Judith Krantz (46 page)

Could she possibly endure doing a job with the client glued to her side, particularly one like chattering Sally Evans, who had that most dreaded quality in a client, indecision?

Outright, full-blown bad taste was easier to deal with than indecision. At least, with bad taste, you knew your client’s point of view, but Sally Evans had arrived with a notebook filled with pages torn out of magazines, each one an interior she’d admired, each one an interior she wanted, each one in an entirely different style. Did she, Valerie wondered, have the patience to try to train a twenty-six-year-old third wife, to educate her—assuming that it could be done—or was no amount of money worth it?

On the other hand, did she have a choice? Billy’s income and earnings were simply not enough to cover the way they lived, and everything, from a head of lettuce to her daughters’ shoes, was getting steadily more expensive. How had she imagined for a minute that she could afford to turn Sally Evans down? Indeed, why not admit it, she was lucky to get her, and that was the hardest fact to swallow.

“What’s that odd smell?” Billy inquired languidly, finishing his third martini and pouring another.

“Rice burning,” Valerie snapped. If he wanted his God damned dinner, why the hell didn’t he get up
and check the God damned casserole himself? Nothing, no power on earth, would make her look in the oven one more time.

Valerie poured another drink, walked out on her irritating kitchen, her irritating husband, her unquestionably dry casserole, and retired to her dressing room to take refuge from life on her chaise longue.

She tore off her apron and her shoes and flopped down on the chaise, covering her feet with a soft mohair throw, and just lay there for a minute, contemplating nothing at all, sipping gin.

After a while a familiar picture formed in Valerie’s mind, the picture that never failed to calm her. It was a vision of a two-story fieldstone country house in the suburb of Chestnut Hill, on the Philadelphia Main Line. The house belonged to Martha and Wheelwright Stack, the parents of her distant cousin and schoolgirl best friend, Mimsie Stack.

Mimsie and Valerie had been in the same class at Foxcroft, and the Stacks had treated Valerie as a second daughter, since her own mother was so far away, in Spain. They had arranged for her debut at The Assembly the year that Mimsie made her own bow to society, and Valerie loved them both dearly. Each year, during school and summer vacations, she had spent every minute that she didn’t have to be at the Kilkullen Ranch or Marbella with the Stacks in Chestnut Hill. Even now, she and Billy returned there four times a year to spend weekends with the elder Stacks, in spite of Billy’s protests that they bored him. Valerie had kept up all her contacts with the girls of her debutante year, and from time to time she went to Philadelphia for some particularly important lunch party.

Her mother had cheated her of Philadelphia, Valerie brooded. If Liddy hadn’t decided to live in Marbella, out of pride and anger, she could have brought up her daughters in the city that Valerie loved. If her mother had been able to endure a brief period of post-divorce embarrassment, her daughters wouldn’t have had to grow up eternally shuttled about, without a real home. She would have been a Philadelphian who had
just happened to spend her first twelve years in California. She would have grown up there, in a secure and familiar atmosphere of confidence that should have been her right, and married someone who belonged by birth to old Philadelphia, just as she herself did. But she’d met Billy Malvern while she was at the New York School of Interior Design, and now Philadelphia was a place she returned to only from time to time, a semi-lost paradise that she had never truly possessed.

But, oh, how she loved the Stacks’ house! It was of a medium size, some fourteen rooms, but utterly
substantial
. It had small, cozy windows made of small, cozy panes of glass, framed by cozy white shutters. The fieldstone itself was dappled in shades of gray and beige, and the roof of the Stack house was weathered brown slate. An undiluted plainness of weathered, first-class surfaces was the characteristic of the exterior that Valerie valued the most. Mature trees grew on the surrounding four acres of lawn, there was a proper English garden, the driveway was bordered by weeping cherry trees, and the front courtyard was paved in brick.

There was not one inch of the Stack house that failed to breathe dignity and serenity, not one room that was not, in a mysterious way, exactly the right size for its function. To Valerie it was the most perfect shelter she’d ever known.

Once inside the house in Chestnut Hill, she had always known that she was safe, in a way she had never felt in any other dwelling, no matter how massive. The house itself had been built in the early 1800s on the model of an unpretentious English country manor; it was comfortably and solidly furnished with well-cared-for but nondescript American antiques; it contained no rare collections or particularly good art or fine examples of anything at all.

