I’m here. I’ve accepted my fate. I don’t want to hear it again.
Not today.
“This is why you need a wife,” she says. “If you were married, your wife could step in.”
I think of Iris in Colorado. There’s no way I’d want to put her through an evening with most of the people at these dinners and galas.
“Have you had a chance to catch up with Penelope Althorp?” she asks.
I narrow my eyes, trying to remember if I was supposed to be catching up with Penelope.
“You two would make a very good match.”
“You want me to marry a lesbian?”
“There are lots of ways to have a baby, Jack. Test tubes and things. You wouldn’t have to be intimate.”
Is that what she wants for me? A loveless marriage? An arrangement? I don’t know whether to be hurt or angry. I study her, trying to figure out if she cares about me at all. Or my father. Shouldn’t she be more concerned about her husband and getting him as well as he can be, rather than my marital status? Or maybe she doesn’t care about him either. Maybe their marriage was an arrangement too.
“Or Gabriella Campbell?” she says.
“I’m not interested in Gabriella Campbell.”
“You need to put your mind to it. It will ease your burden. You need a partnership. I know you think I just sit around all day and have lunch, but I’m an important member of the Alden family. Your father relies on me. You need someone to rely on.”
I don’t respond. There’s no point going around and around in circles.
Greg enters with our appetizers. “I have your scallops.” He places down my mother’s plate and then mine.
“So along with scallops, what else are we having?” I ask, hoping to change the subject.
“Chicken salad,” Greg says.
“The one Bridget likes,” my mother says. “With the pomegranate.”
I don’t know who Bridget is, and I don’t want to know.
“She was telling me that she hopes Richard Ives will resign at the end of the year.”
I take my seat opposite my mother and we eat the scallops, making polite conversation. She talks about various rumors about changes on boards and her contemporaries’ children flunking out of college or being fired from Goldmans.
I’m not interested in any of it.
Then I realize thatthisis what she means. She’s telling me things she would normally tell my father. Things that might be useful to him. This is why I’m here at lunch. I thought I was having lunch, but I’m having a meeting. This is part of my job now.
“I could show her what’s expected of her,” she says out of the blue. “While I’m still well, I could act as a mentor of sorts. Of course, whoever you choose to marry has to have the requisite social skills and social standing. But there are nuances to being an Alden that I will be able to share.”
I can’t think about any of this now. All I can picture when she talks of me marrying is Iris. And I’m absolutely sure that Iris’s not the woman she has in mind for me, even if she was prepared to give up her life in Colorado and come to New York.
“Jack? Are you listening to me? You need to take action. And I don’t mean by falling for some farmer’s daughter in Colorado who has an interest in ballet because she took a few classes.”
Anger floods through me. Howdareshe speak like that about Iris. About the woman I love!
Love.
IloveIris.She’sthe woman I want to come home to, the woman I want to be my partner in everything. It’s Iris.
My mother thinks I need to find a woman to be my wife. But I’ve already found her. We just can’t be together.
