Lily White (40 page)

“Night and day,” Robin said.

“Rich and poor,” Lee added.

“Black and white,” Robin continued.

“Christian and Jew,” Jazz chimed in. As if on cue, the sisters looked from Fos and Ginger to Leonard and Sylvia—and began to laugh. It was only then that Jazz could see the resemblance: heads leaning to the right at the precise same angle, cheeks red and shiny. They wiped tears of laughter from their eyes at the same instant with the exact same motion, an outward flick with their middle fingers.

“What’s so funny?” Ginger asked too eagerly. She sounded beyond desperate now, so with Robin and Kent in tow, Lee hurried over to her in-laws to try and make them think they were having fun. This was no simple job. She became a jurisprudential Scheherazade, regaling them with one whimsical courtroom
tale after another. Finally, after three-quarters of an hour, she succeeded. Sylvia had joined them in good-natured chuckling, and then Fos took the floor, telling horror stories of pushy parents of would-be Olympic competitors. It was only then that Lee looked around for Jazz and found him gone.

“In the den with Daddy,” Robin informed her. Lee pictured Jazz and her father watching football, her father mimicking Jazz’s “Yeah!” and “Asshole!” after various plays. Her father admired men who admired sports, and though he himself knew little and cared nothing about athletics, she was aware he was shamed by this defect in himself. Still, after another hour, Lee was astounded at her father’s tenacity. True, she realized Leonard idolized everything about Jazz, from his Platonic ideal of a nose to the way he said thank you to busboys in restaurants when they refilled his water glass. Nevertheless, she wondered how Leonard could last through so much football. Of course, she admitted to herself, she could be wrong; there might be a documentary on Channel 13 on the history of the mink stole.

The two men came out moments later in high spirits, Leonard calling to Sylvia that he was
starved
and Jazz putting up his fists for a round of mock boxing with Kent. Sylvia whipped yards of Saran off the spread on the table. Leonard uncorked two bottles of wine Lee sensed were embarrassingly expensive, and the Whites and the Taylors dug into the buffet as if they had spent years in caloric deprivation.

“Mmm! Great turkey,” Ginger said.

“Good vino, Len,” Fos remarked.

Everyone, even Robin, had at least two portions of everything and at the end, they all applauded as Sylvia cut the gingerbread White house into slices.

“Yum!” said Fos.

“I can’t believe something that looks so good can taste so delish!” Ginger remarked.

Sylvia insisted the Taylors take home the model of Hart’s Hill. They made a brief, bogus protest, grabbed the cake, and, with an overenthusiastic chorus of “Thank you!” and ecumenical “Happy holidays!” they rushed out the door, forgetting Kent.

“Don’t worry,” Jazz assured Lee as she made for the door to call after them. “They know he’s in good hands. I’ll drop him off later. Sit down.” He glanced over at Leonard who, as if by design, was sitting back expansively on one of Sylvia’s newly acquired Corbusier love seats, his arm resting on the back, legs crossed in leisurely
Gentleman’s Quarterly
style. Jazz led Lee to the matching love seat, across from his father-in-law’s. Leonard, meantime, patted the spot beside his own, inviting Sylvia to sit. When she took no notice, preoccupied as she was with watching Greta clear the table, he called out: “Sylvia! Over here. Sit down. We have something to tell you.”

Lee interpreted the “you” as meaning her mother, so she snuggled against Jazz, her cheek enjoying the incredible softness of the vicuña sweater Sylvia and Leonard had given him the previous Christmas. She half closed her eyes, the better to luxuriate in the blended scents of Woolite and Jazz’s own virile odor. But then she opened them. He was not circling his arm around her in their customary marital embrace. No, he looked casual, legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles, but his torso remained erect, and the arm that always crooked so comfortably around her stayed on the back of the love seat. She sat straight up.

Her father cleared his throat, then Jazz his, even louder. Deep, manly sounds. But then Leonard met Jazz’s eye, and the next sounds out of them were boyish chuckles. Lee couldn’t be sure. Were they We’ve Got a Secret chuckles or Bad Boy sniggers? Had they planned something? A surprise New Year’s Eve black-tie dinner at some four-star restaurant? God forbid, she thought, having to ring in the bicentennial year with her parents
and Robin over mountains of shaved truffles and oversolicitous waiters instead of over a six-foot hero and Chianti with their friends. Or worse, had her father gotten Jazz involved in planning a lavish vacation the five of them could share in some exorbitant tropical paradise? She wished she could be certain that Jazz’s increasing closeness with her father—the twice-weekly lunches, the frequent exchange of jokey notes accompanied with
Wall Street Journal
or
Forbes
clippings—arose out of Jazz’s inability to hurt anyone’s feelings and not from any commonality of interests.

