Everything and More (47 page)

At Patricia’s, each customer had her own saleslady, and if that saleslady was busy, the customer waited, browsing in the little boutique that carried handsome belts, a few carefully selected glimmers of antique jewelry, Hermès scarves, and crazily expensive sweaters. Generally by five o’clock most of the customers had completed their shopping.

Roy, in addition to her managerial tasks, had her own clientele. The following day at a little after five she was returning a richly colored armload of fall evening gowns to the stockroom. Her feet hurt, and pain splintered behind her eyes. She had spent the entire afternoon waiting on the fortyish, sleekly attractive, alcoholic wife of a prominent surgeon; the woman, having tried on Patricia’s extensive stock of size sixes, had just walked out sans apology or purchase.

The saleslady designated to watch over the boutique was nowhere in sight, and a tall, slender woman with a loose, streaked blond chignon stood picking through the unattended sweaters. From the back, Roy could recognize the easily cut beige silk as part of the Paris Fath collection. And there was something familiar about the hair.

“Do you have a saleslady, madam?” Roy said. “If you’ll give me her name, I’ll get her right away.”

The blonde turned. The long, handsomely patrician face relaxed into surprise. “Roy?”

“Althea!” Roy dropped the formals on one of the velvet poufs.

Their embrace was a brief feminine hug, the sort in which bodies do not enter into configuration and kisses are pressed in the air near the cheek, yet for all of the stereotyped awkwardness their eyes grew moist as inevitable memories assailed them: the Big Two . . . lunches in proud isolation on the Beverly High cafeteria patio . . . hours spent plastering on odalisque makeup . . . slow, croony Frank Sinatra records and the hypnotic seduction of Ravel’s
Boléro.
 . . .

They drew apart.

Althea gave a little cough. “So you work here?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m the assistant manager,” Roy replied proudly.

She didn’t need to inquire about Althea’s life. In the intervening decade Althea’s doings had been duly noted by the press. She was twice married. At seventeen to Firelli—that wonderful old man, as Roy mentally called the English maestro. Invariably, though, Roy shuddered at the repellent image of her erstwhile friend’s slim youthfulness locked in the marital embrace with that rotund little old man, an image far more loathsome than Joshua with Marylin because of the far greater age span. Althea had a son by Firelli. After their divorce, she had picked off another Englishman, Aubrey Wimborne. The lovely Mrs. Carlo Firelli, the lovely Mrs. Aubrey Wimborne, was photographed at the parties of Coynes, Guggenheims, Rockefellers, Mellons, at the Côte d’Azur estate of the Duchess of Alba and the châteaux of various Rothschilds, at the Paris opera house between Firelli and Horowitz, in Bermuda with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, at Princess Margaret’s wedding to Anthony Armstrong-Jones.

Althea said, “Cheating and clawing your way to the topmost
haute couture?”

Roy laughed. Yet suddenly she felt more than the four inches shorter that she was to Althea. What a stupefying chasm between their lives.

Mrs. Fineman had come to stand outside the boutique area, a squarish, carefully coiffed and jeweled presence. As she stared at the heaped, rich-colored designer garments, her fleshy face took on a disapproval that was both proprietary and maternal.

“I’m in the market for some evening things,” Althea drawled loudly. “Like those little frocks you have there.”

“Yes, Mrs. Wimborne.” Roy scooped up the armful of luxurious silks. “If you’ll follow me, Mrs. Wimborne.”

She led Althea to the largest of the fitting rooms. Their reflections
receded endlessly in the angled mirrors, and neither woman looked directly at the other. How strange to be confronted by an infinity of their paired images after so long. . . . Roy could not help attempting to reconcile this serene and worldly Althea (who wore no smidge of makeup on her smooth, exquisitely tanned skin, not even lipstick on her narrow, well-delineated mouth) with the aloof, secretive, unhappy, overpainted schoolgirl Althea. Into Roy’s mind popped a memory of those crazy, unending sobs reverberating through her messy bedroom. Her awe of her old friend vanished.

Roy asked, “Are you living back here?”

“I’m at Belvedere while I get a divorce. A two-time loser. Hopeless, aren’t I? What about you? Are you married? Divorced?”

“Neither. I’m in love,” Roy replied, not even attempting to disguise the radiance of her smile.

“In love?” Althea spoke in a questioning tone as if it were an expression she had never heard.

“You know—a mad, passionate involvement. He’s the only thing in the world that matters to me.”

“Oh, Roy.” Althea smiled, shaking her head. “You haven’t changed—not one iota.”

“That may be true, but this is the first time I’ve ever really fallen. I’d all but abandoned hope. It’s like a religious experience. It’s like somebody’s switched on all the lights. Do I sound corny? Well, love’s done it to me.”

“I’m joyous for you,” Althea said with a superior little half-smile. This was her old way of dousing Roy’s enthusiasms. After a brief silence, though, Althea was inquiring warmly, “How is your family? I read about Marylin, of course, but tell me the news about your mother.”

Roy sat on the velvet bench. “We’re on the outs,” she sighed. “Gerry and I live together without benefit of clergy.”

“You don’t! But hadn’t you become so veddy, veddy proper? Sorority life and all that jazz. Openly?”

“I
was
Miss Middle Class Propriety for a few years. But now I live in sin.”

“Wonders will never cease.”

“He’s the most important thing that ever happened to me.” Roy glimpsed a hundred repetitions of her cherry-red, sappily smiling face. She said crisply, “I read you have a little boy. He’s a bit younger than Billy.”

“Carlo’s almost ten—oh, drat! I keep forgetting he calls himself Charles now. That’s Firelli’s real name.”

“Yes, I know. I still remember nearly dropping in my tracks when
I heard the English accent. He told me the whole deal about changing his name. Originally he was Charley Frye.”

