Nancy’s Theory of Style Read online

  She smiled and thought of how much good she was doing just by being in the world. She spotted Todd, who was cornered by Junie Burns, and hurried to rescue him.

  “Junie!” Nancy reached out to the tall woman with unruly russet hair. As they exchanged air kisses, Nancy noticed harsh aldehyde notes in Junie’s perfume and saw the unevenness of her thick liquid eyeliner on her melty chocolate brown eyes.

  “How have you been?” Nancy said. Over Junie’s shoulder, Nancy saw Todd mouth a thank-god and move off.

  “Good! Well, you know,” Junie said in her whispery voice. The sleeveless blouse she wore now was too tight in the shoulders and the arm-holes gaped showing a slice of beige bra. “Busy with work and I just got named president of the Alumni Singles.”

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone!”

  Junie’s head shook as loosely as a bobble-head doll. Then she looked around and noticed that Todd was gone. “The guys I meet always want feminine girls, and I’m, well…”

  “You’re fabulous, Junie! I’d kill to be as tall as you. I’d wear four-inch heels and stalk into rooms like an irate dominatrix. Let’s spend a day together soon, okay? We’ll go shopping and to the salon.” Nancy wanted others to see how attractive Junie could be.

  “I’d love that,” Junie whispered shyly.

  Nancy heard shouted hellos and looked to see a tall, sandy-haired man walking into the party. “Excuse me, Junie. I’ve got to say hello to someone.”

  Junie followed Nancy’s glance and blushed so Nancy said quietly, “When we get together I’m going to give you some flirting tips, too. Won’t that be fun?”

  She made her way over the sand to the good-looking man in the jeans, white shirt, and light-weight blazer. “Why, Bailey, Todd said you couldn’t make it.”

  Bailey Carson Whiteside III was well-over six-foot and he bent to give her a kiss on the cheek. “I rescheduled a few things so I could see you. This is for you. It’s heavy.” He handed her a large glossy gift bag with a red ribbon tying the handles together.

  She took the bag and said, “Bricks for the house?”

  “Books on Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and Jean Prouve. I thought you might like reading them while you work on the house.”

  “You’re always so thoughtful, Bailey!” His hazel eyes looked right at her in a way that made her feel shy. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Less is more, except where books are concerned,” he said. “I envy you building a house.”

  “Why not buy one of the lots here?” Nancy said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to be neighbors?”

  “It would be great, but I’m going to study the housing market a little longer before making any decisions. Where’s Todd? I want to tell him about a great opportunity with a sports medicine group.”

  “He’s somewhere nearby.” Nancy looked around, but didn’t see Todd. She dropped her voice. “No doubt he’s hiding from Junie and her monologues about city zoning law.”

  After the party, Nancy and Todd drove back to San Francisco and the condo that he’d bought as a bachelor. On the ride up the elevator, Nancy noticed a chip on the baseboard, and as they walked down the corridor she saw the unevenness of the paint on the walls. Someone (Todd) had spilled coffee on the carpeting months before and a shadow of the stain remained.

  So many little things, but they had the cumulative effect of making the world a tackier place.

  The interior of their condo was taupe, black and gray, the default masculine color scheme. Whenever Nancy suggested changing it, Todd countered that they were moving soon. It was true, too, that she could always escape to the charming apartment she still kept in a family-owned property.

  While Todd showered, Nancy sat cross-legged on the bed with her new design books, but mostly she was reveling in the success of the party.

  When Todd came out with a towel wrapped around his waist, he saw the books and said, “Don’t get any more expensive ideas. Every change to the plans cranks up the cost.”

  The skin on his broad shoulders was peeling and Nancy chided herself for not rubbing sunscreen on him when they’d been on their honeymoon. But every time she’d tried, he’d misinterpreted it as foreplay.

  She put the books on her bedside table and said, “It shouldn’t be an issue of money, honey bunny. It’s about quality. I want our house to be beautiful next year and ten years from now and a century from now.”

