Blue Heaven (7 page)

Moira opened her mouth to protest but Maddie held up a hand and plowed sweetly on.

"Yes, dear, I know what you're going to say, and it's just
dumb.
Sure your mother's a proud lady and sure she'd rather follow tradition! But Moira, honey, the traditions to worry about are the fun ones, not the who-pays-for-what ones! Listen, I got an idea-why don't I just fly over there tomorrow and have a nice little heart-to-heart-?" "No! You mustn't do that! She'd hate it!"

Maddie stared bewildered.

"I mean, it's not
you,
Momma Cellini! She doesn't want to see anyone! Not until after the cosmetic surgery!"

"The accident was that bad?"

"Yes! When she fell her face hit a flagstone. She bit her own lip off.

"The poor
thing!"

"Oh, they sewed it back on. But between that scar and all the other
facial bruises and the broken nose she's not looking her best. And, just between us, Mother is terribly vain."

"Well, who isn't?"

"She'd feel wretched if you saw her for the first time looking like that."

"Well, I don't blame her! Not one bit. I'll just call her on the phone."

"She can't talk! She's not allowed to move her mouth until her doctors are sure the lip won't be rejected."

"How
awful
for her! Gilbert, are you all right? Quick, Philip, pound him on the back a few times."

"Are you okay, love?" asked Moira.

"I'm fine, dear. I must have choked on something."

"Poor lamb!"

"I'll tell you what then," said Maddie. "Why don't I just write her a nice long letter?"

"That really is very thoughtful of you, but I just know however tactfully you make the offer she's still going to be very upset. Oh, she may accept eventually, but she's going to feel embarrassed. I know it's silly but that's just the way she is."

"Proud," said Maddie, nodding sagely.

"And the doctors did say she should avoid any emotional stress whatsoever for the first six weeks of her recovery."

"Six weeks! Well, honey we can't wait that long to get started. There's too much that has to be done!"

They mulled it over and finally arrived at this accommodation: Maddie would go discreetly forward with some preliminary expenditures and then, at some point in January, Moira would gently break the news to poor Mother that the Cellinis had insisted on shouldering the expense of a larger wedding and hoped she would not take offense at their presumption.

"You've been so understanding!" said Moira. "And so generous! How can I ever repay you for being so kind?"

"Easy! Just let me get started the minute we stagger out of here! I just love to plan weddings! I know I'll never have another one of my own," she said, an assertion which, given her husband's line of work, struck me as unduly pessimistic, "so the nicest favor you can do for me is to let me help with yours!"

And with that, she rose and strode off to the powder room to repair the damage Moira's poignant tale had wreaked on her mascara.

Moira downed her drink and smiled triumphantly as though she expected us to fall all over her with congratulations on a job well done. She deduced quickly that no such reaction was forthcoming.

"What's the matter with you two?"

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" hissed Gilbert through a frozen smile.

"What do you think! I'm getting your family to pay for everything!"

"I know that, you lying bitch! How
dare
you soak my mother for all the money you blew on your goddamn assholic investments!"

"Well, there's gratitude for you!"

"Gratitude!" snarled Gilbert.
"Gratitude!"

"You stupid twink! Don't you realize I just made you somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars?"

The anger left Gilbert's face and was replaced with a look of utter confusion.

"Huh?"

"How?"
I asked.

"Gawwd!" she whispered. "It's a good thing Winslow and I are the brains of this operation because you two are totally thick! Don't you get it? Mummy is going to
reimburse
me for everything that gets spent. Everything! If we borrow the money from someone we have to pay it all back when Mummy pays me. But if it's a
gift
-! We just get our hands on the receipts, give them to Mummy, she 'reimburses' us and it's all ours!"

Gilbert said nothing for a few moments. He just sat there transfixed in a state of religious ecstasy.

"Moira," he finally whispered, his voice thick with emotion and rum. "You are so wonderful!"

"That's more like it!" she said, kissing his cheek. "Mind you it wasn't
all
Winslow's idea. He came up with the part about getting your family to pay and my mother to 'reimburse' us, but
he
wanted me to use all the money to replenish the trust fund so
he'd
be off the hook. Which is just like Winslow! But I said, 'Don't be silly, Winnie, why put it back? Much better to find some good investment that will
triple it and then there'll be plenty to replenish the silly fund and tons left over for-' "

"Are you two serious!"

