Lace (2 page)

That gold-digging slut!

But Maxine was undoubtedly intrigued by Lili’s offer and it was partly her curiosity that had brought her all the way across the Atlantic. Again she wondered whether she would accept the
job. She would have thought that Lili—who must be about twenty-eight years old by now—would never have wanted to see Maxine again. Maxine remembered that long-ago expression of startled
pain in the flashing chestnut eyes of the troublemaker whom the press had nicknamed “Tiger-Lili.”

She had been amazed to receive the telephone call, to hear that low, sensual voice sound so astonishingly humble, as Lili had asked Maxine to meet her in New York to decorate Lili’s new
duplex on Central Park South. Lili wanted her new home to be a showpiece, a conversation-stopper, and she knew that Maxine could supply the correct blend of erudite elegance and spirited style. The
budget would be as large as was necessary, and of course all expenses for Maxine’s trip to New York would be paid whether or not she decided to accept the commission.

There had been a pause, then Lili had added in a penitent voice, “I would also like to feel that something no longer has such painful memories for you. For so many years I have lived
unhappily with my conscience, and now I dearly wish to do whatever is necessary to be at peace with you.”

After this apology there had been a thoughtful pause, then the conversation had turned to Maxine’s work. “I understand you’ve just finished Shawborough Castle,” Lili had
said, “and I also heard about the stunning job you did for Dominique Fresanges—it must be wonderful to have a talent such as yours, to rescue historic houses from decay, to make so many
homes beautiful and comfortable while they still remain a heritage for the world. . . .”

It had been a long time since Maxine had enjoyed a holiday in New York by herself, so eventually she had agreed to make the journey. Lili had asked Maxine to tell nobody of the meeting until
after it had taken place. “You know the press won’t leave me alone,” she had explained. And it was true. Not since Greta Garbo had there been an international movie star who so
intrigued the public.

As the limousine started to crawl forward, Maxine glanced at her diamond wristwatch—there was plenty of time before the six-thirty meeting at the Pierre. Maxine was rarely impatient; she
disliked being late, but assumed that everyone else would be. That was life today—undependable. If a situation could be improved, Maxine would generally do it with a slight, one-sided smile,
a look that combined conspiratorial charm with a hint of menace. If a situation could
not
be improved, then she folded her hands in her lap and imperturbably accepted
la loi de
Murphy.

She happened to catch sight of herself in the back mirror of the limousine and leaned toward it, lifting her jaw above the cream lace jabot and poking it sideways at her reflection. It was only
five weeks since the operation, but the tiny scars in front of her ears had already disappeared. Mr. Wilson had done an excellent job and it had only cost a thousand pounds, including the
anesthetist and the London clinic bill. There was no tautness, no pulling at the mouth or eyes; she simply looked healthy, glowing and fifteen years younger—certainly not forty-seven. It was
sensible to have it done when you were still young, so that nobody noticed, or, if they did, they couldn’t pin you down; today you never saw an eyebag on an actress over thirty, or on an
actor, come to think of it. Nobody had noticed her absence; she had been out of the clinic in four days and had then spent ten days in Tunisia where she had lost seven pounds, a satisfying bonus.
She simply could not understand why some people went all the way to Brazil and paid heaven knows what for their lifts.

Maxine was a firm believer in self-improvement, especially surgical. One
owes
it to oneself, was her justification; her teeth, eyes, nose, chin, breasts, all had been lifted or braced
until Maxine was a mass of almost invisible stitches. Even so, she was no great beauty, but when she thought back to her girlhood and remembered the prominent nose, the horselike teeth and her
painful self-consciousness, she was grateful that years ago she had been persistently urged to do something about it.

It had not been necessary to do anything about her legs. They were exquisite; she stuck out one long pale limb, rotated an elegant ankle, smoothed the blue silk skirt of her suit, then opened
the window and sniffed the air of Manhattan, oblivious to the strong carbon monoxide content at street level. She reacted to New York as she did to the champagne of her estate—with happy
delight. Her eyes sparkled, she felt high and ebullient. It was good to be back, despite the traffic jam, in the city that made you feel as if every day was your birthday.

