knew more about Jackie than anyone else did at Berkley.
“Thank you,” Jackie said. “That’s so sweet.” Todd could see there was no recognition in her face.
“Hannah is an English teacher here. She makes the desserts for the tearoom,” Todd said.
“Todd and Ethan have been great,” Hannah said. “I’ve even got Ethan working for me.”
Jackie gave Hannah a confused look.
“He’s organizing her library,” Todd explained. He sensed Hannah would be annoyed that she was a virtual stranger to his mother.
“Don’t let me keep you from your meal,” Hannah said.
“Of course not,” Jackie said. “It’s always lovely to meet Todd’s teachers.”
The three of them zipped along the roads of Massachusetts and New York in Jackie Eldon’s emerald-green Jaguar, alternating Vivaldi and classic Bowie on the CD player. Ethan savored the scent of fresh leather, admired the wood paneling on the doors. Even if they decided they could afford it, he couldn’t imagine his parents owning a car like this one.
Todd didn’t seem to be fazed by the luxury of his mother’s ride; she had to tell him twice not to put his feet on the dashboard. He spent half the trip turned around and chattering at Ethan until, at Jackie’s insistence, they finally switched places at a rest stop off the Taconic.
Ethan sat next to Jackie (she had said he should call her that) and tried to relax. He imagined New York was full of women like her. He had the strange urge to read one of her novels.
“So tell me,” Jackie asked Ethan, as they cruised along the woodsy parkway, “do you have your eye on anyone at school?”
“Mom!” Todd barked from the backseat. “Leave him alone.”
“Darling, we’ll be spending the whole weekend together. I think we should get to know each other.”
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” Todd said to Ethan. “Besides, we’re not spending the weekend together. Ethan and I will be doing our own thing.”
“No, it’s fine,” Ethan stammered. “I, uh, well, there’s this one girl…” It was Alex Roth, but he couldn’t say that. There was no way he could talk about having a crush on Todd’s ex so recently after they had broken up.
“Who is she?” Jackie asked, teasing.
“Yeah,” Todd said, “you’ve never told me about this.”
He decided to name someone else, someone from his art class. He would say it was Julie Moore. She was from Boston, was applying early to Harvard. She wasn’t going out with anyone, and would serve as a plausible decoy.
“It’s Julie. You know, Julie Moore?”
“Ethan, Julie Moore is way out of your league. She dates jocks.”
“Todd, stop being such a pain in the ass!” Jackie said. “Okay, so, Ethan, what are we going to do to get Julie’s attention?”
“Mom, you’re crazy.”
“Oh, come on,” Jackie said. “I’m just having fun.” She put her hand on Ethan’s knee as she spoke to him. “My son can be such a spoilsport sometimes!”
Ethan squirmed in his seat. Thank God for seat belts, or else Jackie Eldon would see him sporting wood in her Jag. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s this Halloween dance. I thought maybe I’d try to, you know, dance with her or something.”
“She’s out of your league…” Todd continued in an annoying singsong voice.
“Dancing is good,” Jackie said. “I prefer champagne and jewelry, but then again, I suppose you are in high school.”
“Mom, it’s totally different for us,” Todd said. “You don’t know how it works.”
“Explain it to me then,” she said.
“Please,” Todd said. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“I am not being ridiculous!” Jackie waved one of her manicured hands at her son in the backseat, and the car swerved onto the shoulder of the road. She started laughing hysterically as she righted the car.
“Mom! You’re going to get us killed.”
“Don’t worry, I just renewed my insurance.” Was the woman crazy? Ethan wasn’t used to adults who didn’t take things seriously. “Come on,” she said. “How do you get a girl to like you?”
“Mom, just drop it. Why do you care so much anyway?”
“Well, of course I’m interested in your life. But there’s another reason. My publisher has asked me to write a young adult novel. And, if I’m not mistaken, you two are young adults.”
“You’re going to write about teenagers?” Todd laughed.
“What’s wrong with that?” Jackie said. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’ve had two of them. Tell me. How does it work these days?”
“I don’t know,” Todd said. “It just happens. You start off as friends with a girl and then, you know, one thing leads to another, and then you’re a couple.”
“‘One thing leads to another.’ God, is there no romance anymore? What about dating?”
“Mom, we go to boarding school. We can’t go on dates. We have to be in our dorms by ten.”
“What about that tea place? Can’t you take a girl there?”
“That’s not really dating. That’s just hanging out.”
Relationships, dating, being a couple: it had all seemed so complicated back at home. Just when he thought he had figured out how it worked at a day school, Ethan had been hit with an entirely new set of rules at Berkley. But it seemed not so much about rules as it was about summoning an essential range of emotions. Ethan feared that even if he did follow the guidelines to the letter, it wouldn’t be right, the girl he had chosen would feel something lacking, would turn away, and he would never know what he had done wrong.
The walls of the Eldon apartment’s private vestibule at 1040 Fifth Avenue were upholstered in tan suede panels, a Picasso drawing of a female nude greeting visitors as they got off the elevator. The floors were ebonized to a deep black shine and covered in Persian rugs. To the right were the dining room, living room, kitchen, and servants’ areas; to the left were the private rooms, a quiet cream-carpeted hallway that led to Todd’s, Brian’s, and their mother’s bedrooms, Jackie’s study, and the library. The art adorning the walls was not the type of local artists’ work that Ethan’s parents had decorated their house with, but statues and paintings and antiques of the quality he would see in books and museums (was that really a Miró, he wondered, in the living room?). Family photographs (Todd, age four, with his parents, Todd and Brian together, Todd grinning after losing a tooth) were carefully arranged on the glossy black piano in silver frames. Flowers everywhere, enormous multicolored arrangements in the public rooms, and then simpler arrangements, perhaps put together by the housekeeper, in little nooks, on bedside tables, in the powder room: small vases of fresh roses, a single lily. As his friend glided around the apartment like a museum director rushing through a priceless collection on his way to an appointment, Ethan marveled at the abundance of brass and gold and silver; everything stopped short of being overdone, but was decadent, still: chandeliers and candlesticks and picture frames and door-knobs and switch plates. Hand-painted fabric murals in the dining room, a scene from the French Riviera. Ivory craquelure’d walls in Jackie’s study, like fragmented eggshells, a giant ebony Chinese desk its centerpiece. Framed covers of her numerous best sellers were the only nod to her professional persona as Jacqueline Sterling, a writer hard-bitten by glamour, someone who maintained a steely outer facade, a mask of foundation and Chanel. Those novels, hoarded by women all over