She Regrets Nothing Read online

“Stop it.” Nora reached over and pinched her brother’s side. “She just got here. I shouldn’t have left her alone all afternoon.”

  “Should we get a nanny for her?” he asked. He looked at her sleeping. She was awfully pretty, though she didn’t resemble his sisters at all. She was like a contestant in one of the beauty pageants Nora loved to watch—wholesome-looking, not a shred of chic or cool. And like most men, because he found her beautiful, he also found her much more sympathetic. Poor thing: her parents, the bad marriage. Poor, poor thing.

  “Laila, honey,” Nora said softly, leaning forward to shake her cousin’s shoulder.

  Laila awoke with a snort; it took her a moment to gain her bearings, but as she came to, she appeared overwhelmed by humiliation.

  “Oh God,” she said, “I’m so sorry, Nora, I fell asleep . . . and I was just . . .”

  “Playing dress up?” Leo suggested. She was delightful, he thought; so guileless.

  Laila blushed crimson and looked like she might cry.

  “Cut it out, Leo.”

  “Nora, I . . .”

  “Honey, it’s fine. I said you could borrow my clothes, didn’t I?”

  “I know, but I’m embarrassed. I was just feeling lonely and bored, I guess.” She sat up abruptly and then immediately lowered herself back down again. “Oh, my head.”

  “One of Leo’s sidecars will fix that. Come on, let’s go downstairs.”

  “You go; let me just clean all this up.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nora said, “Maggie will be in tomorrow; she can do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course!”

  Soon the three of them were settled in the plush couches and armchair that surrounded Nora’s automatic fireplace. The day had been pleasant, but a cold snap was descending as the sun went down, a harbinger of autumn. Leo had made them cocktails, wheeling out Nora’s beloved copper bar cart with its mirrored trays.

  “Is it really Sunday evening already?” Leo wondered aloud. “Ah, tomorrow the mines.”

  Laila looked at him curiously. Neither of the twins worked, at least not in any traditional sense, and she was curious about how they spent their days.

  “I promised Brian I’d get him pages by the end of the week,” Leo said by way of explanation, Brian being his long-suffering literary agent. Of course, he’d told himself this every week since they’d sold the book a year ago. His original deadline had come and gone, and he still didn’t have much beyond the original proposal—which had been heavily edited by Brian, who had suggested simply hiring a ghostwriter to complete the book, but Leo was appalled by the suggestion.

  “Why don’t you go out to the house in East? It would be so quiet, and you could focus. I could come with you so you wouldn’t be lonely! At least until Thursday, but then I have to be back for the Operation Smile luncheon. Did I tell you?”

  “Yes, you know I love Lydia.” Leo smiled approvingly, “But see, if I go isolate myself in my little writer’s garret, how can I write Man About Town? Which is the whole essence of the book. It’s a Catch-22!”

  Laila had read through the online archive of Leo’s columns. It was mostly a collection of names, places, and events in bold typeface—none of which meant anything to her, with the exception of the occasional famous actor or model who popped up. She felt as though she were reading coded messages, the details decipherable only to those in the know.

  Leo vowed to tackle his manuscript in monastic seclusion early the next morning, but for now, he wished only to distract himself from the task that awaited him.

  “How was the matchmaker?” he asked his sister.

  “Oh God,” Nora said. “Awful, what do you think? She appraised me, like I was going up for auction at Christie’s or something. And she and Mom kept talking back and forth in Russian. Ugh. Be glad you’re a boy and Mother doesn’t pull this bullshit on you.”

  “I’m a lost cause anyway.” Leo’s brief attention span was as consistent in his love life as it was in the rest of his endeavors.

  “No, you’re a man,” Laila said. “You can wait as long as you want to get married.” He gave her a surprised little smile. The beauty queen had bite.

  “So can you!” he said, directing his words back to his sister, whom he hated to see in distress for any reason.

  “Mother doesn’t think so.”

