People Like Us (8 page)

“A veritable olio,” she replied.

“Do you have a preference?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Let me see how you look with this on,” she said, opening her bag and tossing the rubber across the room to him.

“You are surprising, Gus,” she said thirty minutes later.

“How so?”

“I mean, you look like and act like you have no interest in this sort of thing whatsoever, and, actually, you’re terribly good at it.”

“Well, so are you.”

“But everybody knows about me, so I’m no surprise. Do you always wait for the lady to make the first move?”

“I suppose.”

“Are you, as they say, involved at the moment?”

“I’m more for the quick encounter than for romance,” said Gus. “I have been a failure at romance.”

“Is that a nice way of telling me no repeats?”

“No, no. It just means, let’s wait until we bump into each other at the bookshop again.”

She lay back against the pillows, opened her bag, took out a gold mirror, and examined herself. “Look, my color’s marvelous. I always feel so much better after a good fuck.”

He laughed.

“You should laugh more, Gus,” said Matilda. “You sound nice laughing. Sometimes I think that beneath that very calm veneer of yours, you are exploding with thoughts that none of us know anything about.”

Dressed, they moved from the bedroom back into the living room. Matilda looked at the photographs on one of Gus’s tables.

“May I suggest something to you?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Why don’t you remove those pictures of your dead child from your apartment? It’s just a constant reminder.”

There was a silence before he replied. “May I suggest something to you?” he asked.

“Of course,” she answered, unaware of the steel in his voice.

“Mind your own fucking business.”

Matilda, scarlet, replied, “But I just meant—”

“I understand what you meant.” He breathed deeply. “Now, about tonight. What will it be?”

“You’re livid with me,” she said.

“I’ll get over it.”

“I think I should just go back to the country.”

“No, you shouldn’t just go back to the country. We have had a misunderstanding. There is a part of my life I do not share, that’s all, just as I’m sure there is a part of your life that you do not share. We are people of a certain age. We should be able to deal with a crisis. Right?”

“I suppose.”

“Now, about tonight, what will it be?”

“You’re not just being polite because we had a sort of date?”

“Of course not.”

“Let’s go to Marty Lesley’s movie-star party. I’m so glad you know all those Hollywood people, Gus. I read in Mavis Jones’s column that Faye Converse is going to be there.”

“Perfect.”

“You know Faye Converse, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I read the story you wrote about her.”

“I like her.”

“You’re strange, Gus.”

“How?”

“You listen to all of us talk, but you never say anything about yourself.”

Gus looked at Matilda but did not reply.

“I better keep my mouth shut and quit when I’m ahead,” she said, and they both laughed.

6

Very few people would have guessed that Loelia Manchester was one of the unhappiest women in New York. For twenty years the dazzling blond society figure was known as the girl who never missed a party, no matter where. She had once been reported, in the same fortnight, to have danced at balls at a maharanee’s palace in Jaipur, and a German prince’s castle in Regensburg, and an industrialist’s villa in Palm Beach, and it was true. She flew to Paris thrice a year for her clothes, and was so often photographed in the fashion and society press, for no other reason than her social perfection and perfect taste, that her face had become as familiar in New York as a film star’s.

Loelia was the youngest of Fernanda Somerset’s four children, the only daughter after three sons, and the child the Somersets called their reconciliation gift to each other following an estrangement that had mercifully not ended in divorce. Arthur Somerset adored his beautiful child and, when he was killed in a plane crash in the Bahamas, left her a fortune equal to the fortunes he left to the three Somerset sons who had preceded her.

When, at twenty-two, Loelia told her mother that Edward Potter Manchester had asked her to be his wife, Fernanda Somerset was beside herself with joy. Ned Manchester was known to have no inclination for social life. He detested dinner parties and charity balls, often refusing even to go. So it was a surprise to one and all when he fell in love with the excessively social Loelia.

The Somerset fortune dwarfed the Manchester fortune,
but the Manchester family superseded the Somersets in social standing, going back in American history to Gerald Manchester, who signed the Declaration of Independence, and in American society to Honoria Manchester, whose gold-and-white paneled ballroom in her Fifth Avenue house, now demolished, had been brought over from Castleberry House in London when that great pile of gray stones had been pulled down early in the century.

On each side the families were delighted with the match, from both a family and financial point of view, and the Manchesters felt certain that Loelia would grow to enjoy country life and sport while the Somersets felt that Loelia would be able to persuade Ned to take more of an interest in social life. Thereafter Loelia, following a brilliant wedding, moved into a world of New York society where she was asked everywhere, even by people who disliked her, and Ned, for years, trailed dutifully behind.

So it was that the rumored divorce of the Edward Potter Manchesters, after twenty-two years of marriage and two children, would put every other dinner-table conversation into oblivion for at least three months that season, or, at least, put every other dinner-table conversation into oblivion in the fashionable world in which Loelia and Ned Manchester moved. Whenever Dolly De Longpre wrote about the Edward Potter Manchesters in her column, which was often—for the Manchesters, particularly Loelia, were not only involved in charitable fundraising at the highest level but entertained privately in a manner that very few social aspirants could hope to emulate—she always used all three of the Manchester names and then added, in case the point was not already made, “of the New York
Social Register
.” Furthermore, to add to their cachet, there was, as the saying goes in society, money on both sides.

Cora Mandell, who had decorated the Manchesters’ Fifth Avenue apartment, as well as their house on Long Island, and their house in Bermuda, and all the
houses of Loelia’s mother, Fernanda Somerset, was rarely at a loss for words, but when Ezzie Fenwick, who knew all the news ahead of everyone else, told her about what he called “the Manchester splituation” when they were having lunch at Clarence’s, she was so overwhelmed that she was speechless. Cora Mandell always wore black, no matter what the season, always wore three strands of perfect pearls, always wore her white hair parted in the middle, and worked harder than most people half her age. Ezzie often said about Cora that if she’d only let Bobo touch up her hair a bit and give her a more up-to-date coiffure, you’d think she was sixty rather than seventy-eight.

