Social Crimes

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  Sincerely yours,

  Jo Slater

  I purposely didn’t sign it “Love, Jo,” or “With fondest regards,” or anything to imply the slightest warmth. I knew Roger would know exactly how I felt by the formal, businesslike terminology. Mercifully, there were still certain things in social life that didn’t need spelling out.

  As I slid the letter into the envelope and wrote out Roger’s name and address on the front, I thought to myself that if New York City had a great seal, its motto should read: “Out of money, out of mind.”

  One week later, I received a long letter from Roger regretfully accepting my resignation. He waxed rhapsodic about the “incalculable” contributions I’d made to the museum. I threw it away.

  Chapter 20

  When Dick Bromire heard that I’d resigned from the Muni board, he offered me a “consulting” job—consulting, of course, being a euphemism for unemployment. I turned him down because I was too proud to accept charity—and that’s what it was. Still, it was very sweet of Dick, who was still in the midst of his own ongoing legal woes. I think he and Trish felt personally responsible for having gotten me involved with the Dents, although they never said it outright.

  On the practical side, I simply couldn’t afford to sit home in my apartment, feeling sorry for myself all day, obsessing over the Countess while waiting for my financial troubles to miraculously straighten themselves out. I decided to get a mindless job in pleasant surroundings in order to earn some money as well as to try to put Monique out of my mind. I viewed this as a temporary measure until I could come up with a more definitive career move.

  At first I considered tapping some of my pals in the antiques business where I could use some of my expertise. I went to a couple of places where I’d shopped for years and asked them if they wanted to hire me. Everyone’s initial reaction was a hearty laugh and then a move to show me the latest stock. They all thought I was kidding. Apparently, not everyone had followed my troubles as closely as I’d rather egotistically imagined. Most of these people, from whom I had bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of antiques over the years, couldn’t conceive that I was broke and in need of a job. When I pressed them, however, and it became clear I was dead serious, many literally backed away in profound embarrassment, murmuring vague excuses and good-byes as if I had upset something fundamental in their universe.

  One day I walked up and down Lexington and Third Avenues, stopping in at the antiques shops where I wasn’t known, asking for a job. No dice. I began to realize by the way proprietors looked at me that there was something a little sinister about a middle-aged woman coming in cold off the street looking for work. I decided to try my luck downtown in the Village, where sinister occurrences aren’t quite as offputting as they are uptown in the precincts of privilege.

  I tried the same tactic, going from door to door. Finally, I was offered a job in a cluttered shop on Tenth Street, filled with third-and fourth-rate antiques and “collectibles” at inflated prices. I was on the verge of accepting when I looked around a little more closely at the fake tole monkeys, Coca-Cola memorabilia, movie posters, and badly restored arts and crafts furniture, and suddenly came to my senses. What was I doing? What was I thinking of? I couldn’t sell that junk with a straight face. I left.

  After a good night’s rest I came to the decision that I needed a proper job in a proper place—somewhere where other middle-aged women, like myself, could associate in easy, familiar surroundings and take home a fairly decent paycheck. I also needed to meet some new people, particularly as I wasn’t seeing any of my old friends. New York is a big city. I knew there had to be other women, like myself, who were slightly down on their luck, or in a transition period, or just bored and wanting to get out of the house. I could talk to them and perhaps not feel so alone.

  I found a job in a field I knew very well from childhood: selling women’s apparel. My mother had been a saleswoman in an upscale department store in Oklahoma City. And now I became a saleswoman at an upscale department store in New York City: Bergdorf Goodman. Designer evening gowns. Fourth floor.

  This was a little like an alcoholic getting a job in a liquor store. I adored clothes. In the old days, I’d always made a point of going to the collections in Paris twice a year. I still had most of my old couture clothes locked up in a warehouse somewhere in Queens, along with a few other belongings I refused to part with. I figured that being around clothes, day in, day out, would suppress any residual urges I had to shop for them.