  He lay on the bed next to her. His eyes were acid-wash denim blue, with lashes as pale as straw.

  “Old classics get rebuilt and improved over the years,” he said. “We can always take our equity and move up.”

  “I thought we agreed that we were going to stay here.” She wished they lived in a time when she could give her house a name. Peregrine House, The Meadowlands, Carrington House.

  “All I’m saying is we have a budget, and we’ve got to stick to it.” He and some biz school buddies had started a venture capital firm and were still seeking investors and exploring start-ups. “You said you were thrillified with the plans.”

  “But I could be more thrillified. I just want it to be right.” She was thinking about a guest bath, now, and how perfect it would be to have a Japanese soaking tub with views across the hills. She knew that she couldn’t compromise, shouldn’t compromise and said, “If I think we need improvements to the original plans, I’m willing to cover the additional costs, because excellence cannot be reduced to a parakeet.”

  She saw his confused look and said, “A parakeet is also called a budgerigar, or a budgie, thus budget.”

  “I’m not verbal enough to keep up with your word associations,” he said as he put his arm around her waist. “I’m more physical. You live with me which proves you can live with imperfection. Your father is not going to let you sink any more into construction.”

  She laughed. “Everyone knows I can’t live with imperfection. I’ll sell off the stock I got as a wedding present, and that way he can’t stop me.” She wove her fingers through Todd’s hair and made a mental note to buy a different kind of conditioner for him.

  “Over-improving a property is never advisable.”

  “Either you believe the development’s property values will increase, or you don’t. Tell me now.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s prime, but that isn’t the issue. Your ideas about what’s necessary are way beyond what anyone else cares about or notices. What you spent on the wedding…”

  “The wedding was incredible. Everyone said so,” she said. “It’s my money. I want to do it for us and the family we’ll have.”

  “I’d argue, but I know how you are when you’ve set your mind,” Todd said. “But make all your decisions prior to construction. Remember that many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations lead to defeat.”

  “Is that from The Art of War again? You can’t apply Sun Tzu’s rules about military strategy to modern life, Todd.”

  “Yeah, you can,” he said. “For example, I should have taken evasive maneuvers to avoid Junie Rug-Burns Butt.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call her that dreadful nickname.”

  “I’m not the one who came up with it,” Todd said blandly. “GP’s another loser, but he’s setting up a meeting for me with his family’s people.”

  “GP is adorable and crammed with potential. I’m his career counselor and I’m giving him a reverse makeover.”

  “Whatever that is. You just like him because he takes every crazy thing you say seriously,” Todd said. “You know how his family got their money?”

  “Everyone knows. High tech.”

  “That’s the story they tell. But his mom’s family had a crappy little deli in Cupertino,” Todd said with a smirk. “She traded sandwiches for stock with start-ups, and turned a few hundred bucks worth of greasy cold cuts into a fortune.”

  “Todd, he may be new money, but in a century his family will be oldish money. It doesn’t hurt to build a relationship now. Speaking of old money, I was thrillified that Bailey came. You should conv
ince him to buy a Villagio Tuscana lot. All our friends should buy lots and then we could have block parties all the time.”

  “You and parties,” he said, tumbling her back on the bed. “I love you, Mrs. Todd Carrington Chambers.”

  “I love you, too, and I’m going to love our house.” As Todd’s big red hands grabbed the thin straps of her silk charmeuse cami. Nancy tried to imagine what their children would be like, but her imagination couldn’t extend that far. She hoped they would be exactly like her; she had been a delightful child.

  Chapter 2: The Devil is in the Details

  Nancy Carrington-Chambers looked at the diamond and sapphire watch that encircled her slim wrist. It had been her grandmother’s, and Nancy was so angry that she only briefly admired the graceful rectangular design. Todd was now an hour late for the dinner that she’d so laboriously directed the housekeeper to prepare.

