Arm Candy (7 page)

All the while, Eden didn’t mind the lack of bended knee and ritual rings—Otto always made it clear that matrimony was for the masses, a biblical opiate to tame the rowdy hordes into little submissive units. It wasn’t for him. And that was fine. It wasn’t for her, either.

The years passed and she remained cool with it, even as friends like Allison, at twenty-nine, happily walked down the aisle with her doctor boyfriend, Andrew Rubens, reciting vows with dewy eyes and jubilantly tossed bouquets. At each white wedding, a longing for a tulle veil flickered like lightning in Eden’s brain, stealth and momentary between two of her heartbeats. Occasionally she would flip through the
New York Times
Weddings section and smile warmly at the “Vows” column, a story of how that week’s featured bride and groom met. And then, instead of becoming an emotional thunder crack, the dull temptation vanished. Allison was a radiant bride, showered with petals and presents, embarrassed by the spotlight but relishing her day in the sun. Eden, however, knew that was not her path. She and Otto were the hip couple with the cute growing son, the offbeat stars of their galaxy, like Brangelina but with a much better brand of fame: the kind where only cool people in the know recognize you. She didn’t need to be in the spotlight for a day; she was already basking in it all the time: red carpets, gallery openings, a sexy, grainy campaign for the Marc Jacobs Collection, fashion shoots as a guest model when an editor called for “real” people—she didn’t need to be swathed in organza and snapped in glamorized perfection. That was her job on a daily basis.

“Look at us,” said Otto, his arm around her as the paparazzi of Europe gathered at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for a much-hailed retrospective. “We are the toast of the Continent! You are their muse, too.”

“I can’t believe this,” Eden said, stunned by the hordes of French press and fans, toting cameras, pads, and pens. Her hand cramped from the autographs, her eyes saw orange circles from the blitzes of light from cameras capturing her celebrated visage.

As the Clydes’ fame and fortune increased through the years, so did Eden’s euphoric high. She had it all: her precious son, Cole, who traveled the world with his parents and aced school when he was home, a partner who worshipped her in Otto, and a career of her own: part mother, part muse. And as more and more canvases of her naked body and fierce stare sold at higher and higher and higher prices to museums on every continent, Eden knew she had not only climbed to the heights she’d once dreamed of, she’d transcended them.

—Maya Angelou

 

 

 

M
eanwhile, on the same island of Manhattan but in a milieu so drastically different it may as well have been Abu Dhabi, two other lovers were at the top of their game. Chase and Liesel, both twenty-five, had been introduced at the Ball for New York Hospital, where both of their mothers served as trustees, and were instantly the toast of the diamond-paved philanthropic circles of Manhattan. The It Couple. The heads of every junior committee, the most invited guests, the boldfacers on social columns and best-dressed lists. Their evenings were filled with grand parties, opening-night theater tickets, and tête-à-tête cocktails. Their weekends featured jaunts to their families’ country homes, friends’ lavish destination weddings, and little getaways to the Wheatley in Lenox, Massachusetts, or the Mayflower in Washington, Connecticut. Not to mention dinner every night in a capital-lettered ZAGAT establishment: As any discerning eater knows, a restaurant in all-caps means TOTALLY YUMMY BUT FUCKING EXPENSIVE.

“You look beautiful tonight, Buttercup,” Chase said, taking Liesel’s hand as she stepped from their chauffeur-driven car. He had nicknamed her that not for the gold-hued flower but for her resemblance to Robin Wright Penn.

“Aw, thank you, sweetie,” she said, lifting her delicate wrist so he would notice the thin emerald-laced links. “Look, I’m wearing my new bracelet!”

“You wear it well.”

“I love it!”

“I was thinking we should go up to Blantyre this weekend, what do you think?” Chase asked. “It was really great last time when the weather was freezing.”

“Hmmm . . . what about the Wheatley?” Liesel asked, tilting her perfectly coiffed head in serious consideration. Ahh, decisions, decisions. “That food was so delicious. Plus remember that massage therapist who came to our room? Oh, I just love that place. It’s so cozy. But the Blantyre’s great, too. Up to you!”

“Then the Wheatley it is,” Chase said, as if they had just settled on a strategy in a business meeting. “I’ll have Pam book it in the morning.”

