The Pact (3 page)

“Second, and more importantly, I wanted to give all of you a sense of what sort of person Emma is. The list of glowing adjectives could go on forever, starting with giving, loyal, and trusting. But I worry that the story doesn’t do justice to all of the other traits that make her so special—her quiet insight, her subtle wit, her incredible talent.

“I feel privileged to have Emma for a friend. I think I speak for all of her bridesmaids when I say that we are honored that she wants us to stand up with her tomorrow, and that we hope that she has some small inkling of how much we want her to be happy. I trust that Richard realizes how very fortunate he is to have Emma in his life.” I hesitated, wondering if my last sentence had sounded sincere. Richard was far too arrogant ever to understand how lucky he was to be sitting at the same table as Emma tonight, let alone marrying her.

Raising my glass, I scanned the assembled guests. “Please join me in drinking a toast to Emma.”

“To Emma,” the crowd joined in. I sat down amidst a cascade of clinking glasses.

Embarrassed, I looked over at her. A silent tear rolled down her face. “Thank you,” she mouthed.

“Of course,” I mouthed back. What else could I do?

“W
ell done,” a voice said, low and intimate and positioned mere inches from my right ear. It was a warm, deep voice, and it sent a distinctly pleasant tremor down my spine.

Startled, I turned to establish its owner.

The seat next to me, the one that had been empty all through dinner, was now filled by the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

He wasn’t beautiful in the obvious sense—the male model, movie star sense. In fact, by traditional measures, he was fairly nondescript. Thick, sand-colored hair, a regular-size nose, normal-size eyes topped by straight eyebrows that were golden at the edges, as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. He was altogether not my type—as a general rule, I preferred men who were dark, brooding and aloof. Still, I found myself wondering what our children would look like. My cheeks flushed in that lovely way that makes my freckles stand out as if I’ve been spattered with mud.

“I’m Peter Forrest,” he said with a quiet smile, displaying even, white teeth. “Richard’s best man.”

My heart slid like a lead weight from the fluttering position it had assumed in my throat down to the depths of my stomach. The glowing mental photograph I’d constructed of our two (perhaps three) perfect children morphed from color to black-and-white and then faded into shadow. Surely a close friend of Richard’s was, by definition, an evil troll, even if every molecule in my body begged to differ. I should have known that any handsome unattached stranger must have a tragic flaw.

“My flight was late,” he continued, oblivious to the fact that his previous words had destroyed any potential for our future together. “But I got here just in time for your toast. I’m glad I don’t have to give mine until tomorrow. You’re a tough act to follow.” As if flattery could mitigate his damning association with Richard.

“I’m Rachel,” I said, hoping that my voice didn’t betray the speed with which I’d just internally staged and discarded courtship, marriage and procreation. “Emma’s maid of honor. We’re friends from college.” I gave myself a swift mental kick in the shin—after all, I’d just spent several minutes explaining precisely that to the entire room. Then I gave myself another mental kick in the shin for caring about the impression I was making on one of Richard’s cronies. “But I guess you know that. And how do you know Richard?” I asked, trying to mask the despair I felt. If only his answer could in some way absolve him of the intimacy implied in being Richard’s best man.

“Oh, I’ve known Richard since birth, practically. We grew up together in San Francisco, went to the same school and everything. At least until Richard came east for boarding school.” I’d known Richard was from San Francisco, but I never gave it much thought. Yet when Peter said San Francisco, my mind instantly conjured up images of Peter on a sailboat, Peter skiing on an Alpine trail, Peter hiking up a mountain, and Peter doing all of those other healthy things for which the Bay Area is famous. As quickly as these images flashed before my eyes, I struggled to replace them with ones that more accurately would reflect the ways in which any friend of Richard’s must pass his leisure time—Scotch drinking, cigar smoking, shooting small defenseless animals, and amusing his like-minded pals with misogynistic limericks. All my mental maneuverings, however, met with little success.

“San Francisco,” I said, trying my best to act like a normal person making conversation with her dinner partner. “It must be hard for you to see much of each other when you’re so far away.” I was grasping at straws, I knew, but somewhere inside me burned a small flame of hope that hadn’t yet been extinguished by the facts at hand.

He hesitated a moment before answering, contemplating the bubbles in his glass of champagne, as if he were trying to word his response with care. Then he turned his gaze back to me. His eyes were the color of rich, dark chocolate. “It is hard. In fact, I’ve only seen him a couple of times since we started college. His mother moved away from San Francisco years ago, and I don’t think he’s been back to the West Coast since then except for maybe a couple of quick business trips.”

My brain sucked up that fact with the power of an industrial-strength magnet and allowed my heart to register a flicker of pleasure. After all, you can forgive anyone for his childhood friends; it’s just the friends people choose when they’re old enough to know better that you can hold against them. Still, I couldn’t 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, I added silently.

“Oh, but your frock, darling. I’m so sorry.”

“Nothing a little seltzer water won’t fix,” I said as politely as I could under the circumstances. She was still apologizing as Peter took me by the elbow and steered me across the room and through a swinging door into the kitchen. The room was busy with staff cleaning up the remains of the elaborate meal, but a harried waitress pointed us to a side pantry in answer to Peter’s inquiry about seltzer.

This was just great, I thought to myself as Peter guided me across the crowded kitchen. Only a moment ago I’d been managing to dance and have a conversation with an attractive man simultaneously. Now I had a huge splotch all over the front of my dress and had provided him with a choice demonstration of just what a clumsy oaf I was.

Peter led us through another swinging door into the pantry, a small room lined with counters and cabinets. “Alone at last,” he said with a smile that acknowledged the cheesiness of his words. “But that looked like it hurt.” His eyes were filled with concern.

“Which part?” I asked, trying to put up a valiant front. “The puncture wound to my foot or the destruction of a perfectly good Armani? Do you think I should get a tetanus shot? Matthew probably has his doctor’s bag around here somewhere.”

Peter put his arms around my waist and set me on one of the counters. This simple gesture was almost enough to make me forget the pain I was in. He knelt to examine my foot, while I studied the top of his head. I gripped the edge of the counter tightly to prevent myself from running my hands through his hair, which was full and sun-streaked, with a couple of adorable cowlicks shooting off in unlikely directions. “Okay, there’s no blood. And I don’t think anything’s broken.” He rose to his feet and looked at my dress. “I wish that I could say the same thing about the Armani.”