Page 11 of State of Ruin

“Happy birthday, Mom,” I say when I straighten up. “Ladies?” I address her friends. “You’re looking lovely. How are we all doing?”

Mom’s face is positively alight as she takes me in, standing before the circle of women in my navy blazer and chinos. It’s an expression with which I’m all too familiar. Boasting about any of your material possessions is decidedly déclassé in these circles, but when it comes to boasting about your offspring, the gloves come off.

“You’re looking so well, my darling,” she says for everyone’s benefit. “It’s so good of you to make the time for us. Sinclair is working so hard at the moment,” she tells her friends, and they nod sympathetically.

Mom has a strange relationship with the concept of working for a living. She straddles the uneasy line between finding it plebeian that my generation feels the need to work at all and approving of our commitment to furthering the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. After all, when your “old money” wealth dates as far back as the self-made scions of the Gilded Age and not a generation more, capitalism can be conflicting.

I share no such conflict.

“You know I wouldn’t miss your birthday lunch for the world—as long as you’re planning on serving the lobster ravioli, of course.” I wink at her, and she and her friends all titter as if I’m Jimmy fucking Fallon.

“Did you not bring a date, Sinclair?” Ginny Grace, an old crony of Mom’s from their school days, asks.

I incline my head graciously. “I did not. Didn’t want to cramp Mom’s style. You know it’s her favorite birthday activity.”

They all laugh again, delighted at my barb, because it’s common knowledge that my spot at lunch will be amidst a positive array of eligible Long Island socialites. And, honestly, I don’t shun them all to be a dick or make a point. If Mom could muster up one vaguely interesting woman, then I’d invite her to dinner, give her a shot. I guess my main problem is that I’ve never had to work to get women. One hundred percent of my potential wife traffic is incoming, and it’s as homogenous as a sea of yellow cabs, all of which means it’s seriously hard to give a fuck.

The irony, of course, is that in this sea, the sea my mother apparently wants me to fucking drown in, there’s one unforgettable woman whose face my brain refuses to serve me up every time I shut my eyes.

“He’s got your number, Marion,” Ellen Carnegie says.

“If he would have gotten himself married by now, or at least engaged, I wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Mom retorts, beckoning over a server. “Now, take a mint julep and go circulate. Please.”

“Are my siblings here?” I ask, accepting a drink in its sweating silver julep cup.

Instantly, Mom’s face goes blank: shutters down, armor on. “The younger two are around somewhere, but Sebastian has whisked Charlotte off for a last-minute weekend away. It’s very sweet of him.”

Subtext: Seb is paying lip service to making his arranged marriage work, even if I suspect it’s too little, too late. But it would never do to say so—even if my brother’s union would be Exhibit A in my rebuttal of Mom’s matchmaking plans. It’s not like she has great precedent here.

I nod. Message received. “Please excuse me, ladies, while I go say my hellos.”

Out of the frying pan… and into the fire.

Lunch feels less like a celebration and more like a feat of endurance, softened only by the fact of my sitting facing the sparkling Sound. The Spanish Inquisitor General had nothing on the socialites of New York.

“So, Sinclair,” Whitney Halsey asks from beside me, tossing her sleek curtain of golden hair over her shoulder, “are you going to the Fall Fashion Gala next month?”

“Oh yes,” Tatty Sedgwick cuts in from my other side before I can reply. “Rodarte is dressing the performers this year. They’re dressing me too.”

“Aren’t you a patron?” Whitney asks me, glaring daggers at Tatty across my body.

“My parents are.” Mom and Dad have supported the New York City Ballet for decades. “Hopefully I’ll see you both there,” I tell them. It’s the only way out. These women are relentless.

Fun fact: I fucked Whitney back when we were at college. Popped her cherry that first Christmas I was back from Yale. Having a Voss relieve you of your virginity was practically a rite of passage when we were growing up, and I understand it was the same during my father’s college years, too. But you’d think that over a decade later she’d finally stop trying to land me. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. Let me tell you, once you’ve fucked one WASP, you’ve fucked them all. It is a thankless fucking task.

I endure the rest of the interminable lunchtime conversation as well as possible, but you’d never know I was suffering, of course. I’m far too well trained in the social arts to be anything other than an engaged, and hopefully witty, lunch companion. Anything less would be enormously disrespectful to my parents. We have a name to uphold. The lobster ravioli is stupendous, thank God.

In a move intended to encourage socializing, dessert and coffee at Mom’s annual birthday lunch are served not at the long tables in the marquee but out on the lawn, where we can mill about and eat off the white-clothed cocktail tables. It’s the perfect opportunity for me to do what I’ve been wanting to do for the past two hours. I give the bloodsucking blondes the slip, swipe some tiny lemon meringue pies, and head straight for my refuge: my house, The Lindens.

If I weren’t so hell-bent on getting back to the city and overwriting the utter turgidity of today with some good old Manhattan-style debauchery, I’d consider staying here tonight. I love this house. Obviously, Fairwater is as rich with good memories as with bad—the Vosses have imprinted both variations of their DNA onto our family home over the generations—and I had a superficially idyllic childhood here. But The Lindens is mine, just as The Beeches, The Willows, and The Oaks are Seb’s, Melissa’s, and Xander’s.

As a twenty-something-year-old guy, I was just happy to have an escape, somewhere removed from the main house and my mother’s omnipresence. But in the past two to three years I’ve seriously invested in The Lindens, commissioning a well-known Long Island interior design team to overhaul it. The palette is far softer than in my Manhattan home, with beiges and creams and dusky blues that echo the colors of the Sound and the long grasses that grow by the inlets. But it’s masculine and serene and, in a neighborhood that’s long on stuffed mallards and boating trophies and plaid wall colorings, intentionally under-furnished.

Idly, I slide my cell out of my pocket and glance at the screen as I cross the airy and blessedly quiet great room. Mom would have had me thrown off the end of the jetty if she’d caught me checking my phone during the party. I scroll through a number of notifications on the lock screen, mostly from my friends and probably making plans for tonight, before a name catches my eye. Katrin Lawlor. From Alchemy. Instantly, I tap on the notification.

Check your email.

Please, Lord, please let this be what I think it is. I open my email app, and there it is. An email from Katrin entitled She’s in. Here’s the paperwork.