It was a tone Franklin hadn’t heard quite so clearly since his own boyhood in East London. It was one of those meaningless phrases the tough kids with the scars above their eyebrows said when you tried to walk away from them. You turned and you caught a right hook on the cheekbone. Not that Franklin expected a right hook here in America, at Stasny’s, at a birthday party. Still, there was no mistaking the challenge in the young man’s voice, sly and assured. Franklin turned back to him, expecting that no good would come of it.
“Yes?” he said.
“I wouldn’t check with her folks if I were you,” the young man answered. “I’d check with Jessica.”
“My instructions are to check all, um—”
“Questionable cases,” Eddie suggested.
Franklin smiled in spite of himself. This wasn’t something one saw very much of among young people these days. Franklin himself had a son almost this boy’s age who never would have been capable of realizing he was a questionable case. One couldn’t help being impressed with the young man’s worldliness.
“I’ll check with Mr. Blaine or Mrs. Blaine, yes,” he said with cold professionalism, giving no hint of his admiration.
“And they’ll tell you we don’t exist,” Eddie said, with a gesture that took in his three friends. “There must be some mistake, that’s what they’re going to say.”
“Then it’s a good thing I check with them, isn’t it?”
“Except I’m going to say, ‘No, it’s no mistake, check with your daughter.’ You see what I’m saying?”
Franklin saw. Of course he saw. Franklin was no fool. In American families like the Blaines, the children were nothing less than a permanent obsession. The sheer magnitude of their dependence gave them appalling power, the way a house one sinks one’s fortune into shapes one’s spirit more than the spirit shapes the house. Which was simply a more abstract way of saying that teenage girls who are given seventy-five-thousand-dollar birthday parties can pretty much do as they please. Affairs with dangerous boys were never out of the question because nothing was out of the question.
Already the Blaine girl was walking toward him, looking past Franklin to Eddie and his three friends, all blond hair and pale skin and pale pink lips and the palest of blue silk. She kissed this young man on the lips and said, “I thought you were never going to get here.”
Franklin stepped aside and let the boys pass just as the band started to play with an explosion of drums.
Phyllis and Jeffrey saw none of this. As a matter of tact, they were keeping themselves almost exclusively on the side of the dining room reserved de facto for the adult guests. They were planning to take a tour of the “young people’s” side of the room just before dinner, which was scheduled to be served shortly before ten. At that time they would socialize with their daughter’s friends for a few minutes, welcoming them with all the grace at their disposal, encouraging them to have a good time, accepting their gratitude. It was only a little after nine when Eddie Vincenzo and his friends walked through the door, which meant that for more than half an hour Phyllis and Jeffrey had no idea that anything untoward was under way.
Phyllis gasped when she saw them. She was talking with Carly Westergaard, who was on Jessica’s soccer team and had won what amounted to an athletic scholarship to Wesleyan. She was a short, boyish girl, powerfully built, who knew how to capitalize on the popularity she won on the playing field. Her family was Dutch, like the Roosevelts, with whom Carly’s grandparents and great-grandparents had shared weekends upstate. Phyllis was just congratulating the girl on the scholarship, which of course would be turned back to the college, when she noticed three Italian boys moving around the edge of the dance floor. They couldn’t have looked more Italian if they had been selling cannoli from pushcarts. It looked to Phyllis, from where she was standing, as though they had drinks in their hands.
“Excuse me,” she said, interrupting herself in the middle of a sentence. “I’ll talk to you later.”
She hurried off in search of her husband. She found him in what looked like an earnest conversation with Longley Millsap, a Collegiate boy who would be going to Harvard in the fall. “Jeffrey,” she interrupted in an urgent tone that left no room for apology.
That was all she said, but when she turned to locate the three interlopers, Jeffrey’s eyes followed hers.
“Please,” she said. “Find out who they are.”
Drinks were now in the hands of Amy Laidlaw, Grace Tunney, and Renée Goldschmidt, Jessica’s closest friends, and the boys had them surrounded like sheepdogs around sheep.