“Lee,” Jazz began. But then he stopped and looked to Leonard.

“Honey,” her father said. Out of the corner of her eye, Lee saw Robin sitting Indian-style on the daybed with Kent, folding the
Times
into hat shapes, straining to hear what was being said. “Jazz and I have been talking,” Leonard said. Jazz nodded, as if to quell any doubts that this was the truth. “We’ve come to a decision.” For some reason, Lee suddenly remembered what Melanie Tucker had been saying when they had a drink a few weeks earlier, about never giving the other side any help in putting a knife in your back: I’ve seen too many women lawyers smiling supportively or murmuring comforting, maternal uhhuhs. Don’t get caught in that trap. Just sit there with a neutral expression and let them get out the bad news as best they can. Sometimes they’ll trip themselves up. “It affects all of us,” her father was saying. This is crazy, Lee thought, my thinking like this. I’m not in court. I’m with my family. But her face could not move itself out of its frozen neutrality.

“What?” Sylvia demanded. “
What
is going on?” Her cajoling was so girlish it demanded a ruffled petticoat and a hair bow, not the sleek black velvet condom of an at-home dress she was wearing. “Come on.
Please.
I can’t stand secrets.”

Both men ignored her. Their eyes were on Lee. “Babe,” Jazz said, “don’t react. Just listen.” An entirely unnecessary statement,
since Lee was sitting as unyielding as a petrified tree. “This is going to be great for all of us.”

“I can’t take the tension!” Sylvia protested. “Pretty please!”

“This is the story, honey,” Leonard said to Lee, ignoring his wife. “You know what’s been happening with Le Fourreur. Can I say it? Can I brag? An unqualified success. A success beyond my wildest dreams.” When his satisfied smile did not elicit the same from Lee, he looked across the huge block of pink-veined marble that was the coffee table and winked at Jazz, bolstering and boyish. Lee did not have to look to know her husband was winking back.

“You men!” Sylvia declared. “Tell us!”

“Success brings rewards, enormous rewards, but it brings problems too. Dealing with top-of-the-line designers who have armies—I’m serious—of advisers. Dealing with suppliers, with foreign governments, for God’s sake. Do I have to tell you who the number one importer of Russian golden sable into this country is? I mean, I should have my own embassy in Moscow.”

Jazz let out a deep breath, reluctant to join the conversation, but he realized Leonard had stopped and was waiting for him. “You know how I’ve been trying to help,” he told Lee. “Serving as a sounding board, really, so your dad can check out what his lawyers have been telling him. And in general, trying to be there for him.” Lee was close enough to smell sweat-drenched vicuña. “But this is the thing: We talked. We went out to lunch. You know. Got to know each other.”

“More than father-in-law and son-in-law,” Leonard interjected.

“More like peers.”

“Peers,” Leonard echoed. “And friends, I hope.”

“Friends,” Jazz said, as if it could not be otherwise. “And besides that, I realized one thing. No. Two things. One, I was able to help your father.”

“It was incredible!” Leonard said. “I had a whole law firm working for me. You wouldn’t believe the fees they were charging. And what was I getting? A lot of ‘On one hand, but on the other hand.’ No one could make a decision. Until Jazz. He’d say: ‘This is what I think you ought to do. Here are the pluses. And so you can reach a balanced decision, here are the minuses as well.’”

At that moment, Lee regretted being a lawyer, because she understood what was going on: What Jazz was telling her father was no different from what Breitbart, Wasserman, Mishkin, Schwartz and Oshinsky was telling him. But she kept stone-faced and stony silent. Because she thought she knew what was coming next—and she was right.

“It wasn’t just that I liked helping your father,” Jazz continued. “You know, being useful to him. I found out that all the times I was working with him, I was having fun. I mean, sometimes we’d have lunch uptown and then I’d go back to the salon with him and look at whatever needed looking at, and it was
fun.
Challenging. Interesting.” (Naturally, Jazz did not mention, then or ever, that it had taken him about twenty minutes in Leonard’s mahogany-paneled office to realize that his father-in-law and Dolly Young were longtime paramours, a state of affairs Leonard confessed to him anyway, at their next lunch.) “But then I found out something else. That when I was finished and had to go back to the office, I was … well, I felt really, really low.”