When the backdrop for time together is so romantic, lubricated with Dom, sparkling with gems, and scented with peonies delivered weekly from L’Olivier, relationship cracks take longer to emerge. In five-star hotels, anyone could feel misty eyed and hit in the ass by Cupid’s arrow. Hot meal, hot tub, hot sex.

Also, Chase was as gorge as he was loaded. Chase DuPree Lydon’s facial architecture was so refined that you could slash your wrist on his chiseled cheekbone, and his eyes were so blue you’d bet the Vineyard compound that they were colored contacts. If a
New Yorker
cartoonist were commissioned to create a caricature of his perfect visage, it would be the artistic equivalent of shooting a fish in a barrel: too easy. He was almost too handsome, too perfect. Not that he was ridiculous like Gaston in Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast
, overmuscled with Leno’s chin and beefy ’roidy chest. No, his handsome beauty, innocent and cold, was like a child’s, gripping and hypnotic. When Chase walked into Waverly Inn or Da Silvano, everyone—from Graydon to Anna to countless celebs—turned to look at him. Even tourists who didn’t know who he was wondered, “Who’s that?” sensing instantly he was at least B List.

Like JFK Junior before him, this scion of a world-renowned, prominent political family had been in the public eye since a very young age. His attractive, popular maternal grandfather, Price Hutton DuPree, had been a United States senator, ambassador to the Court of St. James, and then head of the United Nations. His mother, Brooke DuPree Lydon, had married his father, Grant Lydon, in a grand society wedding at the University Club in Haute Couture, chronicled in
Vogue
. Brooke was a Hitchcock blonde, picture perfect, pulled together and full of pronouncements, be they political (“I’m to the right of Mussolini and proud!”) or fashion-related (“People over ten who wear Crocs should be executed.”). Brooke had three sisters (Paige, Blair, and Lynne) and followed in her family’s tradition of curt, monosyllabic names for her three sons: Price, Pierce, and Chase. The four DuPree girls had been blond photogenic catnip for the press, waving beside their parents at the Republican convention or riding their thoroughbreds in Millbrook, and now so were Brooke’s three sons. They were constantly snapped by shutterbugs—on the beach in Massachusetts or at a polo match in the Hamptons or at a black-tie ball on New York’s benefit circuit.

Truth be told, Chase didn’t really care for the air-kissing scene of Manhattan’s elite. He had been educated at Buckley, Groton, Princeton, and Harvard Business School, with classmates at each institution whose family names were synonymous with those on the Fortune 500. But while he had never cared about any of that crap, and even sometimes wanted to bag some of these sometimes twice-weekly rituals, Chase was dutiful. He was the model son who never got into trouble at school (whereas Price has been expelled from Andover and spent his senior year at a public school in Southampton, near the family estate). And forget about the entitled generation: Chase exhibited what his mother, Brooke, called “the work ethic of a Filipino,” laboring for his family firm till all hours, while Pierce had been “between jobs” for six years (read: does jack shit). Both of his brothers rolled in the proverbial hay with blond tits-on-sticks with head shots and their own Web sites who may have shimmied by a greased pole or two, and had names that ended in the letter
i
, the classy nomenclature kiss of death. But good Chase dated a shining star of Mayflower descent on par with the DuPree Lydon pedigree: Liesel van Delft. No Brandis or Candis for him.

Yet as the years passed, the union that would have had his forefather’s fossils cheering from their cobwebbed graves, all was not well. Though it was a sunlit, romantic courtship, by twenty-eight, Chase and Liesel were coasting on a cross between love and inertia.

“Sweetie,” Liesel said one night as they undressed for bed. “I feel like you don’t even notice my new matching lingerie. I splurged at La Perla and you barely looked up.”

“Oh, it’s beautiful, honey. I’m so sorry, I’m just, I have a splitting headache.”

“I have seventeen sets of perfect matchy-matchy sexy stuff. I even went for this magenta set, and it’s like . . . I may as well be wearing my eighth-grade Calvins.”

“Not true, Buttercup. I’m just in agony, that’s all. I need to take some Excedrin.”

The truth was, he had hardly noticed her pinup getup. Under her cream-colored cashmere twinsets, strings of pearls, and proper pencil skirts, she always paired together a lacey confection. Part patrician kindergarten teacher and part burlesque, Liesel made an effort to rock some titillating lingerie beneath her ho-hum one-notch-above-Talbots WASPy attire. But no such luck tonight for her hope to have her longtime boyfriend crave her. Within a few minutes, after bringing him the two capsules and a drink of bottled water to wash them down, she had slipped a silk floor-length nightgown over her head and was over it.