Jeffrey made his way across the floor toward them, weaving among the guests like a holiday shopper hurrying up Fifth Avenue. When he got to them, the drinks were back in the hands of the young men. Jeffrey nodded to the girls but addressed himself to the nearest boy, who happened also to be the smallest, a stocky kid at least twenty years old, probably a few years older. “I’m Mr. Blaine,” he said. “I don’t believe I know who you are.”
“Friends of Eddie’s,” the kid answered.
“Eddie?”
From behind him, his daughter said, “Daddy, I’d like you to meet Eddie Vincenzo.”
There was a certain portentousness to I’d like you to meet that signified far more than Jeffrey, or any father for that matter, could possibly deal with in the middle of a party. The boy was good-looking in a way that made matters even worse, an arrogant sort of way available only to those who know themselves to be sexually irresistible. It was the kind of charm Jeffrey would have liked to believe his daughter could have resisted easily. Apparently not. He couldn’t help wondering how well he knew his own child.
She had her arm around the young man’s waist.
“It’s a wonderful party, Mr. Blaine. I’m glad to meet you,” this Eddie character said, offering his hand.
Jeffrey shook his hand but spoke to his daughter. “Am I forgetting something? I don’t remember his name on the invitation list.”
“He was on my list,” Jessica said. “Don’t you remember Mommy said I could…”
Jeffrey remembered and waved off the rest of her explanation. She had asked for permission to send out some invitations on her own. Neither Jeffrey nor Phyllis understood why she would want to do that. All her friends, and their dates, were on the list anyway.
Clearly that wasn’t the case, Jeffrey realized with a very unpleasant sense of disorientation, even perhaps betrayal. In a family that prided itself on having no secrets, here was a secret. His daughter had friends neither he nor her mother knew about. He wanted to say something sharp, something that would make her realize that her parents’ trust was not something to be trifled with.
“And these other young men were on your list as well?” His tone left no room for possible misunderstanding.
The three young men all sipped on their drinks as though the conversation didn’t in the least concern them. Jeffrey took some satisfaction, but not much, from the fact that the boy with Jessica, the one she introduced as Eddie, didn’t have a drink.
“That’s right,” Jessica answered in the cold and precise tone she used whenever she was faced with parental disapproval. “They’re friends of Eddie’s. George is Amy’s date.”
Jeffrey didn’t know which one was George. It didn’t matter. This was neither the time nor the place to deal with the larger issues involved. “I’m not going to ask them for identification,” he said. “I assume if they have drinks in their hands that they’re over twenty-one.”
“Yeah, we are,” one of the boys said, although he certainly hadn’t been spoken to.
“Fine,” Jeffrey said. “Just don’t let me see any of you sharing those drinks with Jessica’s friends. We wouldn’t want the party to end on a note like that.”
This was the strongest threat at his disposal. None of the young people said anything. Silence was the response Jeffrey wanted, and so he waited a moment to assure himself that he got it. Then he told them all to enjoy themselves and walked away. H
e could hear the urgently melodramatic whispers with which Renée and Amy and Grace questioned Jessica the moment his back was turned. What was that about? What did you say? My dad would have had a total fit.
He smiled to himself as he made his way back to Phyllis, pleased with the way he’d handled the situation, getting his point across without having to resort to a total fit. “They’re friends of Jessica’s,” he told her
“What do you mean, friends of Jessica’s? They’re drinking.”
“They’re twenty-one,” he said. “At least.”
“At least?”
“They look older.”
“For god’s sake, Jeffrey, she’s eighteen years old.”
“They’re friends of Jessica’s,” he repeated. “I don’t think we can inquire into that tonight.”
A few minutes before ten, Erill Stasny came out of the kitchen to inspect the room and the attentive rank of waiters lined along the wall by the kitchen door, a general reviewing the troops before battle. Jessica and Eddie Vincenzo happened to be near the kitchen door at the time. She thanked Mr. Stasny for a wonderful party.
