VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “It’s only twice a year—and we’re friends.”

  “And you have a choice, so don’t come whining to me that you’re trapped. You don’t have to sit there for two hours. You can take those bitches shopping.”

  She drew in a deep breath and pulled her voice way, way down. “There’s a new boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s, and I hear the designer’s great. I had them pencil us in for a private showing at two-thirty. And please don’t call my friends bitches.”

  “Cut lunch short.” Luddie tossed her a lopsided, cynical grin. “Get to Marsh and Bonner’s at one-thirty. Say you made a mistake.”

  “I thought you wanted me to be honest.”

  “Then get to Marsh and Bonner’s at one-thirty and don’t say you made a mistake. Just get your ass out of that restaurant before your two pals have you drinking again.”

  THREE

  Wednesday, May 8

  “HI, KIDS,” LEIGH SAID with her best reunion smile.

  “Hi, toots,” Oona said. “What’s the magic word?”

  Leigh bent down and exchanged the ritual lunchtime kiss with each of her schoolchums, lips barely brushing makeup. A waiter pulled out a chair for her and she sat. “Have you two said anything interesting yet?”

  “Waiting for you before we bother.” Tori, with her small freckle-splashed nose and dimpled cheeks, had a face that would have seemed impishly pretty if she hadn’t countered the effect with enormous, rimless aviator glasses. The glasses made her look intelligent.

  Leigh had never understood why Tori needed to look intelligent. Tori had been Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, and surely being intelligent was enough.

  “Would you care for something to drink?” the waiter asked.

  Leigh took the linen napkin from the wineglass and spread it on her lap. She saw that Oona was working on a split of Piper and then she saw a split already up-ended in the wine bucket and she realized this was not Oona’s first.

  Tori was drinking a Kir.

  “Just some diet Pepsi for me.” Leigh’s hand went to the tiny platinum hummingbird that she had pinned to the lapel of her ecru silk jacket. She drew an instant’s security from its touch. Encrusted with emerald and ruby chips no larger than grains of demerara sugar, it exactly matched the brooches that Oona and Tori were wearing.

  They had made presents to one another of the three hummingbirds when they were students at Smith. They wore the brooches only when they were alone together—which had come to mean at these twice-yearly lunches, when they did their best to pretend the last fifteen years hadn’t changed a thing and they loved one another just as much now as they had then.

  “Ugh,” Oona said. “How can you drink diet anything?”

  Oona had been a beautiful young woman in college, in the blond way of the time, and usually Leigh saw her with the eye of memory. But today, in the noon light pouring in through the window onto the best table in Archibald’s, memory didn’t have a chance. Oona looked like an artifact—her face powdered white as rice paper, the makeup heavy as ink on a Chinese scroll. She was like a clumsy tracing of a beautiful picture.

  “We were talking about Ronald Ballantine,” Oona said.

  “Never heard of Ronald Ballantine,” Leigh said.

  “The Wall Street lawyer.” Oona nodded toward another table. “Right over there.”

  Leigh glanced toward the corner table. “Still haven’t heard of him.”

  “He’s on the cover of New York this week,” Oona said.

  “And he’ll be the lead article in Vanity Fair next month,” Tori said.

  “I see overnight success is still a growth industry in this town,” Leigh said.

  “Until last night,” Oona said, “Ronnie was the guy everyone wanted. Men wanted him for litigations, women wanted him for dinner parties; today no one wants him, except the SEC—for fraud. That woman he’s having lunch with is Dorcas Stockelberg. She’s a major stockholder in Exxon, and she’s trying to leverage a takeover of Saks.”

  Despite herself Leigh was taken by something guileless in Oona’s open love of scuttlebutt.

  Tori, on the other hand, clearly was not. “That’s only a rumor,” she said.

  “There’s more than rumor to the rumor,” Oona said. “Look who just joined them.”

