In the Drink (17 page)

I lifted my newspaper so I couldn’t see any part of him but his two bony knees in their shiny green pants, which he kept turned toward me, not quite supplicating, but conveying a distinct air of offended propriety. He couldn’t have known it, but he represented the losing end of an internal battle I was waging. A few minutes later I escaped from the Skouros without paying a cent to anyone, under cover of a sudden influx of hungry customers. A cold gust spattered against me, belly-full of raindrops. I’d left my umbrella under the counter, but I’d just burned the bridge back to the Skouros.

Buses and cabs rolled north and south. On a bench in the island in the center of Broadway sat a figure of indeterminate sex and age wearing a blanket and a pair of sneakers without shoelaces, his or her face hooded by the blanket. That person
was shouting at me, gesturing with the ends of the blanket. What did this person have to say to me? What made him or her think I’d want to hear it? Why did they always pick me? I set off fast down Broadway, as if I had somewhere urgent to go like everyone else.

The rain eased a little, then stopped. A wind blew off the Hudson, fresh and cold. I stopped into a deli, bought an orange and put it in my pocket, then walked over to Riverside Park. On West End Avenue I passed Margot’s prewar wedding cake of a building, which was only eight blocks from my own but might as well have been in a different city. I looked up at her fifth-floor windows; they winked back at me. She’s not here, they said pityingly. She’s busy.

In the park, I sat on a wet bench. The river lay flat and sullen, a drenched, dark mineral gray-green. The banks of New Jersey hulked, beaten-down; the sky was several shades lighter than the water, but just as dense. The mastodonic roar of trucks along the West Side Highway was pierced by a bicycle bell on the path behind me, and the voices of children playing nearby on the paved walkway. I felt a fuzzy early-afternoon languor creep into my limbs; a sleep hangover thrummed through my skull.

I took the orange from my raincoat pocket and peeled it, pulled off a section and broke it in half and examined the long, striated sacs of fluid packed like tendons into the tough clear outer skin. What had I eaten this past week? Hot dogs, chow mein, a Danish, a bag of Chee-Tos. I spent my life inside under artificial lights, or out in the streets breathing carbon monoxide fumes, or in bars breathing smoke and drinking alcohol, which was technically a poison even though it felt like just the opposite. Except for my walks to and from Jackie’s, I never exercised; I didn’t sleep nearly enough and drank water only in the form of the melted ice in my drinks. I was like a tiny
version of the city itself: all my systems were a welter of corruption and neglect.

A mouse had been scratching all day under the floor of my more immediate worries, and suddenly it came to me with an intense shock of horror: the scene I’d written yesterday in that Scotch-hazed fury of relief and hysteria. She might be reading it right now. Oh, shit. Oh,
shit
. I writhed on the bench for a moment, unable to believe that I had actually allowed myself to leave such a potentially dangerous scene on her kitchen table in all its naked, subversive glory.

Once, and only once, very early on in my tenure, Margot had told me after swearing me to absolute and solemn secrecy that Jackie’s marriage had ended when she’d inadvertently caught her beloved husband of well over forty years in bed with her younger sister Isabelle. Margot didn’t say which bed Jackie had caught them in, but for some reason I imagined it was her own; to make matters far worse, Giancarlo and Isabelle had, they confessed to Jackie, been having an affair for nearly twenty years. Jackie had apparently demanded a divorce on the spot and disowned her sister forever. I didn’t ask Margot how she knew this. Margot had been much closer to Jackie than I was, so of course Jackie told her things she would never dream of telling me. And since no one else had ever referred even obliquely to Isabelle, I gathered that either everyone knew about the affair and was protecting Jackie by pretending along with her that her sister had never existed, or no one knew about any of it, and it was her darkest, most closely held secret. Either way, nothing good would happen to me if she read that passage.

Even before her divorce from Giancarlo had become final, Jackie had returned to the States to live in their pied-à-terre on Park Avenue, part of her generous settlement. Although
small by her standards, it was large enough for a woman living alone, and had the additional attraction of holding few reminders of her marriage. Shortly thereafter, at the age of seventy-six, while in bed with his son Gianni’s girlfriend, Giancarlo had suffered a heart attack and died. It was around this time that Jackie had hired Margot, more as a paid companion than a secretary, since she hadn’t got into the swing of the Upper East Side social scene yet.

