didn’t
come up anymore. She was just happy to be with him when they could be, she ran her
business with an iron hand, and her children were adults and busy too. It seemed like
enough to her, just as Armand had been enough for Marie-Aurélie, even though they
never married. But they had been able to live together. Bill and Dominique couldn’t.
Dominique had seen how happy they were when she was growing up, and they were
inseparable. Their circumstances had been acceptable in France and wouldn’t have
been in the States. Bill and Dominique had to remain hidden in order to avoid a scandal,
which would have impacted them, their children, his wife, and even her business.
Dominique said pubicly that marriage wasn’t important to her since her parents had
been happy without it. She had a full life, children she loved, a satisfying career and
extremely successful business, and a man she loved in secret. It was enough for her. She
regarded marriage as a sacred state and never wanted to be responsible for destroying
his. The love she had lavished on Bill had made his dry, empty marriage tolerable for
the last sixteen years. Ironically, without Dominique in his life, he could never have
stayed married to Eileen for as long as he had. Dominique gave him everything he
needed emotionally, and he was a stable force in her life. She knew that she could count
on him, even though officially he belonged to someone else. In her own way, she had
followed her parents’ model, although at a different time, in a different country and
culture. In America, it would have made sense, and been less scandalous, if Bill had
gotten divorced and she weren’t his mistress. But it had never seemed like the right time
to shake up their families, admit to their affair, and turn their lives upside down, so they
had chosen to continue loving each other in secret. It was the one thing she had sworn
she would never do, be a married man’s mistress like her mother, and yet she had.
Dominique wondered about it now. But even with his youngest son, Tyler, having
left for college in the fall, Bill wasn’t offering to get divorced. Keeping things as they
were was always easier, and Bill didn’t have to get into a messy legal battle or give up
half of what he owned to his wife. Bill and Eileen had married without a prenup when
they were young. Staying married now was easier and less costly. And Bill said he felt
too old now to start his life over. Dominique would gladly have married him if he
would have.
Bill and Eileen still lived in the same house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and saw
each other as little as possible. He and Dominique couldn’t spend holidays together, but
she had her own children to spend them with, and she and Bill went on a vacation
together every year after Christmas, usually somewhere in the French Alps, in order to
ski, which they enjoyed doing together.
Bill had met Dominique’s mother and she liked him very much. He was a kind,
intelligent man and a good father, but Marie-Aurélie always questioned why he didn’t
leave his wife. She wasn’t sure if it was a sign of responsibility or cowardice, or
perhaps both. She and Armand had been completely open about their relationship.
Dominique had been Bill’s dark secret for sixteen years and her mother didn’t like that
for her. Originally, Dominique had resisted becoming his hidden mistress, but over time,
she had gotten used to it, and they accepted their relationship now as it was.
Their separate lives had some advantages. Dominique made all her important
decisions on her own, about her children, her business, and her life. She answered to no
one and was captain of her own ship. And no one complained about how much she
worked. She spent most of her free time working.
Dominique’s relationship with her children had always been close and their bond
strong. Their father had been so superficial and absent in their lives that it had brought
them closer to their mother. But that had been changing for the past few years, as they
grew up and had their own lives, and she felt their absence sorely. Their growing up
and moving on created a void in her life, which she knew would only become worse in
time. She tried to fill the emptiness they left with her business, which worked to some
degree, but not always. It was now that she regretted not living with Bill and only
seeing him twice a week, and sometimes only once. He had a busy life too. Tyler, his
youngest child, was at Princeton, so he would be home frequently on weekends, which
would alter their plans, and Justin, the older boy, was at Boston University, and was
home often too with no advance warning, and in their status, they had to cancel their
plans instead of including him. Bill had not experienced yet the ache of emptiness one’s
children left once they were really gone. Dominique’s children were on the cusp of
thirty, just enough older that she had already felt the chill winds of their adulthood in her
life, and the loneliness it brought with it, especially without a full-time partner herself.
Because of her own childhood, and the unspoken stigma of having unmarried
parents, Dominique had been conservative in her own life, and traditional in the
upbringing of her children. As a child, she had suffered from the disapproval of some of
her friends’ parents. Her ex-husband came from a family that had been firmly ensconced
in the Social Register for generations. He came from old money and had added large
quantities of new money to it, which he thought gave him the freedom to be as much of a
libertine as he wanted. He had a rebellious nature, set no admirable example for his
children, and chafed against the restrictions of marriage with his affairs while he and
Dominique were married, and with countless unsuitable women once divorced. In
contrast, Dominique had been faithful to Andrew while they were married, and to Bill
afterward. She had never remarried. She wanted to give her children a perfect life, and
set high standards for them and herself. She was an honorable, honest person who
valued traditions.
