by Simon Brooke
Marion greets me as if I was the caterer, reminds me I am late and then turns round to talk to someone else. Fair enough. I take a glass of champagne from a tray and knock it back partly to give me Dutch courage for this ghastly event and partly to obliterate the awful memory of my bizarre performance in front of Jane.
I pick up another glass and wander around a bit, trying to looking bored and aloof but it occurs to me after a while that in fact I just look a bit dim like I don’t know the point of the party. I start desperately looking for someone I know. Luckily, by the time I look around the room again it is half full of people. Everyone seems to be looking past everyone else, probably to see who they could or should be talking to. Just then Farrah says “Hi.” We double kiss and she introduces me to some smooth-looking guy who is dressed in a tweedy jacket and a pink Brooks Brothers button-down collar shirt. All wrong but he does look rich. We shake hands. For some stupid reason I say, “Where’s David?”
Farrah gives me a look of what I realize is discreet panic.
“He couldn’t come.” No, of course he couldn’t. Not with his replacement here. Perhaps he’s in prison, after all. That thought, together with the one and a half glasses of champagne I’ve just downed, cheers me no end. I knock back the remainder.
“Farrah, you look great,” I gush.
“Oh, Andrew, you’re the sweetest ever. I could just eat you. I’ve just been to see my crystal therapist.”
“Your crystal therapist? What does he do?”
Farrah licks her lips in concentration and begins to explain.
“They apply different types of crystal to every bodily orifice and these crystals draw the impurities out of your body and replace them with positive energy.”
I laugh. By now I don’t really care and I’ve had two glasses of champagne on an empty stomach.
“What? You pay someone to shove a crystal up your—”
“Andrew!” It’s Marion who has come up behind me like the Belgravia Secret Police. When I turn round I notice that she does look very good indeed—diamond earrings and a simple white dress.
“You look great,” I say, giving her a quick kiss on the lips. This is going to be my standard line for this evening, I decide. I’m sure one of my Dad’s books advises it: “Try greeting every new acquaintance or prospective co-worker with a positive, opening expression of your feelings.”
“Thank you. Now, get yourself another drink. There are a lot of people here tonight that I really want you to meet.”
“Hey, you look great,” I say to Anna Maria as I grab another glass.
I’m actually really pleased to see her but Marion hisses irritably, “Don’t talk to the staff like that. Andrew, you have so much to learn.” She looks round at Anna Maria who is moving off through the crowd, tray in hand, more mystified by my comment, I think, than flattered.
Marion leads me into the centre of the room. For one awful moment I think she is going to make some sort of announcement but luckily a man leaves the group he is with and walks over to us. His aftershave arrives before he does and it burns my nostrils.
“Channing,” says Marion.
“Marion,” he says. “We were just talking about Sonia Kaletsky. You heard she told everyone she wanted a small wedding. Well, apparently she got such a small wedding there wasn’t even a groom.” We all laugh.
After a few seconds Marion has done enough laughing and she says, “Channing. Look, Channing, this is Andrew.”
“Hi,” says Channing. He is small, dark and tanned with viciously gelled short hair. He’s wearing a black and yellow Versace check jacket with dark blue jeans and black bikers’ boots which reach up to his knees. We shake hands. His hand is soft, plump, hairy and heavily ringed. It lingers a little too long in mine.
“Channing is my best friend from New York,” says Marion, careful to add this geographical qualification. I’ve learnt that Marion has “best friends in London,” “best friends from California,” “best friends for shopping,” “best oldest friend” etc. Everyone can be Marion’s best friend as long as it’s in their own particular category. I’m probably her “best media sales friend.” Or “best friend for imposing circumcision on.”
“Very nice,” says Channing. I sort of hope he means “very nice to meet you” but I’m sure he doesn’t.
Then he completely ignores me and starts telling Marion about somebody they know from New York who sold his apartment to someone else they know from New York and what the person who bought the apartment said about it and what they were going to do with it or something.