  Getting up every morning at a regular hour, walking to work amid the early-morning bustle of the city, punching a time card, mingling with my coworkers was all therapeutic. I felt energized by my new routine. Once in a while, I let slip a detail or two about my glory days to a fellow salesperson. A couple of the older women remembered me. But most were too young or too new to have any clue who I was. One young woman asked me if I was any relation to the Slaters of the Slater Gallery at the Municipal Museum. I said no.

  I’ll never forget the day I saw June Kahn step off the elevator in one of her ladies’ lunch suits, looking neat and prim and perfectly coiffed. I walked up to her and said in a facetiously formal voice, laced with unction, “May I help you, dear madam?”

  She looked at me and said flatly, “Yes. I’m going to a wedding and I want something pretty and summery.” Then she immediately began searching through the racks paying me no more mind.

  I thought she was kidding, so I went on.

  “How about a lovely burlap bag?”

  She flung me a scornful little glance. “Burlap? In July? I don’t think so.”

  It was only then that I suddenly grasped how badly I had let myself go. June didn’t recognize me.

  “Junie, aren’t you going to say hello?” I finally said, only to be confronted by a blank stare that gradually, comically mutated into a sort of stunned disbelief as it dawned on her who I was.

  “Jo?” she said, squinting at me as if she were peering through a pane of dirty glass. “Sweetie, my God!”

  “Do I look that bad?” I said with a self-conscious little laugh.

  Apparently I did, because she didn’t laugh with me. She just winced.

  “No,” she replied unconvincingly. “You . . . you’ve just gained a little weight, what?”

  Try thirty fucking pounds, cried my impish inner voice—a voice that was growing crasser and more out of control by the day, I might add. For a second, I wondered if I’d said it out loud, but June carried on blithely so I assumed I hadn’t.

  “Betty and I have both called you a thousand times, sweetie. You never answer your phone. You’ve got that damn machine on all the time. We’re longing to come visit you, see the new digs and everything. Where on earth have you been keeping yourself? Have you been on a cruise or something?”

  “I’ve been right here,” I said trying to be chipper.

  “Shopping, I know. Great therapy, isn’t it? What are you going to wear to this damn wedding? I can’t find a thing.”

  “What wedding?”

  She named a couple we all knew in Southampton whose daughter was getting married. I hadn’t been invited.

  “Oh, I’m not going,” I said.

  “Wise woman. It’ll be a zoo . . . I’ve got to find a dress. I hate evening weddings. And I hate this place,” she said, looking around at the racks of evening gowns. “There’s never a salesgirl around to help you.”

  “I can help you.”

  “Thanks, sweetie. You absolutely can. You’ve got the greatest taste. How do you think I’d look in this?”

  She pulled an orange silk organza dress with ruffles off the rack and held it up high, inspecting it from every angle. Exactly June’s style, I thought: early Shirley Temple. Glancing at the ticket, she said, “Huge. Size ten. I need a six. Where are all the salespeople?”

  “You’re looking at one,” I told her.

  June cocked her head to one side for a brief moment. Dismissing the idea as a bad joke, she turned
the dress this way and that, saying, “Very funny, Jo.”

  “June, I work here.”

  The arm holding the dress dropped to her side. The dress fell to the floor, creating a little orange ruffle campfire at her feet. Her naturally perky expression was flattened by a look of disbelief, then mortification, then pity. She stared at me, slack-jawed.

  “Oh, Jo . . .” she murmured, unable to complete her thought.

  I was determined not to let her reaction get to me. Knowing that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, I’d prepared myself for my response. I’m the poet of my own life, I told myself. It’s not how they see it; it’s how I see it.

  “I’m having fun,” I said cheerfully, picking up the dress. “It’s just temporary, until I decide what I really want to do.”

  “I know, Jo, but couldn’t you have found something, I don’t know, something else?”