Her children went to the best private schools in New York. Her older daughter,
Felicity, had made her debut at the most respected debutante ball. Her youngest, Violet,
named after Dominique’s paternal grandmother Violette, had refused to make her debut
and considered it politically objectionable. Violet was a rebel to her core. Their father
had spent little time with them when they were children. Dominique had taught them that
hard work was important. She set the bar high for herself and for them. Respectability
was important to her. She was a dignified woman, with a decidedly aristocratic air.
Having unmarried parents had left a deep mark on her.
And as a result of her hard work in her business, a debut dress or wedding gown by
Dominique Dupont was every young woman’s dream, which their fathers paid dearly
for. Her business had been a stunning success, and she used it to give her children every
advantage she could provide for them.
Dominique’s oldest child, Tommy, had been the first to break free from her
ultraconservative expectations. Tommy had gone west to college at USC, to study film,
instead of the eastern Ivy League schools he qualified for that she wanted for him and
that his father and his relatives had attended. Tommy wanted to be his own person, and
resisted his father and mother’s influence. He went to business school at Stanford after
USC, moved to L.A. when he got his MBA, and at thirty-three was now the number two
person at the most important streaming platform in the business, and a favorite to
become CEO when the current one retired in the next few years. He loved his job, and
his wife, Marlene, a flashy young starlet he had fallen in love with as soon as he got to
L.A. He had married her four years later, at twenty-nine, and Dominique was still leery
of her. She was an ambitious girl who had set her sights on Tommy relentlessly and won
him in the end. She gave up a minor acting career the moment they married. They had
two babies in two years, and she was dressed in head-to-foot Chanel now, thanks to
Tommy. Everything she wore and did was expensive, and she wore clothes that left her
as naked as possible and showed off her flawless body. Tommy loved it. He had bought
a big house in Bel Air at her urging, and indulged her in all the ways she demanded. It
set Dominique’s nerves on edge to see her son taken advantage of, but she said nothing
to her son. He would have leapt to his wife’s defense. And she didn’t want to
jeopardize her relationship with him by criticizing his wife.
She had set up trust funds for all three of her children from her own generous
inheritance from her father, but she hated to see her son pumped for money by a greedy
wife. Dominique considered Marlene arm candy, not a woman of substance who
contributed anything, which made Dominique angry on her son’s behalf. Despite his
success in business, which she was proud of, he was an innocent with his wife.
Dominique had a discreet, restrained personal style. Marlene flashed sex and money
like a neon sign. Everything she wore was too short, too low, and too tight. She had a
fabulous figure even after two babies, and Tommy was ecstatic, and seemed to have
tossed all sense of propriety to the winds. Her look shrieked of vulgarity, and the more
naked she was, the better he liked it, as he showed off his prize at every Hollywood
event they attended. It made Dominique wince when she saw them in the press.
Dominique visited them in L.A. a couple of times a year, and Tommy always had
lunch with his mother when he had business in New York. He was a devoted son,
husband, and father, but totally blind to his wife’s greed, bad manners, and bad taste,
which amazed his mother and sisters. Dominique knew better than to complain about
her, and Tommy wouldn’t have tolerated it. He was loyal to Marlene. It made his
mother’s heart ache when she saw them. There were so many genuinely nice women he
could have had, but Marlene had him enthralled. He loved everything about her, and
Dominique accepted it with tolerance and grace.
Their wedding at the Hotel Bel-Air had been a lavish affair that Dominique had paid
for, without complaint, at Tommy’s request, since Marlene’s father was in jail for
passing bad checks at the time, and her mother was dead broke and still in rehab for
severe alcoholism. She made it out in time for the wedding in a skin-tight white dress as
mother of the bride. Dominique offered to make Marlene’s dress, but she had found her
own, which was slit up to her hip bone and showed the cleavage Tommy loved, a
backless, nearly topless dress that left nothing to the imagination. Tommy thought she
looked fabulous, which was all that mattered. Dominique just wanted her son to be
happy. And the wedding was lovely. His grandmother had come from Paris, the last big
trip she had taken, and she was glad she had come to support Dominique. It had been a
hard night for her. Once Tommy and Marlene were married, her relationship with them
was cautious, distant, and tenuous. Dominique saw little of her son, living in L.A., and
he was off to his own life now, under the influence of his wife. Their two sons were
adorable at two and three, but she didn’t see them often either. It had been her first
experience with learning to let her children go and it hadn’t been easy for her. Bill had
been at the wedding too, and was shocked by how bold the bride was, and how totally
enraptured Tommy was, although he was otherwise sensible, and smart about his career.
