always has a good time,” he said.
I was glad I wasn’t taking a sip of my drink, because white wine spurting out of my nose wasn’t the image I wanted Peter’s friends to take away from the evening. Peter made a choking noise that I knew was his way of trying not to laugh.
“Iggie, have you met Caroline Vail and Alex Cutler?” I asked.
“Sure. We’re like this.” He held up two fingers to indicate just how close they all were, and Caro and Alex smiled and nodded in agreement, but Iggie clearly wasn’t interested in talking to them or to Peter and me—he had a very different agenda. “Ready for that dance, Hilarita?”
When we were in college, Iggie had hit on Hilary with a single-minded perseverance that was staggering when you considered most of the time she didn’t pay him enough attention to notice he was hitting on her. But even without the imminent certainty of a billion-dollar bank account, Iggie had been sufficiently self-confident to keep trying. Now he appeared to be picking up where he’d left off, and tonight Hilary had an agenda of her own.
She drained the rest of her martini and handed me the empty glass. “Let’s do it,” she said, allowing Iggie to lead her onto the dance floor.
“‘The Igster’?” Peter said as soon as they were out of earshot. This time I was taking a sip of my drink, but I managed to swallow without incident. “Who does he think he is? Elmo?”
“That’s new since college,” I said. “He never used to refer to himself in the third-person, and definitely not as ‘the Igster.’”
“He’s famous for it out here,” said Alex, an expression of bemused tolerance on his face. “Or maybe notorious would be a better way to put it.”
“I handle public relations for Igobe,” said Caro, her own expression equally bemused. “And I’ve tried to give Iggie some tips on things like wardrobe and assigning nicknames to himself and others, but he likes to do things his way.”
“And except for the wardrobe and the nicknames, his way is usually right,” said Alex. “Which is why I put money into his company. My firm is Igobe’s biggest outside shareholder. I even helped him with his business plan back when he was just getting started.”
“So that’s how you two know him?” I asked. “Alex, you invested in his company, and Caro, you do his company’s PR?”
They nodded in unison, and I wondered if they were a couple. It was hard to tell from their body language, and there’d been nothing in Peter’s introduction to indicate one way or the other, but they shared a similar outdoorsy look, as if they spent a lot of time doing healthy things, like eating trail mix and training for triathlons.
Caro glanced toward the dance floor. “Oh,” she said, wincing. “I’ve tried to give Iggie some tips on dancing, too, but that doesn’t seem to have helped much, either.”
We all turned to look. The band had reached the slowed-down, writhing-on-the-floor part of “Shout,” but only Iggie felt it necessary to actually writhe on the floor. Hilary stood watching, her head cocked to one side and her expression unreadable, a rarity for her.
“The Igster seems to have a thing for Hilary,” said Peter. “Is it requited?”
“I hope not, especially since she’s supposed to be dating someone else right now,” I said. “I think she’s just trying to hit him up for an interview for her story. She said she was thinking of making Iggie and Igobe the focus. Although, it could be useful to have a friend who was married to a billionaire.”
“I wonder what ever happened to Iggie’s first wife,” said Alex. “She must be kicking herself for bailing before the payoff.”
“Iggie was married?” I asked in disbelief.
Caro smiled at my reaction, revealing perfect white teeth. “There’s a lid for every pot.”
“Who was his lid? Or pot?” My contact with Iggie had been limited since college, picking up only recently with the discussions about my firm potentially handling his company’s IPO, but I was still surprised to have missed an entire marriage, and it was hard to imagine anybody willing to put up with Iggie long enough to marry him.
“Believe it or not, her name was Biggie,” said Alex.
“Did she call herself the Bigster?” asked Peter.
Alex chuckled, but Caro shook her head. “It was a nickname—probably left over from not being able to say Elizabeth, or something like that, when she was little.”
“Or maybe Iggie made it up. Either way, it fit,” said Alex.
Caro leaned forward and lowered her voice as if she were imparting classified information. “Unfortunately, Biggie was a little on the heavy side.” She smoothed the pink silk sheath she was wearing over her own trim hips.
“A little?” repeated Alex. “A little on the obese side is more like it.” He held his arms out and puffed up his cheeks to indicate that Biggie was a sizable woman. I was still having a hard time adjusting to the idea of Peter in a fraternity, but picturing Alex engaged in raucous male-bonding hijinks was a lot easier.
“She really had a very pretty face underneath all that hair,” said Caro. “And she was supposed to be very bright. But the marriage didn’t last. I think they met when they were in graduate school at Berkeley, and then they worked together at Iggie’s first start-up, the one before Igobe.”
“The one that never really got off the ground,” said Alex.
“Whatever did happen to Biggie?” Caro mused. “I haven’t seen her since the divorce, and that must have been over a year ago. It’s as if she fell right off the planet—just disappeared.”
“Nothing that big could just disappear,” said Alex with another chuckle.
Caro changed the subject then, asking about our plans while we were in town, and I was happy to end the discussion of Iggie’s ex-wife before Alex could make any more cracks about the poor woman’s weight. As far as I was concerned, anyone who’d had the misfortune to be married to Iggie deserved our full sympathy. We chatted a while longer, but guests of honor were supposed to circulate, so Peter and I eventually excused ourselves and circulated, working our way methodically through the crowd of people outside. Then we headed inside, where he abruptly pulled me down a short passageway and into the small laundry room.
“Hi,” he said, wrapping his hands around my waist.
“Hi back,” I said, resting my hands on his shoulders.
“You look really pretty.”
“Thank you. You look really pretty, too.”
“Pretty wasn’t what I was going for, but I’ll take it. Want to make out?”
“Here?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Now?” I asked.
He nodded again.
“Okay.”
We
