“And the title of Countess came from where?”
“Papal,” replied Jorgie. “Geraldine was rewarded by His Holiness for her philanthropic endeavors.”
“Ah, yes, papal. Tell me about the Countess’s limp,” said Gus. “Did she always have a limp?”
“She was born with a clubfoot,” answered Jorgie. “Look, there’s Yvonne Lupescu coming in. Do you know her? Used to be one of Madam Myra’s girls. Carried her whips in a custom-made Vuitton bag. Such a dominatrix she is. Oh, my dear, the things I could tell you about that one.”
Gus, working now, looked up from his notes to register what Jorgie had just said.
“I didn’t know Mrs. Lupescu was one of Madam Myra’s girls,” he said.
“Used to be,” Jorgie corrected himself. “You know of Madam Myra then?”
“Yes,” replied Gus. “Ms. Myra she’s known as in New York.”
“How very amusing,” said Jorgie. “I must remember that.”
Gus tapped his pencil on the tabletop to get the subject back to the point of the lunch. “But your wife, the Countess, the late Countess, danced so well for a woman with a clubfoot.”
“I taught her how to dance,” said Jorgie. “Geraldine loved to dance. You see, I brought joy into her life. Those twins of hers, those playboys, paid no attention to their mother at all. Wait for her to die, that’s all they thought, so they could get the money. If I hadn’t come along and swept her off her foot, they would have put her in an old ladies’ home. I gave her a wonderful life. Now they say about me that I exerted undue influence on her to leave me all her money. It was Geraldine’s choice. I was as surprised as everyone eke when the will was read.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Gus, writing down Jorgie’s words.
“She was a wonderful woman,” said Jorgie.
“Is it true that the pair of Renoir paintings were copies and you sold off the originals during her last illness?” asked Gus.
“Heavens, no!” replied Jorgie, laughing merrily at the absurdity of Gus’s questions. “How do these terrible stories start?”
“There’s something I’d like to ask you. Rather personal.”
“You ask me, Mr. Bailey.”
“Gus.”
“You ask me, Gus.”
“Did you, uh, have to make love to the Countess?”
“Oh, yes, on a regular basis. Geraldine was very attracted to me.”
“I see.” Gus sipped his water, as if it were a drink. “Tell me, Jorgie. Isn’t it difficult to make love to a septuagenarian lady with a limp?”
Jorgie Sanchez-Julia smiled and shook his head. “I have never met the person, woman or man, I couldn’t get it up for, Gus,” he said. He thought for a moment, and then added, with a slight wink, “if the price was right.”
“This is on the record, I assume,” said Gus.
“On the record means what?” asked Jorgie.
“Hello, Jorgie,” said Yvonne Lupescu, coming up to the table. “I didn’t know you were in New York.”
“Hello, Yvonne,” Jorgie said unenthusiastically, holding out his hand to her without rising.
“Up,” said Yvonne, with a thumbs-up gesture for him to rise. “That’s no way to greet a lady.”
“I just arrived on the Concorde yesterday,” said Jorgie, rising lazily and winking at Gus to cover his lie. He kissed Yvonne in a lackluster manner on both cheeks, at the same time looking around the restaurant. They were both young and attractive, but indifferent to each other physically. “And you?”
“I live here now,” said Yvonne.
“Oh, yes, I heard something about that. Constantine de Rham, isn’t it?”
“I read that Geraldine died,” said Yvonne.
“I miss her dreadfully,” replied Jorgie.
“I’m sure.”
“Do you know Mr. Augustus Bailey? Baroness Lupescu,” said Jorgie, introducing.
“Yes, we know each other,” said Gus.
“Jorgie, Fritzi von Stauffenberg is in the other room and would like you to say hello,” said Yvonne.
“Fritzi is here? How marvelous. This is why I wanted to come to Clarence’s, Mr. Bailey. Everyone who is in New York comes here. Would you excuse me for a minute?”
