Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls (7 page)

“Now you’re being cruel.”

Trip leaned back and crossed his hands behind his head. “I’m just being realistic. You want it both ways, Anne.”

“What does that mean.”

“You want to start all over again—let’s call it what it is, we’ve talked about it before, the whole Gillian Girl thing was, like, five centuries ago—you want to start all over and make a career for yourself. And at the same time, you want to hold on to this ‘I’m a lady and we came over on the
Mayflower
’ bit. Well, you can’t do both.”

“Some choice.”

“At least you have a choice. You think you’re the first thirty-something divorcée to walk through the door looking for work? We see them all the time. For every hundred that come see us, we agree to represent maybe one or two.”

“I’m honored.”

“You should be.”

“So why did I make the grade?”

“You know, when they first passed you on to me, they basically told me it was a favor. Professional courtesy to Lyon and all that. We figured you’d go on two or three auditions and call it quits. Find a rich boyfriend, start the hunt for a second husband, maybe get a job at a gallery or a real estate company like most of the Upper East Side types do. But then … well, I’m not sure how to say it. You
surprised
me.”

“Really.”

He laughed. “You aren’t like the rest of them. Underneath it all, you’ve got guts.”

She laughed with him. “Guts and about two hundred dollars in my checking account.”

He wrote a name and a West 47th Street address on the back of his business card. “Here. He’s my cousin, he won’t rip you off. Those earrings will take care of you all summer.”

I
t was turning out to be a lucky day. First there was the news of a good audition and the check from the jewelers’. Then she made her train with five minutes to spare. And best of all, when she got back to Southampton, her car started.

Anne stopped at the supermarket to pick up a few things for a celebration dinner with Jenn. After weeks and weeks of living on a shoestring budget, she splurged on a pint of name-brand ice cream and some colored felt-tip markers for Jenn.

“Special occasion?” asked the cashier at the checkout line. Gretchen was a local girl who always had a joke or story ready for Jenn. Even when the line for Gretchen’s register was the longest one at the market, Jenn always insisted they wait to check out with Gretchen.

“I had some good news today,” Anne replied. “My goodness, what happened to you?”

Gretchen had a black eye, and her left arm was in a sling. “Oh, it looks way worse than it is. I fell down the stairs night before last, tripped over a pair of shoes. My own fault for leaving them there. I am such a slob!”

“Your arm—is it broken?”

“Yeah, but it isn’t serious.” Gretchen smiled. “I’m just a big klutz.”

At the end of the counter, another girl was bagging Anne’s groceries and shaking her head. “Yeah, and I can think of someone who is an even bigger klutz.”

“Shut up, you,” Gretchen said. She turned to Anne with a wide smile. “Coupons?”

Anne unsnapped her Kelly bag and laid out a half-dozen coupons. “There you go. And who do I see about posting something on the bulletin board?” she asked. She took out a pale pink 3-by-5 index card. “Does the manager approve them first?”

“You’re looking for an au pair?” Gretchen asked.

“Not exactly,” Anne said. An au pair was exactly what she needed, but it was hardly within her budget. “I’m looking for someone who would want to take one of the extra bedrooms in exchange for a very low rent and a couple of nights of baby-sitting a week.”

Gretchen looked at the card. “Wow, this is low,” she said.

“It’s a very small room,” said Anne.

Gretchen slipped the card into her apron pocket. “I’ll give it to him when my shift is over,” she said.

Out in the parking lot, the bagger helped load Anne’s groceries into the backseat. Anne fished in her bag for a loose single.

“Nice pocketbook,” the girl said.

“I’ve had it for ages,” Anne said.

“You don’t get it, do you. About Gretchen.”

“Get what?”

“The broken arm. The black eye.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like she fell down the stairs! What a lame excuse. I mean, how many times a year can a girl fall down the same stairs? It’s her husband who did it to her.”

“Gretchen is married? She can’t be more than nineteen!”

“She’s married, and he’s a real asshole. He has two hobbies, drinking beer and beating up on Gretchen.”

“Why doesn’t she leave him?”

“Don’t ask me, I never figured out why she got married in the first place.”

Anne turned the ignition, but the car refused to start. She waited
a few minutes and tried again, but still the engine wouldn’t turn over. There was a knock on the window.

“Need a lift?” Gretchen asked.