  An extremely tall man in a dark blue Ralph Lauren suit and a towering brown toupee had joined the corner table. Leigh recognized Stanley Siff, the Park Avenue South-based conglomerateur whose takeover schemes had plunged three New York department stores and two national airlines into liquidation. His wife, tall and dark and stagily glamorous in a borderline anorectic way, was sitting down beside him. Under her maiden name, Gloria Spahn, she designed dresses. Leigh estimated that a dozen of them were being worn in this very room at this very moment.

  “Why’s Stanley involved?” Leigh said.

  “The buzz is,” Oona said, “Saks refused to carry Gloria’s evening dresses.”

  “That man has destroyed retailing in this city,” Tori said.

  “Oh, come on,” Oona said. “He happens to be damned good at what he does, and he gets a kick out of it.”

  “That’s still no excuse for doing it,” Tori said,

  “I couldn’t disagree more,” Oona said. “We’re all in a race with the Reaper, so there’s no sense wasting time. You’ve got to pick two or three things you really like to do, and then do five of them.”

  Tori heaved a short sigh filled with resignation. Her eyes flicked up at Leigh.

  “Waiter!” Oona snapped her fingers.

  Their waiter approached the table. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “This dip is rancid,” Oona said.

  Leigh had not seen Oona so much as taste the dip. It came in a hand-painted little Provencal terra-cotta pot and there did not appear to be even a ripple disturbing its smooth surface.

  “You know we flavor it with Pernod,” the waiter said.

  “Young man, I’ve been coming to this restaurant since it opened—of course I know you flavor the dip with Pernod. The Pernod is not the problem, the rancid crème fraîche is the problem. Please take this dip back to the kitchen and bring us a fresh bowl.”

  The waiter took the pot of dip and gave a slight bow of the head.

  “Really,” Oona said, “this city is getting impossible.”

  Leigh was thinking, sadly, how alcohol could twist a person, how it had twisted her once upon a time, and how it was twisting Oona now. For almost two years something inside Oona seemed to have been losing its resilience, like a spring stretched too far: little things had begun getting on her nerves, she had begun taking them as personal affronts—and now she had begun imagining affronts as well.

  “You have to fight for everything in this town,” Oona was saying. “Just the other day I was at Bergdorf’s and—” The flow of her words broke off. She was staring across the room. Her eyes were wide and her face had a stunned look. “I don’t believe it. Oh, my God, I do not believe this!”

  “What’s that, darling?” Tori said.

  “He’s back there in the kitchen slicing endive.”

  “Who’s back where?”

  “What’s his name—you remember—Jim Delancey.”

  Leigh felt a queasy sense of unreality. She realized her hands were cold and at the same time beginning to perspire.

  The smile had dropped off Tori’s face. “Oona—please.”

  “Don’t Oona, please me—I’m talking about the man who killed Nita.”

  “We know who Jim Delancey is,” Leigh said quietly.

  “Well, he’s in that kitchen tossing salads.”

  “That’s not possible,” Tori said.

  “Just look through that door the next time it swings open. He’s standing there in plain view.”

  Leigh turned her gaze by slow degrees. The room with its carved mahogany bar and close-packed tables seemed to narrow, pulsing with each beat of her heart. Now she could see the kitchen door.

  The noise of a siren howled down the street outside. />
  The door swung open and their waiter stepped through. Behind him Leigh could see a Korean and a black man in chef’s hats, mincing vegetables at a butcher-block counter.

  She let her breath out. Of all possible delusions, she wondered, why had Oona had to imagine Nita’s killer in the kitchen?

  The waiter set a fresh pot of Pernod dip on their table.

  “I will not eat this food.” The sound of Oona’s voice carried through the entire room. “Get the manager over here.”

  Leigh realized it was going to get worse. She lowered her eyes. She felt shrunken.

  There was a silence behind her head. The other patrons in the restaurant had stopped talking. She could feel them with her skin, sitting there utterly quiet, not speaking, not clinking a fork.

  A man in a dark tailored suit came rapidly across the room. “Bonjour, mesdames, how may I help you?”

  “Are you the manager?” Oona said. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “The manager is not here today, ma’am. I’m the assistant manager. Could I help you?”