  June looked absolutely stricken, as if she were about to burst into tears. I found it amusing that she was the one in need of comfort at this moment when it should have been the other way around. Still, I felt so bad for her that all I wanted to do was to cheer her up.

  “You mustn’t take it so hard, Junie. It’s a very pleasant job. I’m enjoying myself. I really am.”

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “Sweetie, if it’s a question of money, I could lend you—”

  I cut her off. “You’re very sweet, June. I really appreciate the thought, I do. But I wouldn’t dream of it. Listen, it beats going down a mine shaft with a canary on my head.”

  I couldn’t even get a chuckle out of her, so I hung the dress back up on the rack and said, “Let’s go find you something pretty to wear.”

  We differed on the kinds of outfits she should try on, but we finally got together a mutually acceptable selection. It was my moment to dress June in clothes that would make her look more elegant. I unlocked the door of our most spacious dressing room, which looked down over the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel on Fifty-eighth Street. The bright spring day had grown overcast. June took off her suit and started trying on the clothes. I stood by and watched, occasionally helping her with snaps and zippers. The red and white polka-dot dress that she had picked out against my objections made her look so frightful that we both started laughing hysterically. June struck crazy poses in the mirror.

  It was during that moment of foolish merriment that I realized how much I missed her and the carefree days of my old life. In a fit of emotion that snuck up on me quicker than a crow’s-foot, I burst into tears. Sinking down on the divan, I started to sob. I just couldn’t stop crying. June sat down beside me and put her arm around me, trying her best to console me. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until that moment in the dressing room that I realized for the first time just exactly how hard it had been, how hard it was, and, indeed, how hard it was always going to be.

  “I think I could take it if it weren’t for Monique,” I said. “Other women survive this kind of thing every day. But it’s the thought that she’s taken over my life that’s so hard for me, June. Can you understand that?”

  “I know. It’s awful. I don’t know what to say.”

  I clenched my teeth. “I never knew I could hate like this. I recognize it’s an obsession, but I can’t help it. The harder I try not to think about her, the more I do. Sometimes I’ll pick up a copy of Nous and turn right to the ‘Daisy’ column just to see what parties she went to. I’m thumbing through the pages. I don’t even want to know and yet I’m desperately searching for her name, dreading I’ll find it. How crazy is that?”

  “I used to be that way about a boyfriend I had in college,” June mused. “I went to all of his hangouts terrified I’d run into him, yet wanting to at the same time. I couldn’t keep away. It was so sick.”

  “Well, I guess love affairs and hate affairs are opposite sides of the same coin. I pray for indifference. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards at the moment.”

  “It’s only natural for you to be upset, sweetie,” she said, handing me a tissue from her purse. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose. “Poor Jo,” she said. “I hate to say it, sweetie, but maybe you should think about leaving New York for a while.”

  “Then she will have won completely. I love New York.”

  June stood up. “Come on, let’s go have a cup of tea,” she said, getting dressed.

  “I can’t. My shift’s not up until four.” Thinking of Ruth Slater and how Lucius had betrayed her, I said: “Junie, do you believe the dead can wreak revenge on the living?”

  June looked at me askance as she was fastening her skirt. “Only at New York dinner parties,” she replied without a trace of humor. She put on her jacket. “Jo, dear, if I may say so, you’re really not yourself.”

  I thought for a moment. “I give up. Who am I?” Then I laughed like a fool.

  Chastened by this encounter with June, I went home and took a good long look at myself in the mirror. It’s funny, you know, because there I was, around mirrors all day, helping women try on clothes. And yet I hadn’t taken stock of myself in months. It was almost as if I’d become invisible to myself, willfully blotting out the image staring back at me in the looking glass. I was mightily exhausted. The grace with which I’d once moved through life, gliding on a carpet of privilege, was gone. I was scrambling now, like everyone else, tripping over potholes, getting caught in storms, buffeted by worry and regret. I’d fallen back down to earth with a terrible thud.

