Page 35 of All These Beautiful Strangers
My mother smiled wanly at us as Margot steered me across the room.
“You let her get to you,” Margot whispered disapprovingly to me.
“How can you not let her get to you?” I whispered back.
Margot shrugged. “Because I have nothing to gain from that. And it’s amusing to me. It’s a little game I’m playing. The nastier she is, the sweeter I’ll be. I’ll break her down eventually. One day, she’ll leave me her shares in the Calloway Group, and I’ll know I’ve won. I’m going to make that bitch love me.”
“Eugenia doesn’t love anybody—except herself and Teddy.”
“Yeah, how do you think Teddy managed that exactly?” Margot asked, taking two wineglasses from the tray proffered by a waiter and handing me one.
“He’s a wounded little bird,” I said, taking the glass. “He’s broken, and so Eugenia feels the need to fix him.”
“Interesting,” Margot said, and I could practically see the gears clicking in her head as she formulated some plan. “I never thought weakness could be perceived as desirable. I can use that.”
I took a sip from my wineglass and glanced at my fiancée. Margot was a mosaic of strong, distinctive features all warring with one another for prominence: a tall forehead, a sharp chin, high cheekbones. If she’d had only one of these features she might have been quite striking, but the effect of all of them together was that they washed each other out, making her rather plain.
Plain girls have always interested me more than pretty girls. Pretty girls have never had to work for anything, but the plain ones, they’ve been working at everything their whole lives. They’ve had to make people notice them. They’ve had to work at being funny, or being smart, or being daring. The pretty ones, they just sit there and smile at you and are either so damn nice and so damn agreeable all the time that you want to pull them aside and tell them some ugly truth to wipe that stupid smile off their faces, or they’re so damn disagreeable and hard to please that you want to knock them around a little bit, remind them that they bruise and break just as easily as anybody else.
Margot was smart. That was the thing she had chosen to work at. And not just book smart—though she was that, too. She was in her first year of medical school at Columbia. But she was also street-smart. She was ambitious, and cunning, and manipulative as hell. In truth, I was 99 percent sure Margot was a sociopath, or at the very least, she displayed strong sociopathic tendencies. That was one of the things that connected me most to her. I had been raised by a sociopath (my father) and a narcissist (my mother), so at the very least, it felt familiar.
Having strong sociopathic tendencies was practically a prerequisite to exist in my world. “Normal” people (a.k.a. weak-willed pansies) could talk about how having a conscience was what made us human, but to me, a conscience was a whiny little bitch voice I liked to hit the mute button on. A conscience wasn’t going to run a successful billion-dollar real estate company. It couldn’t make the hard cost-cutting decisions; it couldn’t fire Monica, the single mom with three kids at home, or Jerry, the guy whose wife had stage-three breast cancer, when that’s what was best for the bottom line. A sociopath could smile and ask Monica about her kids in the break room and nod consolingly as Jerry nearly lost his shit recounting how the doctor said the last treatment didn’t take, and then turn around and tell Monica and Jerry that they needed to box up their offices and ship out because they hadn’t been meeting their sales goals and they were trying to run a business here. A sociopath didn’t lose sleep over how Monica was going to pay her kids’ orthodontist bills that month, or how Jerry and his wife were going to manage without health insurance.
Here it was plain and simple: a conscience would strangle you. Normal people could have their sensitivity and vulnerability and feelings and live their pretty little lives, but that was all they were ever going to be. Normal. Average. And I’d never wanted to be average. I was a Calloway. I wasn’t born and bred and raised to be average. I didn’t see the appeal. I’d had the average beat and starved out of me, and I was better for it, stronger.
Margot put a hand on my arm. She was staring across the room, back toward the entrance.
“That little shit,” she said. “What game do you think he’s playing now?”
I turned and followed her gaze. To my astonishment, there was Teddy. Not only was he practically on time, but he was wearing a suit; his hair was neatly cut and gelled, and on his arm, he had a respectable-looking date: some dark-haired beauty wearing a simple satin off-the-shoulder gown with a sweetheart neckline. Nothing gaudy or loud. Nothing that screamed for attention. So unlike the leggy blond dates in tight, low-cut gowns that Teddy normally brought to family functions.
“What’s his angle—being all punctual and parading around some boring prude?” Margot asked, narrowing her eyes at Teddy and his date as we watched my mother gleefully embrace them both.
I downed my wine. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” I said, handing Margot my empty glass.
I started off across the room toward my brother.
My deepest fear was that one day Teddy would get his shit together and try to prove himself to our father. That he would somehow weasel his way into managing the Calloway Group even though it had been me busting my balls all these years. It had been me who had graduated first in my class at Knollwood Augustus Prep. It had been me who had graduated summa cum laude from Columbia. Me, again, who had spent every summer interning at the Calloway Group, working my ass off in the mailroom like some nobody, because my father believed in learning the company from the ground up. I had kept my nose to the grindstone all these years, while Teddy had partied and done whatever he damn well pleased. He had gotten thrown out of three boarding schools. My parents had had to buy his way into Princeton, and now that he was there, he spent more of his time drinking and taking lavish trips with his friends than in the classroom. It was all a big joke to him, which was how I preferred it. I didn’t want him to try, because if he did, I knew he had a huge advantage as my mother’s favorite, and that my father would pit us against one another until one of us broke. I was under no delusion that my father favored me for any other reason than that I tried the hardest.
I found my brother by the hors d’oeuvres table, loading up a small plate.
“Slow down,” I said. “I know by the time you usually get here, there’s only dessert left, but there are actually seven courses to this thing, so you can pace yourself.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Teddy said.
“Who’s the skirt?” I asked.
Teddy peered over his shoulder as he took a bite of his salmon puff.
“Her name’s Grace,” he said.
I glanced back at the girl, who was still standing by the entrance with my mother, deep in conversation. Grace. The name suited her. It was soft and old-fashioned and Grace did indeed look like an old-world beauty, quiet and demure. What was someone like that doing with my brother?
“She doesn’t seem like your type,” I said.
“What? Leggy? Blond? Easy?”
“Well, yes.”