“You are enjoying, Ms. Blaine?” he asked.
“Very much.”
“And you, Edward?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Great. Really.”
“Ah, this is the important thing,” Stasny purred. “Everybody must enjoy. You sit down now. We eat in two moments. Perfection. You see.”
He floated off, snapping his fingers to the waiters, who dutifully filed into the kitchen.
For just a second a question flashed through Jessica’s mind. How did Mr. Stasny know Eddie’s name? If she had been more collected, she would have asked herself if she had introduced them. She was certain she hadn’t. Maybe the puckish restaurateur had studied the guest list. Maybe that was what you had to do if you ran an exclusive restaurant. If she had thought these questions through, she probably would have said more than simply, “Have you ever been here, Eddie?” and he would have had to say more than just “C’mon.”
Because it was silly. This was Eddie Vincenzo, whom she met at a convenience store on York Avenue one morning when she stopped in with Amy Laidlaw for Amy to get a pack of cigarettes, and he was at the counter buying a lottery ticket, his truck double-parked at the curb. This was Eddie Vincenzo, who never in a million years would have seen the inside of a restaurant like Stasny’s if it weren’t for the fact that Amy turned out not to have the price of a pack of cigarettes, and while Jessica looked in all her pockets Eddie Vincenzo put a five on the counter and said, “My treat.”
They both thought he was beautiful, and when they walked out to the street together, he said, “You girls go to school around here?”
They showed him where, and when they reached the school gate, it was Jessica he asked if she were free that afternoon.
Amy settled in the end for being introduced to Georgie Vallo. She called him George because she couldn’t understand a grown man being called Georgie.
3
The band had been told that they didn’t have to play through dinner. Johnny Balls and Jake August, the lead singer and the bassist, took advantage of the opportunity and went outside to check out the snowstorm, but the other two remained at their posts, the guitarist settling into a series of gentle obligato riffs mixed in with some intricate jazzlike fingering, while the drummer dug into his kit for a set of brushes he hadn’t used in years. The two musicians looked as mellow and relaxed as they sounded. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.
No one, especially the kids, expected anything like this from Falling Rock Zone. Chris Mamoulian, a Trinity senior whose father started out as an A&R man at Columbia Records and now ran his own label, led his date to the bandstand and struck up a conversation with the drummer as though he meant to sign him for his father’s company.
The music set a pleasantly relaxed tone for the dinner, which turned out to be everything Stasny promised. The braised duck, the oyster-stuffed shrimp, and the roast lamb were especially popular, recommended by the waiters and earning sighs of satisfaction and enthusiastic congratulations when Stasny himself came out of the kitchen after the main course had been served. The soups had been exquisite as well, the salad—only one salad was ever served on any given night at Stasny’s—so crisp and tart it sent shivers down people’s backs.
The only ones not enjoying themselves were Jeffrey and Phyllis Blaine, who kept finding excuses to get up from their table and wander at least far enough to look over at where Jessica was sitting with her three best friends and their four dark-haired beaux. Nothing seemed to be going on, at least as far as alcohol was concerned. But that wasn’t the question, was it? Phyllis knew already that no good would come of this. She believed in the magic of blood and breeding with an intensity found only among those who were born with neither. Twenty-odd years ago she came east after graduating from Macalester and found Jeffrey Blaine within a matter of months. Success was already written all over him. He wasn’t at Layne Bentley yet, and hadn’t really staked out any territory of his own, but it was clear that the world would be his before very long. He was the first boy she had ever fallen in love with, and she knew before they had been dating six months that he would give her the kind of life she knew she wanted. She expected they would have three children but settled happily for one, upon whom she lavished every possible attention, whose proper upbringing became the center and focus of her life. She saw in Jessica the perfect culmination of her own journey. She had made no detours and she expected none from her daughter.
Jeffrey didn’t see it quite the same way, perhaps because he regretted to some extent the straightness of the path his own life had followed. In retrospect, he wouldn’t have minded a few false starts, a few wrong turns before he finally found himself on the right road, and that made him willing to tolerate in Jessica the kinds of errors he himself had never made.
