“Still Bo?” Deacon says. He logged in a lot of hours listening to Scarlett pine away for Bo the football star, Bo the president of Delta Chi at the University of Georgia. Deacon feels more jealous of Bo Tanner than he does of the ostensible genius Pilly Dodge.
“Sort of, yeah,” Scarlett says. “He sends me letters when he gets into the bourbon. Anne Carter has no idea about that.”
Deacon can’t believe the jealousy that consumes him. He gathers Scarlett up in his arms. He wants her to be his. How can he make her his?
The very next day he heads to Harry Winston and blows $90,000—his entire savings, basically—on a diamond solitaire engagement ring. Ninety grand: the number makes him shake, but he’s still not sure the diamond is big enough.
That night, he invites Scarlett to his apartment for dinner. He tells Angie only that there will be a surprise visitor eating with them; he doesn’t say who. Deacon makes a cold curried zucchini soup, a roasted red pepper and smoked Gouda quiche, a delicate mâche salad—Scarlett tries to eat vegetarian when she can, she’s confided—and he makes the champagne cake with champagne icing and champagne-candied strawberries. He feels a little squinchy about this because it was a cake he created for Belinda, but he convinces himself that if it worked on Belinda, then it will work on Scarlett.
When Scarlett rings the bell and Deacon ushers her in, Angie’s face falls. She glares at Deacon. “You’re kidding me, right?”
Scarlett doesn’t seem to hear this. “Angie!” she says. “I can’t believe how big you are! Come here and give me some sugar!”
“You’re dating my father?” Angie said. “You’re dating him?”
Scarlett’s arms drop to her sides.
“Angie,” Deacon says. “Stop with the theatrics.”
“I think it’s disgusting,” Angie says. She grabs her jacket, purse, phone. “I’m going to Pierpont’s.”
“No, you’re not,” Deacon says. “You will stay right here and eat with me and our old friend Scarlett.”
Angie opens the door to the hallway and steps out without another word.
Scarlett is suddenly teary. “She hates me.”
“It was a bad idea to surprise her,” Deacon says. “I should have told her you were coming. I should have explained what all the fuss was about.”
“Fuss?” Scarlett says.
Deacon pours two glasses of Billecart-Salmon rosé champagne. He’s just going to do it, no point in waiting. Angie is fifteen years old; she will get over whatever imaginary problems she has with this.
Deacon pulls out the velvet box. Scarlett’s eyes widen; they are a kaleidoscope of green, blue, gray. He opens the box, revealing the ring. “Will you marry me?” he says.
Now that he is back on TV, he is tabloid fodder. News of Deacon’s engagement to his former nanny, Scarlett Oliver, a scant two months after his divorce from Belinda Rowe hits the front of Us Weekly and the National Enquirer—complete with paparazzi photographs of the ice cube on Scarlett’s finger.
Belinda calls in a rage. She says, “Did you take Scarlett to St. John? I can only assume that you did. You were probably banging her the entire time she worked for us!”
Deacon doesn’t want to talk about St. John. To deny that Scarlett was there seems to put him at risk of admitting that he took Laurel.
He says, “It’s none of your business, Belinda.”
She says, “We were married when you went to St. John, Deacon. It is absolutely my business.”
He says, “Scarlett and I are in love, and we’re getting married.”
Belinda says, “She’s too young for you. And too shallow. Mark my words, you’ll be miserable.”
Deacon hangs up.
Deacon and Scarlett are engaged for nine months, and those months cost Deacon a fortune. Scarlett doesn’t want to move into Deacon’s apartment in the Waldorf Towers because that’s where he lived with Belinda, and her apartment on Sullivan Street is a studio that she shares. Deacon enlists the help of a real estate agent who also happens to be a gourmet cook and a fan of his show. Veronika has an inflated sense of Deacon’s net worth, however, because it takes her five tries to show him something even remotely in his price range, and that is the spacious, light-filled two-bedroom apartment in a newly renovated doorman building on Hudson Street.
