The Real Liddy James (18 page)

“You'll be lucky, particularly at this time of night.”

“Oh, Peter,” said Rose, laughing, taking his hand and resting it on her belly. “Won't it be lovely when the baby is born and everything can go back to normal?”

“Yes,” agreed Peter. “Let's just get through the next few months without any more drama.”

After a long afternoon in the office perfecting a complicated motion, then a speedy and acrobatic change in the bathroom, Liddy, handsome in gun-metal silk and a tousled updo, sat beside Curtis Oates, handsome in immaculate black tie and spray tan, in the back of his car as they cruised past the imperially proportioned apartment blocks of Park Avenue. A discreet card in white and gold lay on the seat between them, an invitation to the
BARTLETT FOUNDATION ANNUAL BENEFIT DINNER, JUNE 15.

Normally Liddy looked forward to such events. Although in the abstract she was repelled by the idea of a life of unabashed hedonism supported by unearned riches, she enjoyed the private viewings of Lisbeth's unparalleled art collection, and was seduced by Lisbeth's irrepressible life force and her stories: the big bands flown in from Havana in the fifties, the elephants with jeweled headdresses coming up in the elevator, the elopement with a hunter she met shooting big cats in Kenya.

But this evening Liddy stared out the window, her phone clamped to her ear, preoccupied. Not only had Josh, the manny, gone missing in action with her children yet again (he had an infuriating habit of taking the boys on impromptu adventures after school), but she was also rehearsing how to tell Chloe Stackallan that she had received no counterproposal from Sebastian about the divorce settlement.

Liddy dialed her apartment for the tenth time, but there was still no answer. She dialed Matty's phone, but again, no answer. She tried not to worry. She blew breaths onto her window and made drawings with her forefinger in the condensation, as Curtis happily sipped a pomegranate juice and talked about himself.

“This is what ‘Manhattan' means to me,” he was saying, surveying the wide avenue. “I shoulda been born in a different time. This is where I belong.”

Liddy looked up from her drawing, a Keith Haring–style heart with two halves and a jagged edge. She knew exactly what he meant. The two of them shared the same relentless, pioneering spirit that would have served them well skinning buffalo on a hostile prairie but had driven them almost mad in the suburbs. If Curtis had come of age in the early years of the twentieth century, he would have escaped his childhood poverty in a more mythical way than a school scholarship. He'd have discovered a gold mine, or built a railroad, or brokered real estate as the city rose on limestone and marble legs into the sky. With a judicious marriage to the daughter of an Astor, he would have made a substantial life in a triplex fortress of wealth and privilege, such as the one they were heading toward.

Of course, if Liddy had been born poor in the early days of the twentieth century, despite her relentless, pioneering spirit, she would have been lucky to enter such an apartment building by the servants' entrance.

“And here we are, Liddy, you and me. We made it here.”

Curtis started to sing “New York, New York” softly, as he sometimes did, and Liddy always found this endearing, as she too loved a musical medley on the marvels of Manhattan. (Her particular favorite was “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” from
Hello, Dolly!
). But today she did not join in and Curtis trailed off.

“What is it?” he said.

The car changed lanes, pulling sharply to a halt outside a canopied doorway, where a liveried doorman was waiting in the frescoed lobby.

At that moment, a text from Josh saying
all g!
beeped through on her phone. Liddy wiped her window, obliterating the broken heart.

“Nothing,” she said.

Like many men of his age, Curtis looked best in formal wear, the bow tie and buttons corseting and concealing the withering of muscle and gobbling of neck. From a distance, as the city turned black and white and romantic at dusk, they were a magnificent sight together. But close up, illuminated by the street lamps, Curtis was rigid and yellowing like a mummified corpse, and Liddy knew this was why, in all the time they had worked together, she had never experienced so much as an ion of sexual chemistry. When alone, they treated each other like distantly related members of the same family, a rakish uncle and his bookish niece,
perhaps, meeting at a christening. This was not surprising, Liddy often thought, as she spent more time with him than any member of her own family.

A butler shepherded them into the entry hall, where the first guests were already mingling, most of whom she either knew or recognized and each of whom had paid several thousand dollars for the privilege. Mirrorlike silver trays glided around them, heaped with exotic canapés and signature cocktails, and both Curtis and Liddy had to restrain themselves from grabbing two drinks and caviar toasts, as neither had ever quite got over the impulse to take food if it was free.

Curtis headed straight into the gathering, but Liddy paused for a moment. Marisa Seldon was standing in front of a large statue of a Roman general. Liddy went over and kissed her on the cheek.

“Is that real?” Marisa whispered, looking at the marble head before them.

“Everything in here is real,” said Liddy.

“Not everything,” said Marisa, surveying the faces of the crowd, many of which were as smooth and immovable as the Roman general's. She nudged Liddy.

“Look!” she said, pointing toward the doorway. “Dr. Chip Hunter! You know, from that show
Cardiac Arrest!
”

“You mean the actor Lloyd Fosco?” Liddy said, enjoying the moment thoroughly. “He's my date.”

“You're seeing an
actor
?” said Marisa, trying and failing to conceal her astonishment.

Liddy looked at her. “Lloyd does a lot of humanitarian work.”

On the couple of occasions they had been in a public place, Lloyd, who seemed not to know how to dress incognito, would be accosted by complete strangers who wanted to talk to him or touch him. Tonight was no exception. As he made his progress toward her, Liddy watched the party divide into people who stared dumbstruck at him and people who pretended not to.

Marisa fell into the former category.

“You're early, Lloyd,” said Liddy. “Curtis and I have got to talk to Lisbeth.”

“I couldn't wait to see you,” Lloyd replied. “You look amazing in that silk!”

“You look amazing too.”

