“Don’t tell me you’re not worried too.”
“I’ll get worried if I have to contact the Dahlbergs for a postponement. Pippi doesn’t miss a trick; she’ll make us pay out the nose. Leave it to your son to pull a stunt like this less than two weeks before the wedding.”
“He’s your son too. Maybe he has cold feet and is too afraid to tell you.”
“Good. He should be.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Honey, you’re a beautiful dancer. Don’t let this weigh on you so much.” Humphrey picks up his copy of insight guru Maxwell Gladfish’s It Feels Like You’re Thinking! and brushes orange crumbs off the expanse of his hand-stitched maroon velour tracksuit. He chews noisily. The conversation is over.
Katya frowns. She swings around the pole one more time, then traipses across the room to switch off the low funk music emanating from the room’s surround sound.
“Get me a tallboy while you’re up?” Humphrey calls after her as she leaves the room.
Katya Ripple, age thirty-seven, strides down the hallway of her mansion in a T-back and bunny pumps, thinking about her son. She’s never lost the model’s way of walking, and even now, she holds her shoulders low and her head high, her narrow hips swinging with cool insistence. Her face is the Golden Ratio made flesh; her body is hairless, ageless, and glowing. Generations of Ripple men leer at her from their portraits on the walls to either side. Her placid eyes do not return their gaze. With these shoes on, she’s nearly tall enough to see the dust atop the picture frames.
Katya enters the kitchen. Two dishwashers sit at the center island, eating their lunch beneath the elaborate mobile of copper pots and pans suspended from the ceiling rack. They look up, and in their eyes, Katya recognizes the gaze men have cast in her direction since the first stutters of her adolescence. For an instant, she is twelve again, walking the frozen river to school, while the neighbor boys and tradesmen stare down from the banks, halted by the sight of her. Her homeland had given up religion on principle, deposed God like all the rulers before, but on the back roads they still practiced the ways of awe.
“Pardon,” she murmurs. She pulls open the steel door of the walk-in fridge; steam pours off her body as she enters.
Katya came from Smoczek, a village in the snowy east of an adjacent continent. In her country, girls entered at birth into the National Attractiveness Registry and underwent development inspections once annually—if their aggregate scores qualified, they were permitted at age fourteen to apply to the National Modeling Bureau, which shipped top candidates overseas for government-sanctioned fashion and prostitution assignments. It was either that or chop work in the National Ice Manufactory. Although her life hasn’t turned out exactly as she dreamed, Katya still feels that she chose wisely.
She wasn’t so certain her first two years in the city, which she spent on a packboat in the Empire Island harbor, cramped in a hull moist with the breathy hope of a dozen other girls, every surface strewn with lingerie. Always she was bent toward a radiant mirror, eyes wide, mouth an O of surprise, an implement of beauty trembling in her hand. Always was the fear, indistinguishable from the sensation of being awake, that she would gain a pound, an inch, a blemish, a size—that she would take up too much space, and she would be sent back. There were more where she came from, so many more. So many pretty girls. And Empire Island was no longer even a top destination: all but the richest and most eccentric zillionaires had already fled the city.
Why, Katya sometimes wondered, would anyone stay here, least of all these men, who could carry their wealth and privilege with them far away—to the ends of the Earth? It would be a long time before she learned how riches could tether you in place, harness you to a burdensome hoard that made true flight impossible. The remainders, as the city’s bachelor holdouts were known, were in one sense already married, to their real estate and their investments in infrastructure, to the institutions their ancestors had founded, the streets in their names. To disavow these assets would cause a panic, a loss; it could wipe them out entirely.
Nevertheless, she and her sisters hunted those remainders with a single-minded desperation. The models were technically competitors, but they banded together as orphans in a strange land do. Katya hardly knew her own body, her own thoughts, from the others’. By day, they piled together in the packboat waterbeds, golden limbs interlaced, makeup smearing the pillowcases. By night, their eyes burned in their starved faces as they designer-stripped on the catwalks of deserted nightspots to the songs of distant and not-so-distant sirens.
Humphrey Ripple, financier, didn’t speak to her the first few times she lap danced him, but he kept coming back to her stage. Once he brought a videographer. Once he brought his impotent brother. When at last Humphrey chose her, brought her to his home, he gave her an identity: a name that rendered her visible in his world, collapsing though it was. And when she bore his child, he gave her a vocation too.
Katya peels a grapefruit, delivered here from the balmy tropics, and eats a bitter slice. She knows what Humphrey is worried about. He’s worried Duncan is on the chaw, like the Liddell heir was a few years back. Enterprising torchies do smuggle it out to the surface streets sometimes; some say they travel in the sewers, on a network of dinghies for hire, mercenary gondoliers circulating drugs through the city’s intestines, down where they’re safe from the fires. Katya’s no innocent and she’d like less than anyone to see her son carted off for Chemical Re-Education, but privately, she thinks Humphrey’s giving their son a bit too much credit. Duncan left the house in a Bot Tot hoodie and a pair of pajama pants with dolphins on them. He uses his inhaler like a pacifier (it’s to treat his affluenza, which the pediatrician reassured her “isn’t even a real thing”) and his sneaker soles light up when he walks. Probably the worst thing a chawmonger would give him would be a bloody nose, or some condescending advice. Besides, even if Duncan was using, that’s no reason why he would vanish for three days. If anything, he’d be back to get more cash. Chaw doesn’t make you disappear. She should know. She’s tried it herself.