Anne shook her head and rolled down the window. “It’ll start, eventually.”

Gretchen pulled the card out of her pocket. “Listen, are you serious about this? Because I was sort of thinking about moving, and this sounds perfect.”

“Why don’t you come over tomorrow and look at the room?”

“I’m sure the room is fine,” Getchen said. “I’m kind of in a rush.”

Anne recognized the look in Gretchen’s eyes: the kind of bravery that wouldn’t last long. “You can move in tomorrow if you like.”

“I don’t have much stuff,” Gretchen said. They made the arrangements quickly, each woman slightly nervous that, given a few more minutes, the other would change her mind.

“And Saturday night,” Anne said, “some friends invited me to dinner in East Hampton and I was planning on bringing Jenn along, but it’s going to be awfully boring for her. If you’re free from seven to around eleven, that would be wonderful.”

“I’m free,” Gretchen said. “Free as the wind.”

“Perfect,” said Anne.

D
inner on Saturday was with a gay couple who had moved to the Hamptons in the early sixties. Jerry was an architect, and Curtis ran a party-planning and catering company. Their favorite activity was making fun of all the new people who were moving out to the Hamptons—the same people, Lyon used to point out, who were making them unbelievably rich.

“Fifty thousand dollars’ worth of landscaping!” Jerry said, finishing a story about a house he had designed for a banker and his wife. “The most gorgeous house I’ve done in years, all simple lines and
glass, and then they go junk it up with this dreary English shrubbery. The most high-maintenance plantings you can imagine. They’ll need two full-time gardeners.”

“Which may be exactly the point,” Curtis said, winking. “A gardener for him, and a gardener for her.”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “Curtis, don’t be evil. So, Annie, do you have any gossip for us? Bring back any juicy tidbits from Manhattan?”

“Nothing much,” Anne said. “I had lunch with Stella, that’s about it. Heard about all the parties I’m not invited to anymore. I’m sort of dreading the summer.”

“Not me, I can’t wait,” Curtis said. “I have seventeen weddings to do, and every one of them is pull-out-the-stops. Ka-ching, ka-ching! It was so slow this winter, I nearly lost my mind.”

“I’m the one who lost my mind,” Jerry said. “Having you around the house all the time.”

The phone rang, and Curtis went to get it. Jerry poured another inch of cognac into Anne’s glass. “And how is the dating scene?”

“What dating scene? Anyway, it’s too soon.”

“Bitch!” Curtis cried from the kitchen. “You total bitch!” When he came back in, his face was bright red. “Can you believe it? I’m meeting with Mrs. Lightman on Monday about her daughter’s wedding, and Oona was supposed to have all the sketches ready, and she just called to say she’s gotten a job offer in Los Angeles and she’s quitting on me.”

“That’s what you get for hiring someone with a name like Oona,” Jerry said.

“Don’t joke. I’m sunk. This is a five-hundred-thousand-dollar wedding, and I don’t have a single thing ready to show. I’m sunk, utterly sunk.”

“You can tap-dance with the best of them, darling.”

“It’s a
theme
wedding. South of France. And now I have thirty-six hours to pull it together.”

“Hey, I have an idea,” Jerry said. “Annie has given some pretty spectacular parties over the years. Maybe she can help out.”

Curtis turned to Anne. “Oh my God,” he said. “How do you say ‘perfect’ in French?”

“
Parfait
,” said Anne.

“So, imagine this is your party, what would you do?” he asked.

“We never gave theme parties. We always thought, I mean, Lyon thought … you know. They’re so …”

“Vulgar?” Curtis said. “You can say it, I won’t be offended. Okay, then: your party, if you had a zillion dollars to spend and you wanted to make sure every penny of it showed.”

“Let’s see. Jenn’s old music teacher in the city is from Paris—she and a few of her friends play parties on the weekends. It’s a delightful little group with an accordion and a singer who sounds just like Edith Piaf. For the right amount of money I bet they’d love to come out and play.”

“
Sacré bleu!
Now keep going,” said Curtis.

“No fair,” said Anne. “You invited me here for a nice dinner and now you’re trying to put me to work.”

“Annie, darling, I’m in a jam and I need you to help. How can you say no?”

“
Non
,” she said in her flawless accent.