Judy Jordan looked like a tiny, blond, exhausted Orphan Annie, although she was forty-five years old. In her Chloë brown velvet suit, and a fragile, cream silk blouse, she
sat in the crowded bus as it crawled up Madison Avenue. Impatient by nature, Judy always took what came first, a bus or a cab. She had in fact recently been photographed by
People
in the
amazing act of getting on a bus. This had given Judy a great deal of satisfaction, because there had been a long period in her life when she couldn’t afford anything
but
a bus.

Suddenly she felt sad. As if she were touching a talisman, she fiddled with one of the matching rings she wore on her middle fingers, each one an exquisitely carved coral rosebud on a thick gold
band. Apart from these she didn’t much care for jewelry—her passion was for shoes. Her walk-in shoe closet contained row upon row of exquisitely handmade boots and shoes. Judy decided
she might just celebrate tomorrow by going mad in Maud Frizon. Why not? Her partner had told her only this morning that they were worth nearly two million dollars
more
this year!

It was increasingly hard to remember life in her old studio on East 11th Street, from which she’d been evicted because she couldn’t pay the rent. But Judy forced herself to remember
those days. They made the present all the more pleasant by contrast.

There was another reason why Judy never wanted to forget what it felt like to be short of money in a big city. That was how a lot of her readers felt. They bought
VERVE!
for its optimism,
its encouragement, its sensuality, and they looked on the magazine as a
friend.
The truth was that Judy travelled to work by bus because she wanted to stay in touch with her readers.

Reconciling the opposite sides of her public image was sometimes difficult. On the one hand, she liked to be seen as a warmhearted, straightforward, hard-working woman who’d been known to
lunch off a street corner hot dog, a working girl much like her readers. On the other hand, those same readers expected her to lead a glamorous social life, dress the way they dreamed of dressing,
and be a celebrity herself. So, when Judy was not eating hot dogs she lunched at Lutèce, dieted at the Golden Door when necessary, and travelled constantly. Like New York, she set a brisk,
optimistic pace. On those occasions when—suddenly—she plummeted into black loneliness, she gritted her teeth and bore it. Loneliness from time to time was the price of freedom, and
freedom wasn’t a stars and stripes, Boy Scout idea, it was doing what you damn well wanted to do—all the time.

The doors of the bus hissed open, sucked in more passengers and hissed shut again. A sallow, middle-aged woman collapsed into the seat opposite Judy, settled her shopping bag on her knees, then
suddenly groaned. “I wish the buildings would go up in flames, then there’d be no more problems.” She said it again, then yelled it. No one in the bus took the slightest notice
until the woman got off; then there was a general rustle of relief, a few smiles and shrugs—just another New York crazy who didn’t care what anyone thought of her.

But that was also a sign of maturity, mused Judy. You became an adult when you stopped caring what other people thought about you and started to care what
you
thought about
them
. .
. . Was it a feature? she wondered professionally. She thought about a possible author, celebrities to interview, a quiz, and made a quick mental note to get one of the editors working on it.
“Are You Grown-Up Yet?” Not a bad title. Not a bad
question,
either, she thought to herself, unable to answer it. She still felt as childlike inside as she looked on the outside,
although she would never allow anyone to know it. Vulnerability was bad for business. Judy preferred her reputation as an
enfant terrible,
a baby tycoon, the lethal little lady publisher who
had already come a long way and intended to go much further. The image that Judy projected was that of a woman to be reckoned with—a woman who made you think ten percent faster when you were
with her, but also a woman with a weakness for pretty shoes.

She was making up for lost time. Until she was fifteen, Judy had worn only sensible black shoes.

Behind the lace curtains her family had been painfully poor. Her parents were devout Southern Baptists, greatly interested in sin and its avoidance. In order to avoid sin, Judy and her young
brother Peter were never allowed to do anything on Sundays. They could sing in church but they weren’t allowed to do so at home, they were not allowed to listen to the radio, because radio on
Sunday was sinful: the big, elaborate, walnut radio, with the wooden sunray pattern over the speaker, was the focal point of the living room, but on Sundays, apart from cooking noises, the only
sound in the house was the clatter of the old icebox that stood by the door to the back porch.

Naturally, smoking and drinking were sinful. Nevertheless, her Grandad, who lived with them, would disappear from time to time into the cellar for a drink from the bottle that he kept hidden
behind the boiler; perhaps he justified it to himself as medicine. After his Sunday drink, Grandad always went to the back porch to his rocking chair, which creaked under his weight as he beamed at
the apple tree at the end of the yard and waited for the hereafter. Judy’s parents must have known about the whiskey because you could smell the stuff on his breath; her mother’s mouth
would tighten, and she would give a tiny, delicate, disapproving sniff, but she never said anything. Grandad was supposedly a teetotaler.

