Elias, surprised, replied, “I was rather hoping you’d fly out here.”
“I’ve spent so many Christmases here, Elias, and I’m simply not going to go through it again. Singing Christmas carols with all those prisoners and their wives and all those crying children, and the warden and his pushy wife who wants to be my best friend. Not to mention that awful turkey dinner with the cold mashed potatoes and the thick gravy. No, thank you very much. I can’t, Elias. I just can’t do that again. I hate it when the prisoners’ wives all call me Ruby. ‘Got any room in your private plane to fly me and the kids back to Newark, Ruby?’ I could die when they do that.”
“Ruby, you’re no different from any of those prisoners’ wives out there, except that you have a private plane and a husband with a billion dollars. You’re a prisoner’s wife. Max Luby tells me people in New York refer to you as The Convict’s Wife.”
“I can always count on Max Luby to come through with the definitive statement on just about anything in my life,” said Ruby bitterly.
“I heard they turned you down for membership at the Corviglia Club in St. Moritz,” said Elias.
“Who told you that?” she snapped.
“A little birdie.”
“It’s all because of you,” she hissed. “They told Chiquita Chatfield, who was one of my sponsors, that they couldn’t have a member whose husband was in prison.”
“Let me tell you something, Ruby. Say, just say, it was Loelia Manchester Minardos who was in the same predicament you were in, with a husband in the clink. She’d have gotten in. We may have the money, but she has the class. In those circles, that’s what counts.”
Ruby looked at Elias. She knew he was right.
“I learned a little about society during the nine years we were in it,” said Elias. “Imagine what an asshole I was to have paid a million dollars to put a new roof on Chiquita and Bunny Chatfield’s castle, just so they’d have to start inviting us to the shoots, and now she can’t even pull her Duchess of Chatfield weight to get you into the Corviglia Club.” He shook his head. He remembered himself in his shooting tweeds, made to order by Huntsman in London, with his Lobb boots laced up in front. He had been on top of the world then, shooting at Deeds Castle with Bunny Chatfield and his weekend party. He knew he’d never wear those clothes again after he got out of prison, even if the Chatfields asked them out of courtesy. He knew he’d lost the panache to carry off that kind of dressing anymore. The light within him that had made him such a favorite with the aristocrats had gone out, and he knew it.
“You still haven’t gotten those people straight, Ruby. You still want to be one of them. It’ll never be the same for either one of us. I know about the baron in Paris, who went back to his dyke wife rather than marry you. She may like to rub her face in hair pie, but she has lineage, like a title, and a family château and all that stuff. You don’t. You’re tarnished goods, Ruby. They used to call you The Billionaire’s Wife; now they call you The Convict’s Wife. I know why you remarried me. You had no place else to go, and I still had a billion dollars, even after all the fines, and a plane at your full-time disposal. I was the best that you could do.”
Ruby started to cry. “Prison’s changed you, Elias,” she said. She looked at him. She realized that he didn’t love her anymore. “You always said we were a wonderful partnership. We could still be that, you know.”
CHAPTER 3
“KYLE CRAMDEN, THE CALIFORNIA CONGRESSMAN, is suing you personally, Gus. He is not suing Park Avenue. It’s not libel, you see. It’s slander,” said Mitch Weill, the lead lawyer for the publishing empire, Forward, that owned Park Avenue. They were sitting in the office of the editor, Stokes Bishop, along with the associate editor, Lenore Cummings, and Gus’s personal editor, Lance Wilson, who had edited every story Gus had written for the magazine for the last twenty-odd years. He feared he was going to be fired, even though he was long past retirement age.
Outside, the city, as seen from the twenty-second-floor office, had never been more beautiful. People had finally adjusted to the missing twin towers of the World Trade Center that had so drastically changed the skyline. “That’s where they used to be,” Stokes always said to people who were in his office for the first time.
Inside Stokes Bishop’s office, everyone was uncomfortable. They had all worked together for years and were friends, except for the lawyer, Mitch Weill, whom Gus had never met before. Gus was miserable and ashamed to be in the position that he was in.
He was being sued for slander for something he said on Patience Longstreet’s under-watted radio show. It was broadcast only in limited locations. The audience for Patience’s show was minimal. The following day, Patience, in an effort to publicize her show and increase her audience, telephoned Gus’s amazing story in to Toby Tilden, the gossip columnist of the New York Post. It was that column that quoted Gus as having said that Diandra Lomax had been kidnapped by five Middle Eastern men who drugged her and put her onto a commercial-size private jet heading for Saudi Arabia and that Kyle Cramden knew all about it. It was the fake story, brilliantly told, that Gus had fallen for hook, line, and sinker. In months to come, Toby Tilden’s gossip column turned out to be the main reason that former congressman Kyle Cramden sued Gus Bailey for slander, and that’s where his troubles had begun.