“She was lost,” Margot told me during one of our phone conversations (Jackie often asked me to call Margot and ask where she’d left this or that file, and we’d stay on the phone discussing Jackie in low, confiding voices for half an hour or more). “She had no idea how to fit into the social world here; she hadn’t lived in the States for more than forty years. She’d follow me from room to room like some little abandoned dog. God, it was pathetic. You’d never know her now. I created a monster.”

By this, Margot meant that one day, hoping to alleviate her new employer’s grief and depression, she had suggested to Jackie that she write her memoirs.

“Well, I’ve certainly had an interesting life,” said Jackie, perking up a little. “I’ll give it a try.” She began to narrate aloud her personal history while Margot took notes and asked leading questions and encouraged her to go on when she protested that it was too painful, remembering how wonderful it had all been. “It’s good to remember,” Margot said soothingly, “because that’s how you start to forget.” (“I don’t know where half that stuff came from,” she told me one day. “I sounded like the corniest self-help book. But I guess it worked.”) When Jackie mentioned along the way that she had done some snooping around for Roper and Blythe, a well-known detective agency, Margot had seized on this as an interesting thread. Apparently Tony Roper had enlisted his friend
Jackie to ask an acquaintance some leading questions at a dinner party, eavesdrop on various conversations at a charity ball and the like, all fairly tame stuff. But these anecdotes became the cornerstone on which Jackie and Margot had together, over the next two years, constructed
The Sophisticated Sleuth
.

Unlike most detective novels, this one wasn’t plotted so much as artificially generated, carrying the reader along with the pointless energy of an amusement-park water ride. Nothing was seriously at stake; actions had no real consequences. A clue dropped on page twenty-seven was sure to have become irrelevant by page ninety-eight. Despite the narrator’s frequent panics concerning the great danger she was in, the crime Genevieve was supposed to be solving had no real urgency; it was subsumed by the dreamlike, impervious world of extreme wealth. At the end of the first book, after three hundred-plus pages of high-society gossip and implausible adventures, Genevieve, on her way to powder her nose at a party, happened upon Johnny Abbott, the odious socialist son of her dear friend Bitsy Abbott, in the hallway outside their hostess’s bedroom with a stolen ruby necklace in his hands. The case was solved, establishing Genevieve’s niche in the pantheon of whodunit heroines: the socialite private eye who attended balls and parties, jetted off to Cairo and Monaco and the Philippines, went skiing with countesses and yachting with senators (frequently pausing to muse at length on her devotion to Giancarlo and her spoiled, darling sons, Gianni and Federico), and happened to stumble on the criminal just in time for the end of the book.

Jackie’s agent placed
The Sophisticated Sleuth
at Wilder and Sons with Gil Reeve. Jackie deeply relished the attention and respect she received as one of the most valuable cash cows in Wilder’s barn. Gil took her to lunch every so often for no reason except to keep her happy; their discussions about the progress of her books left her glowing with authorly legitimacy.
His assistant Janine fawned over her and fetched her coffee from the good place downstairs because the company swill wasn’t good enough for her; I think she may even have called her “Signora.”

When Jackie hired me, her second book,
The High-Heeled Gumshoe
, had consisted of little more than an outline of the first half devised by Jackie, Margot and Gil Reeve in the month or so before Margot quit. During the first three months I worked for her, Jackie had made a great show of sitting at her own computer in her study for part of each morning, tapping away. I was afraid that Margot had been wrong, that Jackie was planning to write her new book herself and there would be no alleviation of my tedious secretarial chores after all. But one day she drifted into the dining room when I was working on her accounts and said, all dimples and charm, “I know that’s important, Claudia dear, but do you think you could take a minute and see what you can do with this? I just need a fresh point of view. Sometimes it helps so much to see it in someone else’s words.”

I abandoned with relief the unsavory business of overstating her deductible expenditures and listened while Jackie narrated the synopsis of the first part of the book. She did so with such conviction that I was nonplused when she finished and looked at me expectantly.

“Well,” I ventured, perceiving that the autobiographer was open to suggestion, “maybe a creepy guy with a scar could follow you home from the Museum Ball and get killed in front of your house by someone who runs off into the night.”

“That’s good, that’s very scary, Margot!”

“It’s Claudia, actually.”

“Well, I know that, Claudia, that’s what I said.”

“Who is the murderer, anyway?”

She clapped her hands together. “We must decide that
very soon. It was never really solved, Martha Von Jetze’s murder, but we must change that for the book. Readers like to know who did it at the end, always remember that.”

“I will,” I promised with a poker face.

