Phyllis made the reservations and made Jessica cancel her plans for a weekend on Long Island with her friends so that she could be there. Stasny himself seated them when they came in, gesturing to a waiter with a crook of his finger as he bent close to Jeffrey’s ear. “Your drinks will be presently, Monsieur Blaine,” he said.
Their waiter, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-suited, materialized immediately with the drinks they hadn’t ordered yet, a Bushmill’s on the rocks for Jeffrey, a chilled Chardonnay for Phyllis, a diet Coke for Jessica. They were given no menus. Stasny said, “Stasny makes the selection,” adding a flourish of the eyebrows that turned it into a question.
“Yes, please,” Jeffrey said.
Stasny bowed and withdrew. Jessica said, “Is he weird or what?”
“He’s very nice,” her mother corrected. “He is being extremely cooperative.”
“I’m sure Daddy’s paying him a fortune,” Jessica said.
“Then you could show some appreciation.”
“To Mr. Stasny?”
“And to your father.”
Jeffrey looked away, annoyed. It seemed to him that Phyllis was picking on the girl more and more lately, most of the time for no discernible reason. Jessica didn’t fall all over herself saying thank you, but she was certainly appreciative of the things she enjoyed in her life. Most of the girls in her set had no idea, really, of how privileged they were, but Jessica wasn’t like that in the least. She knew she was lucky and she even said so from time to time. “She expresses appreciation,” he said coldly, not looking at his wife.
Phyllis reached for her wine glass and looked around the room over the rim of it. She didn’t like being corrected, especially where Jessica was concerned. It had always been her belief that Jeffrey stood up for the girl too much and that this was why she was so spoiled. Sometimes, it seemed to her, it was as though the two of them had two different daughters.
Stasny joined them when the salads were served. Jessica let her mother do the talking, and the menu was finalized by the time the soup arrived.
Jessica, Amy, Grace, and Renée swept this way and that across the dining room with the force of a tide and the capriciousness of ripples on a pond, pushed and pulled by the need to talk to this boy, to that girl, to share a joke or whisper a story. Jeffrey’s eyes followed his daughter’s movements. He heard her tell someone, an older woman, one of Phyllis’s guests, that it was all so beautiful, really, just beautiful, and the warmth of her smile reached across the space to where Jeffrey stood watching, wanting only, first and last, to make his little girl happy.
Well, she was happy. Radiantly happy. He couldn’t have asked for more.
And yet, as he watched her, a distinct and troubling shiver ran the length of his back. There is a sense one has, when one has everything, that everything is surely enough. For a moment Jeffrey Blaine felt this, but the feeling never lasted. As always, other things got in the way. These were the times he could have cursed himself for his nervous inability to enjoy what he had.
Shaking off this unexpected and inexplicable feeling of discomfort, he told himself that it was time he checked outside. As he reached the front door, Jessica ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Daddy,” she gushed, hanging on him, “everything is so utterly perfect.”
He put his arms around her, tightening the hug. He felt her warmth the way he used to feel it when she was a baby and he had to carry her around the apartment until she fell asleep. They didn’t hug much anymore, because of her age, and he missed it. This felt good. Still, he found himself inexplicably unable to manage more than a forced and fleeting smile or to shake off that sense of sudden apprehension that seemed all the more gripping because there was no reason in the world to feel it. This was a recent thing, it seemed. It had been going on for less than a year. He nodded to Phyllis as he left, holding up a finger to indicate that he’d be back in a minute.
On the other side of the inner door, he paused for a slow, deep breath. He had no idea what was wrong. In fact, he doubted that anything was wrong. It was just that…
No, he almost said aloud, it wasn’t just anything. Everything was exactly as it should be. Almost all the guests had arrived, none of them kept away by the storm. Jessica’s guests, his guests, Phyllis’s. And Phyllis, of course, had overlooked nothing. In a closet in the office off the kitchen at this very moment there hung half a dozen dresses in different sizes—dresses by Badgley Mischka and Donna Karan, Carolina Herrera and Vera Wang, dresses with sequins and without, dresses in black and pink and turquoise, thousands of dollars’ worth of dresses—waiting on hangers just in case anything got spilled. Everything was under control. Everything had been foreseen and seen to. Jeffrey knew all this and knew that he had no business feeling anxious. Or restless. Or anything less than perfectly satisfied.
The problem, he told himself as he pushed open the street door, was simply that he was not the sort of man who could ever permit himself to settle into contentment. It was his nature to be restless. Nothing wrong with that. A man’s reach, etc., etc., whatever that saying was. If he was restless, he told himself, as he always did at moments like this, it was only because, even with all his success, even with the emblems and reminders of it all around him, there was still so much to be done with his life. He didn’t pursue this line of thought further because he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to say what exactly remained to be done, other than endlessly more of what he was doing already.
Sometimes, not often, but more often than he cared to acknowledge, the prospect made him numb.