But he was ingenuous and innocent with women, and had had no guidance from his
father for his entire life. Andrew was there with his latest girlfriend, who was younger
than the bride.
Neither of Dominique’s daughters was married yet. Felicity was thirty-two, and had
a very conservative boyfriend, Taylor Whitfield, from an old guard New York family.
He worked on Wall Street in investments, and he worried Dominique. Felicity was an
artist and a gentle soul, and Taylor seemed to control her. They lived together, and
Dominique was relieved that they seemed to have no interest in marriage. There was
something about Taylor that made her uneasy, no matter how socially prominent his
family was. She worried about Felicity, who never seemed to stand up for herself or
what she believed in. All she wanted to do was paint and lead a quiet life. Taylor was
much more sociable than Felicity was, and in her mother’s opinion, he didn’t seem the
right match for her. He had a strong need to control and rule by intimidation, and
Felicity was easy prey.
Dominique’s third child, Violet, at twenty-eight, was a fireball and an extrovert who
had lots of opinions, was politically liberal, and had an interesting store on Madison
Avenue, full of high- priced luxury objects she found all over the world. She had been
dating a sports reporter for two years, Jamie Madison, who was casual, fun, from an
unruly but wholesome, simple family. He was a little rough around the edges, and a
thoroughly good guy, but not the kind of man Dominique had envisioned Violet marrying
one day. She could imagine her more easily with a European, maybe even someone
older, like Dominique’s father, not a boy from Boston who knew every player’s batting
average all the way back to Babe Ruth, but had no social graces. The choices of
partners her children had made were unexpected if nothing else, and not the people
Dominique hoped they would marry. But at least neither of her daughters seemed
interested in marriage for the time being, which was a relief. She and Bill talked about
the girls sometimes, and he told her that he was sure that neither Taylor Whitfield nor
Jamie Madison, at the other extreme, was likely to be the men they would marry one
day. He had said the same about Marlene, and had been wrong. Dominique had made
her peace with Tommy’s choice of wife in the meantime, but not easily, for the sake of
harmony. Dominique’s mother was much more philosophical about it.
“There’s nothing you can do about their choice of life partners,” Marie-Aurélie had
said. “My parents were heartbroken about my life with your father, particularly when he
never divorced and we never married. And I was the happiest woman on earth as long
as he was alive. It worked for us, which is all that matters really. If Tommy is happy
with Marlene, you’ll have to swallow your own ideas about her. Looking vulgar doesn’t
make her a bad person. They’re crazy about each other, which is something. My parents
never saw me again, which was wrong of them. They wanted to come to Armand’s
funeral, to pay their respects. I wouldn’t let them, it was too late for me, and I never
saw them before they died, and never regretted it. They were too cruel to both of us
when your father was alive. He never minded about my parents. He was a very
forgiving person. It took me years to forgive them, and they were long dead by then. Our
role as parents is to support our children in their life choices and not impose our own
will or dreams on them. We don’t have the right to do that once they’ve grown up.”
Dominique had tried to follow her mother’s advice, though it hadn’t been easy. Marlene
had become more flamboyant since marrying Tommy, instead of less, and she could do
it with his money, but they were happy. Dominique felt as though she had lost her son to
Marlene, which was somewhat true. His life centered around his wife and children
now, and his career and life in L.A. Dominique had lost him to his new life, and hoped
it wouldn’t happen with the girls too.
She was thinking of all of them as she looked out her office window on a bleak
November afternoon. Tommy had just sent her an email to tell her that he and Marlene
and the children weren’t coming home for Thanksgiving, and were going to Mexico
instead, taking his mother-in-law and Marlene’s sister with them. He had a new family
now, and Dominique had no choice but to accept it and be a good sport.
She sighed as she read her other emails, and went back to designing the next
collection, due on the runway in January. Tommy hadn’t been home for Thanksgiving in
four years, and had only come for Christmas twice. After thirty-four years dedicated to
her family, it was slowly unraveling in spite of her, and this was only the beginning. It
was the hardest thing she had ever faced, while pretending to her son that it was fine
and didn’t bother her. Not seeing much of them bothered her a lot. If nothing else, being
the parent to adult children, especially married ones, required that you be gracious, and
never say a word about how much it hurt to let them go. She knew they would never
understand it until they had adult children of their own, which was years away.
