People Like Us (5 page)

2

Bernard Slatkin knew Justine Altemus by sight for several months before he actually spoke to her. Justine, the daughter of the famous Lil Altemus, and the niece of Laurance Van Degan, was a regular figure at most of the fashionable parties in New York that Bernard Slatkin, in the first flush of his professional success, had started being invited to in the last year.

“We’ve met before,” he said to her in the elevator leaving Maisie Verdurin’s party.

“Where?” Justine replied.

“Here at Maisie’s.”

“I’ve just attended my last party at Maisie’s,” said Justine. “Too crowded, and I don’t like having to sit at a table with Constantine de Rham’s mistress. Consuelo de Rham was my mother’s best friend.”

“It was the party where one of the Zobel brothers bought the Toulouse-Lautrec,” said Bernie.

“Tonight Elias Renthal was buying a Monet,” said Justine. She looked at him. “Oh, yes, I do remember
you. You were talking to Violet Bastedo about corruption in city government. Oh, so serious you were. And Violet was pretending she was understanding the conversation, which she wasn’t.”

“Would you like a ride home?” he asked quietly.

“One of the advantages of being a Van Degan, even by indirection, is that I have a car and driver. Not a limousine, mind you. That’s for the Mr. Renthals of the world. Just your average station wagon, but it relieves my mother’s mind to know I’m not standing out in the street waving for a cab at ungodly hours,” replied Justine. She spoke in a breezy manner, friendly but distant, with the assumption that great heiresses possess that the young man knew exactly who she was.

“I thought your name was Altemus,” he said.

“It is, but my mother was a Van Degan.”

Bernie Slatkin looked at this youngish woman who had now mentioned her mother three times. Her eyebrows were dark and gracefully arched. Her face was unmistakably the face of a well-born woman, but, somehow, beauty escaped it. “Do you live with your mother?” he asked.

“Same building. Different apartments. Different elevators too,” she answered.

The elevator stopped with a jolt. When she accidentally bumped against him, she could feel his erection, even through their coats.

“How about giving me a ride then?” asked Bernie, meeting her eyes.

“As long as you don’t live in the outer boroughs,” she replied. Then she remembered what she knew about this man. It was the very same Violet Bastedo who told her. Violet, who discussed such things, said he was more than amply endowed, referring to his male member. Violet said it right in front of the waiter at Clarence’s while he was serving them their chicken paillard. Of course, Violet had said it in French, but, even so, Justine had been shocked and screeched, “Violet!”

“Just Central Park West,” said Bernie.

“Just don’t get fresh with me in the backseat,” said Justine, wagging her finger at him, in a joking way that covered her shyness. “My driver doubles as a bodyguard.”

Bernie Slatkin laughed. “Only my thoughts will be impure,” he said.

“Now I know who you are,” said Justine. “It’s the dimple. I recognized the dimple. You’re on the television news.”

“And all the time I thought you knew that.”

“You see?”

In the car he held her hand and told her about being an anchorman on the local New York news. She made appropriate comments, saying “Fascinating” from time to time, but her mind was on other things. Sleeping with men, or “sleeping around,” as her friends like Violet Bastedo called it, was not a thing that Justine Altemus did. She had had the occasional affair—with Toby Walters, for instance, when she was thinking of marrying Toby, and Jean-Claude St. Cloud, one summer in France—but those carnal events were rare, widely spaced in time, and only occurred after careful deliberation on her part. To sleep with a man within the first hour of meeting him was altogether unthinkable, but, at this moment, in the backseat of her mother’s car, with a man she had just met in an elevator, whose erection she had accidentally bumped into, it was the thing she most desired in the world and intended to consummate, with no thought of consequence, if he made the request.

It had been a dozen years since her presentation, a small dinner dance at Grandfather Van Degan’s house in Syosset, for family and close friends, and then a ball under a pink tent for six hundred, with a list carefully honed by her mother to eliminate all the arrivistes, outsiders, and “New People,” as her mother called them, who were being invited everywhere in New York. The hope was, of course, that she would have a year of dancing and parties, and then a year of traveling, meeting
all the most eligible young men, and after that would take her pick of the many suitors her mother envisioned would be lined up for the tall, pretty heiress, but it hadn’t worked out that way, and Justine Altemus, at thirty, had still not wed.

“Drink?” asked Bernie, when the car stopped.

“Where?”

“My place. Great view.”

“Great view right across the park at my mother’s apartment.”

“Yours, too.”

“I’m on the other side of the building.”

“Well?”

“I’m going to be having a drink at Mr. Slatkin’s, Joe,” said Justine to the driver. At thirty she still behaved as if she were twenty.

She was nervous when she entered Bernie’s apartment. She looked around at the stark black-and-white room with its floor-to-ceiling windows. “Is this what they call the minimal look?” she asked.

“Like it?” asked Bernie.

“Actually, no,” eplied Justine. “Now don’t look crestfallen. It’s just that I’ve been brought tip in rooms of cabbage-rose chintz, as dictated by old Cora Mandell.”

“Who’s Cora Mandell?”

“Oh, well, now’s not the time for chintz lessons,” said Justine. “At least, that’s not what I thought you had in mind when you asked me to your West Side aerie.”

“No, no, it wasn’t,” said Bernie.