“If you don’t like this,” Veronika says, “we can cross the bridge and look in Brooklyn.”
Deacon takes the apartment, even though it feels like swallowing a crab apple whole.
Next, Scarlett wants to enroll as a photography major at University College. She’s learned all she can from Pilly, she says, and from Dexter Candis before him, and from Annie Leibovitz before Dexter. What she needs now is schooling, a foundation in the basics.
Deacon is dying to point out to Scarlett that she has done this whole photography thing completely backward. What if he had interned with Marco Pierre White before learning to chop an onion? He wouldn’t have become a chef, that’s for sure. He also has hesitations about University College, which, ironically, is neither a university nor a college but rather a very expensive “institution of higher learning” whose sole reason for existence seems to be indulging the many, many dilettantes in Manhattan with money to burn on courses that won’t get them credits or a degree.
But Scarlett is dead set. She rattles off the names of the “professors”—oohing and ahhing after each one—though Deacon has never heard of any of them. She insists they’re all talented, all masters of the craft, and reluctantly, Deacon gives in, but this time it feels as if he’s swallowing a grapefruit whole.
It would be nice if she learned the basics, he thinks. All she has seemed to have learned during her years with Annie, Dexter, and Pilly is how to party. She knows the names of all the bouncers at all the clubs, but after going downtown with her a few times, he gives it up. Deacon can’t stand the crowd Scarlett hangs out with, and besides, he has to be home to supervise Angie. He is also pursuing a dream of his own: he wants to gather a group of investors and open his own place in midtown called the Board Room, which he envisions as a groundbreaking restaurant, even here in Manhattan, where nearly all ground has been broken.
He’s so excited by the concept of his new restaurant that he secretly wonders if getting married is a good idea. Once this restaurant takes off, Deacon will be working around the clock. He fears there might also be something to Belinda’s argument that Scarlett is shallow. She works out three hours a day, and she barely eats a thing. Deacon can’t feed her; he has tried and failed. She talks about Sue, a new dermatologist she goes to for facials; Mikey, the trainer she’s hired at the gym; and a DJ at Club Barcelona named Go-Go; she talks about someday working for Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Elle, French Vogue. She talks about traveling to Africa, the Philippines, Tokyo. When Hayes lands his job with Fine Travel, Scarlett begs him to put in a good word for her with the photo editor. Meanwhile, she’s only three weeks into her classes.
Deacon decides he’s going to break the engagement, and he has to do it soon, because wedding plans are in the works. The nuptials are to be held in Savannah in July, in the backyard of Scarlett’s childhood home. Her uncle, a judge, will do the honors. A week before the invitations are to go out, Scarlett says she needs to talk to him. She has been acting strange and distant. Deacon assumes she feels as he does, and wants to break the engagement.
He says to her, “Scarlett, is there something you want to tell me?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m pregnant.”
The Board Room opens to rave reviews when Ellery is six months old. Scarlett has decided to take a year off from University College to nurse the baby and work on getting her figure back.
Everything is going smoothly.
Deacon has a $2,000-a-week coke habit, and he goes through a bottle of Jameson every three to four days. He tells himself it’s medicinal: he needs the coke to stay awake and the whiskey to fall asleep. Anyone who thinks he has a “problem” has never opened a restaurant before.
Ellery is six years old and wears her hair in two braids. She joins the Brownies, and the local troop meets in the basement of the Cowgirl, a bar in the West Village. Deacon takes Ellery every week and sits up at the bar with moms Janelle and Greta Rae and dad Potter. They drink a few beers and mow through bowls of peanuts, dropping the shells on the floor. They talk about their kids and schools and a little bit about their lives. Deacon regales his new friends with the names of the celebrities who have come to eat at the Board Room—Beyoncé, Clint, Kiefer. Potter is a financial columnist for the Huffington Post; Janelle does hair and makeup on CBS This Morning; Greta Rae is married to an advertising mogul.