When Jorgie Sanchez-Julia moved away from the table, Gus, not wanting to get into a conversation with Yvonne, went back to studying his notes.
“May I sit down, Gus?” asked Yvonne.
“Of course.”
“Such a naughty boy, Jorgie Sanchez-Julia,” she said. “The things I could tell you about that one. But he was so sweet to his poor sister, the nun. He inherited everything, I heard.”
Gus put away his notebook.
“That makes him the most successful male hooker in the world, I suppose,” said Yvonne.
“Did the old lady know, do you suppose?”
“Geraldine? She couldn’t have cared less. Jorgie showered her with roses, dozens at a time, which, of course, her accountants would get the bills for eventually, but she loved the attention.”
“Good God,” said Gus.
“Better than a nursing home,” answered Yvonne, with a shrug of practicality.
“Depends,” said Gus.
“I was wondering about something, Gus,” said Yvonne.
“What?”
“How about doing one of your articles on me? I could stand a little exposure in New York.”
“You’d have to shoot someone first, Mrs. Lupescu. Or inherit someone’s money. Those are the kind of people I write about.”
“I’m too dull, is that it?” asked Yvonne, smiling at him. “I’m twenty-eight years old. I’ve never been divorced. I’ve never even been married!”
Gus smiled, wanting to, but refraining from, asking her about Ms. Myra. “How’s Constantine?”
“Oh, the same as ever.”
“What is the-same-as-ever with Constantine de Rham?”
“He is dismayed that he is no longer received in New York,” said Yvonne. “It haunts him. After all, for him, what else is there to life but lunching out and dining out?”
“Mrs. Verdurin invites him,” said Gus.
“That’s only once a month. There are twenty-nine more nights with no place to go. He came here for dinner the other night, and Chick Jacoby made him wait an hour for a table. He blames me. He thinks he is not invited because I am an encumbrance. The time is coming, I know, I can feel it, when I am going to have to leave him.”
“Then what happens to you? Where will you go?”
“I know, if I left him, he would be in despair,” said Yvonne, as if Gus had not spoken. “In fact, just between us, Gus, I rather enjoy Constantine’s despair. It’s so utterly abject. I like it when he begs me not to leave him. All his grandiosity leaves him completely. It makes me feel, oh, what is the right word for the feeling? Imperious, I suppose. I feel filled with power that a man could love me so passionately.”
“Like a dominatrix, you mean?” asked Gus.
Yvonne smiled. “Jorgie’s been gossiping about me, has he?”
Gus, paying his check, looked at Yvonne.
“You look so disapproving, Gus. So proper. So aboveboard.”
“I don’t know. Am I so different from any of the rest of you?”
“This is my stepson,” said Fritzi von Stauffenberg, introducing Jorgie Sanchez-Julia to his luncheon companion.
“Yes, I know Jorgie,” answered Jamesey Crocus. “He used to be my stepson.”
Gus had no instinct for the chase. He had no desire for love. He did not want an involvement that would complicate his life and deflect him from what he knew he was going to do when Lefty Flint was released from prison. It was his friend George Eardley who introduced him to Myra Wealth. In Europe, they called her Madam Myra. In New York, they called her Miss Wealth. She preferred to be called Ms. Myra, a name that amused her, once she favored you. Ms. Myra ran an establishment of utter discretion from her apartment in the once-grand Murray Hill section of New York, catering to
what she herself described as some of the most successful men in the city, although, she was quick to point out, none of the political crowd—since they lowered the standards of a place and, invariably, brought down an establishment as their political opponents and enemies sought to undo them.
“On the turn,” was the way she described herself. Closer to forty than thirty, perhaps even beyond, she was in a voluptuous period of life and felt not remotely threatened by the younger girls of her establishment who were in greater demand than she was. She could spot in an instant the sort of men who were attracted to her ripe charms. Ms. Myra, in time, grew fond of Gus, whom she liked to call Augustus, and their business arrangement settled into a weekly visit, at his apartment, on Saturday nights, when most people he knew were in the country. No whips. No chains. No aberrations. No cocaine. His sexual tastes were plebeian, rarely varying from the missionary position. She stayed for an hour and a half, but one hour of the time was always taken up with conversation, when she told him tales of more exotic behavior of the clients of her house, always careful never to name names.