  A tilt came into Oona’s jaw and her face tightened. “Yes, you could. What is your name?”

  “My name is Matthieu.”

  Oona foraged in her Gucci purse and pulled out an expired Percodan prescription and began writing on the back of it. “All right, Matthieu. First of all you could explain to me what a convicted murderer is doing in your kitchen slicing endive.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there must be some mistake.”

  “There sure is and I’m not the one making it.”

  “Oona. Please.” Tori gathered up her purse. “We have to go.”

  “I’m not through,” Oona said.

  “There isn’t time,” Leigh said. “We have an appointment at Marsh and Bonner’s.”

  Leigh handed Oona her jacket. “Come on, darling.”

  Oona waved her prescription at the assistant manager’s face like a straight-edged razor. “Get rid of him,” she warned, “or I will personally see to it that this restaurant is killed in the columns.”

  Out on the sidewalk Oona looked up at the sky. She seemed genuinely surprised to see the sun peeking through scudding clouds. She dipped a heavily braceleted arm into her bag and dragged out a pair of sunglasses. She spent much too long a moment getting them to stay on her nose. Tori hailed a cab and Leigh helped Oona into the rear seat.

  “Where to, ladies?” the driver said.

  “Marsh and Bonner’s,” Leigh said. “Fifty-seventh and Fifth.”

  The cab pulled into traffic.

  Leigh patted Oona’s hand. “You’ll be calm, won’t you, darling?”

  INSIDE MARSH AND BONNER’S with its three-story atrium, the air was cool and pleasantly perfumed. Well-dressed, well-mannered customers strolled the aisles, pausing to discuss scarves or cosmetics or gloves with well-dressed, well-mannered salespeople. A subdued murmur of civilized voices flowed across the gleaming display cases.

  Leigh and Tori guided Oona to the elevator.

  “I swear,” Oona said, “when you have murderers slicing radicchio at Archibald’s, you know these are the plague years.”

  “Mezzanine,” the elevator operator said.

  “What’s happening in this town?” Oona said. “Who’s minding the store? The PLO? Bishop Tutu? Somebody’s got to care!”

  “Right.” Tori glanced at Leigh.

  “Second floor,” the elevator operator said.

  “Excuse us,” Leigh said to a woman standing in the way. She and Tori shepherded Oona across the floor to the Ingrid Hansen Boutique.

  It was not so much a separate store as a stage set of a separate store, erected in the northwest corner of the floor. SCANDINAVIA’S LEADING DESIGN EDGE, a sign over the entrance announced.

  A slender, almost fleshless blond woman sailed across the boutique toward them. Leigh recognized the boutique proprietress from her photograph.

  “May I help you?”

  “We have an appointment,” Leigh said. “Baker and Sandberg.”

  The woman stood smiling with crisp formality. “I didn’t realize we’d said one-thirty on the phone.”

  “We’re a little early,” Leigh said. “By the way, do you know our friend, Oona Aldrich? Oona, this is Ingrid Hansen. She designed all these terrific clothes, and she was written up in last week’s New York magazine ‘Intelligencer.’”

  Ms. Hansen gave Oona a quick, appraising look. “Delighted. If Mrs. Aldrich is the friend you mentioned, I have something for her. Could you wait just a moment?”

  Ms. Hansen went to the other side of the boutique and began whispering to a sales assistant.

  “I can’t believe it,” Oona said. “I simply cannot believe it. Delancey is everywhere.”

  Leigh had never seen Oona this out of control so early in the day. “Jim Delancey’s not here.” She said it calmly, easily, as though it didn’t matter one way or another, as though they were idly discussing guests at a party. “Do you see him anywhere, Tori?”

  “He’s not here,” Tori said. “Really, Oona, he’s not.”

  “Not him.” Oona snapped a nod toward Ms. Hansen’s sales assistant. “I’m talking about his witch of a mother.”

  Leigh glanced again at the stiff, stout little woman. Except for the octagonal wire-rimmed glasses, she could see a certain broad resemblance to Xenia Delancey. The saleswoman had the same sort of uptilted, thimble-sized nose. She wore her gray hair wound into the same tight sort of gray nautilus coil. She even had the same way of listening with her head cocked to the left.