She nodded. “You’ll find you’ll learn quite a few invaluable lessons about best-seller writing, working for me. It’s a wonderful opportunity for a young writer just starting out. I wish someone had taught me these things, but I had to learn them all on my own. That’s why I don’t know all those fancy writing techniques, those complicated words and similes you girls all learn in college.”

“I’ll throw some in if you want,” I said, trying not to sound patronizing.

I shouldn’t have worried; my strengths were her strengths. “Wonderful,” she said eagerly. “We might as well get started right away.”

Half an hour later, having given me as much detail as she could remember about the actual Museum Ball while I took notes, she said, “Let your imagination run wild! You’ve read the first book, you know how I tell a story. Put something suspenseful on every page, create suspicion about all the characters. And always, lots of glamour. Describe the gowns, the jewels they wear, mention famous people I know, you can look in my little telephone book for names. For the descriptions of clothes and so forth, you can ask me if you get stuck.” She buttoned her jacket and swept out the door to buy a heap of things I’d have to return the following day.

I inserted the computer disk she’d given me and opened the file. Margot had written a few pages of Chapter One before she’d quit; she’d thoughtfully left Genevieve dancing with the half-wit son of one of Zurich’s oldest families. There were several subsequent pages, a jumble of notes about potential characters, reprises of the plot, unintelligible dialogue and hyperbolic
prose, no doubt the product of Jackie’s mornings at the computer.

I deleted it all and picked up where Margot had left off: Genevieve escaped Rolf’s humid embrace and returned to her table. “You look good enough to eat in that dress, Genevieve,” Gregory Peck told her over the mousse de lapin. “Don’t you dare,” Genevieve sparkled flirtatiously back at him. She nibbled champagne sorbet and caviar, eyeing a few suspicious swarthy types in fezzes lurking against the far wall. The ballroom bristled with furtive looks, catty asides, inexplicable tensions, slips of the tongue, all of which just happened to occur in the immediate vicinity of our heroine. I spun flashy triple axels over the cracked ice of the story, a Balenciaga here, a tiara there, an Austrian count this, an over-the-hill movie star that, all in the breathless, ladylike voice of Genevieve del Castellano, the voice I’d already learned to use when I answered her fan mail and impersonated her on the phone, not the voice of Jackie herself, but the voice of the woman she wanted to be.

Finally Gregory whirled Genevieve out onto the dance floor, where they exchanged more innuendoes while she kept her eye on the fezzes. I tossed in an underhanded reference to the orchestra, which “caught the dancers in its swirl and sway like a charmer mesmerizing a basket of cobras,” hoping that Jackie would be too dazzled by the prose to notice that I’d compared her and her friends to a bunch of snakes.

When five o’clock came, I printed out the pages I’d written and left them for her, then turned off the computer and went downtown to the East Village for a night of focused drinking. I rolled home at around three-thirty in the morning to find a message on my machine. I played it, swaying a little with the effort to keep upright for its duration, as if she were actually in the room with me. “Claudia, it’s just great. This is going to work out very well; I’m absolutely thrilled. Now. A quibble or
two, you couldn’t have known, but they wouldn’t have served that sort of thing, I’ll give you a sample menu tomorrow. And I think instead of Gregory Peck we’d better have Cary Grant, because he’s dead, and he can say whatever we want him to. Maybe he could drop a clue about that man in the—” Her voice trailed off for a moment as something distracted her, a thread hanging from her blouse, a random itch, “—well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. See you tomorrow morning!”

Jackie’s accolades for her ghostwriter were equal in magnitude and frequency to her attacks on her secretary. She greeted each new chapter with cries of excitement, and often read parts aloud to me with as much pink-cheeked gusto as if she’d written them herself. Once the book was under way, her involvement consisted almost entirely of correcting my “mistaken” representation of her life, about which she was the unchallenged expert: “You don’t know this world, we never shout at our maids like that”; or “I can’t be saying things like that to strange men I don’t know, you have me sounding like a fishwife!” Without protest, I deleted the offending passage and rewrote it to suit her. I was careful always to bear in mind that she was the author even though I was the writer, and that her alter ego Genevieve was a model of refinement and elegance even though she herself was not. I was prepared to relinquish every word I wrote as soon as it came into being. Margot had warned me that once the book was finished, Jackie would “forget” that I had so much as a passing familiarity with the general story outline. “It’s sort of like brainwashing,” Margot had told me. “She’ll wear you down until you believe it too.”