The elder Stacks were a comfortably thrifty couple, in the Philadelphia manner, which some misguided people mocked as stingy. Martha Stack saved string and tissue paper, and directed her cook to rinse
off and reuse aluminum foil and plastic wrap. She’d never throw away the tie of a Baggie until it broke. She tore her Kleenex in half, horizontally, because otherwise most of it went to waste; she recycled her Christmas wrappings, and she wouldn’t part with a bar of soap until it fell apart.

Martha Stack was a knowledgeable gardener who wouldn’t have dreamed of planting her annuals close together, for the gratification of a quick mass of bloom. She preferred to delay that pleasure until the well-spaced-out seedlings naturally reached their destined size. Once, in a moment of particular intimacy, she’d confided to Valerie that she’d always wanted to plant annuals from seed, rather than spend the money to buy plants at the nursery, but the spring weather in Pennsylvania didn’t last long enough for her to risk such a delight of sensible economy.

Economy
, Valerie thought dreamily, such a pleasant word, so soothing and sensible. She practiced it herself with her smile, her goodwill, her invitations and her endearments, but in her slice of New York, economy was suspicious and hinted at some carefully hidden impoverishment, instead of intelligent husbanding of bounty.

When Martha and Wheelwright Stack gave a dinner party, she put fresh candles in the candlesticks on the dining room table, and saved the candle ends that were removed, no matter how short, for family dining. Only the prospect of damaging the top of a candlestick could force her to remove a candle that retained a quarter-inch of usable wax.

Martha Stack’s guests were always family and old friends; the Stacks had not invited recently met people to dinner in the course of their marriage, for they had not had occasion to encounter any.

They owned a summer place in the lovely sea-coast town of Camden, Maine; they employed a full-time live-in cook-housekeeper; they were generous to their two children and seven grandchildren; they were mainstays of Philadelphia cultural life, an enormously popular couple who considered themselves indecently
rich while living within an income that was no more than Billy’s alone.

Was it the fact that there were no surprises in the Stacks’ life that made it seem so desirable, Valerie asked herself. Was it the lack of challenge, the calm, the routine, the pleasantness, the expectations that were never too large to be met, the knowledge that they wanted nothing they didn’t have? Was it a small-ness—or was it a …

Tightness?

She sighed as she finished her martini. Whatever it was that the Stacks had, it appealed to some deep need in her. But whatever it was that the Stacks had, it couldn’t be found in New York at any price.

Valerie got up to go back and rejoin Billy. After all, she didn’t want him to have to eat that casserole alone. As she passed her dressing table, she stopped for a minute to contemplate a bud vase. It held the last yellow chrysanthemum of an arrangement that someone had sent her well over two weeks ago. Valerie always took apart flower arrangements the minute they arrived, separated the flowers, recut their stems, and put them in bud vases so that they could be distributed all over the apartment. This mum had another good three or four days left in it, she thought, and, considerably heartened, she returned to feed her helpless husband.

Pete di Constanza hadn’t smiled once, Jazz noticed, during today’s monthly meeting in Phoebe’s office, nor had he taken the name of the Lord in vain, nor had he complained about the stale doughnuts and lukewarm coffee Phoebe served. This was so unlike her old pal that when she finished shooting the following Monday, she decided to try to find out what was up with him. The double garage doors of his studio weren’t locked, and when Jazz peered inside, she saw that although the overhead worklights were off, Pete was still there, all alone, sprawled full-length on the floor, leaning on one elbow and looking fixedly in front of him. This was his normal, visionary position, in which he remained for hours at a time as he pondered
the lighting of a car, no less intent than Mel had ever been, but the vast studio was completely empty of automobiles, none of Pete’s four muscular assistants was in evidence, and even his studio manager had gone home for the day.

“Business slow?” Jazz asked, as she walked over to him, safe in the knowledge that Pete was booked a year in advance, sometimes two years, by clients who would accept no other car photographer.

“Yeah, sure.” Pete looked up with a doleful attempt at a smile. He was wearing his favorite Patagonia parka, designed for serious mountain climbing, although the December day had brought with it a typical pre-Christmas heat wave and hot Santa Ana winds. Pete thumped the floor next to him in invitation to Jazz to sit down next to him.