The man in the plaid shirt seated across from Judy looked uneasy and lowered his eyes furtively to check his zipper. She looked away quickly—she must have been staring again. When she was
lost in thought, her dark blue eyes glared through the big tortoiseshell frames with a ferocity that was as alarming as it was unintentional.

She wondered again what the purpose of this meeting with Lili was, and why the mystery?

First there had been the contrite telephone call—and God knows, Lili had every reason to sound contrite. Ultimately, of course, the bust-up with Lili had been good for Judy’s public
relations business, but that hadn’t been Lili’s intention that night in Chicago. . . . “If you could find it in your heart to forgive me for the very bad way in which I behaved. .
. .” Lili had pleaded, in that deep voice with the slight continental accent. . . . “I was so ungrateful. . . . So very unprofessional. . . . I am ashamed when I think about it. . .
.” In spite of herself, Judy had started to mellow; it wasn’t just because of Lili’s stardom or her magnetism, it was simply because Judy had enjoyed working with her. They really
had been a terrific team until that night in Chicago.

Lili had said there was a special matter that she wished to discuss with Judy, “something of a very confidential nature I should like to speak to you about personally.”

Judy didn’t waste her time on anybody. Dozens of strange proposals were put to her each week, and most of them didn’t get past her secretaries. But this was Lili, whose name had been
linked to more celebrities than that of any other woman, Lili, whose waiflike beauty was a twentieth-century legend, Lili, who
never
gave interviews.

The last fact counted most with Judy. Lili was worth at least a thousand words for
VERVE!,
whatever happened at the meeting, so Judy agreed to it. Eager and charming as a child, Lili
thanked her and asked her to keep their rendezvous a secret. Judy hadn’t intended to tell anyone anyway. But she was intrigued; like herself, Lili had also succeeded in life fast,
mysteriously and against the odds. She must be about twenty-eight or twenty-nine now, although she didn’t look it.

Last month’s telephone call had been followed by a confirming letter on thick, cream paper with the single word LILI centrally engraved in navy Bodoni typeface; for some reason Lili had no
last name.

What could she have in mind? Judy wondered. Backing? Surely not. Publishing? Not likely. Publicity? No longer necessary.

It was six-twenty and the traffic was still motionless, so Judy jumped off the bus and walked the last few blocks. She always liked to arrive on time.

The cab smelled of stale cigarette smoke, the backseat had been slashed and the guts were spilling out; it was also stuck in traffic on Madison Avenue, but the driver, a surly
Puerto Rican, was mercifully silent until suddenly he barked, “Where you from?”

“Cornwall,” said Pagan, who never thought of herself as English. She added, “The warmest part of Britain,” and thought that wasn’t saying much. Pagan’s pallor
was due to poor circulation; she had always suffered from cold weather, which was eleven months of the year at home. As a child she had hated to put her naked feet out of bed on winter mornings and
hurriedly plunged her chilblains into sheepskin slippers. Her first frenzied love-hate relationship was with her warm but uncomfortable winter underclothes; the scratchy, cream wool combination
suit that covered her from neck to ankle, with sagging sanitary trapdoor that unbuttoned at the back; the prickly, flannel Liberty bodice, a vestlike garment that ended at the stomach with long,
dangling suspenders to hold up her thick woolen stockings.

When Pagan was a child, at seven every morning a little housemaid had scurried around Trelawney to light the stoves and the fires, which were banked down or turned off every freezing winter
night at eleven p.m. no matter what time everyone went to bed. Smelly cylindrical oil stoves stood before the lace curtains of the bathrooms and minor bedrooms, open coal fires smoldered in the
principal bedrooms and great, glowing logs were piled in the hall and drawing room, but the long hallway and bathrooms were always freezing, and the food from the home farm was lukewarm when it
finally arrived on the manor table. The uneven flagstones in the dining room always felt cold, even in summer, even through Pagan’s shoes; when she thought no one was looking, Pagan used to
tuck up her feet under her bottom and away from the icy floor—but it was always noticed and she would be told sharply to “sit up like a lady.”