Then Came You

magazines—Newsweek and Time, along with the week’s tabloids — and a water cooler that let out the occasional burble in the corner. I gave the receptionist my name, sat down on the couch, my legs, in sheer hose, crossed at the ankle, and pinched the pleats of my skirt between my thumb and forefinger, making sure each one was smooth.

Church lady! a guy in college had called me one night when I’d allowed my roommates to coax me out of the room and to a party in a neighboring dorm. It was true that I dressed far more conservatively than most of my classmates: after a lifetime in the kilts and knee socks of my Upper East Side all- girls’ school, I’d never felt like myself in pants. Besides, I had narrow shoulders and tended to carry my weight in my hips and thighs, so jeans gave me the appearance of a bowling pin. . and after seeing my mother traipsing around in belly-baring yoga pants and lowwaisted double-dyed skinny jeans, I’d only wanted to cling to my skirts even more tightly. The summer before my senior year of high school, when I’d been choosing colleges, I’d actually checked to see if there was such a thing as a non-military school that had uniforms. If I could have found such a place, I would have happily attended.

“It’ll be fun!” my roommate, Vanessa, had told me, slipping into her own tight low-riding jeans and the inevitable silk tank top, with a down coat on top, because it was January and freezing. I let her drag me along, in my skirt and tights, my sweater set and my loafers, even though I truly didn’t see the point of parties. If I wanted to be hot and uncomfortable in the presence of drunk people yelling at one another, it would be easy enough to arrange those conditions, but why would I ever want to?

In the dorm room, I’d stood in the corner next to the stereo speakers, sneaking glances at my watch and wondering how soon I could feign a headache and get back to my room. There was a girl I recognized from my art history seminar lying on her back on one of the desks, giggling as a boy poured tequila into her navel, then bent down to slurp it out. Maybe it was supposed to be sexy, but all I could think was germs! and disease! and belly-button lint! At another desk, a half dozen of my classmates stood in front of a computer, watching porn. That was a big thing at Vassar: girls watching dirty movies with their boyfriends to show that they were progressive and evolved. I turned away as, onscreen, a naked man with a six-pack and tribal tattoos pulled his penis out of the woman he’d been hunched over and smacked it, over and over, into her cheeks.

I must have been making a face, because when I looked up, a guy I didn’t know was staring at me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He pointed. “Church lady!” he hollered. His friends started laughing, and then the girl with tequila all over her belly sat up and started laughing, too. Even after the guy who’d first said it had wandered away, probably to poop into the host’s rice cooker, then post a picture on Facebook, people were still saying it and laughing. Of course, Vanessa had overheard, and she’d hustled me over to the porn computer so she could show me YouTube videos of a man dressed as a woman with a sour face and a blue tweed suit and eyeglasses on a chain acting offended about everything. The guy had undoubtedly meant it as a devastating insult. I was not insulted. Given a choice between being a church lady or one of my female classmates who’d have to wake up the next morning wondering whether her nipples were now online, I’d take the church lady every time.

“Bettina Croft?”

I got to my feet. A woman was standing in the doorway of an office. Through the open door I could see bright art on the walls, and a dozen framed photographs on a side table. The woman had a friendly-looking face, brown hair in a ponytail, and a white short-sleeved T-shirt on top of a pair of loose-fitting cropped linen pants the color of raspberries. She wore flipflops and a necklace of brightly colored glass beads as her only accessory. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand and leading me inside. “Now. Before we get started, one quick question, and you have to tell me the truth,” she said, after I’d taken the chair across from her desk and settled my purse beside me. “Are these pajamas?” She stood, pointing at her pants. I stared.

“Excuse me?”

“I know you’re not here to talk about my pants,” she said. “We’ll get started in a sec. It’s just, I’m so distracted! I bought them — it was this ungodly hot day, and everything was at the dry cleaner’s, so I was wearing a wool skirt, and I thought I was going to melt, so I just ran in and grabbed them off the rack. They’re really comfortable, and I liked them so much I went online to buy another pair, and they were listed under ‘loungewear’ instead of pants, and I’m worried that I’m actually out in public in my PJs.” She made a face. “If that’s true, my partner will kill me. Janie’s stylish,” she said. “She finds me very frustrating.”

