The Unfortunates Read Online Free

take your lunch?”
    “I love to spoil him,” she says. To change the subject she asks, “And who are we?” as she reaches out to muss the head of a passing child, who swivels in alarm. She looks into the faces of the child’s parents, and into an adjacent group of guests. In this way, with her eyes and her hand, she dismisses the widows and the ambassador and brings this new group to her, mostly Bakers. Mrs. Baker leans down to kiss her, saying, “CeCe, don’t you look beautiful today!”
    She does not look beautiful. No, what she looks like now is a squirrel monkey. Her head, one day, tiny under the elegant fringe of silver and honey-colored hair. Her green eyes, muddier, shrunk into the sockets. Unchanged are her high but flattened cheekbones that, while not in fashion in her youth, were geometrical under her eyes, the eyes close together but bright and captivating. Along with her fair hair and her stark, Cleopatra eyebrows, she turned heads, the black and the blond of her, her face an assemblage of unlikely contrasts that she embellished with large, precious stones. She’d never been beautiful. But she was remarkable, and glad to not be counted in the limp category of pretty. The elegant force of her had once made her appear taller than her five feet five inches. Now she seems shorter, short. Gone is the glow of the skin but unchanged is her long, precise nose and tight nostril, as if drawn in perpetual inhalation. Her hair is blown out straight, cut expensively below the chin with a demure flip, pushed impatiently and tidily behind her ears, gold at the temples, not the high-voltage blond of some of her contemporaries—but that toy-monkey face beneath! Can it belong to her?
    To mask her irritation at Mrs. Baker’s flattery, she musters some of her own. “Talk about beautiful. This year I can see your honeysuckle from a mile away!” There’s no denying the Baker garden is a mess. She turns to Mr. Lewis, and they laugh about the disparity in age and attractiveness between himself and his wife, whom they wave to while they speak. CeCe kisses Nan Porter, whom she’s known since their sophomore year at Vassar, from the days when every afternoon they were required to attend tea wearing white gloves and pearls. She says, “Give it a rest, today, Nan,” and Nan says, “Give what a rest?” and they too have a laugh.
    Forty-five years before, CeCe was thirty, sitting up on the rail of a smaller boat, her silk collar fluttering in the breeze. Walter Minch—a stranger twenty years her senior—grabbed her shoulders and leaned her backward over the sea. Stranger, curio, husband, enemy, stranger once again, father to Patricia, father to George. Walter, the third and last man she ever had relations with on a beach, but who was the first? That pocket-eyed manufacturer of Italian cars, always mentioning the time after the war he drank absinthe with Picasso in Vallauris. Halfway up the cliff of a chalky Dover beach, she’d put her hand on his spine and they looked at the long shadows and no one was in sight, no one at all. How boring this party would have been to her younger self. How the line where the ocean meets the sky—now or then, how it remains the same. The face of the man who met Picasso slips back into the black chamber of forgetting. The voice of Wickie Randall eddies in. Wickie, who always wants to know what things are made of, is asking what the boat is made of. Someone says it’s teak. Yes, CeCe enjoyed getting ready for the party more than she’s enjoying the party. This, the part of sliding again and again into the right tone of voice, she does as a starling reiterates a snatch of music. She could do it in her sleep.
    “Well, hi, look at you,” says a woman CeCe doesn’t recognize, all in black, hanging over the rail in front of her. “I don’t feel great either. So hot. Worst idea, martinis.”
    CeCe looks deeply at the side of George’s head. Her guests are, as Walter would have said, getting