People Like Us (10 page)

“I didn’t even know who she was when I met her,” he said.

“You don’t read Dolly De Longpre’s column.”

“I didn’t then. I do now.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“In an elevator.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“No, no, no, not like that. We were both leaving a party at Maisie Verdurin’s, and she gave me a ride home.”

Brenda nodded. “I’m not hurt, Bernie, but I do feel a bit used. I realize I’m just the office fuck, but us office fucks have feelings too.”

“Office fuck, indeed,” said Bernie. He hugged her.

“Congratulations,” she said, finally.

“Thanks, Brenda. I’m really going to make this marriage work.”

Brenda didn’t believe him, but she nodded. She knew he was an alley cat. She knew that six months after his marriage he would be on the prowl again.

“Have you told Sol and Hester yet?” she asked. Brenda Primrose had once met Bernie Slatkin’s aunt and uncle, who brought him up, when they came to the studio to watch him broadcast, and she always called them Sol and Hester when she mentioned them to Bernie.

“Not yet.”

“I don’t think they’re going to be thrilled with a
shiksa
for a niece-in-law, do you?”

“When they meet Justine, they’ll like her,” said Bernie.

“Sure, Bernie. Probably about as much as Mrs. Altemus and Laurance Van Degan are going to like you.”

Lil Altemus looked up and watched her daughter enter the restaurant. Lil resented Justine’s height and often blamed her single status, although she was only thirty, on the fact that she had towered over most of the boys in Mrs. Godfrey’s dancing classes at the Colony Club when her age group was growing up in New York. Mostly, however, Lil Altemus resented Justine’s height because she felt it would have far better suited her son. Still stubbornly mistaken about Hubie, Lil insisted that he would eventually find a woman, even encouraging him to pursue this one or that one, and she once gave him her discarded engagement ring, a rather large diamond from her own failed marriage, when she thought, incorrectly, that he might have found his life choice in the unlikely person of Violet Bastedo.

Lil watched as Justine, on her way to the table, stopped to speak to a trio of young married women whom she had come out with who were lunching together. Justine had never, like the Millingtons’ daughter, taken to dope. Nor had she ever, like Emerald de Grey’s daughter, become radical and slept with NYU associate professors with ponytails. And, thank God, she hadn’t become a dyke, like poor Baba Timson’s Nan, whom Baba never spoke about anymore. Lil could find nothing to fault in Justine’s perfect appearance, but, used to faulting her, she stared and then squinted at her daughter’s hair in such a way that Justine’s hands went immediately to her coiffure, as if the wind outside had mussed it, although there had been no wind outside.

“Who’s that great fat man with the foot-long cigar?” asked Lil, after her daughter was seated. Lil Altemus often pretended she didn’t know things she knew very well, and she knew perfectly well who the great fat man with the cigar was.

“He’s called Elias Renthal,” answered Justine, who knew that her mother knew.

“The one who bought Matilda’s apartment? Looks horrid. Brown shoes with a blue suit. His wife is the pushiest woman ever. Ruby, she’s called. She asked me to have lunch. I mean, I know her about as well as I know this waiter.” She waved her hand in the direction of the waiter who was placing a glass of white wine in front of her. “First she served a cheese soufflé, and then a chocolate soufflé for dessert. Can you imagine? Even her Rigaud candles were the wrong color. Get Matilda going on the Renthals sometime.” She sipped her wine.

“Why did you go if you feel like that?” asked Justine.

“I was raising money for the new stroke center for the hospital, and all my friends said they simply couldn’t give another cent, and Mrs. Renthal couldn’t get her checkbook out fast enough so, of course, I had to go. It’s what’s called a once-only. Chick Jacoby really shouldn’t allow him to smoke cigars in here.” Lil waved her napkin back and forth in the air, as if to clear it of the offending cigar smoke.

“Chick Jacoby wouldn’t have the nerve to tell Elias Renthal to put it out,” said Justine.

“I wonder how he got such a good table,” said Lil.