The next night, Liesel tried her luck again. Perhaps soon she could get a sense of what her boyfriend’s intentions were.

“Mother says we make quite the handsome couple,” Liesel mused as the duo caught sight of themselves on the mirrored door of an elevator up to the Rainbow Room on yet another glamorous date night.

Feeling guilty for being less affectionate with her, Chase kissed her up sixty floors until the ding of the roof destination sounded. As the double doors were about to open, Liesel abruptly pulled back and smoothed her hair, lest, heavens forbid, someone spy their unseemly PDA.

“Liesel, come here,” Chase said, trying to kiss her again.

“Chase, people are looking!” Liesel unfastened the toggles of her Dennis Basso fur coat. “Sweetie, will you check this for me? I’m going to run to the Ladies’ quickly.”

Chase knew her lipstick had to be refreshed; Liesel simply couldn’t make an entrance without being preened to perfection.

As he waited, Chase surveyed the scene, watching one couple cuddle sweetly, while another was reunited across the bar with a huge hug and passionate kiss.

“I’m back! Did you miss me?” she cooed in an almost childlike tone.

“Like the Sahara misses the rain,” he said sarcastically, hand on heart.

“Stop teasing me!” she squealed jokingly, mock-whacking him with her Fendi clutch.

As the years wore on, Chase started to get a creeping feeling about that allegedly perfect word: satisfaction. Isn’t life supposed to be more than “satisfying”? Isn’t there supposed to be an elated surge of heated passion, a crazy, scream-from-the-rooftops, jump-on-Oprah’s-couch epiphany of utter besotted
amore
? Little by little, the white peonies on Liesel’s birthday, the bracelets from Tiffany at Valentine’s Day, the necklaces at anniversaries, and the trips for Christmas felt rote. He had tried, a few months back, to do something crazy and surprise Liesel with a helicopter ride, but she had declined, saying she didn’t much like surprises. Or choppers, apparently.

Throughout Chase’s entire life, any latent impulses toward adventure had been summarily quashed by his family, and now Liesel was doing the same thing. When he wanted to travel abroad, The Family warned him of cousin Barrett, who had gone to the Amazon on an ecotour and disappeared; no one knew if he had fallen into a ravine, OD’d on drugs, or encountered some tribal, bone-through-nostrils headshrinkers who rendered his aristocratic melon the size of a clementine. Barrett’s disappearance, along with his great-aunt’s falling asleep cuddling her boyfriend, Jack Daniels, and a cigarette, plus his uncle’s bungee jump gone awry, caused speculation in the press of a DuPree curse. So paranoid was this family tree that its powerful branches swayed with fear when even the slightest threat appeared on the horizon. When Chase subtly floated the idea of parasailing by the family home at Round Hill in Jamaica, Brooke looked at him with squinted eyes.

“Surely, you jest.”

“Mom, please: It’s no big deal! Countless people have businesses doing parasailing all over the island. It’s their living. If people got killed, they wouldn’t do it,” he pleaded.

“Do what you must,” Brooke said with a crisp, passive-aggressive shrug. “But if you smash into the dock and shatter both legs, don’t come running to me.”

Needless to say, Chase decided to skip it.

Sometimes Liesel was, in a far less manipulative way, similar to Brooke in her slight puppeteering.

“Really, you want to play golf today?” Liesel would say with a sad face. It was clear that little pout had worked with Daddy since babyhood. “Okay, fine. I was so hoping to play tennis together with Wills and Becky, but it’s fine, we’ll do that another time, sweetie. You go play golf.”

“No, no, no, you’re right,” related Chase. “I’d be psyched to play tennis, too. I’ll call Wills.”

But while Liesel gently floated one café over another or perhaps a different activity instead of the one Chase had envisioned, she found ever-so-annoyingly that forcing her boyfriend’s hand to take her hand was proving slightly more difficult.

“I’m so excited for Phoebe Nordstrom,” she said at La Goulue one night. “She and Roddy got engaged! She seems sooo happy.”

“She’s a nice girl,” Chase replied, not sensing the nudge-nudge. “Roddy’s fine, though all he wants to talk about is business. I’m not sure if he has any other interests.”