While I am looking around the room a girl comes to join the three of us. She is tanned with long blonde hair and a face that would be pretty if wasn’t just a bit too sporty. She is also wearing dark blue jeans and a huge white shirt, undone so that I can see her bra and the top of full, freckled breasts. Her gold chains and bracelets look really good against her tan. She holds her glass in both hands in front of her. Looking up at me, in her gold and white, she looks like an altar boy, offering me the blood of Christ.
She laughs enthusiastically with Marion and Channing. She doesn’t know what they are talking about and so her guffaws make me laugh and soon we are laughing at each other laughing. Marion and Channing become uneasy about the amount of laughing going on and so Marion drags me away just as the girl is putting out her hand and saying, “Louise.”
“Hi. You look—” But Marion has pointed me in the direction of some people sitting on the settee.
“God, that girl’s dumb,” she spits. “She says she’s into photography but I can’t believe she knows one end of a camera from the other. At least not like she knows one end of a photographer from the other. Here, I want you to meet Toby Erskine-Crumb. Toby works in the City of London,” she says as if he were the only one who did.
“Well, that’s what I do when I’m not drinking there,” laughs Toby, offering a hand. “Hello.”
“Hello, Toby,” I say. “Oh, fuck off, Toby,” I think. Marion whisks me off again. My head is spinning with champagne and this whirlwind tour of her friends.
At another settee she introduces me to a tiny little lady clutching her glass as if her life depended on it. In front of her is a sea of cannibalized canapés—each half-bitten through or gnawed at. Like most of Marion’s friends, her face has that surprised, shiny look, probably because most of it is now gathered up behind her ears.
“Davina, I want you to meet Andrew.”
The lady’s face cracks as far as it can into a smile.
“Hoi,” she says in a thick Manhattan drawl. I bow slightly and take her hand, which she obviously appreciates. In fact the only reason I am bowing is because she is so tiny. Marion leaves me squeezing onto the settee next to Davina, presumably because it is less likely I will get off with her than with Louise. As soon as I sit down Davina is off.
“Do you know Marion’s problem?”
Is this going to be a joke? I shake my head, getting ready to laugh if I’m required to do so. “Marion’s problem?”
Davina waves a liver-spotted hand at me and draws me in closer. “She’s working class. She’s blue collar and she hates it.”
I am not sure what my reaction is supposed to be. In some ways Marion is so strange that I wouldn’t be surprised if she was created in a test tube or constructed by the inventor of Barbie on an off-day. On the other hand, that little speech she gave me at lunch a couple of weeks ago suggested that she was more blue blood than blue collar.
“That’s why she always acts so grand,” hisses Davina from beside me, almost making me jump.
“Does she?”
Davina rolls her eyes, a rather risky manoeuvre given the number of nips and tucks there probably are around them. “Marion acts more grand than anyone I know. Your Queen could learn something from her.” Davina takes a long slurp of champagne. “And that’s why she always surrounds herself with pretty things. You, sugar, are a case in point.”
“Am I?” I really only ask to break
the tension and move the conversation on a bit. She looks at me as if I’m the stupidest thing that she has ever come into contact with.
“Course you are. You must know that. But I bet she hasn’t told you.” She takes a prawn and cream cheese pastry thing, removes the prawn, scoops out the cream cheese, sucks it off her fingernail and then squashes the prawn back in the pastry and puts it back down in front of her. Then she spends some time running her tongue round the inside of her mouth to clear it of cheese. I watch repulsed, fascinated, suddenly feeling stone-cold sober.
She looks round the room with her hard little eyes and starts to tell me a story. “Marion’s father sold furniture out of a big warehouse in Brooklyn. I mean, it was supposed to be a store and her mother had pretensions about it being, you know, Bergdorf Goodman or something but the point is her mother never went there. The only people visited Marion’s father’s store were people who had been to the fancy stores and realized that they couldn’t afford the fancy prices. They would sneak into that place, praying that their friends and neighbours wouldn’t see them there, see where they had ended up just trying to save a few bucks when they wanted a new sofa or a chair or something. And the reason why Marion’s mother had pretensions about it was like I said, because she never went there. Oh no, she sat in that house in Scarsdale and took tea and spoke to her friends on the telephone. All very nice, all very proper. Wishing her husband was a society doctor or a big shot lawyer or something.”
