Morgan walked up to a door that at first appeared to lead nowhere, until he noticed a small sign that read, FRANK’S. He took a deep breath and pushed open the door.
There was a bartender behind an old-fashioned bar, and two men sitting at a table, smoking and drinking. The place itself was not bad, just an average bar, but it seemed all the more sinister to Morgan because of his reasons for being there. He approached the bartender, who stared at him without saying anything.
“Hi, um, I’m looking for . . .”
“Me,” said someone behind Morgan before he could finish.
Morgan turned around. There was a skinny man with a pockmarked face, revealing surprisingly perfect teeth as he smiled.
“You’re . . . ?”
“That’s right.”
“All right. So,” said Morgan, taking a deep breath. He was prepared to sit down, lay out his life story, and explain why he first chose to and then decided against killing his mistress. He’d go into detail about her relentless whining and demands, how he had forgotten how fantastic his wife was, how he had experienced a midlife crisis but had come to his senses. How Maria had first been great but was now evil, but regardless, he couldn’t be responsible for the death of another human being. But the pockmarked man stopped him.
“So, you want it off?”
“Yes,” said Morgan, looking around. He had thought he’d be led to a small dark room and made to plead and beg.
“Okay.”
“Okay, and as I said, please keep the money.”
“Sure.”
Morgan looked around, uncertain. This was it?
“So, is this it?”
“Yup. You can go.”
“All right,” said Morgan. He looked at the bartender, who was busy watching the Rangers game on a small screen on the wall.
“Great, thanks,” said Morgan, relieved.
The man returned to his seat with his friend.
Morgan exited the bar with excitement. That was so easy! He’d just walked in there and called off the hit. Hooray! It was only after he was back in the cab and crossing the bridge that his elation burst. He had done the Right Thing. Too bad his reward was to have to endure more suffering from Maria as he squirmed in her tyrannical, blackmailing hands. Christ.
chapter 57
“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” asked Rosemary for the fifteenth time.
“I swear,” replied Olivia, earnestly.
“Anything we should know about? Something happen with your family?”
“No, no, they’re fine.”
“What about Henry? Are you still going to Lyford with him?” asked Lila.
“Yes, I think so.”
“So it’s not your love life?” asked Rosemary.
“No.”
“Is it that you lost out on the Childe Hassam painting?” asked Lila.
“No.”
“’Cause you can’t blame yourself. Frothingham’s always messes up with the phone bids.”
“No, I just called the dealer who bought it and purchased it from him directly.”
“No sicknesses, no ailments?” asked Rosemary.
“I already said, I’m fine.”
There was a pause.
“Oh! Is it winter bloating? ’Cause you look great,” said Lila.
“Why?” asked Olivia, panicked. “Do you think I look fat?”
“No, you’re a stick.”
“I mean, I haven’t had carbs in two weeks. I’d better look good.”
“You look great.”
Olivia lifted up her arms and squeezed them to make sure there was no extraneous fat. There wasn’t. Rosemary gave Lila a look and they both turned to Olivia. She looked very regal sitting on the pistachio armchair in her library. But something was up.
“Listen, Olivia. We’re just very worried about you,” began Lila.
“About me? Why?”
“Because you’ve skipped the last two charity balls and you haven’t been out to dinner in days,” said Rosemary.
“I guess you’d call this . . . an intervention,” said Lila.
“We just can’t imagine what’s amiss. If you’re not sick, or lovesick, what could possibly keep you holed up in your apartment?”
Olivia sighed deeply. She knew it was only a matter of time before people came asking questions. She just wasn’t in the mood to party or socialize, and although that sounded strange, it was true. For the first time in her life she was seriously stressed—she had a deadline and no writer to help her. Holland wouldn’t return her calls, and even Rob—who’d introduced her to Holland—refused to intervene. Perhaps she shouldn’t have slapped her.
“You two are so sweet to be worried about me. The fact is, it’s work related. I’m just very stressed about my deadline.”
