Shades of Fortune (2 page)

If the campaign was successful, before it was over each would have earned something in the neighborhood of two million dollars.

And then what? Though these beautiful two did not know it yet, once this costly advertising campaign had run its course, both might find themselves virtually unemployable. It is one of the glum ironies of this business. For this is a business in which intense celebrity can be followed by an even more intense oblivion. It is called overexposure. A few years from now, I thought, unless they were very careful, she might be going back to modeling shoes on Seventh Avenue, and he might become a dance instructor at Arthur Murray's.

But who knew at that point? Tonight they were nobodies about to be, however briefly, Somebodies—she, a raven-haired girl of nineteen who, with her eye makeup and in her Scaasi, managed to look two or three years older, and he, a young man of twenty-five who, for career purposes, said he was twenty-two, with hair the color of canary feathers.

“I want a blond male and a brunet female,” Mimi had said. These were they. It didn't matter that they loathed each other.

And their importance to the story is that Mimi's dinner party was where it all began, and these two were the first to arrive.

As they ascended in the elevator, I imagined her saying, not to him, but to her reflection in the mirror, “So. If you've met her, what's she like?”

And his superior reply, “You'll see, love.”

And her turning now to Buddy to demand imperiously: “So you work here. So what's this broad like?”

And Buddy, not approving of this sort of talk in his car, saying politely but reproachfully, “You'll find that Mrs. Moore is a very great lady, ma'am.”

Now they are at the fourteenth floor, and Buddy's white-gloved hand slides the door open for them, and they step out, and the door glides closed behind them.

“Never talk about your hostess in front of her elevator man,” the young man says. “Bad form, love. Rule number two. It'll get back to her that you said you heard she was a bitch.”

The elevator foyer of Mimi's apartment is a small, oval room, with walls covered in pale yellow silk and with a pair of Regency commodes flanking the front door, and above each commode hangs an oval mirror in a silver frame. I saw the young woman immediately go to one of these, lipstick in hand.

“And what's this Mrs. Moore shit?” the girl says, pouting at the mirror. “I thought her name was Mimi Myerson.”

“Rule number three,” the young man says. “When you're in her office, she's Miss Myerson. When you're in her house, she's Mrs. Bradford Moore.”

“This isn't a house. It's an apartment, asshole.”

“On Fifth Avenue, an apartment is called a house, even if it's an apartment. That's rule number—what? Four, I think.”

“Fuck you and your rules,” the girl says.

The young man leans languidly against the door frame, plucks an invisible fleck of lint from the sleeve of his dinner jacket, and says, “Oh, my, what a foul little tongue we have in that pretty head. That pretty, empty head. When you've finished with your face, let me know, and I'll ring the doorbell. Meanwhile, knowing a few rules of correct behavior might explain why I get five hundred an hour, and you've never made more than two-fifty.”

“Not anymore that's all I get, faggot,” she says.

“Try charm,” he says. “Try it tonight. Who knows—if you tried a little bit of charm, you might even have a future, love. It would certainly be worth a try.”

“I got this contract, didn't I?”

“This woman could always change her mind, you know,” he says. “She's been known to do that in the past.”

From the mirror, she gives him a brief, frightened look—in that moment she looks about thirteen—and he touches the doorbell with the tip of his index finger, as though testing a soufflé for doneness.

Downstairs, from across the street, and imagining this typically unpleasant exchange between two unknowns—“I want unknowns,” Mimi said. “I want two brand-new faces, faces that will belong exclusively to me”—I looked up at Mimi's apartment through the leafy shade of the trees and saw the lights coming on in room after room. Then, in a sudden oblique shaft of afternoon sunlight against an open window of what I knew was her bedroom, I was amazed to see, even from fourteen floors below, her unmistakable silhouette, and for a moment I imagined I heard her special, ripply laugh. Then I saw the figure of a man approaching her, and saw her quickly turn her back to him. The man bent over her, and I realized that he was zipping her into a white dress, and that this man was not Brad Moore, her husband. Brad, I knew, had been detained at his office and would be fifteen or twenty minutes late. I saw that the man helping her with her zipper was Felix, Mimi's major domo.

