Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Delilah ate her steak. She had asked for it rare and it had come perfectly cooked, seared on the outside, dark pink on the inside. Addison had also ordered his steak rare, but the Chief had ordered his well done. (Predictable.) They had moved on to drinking a red wine from Argentina-shocking, since Addison was a Francophile. But it was the most incredible wine Delilah had ever tasted. It was like drinking velvet. It was like drinking the blood of your one true love. If she said this, everyone would laugh. Phoebe would say, God, Delilah, you are so clever, and mean it, and Jeffrey would shake his head, embarrassed.

Andrea was talking about her kids. Dullsville. But Delilah would not save her.

In her mind, she moved on to Phoebe. Phoebe was Delilah’s best friend, though they were an odd match. Phoebe was blond, stick-thin, never caught in public without perfectly applied Chanel lipstick. She was a cruise director, a cheerleader; she was the pep squad. She was a trophy wife. She liked being all these things; the stereotype was her identity and she relished it. The shopping, the waxing, the Valentino heels, the Dior perfume, her slavish devotion to Sex and the City. She did not cook, she did not clean or do laundry, but she did take spinning and yoga classes, she did avoid red meat, as well as chicken and fish and all starches. It seemed like she ate the same way that she drank champagne: sparingly, on special occasions. Tonight she had ordered a beautiful leafy salad with a timbale of roasted vegetables, but at home it was all rice cakes, navel oranges, and mineral water.

What Delilah had learned, however, was that there was depth to Phoebe. The woman was a fantastic administrator. She sat on the boards of directors of two charities, she cochaired events that raised ludicrous amounts of money. She ran her consulting business with acuity; she was as shrewd as Addison-shrewder, perhaps, because whereas Addison was acknowledged as being shrewd, Phoebe was considered ditzy and vacuous.

Phoebe came from a close-knit family from Milwaukee. She had grown up with loving parents and a twin brother, Reed, whom she adored. They were the kind of twins who created their own language; they were, in Phoebe’s words, “just like the twins in Flowers in the Attic , minus all the nasty stuff.” Her parents, Joan and Phil, were still married, still living in a center-hall colonial in Whitefish Bay, still sustaining themselves on the milk and cheese of Phoebe and Reed’s youth. Reed was a fantastically successful bond trader in New York. Phoebe talked to him at least twice a day. He invested her money. He had made her millions.

Something fell and hit Delilah’s foot. It was… Greg’s spoon, one of Greg’s many spoons. (This dinner required the full Emily Post lineup of utensils.) He bent down to retrieve it, a very un-Emily-Post-like move. (How many times had Delilah’s mother told her that when you dropped a utensil, you were to leave it be and ask the server to bring you another one?) Delilah felt Greg’s fingers fondling her left heel. She was shocked, but she kept her expression steady. His fingers kept going; he dragged them up the back of Delilah’s calf to the crease in her knee. This was outrageous. It was unprecedented. There had been new allies forged on this trip, yes, and maybe Greg, like Jeffrey, was recalling their flirtatious afternoon at the Hoover Dam-but to fondle her foot under the table during dinner?

Greg surfaced like a kid trolling the bottom of a swimming pool for coins, holding his spoon aloft.

“Got it!”

It might seem like Addison and Phoebe were the couple who were the most mysterious, respectively unknowable and misunderstood, but Delilah was baffled by Greg and Tess. Because they, somehow, had won. They were everybody’s favorites. They were Boy Bright and Suzie Sunshine; they had what everybody wanted.

With Greg, it was easy to understand. Greg was, after all, their rock star. He played guitar and piano; he sang. He had shaggy brown hair and intense green eyes and a day of growth on his face. He was six feet tall-shorter than Jeffrey by five inches and Addison by three-but his body was that of a professional surfer. He had six-pack abs and the shoulders of Adonis. He had a vine tattoo encircling his left bicep. He wore two silver hoops in his left ear and a silver ring on the second toe of his left foot, which only someone like Greg could pull off. If there was a woman in the world who was resistant to the charms of Greg MacAvoy, Delilah had yet to meet her. In a way, Delilah was immune. (His looks and charm were a virus she had encountered many times before.) She prided herself on being Greg’s buddy, his partner in crime. She did not fantasize about Greg; she did not desire him.

(But this thing that had just transpired under the table-what was this? A joke, she decided. A harmless funny.) She looked at Tess. Had Tess noticed anything strange? She had not. She was listening with ridiculous, eager attention to Andrea talk about Eric’s crush on the elementary school art teacher.

Tess was the ingenue, the baby sister. She was Amy in Little Women; she was Franny Glass. Adored, coddled, spoiled, adored some more.

It helped that she was small-five feet tall, ninety-seven pounds-and it helped that she had thick dark hair cut into a bob and tucked behind her ears, showing off her pearl earrings or her microscopic diamond studs. It helped that she had freckles and a Minnie Mouse voice. It helped that she was the nicest, kindest, most generous person on the face of the earth. She loved babies and animals. She cried at movies and AT &T long-distance commercials. She sponsored an orphan in Brazil, an eight-year-old girl named Esmeralda, and in addition to sending regular checks, Tess sent boxes packed with brown rice, muesli, coloring books, Crayola markers and colored pencils, jigsaw puzzles, modeling clay, a hairbrush, barrettes, packages of new underwear, a toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, stickers, a flashlight, and a special-ordered copy of A Little Princess in Portuguese.

Only Tess.

She was a good egg, for real. She never had a mean word for anyone; she loved Greg and Andrea and the Chief and the rest of them with unbridled intensity. It felt good to have Tess like you, to have Tess love you; it felt like sunshine, it felt like warm chocolate sauce over your ice cream.

Greg was no dummy. He could have had any woman he wanted and so he snapped up the prize: Tess DiRosa. He had been playing with his band at the Muse and Tess had been in the front row, wearing-how many times had Delilah heard the story?-jeans and a green bandanna on her hair. And Greg said to his bass player, Hey, that little Gidget girl is hot.

They were, now, the perfect couple.

Or were they? Delilah was suspicious. She didn’t believe in perfect couples. She didn’t believe in perfect families. Delilah told off-color jokes and stories, she threw decorum to the wind, and people liked this about her because on some level everyone related. Life was messy. It did fart and burp, it left a stink in the bathroom and bloodstains on the sheets. Polite society had an underbelly. People led complicated, secret lives, and this fascinated Delilah.

But what did she know?

Greg’s hand on her foot. Her leg!

Dessert was served, and Delilah was tired of thinking. She wanted to talk. She cleared her throat, and everyone at the table looked at her. They were hungry for her.

“Greatest band of all time,” Delilah said. “Who is it?” She pointed at Greg. “You’re not allowed to say the Porn Stars.”

“Or the European Bikinis,” Addison said.

They were off and running.

By the time they left Le Cirque, they were all drunk. Happy drunk! Too drunk for Wayne Newton, too drunk for Barry Manilow, too drunk for O. Too drunk for the crooner in the cheesy lounge at Caesars who liked to end his cabaret show with “Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain.”