Heads turned toward us from every corner of the bar.

"Philip!"

"Shhhhhh!"

"Honestly! What's the matter with you?"

"What's the matter with
me?
Are you two insane? You can't
do
this!"

"I don't see why not," said Moira.

"Gilbert! Don't you see what you'd be doing!?"

"You bet I do!" he giggled. "Pulling a fast one on old Tony and making a fortune while I'm at it!"

"But Gilbert-you just don't embezzle money from mafiosi! They don't
like
it! If he catches on to what you're doing he might kill you! He might kill all of us!"

Gilbert guffawed through his cocktail straw, blowing bubbles in his Stinker.

"Oh, puh-leeeeeez!" groaned Moira, amused in spite of herself. "You're not going to start that nonsense again!"

"Gilbert," I said, as close to apoplexy as one can be while managing to remain outwardly composed in the bar of a Polynesian restaurant, "I think you're making a very serious mistake. I know I've never met the Cellinis but I don't care. They frighten me."

"Oh,
everybody
frightens you."

"Look!" cried Moira, lampooning my alarmist tendencies. "Lelani! She's got a gun!"

Gilbert hooted and pointed to the South Seas landscape just above Moira's head.

"That painting!"

"What about it?"

"The eyes on the native girl just moved!"

"Oh no! We're being watched by the Menahooni gang!"

This last sally did them in completely. They sat there clutching their sides, convulsed with drunken laughter.

"Well, what's gotten into you two?" asked Maddie, plopping down beside Moira.

"Philip's been telling the most wonderful jokes."

Seven

"O
h, you writers are so clever. Well, I'm glad to see you all in such a good mood again. I can't stand to see people get all gloomy over money-not when Tony has so much he hardly knows what to do with it! Why, only a month ago I saw him filling a suitcase with twenty-dollar bills-just for a weekend in the Bahamas! 'Tony!' I said to him. 'How much can you
drink
in two days!' Lelani! Thank you so much! Aren't these delicious?"

"I tell you, Philly," said Gilbert as we set off across Central Park, his mother and betrothed having parted company with us to enjoy the first of many shopping sprees, "there have been times when I've considered Moira just about the lowest form of life you could see without a really expensive microscope. There have been moments when just thinking about sharing a place with her for another year and a half has made my skin break out. But when I sat there just now listening to her talk about receipts and reimbursements I knew, right here"-he thumped his chest-"this was the girl for me!"

"Gilbert! Open your eyes, will you? That girl is pure poison. Don't you see what she's getting you into?"

"A higher tax bracket, that's what. She's magnificent, Philip. She just doubled our take from this, and all it took was one little lie."

"One
lie? Maybe it's one lie now but keeping it up is going to take hundreds and hundreds more."

"We're up to it," he said, smiling confidently.

"Not me."

His smile vanished and he stopped in his tracks.

"I hope you're not thinking of quitting on me."

"I'm not thinking about it. I'm doing it. As of right now, you can count me out."

"But why?"

"Why! Gilbert, you're swindling the fucking
Mafia\"

"Oh, that again," he said, rolling his eyes.

He seated me on a bench and addressed me as if I were a small child who refuses to give up the notion that his closet's inhabited by Dr. Blood and the Monkey Men.

"Philip, I really don't know why you're suddenly convinced my stepfather is some Napoleon of crime, but I wish you'd cut it out. It's getting old."

"Well, how do you explain all the things Maddie was saying? People drowning in their soup. And Tony with his suitcases full of money!"

Gilbert giggled and fixed me with a smile that was a perfect mix of affection and condescension.

"Phil! How do you explain
anything
my mother says? I mean, c'mon! You've listened to her for ten years-have you ever heard her get
anything
right?"

He had a point there. My mind strayed back to that excruciating night during Gilbert's adolescent golddigging stage when Maddie pulled me aside at a dinner party and confided how embarrassed she was that Gilbert was playing matchmaker for her. Why, in the last year he'd dragged home
three
refined fortyish gentlemen, all of whom had money to burn. Very sweet of him, she felt, but if she had to sit through one more opera she'd scream.