“There is a man on Wall Street, very important, you would know his name in a minute, lives on Park Avenue, has a house in Southampton, and his wife is always written up in Dolly De Longpre’s column. He likes to cross dress.” Or, “There is a Hollywood producer. Very important. You must have known him from your time there, when he was at Colossus. Old now. He only wants me to sleep by his side. Nothing more. Nothing ever happens. So sweet.” Or, “I’ve stopped seeing the rich Arabs entirely. Two of my girls have disappeared.” In turn, she would ask him about people he had written about. “I read your article about Faye Converse. She was always my favorite movie star, when I was growing up in Paris. Some people say I look like her. Do you think so?”
Leaving, Gus never handed her her money outright. In advance he placed the several hundred dollars in an envelope and left it on the hall table. It was only after he helped Ms. Myra into her black mink coat that he discreetly placed the envelope into her pocket.
“So sweet,” she said to him, touching his face. She reapplied her lipstick, using his chipped gilt mirror. Then she put on the evening hat she always wore and arranged a black veil over her face.
“Ravishing,” said Gus, smiling at her.
“So sweet,” she said again.
“Saturday,” he said.
“Saturday,” she repeated, acknowledging the date.
He opened the front door of the apartment to ring for the elevator.
“When does that man get out of prison?” she asked.
“Much too soon,” Gus answered. He never minded when she asked him questions that he would have minded from someone else.
“Does it worry you?”
“Yes.”
From below, he could hear the elevator.
“Did you ever hear of someone called Yvonne Lupescu?” he asked her.
She looked at him, and their eyes met. Then she lifted her hand to her face and assumed a pensive expression, as if she were searching her memory. “No,” she answered.
The elevator came. She got in and turned back to him as the door closed in front of her. They smiled at each other.
17
When Ezzie Fenwick looked in the mirror, he turned his head sideways so that he would not have to confront his peculiar eye, the one that looked off in a different direction entirely. If Ezzie could have had a say in his own physical formation, he would not only have given himself eyes that matched, but a pencil-slim silhouette as well, and higher eyebrows, and more height, but, alas, weight problems also plagued his life, and, in retaliation, he long ago discovered that solace for what God had denied him was to be found in clothes, for which he had a limitless passion. Each day, dressing, Ezzie Fenwick gave as much thought to combinations and compatible colors as Elias Renthal gave to making money and Nestor Calder gave to plots and characters.
On the day of Justine Altemus’s wedding, Ezzie Fenwick was fit to be tied. The lavender shirt with the violet monogram and the white collar and cuffs had not arrived from London as his shirtmaker there had promised it would, along with the eleven other shirts he had ordered weeks earlier, but the eleven other shirts didn’t matter, only the lavender shirt with the violet monogram and the white collar and cuffs, because Ezzie had expressly explained to his shirtmaker that he must have it finished and delivered in time to wear with his new pearl gray flannel suit, with the gray-and-white striped silk lining, to Justine Altemus’s wedding to the television announcer.
Constantine de Rham tapped his boiled egg with a knife and then, with a clean thrust, like a beheading, cut off the top of it, and proceeded to eat the egg from the shell in silence. Yvonne Lupescu, watching from her end of the table, knew when not to talk to Constantine and returned her eyes to Dolly De Longpre’s column, about the excitement in society over Justine Altemus’s wedding that day. She knew that Constantine’s anger was because he no longer was invited to the sort of rarefied social events, like Justine Altemus’s wedding, that he had been invited to during the years of his marriage to Consuelo.