“Exactly.
My
Charles is gorgeous. The strong, take-command type—he treats me like a bit of fluff. At the moment he’s keen for his grandpa’s collies.”

“How are they, your parents?”

“The same. Mother tends her flowers and worships Daddy. He strides gracefully around, lord of the manor,” Althea said levelly. “They defy time.”

It was closing hour, and outside the fitting room, soprano voices rippled.

Impulsively Roy said, “If you don’t have any plans, we could finish catching up at my place.”

“Your love nest? Wonderful!”

Althea insisted on buying one of the expensive Italian sweaters on their way out.

They left her maroon Cadillac convertible parked in the lot. In Roy’s fender-dented Chevy they joined the slow-moving rush-hour traffic that edged along Wilshire. Each corner drew forth bantering reminiscences, Simon’s Drive-in where they had followed the public antics of Big Timers, Armstrong Schroeder’s, where they had sometimes gorged on plate size apple pancakes, Beverly High’s square clock tower in the distance. The conversation lapsed at the fountain where they had first met Dwight Hunter. They remained silent until they were passing between the two manicured green golf courses of the Los Angeles Country Club.

Then Althea inquired, “What sort of man is he, your guy?”

“Gerry? He’s completely different from everybody. There’s nobody like him.”

“Let’s be a trifle more explicit, Wace.”

“He has high cheekbones and narrow sort of eyes, not Oriental but Slavic. He’s not exactly what you’d call handsome, I guess. He has a broody, interesting face. And a terrific build. Muscular, well-proportioned—he’s not tall, about five-eight. I’m wild for him, but he’s on another wavelength. I have such ordinary, middle-class values, and he’s an artist, a real artist, a very talented painter—”

“What’s his other name?” Althea interrupted.

“Horak.”

Althea made a choking sound.

Roy glanced away from the traffic. Althea was staring ahead, her slender neck held so rigidly that the tendons stood out.

“So you
have
heard of him?” Roy said. “He’s really quite famous.”

“I know him,” Althea said in that odd, strangled voice. “We were both at Henry Lissauer’s.”

“Lissauer? The German artist who killed himself?”

“Right.” Althea’s voice dipped on the word. She drew a breath, asking in a worldly drawl, “Is he aware we were girlhood chums, you and I?”

Roy thought a moment before admitting, “I don’t remember ever mentioning you. Gerry’s not much on talking about old times or that kind of thing.”

“Well, well. Gerry Horak, of all people. Small world and will wonders never cease. Or coincidences do happen.”

“So you were friends?”

“One might call us that if one stretched the point.” Althea’s tone was humorous, yet for a moment Roy felt something sinister, dangerous even, enter the car.

She gripped the hot steering wheel. This idea of hers was typically half-baked. What had possessed her to invite Althea home? Gerry scorned rich people, and Althea Coyne Cunningham Firelli Wimborne was the richest of the rich. Besides, it was clear that they had tangled somehow at that poor dead man’s art school. God, he’ll blow a gasket when the two of us stroll in.

Althea said, “Possibly, Roy, your love nest isn’t the spot for us to catch up on our shady past.”

Roy said with a surge of relief, “Let’s go to Westwood. Crumpler’s makes terrific malts and hamburgers.”

At Crumplers they sat wedged between noisy tables of UCLA kids. Althea talked in a high, staccato way about Gloria Vanderbilt, Grace and Rainier, Princess Margaret and Tony, the Windsors: undeniably there was a heady pleasure in getting the real dirt about these inhabitants of the celestial spheres, yet at the same time the gossip (and perhaps this was its purpose) demeaned Roy, showing her up as a gauche, insignificant nobody. She found herself compulsively serving up the Fernaulds’ better-known peers and acquaintances—Greer, Cary, Marilyn, Ava, Bing, Liz. The arch, phony ring of her tattling voice disgusted her and she barely touched her nutburger.

They drove back to Beverly Hills.

As Althea opened the door of her maroon Cadillac, she had a cool look that Roy found utterly enviable—she herself felt sweaty and disheveled.

It was completely old times’ sake that obligated her to say, “Althea, what about lunch? I’m available on Saturdays.”

“Wonderful,” Althea said.

“I’ll call you at the end of the week.”

Althea gave a high shivery laugh. “Oh, and by the way, your Gerry and I had rather a falling-out. So it might be best for you if you didn’t mention my name.”

Roy shook her head and raised her shoulders, an exaggeration of bewilderment.

Althea smiled. “Doesn’t he still have moods?”

At this slur, Roy’s loyalties rushed to Gerry’s side. “He was in awful pain then! He was badly wounded in Italy.”

Yet as Althea started her engine, the defensive anger drained from Roy. “I really meant it about lunch,” she yelled.

Althea did not seem to hear. The long wine-colored car eased from the parking lot.

  
44
  

She had no clear idea of how she got to Belvedere. She was in her room, her body and face blazing hot, her reason decimated by great, turbulent emotions. She could hear Charles’s clear contralto voice somewhere in the house, a faraway sound that made no more sense than anything else. Gerry Horak, the bastard, she thought over and over. Will I ever be quit of that mess?

Gerry Horak.

By a mad twist of fate’s kaleidoscope, Gerry Horak had latched on to curly-haired, eager little Roy Wace, once dirt-poor, now a shopgirl.

Gerry. . . .

He deserted me years ago, so why should I care that he’s taken up with Roy?

Yet she was surging with helpless despair.

In the past decade she had trained herself like an Olympic athlete, controlling every weakness, subduing her obstreperous demons, and quieting her baleful insecurities. It had been years since she had felt this way, crushed, immobilized, and at the mercy of another—or rather, at the mercy of her own torturous emotions about another.