“I thought her father worked on Wall Street,” I say. Davina cackles, boy am I ever stupid! Anna Maria comes back again with the champagne. Davina swipes another glass. I smile at Anna Maria and help myself as well. She beams back, unaware that her mistress is being ripped apart and her guts left out for carrion on the sun-scorched hill tops of Manhattan society. On the other hand, if she did know, would she care?
Davina is off again, half-finishing her glass in a single slurp. She ignores my contribution—obviously I am too dumb to bother with.
“And do you know why she has no children?”
Oh Christ! I hope this is not going to be too gynaecological. I want Davina to stop but at the same time I desperately want to hear more. Thing is, I know that Marion will be able to tell with one quick glance at my innocent face that I know all.
I look around the room quickly to check that she isn’t looking. Nowhere to be seen. Probably upstairs adjusting something.
“Well do you know?” Davina punches my arm.
“No,” I gasp, in some pain.
It is the answer Davina is looking for. She raises her painted eyebrows slightly and looks shocked. “She doesn’t want the competition.”
“Competition?”
“Sure. She doesn’t want to have to compete with anyone. What if she had a daughter and what if the daughter was pretty and popular? What if she outshone Marion? What then? Or worse still”—Davina stares even more fiercely—“but what if she didn’t? What if Marion had a kid that was plain and boring—you know, mousy hair, bottle-bottom glasses and braces like a railway siding. OK, she could have a little surgery. Oh sure, a little cutting and tweaking here and there, we’ve all had it but if you ain’t got the raw materials in the first place, bone structure and all, not even the best surgeon in the world can do anything and don’t tell me he can.
“No, she doesn’t want the competition so she figures it’s much better to use surrogates. Surrogate children. Like you. Choose them, parade them around like a poodle and then, if they fail to impress, or, if they impress too much you can always ditch ’em and get another. Oh, yes,” she says, shaking her head, “Marion has had plenty of those.”
Nice to hear.
“Of course, I don’t suppose you’ve heard about the husbands.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Now, I must confess, I did like the first. You couldn’t help liking Edward. A bit dumb, a bit of a bore but basically a nice guy. What he did have going for him, though, was potential. You know? Potential. And that’s what Marion liked about him, his potential. He was potentially very rich. His father had made a fortune as an oil broker, well, he was a broker in anything. He was the complete opposite of Edward—a devious little scheister. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, in business. But the problem was that he hated Marion. God, he hated her.” Davina takes another great slurp of champagne and, for some reason, hands me her empty glass. I look around for a passing tray and then put it down between us. There is a pause while Davina’s intense stare draws over another waitress with more champagne.
“Hated her, absolutely hated her.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She takes another gulp. “He thought she was stuck up and had airs and graces. But cheap all the same. Which is what she is. But what Edward’s father really hated about her was that he thought she was a gold-digger. And she thought he was rude and vulgar and rough as a stevedore’s ass, which he was. What really got him, though, was when Marion tried to ban him from the wedding. She figured she needed her father, who was not exactly smooth as a kid glove, to give her away but she sure as hell didn’t need Edward’s.”
“This was the wedding at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral?” I say, hoping this will earn me some credibility. Wrong. Davina looks at me in disbelief.
“Saint Patrick’s? Saint Patrick’s Fifth Avenue? Not exactly, sugar. They couldn’t exactly afford that. It could have been their local church, but Marion figured that didn’t look none too good so she broke her family’s heart and found a hotel. Sure, it was a pretty hotel but Fifth Avenue it was not. Anyway, however pretty the goddamn hotel is, if the atmosphere is ugly, the wedding is ugly.”