  No wonder June hadn’t recognized me. I’d completely let myself go. I barely recognized myself. I looked like a toad—fat, bug-eyed, and bumpy. I recalled something my mother once told me: “Jolie Ann, you have two choices in life: You can be envied or pitied.” I was pitiable now. Enviable was better.

  Chapter 21

  Later on that week, I received a call from a woman I’d avoided for years: a third-tier hostess who dealt in tarnished celebrities. She was one of a number around town. Betty called them “scavengers” because they preyed on the carcasses of has-beens with famous or infamous names.

  I remember Betty saying about this particular woman, “She likes to portray herself as a concerned individual who reaches out for you in tough times. But actually she’s a shameless climber who only gets a shot at people when they’re washed up.”

  Scavenger or not, she had invited me to a dinner with the promise of a curator from the Tate as a dinner partner. If she’d known I worked in a department store now, I doubt she would have invited me. But despite my encounter with June, word had apparently not gotten out yet.

  The party was dreary. I didn’t know any of the guests. The hostess laughed like an asylum inmate and referred to me, in a not altogether friendly manner, as “a queen bee.”

  “Jo never invited me to her apartment,” she said to the assembled company. “But everyone said it was absolutely divine.” I admit I was a bit taken aback by this unsubtle reprimand. If I am a queen bee, I thought, I don’t like being surrounded by rude drones.

  The young “curator” from the Tate turned out to be a middle-aged art dealer who was interested in peddling some third-rate Old Masters to me, photos of which he just “happened to have” in his tweedy pocket.

  The dinner was hippy gourmet. Courses came garnished with flowers that look more appetizing than the food. The conversation was all about money in one form or another: how it related to politics, to art, to science, to culture, who had made it, who had lost it, what stocks to buy, what stocks to sell. Billionaires were discussed with the kind of admiration formerly reserved for Nobel Prize winners. I was bored stiff. Old Economy, New Economy—it was all the same to me, who couldn’t make money in any economy.

  I felt myself wilting more with each course. Like many ripe women of a certain age, I looked attractive sitting down for the appetizer and embalmed by dessert.

  The coup de grâce, however, was delivered after dinner in the living room where coffee was served. The topic of capital punishment somehow segued into a gen
eral discussion about forgiveness and how we must all learn the “art of forgiveness” as we get older. At which point, my hostess gestured to me in front of everyone, and said: “Listen, if she can forgive Countess de Passy, anyone can forgive anybody anything. Right, Jo?”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said, my demitasse spoon poised in midstir.

  She went on, quite oblivious to my consternation.

  “The Countess speaks so highly of you. I was at a benefit luncheon the other day and she was going on and on about how wonderful you are and how brave and how the two of you are such great friends.”

  I removed my spoon from the little cup and placed it primly on the saucer. Setting the cup down on the coffee table, I pulled myself up to my full height on the hideous overstuffed puce brocade couch and announced: “Monique de Passy does not exist for me.”

  The assembled company fell silent as our hostess launched a nervous flurry of words into the air, complete with hand gestures: “Oh really, because she speaks so highly of you, I mean she really does, she was saying how fond she was of you and how you’d taught her so many things and how you were her mentor in New York and how you and she both loved Louis the Sixteenth and . . .”

  It may have been my icy glare, or the not-so-subtle hand signal from her wincing husband across the room, or a combination of the two, that made this insensitive woman stop chattering midsentence. She looked around as if to gather allies.

  “Well, I’m so sorry. I had no idea,” she said rather huffily. “I was just making a point about forgiveness, that’s all. I certainly meant well. I did.” Her husband was shaking his balding head in dismay.

  I now understood perfectly why this woman was a third-tier hostess. She had the tact of a storm trooper and the sensitivity of asbestos. Still, I didn’t believe she was lying. It enraged me that Monique was going around making people think we’d patched things up. She may have claimed my life, but I’d be damned if I’d let her claim my friendship as well.