“This old thing! I just threw it together,” he said theatrically, winking at Marisa, who was so overcome she turned and disappeared, off to find her husband by the El Greco. Although Lloyd had obviously been joking, Liddy steered him away from the crowd toward a red velvet banquette in a corner.

“I've got something to say,” he continued, throwing himself down and pulling her beside him. “It's about you and me and your current situation.”

“
Really?
” said Liddy curiously.

“Yeah.” He smiled and touched her cheekbone with his forefinger. “The way I see it, Liddy, your life's too hard. When d'you get to have fun?”

“Don't we have fun?” said Liddy, with what she hoped was a twinkle in her eye.

“Sure, I guess, in the forty minutes after midnight when your kids are asleep and you can sneak downstairs before disappearing back to use your micro-dermabrasion kit.”

“I did that one time,” said Liddy, a little offended.

“Whatever. You need to simplify your life, that's all. So . . . my plan might sound big to you, but if you think about it, it's obvious.”

Liddy was momentarily spellbound. It had to do with the soft lighting, his broad shoulders, and the perfect delivery of his lines.

“Liddy!”

From across the room, Curtis's call echoed into her reverie like a voice-over.

“Go on,” she said to Lloyd. “I'm intrigued.”

He took her hand and stroked her palm.

“I wanna buy your apartment,” he said.

“Sorry? . . .”

She pulled away, folding her arms and crossing her legs, something not easy to do with a glass of champagne in one hand.

“I'm gonna be very straightforward, after all we're in the co-op together, right? I saw the figures from when you bought. You've got a two-million-dollar-mortgage and no savings. Man, I don't know how you convinced the others to let you buy—you're a very persuasive woman, Liddy—but I just saw the estimate for the repair work on the roof, two hundred grand at least.
Each.
If something went wrong at work, we both know you'd be fucked financially. I want to take that stress off you.”

Liddy stood up, shocked but refusing to acknowledge it.

“You won't get permission to extend upward, you know,” she said. “The lease forbids any internal renovations without board approval. And we stopped Hermione in the penthouse from building a sauna and plunge pool, so forget a home cinema.”

“I don't want to do any of that. My ma died last year and I want to bring my pa and my brother Wayne to the city.”

Liddy looked at him.

“Is that why you wanted to go out with me?”

“'Course,” he replied, bemused by having to explain himself. “That's why I asked you for drinks. But then . . .”

He paused and rose to his feet. He leaned over her lasciviously. “Events took over . . .”

FLASH!

The event photographer appeared at this point to capture the magic of the moment.

“What are you doing, Liddy? Lisbeth's waiting. Come
on
!”

Liddy turned. She had never been so relieved to see Curtis. “I'm ready,” she said, and they hurried off together.

“Who's that?” asked Curtis, glancing back at Lloyd. Liddy glanced back too and caught Lloyd's eye.

Lloyd looked furious, and she knew he must have heard.

They followed the butler through a spacious gallery lined with Chinese scroll paintings and into an oak-paneled library. The library had been shipped over in crates—wood, books, even the gold-leaf roses on the ceiling—from an eighteenth-century manor house in Cornwall, England.

“Curtis, my sweet,” said Lisbeth Dawe Bartlett from the
red-leather armchair into which she had been placed by the two male nurses on duty day and night. She raised an arm so thin it was like a claw-handled poker. Curtis, who had been flirting with her for forty years, approached her with awe, lifted her hand—its skeletal fingers hung with a selection of heavy gold rings—and raised it to his lips.

“Did Robert die?” asked Curtis, noticing the magnificent stuffed cockatoo in a glass display case on the wall.

“Yes. All my friends are falling off their perches,” she replied, giggling so hard that Liddy feared she might break in two. “I miss him madly, but they're going to take him to Slane to live in the ballroom with Magda.” (Liddy translated this as meaning that the deceased cockatoo would be shipped to Lisbeth's estate in Montauk, where he would sit beside the glass case containing Magda, the serval cat. In days of yore, Lisbeth had once been featured in
LIFE
magazine promenading down Madison Avenue with Magda, both in matching diamond-studded collars.)

“I'm going to follow them soon.”

Curtis made an exasperated face and shot a conspiratorial comedy look at Liddy. “Lisbeth's been saying that for twenty-five years.”

“My dear, believe me, my time is coming, I know it. There's something I want us to do today—
Chloe, darling?
”

Chloe Stackallan, dressed in rippling silver, materialized from a secret door carrying a matching tray with four slender flutes of champagne upon it.

“Chloe tells me you have been working tirelessly on her behalf, Liddy.”

Lisbeth fixed Liddy in her most piercing of gazes.

“Yes,” said Liddy. “I am confident that, with a reasonable amount of compromise, we will reach a speedy and satisfactory resolution.”

“Chloe? . . .”

Chloe handed them each a glass and demurely lowered her eyes.

“I know what I want.”

“Just remember, a protracted battle may keep Sebastian in your life for longer, but he's not coming back, Chloe.”

Liddy looked at them. Lisbeth was one shrewd old bird.

“I know,” said Chloe quietly. “I've seen his face when he looks at me now. He can hardly bear to look in my direction. But it wasn't like that at the beginning. He couldn't get enough of me.”

There was a hollowness in her voice, and Liddy knew that, like so many others, the insane bravado Chloe had exhibited during their first meeting had been replaced by a deep and debilitating sense of loss.

“Why did you invite him tonight, Aunt Lisbeth?” she said.

Liddy glanced up in surprise.

“I've always been fond of him,” replied Lisbeth. “And his firm donated to the auction. Dignity at all times, my dear. There are plenty more fish in the sea for you.” She paused. “Now, Curtis. You are to accompany me to my private sitting room and you will choose one painting for yourself. As a gift. To remind you of me when I am gone.”