The Pact. Jennifer Sturman

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СКАЧАТЬ help but wonder why Richard would ask someone he was barely in touch with to be his best man.

      As if reading my thoughts, Peter leaned toward me and confided, “I have to admit, I was a bit surprised when Richard called and asked me to be in the wedding. It must have taken some doing for him just to track down my phone number. But it’s hard to say no to someone you’ve known all your life.” My heart gave another flutter when he said this; loyalty, even to someone as vile as Richard, was a noble trait, however undeserving its object might be. But Peter’s words still didn’t explain why Richard had asked him in the first place. Was Richard that bereft of close friends? It was entirely possible, I guessed; I was all too aware that to know Richard well was to despise him.

      Richard’s tedious colleague stood to give the next toast, and Peter turned his head to listen. This provided me with an excellent opportunity to observe his profile, the strong set of his jaw, and the handful of prematurely gray hairs at his temple. I pretended to listen to the toast, laughing at the appropriate moments, but mostly I was busy looking at Peter’s left hand, loosely gripping his champagne glass, and thinking about how nice his left earlobe was. I caught myself unconsciously leaning toward it, the better to give it a gentle nibble. “Behave yourself,” I admonished my wayward id.

      The toasts went on, as they usually do, interminably. It turned out that I’d had no need to fear the audience’s level of sobriety. A number of drunken but earnest souls, some of whom barely knew either the bride or the groom, stood to bless Richard and Emma’s union. Finally, the last well-meaning speaker had slurred his way through a wandering speech and sunk back into his seat. I saw Emma’s mother give the bandleader a discreet but urgent hand signal. Her sense of etiquette was extraordinarily well developed, and the endless toasting and clinking of glasses was probably like a form of torture to her. She hated public displays of emotion and frivolous sentimentality more than anyone I’d ever met; if I found the toasts tiresome, she probably found them excruciating.

      Peter turned toward me as the band began to play. “Care to dance?” he asked.

      “I’d love to,” I answered, quickly, before my brain could thoroughly analyze the situation and pass down a judgment that would forbid physical contact of any sort. He helped me up from my chair and took my hand in his. His palm was pleasantly warm and dry. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jane and Luisa exchange a bemused look.

      Peter led me onto the dance floor and swung me smoothly into a fox-trot. I silently thanked my parents for those nights as a child when my mother had played our old battered piano while my father twirled me around the living room, my bare feet resting atop his polished shoes as he taught me the elements of ballroom dance that he’d learned long ago in Moscow.

      I was so appreciative of how well Peter led and so busy refereeing the battle raging between disparate internal constituents that I almost forgot to pay attention to anything he was saying.

      “—how talented she is,” I heard him say. “I mean, I’d heard her name, but I’ve never really followed the art scene. And somehow I never pictured Richard with an artist. I was in New York on business a few months ago, and I stopped into the gallery to see her show. I had no idea—I mean, I didn’t know what to expect, really, but I was incredibly impressed. I would have been interested in buying a couple of pieces if everything hadn’t already been sold. Although, I doubt I would have been able to afford anything. The prices all seemed to have an extra zero or two on them.” He was talking about Emma’s most recent exhibition, I realized, which had opened at the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in May and met with unqualified critical praise.

      “Everything was spoken for by the end of the opening,” I told him proudly. “And the reviews were great, too. As soon as I can get a day off, I’m going to have to dredge up all of my old notebooks and letters to see if Emma doodled in any of the margins. I could make a killing on eBay and retire. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” He laughed.

      “What do you do now that you don’t get days off and you want to retire so badly?”

      “Ugh,” I replied. “Do you really want to know?” For some reason, finding out about my profession was usually enough to send most men running. Not, I reminded myself, that I should care what any friend of Richard’s thought of me or my chosen career.

      “Of course. It can’t be any worse than hawking your best friend’s personal memorabilia on the Web.”

      “I’m an investment banker,” I confessed. “Mergers and Acquisitions at Winslow, Brown.” I cocked my head and waited for him to gasp with horror and run, shrieking, from the dance floor.

      Instead, he chuckled. “You say that like you’re a bounty hunter or a paid assassin.”

      “Not too far off,” I said. “Even worse, it’s so 1987.”

      “Hardly. I’m sure it’s very high-powered. All of that glamorous wheeling and dealing.” There was a teasing edge to his voice.

      I laughed. “I guess it depends on how you define glamorous.” I’d spent far more sleepless nights crunching numbers and cranking out client presentations for smug bald men than I cared to remember. My life at Winslow, Brown bore about as much resemblance to Gordon Gekko’s in Wall Street as my legs did to Cindy Crawford’s. But at least the rules for a successful career in investment banking were clear, and I knew how to follow them. My hours were long and grueling, and I frequently despised my colleagues and my clients, but my bonus checks were large and if I continued to play the game, I might be in a position to retire well before my fortieth birthday with several million in the bank, financially secure and independent at last. I changed the subject. “What about you? What do you do?”

      “Me? Equally embarrassing. Very 1999.”

      “What? Tell me,” I demanded.

      “I run an Internet start-up.”

      “How is that embarrassing? Now that really does sound glamorous. And hip. I bet you never have to wear a suit. And you probably get to take your dog to work.”

      “Right,” he said. “I spend most of my time sucking up to venture capitalists and worrying about how I’m going to make the payroll.”

      “Still, it must be exciting,” I told him, even though the very idea of so much risk and uncertainty was enough to make my blood pressure rise.

      “It doesn’t seem so exciting when you can’t sleep because you don’t know where your next round of financing is going to come from,” he replied, but his easy tone suggested that he didn’t really lose much sleep.

      “Maybe I could help,” I started to offer, when a sharp elbow jostled me and a spike heel stamped down on my foot. Icy liquid splashed down my dress and a glass shattered on the floor, but I was blinded by pain and hardly noticed.

      “Oh, dear,” I heard someone drawl in a faintly slurred lockjaw. “Now look what I’ve done. Darling, are you all right?” The black curtain of physical anguish that had swept before my eyes faded to jagged purple and white lines, through which I could make out one of Emma’s aged great-aunts gazing at me with tipsy alarm and wearing a dress that had probably been the height of chic when she’d purchased it from Monsieur Balmain’s house of couture back in the late 1950s. Its pattern clashed in an unfortunate way with the vibrating stripes that clouded my vision. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, even if you factored in the heft of her bee-hived hair, but I still felt as if a Mack truck had run over my foot.

      “I’m fine,” I managed to gasp out. “Really.” You old bat, СКАЧАТЬ