Outside, the snow swirled around him as though the whole world were a shaken globe. Four sanitation workers in foul-weather gear swept the snow with broad, straight-bladed push-brooms. Beyond the small rectangle where they were working, to their left, to their right, across the street, and in the street, the snow was accumulating steadily, already more than three inches deep. But the broom battalion didn’t allow a single flake to settle in front of Stasny’s. A pair of garbage trucks with plows mounted on their front ends came around the corner from Lexington, one following on the other’s flank, their plow blades angled in opposite directions. As Jeffrey took a deep breath and walked out to the curb, enjoying the feel of the snow on his face and on his hair, a waiter, obviously acting on urgent orders from inside, rushed out from the restaurant clutching an umbrella, which he deployed over Jeffrey’s head with a push of a button and an explosion of springs. Startled, Jeffrey whirled to the young man. He hadn’t asked for an umbrella and his first impulse was to send it back. But that was impossible. The waiter would only be sent out again.
“Thank you,” Jeffrey said, resigned to having this person hovering over him as though he required looking after. He crossed the street to pay a courtesy call on the reporters and photographers herded behind police barricades set up well away from the restaurant entrance.
“Look,” he said, letting his eyes move from face to face as though these people were his friends, “we want to keep things orderly. The police tell me they don’t want any congestion in front, especially with this storm. I’ll see what I can do later to get you some pictures.”
No one quite believed him but that was okay because it wasn’t meant to be believed. The reporters knew they were on the other side of the street because Jeffrey Blaine wanted them there. But that was Blaine’s style. He got what he wanted but he made nice.
“Right,” one of the photographers had the bad grace to mutter loud enough to be heard.
Jeffrey came right back at him. “Lighten up,” he said. “It’s only a birthday party.”
The reporters all laughed.
“Ah, yes,” Noel Garver purred. “But not just any party. The party of parties. Isn’t that the idea?”
Noel Garver was an outlandishly gay and desperately alcoholic former actor, former novelist, and former journalist whose multiple careers had all come to a complete stop until a few years ago when he miraculously massaged his knack for cadging inv
itations into a position as society columnist for the Post. When he was too drunk to write, which was much of the time, his columns were ghosted from press releases by the twenty-two-year-old Princeton graduate who constituted Garver’s entire staff. But when he could manage it, he cranked out hilariously scathing commentaries on social events to which he nevertheless continued to be invited. His secret, insofar as he had one, was that he reserved his satire for the husbands who paid for the bashes, but was unfailingly kind, even generous, in his flattery of the hostesses. He never got too drunk at a party to remember who was wearing what or even who disappeared for how long with whose husband. It was Noel Garver who wrote the critique of Jessica’s seventeenth birthday party in which her father was compared to Ivan Boesky.
Which of course Jeffrey knew. And ignored. “Just a party, Noel,” he answered graciously.
Not even his eyes betrayed the animosity he felt for this man.
For just a minute Jessica wanted to be by herself. She stood at the side of the room, letting her eyes drift at random while she thought pleasantly satisfying thoughts about Eddie Vincenzo. He had the most beautiful black eyes she had ever seen.
She was in love with Eddie Vincenzo and her parents didn’t even know he existed. But they were going to find out tonight. The thought sent a delicious shiver down her back.
2
In her mind, if not out loud, Sharon Lamm was swearing like a sailor. She wasn’t a gossip columnist like the drunk standing next to her. She was a goddamned fucking journalist. She was a respected journalist. She hadn’t won any Pulitzer Prizes or anything like that, but she had been told on good authority that she had been considered for one. So what in heaven’s name was she doing covering the birthday party of the little bitch daughter of the big bitch wife of some arrogant prick with the cash and the connections to buy out Stasny’s for a night? The little cunt showed up in a blue silk dress that showed off her rather impressive and expensive set of tits. How was that for a lead? Oh, you don’t like it? Then you tell me how the hell you cover a birthday party. Do you pretend it’s news? How exactly do you do that?
For a moment she toyed with the notion of taking a taxi back to the office and plunging a letter opener all the way in between the shoulder blades of Herb Adkin, the moronic city editor with bad skin who dreamed up this pathetic excuse for an assignment. She didn’t even work for him. She was on the Wall Street desk, where a pusillanimous editor whose name she couldn’t even think without wanting to scream consented to lending her out to that imbecile Adkin, who actually believed that assigning a financial reporter to cover a birthday party would give the piece an interesting slant.
Sharon Lamm had found, over the years, that editors who talked about slants missed their calling. They should have been in television.
The drunk standing next to her was Noel Garver, who thought he was I. F. Stone and that East Forty-seventh Street was the Tonkin Gulf. He actually didn’t mind standing out in the snow because he swore, promised, guaranteed—that was the word he actually used, guaranteed—that before the party was over he would get inside, and that if Sharon was a good girl he’d let her come in with him.
It was tempting to tell him he was an asshole, and an alcoholic asshole at that, and that she had no more interest in being inside than she had in being outside. Unfortunately, she couldn’t say any of this, because she was here, and the only thing worse than being here at all was being here against one’s will. She would willingly succumb to hypothermia here in the snow before she let Mr. Noel Garver of the New York Post, or anyone else for that matter, know that she had been sent off on a story like a twenty-year-old kid just off the copy desk.