“Drinks, wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t drinks either.” By this time Bernie had had enough repartee. He took off his overcoat and dropped it on a chair, untied his black tie, and unbuttoned the top button of his dinner shirt. When he kissed her the first time, he put his hand under her short evening dress and between her legs.

“Oh, the finesse of it all,” she whispered. Justine, unused to passion in her few refined forays into physical
love, thrilled to his blunt approach. In less than a minute, his trousers and undershorts were off and flung far afield, and he was guiding her hands to his hairy regions. “That’s awfully nice, what you’re doing,” she whispered.

“That feels pretty good, what you’re doing, too,” said Bernie.

“I feel quite content.”

“This is only the pregame warmup, Miss Altemus,” said Bernie, taking his tongue out of her mouth only long enough to answer.

“Do you prefer to be called Bernie or Bernard?” she asked, between kisses.

“Whatever turns you on, honey,” he answered, unzipping her dress and helping her step out of it. The consummation of their lust was swift and violent. It was only in repetition that the beauty of the act of love became apparent to Justine. She liked looking at his body, every inch of it, and she allowed him to look at hers, every inch of it. With Toby Walters, who later married her friend Marie Harcourt, it was over each time almost before it started. With Jean-Claude St. Cloud, that summer in France, it was romantic but unsatisfying, each too aware of the perfection of the match. With Bernard Station, it was passion and carnality.

“I never heard a man talk so dirty,” she said afterward.

“Too low for you?”

“Quite the contrary,” she astonished herself by saying.

“I knew we were going to hit it off,” he said, smoothing her forehead with his hand. “Why the worried brow?”

“I was thinking of my mother’s chauffeur downstairs,” replied Justine.

Bernie chuckled and shook his head in disbelief. “How old are you, Justine?” he asked.

She blushed. Her age was for her a sensitive subject, as it was one her mother never let her forget.

“Thirty?” he asked when he saw her hesitate.

“Thirty,” she conceded.

Bernie got up, making no attempt to cover his nakedness, and walked over to the intercom by the front door and buzzed. “Jose, it’s Mr. Slatkin in Twenty-two C. Miss Altemus’s chauffeur is in a dark blue Buick station wagon outside. His name is Joe. Would you tell him that Miss Altemus said for him to go home?”

“What am I going to say to my mother tomorrow?” she asked.

“Take this in your mouth while you’re thinking about it,” he answered, pushing her head down on him. Justine Altemus was not offended. She had fallen madly in love with Bernard Slatkin.

3

Invitations to dinners, dances, screenings of new films, and publication parties to launch new books crowded the chipped gilt frame of a nineteenth-century reproduction of an eighteenth-century mirror. Gus Bailey, bathed, shaved, but not yet dressed, was wearing a white terrycloth robe he had once stolen from the Ritz Hotel in Paris. As he brushed his hair with two brushes, a blizzard raged outside his window, and for an instant he regretted his decision to make the bus trip into New England that he had promised to make.

The doorbell rang, as it always rang, at ten minutes past seven each morning. Gus opened the door. It was, as he knew it would be, Innocento, the delivery boy from the coffee shop on the corner, bringing him his standing order of three dark coffees with artificial sweetener in cardboard containers. Innocento always handed Gus his morning papers, which had already been dropped
outside the door by the elevator man, always gave him a weather report, and always received a dollar tip.

“Cold as a nun’s cunt out there,” reported Innocento.

“Cold as a witch’s tit has a better ring to it at this hour of the morning, Innocento,” said Gus.

“Hey, I like that, Mr. Bailey.”

The interstate bus carrying Gus Bailey traveled between the Port Authority Terminal in New York and Brattleboro, Vermont, with stops along the way. Gus tried to read and could not. He tried to sleep and could not. He wished the man in the next seat would stop smoking, but an attitude of unfriendliness on that person’s part made Gus disinclined to make such a request, and there were no empty seats to move to. He wondered again why he had agreed to make the trip that he was making.

People said about Gus Bailey, on occasion, “Isn’t it marvelous the way he got over it so well and put the whole terrible thing behind him?” Because he never mentioned it, or rarely, and seemed to have progressed on to a full productive life. He was seen about, asked places, and considered an addition. But none of them could know that his last thought before sleep and his first thought on awakening dealt with his torment. Nor did they notice those moments, sometimes even in the midst of frivolity, when his mind blanked to the topic at hand and dwelled in private thoughts.

He looked out the window of the bus. Near here, somewhere, there was an aunt in a nursing home, an aunt who had brought him up. Tante, they called her in the family. It had started as a joke, calling her Tante. His sister Eliza, dead now, cancer, claimed it was she who had given Aunt Mary the name Tante, but Gus knew it was he. He could even remember exactly when, on the day in French class he had first learned the phrase
la plume de ma tante
. It became the name the whole family called her. Unmarried, by choice, she had always been called Aunt Mary until then, and there were stories that she had once wanted to be a nun but
her father had discouraged her from that calling. Even she grew to enjoy the name and signed postcards to them from her endless travels, “Love, Tante.” Old now, ninety, she no longer knew him when he visited her, and each day he expected the call that would tell him she was dead.

Three and a half hours out of New York the bus pulled to the side of the road near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, and Gus descended onto the icy highway. A car, described to him in advance as a six-year-old Oldsmobile, was parked near the sheltered bus stop. From behind the wheel he saw the driver make a gesture toward him, and he stepped toward and entered the car.

“Mrs. Haber?” he asked.