When he left the breakfast table, carrying the Times, there was a look of hostility on his face that prevented her from telling him that there was egg on his chin. He walked very slowly past her to the door of the dining room, but he always moved slowly on the mornings after she had whipped him. She was aware that he never responded to her on those days, although it was he, never she, who instigated the arrangement and begged to be whipped. At the door, before walking out, he said his first words of the day to her, without turning to look at her. “I would like you to pack your bags and get out.”
“I never saw you in an outfit like that before,” said Juanito, lying on the bed as he watched Hubie dress for Justine’s wedding. Juanito was in one of his sullen moods, which always happened when Hubie had family obligations from which he was excluded.
“I don’t often wear striped trousers, a cutaway, spats, and a top hat,” said Hubie. “That’s why you never saw me dressed like this before.”
“I want to go to the wedding,” said Juanito. It was not the first time that day or that week that Juanito had said, “I want to go to the wedding.”
“You can’t,” said Hubie, patiently. It was not the first time that day or that week that Hubie had said, “You can’t.”
“Why?”
“You know why, Juanito. We’ve been through all this a hundred times.”
“Tio Laurance, I suppose,” said Juanito, doing a facial gesture of Uncle Laurance’s Van Degan grandeur that always made Hubie laugh.
“Yeah, that’s it. Tio Laurance. Not to mention Madre Lil. And Padre Hubert. And Hermana Justine. And todos los Van Degans.”
“I thought you said your sister liked me,” said Juanito, in his sulking voice.
“Well, she does, in her own way, but this is a situation she doesn’t want to have to deal with on her wedding day at St. James’s church. She’s already walking on eggs with her TV announcer.”
“You and your sister both go for the lower classes, it looks like.”
“Bernie’s not lower class. Just different from us.”
“But I’m lower class, right?”
“Come on, Juanito. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.” He opened his wallet and took out some bills and handed them to Juanito. “Go buy yourself that leather jacket you said you liked.”
“Don’t blow my low,” said Juanito.
“Sometimes you’re a real pain in the ass, Juanito,” said Hubie.
They both laughed. “You look classy, Hubie.”
“Thanks, Juanito. How does this look?” he asked, patting his chin. He had applied a flesh-colored makeup base where the skin of his chin was blemished.
“You could never tell.”
“Can you tell there’s makeup on over it?”
“No. I told you, you look great.”
“Listen.”
“What?”
“A church is a public place, even St. J
ames’s. I can’t keep you out of the church if you want to stand in the back and look.”
“You mean it?”
“They let the homeless stand in the back and look.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“But no Colony Club.” Hubie looked out the window of his loft. “My mother’s car is here.” He opened the window and called down, “I’ll be right down, Joe.”
“Joseph,” corrected Juanito. “You’re supposed to call your chauffeur Joseph, not Joe, for God’s sake.”
“Oh, is this something you know a lot about?” asked Hubie, amused.
“Sure, my family always had chauffeurs down in Puerto Rico.”
Hubie put on his top hat.
“Let me see you in your top hat,” said Juanito.
Hubie, shy, turned around.
“Give it a little angle,” said Juanito.
Hubie gave his hat a little angle.
“You look just like a swell.”
Hubie shrugged. “I am a swell.”
“Will you give me a ride uptown?” asked Juanito. “I never rode in a limo.”
“Let’s go.”
Juanito opened the door and, with a flourish, waved Hubie out the door.
“After you,” said Hubie.
“No, after you. AIDS before beauty.”
Hubie shook his head. “You’re a class act, Juanito.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t pee in my new bidet, Elias,” said Ruby. “It’s disgusting. The new maid is going to think we don’t know anything.”
“Let’s worry a lot what Candelaria with the harelip who can’t speak a word of English thinks about us,” said Elias.
“I’m not wearing too much jewelry, am I?” asked Ruby.
“You look great, Ruby. New dress?”
“Of course it’s new. Pretty soon they’re going to say about Ruby Renthal that she never wears the same dress twice. Do you think mink or sable?”
“Honey, I don’t know.”
“This is the first time we’ve been to one of these affairs where we haven’t had to buy tickets to get in.”
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