  The ice in the cocktail shaker had long ago melted. She drank down another watery martini. Gin on an empty stomach left her feeling both light-headed and dramatic. She checked her watch again before going to the enormous kitchen.

  After an extensive search, Nancy found red striped oven mitts and wondered where they had come from. They were disagreeably holidayish. She took the platter with grass-fed organic beef roast out of one of the warming drawers and walked outside.

  The lawn was overgrown and weeds had sprung up since their yard maintenance company had gone bankrupt. The neighbors’ trio of slobbering Chesapeake Bay retrievers immediately began barking and lunging against the tall, redwood fence, as they did every time she came outside.

  Nancy hefted the hunk of meat over the fence and heard a gnashing of teeth and horrible chewing that sounded like Cerberus devouring unfortunate souls, thereby confirming her own hellish existence.

  As she turned back to the house, she saw the vulgar rectangular, electric blue pool, each corner of which was marked with a tall plinth bearing a bad reproduction of a Greek statue.

  It was all so different from the plans she’d approved.

  The architect’s design had been exquisite, so Nancy had felt comfortable taking her mother to Sedona for an extended spa retreat and then to Heidelberg for a long visit with her sister. Nancy had explored the streets of the Altstadt, photographing of the Baroque architecture and wondering how her own house would be viewed in the decades to come.

  She’d returned home to find that Todd and the contractor had radically altered the house plans. Todd knew people in the county permit office who would sign off on anything he asked, and the construction was already too far along for her to have them tear it down and start over.

  Construction had continued for over a year, and during the last several months, Nancy and Todd had argued every single day. In addition to her initial contribution toward the construction, she’d cashed out her wedding stock for high-end improvements, and then tried to borrow against her trust fund’s future earnings.

  Now she was glad that her father, who managed her trust, had vetoed her request, since no amount of window dressing could disguise this wreck.

  Nancy went back into the house and threw the candy-cane oven mitts in the garbage compacter. She walked down the long hallway with its too shiny polished black granite floor, humiliated that her money had paid for this ugliness. I am walking on my money, she thought.

  She went into her bedroom suite and locked the massive double doors. She might as well spend the evening going over the plans for her next Froth event. Todd could sleep in one of the guest rooms.

  Her gaze went to the thing that she hated most: a granite-topped wet bar of monstrous proportions. Its permanence mocked her.

  Nancy used the remote to open the panels that inexpertly hid a 52-inch television and turned the channel to one of the PBS stations. She found the inflectionless voices reassuring, a sign that somewhere in the world there was civility.

  As she took off her new little black cocktail dress, she heard heartbreaking music and turned to the television. On the screen, a thin man was hunched over an organ. His eyes were closed and he lurched in time to the music. She wondered where she’d seen him before.

  Then a date flashed on the screen and the announcer said, “Leo Emmanuel McElroy, one of the most promising new artists of progressive classical, passed away today at twenty-eight after an extended illness.”

  Nancy stood motionless, recalling her cousin Birdie and Leo at her party on that sunny May afternoon three years ago. She had made mocked the way he looked and hadn’t noticed that he was sick. How many other things had she misjudged as she’d chattered to her friends about her dream house, her dream honeymoon and wedding, and her dream marriage?

  And, although Nancy hadn’t known him, Leo’s death changed everything for her, like a click of the optometrist’s lenses that brings everything into sharp focus.

  She didn’t have to stay here. She was Nancy Carrington-Chambers and she had options, the most significant of them the apartment she still kept in San Francisco.

  Nancy went into her dressing room and gathered her luggage and cases. She placed all her intimates in silk pouches, shoes in their own zipped bags, and she folded her essential garments compactly.

  The house was so big that she didn’t know Todd was back until he rattled the bedroom doorknob. “Nancy? Honey?”

  “Go away.”

  “What have I done now?”

  She zipped up a carry-on filled with her skin care products and went to the door. “I cooked dinner for you! You said you’d be home. This is our ten-year anniversary!”

