Page 10 of State of Ruin

I turn to my sister. “Hey. Want to watch Indecent Proposal later?”

It turns out, watching the movie is exactly the right call.

That night with Gage didn’t break Diana. On the contrary, she came back stronger. It was her husband who couldn’t handle it. She could handle it just fine… and she even went back for more. Why wouldn’t she? Even as a teenager, I knew that a night with a guy like that would be the fantasy.

My real-life John Gage may be offering me substantially less—one hundred times less, to be precise—but I read Page Six often enough to know that, in my reality, Sinclair Voss is the fantasy.

He wants me.

He wants me so badly he wants to pay me.

He’s offering to do it in a highly boundaried and tightly policed way (a.k.a. Katrin will castrate him if he puts a foot wrong).

And it’s not like I have an adorable, out-of-work husband to consider, or even a boyfriend!

As the movie progresses, I feel galvanized to the point of recklessness. It’s an hour with the JFK Junior of our times, an hour that can also make a good enough dent in our debt to get the physical therapy center off our backs for a while.

When I consider it that way, there’s no question at all what my answer should be.

Furtively, I text Katrin as, on screen, David Murphy throws his toys out of the stroller in spectacular style.

I’ll do it.

CHAPTER 6

Sinclair

In a month’s time, I won’t be able to travel to Fairwater like this. I’ll be back to a car and driver, crawling through Queens with everyone else. But, right now, it’s still warm enough to take the family’s immaculate ninety-year-old Hacker-Craft Runabout up the East River and arrive at my favorite view of all: our summer cottage approached via the Sound.

The term “cottage” is, naturally, an exercise in studied restraint, even if the sheer scale of the property, sitting squarely on over one hundred acres of prime Glen Cove real estate and dominating the coastline with its architectural beauty, is anything but. The Fairwater estate comprises not one but five shingle style houses, all flawless examples of their style and built in perfect symmetry in the 1890s by none other than McKim, Mead & White and commissioned by my great-great-grandfather, Sebastian Clement Voss.

Grandest of all, of course, is the main house, Fairwater itself, my parents’ domain. It’s flanked by two smaller but equally flawless waterfront homes—one of which, The Lindens, fell to me on my twenty-first birthday—and two further edifices behind them. Throw in all manner of tennis courts and swimming pools (carefully encircled with laurel hedges so as not to ruin the timeless view from the water) and you have quite the private playground.

I’m running slightly late. It’s intentional—I’m an excellent timekeeper—and, I’ve found, an effective way to protect myself against the worst of Mom’s machinations. If I arrive as the lunch party is kicking off, I run a lower risk of general interference. The downside is that I draw more attention to myself by arriving, Bond-style, from the water, but the scene that draws my eye as Stuart, one of our butlers and equally adept at driving a launch and a Lincoln, steers us in the direction of the house more than makes up for it.

It’s fascinating how a place can hold as much intrigue, as many ruthlessly suppressed scandals, and as many decidedly unhappy memories as Fairwater does and yet evoke such an uncomplicated feeling of pleasure in me when I take it in from the water. The pleasure is entirely aesthetic: it sometimes feels as though Fairwater is the portrait of Dorian Gray in three-dimensional form, its façade lovelier with every skeleton my family bolts inside its closets.

As Mabel—that’s our Hacker-Craft—cuts cleanly through the water toward our jetty, I’m rewarded with an almost unbroken view of the property. The jetty sits to the left of my view, a long, narrow reach of pale timber emerging from our private sand-and-shingle beach and punctuated with a weathered-shingle gazebo at the end. To its right is the bulkhead seawall above which sits our vast lawn—less emerald than it was at the beginning of the summer, but still impressive—and, above that, the main house: its frame luminously silvered and trim white and roofline gabled, its offspring flanking it in perfect, pale symmetry.

Today, the only obstacle to enjoying the majestic sweep of Fairwater is the large white open-sided marquee in situ on the lawn, my parents’ guests milling about in a tasteful, turgid array of country-club pastels.

I was wrong. The sight of what awaits me—of an afternoon I’ll never recoup—is enough to dampen my pleasure all on its own. I’m not often tasteless enough to envy our staff—I’m aware that my burdens come with ample amounts of privilege—but I rather envy Stuart, whose afternoon will be spent lovingly buffing Mabel with a discreet but ice-cold beer in hand and zero chance of anyone trying to ensnare his hand in marriage.

All too soon, he docks the boat by the jetty. It’s time to stop admiring the scene and become a part of it.

“Thanks, Stuart.” I hold out my hand, and we shake. “Appreciate it.”

“No problem at all, sir. Enjoy the party.”

“Doubtful,” I tell him with a sigh. I climb out of the boat and onto the jetty.

Time to face the ultimate WASP nest.

Marion Voss was deemed a society beauty back when she married Dad, and those looks are still in evidence today, even if her lifelong horror of appearing flashy causes her to shun most makeup and jewelry and the other accoutrements women favor. (I’d be lying if I suggested that my siblings and I have inherited this allergy to flashiness.)

Mom wears turtlenecks nine months of the year: merino in fall and spring, cashmere in winter. Today, she’s solved the conundrum of us being several weeks post-Labor Day and indecently warm with a sleeveless camel-colored turtleneck, which she’s paired with wide-legged cream slacks. She’s skinny in the way many women of her class and generation are: driven as much by nicotine addiction as by a lifelong terror of saturated fat and trending toward a future of frailness if she’s not careful. Cigarettes, coffee, and cocktails are not what sound bone density is made of, but try telling Mom that.

I stoop to kiss her on the cheek, an act made more difficult by the fact that she’s wearing an enormous, floppy-brimmed hat. Under it, the sleek, dark hair that has earned her so many comparisons to Jackie Kennedy Onassis over the decades is secured in its signature chignon. She takes some kind of perverse pride in the fact that, despite being matriarch of one of this country’s wealthiest families, the pearls in her ears are the very same ones with which her father presented her on the occasion of her cotillion. I don’t even pretend to get it. Nowhere on the East Coast is there an heiress set to inherit fewer family jewels than my poor sister, Melissa.