  Leo rolled his eyes. “What’s the point in money if you can’t marry whomever you want? Haven’t those always been the rules?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want someone to marry me for my money.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You want someone who loves you for you, obviously. I just don’t think you need to get married at all if you don’t want to.” Leo had tried, on occasion, to set Nora up, but the few young men Leo felt were suitable for his sister had not shown interest. In his love for his twin, he sweetly overestimated her appeal.

  “I hate to agree with Petra on this,” Laila began. Leo and Nora turned their heads to look at her. “But it’s true that most men want women in their twenties.”

  She suddenly seemed world-weary for her age, and Leo thought, not for the first time, that twenty-five meant something very different where she came from. “Well, I love older women,” he said.

  “Yes, but . . . ,” Laila began then stopped short.

  Leo looked at her expectantly, an amused smile on his lips. “But?” he said, sweeping his hand before him with a flourish.

  “Just . . . don’t you think that’s a novelty? Like, once you get married, you really think it will be to someone older than you?”

  “Leo, married!” Nora squealed.

  Leo made a mock-hurt face at her. “I’ll get married someday!”

  “Oh? To whom? A unicorn princess who slides down a rainbow right onto your lap?” Nora asked.

  “Unfair! I’ll get married when I find the right girl.” Leo did not like to think of himself as mercurial and easily bored with women. Instead, he fancied himself a romantic who found something to love in a great many women, but who would be humbled into monogamy when the right one appeared.

  “My ex-husband, Nathan,” Laila said, “was ten years older, and he confessed once to me how much fun it was to have a younger woman on his arm. I’m just saying, Nora, at our age, we have the most options we’re ever going to have. It’s just a numbers game.”

  “Does this mean I have to go on a date with Larry?” Nora said as though she expected them to follow this.

  “Who is Larry?” Leo and Laila asked in unison.

  Nora groaned. “The guy Oxana wants to set me up with. He owns a clothing company.”

  “Well, that sounds okay,” Leo said, “at least he’s not a banker.” Bankers, to Leo’s mind, were the worst of the worst. There were so many of them in the city—rich and gauche, every last one—they were without nuance, without taste, they were the antithesis of everything Leo held dear. Ironically, they made up the majority of the readership of his Man About Town column and would be the first to buy his prospective book to display proudly on their hulking onyx coffee tables.

  Nora made a face. “He’s forty-one.”

  “That’s horrifying,” Leo said. “He could be our dad.”

  “Only in the technical sense,” Laila said.

  “Would you date someone that age?” Nora was incredulous.

  “Of course,” Laila said, “if it was the right person.”

  “George Clooney?” Leo said. He dearly hoped his cousin was not simply a gold digger. It wasn’t that he had a moral quandary with this, but then she would be boring. And Leo did not want to think she was boring.

  “Clooney is way older than forty-one; not that that would stop me or anyone else.”

  “Well Larry is not George Clooney,” Nora said. “I just wish Mother didn’t have to be so pushy. She never does this with Liberty.”

  “That’s because she wants Liberty to continue speaking to her.”

  “Liberty didn’t talk to my mother for six months
one time,” Nora explained to her cousin.

  “What happened?”

  “This was when Liberty was still modeling. Our mother kind of pushed her into it; it was never . . . it just didn’t really work out.”

  “But she was so good,” Laila said.

  “She was, but she never liked it.” Leo was aware they shouldn’t even be discussing this with Laila just yet. In general, this wasn’t a period of time that any of them discussed.

  “Why did she ever get into it, then?”

  This part of the story was well-worn, unlike the shadowy events that followed it. “Mother was shooting a story for Elle Decor,” Nora began, “and Liberty came home from school while the photographer and his team were still there. My mother called her into the room for a kiss hello, and the photographer kept shooting. They used one of the images in the story, and everyone became obsessed with Liberty. So she started modeling.”

  “It was Mother’s doing. Liberty hates being the center of attention,” Leo said.