Dominique suspected that if she and Bill were married, the impact of her children
growing up and moving away would be less acute. With their limited time together,
because of his own family and wife, she had spent every moment of her spare time with
her children, and was unusually close to them as a result, so it hurt her all the more once
they had lives of their own and she saw less of them.
Tommy’s decision to stay in the west after going to college and graduate school there
had been the hardest blow, and then he married someone so different that Dominique
couldn’t relate to her. Marlene had grown up in Las Vegas, was from a broken family
with two derelict parents, and had landed in L.A. at nineteen, hoping to be discovered
as an actress. Her starring role now was as Tommy’s wife, and at thirty-five she was
two years older than he was. She had nothing in common with her mother-in-law nor
with his sisters. He loved his life in L.A., and the whole California culture, and the
subculture he worked in, closely related to Hollywood, as his company produced films
for their streaming platform. It was far from the world he had grown up in. He had good
values and strong principles, and was a good husband and father. Dominique was proud
of him, but it was difficult to think of his marriage as his finest achievement. Marlene
was a survivor and had grown up in a hard world. Her father had been a blackjack
dealer in a casino before he started writing bad checks. And her mother had been a
showgirl, or worse, who had lost her looks early to alcohol and drugs. She had been
sober off and on for a few years now. Tommy paid for a nice house for her in Beverly
Hills, and Marlene kept a close eye on her, and on her younger sister, Tiffany, who had
been in and out of trouble too. Marlene was the success story in the bunch. She was a
survivor, and Tommy admired what a decent person she was after all she’d been
through growing up, but it didn’t change the fact for Dominique that Marlene was half
naked nearly every time she saw her and had spent more time as a cocktail waitress than
an actress, and that Tommy spent more time with her ragtag family than his own much
nicer one. He had his hands full with his needy, demanding, unemployed in-laws, and
Marlene was unfailingly loyal to them, and eager to share her good fortune with them.
Other than her spectacular body, Dominique couldn’t see what she brought to the table
or how she kept Tommy’s interest. He had a soft spot for the underdog in every
situation, and wanted to cure all the ills in the world. It was one of his more endearing
features, but Dominique was sad that he hadn’t married someone more suitable.
Marlene always seemed tough to her, she had to be, to survive her childhood and the
years before she met Tommy. Dominique wanted more for him, but she realized it
wasn’t her choice to make.
Felicity’s boyfriend Taylor came from a more familiar world, although she didn’t
like his family any better than Marlene’s. At least Marlene’s were honest and had no
pretensions. The rare times she saw them, someone was always going into or coming
out of rehab, which they considered a normal occurrence. Tommy was always paying
for fancy rehabs for them, which never seemed to work, or not for long.
Taylor’s family had all the pretensions Marlene’s didn’t, and none of them had ever
gone to rehab, that Dominique knew of. They were shameless snobs, with blue blood
and a small fortune from long ago that had dwindled over generations. They were
always talking about who had money and who didn’t, were enthralled with all the
people in Newport who had “cottages” and big fortunes, and were fascinated by who
had made their debut and who hadn’t. They were convinced that the only people with
any merit were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose relatives had come over on the
Mayflower, all of which bored Dominique intensely. They looked down their noses at
anything or anyone European, except the British royal family. They thought France was a
shocking, immoral, libertine country, and they had had a field day when they learned that
Dominique’s mother and father weren’t married and that Marie-Aurélie had been his
mistress. They imagined her to be a dancer at the Folies Bergère, or a prostitute.
They were incredibly insular and old-fashioned, and Dominique found them dreary,
and she thought Taylor had some kind of misguided superiority complex as a result,
always telling Felicity what she should and shouldn’t be doing, shouldn’t be saying, and
telling her how to run her life. And much more alarming, Felicity didn’t seem to mind it,
which upset Dominique. She knew that her oldest daughter had ideas and opinions, but
she never voiced them around Taylor, and was willing to behave in the docile, meek
way he expected. His mother had strong opinions she wasn’t too shy to express, but he
wanted Felicity to do whatever he said. To Dominique, it seemed like some form of
extreme narcissism, which genuinely concerned her. He showed no interest in Felicity’s
career as an artist, nor acknowledged how good her paintings were. He treated it like a
hobby. His own job was far from impressive, at thirty-seven, at a minor investment firm
on Wall Street, and Dominique worried that if they ever married, he would expect
Felicity to support him. She would have liked to see more energy and ambition on his
part, and fewer pompous pretensions, but Felicity didn’t seem to mind any of it.