“Rich, rich, rich, Mother. Or, Big Bucks, as Bernard Slatkin would say. Richer even than the Van Degans, I hear.”

Lil Altemus had a horror of what she referred to as the New People, and her own immense fortune had always protected her from having to fraternize socially with any of them, except when she asked them for money for one of her charities. Recently, however, with the publication of Mr. Forbes’s annual list of the four hundred richest people in America, she was aware that her still immense fortune was less immense than the fortunes of such New People as Elias Renthal “and his
ilk,” meaning the Bulbenkians, and the Zobel brothers, and the Jorsts. The feeling was unsettling.

“Imagine anyone wearing a pale blue gabardine suit,” said Lil, still staring over at Elias Renthal. Then she added, “Who’s Bernard Slatkin?”

“He’s the man I’m going to marry,” answered Justine.

“Goodness,” said Lil.

Justine expected a great furor of protestations from her mother, and possibly a scene. Bernard Slatkin possessed none of the requisites that Lil Altemus, who never let anyone forget that she was born a Van Degan, adhered to in past suitors for her daughter’s hand. Surprisingly, Lil was, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least not defiant in her opposition to Justine’s choice. Justine was, after all, thirty, or, to be precise, practically thirty-one. The kind of boys she had grown up with, gone to dancing school with, spent weekends with at Yale or Princeton, and who now worked downtown, in banks or brokerage houses, almost never married girls as rich as Justine Altemus was going to be. As one after another of them had drifted into solid if less spectacular marriages, Lil’s greatest fear was that Justine would fall into the clutches of one of the fortune-hunting foreigners who preyed on American heiresses. Every time she thought of her childhood friend, Consuelo Harcourt de Rham, she shuddered at her sad fete. The sight of Consuelo’s widower, Constantine de Rham, several tables away, spending Consuelo’s money on a blond strumpet half his age, wearing for too many jewels for daytime, may have softened Lil’s opposition to Bernard Slatkin.

“Slatkin,” said Lil. “I don’t know that name.”

“It’s not in the
Social Register
, Mother,” answered Justine.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“He earns a great deal of money, Mother.”

“A television announcer, someone told me.”

“No, he is a broadcaster. On the evening news.”

“Not the little Chinese?”

“No, Mother, that’s the weatherman, and he’s Korean, not Chinese. Bernie is one of the anchormen.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Is he the one with the dimple or the one with the toupee?”

“The dimple. He’s very handsome, Mother.”

“Of course he is, darling. Where in the world did you meet such a person?”

“At Maisie Verdurin’s.”

“Mrs. Verdurin has all those celebrities to dinner, doesn’t she? I’m forever reading about her in Dolly’s column. What were you doing at Mrs. Verdurin’s?”

“We’re here to talk about the man I’m going to marry, not about Maisie Verdurin.”

“What do you suppose old Cora Mandell and Ezzie Fenwick are being so intense about at the next table?” asked Lil.

“Mother!”

“I’m listening, Justine,” said her mother, sharply. “Forgive me if I can’t absorb it all in a flash. This is quite important news, and, after all, we don’t know anything about Mr. Bernard Slatkin, now, do we?”

Justine knew, before her mother even said it, that she was going to say, “Who is he?” She also knew that her mother meant, “Who is his family? What are his schools?”

“Who is he?” asked her mother.

“His parents are dead. He was raised by an aunt and uncle, Sol and Hester Slatkin. Sol is in the printing business. They live in New Jersey. Weehawken.”

“Hmm,” said Lil.

“Bernie went to Rutgers on a scholarship,” said Justine. She loved saying, “He went to Rutgers on a scholarship,” as if it added to the worth of him, a romantic asset to his history. In all her life she had never known anyone who had gone to school on a scholarship, and she found the idea glamorous. Even the names Sol and Hester evoked images in her mind of Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty, and huddled masses, although Sol and Hester Slatkin were several
generations removed from Ellis Island and lived comfortable lives in comfortable circumstances. “He waited on tables in a fraternity house,” Justine continued, her voice filled with excitement. “And then he went to law school for a year, I forget where, but he dropped out, because he was mad-keen to be in television news. First he was an on-the-air reporter covering City Hall, and then he filled in for a week as anchorman when Charlie Walsh broke his leg, and there was such a favorable reaction to him, I mean, people wrote in about him, he’s so good-looking, wait till you see him, and then they made him a coanchorman full time after Charlie went to Los Angeles.”