  “Is that why she stopped speaking to her?”

  “No, when she was sixteen there was a lingerie shoot that my mother wanted her to do. . . .”

  Leo flashed a stern look at Nora. Even the twins didn’t know the details of the shoot that had upset Liberty so much. They were only ten at the time, and their glamorous teenage sister was a mystery to them. When she became withdrawn and stopped speaking to their mother, they only knew something bad had happened, never exactly what. In the years that followed, it became crystal clear that Liberty never wanted to speak of the incident. Of course, the twins were sophisticated enough to know how sordid the modeling industry could get, and they too wanted to look no closer at what might have befallen their sister. Needless to say, the whole matter felt like it ought to be off-limits with Laila.

  “Anyway, Liberty was mad at her,” Nora said, waving her hand in front of her face, “it was a whole thing. So now my mom doesn’t interfere in her life, and they get along fine.”

  “But she kept modeling after that,” Laila said.

  “Yes, but she fired her agent, hired her own team. She did it till college and then dropped it,” Leo said.

  “But wasn’t she doing really well?”

  “She just liked making her own money. I never got why that made any difference. Like, whatever any of us could make from working, it’s not going to matter, you know? It’s a drop in the bucket.” It was something about his older sister that genuinely confounded Leo: the way she seemed to want to pretend that the family’s money didn’t exist, as though it was a burden to her. She lived in a modest one-bedroom in the East Village, and although the neighborhood had gentrified around her, she’d originally bought it for a song with her modeling money. He knew others admired her for it, but he couldn’t understand her motives. It’s not as though they were the children of an arms dealer; why should they be ashamed of their wealth?

  “Now she gets paid to have her nose in a book all day!” Nora said. “She loves it.”

  Laila nodded and took a long sip from her cocktail. “And she’s very close with our grandfather?”

  Leo and Nora both let out a groan. “The golden granddaughter,” Leo said. Their grandfather held standards for each of his progeny that were both impossible to divine and even more impossible to live up to. He had wanted his son to follow him, but then seemed to disdain him for his lack of originality. His daughter was an obvious lost cause, and God only knew what had happened with Laila’s father. As far as Leo went, Frederick always asked him when he would find a “real” job or join his own father at Lawrence Holdings. Leo hoped that in making himself an author, he might win him over. Only Liberty seemed to meet with Fredrick’s approval. Nora just seemed to baffle him, though there was a certain affection in his tolerance of her.

  It struck Laila how the twins seemed to envy their sister without malice. Here in the Lawrences’ world, could it simply be that there was enough for all?

  7

  * * *

  Dear Mr. Haegal,

  Thank you for your submission to Gerard Mills & Co. We recognize the hard work that goes into writing a novel of this length—

  Two hundred and ten thousand words, to be exact!

  and we appreciate your giving us the opportunity to read it.

  Laila rifled back through her notes to find anything positive to say about the intergalactic western she was rejecting on behalf of the agency. Her eyes landed squarely on a space in the margin where she’d written, in all caps, EWWW! It was a graphic sex scene between the middle-aged earthling hero and a buxom blond alien (qualities that existed irrespective of humanity in this author’s reality).

  While we appreciate your vivid attention to detail, we don’t feel that Fear and Loathing and Space Pirates is a good fit for us. We wish you the best of luck in finding representation.

  Sincerely,

  Liberty Lawrence

  Laila sent the e-mails from the main address but signed them with Liberty’s name. She’d been told this made authors feel as if their work were being taken seriously and discouraged them from calling in about it. It didn’t prevent them from doing so: in the first two weeks of her internship, she’d had a dozen calls from writers the agency did not represent—some “just checking in” to see when their manuscript might be read, others irate that they’d been rejected. At first Laila had felt sympathetic to the nicer ones, but she was quickly tiring of all of them. Did they not understand how repellent desperation was?