“But it can’t be true,” cried Cora, putting down her iced-tea glass on the table with such force that Lil Altemus and her daughter, Justine, sitting at the next table, interrupted their argument to turn and stare. “I’m making new summer slipcovers for the dining-room chairs in Locust Valley. Loelia would hardly be ordering new slipcovers if she were getting a divorce. I mean, would she?”

“Take my word for it, honey,” said Ezzie, full of himself as he always was when he was the first one with the latest news. “Have I ever been wrong?”

“Who told you?” asked Cora, who knew that Ezzie, even if he was an old gossip, usually had his facts straight.

Ezzie drew himself up archly and announced, “I’m not telling.”

“But why? After twenty-one years?”

“Twenty-two years,” Ezzie corrected her.

“Twenty-two,” Cora conceded. “Don’t you think couples should just put up with each other after all that time?”

Ezzie Fenwick, whose restless eyes roamed everywhere, even during the most intimate conversation, followed with undisguised interest the entrance into the restaurant of Constantine de Rham and Yvonne Lupescu and then barely acknowledged de Rham’s courtly bow
and looked right through Mrs. Lupescu as the couple passed his table on the way to their own. At times, with lesser mortals or upstarts, a favorite word of his, Ezzie’s face assumed attitudes of aristocratic hauteur, although they were attitudes studied and memorized but not inherited. Cora liked Ezzie. His snobbery amused her. She could remember many years ago when Ezzie had been considered an upstart himself in New York and people claimed that his father, who bought up all the foreign-car franchises that Ezzie’s considerable income was derived from, had anglicized his more exotic name to the Episcopal-sounding Fenwick.

“The things I could tell you about that one,” said Ezzie to Cora about Mrs. Lupescu, but Cora had no interest whatever in either Constantine de Rham or Yvonne Lupescu, or any of the other “trash Europeans,” as she called them, who were overcrowding New York and driving up the price of real estate.

“Pretty cuff links,” she replied, tapping a long red fingernail against one of the tiny green enamel frogs with ruby eyes that Ezzie wore on each wrist.

“Blanche Abdy gave me these when Hector died,” said Ezzie, glancing down to admire how perfectly they went with his green-and-white striped shirt and green paisley tie.

Ezzie Fenwick had never had to make a living, and never had, nor had he ever gone in for any of the artistic pursuits of rich men with time on their hands, like founding magazines, or producing plays, or running art galleries or antique shops, offering, as credentials, their perfect taste, as well as their bankrolls. Ezzie was always considered close, meaning, as Laurance Van Degan often put it, that he was tight with a buck, although he was known to be extremely generous, in gifts of flowers and restaurant dinners, to certain hostesses and fashionable ladies of the city whom he particularly admired.

Early on he was known as a good seat, meaning that he was amusing to sit next to at dinner, and ladies
vied for his attention, although he was quite capable of wounding any one of those same ladies who were kindest to him if he didn’t care for her choice of dress for the evening (“That color yellow is
all wrong
for you!” he once said to Loelia Manchester), or if he thought she had seated a table badly (“Imagine, wasting
me
next to Maude Hoare!” he had complained to Lil Altemus), or if he felt she had redecorated her library incorrectly (“Never, ever, quilt chintz! So tacky!” he once said to Baba Timson).

Although Ezzie was now a stalwart figure in the most fashionable groups in society, it had not always been so. Cora Mandell could remember forty years ago when Ezzie was often asked to leave parties he hadn’t been invited to, not only because he was a crasher, but because he dared to criticize the flower arrangements as puny, as he had at Sibila Monroe’s coming-out dance, or complain that the chicken hash was all cream and no chicken, as he had at Blanche Abdy’s supper party. But that was all long ago and no one else remembered.

“Back to the Manchesters,” Cora redirected Ezzie, with a rap on the tabletop to get his attention away from Mrs. Lupescu.

“There’s someone else involved,” said Ezzie.

“There can’t be,” replied Cora, with disbelief in her voice.

“There has to be,” said Ezzie, knowingly. “Why get a divorce after all that time unless there is someone else in the picture?”

“But Ned doesn’t seem like a player-arounder,” mused Cora.

“How do you know it’s Ned? It might be Loelia,” answered Ezzie.

“Never,” said Cora affirmatively. “Loelia loves all the parties, and dresses, but she’s not the type to have affairs. I mean, I’ve known Loelia all her life. I decorated all her mother’s houses, and I’ve watched her grow up.”

“Well see,” replied Ezzie, raising his eyebrows
mysteriously, to let her know he knew something he was not telling her. “Let’s have some of that grapefruit sorbet. It’s delish and practically no calories. Old big ears Lil Altemus at the next table has been trying to listen to every word we’ve said. Now, why do you suppose Justine never married, with all that money?”

“Young people are marrying later these days,” replied Cora.

“That’s not Justine’s problem. Justine’s problem is that no one has asked her.”

When Loelia Manchester’s private line rang, on the telephone number that not a living soul had, except Lil Altemus, and Matilda Clarke, and her mother, and Bobo, her hairdresser, and, of course, Dimitri Minardos, she was surprised that her caller, when she answered the ring, was Dolly De Longpre. For an instant, her heart sank.

“Listen, Loelia,” said Dolly. “The story’s all over town that you and Ned are separating.”

“There’s not a word of truth to it, Dolly,” replied Loelia. There was panic in her voice. She had still not told her children, which did not frighten her, and she had still not told her mother, which did frighten her.