“I sensed it,” Leonard went on. Listening, Lee was somehow reminded of the oft-repeated stories married couples tell of how they met and fell in love. “And I thought about it. I mean, heavy thinking. I knew how much Jazz liked working with me, and it goes without saying that I was getting more and more … well, dependent is not too strong a word. Dependent on him. His advice was always great. And whoever I introduced him to at the
place: my insurance man, the employees, the customers—my God, the customers!—they were crazy about him. So …”

“So … your father made me an offer, Lee.”

They waited for her to ask what it was. When she didn’t, Leonard finally said: “I offered him the presidency of Le Fourreur.”

Sylvia clapped her hands together with joy, but then she bit her lip. “What about you?” she asked her husband.

“I’ll be chairman of the board,” he said proudly. “And founder. I’ll do the buying of skins. I’ll deal with the designers. Sell to customers who need special handling. Work on bringing in bigger names. But Jazz is going to take over running the show.”

Lee sensed she should be angry, but she felt nothing. Nothing. No matter that the term “absolute zero” had a scientific meaning; that is what she felt. “You’re going to leave Johnson, Bonadies?” she asked.

“Yes. Of course.” Then Jazz added: “I already told them.”

“You already told them?”

“You
know
I wasn’t happy there.”

“I asked you over and over again whether you were happy there, whether you would be better off someplace else, and you said—” She cut herself off because she realized there was no point in going on. Jazz was leaving the law. Unlike the five previous generations of Taylor men, he did not have the stuff. And there was another reason for her not going on. As any smart corporate wife knows, it is counterproductive to belittle one’s husband in front of his boss.

The following year, the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation, Lee successfully prosecuted an organized-crime figure on kidnapping and assault charges, shut down a major heroin wholesaler by going after him—nine times in four months—for building code violations, and convinced a notoriously
lenient judge to sentence a pimp to the maximum seven years for the vehicular assault of a fifteen-year-old prostitute. As a reward for her achievements, she became part of the District Attorney’s elite group, the lawyers who got to try homicide cases. The D.A. himself told her she not only was a natural in court; she had great judgment out of court.

True. Perhaps it had to do with growing up within Leonard and Sylvia’s house. Whatever, Lee White had developed what the street-wise refer to as a built-in bullshit detector. Thus she was able to take the measure of her colleagues, judges, police, and others in the criminal justice system with a fair degree of accuracy. Her passionate soul—the part of her that could be captured at Dante’s Pizza by Jasper Taylor, or that thrilled with anticipation and pride each morning as she walked through the hideously ugly D.A.’s Office at 100 Centre Street—did not get in her way at all. Rather, it helped. It kept her from becoming cynical; it kept her believing her efforts were, truly, on behalf of the People.

Her work was painful at times, all the more so because Jazz’s was now so … well, the only word that came to her mind was “frivolous.” Here was someone with the best education money could buy, and he was now spending his days taking department store executives out to long, extravagant lunches, cajoling them to carry Le Fourreur’s exclusive sheared beaver ski jackets. Or poring over contracts with chinchilla ranchers. But she had to admit, he was happier than ever. His normal good cheer had given way to exuberance, now that he was liberated from what he thought was his life sentence at Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle. He loved his new job, loved his huge salary, loved being loved—adored, actually—by everyone from his father-in-law to the wealthy customers to the young man who swept fur scraps in the back room. He loved the leisure he now had. He took a wine appreciation course. He bought two seats at center court for
Knicks games and a box for the Rangers. He arranged for their vacations, bought their theater and concert tickets, and began to keep up with art gallery openings. And he seemed to love Lee all the more for being the means by which he had secured everything he had ever dreamed of.

So with what little energy she had to spare, she took pains to hide her disapproval of his life. In fairness, if she did not love Jazz’s choice, she still loved Jazz. It wasn’t hard: In his custom-made suits, his gleaming brown hair growing fashionably long once more, he had gone from being good-looking to being devilishly handsome. Coming home from the D.A.’s, she was sometimes startled to discover the beauty of the man waiting for her. He remained an ardent and attentive lover. If he was not particularly inventive, at least he now had the time to read, and he bought books and videotapes and studied the arts and sciences of Eros so he might knock Lee’s socks off. And when she was not in the mood—as she usually was not during the height of a homicide trial—he was the warmest and tenderest friend.