I examined the pants, with their elastic waist and baggy fit, wondering if I should have requested Segal instead of Klein. “They look like regular pants to me.” In fact, the pants looked way too casual for the office, better suited to a picnic or a trip to the beach. There was no official dress code at Kohler’s, but all the women wore skirts and dresses. You could wear pants if they were part of a suit and if you paired them with heels and the right accessories, and, even then, you couldn’t wear them very often before people would start to talk.

But maybe Kate Klein was working undercover, at a preschool or someplace like that. She smelled sweet in a familiar, evocative way, and there was a dab of something golden-brown on the hem of her shirt.

“Applesauce,” she said when she noticed my stare, pouring us both glasses of water from a pitcher filled with ice and sliced lemons that sat on a table against her wall, next to potted African violets. “Kids,” she said, pointing toward all those framed photographs. I saw a pair of identical twin boys and an older girl with hair the same color as Kate’s, maybe as young as ten or as old as fourteen. It was hard for me to guess. I didn’t spend much time around children.

Kate sat down on a chenille-covered couch thick with throw pillows, with a blanket hanging over the back. “So, Ms. Croft. Tell me what I can do for you.”

“My father,” I began. On the subway ride over I’d thought about how to most concisely express my problem. “He’s recently remarried.”

Kate Klein produced a legal pad and a ballpoint pen. Her expression was focused; her posture suggested that, in spite of her casual clothes and her comfortable couch, she was listening hard. “And you’d like us to look into his new wife. Is there anything particular that concerns you?”

“Well, her name, for starters. India.” I heard the scorn in my voice.

Kate lifted her eyebrows. “Maybe her parents were Gone With the Wind fans?”

I sipped my water and thought of my father’s bride standing at the sink at the house in Bridgehampton, washing dishes like she did it all the time, and how everything about her was fake. A few weeks ago, under the guise of looking up horoscopes on the Internet, I’d asked India the year of her birth and detected — or thought I had — a brief flutter of hesitation before she came up with a date.

Kate leaned forward with her elbows on her folded knees. “You don’t think your father might have done his own check? From what I’ve seen of him, he strikes me as a pretty savvy guy.”

“In business, maybe. But this. . my mom left him, which was difficult.” I felt the familiar mixture of sorrow at my mother’s departure and fury at her for leaving rise up inside me like acid indigestion, along with shame for having to say any of this out loud.

“Do they have a prenup?” Kate’s head was bent, and she was writing on her legal pad.

“Yes,” I said. I’d asked my father, and he’d looked at me with an uncharacteristically sharp expression. Why do you ask? he’d said.

Just curious, I’d told him. Later, when he and India had gone out to dinner, I’d found the document in my father’s safe, behind a Rothko lithograph in his home office — the code, I knew, was Trey’s birthday, then Tommy’s, then mine. According to the document, in the event of a separation India would receive a million dollars for every year she was married to my father for the first five years, then two million a year up to ten years, then three million a year. If she had a baby, she’d leave the marriage with thirty million dollars, and child support up to thirty thousand dollars a month, plus school tuition at mutually agreed-upon institutions until the baby turned eighteen. That was what worried me most, even though I figured India was too old and too skinny to get her period, let alone get pregnant. A baby would make her rich, really rich, and I couldn’t imagine her not wanting to grab at that chance, to have a baby, hit the jackpot, break my father’s heart, and go off to find a guy her own age, whatever that age really was.

Kate nodded, asking more questions about India — her age, date of birth, her job, and where she’d come from — before clicking her pen and looking at me. “Did you bring a picture?”

I pulled a snapshot out of my purse. I’d expected the wedding to be a gaudy, overblown affair, three hundred