“Hey, I’m not knocking it…. Whatareyour friends like?”
“Oh … diverse. Quieter, I guess.” She paused pensively. “It’s strange. When I think back to being a teenager, to the group I was with then, I remember irreverent parties and a general law-unto-ourselves attitude.”
“You were never really that way.”
“No, but I was on the fringe of it. When I think of what those same people, even the most rebellious ones, are doing now, I have to laugh. They’re conventional, establishment all the way. Oh, they like a good time, and by and large they’ve got plenty of money to spend on one, but they seem to have outgrown that wildness they so prided themselves on.”
“You say ‘they.’ You don’t identify with them?”
She plucked at the folds of the chic overblouse she’d worn with her stirrup pants. “It wasn’t that I outgrew it. I was shocked into leaving it behind. Somehow I lost a taste for it after … after …”
“After Ethan died,” he finished for her in a sober voice. When she didn’t reply, he took her coat from his shoulder. “Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s take a walk.”
Without raising her head, she slipped her arms into the sleeves of the coat and buttoned it up, then let Web take her hand and lead her into the February night. The party had been in SoHo at the lower end of Manhattan. They’d taxied there, but a slow walk back uptown was what they both needed.
“You still miss him, don’t you?” Web asked.
The air was cold, numbing her just enough to enable her to talk of Ethan. “I adored him. There were eight years between us, and it wasn’t as though we were close in the sense of baring our souls to each other. But we shared a special something. Yes, I miss him.”
Web wrapped his arm around her shoulders and drew her close as they walked. “He would have been president of Lange, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“You took over in his place.”
“My parents needed someone.”
“What about your sister … Tanya?”
Marni’s laugh was brittle. “Tanya is hopeless. She ran in the opposite direction when she thought she might have to do something with the business. Not that Dad would have asked her. Maybe it was because hedidn’task her that she was so negative about it She never did get her degree. She flunked out of two different colleges and finally gave up on the whole thing.”
“What is she doing now?”
“Oh, she’s here in New York. She’s been through two husbands and is looking around for a third. She’s got alimony enough to keep her living in style, so she spends her days shopping and her nights partying.”
“Notyourcup of tea.”
“Not … quite.”
“Were you ever close, you and Tanya?”
“Not really. We fought all the time as kids, you know, bickered like all siblings do. When I read things about sibling placement, about how the middle child is supposed to be the mediator, I have to laugh. Tanya was theinstigator.It’s like she felt lost between Ethan and me, and had to go out of her way to exert herself. I was some kind of threat to her—don’t ask me why. She’s prettier, more outgoing. And she can dance.” They both chuckled. “But she always seemed to think that I had something she didn’t, or that I was going to get something better than what she did.”
“She was two years older than you?”
“Mmmm.”
“Maybe she resented your arrival. If Ethan was seven when she was born, and she was the first girl, she was probably pampered for those first two years of her life. Your birth upset the applecart.”
Marni sighed. “Whatever, it didn’t—doesn’t—make for a comfortable relationship. We see each other at family events, and run into each other accidentally from time to time, but we rarely talk on the phone and we never go out of our way to spend time together. It’s sad, when you think of it.” She looked up at Web. “You must think it’s pathetic … being an only child and all.”
“I wasn’t an only child.”
Her eyes widened. “No? But I thought … you never mentioned any family, and I always assumed you didn’t have any!”
His lips twitched. “Just hatched from a shell and took off, eh?”
“You know what I mean. Whatdoyou have, Web? Tell me.”