Rosemary and Lila turned to each other and then erupted in laughter. “Is that all?” boomed Rosemary. “Good lord, we thought it was something more serious. Sweetie, deadlines come and go. Nobody pays attention to those things.”
“Frankly, we thought it was strange that you were in such a rush to get your second book out. You should enjoy your success for a while,” added Lila. “Plus, writers are supposed to be flaky. That’s part of the image, you know?”
“You really think so?” asked Olivia, both relieved and perplexed. “But there’s been such a demand—everyone is asking, begging to read my new pages, wanting to do follow-up pieces.”
“Well, all you have to do to solve that is write a little article for Town and Country or Elle. Write about shoes or something. That will keep them sated for a long time,” said Lila.
“That’s a great idea,” said Olivia. She could do that. She knew about shoes.
“Well, thank goodness we got that taken care of,” said Rosemary, leaning in and grabbing some of the Greenberg cookies that she had brought over to cheer Olivia. “Now listen to this: Ashley Sommers is getting married.”
“Ashley Sommers?” snapped Lila, quickly. “But she’s . . . much younger than us. Who is she marrying?”
“Some guy from San Francisco. She has to move there.”
“Nightmare,” said Lila.
“Oh, I don’t think Frisco is so bad,” said Olivia, pouring herself tea.
“I don’t mean Frisco, I mean marriage,” said Lila. “I mean, gross, to be tied down to one person. And really, once you marry a guy he refuses to go out. It’s so pathetic. Brooke Lutz’s husband will go out with her only twice a week. He insists on staying home with the kid the other nights.”
“Boring!” said Rosemary. “That’s why I am so grateful I got out when I did.” Rosemary was referring to her own brief starter marriage that lasted only seventeen days and three hours longer than her ten-hour, five-hundred-person wedding at the Pierre.
“Totally. I am so not into that,” said Lila.
“I know what you mean,” agreed Olivia.
“Did you hear about Rupert Wingate’s wedding?” asked Rosemary.
“Who’d he marry?” asked Olivia.
“Some little nobody from nowhereville. Anyhoo, of course the Wingates paid for the entire wedding, since the girl didn’t have two nickels to buy a box of Cracker Jacks, and she was very, very bossy. Fernanda almost had a coronary. Plus, the girl has no taste. Anyway, it was at the Vineyard, and she insisted—and, I mean, gag me with Dr. Phil’s tongue depressor—that she wanted a live butterfly release at the end of the wedding, so everyone got a handwoven basket and got on the dock. They were all ready to release them at the same time and they all opened their baskets in unison and all of the butterflies were dead! Can you imagine?” Rosemary burst into laughter.
“Isn’t Rupert best friends with Drew Vance?” asked Lila. She hadn’t told her friends of her little sex romp; they wouldn’t understand. But she had been on the lookout for Drew everywhere. She walked by 741 as much as possible, went to a cocktail party at the Racquet Club. She even went to happy hour at Dorrian’s one night when she was going to dinner at Elio’s with her p
arents, but he wasn’t there. She thought for sure he would call, but he hadn’t.
“I don’t know,” said Rosemary. She stood up. “Anyway, Livy, so glad you are feeling better. I’ve got to get home. Sergio comes in one hour to do my makeup, and he just did Jane Roberts’s, so I will get loads of scoop! You are going tonight?”
“I suppose,” said Olivia. It was time to end her exile. The public was waiting.
“Fab. It’ll be a blast.”
As the elevator doors opened in the lobby Lila came face to face with Drew Vance. And the pretty blond girl whose hand he was holding.
“Drew!” blurted Lila, without thinking.
“Hey, doll,” said Drew, pecking her on the cheek and then suavely guiding his blonde into the elevator. “How are you?”
Rosemary stepped out of the elevator and stared as Lila froze. “Great” was all Lila could get out.
“Fan-tastic,” said Drew, giving her a big smile. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said, and then winked just before the elevator doors closed.
“How do you know him?” asked Rosemary. She tied her scarf tighter.
“Friend of my brother’s,” Lila mumbled.