  “What are you talking about? Our third anniversary isn’t for two months.”

  “The anniversary of when we met. You should remember!”

  After a moment he said, “You expect me to remember the date of a kegger? Give me a fucking break, man.”

  “That is no way to speak to your wife. Go away, Todd Chamberpot. You are banished from my bed.”

  A minute later he came in through the door that led from the hall to his dressing room and bathroom. He was wearing pants with pleats that made his hips look wide, especially since he’d taken off his tie and shoved it in his pocket, one end dangling flaccidly out.

  Nancy tried to remember when she’d found Todd’s features aristocratic. Now she thought he looked as overbred as a shih tzu. She could endure his ruddy complexion, dry maize yellow hair, and pale eyes. But she loathed the way his nose turned up at an angle that exposed his nostrils. Could she really live as a character in an Edgar Allan Poe horror story, going mad as she watched Todd’s nose hair grow long, thick and gray?

  “What are you doing?” Todd asked.

  “I’m leaving.” Nancy began placing her favorite pieces of jewelry in a leather travel box.

  “What’s your problem, Nance? Okay, I’m late. I’m sorry.” He smiled and said, “Come on, baby,” and tried to put one of his tree-trunk arms around her.

  She twisted away. “You treat each incident as if it’s isolated, but I look at them in historical context. Every day it’s something – work, your pals, a meeting, the gym. You’re never here, and I’m entombed in this ghastly mausoleum.”

  “Not this again. I hope your father’s right and you’ll calm down when you get pregnant. After all, your clock is ticking away.”

  “I’m only twenty-eight!” She thought with revulsion of grubby, stubby fingered Toddlings. “That’s all you want me for anyway, spawn incubation and entertaining your gauche business associates.”

  “This is why I can’t stand talking to you. You twist everything I say. You’re always looking for me to fuck up, to say the wrong thing. Sometimes I think…” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think you’ve always been looking for an excuse to leave me, Nancy. Like there’s someone else. Is that what this is about?”

  The accusation hung between them and then she turned back to her packing. “Don’t be insulting. You’re the one who dragged me to this hell hole, and I’m sick of it.”

  “Not as sick as I am of you
r constant bitching and whining.”

  Nancy felt a distance, as if she was watching old hacks perform a tired domestic drama. The wife made accusations that he was a jackass, had bad taste, and didn’t spend time with her. The husband responded that she was a bitch, spoiled, and a control freak.

  Still, being professionals, they found the energy to improvise. Nancy recalled Birdie’s comment and told Todd he was as boring and braying as a walrus, and Todd said that she was sexually unavailable, a term he’d probably read in Maxim.

  She never raised her voice, though, because a lady didn’t shout and scream even when her husband acted badly. If she took pleasure in the way her coolness infuriated him that was just a perk.

  Act II of their argument featured half-hearted, blaming-the-victim apologies. He claimed that he had to work so much in order to provide her with the lifestyle she deserved. She said that she was sorry if he was offended when she called him an uncouth barbarian, which she wouldn’t have said if it wasn’t true.

  She was willing to go straight into the next act, when Todd changed the script with a bit of melodrama and stormed out of the house.

  Nancy waited for Todd to return. But the intermission stretched on and the lights on his approaching car didn’t flicker in the window, signaling the recommencement of the performance.

  Needing reassurance, Nancy called Junie Burns, because Junie stayed up late and because she could confide in the still-single friend without losing status.

  Junie answered after several rings in her breathy voice. “Hello?”

  “Junie, I’m sorry to call so late, but I knew you’d be up and… Oh, everything’s a disaster.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Things with Todd are awful. He’s an abominable human being.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I do.” Nancy launched into a long litany of Todd’s faults, something she’d done before when talking to her sympathetic friend. “I’m sorry. I’m ranting.”

  “Oh, Nance, isn’t there any bright side?”