Gilded Age Read Online Free PDF Page B

considering there’s two sides to every story. Nonetheless, they make things unpleasant almost everywhere I go.”
    “You’re staying at your mother’s?” I started heating oil in the pot.
    “Until I decide.”
    “If you want to stay?”
    “Who I want to marry.”
    I stopped and looked at her then. “What about a job?”
    “What about one?” she asked, keeping my eye.
    “I mean are you going to work or anything?” I asked, turning back to the pot. Though of course I thought Ellie should work, she and I both knew that the quickest route to stability for her was to marry it.
    Before you hoist a pig’s head on a pike and dance around me, let me explain that I think marrying for money is deplorable. But I am a realist, and you cannot deny that even in the twenty-first century a woman can still marry herself out of a precarious situation. No onebats an eye when a woman is broke one day and rich the next through marriage—especially a woman like Ellie. It’s not the same for a man though. A man will still be expected to earn a living lest he seem a freeloader on his wife’s money or his wife’s family money. Whether the double standard is the product of testosterone-fueled pride, evolution, or simply midwestern sensibilities, it is no less real.
    “Actually,” she said, leaning forward and ashing into the saucer, “I have a friend who’s just moved here from New York. He’s a designer. He needs some publicity and PR help.”
    “A designer in Cleveland?”
    “He wouldn’t mind my telling you that we met in rehab,” she said. “He had to get away from New York, from his old connections.”
    “You always have the most glam jobs.” I’d envied Ellie’s jobs in fashion—not for her, crunching numbers or sitting through interminable meetings in stuffy conference rooms.
    She exhaled out the window, the smoke curling into a rhododendron bush. “It doesn’t really pay anything.”
    I was finishing up sautéing the onions. “If you marry Randall Leforte at least you’ll save money on monogramming. I heard he buys Ralph Lauren because the monogram matches his own,” I said, adding the chicken and spattering oil.
    “People talk about his monogram?”
    “Nothing else to talk about in Cleveland,” I said with a little laugh.
    Ellie rose up out of her chair then to see what I was doing. Worried, I think, that I’d start a grease fire.
    “Jim tells me Leforte’s well-known downtown,” I said. “Not entirely aboveboard—some payoffs, something with politics I guess. I hadn’t laid eyes on him before last night.”
    “Never run into him at parties or benefits?”
    “Never.”
    She nodded and at that moment Jim came through the back door. In his blue suit with the yellow tie unknotted at the neck he looked scrumptiously handsome, the modern warrior returning home. Then again, I was in love with him.
    He kissed me, kissed Ellie on the cheek, gave her cigarette a quick second glance, and disappeared upstairs to change his clothes. Any lingering nervousness I’d had about seeing Ellie seemed to evaporate with Jim’s arrival. In my cozy house with a baby on the way, I couldn’t help but feel a trifle smug—horrible to admit, I know—in front of my old friend who couldn’t make her fancy marriage work and had returned home in disarray.
    “I should go and leave the happy couple,” she said, gathering up her things. “I have to pack.”
    I felt instantly guilty, as if she’d been reading my mind. “Don’t go,” I said, ignoring my recipe and quickly pouring a bottle of red wine and the rest of the ingredients into the pot.
    “I’ve been invited leaf-peeping up at the Trenors’. Julia wants me up there early.”
    “But we’re going too. We’re invited for the weekend.”
    We both squealed and then giggled.
    The Trenors owned a massive ski chalet in New York state that looked like it belonged on the slopes of Aspen, not Ellicottville, New York. Julia Trenor was our age and famous for her