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“No, he doesn’t know about us. I asked for Diana quotes because, after seeing your show, I thought she might have something to say about humanitarianism for a speech I’m giving to a bunch of NGOs. Anyway, that quote stuck with me.”
“Do you think I should be using it?”
“That’s up to you. But it made me realize there are dozens of reasons why I love what you do onstage,” he said, his tone growing reflective.
“Thank you.”
“Do you know which one is paramount?”
I was blotting my eyelids with a cotton ball. With my one open eye, I saw the intensity of his gaze, tired as he was.
“You reveal more of yourself as Diana onstage than you do as Crissy Dowling offstage. Under the lights out there, in costume, you lead from the heart. In here?”
“In here, I’m an enigma,” I said, answering his question before he could. I was being silly, of course, but he didn’t smile.
“You are. That’s my point. You only let down your guard when you’re Diana. That’s where you put whatever pain there is in your life.”
“My life is pretty painless.”
“That’s not true. No one’s is.”
I tossed the cotton ball in the wastebasket. “Is there something you’re not telling me?” I asked.
He pressed himself to his feet and came to the vanity. He leaned over and took my face in his hands and kissed me. Then he smiled and said, “Nope. But someday I will pierce that irreverence you wear like armor.”
He never did. But when he was gazing at me that night, I saw in that kind and august face—those movie star eyes and that movie star hair—that he understood me as well as anyone who had ever come before him.
Betsy was always worried about what she could give me. She didn’t grow up rich, but she didn’t really know poor—I mean crazy poor. So poor you eat the dollar store mac ’n cheese that comes in the box, not even the stuff Kraft makes, because the Kraft version costs twenty or thirty cents more.
CHAPTER SIX
Betsy
Betsy hadn’t viewed herself as underprivileged or deprived when she and Crissy were growing up, but it was only when she went to college in Massachusetts—on a scholarship and with substantial student loans—that she understood how far from rich they were. In rural Vermont, the monied were discreet. The most expensive car anyone dared to drive in their village without looking ridiculous was a Volvo. Betsy never saw a Mercedes up close until her first year of college, and that was when her roommate’s parents picked the two of them up in a silver Benz to take them to dinner.
Their house was a nineteenth-century Victorian in the center of the village, and after their stepfather died, little by little it seemed to wilt like cut flowers in a vase with water grown swampy. It was impossible to keep up with the exterior painting, and the slates on the roof were being chiseled away each winter by ice and snow. The gingerbread trim broke apart and turned into daggers of rotting wood. The screens on the porch were riddled with gashes. The furnace was from the Nixon administration, their mother joked ruefully. (That was not hyperbole. The warranty papers revealed it was from 1973.) The old house was not mute—it creaked and groaned and banged—and amidst its moldering frame could often be heard the skittering of mice and, once in a while, the clawing of squirrels.
Betsy understood that money was tight. Crissy did, too. But they supposed it was tight for everyone. Their mother, a widow, was a high school history teacher.
That changed when they went to college. Their friends had nicer clothes, real jewelry, and second homes in places like Nantucket or an apartment they’d call their family’s pied-à-terre in Manhattan or Beacon Hill. Crissy started college a year before Betsy, and she was in New York City at Tisch—again, some scholarship and lots of debt—and Betsy would never forget the things Crissy shared with her when she came home for Thanksgiving during her first year there. When they were alone, Crissy regaled her with the lives of the rich and famous, and the things—physical things—they took for granted. A tiny Marc Jacobs clutch that cost five hundred dollars. Alexander McQueen heels, works of art that would deform your toes for two grand. Gucci cat’s-eye sunglasses that cost four digits. The sisters never discussed these things in front of their mother, because they revered her and never wanted her to feel the pain of what she couldn’t give them.
Betsy came to understand that her childhood was one of spectacular privilege compared to many of the kids she counseled as an adult. Certainly it was compared to Marisa’s—at least financially. But she knew also the secrets and rot that festered in the Dowling house that had nothing to do with the bricks and mortar and horsehair plaster, and wondered if they were as fetid as the things Marisa never shared. She supposed she would learn over time.
Regardless, she wanted Marisa to have a life that transcended a second bedroom in a house at the edge of the UVM campus. Betsy wanted more for her, and she wanted more for herself.
Which, of course, was where the event cascade began. She’d look back and use that expression: event cascade. The chain that leads an overcrowded passenger ferry to capsize in a storm and take hundreds of people to the bottom of the harbor. She grew enamored of the money that seemed there for the taking if she welcomed the embrace of Frankie Limback and his friends from California and West Palm Beach, and opened herself up to a man with a slight dad paunch but a wallet—the digital one as well as the thick leather one—that seemed a bottomless font of coinage and currency. Yes, she was involving herself in things that, even when her judgment was faltering and she was most out of control as a teenager, she would have viewed as suspect. Yes, there were his sphinxlike business interests—whatever his old bank did in the past and his crypto company did now. Of course, she would tell herself, it wasn’t his bank or his crypto company. He was just a money manager and then some sort of crypto manager. Besides, she barely understood the business. Any of it.
But then, not long after the two of them arrived in Las Vegas, they took Marisa.
And by “they,” she sure as hell didn’t mean the state’s social services.
* * *
Just before they moved to Nevada, Betsy asked Frankie why there were no cryptocurrencies named Kryptonite. It seemed like a natural. Or Cryptic, since most of the world didn’t understand it. Or, perhaps, Cryptococcus, because there was something unnerving about it all, the way one day a coin might be worth fifty thousand dollars, and the next almost nothing.
They were having lunch outdoors at a sandwich place in downtown Burlington, making plans, months after he and his wife had separated. It was one of those days when, together, they found everything funny, and they were laughing and holding hands across the table. Marisa was still in school, though she only had a week left until summer vacation. Frankie looked at her earnestly across the wrought-iron table and said, “I understand why people find cryptocurrency so mysterious. But I’ll teach you and soon you’ll see the wizard behind the curtain is just a man. A smart man…but not a wizard. You’re smarter than anyone I know at Futurium, and that includes yours truly.”
“I doubt that.”