There was nothing unusual about this. But then I saw something that astonished me. I saw Felix's tall shape bend lower and kiss her bare shoulder. There was no mistaking this. He had kissed her. Then both shadows moved away from the window, he presumably to answer the doorbell, and she to start down the curved staircase to greet her first guests.

I was mystified by the kiss. Mimi Myerson Moore did not strike me as a woman who would have a love affair with her butler. It was incongruous. It simply did not fit. In the aftermath of that accidental invasion of her privacy, I kept trying to turn the man's shape into that of Brad Moore. But I knew that Brad had said he would be late, that I was early, and that since my arrival no one had entered the building except the Mireille Man and the Mireille Woman. Also, Brad's was a shorter, stockier, more athletic frame. This man had been taller, thinner, slightly stooped, unquestionably Felix. And somehow the kiss on the shoulder conveyed a more heightened degree of intimacy and tenderness than even a kiss full on the lips would have done. I was nonplussed by it.

Later, I would learn the significance of that kiss. In time, I, too, would be asked to kiss her in just that fashion. But, at the time, I was stunned by what I'd just seen. And I was left with the decidedly unpleasant feeling that, by looking up at her windows just then, I had inadvertently and unintentionally been wrenched from my accustomed role as a listener and become something I have never been, nor ever wanted to be: a voyeur.

Meanwhile, from other parts of town, other guests are making their way to Mimi's dinner party. Mr. Edwin Myerson's limousine left his house on Sutton Square punctually at seven-fifteen, heading westward. Edwin Myerson, whom everyone in the family has always called “Edwee,” is Mimi Myerson's uncle, her father's younger brother. Edwee, as some of you may know, has never had anything to do with the Miray Corporation and is, instead, an art historian and critic of some note, as well as a gourmet cook. His recipes sometimes make their way into the pages of magazines like
Vogue
and
Town & Country
, and his art criticism, which is often harder to follow than his directions for preparing a
galantine
, is published from time to time in
Art & Antiques
and
Connoisseur
, where even his editors are sometimes not sure what Edwee is trying to say. (“The coy caprices of Poussin, so underestimated, are qualified only in the quantum and are introspective by virtue of their quixotic relationship to the later fauves and pointillists.…”) Edwee is a fop, a dandy, a bon vivant, and pleased that his full head of hair, cut rather long, is greying in all the right places. He is fifty-five, and his trademark is the red carnation he always wears in his buttonhole. He is a pet friend of Nancy Reagan's and has sported his signature
boutonnière
at White House family dinners.

With Edwee in his car is his wife of just six months, a young woman with peach-colored hair named Gloria. Marriage is a new experiment for Edwee Myerson, and he is finding it both novel and reasonably pleasant. “You look like a faustian rose,” he has just said to his bride in the back seat of the car, for she is wearing a dress, of the same sherbet color as her hair, that he picked out for her in a little shop on Madison, which, thus far, only he and Mrs. Reagan know about.

“
What
kind of a rose?” And then, “What's this dinner party all about, anyway?”

“One of M-M-Mimi's little whimsies, I fancy.” Edwee Myerson has a little stammer and has particular trouble with his
m
's and his
b
's. In the back seat, Gloria reaches out and tickles Edwee's crotch with her lacquered fingertips. “Naughty little pussycat,” he whispers.

At 200 East 66th Street, Edwee and Gloria's limousine makes its first stop, which is to collect Naomi Myerson, Edwee's older sister and Mimi's aunt Nonie, along with her escort for the evening, a somewhat younger man named Roger Williams, whom Edwee has not met before. Edwee's greeting to this Williams is of the customary chilliness he reserves for all strangers whose names are not familiar from the press and, in particular, for male friends of Nonie's. Nonie, after all, despite her fame as a great beauty in her youth (the forties and fifties), has had notably poor luck with men, both as husbands and as lovers, and even as casual acquaintances.