“Listen, Jazz, how do you feel about vets?”

“Vets—as in soldiers?”

“No, honey, vets as in dogs and cats.”

“I don’t get the question.” Jazz sat down and looked at his downcast face. He was huddled in his parka as if it were a security blanket, the collar turned up around his chin. “Do I like them better than dentists or less than doctors?”

“Do you think they’re incredibly sexy?”

“Aha, that BMW campaign is bugging you again,” Jazz said. For the last two years, BMW had been doing car photos in outdoor settings, at polo clubs and yacht basins, the pictures swarming with elegantly dressed people photographed in a muted pointillist way, with the actual car deliberately downplayed, shown merely as a prop that glorified the lifestyle of the crowd that surrounded it. Pete, like all of the three or four other great car photographers, loathed this approach because it diluted the purity of the automobiles, those splendid machines that inspired aesthetic emotion.

“What are they doing now, showing a BMW filled with a sobbing family rushing its sick cat off to a vet?” Jazz asked sympathetically, for she knew how seriously Pete took his work.

“It’s not that. It’s Marcia. She’s just ditched me for a vet. And eighteen months ago, exactly the same thing happened with Samantha. Jazz, I just don’t get it! I was nuts about each of those bimbettes, damn it, I was just about getting ready to do some major thinking about proposing to each of them, and suddenly I hear, ‘Pete, I’ll always love you but I’m going to marry this wonderful man and I never dreamed this would happen to me and I know you want me to be happy and I’m sorry, Pete, but would you be a darling and help me move my suitcases into the car?’—and they’re out of there like I never was happening. And both times—
vets
. Is this sinister, or what?”

“Ah, Pete, I’m really sorry. I liked Marcia so much.” What could she do besides sympathize, Jazz wondered. If she were a man, she’d offer to go out and get drunk with Pete … wasn’t that what men traditionally did at a time like this?

“So did I, kid, so did I. What I’m looking for is a dose of woman’s intuition. I don’t want this to happen again. Got any to spare?”

“Vets,” Jazz said thoughtfully. “Did Marcia and Samantha have pets?”

“I suppose … yeah, but I never paid much attention. You know I’m a motorcycle man myself. Marcia has one of those shitty little dogs, you know, the kind you can sneak into your purse and try to take on a plane … used to drive me wild when she pulled that … and Samantha kept a horse at the Equestrian Center in Burbank … she used to go exercise him three times a week and take dressage lessons, dressage lessons … big deal, how to make a horse walk backwards on its hind legs.” Pete snorted in disdain.

“I’ll bet you never saw
National Velvet
?”

“Nah, I had a misspent childhood. I don’t think
National Velvet
even played Fort Lee, New Jersey. And we sure as hell didn’t have horses.”

“Were Samantha and Marcia’s pets ever sick?”

“Ever
sick! They were sick all the damn time! What a turnoff—maybe I’m not so unlucky after all,” Pete said miserably.

“Pete, consider this. A woman with a sick pet is like a woman with a sick baby. She’s at her most vulnerable, and you can’t give her any emotional support at all. Meanwhile, the vet is becoming a hero; he’s caring, warm, capable, providing security, advice and reassurance. He’s healing her baby. But where are you when you’re not in the studio, big guy? You’re sitting next to a fancy set of wheels on top of a mountain, waiting for those first three crucial minutes at sunrise which give you the light you need for your shot. Or you’re lying in a road while a stunt driver drives in tight circles around you, so you can get the shot of the rear wheels of a car kicking gravel in your face. So who did Samantha and Marcia turn to in their hour of need? The vets.”

“But they knew where I was,” Pete protested. “And what could I have done anyway?”

“Pete, listen,” Jazz continued. “Who can make a house call at any hour of the day, when a woman’s all alone with her sick dog? The vet. Who exudes the sexually charged aura of a doctor, so that he benefits from the kind of emotional-erotic transference that’s inspired by a shrink? Yet a woman
can
have sex with him because he’s not
her
doctor? The vet. My God, Pete, they’ve got to catch more girls than any other specialty in medicine!”