“Hmm,” said Lil.

“He’s not after my money, if that’s what you’re worried about, because he earns a fortune, an absolute fortune.”

“They all earn a lot of money, those announcers, don’t they?”

“He’s an anchorman, Mother, not an announcer, and he writes all his own copy. He’s very successful.”

“I meant an anchorman,” said Lil.

“I want a big wedding, Mother, with bridesmaids, and a reception at the Colony Club, and, you know, the works,” said Justine.

“This is so nice, Justine,” said Lil. She shaped her lips into an obligatory smile, but Lil’s lips were very little involved in her smiles. Instead she raised her eyebrows and blinked her eyes shut several times in rapid succession in a manner that suggested, somehow, mirth. “You know, of course, there will be things to discuss with Uncle Laurance down at the bank.”

“Yes”

“When will I meet Mr. Slatkin?”

“As soon as you say. You won’t be difficult, will you, Mother, if Daddy gives me away?”

“Of course not, darling, as long as that tramp he’s married to doesn’t come within my sight lines and is seated somewhere at the back of the church,” said Lil.

“Oh, Mother, I’m so thrilled. And you’re going to love Bernie. He knows everything about Libya and nuclear disarmament and all those things. He’s fascinating.”

“Justine.”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Mr. Slatkin, uh—”

“Please call him Bernie.”

“Yes, of course, Bernie.”

“What about him?”

“He doesn’t wear one of those little beanie hats, does he?”

8

People who worked for Elias Renthal accused him, behind his back, of course, as having a vile nature, as he had no patience whatever for people who were not as consumed with the desire to make money as he was. The accusation would not have offended him if he had been confronted with it. Elias looked on his unpopularity as a natural consequence of wealth and power. Maxwell Luby, Elias’s head trader, was a second-echelon executive, knew it, accepted it, and aspired only to be the best second-echelon executive, an indispensable acolyte to Elias Renthal. Only Max Luby, who had known Elias from the beginning, in Cleveland, did not fear his wrath, which could be extreme, and dared to sometime caution him on the enormity of his wealth, although he refrained from voicing disapproval of the manner of Elias’s rapid acquisition of his fortune.

“You’re like a heroin addict, Elias,” he said, “only about money.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Elias impatiently. Introspection was not a thing that Elias
had any time for, especially during business hours, when he liked to devote his fall attention to the fifty computers in his office, beaming fiscal information.

“I remember when you used to think everything would be all right with your life if you had a million dollars. And then I remember when you set ten million as your goal, and then fifty, and then a hundred. You thought the world was going to be your oyster with a hundred million, do you remember?”

“C’mon, c’mon, we got work to do. What is this? Psych One at Cleveland University?”

“But it still wasn’t enough,” Max went on, unperturbed by Elias’s impatience. “Then it was five hundred million. And then you had a billion, even though Mr. Malcolm Forbes said you only had eight hundred million. And now you got three billion. Where does it stop, Elias? How much more do you need?”

Elias looked at Max. “I can’t stop, Max. It’s just too fucking easy. You know what it’s like? It’s like placing red meat in front of a lion.”

Even Max Luby, who knew everything about Elias Renthal, did not know about his several secret bank accounts in Swiss banks with branch offices in Nassau in the Bahamas. He thought that when Elias went to Nassau, it was in connection with a new vacation house he was building in Lyford Key. He didn’t know that one of the accounts was in his name, Max Luby, or that another was in Ruby’s maiden name, R. Nolte. He didn’t know that when Elias got a tip, from a variety of young lawyers in firms that dealt with mergers, or young stockbrokers with access to information not available to everyone, he made collect calls to his Swiss banks in Nassau, who did his buying for him, with no one the wiser.