Gilbert continued:

"She said Joey Sartucci drowned in his soup. What do you want to bet he just had a heart attack at lunch? And someone had a car accident-big surprise! They drink like fish. It's a wonder more of them haven't driven off cliffs. And as for my cousin mysteriously disappearing, he's probably just run off to Vegas with some bimbo. A few silly coincidences and you're convinced you've just walked into
The Godfather, Part III
!"

"Gilbert, even if I agreed your family is harmless-and I don't- there's still that plan to consider."

"It's a beautiful plan!"

"It stinks! There are a million things that could go wrong and if I know you every one of them will. This whole thing is going to explode on you and I don't want to be there dodging the shrapnel."

The argument grew heated after that. He called me a traitor and a coward and threatened to tell Holly every embarrassing secret of mine he could recall including the time when I was seventeen and the copy of
Ranger in Paradise
fell out of my bookbag in full view of the glee club and Sister Joselia. He said Moira would be furious and do dreadful things to me. But I stood firm. For once in my long friendship with him I was going to do the sane thing and walk away while there was still time.

Then he offered me another five thousand dollars to stay and I said, in that case, yes, I'd do everything I could.

All right, yes, it was an incredibly dumb decision and I realize there's little I can say that will make me seem less greedy and stupid than I was. But let me mention a few things about my situation at the time to help you appreciate why greed and stupidity came so naturally to me that afternoon.

As you may have surmised, I am, by profession, a writer. In terms of income, the period when this was all happening was not quite my Golden Age. (Such an Age has yet to arrive and if it's now approaching it's doing so with remarkable stealth.) I hud a part-time job as a secretary-cum-gopher for a writer named Mill Miller who, under the pen name Deirdre Sauvage, was the author of twenty successful romance novels. This job consisted of doing his shopping, answering his fan mail, making his lunch and running to libraries to find out "what the fuck they were wearing in the court of Louis XIV." This brought in about seventy-five to ninety dollars a week, which usually just barely covered the rent on my tiny semi-condemned one-bedroom on West Ninety-ninth.

My only other recent income had been a fifteen-hundred-dollar option paid me for a play I'd finished in August. The option had been purchased by a wealthy young woman named Pears Beaufort. Pears worked out of an office in her Sutton Place town house and had, so far as I knew, produced only one show, a "spring frolic" at Smith College. She'd rhapsodized over my little one-set comedy,
Shut Up and I'll Explain,
but, four months after purchasing a one-year option, hadn't exhibited the slightest intention of ever actually producing it. All inquiries were met with assurances that she was working on it, delivered in a voice which made it clear she considered it unspeakably grasping of me to have asked at all.

So, with my best play destined to languish unproduced for another eight months (at which time I could only begin to look for another producer), Gilbert's offer of five thousand was not one which could be rebuffed without due consideration. So consider it I did. My mental process went something like this:

"Five thousand dollars! Five thousand dollars! A decent stereo! Books, records, theater tickets! No more eggs! Okay, so I have some suspicions. Are suspicions facts?
No.
And what if I'm right and they're
mobsters-does that mean they'll find out?
No.
And what if they do? We just give the money back, right? Five thousand dollars! New clothes! Restaurants! Scotch instead of vodka!"

"What's so funny?"

"You just should have seen the look on your face when I said 'five thousand dollars.' You looked like a Frenchman having an orgasm," he said authoritatively.

"Let me get this straight, Gilbert. That's five thousand
over
the cost of the word processor and the printer?" "I don't remember any talk about printers." "Well, I'm getting one. A fat lot of good the computer does if you can't print out what you've written."

"Sounds a little steep to me," he said in a weary nasal tone like Pears Beaufort haggling at Cartier, "but I suppose I can afford to be generous. Though if you're asking that much, you'd better be prepared to work for it."

"How?" I asked uneasily.

"Oh, hard to say just now, but I'm sure something will come up. We'll have to prepare more. You're right about our plan. It needs work-nothing we can't take care of. I may have you do a little marketing research."

" 'Marketing research?' "

"You know-make a list of everything we need then shop around to see who's going to charge us the most." "Why would you want to pay-oh."

"Exactly. We're being reimbursed for every dime we spend. God forbid we should find any bargains. Oh, shit!" "What?" "Vulpina!" "Ah."

His face was set in a tight wince as he contemplated being saddled with a gown that was apt not only to be hideous but free to boot. "Christ! That no-talent swizzle stick is going to cost us a fortune!" "How much could one dress cost?"