“Ugly atmosphere?” I ask a little unnecessarily.
“They needed Henry Kissinger to negotiate the table plan.”
“How long did the marriage last?”
“Oh, a couple of years and then she realized that he was going no place and didn’t have a nickel to scratch his ass with and so she dumped him.”
“I thought he, er, committed adultery,” I say, trying not to sound too suburban about it. I needn’t have bothered.
“He never got chance. She beat him to it. But one thing’s for sure, if he had of, she’d have been juggling his balls.”
“So who was Marion’s second husband?” I mention her name in the hope that we have been talking at cross purposes and this is not Marion I have been hearing about. She takes a long breath. “He had more going for him than Edward. At least, he did till Marion got hold of him. He was rich, good-looking and had a sort of savoir-faire, know what I mean? Josef. He was Colombian. They gave the best parties.” She looks disparagingly around her. “Their apartment in New York was so beautiful it had a swimming-pool in the dining room. Models, actors, fashion designers. Drinking, fucking, snorting coke off each other. God, it was beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” I say, trying to imagine this little splosh ’n’ nosh love nest.
“And then they had the apartment on Ipanema Beach.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“Honey, it was,” says Davina, looking up at me longingly. “It was beautiful. And she used it to very good effect. She met her third husband there.”
“Third? I thought there were only two.”
“There were four altogether. Plus a little snacking in between meals, you know what I’m saying.”
“So who was the third?”
“Henry somebody. He was an English lord. Looked a bit like you, sugar, only a bit older.”
“What was he like?”
“Boring, boring, boring. I think someone must have told him to go to Rio to loosen up a bit, you know? Learn to have a good time.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, sure, he learned to take off his tie on the beach. Rio is where Marion developed her taste for younger men. Unfortunately so did lordie.”
“He left Marion for a younger man?”
“Some beach bum.”
“Oh, God. And then she married someone else?”
“Yep. Lordie was boring a
nd, fatally, not as rich as Marion first thought. He had this cold, draughty old pile miles from anywhere in the English countryside which didn’t appeal. Ten bedrooms and only two bathrooms. Not only that, it seemed almost everything the family owned would go in tax when his father checked out. So then she met Carlos. He was probably the best of the lot: nasty, ruthless but great fun to be with. And he was the richest. Used to sleep with a Smith & Wesson under his pillow at night. What a guy!”
“Sounds like quite a character.”
“Oh, he was. They gave even better parties than when she was with Josef.” Her face hardens. “The only bad thing was that she met that bitchy little fag Channing there and they’ve been together ever since. Marion says he’s more faithful than a husband.”
“I met him just now.”
Davina is staring across the room at Channing, hatred screwing up her face as much as her surgery will allow.
Intrigued, I ask, “You’ve crossed swords in the past, then?” “Crossed swords?” I sound like my dad.
“I’d like to cross his fat neck with a sword,” says Davina.
Just then Marion appears.
“Marion!” I gasp.
“Are you guys having fun?” she says.
Before I can think of something to say and say it innocently, Davina says, “Beautiful party, Marion,” and smiles warmly. I do the same except that I must look like a grinning idiot. Marion looks at us both for a moment and then touches my arm. I get up and she tells me there are some other people she wants me to meet.
“See you later,” I say to Davina. She just smiles knowingly.
“Was Davina boring you to death?” asks Marion.
“Oh no,” I say casually. “Just chatting.”
“She’s getting on a bit. Sometimes I think she’s losing it—too many heated rollers when she was young. I only invite her to things out of pity.”
Just after one o’clock people start to leave and within a few minutes the room is empty. Some woman with heavy eye makeup comes up to me and says: “Andrew, there you are. We never got a chance to talk all evening.”
“No,” I say. “We’ll have to do it next time.” By which time I might have worked out who she is and thought of something to say to her. Everyone triple kisses Marion and thanks her so much you’d have thought she’d saved their lives.