“You have no choice, you have to help. That’s what friends do.” He got out a notebook and a fresh bottle of wine. They spent the next two hours making plans.

The meeting with Mrs. Lightman and her daughter was a success. They loved Curtis’s sketches, and they loved all of Anne’s last-minute ideas: decorating the altar with lavender-scented candles, getting seat cushions in eight different mix-and-match fabrics from Pierre Deux, buying antique toy sailboats to float in the swimming pool.

“You’re a genius,” Curtis whispered to her in the car on the way
home. “Come work for me this summer. They adored you. All my clients are going to adore you.”

“Some of those clients used to be my friends. Wouldn’t it be awkward?”

“Awkward for who? Not for me.”

“Okay, awkward for them.”

“Maybe twenty years ago, but these days divorced women are expected to work. They buy their houses from divorced women. They buy their art from divorced women. It’s no different from being an interior decorator, really.”

“Okay, then. Awkward for me.”

“Don’t be so old-fashioned. And by the way, these parties are a wonderful way to meet eligible straight men. There’s always an uncle or a business partner lurking around. I’m promising you dozens of rich, eligible, good-looking heterosexuals. How can you turn me down? Even if you get this advertising job, it doesn’t start until September. I can pay you in cash. These clients of mine, it’s almost all about new money, they’re dreadfully insecure and when they get a load of you, well, it will be just like today. You put them at ease in a way that I can’t. They trust you.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know.”

“I agree. But you’ve got style, and you’ve got those glorious cheekbones, and you have just the right pedigree. Everything else can be taught. Please. As a favor to me.”

They had pulled up in front of Anne’s house. The shutters needed repainting, and the hot-water heater was on its last legs. At Southampton prices, the money from the sale of the earrings would go only so far.

“All right,” Anne said. “Promise me it will be fun.”

“It will be fun, and crazy, and sometimes impossibly busy. You’ve never really seen me when I’m cranky.”

“Curtis, you’re cranky all the time.”

“And that’s just one of the many reasons you love me,” he said.

She kissed him on the cheek. “Love you to bits,” she said.

I
n May, the town began to hum in anticipation of the summer season. All around Main Street, trucks delivered heavy cardboard cartons filled with additional inventory for summer visitors. Restaurants extended their hours. Window boxes began to bloom.

Anne felt like a young girl watching her older sister get ready for a party, a party Anne wasn’t invited to. She was starting to see what the summer would be like. Curtis had hung four panels of blackboard on one wall of his office and chalked out a calendar that was five feet high and twenty feet long. The parties and weddings he had been hired to plan were written in thick yellow chalk. Work that had been contracted to someone else was written in green chalk. Work that was still up for grabs was in pink. And in white chalk: every social event he had heard about—family barbecues, golf tournaments, cocktail parties, fund-raisers—anything that might generate a last-minute telephone call for a bartender or a few platters of canapés.

It was ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, and Anne was alone in the office, staring at the blackboard. She had been invited to only one party, the annual clambake that Stella and Arthur gave in early August. She had gotten a few invitations to fund-raisers; the envelopes had all been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Lyon Burke,” with labels spat out by a computer that hadn’t been updated in years. Anne had learned to throw these away as soon as they arrived. The days of writing a five-hundred-dollar check for a cocktail party in support of endangered species were over.

The hotel commercials had fallen through. Anne had had a terrific audition, only to find out two days later that the entire campaign was being canceled. Each time she was rejected, it was a little
harder to rebound. She was beginning to feel like an endangered species herself.

It wasn’t just the money. She had been sleeping alone for almost five months now. At first it had felt delicious: the clean sheets, the mound of pillows all her own, waking up at dawn to utter quiet, the long private cup of coffee after Jenn left for school. For the first time in her life, she read the entire newspaper every day, every section in order, every word of every section. She was fascinated by exactly the kinds of articles she used to skim over—war stories from Eastern Europe, news of economic collapse in Latin America, debates over tax initiatives in Washington. But there was no one her age to talk about any of it with. At night, after Jenn went to bed, she felt herself turning into the lonely college girl she had been at nineteen, the girl who spent all evening in the library, all day in classes. The girl who loaded up her dinner tray with the same dinner every evening (a slice of bread, three slices of cheese, a bowl of salad, and a piece of fruit) and sat at the same cafeteria table with the same three girls, night after night.