Marlene’s exuberant vulgarity was almost refreshing by comparison.
The best of her children’s current partners by far was Violet’s energetic,
enthusiastic, sincere boyfriend of the last two years, Jamie Madison, who worked for
the sports bureau of the Daily News and loved his job. He had turned down jobs at both
the Post and The New York Times, and preferred the more popular newspaper he
worked for. He was an excellent writer who had gone to Brown and had a master’s
from the Columbia School of Journalism. He had a family he loved in Boston, and was
an ardent Red Sox fan. He had invited Dominique to a Yankees game and she’d had fun
with him, eating hot dogs and drinking beer and slushies, and she enjoyed his sense of
humor, which matched Violet’s, but he seemed more like a college romance than a life
partner. At twenty-eight, Violet still had time to spare before settling down, and
Dominique really didn’t want her to marry Jamie. She knew there was a serious side to
him and that he had lost a younger brother to leukemia, so he was on the board of an
annual fundraiser for leukemia and volunteered time to children with cancer. But his
many good qualities didn’t change the fact that the greatest passion in his life was
baseball and almost every other sport, and he didn’t own a suit, other than the tuxedo he
wore every year to the fundraiser, and most of the time he looked like he was on his
way home from practice in the minor leagues. He even coached a boys’ baseball team
in Harlem.
Jamie had many virtues and a good heart, but no social skills. And how would that
play out when they were forty and fifty? Dominique couldn’t see him in Violet’s life
long-term, although she had her eccentricities too. She’d had purple hair all through
college at NYU, had floated around Europe aimlessly for two years after college, had
spent a year in Paris living with her grandmother, much to Marie-Aurélie’s delight, and
still traveled the world looking for unusual objects, from jewelry to vintage clothing,
elegant Vuitton trunks, beautifully bound old books, and occasionally taxidermy or a
Moroccan rug or African Masai jewelry. Everything Violet sold was exceptional, and
she had unusual and remarkable taste and a great eye for special things. The store on
Madison Avenue was called Objets, and she made a very healthy living at it. But
Dominique didn’t see how Jamie would suit Violet long-term. Violet lived in the
present moment and never worried about the future.
Dominique was proud of her children. They had been the joy of her life, and had
filled it to the brim, particularly since Bill had existed on a very part-time basis, in the
shadows of her life, and not at its center.
The little time they were able to spend together had been enough in the early years,
but now, with the children gone, only work was left to fill her days and nights when he
wasn’t around, and it no longer seemed like enough. But nothing in their relationship
had changed, and he was still just as anchored to his wife, even though they didn’t love
each other. As Dominique had known for a long time, it was her love and the time they
did spend together that made his marriage tolerable. It had taken her years to realize it.
There was no great purpose or design to his staying married to Eileen, it was just easier
for him not to deal with it, and it was only recently that Dominique had begun to notice
that the time they spent together was as sweet as ever, but no longer seemed like enough.
It didn’t fulfill her. And for now, they had no plan to do anything about it. There was
never progress on any front. She and Bill were just coasting along as they always had,
and they loved each other. Maybe that was enough. Dominique didn’t know many
couples who still got along and loved each other as she and Bill did after sixteen years.
She wondered if being married would have ruined it. But she had no way of knowing.
Bill had never lied to her, telling her openly from the beginning that he wouldn’t
divorce, just as her own father had told her mother. And his children were very young
when their affair began. He and Eileen had little in common, but he had felt duty-bound
to stay married for his children’s sake, and now they were leaving the nest.
He had never changed his mind about getting divorced, even now with his children
in college, and for sixteen years, Dominique had told herself that what they had was
enough for her. But lately, with his youngest son leaving home, she wasn’t as sure. She
never admitted it to Bill and rarely to herself, but she wanted more than a man she saw
twice a week who belonged to someone else. And she was afraid to ask him for more.
What if he refused, or left her? Two days a week was better than no Bill at all. Or was
it? She was afraid to answer that question to herself. His son had left for college two
months before, and nothing had changed, and probably never would, so she refused to
listen to the voices in her head prodding her to tell him she needed more from him, and
what they had was no longer enough for her. Her heart had begun to ache every time Bill
left her apartment and went back to his wife.