  She’d feigned a passion for books when Liberty had offered her the intern gig—managing to pull some details of classics she’d read in high school out of the ether—figuring she could cultivate her interests as needed. This was something Laila had become good at: mirroring. It was the secret to making men feel loved and making them love you in return (if they could even tell the difference, which so many could not): be into things they liked, be the girl they’d always imagined, a perfect projection of themselves. She’d discovered this when she was coming into herself around the age of fourteen, and it was amazing how true it still was. But women were harder to crack. Women were cannier. Laila longed to be close to her cousins, to Petra. Her mother hadn’t had women friends, didn’t believe in them. It didn’t mean it had to be the same for her, did it? This was a new life. This was another chance.

  When she’d first arrived at the beautiful old brick building near Gramercy Park that housed the agency, and climbed the stairs gazing at the framed book covers that decorated the walls, Laila imagined that the job might be rather glamorous. After all, Liberty herself was the chicest person Laila knew. She had been shocked to find out how hard her cousin worked, often staying at the office long after Laila left at five. You would have thought she actually needed the money! She was beloved by her boss, Gerard Mills—that giant, lumbering publishing titan—and had easily secured Laila a spot as an intern, which, evidently, was a coveted position. Now that she was here, though, Laila couldn’t imagine why. It was a curious thing about New York: the fierce scramble to gain a foothold permeated everything. There were droves of young women who lived in shoe boxes with eight roommates in order to work such internships. Laila swung between feeling lucky—after all, she lived in the resplendent luxury of what had to be one of the nicest penthouses in lower Manhattan—and also entitled, by her very birth, to be exactly where she was.

  At the end of her first week, two of the assistants were already in Liberty’s office by the time Laila arrived for the day. She was late because she’d taken the subway. Nora had taken the car that morning for some errand or other, and when Laila asked how she ought to get to the office—hoping that Nora would simply offer to drop her off—she’d told her to just take a cab. She ought to have just done this; it was a short ride and would not have made much of a dent in her admittedly small cash reserves, but she’d gotten it in her head that it might be fun to take the subway. She’d chosen the right line to get her to Gramercy but had gotten on the R train to Whitehall Street and was s
everal stops in the wrong direction before she realized her mistake. By the time she’d arrived at the office, she was frazzled. On that morning, the city felt like a giant and seething beast threatening to devour her.

  “Good morning, sweets,” Liberty said when Laila had at last made it to the sanctuary of the air-conditioned office, “are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Laila said. “I got lost on the subway.”

  The assistants gave each other a knowing smile, and Laila wanted to smack them. She did not need their patronizing sympathy.

  “It’s fine. Hey, Kim and Daphne offered to take you to lunch this afternoon.” Liberty nodded at the two young women hovering at her office door.

  “That’s so sweet,” Laila said, turning to them and smiling. Though she would rather eat at her desk—or with Liberty in the small kitchen as she had the day before, the two of them snugly sitting at the tiny table chatting about books—than make conversation for an hour with Kim and Daphne, who were of little interest to her.

  “It’s so hard when you first move here,” Daphne—Asian, and the prettier of the two—said.

  “I got lost all the time!” Kim added. She was pale and a little chubby with sporadic freckles and dishwater blond hair. Laila had noticed her grating laugh echoing from Liberty’s office the day before. She was the assistant who directly supported her cousin, and her adoration was plain. But both assistants seemed keen to suck up to Liberty, hence the lunch invitation.

  They took her to a nearby restaurant called Bite.

  “Order whatever you want!” Kim said, “Liberty gave us her agency card. Your cousin is the best, you know?”

  Laila smiled at her. “Thanks.”

  All three studied the menus as Kim tortured herself with her desire for an eggplant panini before at last ordering a salad with the dressing on the side. Daphne then smoothly ordered the eggplant panini—which garnered a look of betrayal from Kim. “It sounded so good, I had to!”

  Laila saw this for the power move it was and one-upped her by ordering the roast-beef sandwich.