“He’s a cutie,” said Rosemary.
“Yeah, but did you get a look at that child with him?” asked Lila, turning a pale shade of green. “Tacky.”
“Such a prepube. He must have plucked her out of kindergarten,” said Rosemary.
“Yeah.”
“I hear he’s an unconscionable cad,” boomed Rosemary. “But at least a handsome one.”
They exited the building, and a huge gust of wind slapped them in the face. Lila felt mortified. She never wanted to go there again.
chapter 58
The buzzing, frenetic spin of Wall Street was silent within the thick plate-glass windows that walled Morgan Vance’s Brown Brothers office, but the headache-inducing noise of his phone call with Maria paralleled (if not surpassed) the din from outside. Her nasal screeches bore a hole through his brain, her voice like a cheese grater in his ear. Her ceaseless complaints, her Rosie Perez–times–ten timbre, her rapacious demands, and her credit card craziness were getting to be too much for him to handle. And yet he would have to suck it up, because he had no choice. This was his fate, from now on.
“Maria, I just opened a huge bill from AmEx for eleven thousand dollars at Cartier,” he said, his rage pumped into every whispered word. “What in the world were you buying? You cannot be spending like this.”
Maria sat twirling the phone cord in her French-manicured fingers as she lay on a settee upholstered in one of the new selections from the Versace Casa line of fabrics. As the receiver rested between her cheek and shoulder, she held her hand in front of her, admiring the recently acquired bauble in question, loving the glint of the sunlight off the ruby in the center.
“What are you talking about?” she asked flippantly. “I have your child, remember? We have our expenses.”
“Maria, I hardly think you were spending all this on Pampers. Last time I checked, Cartier didn’t hock baby bottles.”
“I don’t want to talk about this. I’m late for a shahtoosh party.”
Morgan’s old desire to snuff her spoiled ass out rose to the surface again. Fuck this little whore. His ire snowballed, and he wanted to dive through the phone wires Matrix-style and strangle her with the cord.
“A shahtoosh party? You’d be filing nails in Astoria if I hadn’t rescued you from your janitorial life, and now you need shahtooshes? You didn’t even know what they were when you were picking trash out of cans in Asunción! You’d better not be going near Cordelia or any of her friends—do you understand?”
“I can do what I want, Morgan. It’s a free country. Fuck you.”
With that, she hung up, leaving Morgan only to bury his head in his hands once more, trapped in the exitless labyrinth that he had erected.
But he’d had to call off the hit. Too messy. He had to live in purgatory forever. Only a miracle could save him now.
Maria sauntered out of her building to hail a taxi. She was off to Joan and Wendy’s shahtoosh party at the Carlyle, to benefit the Narcolepsy Institute. Maria had been lucky; her cousin Santiago was a temporary elevator man at the Coddingtons’ building for the holidays, and she had coerced him into purloining one of Joan and Wendy’s invitations. No one would know how she got it. But she was determined to start ingratiating herself into high society. They would get used to her, dammit. She was the next Mrs. Vance.
Uptown at the Carlyle, Joan and Wendy were holding court, playing the hostess with the mostest to the extreme, bending over backwards to make sure everyone had what she wanted to be happy and get in the shopping mood. The scores of ladies sampled the deluxe array of finger sandwiches catered by Fauchon, and sipped teas from a luxurious lineup of fourteen flavors shipped in by Mariage Frères in Paris. Joan surveyed the scene; all were fluttering around, rubbing the soft wares, comparing hues, and already throwing pieces over their arms to take with them. She smelled a good bunch of sales.
Melanie Korn took a deep breath when she entered. She didn’t even know why she was going or why she was invited. But she knew that if she was going to be seeing these people for the rest of her life, there was no better time than the present to return to social engagements. She had been totally nonchalant about it until she got to the door. And then she felt very, very weird. Because for the first time she didn’t have an agenda. She didn’t care about showing off or impressing people. It wasn’t important to her whom she chitchatted with. She was there to have a good time.