“Darlings,” Nonie murmurs as Edwee's driver helps her into the car and as she immediately fills the interior of the vehicle with waves of some violent and passionate and dangerous new perfume. “Darlings, I want you to meet my
brilliant
new friend, Roger Williams,” she says as they settle into the car. “Roger, these are my brother, Edwee, and his wife, Gloria.”

“Hello,” says Edwee, extending his hand halfway.

“Pleased to meet you, I'm sure,” says Gloria.

The car moves northward into the traffic.

In the flattering evening light, and within the tinted-glass interior of Edwee's car, Naomi Myerson, whom everybody in the family calls Nonie, is almost beautiful again. Nonie is not young, but few people in the family can do more than guess at her exact age, and she has lied about it for so long that even she, if she suddenly decided to be truthful, would probably be unable to give you the figure. Only her mother could tell you the date of her birth, and her mother would never dare to do this, knowing how Nonie feels about this subject. Not even Edwee knows his older sister's age, though by the time he was ten years old Nonie had already been married and divorced. You do the arithmetic.

Nonie's age is a secret she will carry with her to her grave. She has never been required to reveal it. By the time she was old enough to drive a car, her father could afford a chauffeur, and so Nonie has never owned a driver's license. The birthdate on her passport is off by a mile. Though she has worked—oh, Nonie has worked at a number of different enterprises and enthusiasms—she has never needed to apply for Social Security. If you are rich enough, there are some things you never have to do. If one is rich enough, too, one can occasionally find oneself in certain financial straits, which has been one of Nonie's recurring problems, but more of that later.

Suffice to say that Nonie Myerson (through all her marriages she has always kept Myerson as her “professional” name) looks younger than she is. She takes good care of herself. She is always dieting, and she is proud of her slim legs and slender ankles, and of being a perfect size four. Tiny, almost invisible scars behind her hairline have replaced wrinkles that might have appeared. In the past, pregnancies have been terminated before they could threaten her with stretch marks. Her hair is still the glossy auburn shade that it always was, and thanks to the ministrations of a clever hairdresser on East 69th Street, it still bounces like a teenager's when she walks. Tonight, in a short black Dior, which flatters her, with a simple strand of pearls at her throat, pearl-and-diamond earrings, and a single diamond solitaire on her ring finger, she looks, as her friends sometimes say about her, “remarkably well-preserved.” Needless to say, they do not say this to her face.

She has a habit of sitting with her chin tilted upward, as though balancing something very small and light—a feather, perhaps—on the tip of her perfectly sculpted nose. In the car, she sits this way now.

“So what's this dinner party all
about?
” her new sister-in-law, Gloria, asks again, this time of Nonie.

“I expect little Mimi has some sort of
announcement
to make,” Nonie says. “Something about the company. She said it was going to be mostly family, but there would be one or two surprise guests. Don't you detest surprises?”

“What a wretched business,” Edwee says. “How does poor Mimi stand it, dealing with that class of people?”

“I haven't seen you tearing up your dividend checks, Edwee dear,” Nonie says, still balancing whatever it is on the tip of her nose.

“I mean so vulgar. The cosmetics business. Not much better than the rag business, is it? So Jewish.”

“Well, Edwee dear, we
are
Jewish,” Nonie says.

Gloria lets out a little squeal. “Edwee?” she cries. “Are we
Jewish?
You never told me that!”

He pats her knee. “Just a little bit Jewish,” he says. “Don't worry your little head about it, pussycat.”

“But I think I should of told my mother about that, if I was going to marry somebody Jewish, I mean.”

“Doesn't Mumsy like Jewish people, pussycat?”

“I just don't think she's ever
known
any.”

“Well, now she knows me,” he says.

“Does that make
me
Jewish?”

Edwee, changing the subject, turns to his sister, who has been ignoring all this, still gazing upward at the ceiling of the car, and says, “Mostly family. Does that mean poor Alice will be there?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Then I predict a debacle,” Edwee says.

“Not necessarily. Alice's been behaving herself lately. The Betty Ford Center, you know.”

“But how long will
that
last? How long have all of Alice's other treatments lasted?”