  What Leigh was not prepared for was the voice that came out of that thick little body, or its effect on her.

  “Right away, Ms. Hansen. I’ll see to it.”

  The voice sent an icy needle of recognition down Leigh’s spine: it was unmistakably the voice of the woman whose son had murdered Nita.

  Ms. Hansen returned carrying a dress and jacket ensemble. “Usually I work in very bright colors. This is one of my first pastels.” She laid the dress along a countertop. It was silk, patterned in white, black, and pale lavender swirls. The cut was extremely simple, with a slightly pulled-in waist. “And then you have the jacket, which matches.”

  “Where do you hire your saleswomen?” Oona said.

  For just an instant Ms. Hansen looked baffled.

  “Oona, please,” Tori said. “Let’s concentrate on the dress.”

  “And as a caprice,” Ms. Hansen continued, “the lining is a silk screen of Warhol’s Mao.” She reversed the jacket to show the Warhol. “But naturally that can be changed. Some people don’t like Mao—even as a joke.”

  “Oh, all right,” Oona said. “Give it to me, I’ll try it on.”

  “You can change right over there.” Ms. Hansen pointed to a curtained doorway.

  There were two crashing sounds, as though a display case had shattered.

  “I don’t believe this,” Oona said.

  Leigh turned. A Hispanic-looking young man in jogging clothes had come into the boutique. In his left hand he was carrying a two-foot long radio and a voice was booming out of it:

  Nickel-dimin’ two-bit pipsqueak squirt,

  Bleedin’ Thursday blood on your Tuesday shirt—

  A woman had come in after him—a young black woman in a pale coffee-colored clinging lace dress. She had a strikingly aquiline profile and dark, wavy hair and she looked like a fashion model.

  “Someone had better tell him to turn that racket off,” Oona said.

  Xenia Delancey approached the black woman. They walked over to a display rack. Xenia Delancey suggested a cream-colored blouse. The black woman held it up to her bosom. She studied her reflection in the mirror. After a moment she shook her head and handed the blouse back. Xenia Delancey began looking for another.

  On the other side of the boutique, the Hispanic sauntered over to a costume-jewelry display. He set the boom box down on the counter and boosted the volume. The glass display case added a rattling vibration of its own
.

  Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt—

  Oona’s eyes had become burning slits. “This is beyond belief. Things are falling apart in this lousy city. Isn’t anyone going to take a stand against that racket?”

  “Oona, sweetie,” Leigh said, “please don’t get excited.”

  Oona drew in a breath, and then she was in motion. She crossed directly to the Hispanic.

  “Will you kindly turn that racket off?” she said.

  He turned. Sweat gleamed on the steep ridges of his cheekbones. His dark eyes returned her gaze unflinchingly. “What?”

  “I said,” Oona shouted, “turn that garbage off!”

  “What?”

  It occurred to Leigh that the Hispanic needed a translation.

  Oona walked to the boom box, snapped it open, and yanked out one of the batteries.

  The music stopped.

  Oona turned and picked up her dress and took the battery with her into the changing room.

  The black woman burst out laughing.

  “Verdict, please.” Tori was holding up a green beaded bolero.

  “Twenty-four hundred.”

  “You mean for the whole dress,” Leigh said.

  “There isn’t a whole dress. This is it.”

  “It seems a little expensive,” Leigh said.

  “I suppose.” As Tori crossed back to the display rack the black woman intercepted her.

  “I love that jacket on you.”

  “Do you really?” Tori said.

  The woman nodded. “It picks up the green of your eyes. But you know, the violet might look even better.” She walked to the rack and pulled out a violet bolero. “Voilà. Let’s see it on you in the daylight.” She carried the violet bolero over to the door, and Tori followed.

  An alarm went off.

  “Excuse me,” Ms. Hansen called, raising her voice above the jangling bell. “That merchandise is tagged. It can’t leave the boutique till we deactivate it.”