“Well, lookee here, what have we?” Garver crooned, screwing the silver cap back onto the flat silver flask he kept in his breast pocket. It bore the initials NFG in an elaborately filigreed script.
“No Fucking Good?” Sharon asked the first time he offered her a drink.
He grinned that grin that showed off a row of tiny teeth, like chicken teeth, she thought, perfectly aware that chickens don’t have teeth but amused by the notion anyway. “That’s probably what my parents had in mind,” he said, “but no, my middle name is Frederick.”
Sharon looked where Garver was looking. She saw four young men walking down the street. There was a swagger to the way they walked. These weren’t just any young men, although it wasn’t quite clear what made them special. Maybe it was the way they walked, commanding the sidewalk as though anyone else who happened along in the opposite direction—there was no one else, but that didn’t matter—would have to make way. Gangs walked like this, but gang kids lacked the intense purposefulness that seemed to flow from these young men with a palpable wave of energy. They were wearing suits, and they seemed comfortable in suits. Not preppy suits. Slick and shining, like their hair, wet with the snow. The one in front, Sharon noticed before laughing at herself for the observation, was a strikingly handsome young man, black-haired, with the deepest of deep black eyes and an intense set to his jaw.
Under the spell of those gorgeous eyes, she found herself wondering where they might be going and wishing for a moment that she could go with them. It sure as hell beat staking out a rich girl’s birthday party. They looked like they knew how to have a good time.
Like a well-drilled phalanx, the four young men swung around in formation and moved up the stoop to the door of Stasny’s establishment.
It seemed to be a mistake. It had to be a mistake.
She glanced to Garver. Who shrugged and grinned, showing his row of chicken teeth.
For three years Elaine Lester had been dating a man named Gil Gehringer. She met him at the gym. He was thirty-eight years old, a professor of literature at Columbia University who was working on a novel. She was impressed with the parts he let her read. He had a good mind and a keenly satiric sense of humor. As a couple, they were solicitous of each other’s feelings and respectful of each other’s careers. They enjoyed an active and exciting sex life together. It was a problem, but not much of a problem, that neither one of them was in love with the other.
The men in her office were shocked when an engagement announcement appeared in the Sunday Times. Gilbert Gehringer came from a wealthy family from Katonah and the announcement was his mother’s idea. No one in the office could imagine their Dragon Lady seriously involved with a man, or even not seriously, although it had been suggested more than once that something along those lines was just what she needed. They assumed that her social life consisted of reading case files at home. She was, in fact, a beautiful woman, tall and slender, small-breasted but with great hips. They all grudgingly acknowledged her fine and at moments even splendid qualities, but what good was having an ass like that when she was so damned serious all the time?
When she got to the office the Monday morning after the announcement, the first thing she saw on her desk was a copy of the Times opened to the social page. A moment later half a dozen young lawyers appeared in the doorway to her cubicle. She took their teasing well. “And all this time you thought all I needed was a good fuck,” she said.
They all laughed and Elaine enjoyed laughing with them. If Elaine Lester had laughed at all in the past three years, it wasn’t at the office.
That was only Monday, four days ago. Now, on Friday night, with a gorgeous February snowstorm careening around her, Elaine put on her coat and went out onto the balcony of Gil’s Claremont Avenue apartment. It was a back apartment and the balcony faced the river. She could barely make out Grant’s Tomb to her left in the swirling snow. Beyond the highway, the snow vanished into the black waters of the Hudson River, blacker than she had ever seen it, catching no light from either shore. Gil came out to join her, and they stood in silence for a moment, enjoying the storm together. Then she said, “I’m not so sure this is such a good idea, Gil.”
Gil didn’t even have to ask her what she meant. “No,” he said, “I’m not sure either.”
They were both relieved that it was
over. After watching the snow a few more minutes, they went inside and made love, and then after a little while Elaine got out of bed and went home to her own apartment in Chelsea.
She figured she would wait until Monday, while he was teaching a class, to go back to his apartment for her things.
Eddie Vincenzo had his invitation in his hand even before the maître d’ came up to him, double time, a sense of urgency in his eyes and in his stride. He was preparing for a confrontation. He held out his hand for the invitation but only glanced at it when Eddie presented it. He seemed to be more interested in Eddie’s polyester suit, his slicked-back hair, and his three friends cut from the same cloth.
“Hey, I’m sorry, this is the best I could do,” Eddie smiled ingratiatingly. “I’m a friend of Jessica’s.”
The maître d’ returned Eddie’s smile in a very perfunctory way. He was British. His name was Franklin, and he didn’t like being a hard-ass. “You are not headmaster of school,” Stasny had explained long before the first guest arrived. “You are host. If there must be headmaster of school, I am headmaster of school.”
“Could you wait right here a moment?” Franklin suggested.
“Hey, no problem,” Eddie said, grinning. “You’re doing your job.”
When Franklin turned to walk away, Eddie said, “One thing.” There was an edge in his voice, as though the one thing wouldn’t be anything Franklin wanted to hear.
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