Besides, he wasn’t quite as convinced as he knew he should have been that the young man sitting next to his daughter, her head bent to him with all the intensity of adolescent intimacy, was ipso facto as objectionable as he appeared to be. Obviously, there was an element of betrayal in the secrecy of her relationship with this boy, as well as in the sheer presumption of presenting him to her parents as a conspicuously accomplished fact. Jeffrey himself, to the best of his knowledge, had never betrayed anyone, certainly not his parents and certainly not their painfully arrived at expectations. All the more reason, he thought, to see how this thing played itself out.
Amy Laidlaw stared at her dessert as though it were alive and moving around on the plate. Her head floated back and forth with the effort of keeping it in one place. George put his arm around her and she sagged onto his shoulder. Grace and Renée were almost as drunk.
Jessica looked over at Eddie and smiled. She put her hand on his and said, “I think she is totally totaled.”
Eddie shrugged. He hadn’t had anything to drink because Jessica asked him not to. Besides, he never drank much anyway and never got drunk even when he did.
The others had flasks from which they topped off the girls’ Cokes under the table.
Georgie stood up and said “C’mon.” He put a hand under Amy’s arm and helped her to her feet.
“Where are you going?” Jessica laughed. “You’re not going to try and make her dance, are you?”
The band was back and had started playing again as the dessert service ended.
Amy swayed on her feet. “I don’t think I can dance, Georgie,” she said, and then giggled. “I just called you Georgie, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did,” he said. “C’mon.”
He led her across the room.
“Where are they going?” Jessica asked again. This time she asked Eddie.
“It’s all right,” Eddie said.
“He’s not taking her home, is he?”
She sounded horrified at the idea that the party would end so early for her closest friend.
“They’ll be back,” Eddie s
aid. He asked her to dance.
The band specialized in a kind of screaming punk music, but tonight, free of their amplifiers and microphones, they turned all their best songs, “Birthday Loser,” “Grimkeeper,” “Rodeo Drive Explosion,” into pulsing rhythmic numbers where the melodies, normally hidden in the overwhelming bass line, emerged in unexpected places. Johnny Balls, it turned out, knew how to do things with the lyric, twisting his usual shout into a kind of brittle irony. Which wouldn’t have been a surprise to his fans if they knew that ten years ago Johnny Balls was Johnny Gill, with a Top 40 hit covering Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes.”
Eddie held her close and they danced slow to a fast song. It was, she was thinking, the most wonderful birthday party ever. Even her parents, she reflected mellowly, were behaving decently. They could have made a scene about Eddie and his friends, but they didn’t. Not that they wouldn’t later, but that was okay.
When Jessica and Eddie got back to their table, Grace and Renée and their dates were gone as well.
There were four private dining rooms at Stasny’s. They were upstairs. Each had been a bedroom before the conversion of the town house into a restaurant. Each contained only a single table for two and an Early American breakfront that held a king’s ransom in gold-inlaid china, eighteenth-century crystal, silver service, and linens. There was also a sitting area with a love seat and two brocaded chairs. The two largest rooms had fireplaces, but even the smallest of the four was ample enough to allow for the substitution of a larger table, although this was rarely done.
Even some of the most celebrated of Stasny’s best customers didn’t know of the existence of these rooms. The Clintons had been in one of the private dining rooms. So had Lauren Bacall, because Stasny admired her films. Rupert Murdoch. And Princess Diana the last time she was in New York before she died. But Governor Pataki, on the rare occasions when he was in town, was seated in the main dining room along with everybody else. The mayor ate in the main dining room. So did Arnold and Maria. So did Peter Jennings and Joe Torre, Bill Gates and Wayne Gretzky. Society-column pundits never troubled themselves trying to divine the laws of social hierarchy that dictated who got a private room and who didn’t for the simple reason that they didn’t even know there were such rooms. Erill Stasny knew how to keep a secret.
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