When she checked her coat she noticed the small Tibetan women—obviously flown in for the occasion—spinning away in the corner. Ladies were gawking at the various colors of wool and barking orders to these confused non-English-speaking people. It seemed a little sick, thought Melanie, who bypassed them and entered the room. Joan and Wendy were grazing at the buffet. Melanie’s first thought was that they looked like two Hoover vacs snarfing up the petits four, but she immediately dismissed that thought. She was trying not to be bitchy. As she made her way over to greet them, they braced themselves for a barrage of tact-free exchanges.
“Oy,” said Wendy.
“Here we go,” said Joan, pasting on her best saccharine smile.
“Hi, ladies!” said Melanie brightly. “What a wonderful party. You seem to have oodles of shahtooshes. How are sales going?”
“Can’t complain,” said Joan.
“We’ve already made a tidy sum for Narcolepsy—that’s where the money goes after the vendors are paid,” offered Wendy.
“Yes, there will be no excuse for people who fall asleep at the dinner table!” said Joan.
“Super. Well, thanks for having me.”
“You’re welcome,” said Joan and Wendy, surprised.
“I guess I’ll go check out the goods,” said Melanie.
“Yes, we know we can count on you to buy, buy, buy!” said Wendy.
“Those spontaneously drowsy people depend on you!” said Joan.
Melanie walked over to the corner, and Joan and Wendy watched as she bent down and talked to the Tibetan women. She didn’t even stop to accost Sandra Goodyear or Fernanda Wingate. Bizarre.
“Listen, sales are not going as well as I thought,” whispered Joan.
“I know. How embarrassing if we only have one grand to offer up to the institute? Cass Weathers made fifteen when she had hers,” said Wendy.
“We need a big spender to come,” said Joan with great seriousness.
Just then, the double doors to the suite opened and heads turned as Mimi Halsey walked in bedecked in floor-length fur, an attractive woman with her. Both were dressed to the nines. Joan and Wendy, dollar signs in their eyes, rushed over to greet them.
“Mimi! You look to die! So thrilled you could make it. And who is this?” asked Joan.
“Joan, darling, this is my very dear friend Alice Martinez.”
“Hello, Miss Martínez,” Wendy said o
bsequiously, pronouncing the name as if she were a local news reporter of Latin descent who uses an accent even for taco. “Any friend of Mimi’s . . .”
“Thank you,” said Alice, surveying the scene. “Beautiful. Is this your party?”
“Yup. Wendy and I organized everything, down to the last smoked turkey with cranberry relish tea sandwich,” said Joan.
“Lovely shawls you have. What are they?”
“Shahtooshes. Haven’t you seen them? Feel one. They make cashmere feel like emery boards. These really are the must-haves of the season.” Joan leaned in closer to Alice, whispering, “They’re very hard to get, and not to be so tacky as to talk about money, but we spent a pretty penny making connections at the airport to get these all through.”
“Why? Are they illegal?” asked Alice.
Wendy rolled her eyes at the nonsense that, yes, they were. “They’re ‘endangered,’ ” she said, making finger air quotes. “It’s all politics, if you ask me. Some laws are made to be broken, like that Cuban cigar idiocy. You only live once, right?”
“I hear you,” said Alice.
Mimi then led her friend to scope the luxurious loot. Joan and Wendy looked around at the busy bees loving their wares as they socialized, fingered plenty, and thanked them profusely for the sublime afternoon.
“Hopefully this will encourage others to buy. Some people are already leaving empty-handed!” whispered Wendy, worried.
“Just relax. People are just biding time. They’ll all follow Mimi’s lead,” answered Joan.
“I hope so.”
“And there’s always Melanie. She’ll probably empty our trunks. She always wants to spend the most.”
Joan and Wendy continued their way around the party, delicately suggesting to their guests that they buy the wraps “for a good cause,” eat the food, have a great time.
“Melanie, how many are you getting?” asked Joan with faked indifference.
“None today. Just browsing,” said Melanie, sifting through the piles of shawls.
The Right Address Page 31