Gus knew he had more in him to write, despite the enormous embarrassment of having fallen for a false story of national importance and having told it on a radio interview. As he sat in a very modern steel and black leather chair, his posture was that of defeat, a posture he had not experienced for twenty years.
“Yes, I understand that,” he said in reply to Mitch Weill’s statement. It was he who was being sued, not the magazine, and he would therefore be responsible for legal fees and restitution. What he was thinking at that moment was that there would be nothing left to leave Grafton and Sandro, his sons, when he died, or Sarah, his granddaughter, whom he had promised to educate in the best schools in the land. Feelings of failure overwhelmed him. Failure was a state he had experienced before, until late-life success had defeated it, or so he thought. Failure was a word that he feared.
Mitch Weill stood up to leave, his mission accomplished. “I’m going to call Flora Dickens. She’s with the Los Angeles firm of Erskine, Sondheim, and Hollerith, but she’s in the Washington office, and she’s the best in this field. I’ll have her call you.”
“You mean she’s not here in New York?” asked Gus.
“No,” replied Mitch.
“Won’t that be difficult, having a lawyer who lives in a different city?” asked Gus.
“Oh, no, not at all. We do it all the time.”
“With this sort of case?” asked Gus.
“Flora Dickens is the best there is,” replied Mitch, in a bragging tone. “She was number one in her class at law school. Editor of the Law Review.”
“Thank you,” said Gus. He shook hands and said good-bye to Mitch. He didn’t like him. He also bid farewell to Lance and Lenore, who filed out behind Mitch, leaving him alone with Stokes Bishop.
“I talked to Hy Vietor in Vienna this morning,” said Stokes, lowering his voice, although they were now the only two in the room. Hy Vietor owned the vast publishing empire of which Park Avenue was an entity. “The magazine is going to stand behind you. You’ve been our most popular writer for over twenty years. You helped make this magazine.”
“Thanks,” said Gus. “I was beginning to think everyone had forgotten that.” The fear of being poor again terrified him. He had had the experience once. He didn’t want to have it again.
“But you’ve got to keep that under your lid. That can’t get out,” said Stokes, continuing in his low cautionary voice. “We can’t pay your legal bills because we haven’t been sued, but you will be given a bonus when this is over to cover all of them.”
“Oh, God. Thanks,” said Gus.
Stokes leaned back in his chair and studied Gus. “You’re like a zombie,” said Stokes, louder now
that business had been taken care of. Editor and writer they were, with Gus in the subservient position, as Stokes was the one who renewed his contract year after year. They liked each other. Gus always said about Stokes Bishop, when people who didn’t know him asked about him, “Stokes is a great editor. He’s made Park Avenue the most successful magazine in the country, maybe the world.” And Stokes often said about Gus, when he was being interviewed, “Wherever I go, people ask me about him.” They were part of a team.
“I feel like a zombie,” replied Gus.
“Are you going out? Are you seeing people?” asked Stokes.
“No. I’ve canceled out of every speech, every lecture, and most parties. I was supposed to have lunch at the Four Seasons tomorrow with Beatrice Parsons about the new novel, but I moved lunch to the coffee shop at the Waldorf,” said Gus.
“No! That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. Call Beatrice and change your lunch back to the Four Seasons, or Michael’s. See people. Go out. Go to the parties. Don’t hide,” said Stokes.
Gus looked at him searchingly. “Do you think my career’s ruined? I can’t believe I fell for that bogus story. I wish I’d taped the call, Stokes. He was calling from a horse farm in Dubai, where he was training the polo ponies of an emir. That’s what he does for a living, all over the Middle East. All those sheikhs and sultans have polo ponies or race horses. First he told me his father had been a friend of John Steinbeck’s. Then he said that Elia Kazan, whom he called Gadge, which only Kazan’s closest friends called him, had asked him to teach James (he called him Jimmy) Dean to be a Salinas boy. This was how he caught my interest, which was his intent. Then he started telling me about the kidnapping of Diandra Lomax, which was the point of the call. I still can’t understand why he picked me to call and spin his tale to.”
“Gus, you’re not ruined. You’re news,” said Stokes. “Just imagine Kyle Cramden on the witness stand here in New York. Look at the kind of life the guy leads. It’s in all the tabloids now. This trial’s going to be sensational. Christine Saunders, everyone will be covering it.”
“I wish those words brought joy to me, but they don’t,” said Gus. “I don’t want to be in the papers, or on the television news.”
THAT NIGHT GUS read about himself again in Toby Tilden’s column in the New York Post, which was mean-spirited on every occasion when he was mentioned in connection with his slander suit. BAILEY’S BOGUS SOURCE ID’D was the headline that day. “What a shit he is,” said Gus about Toby Tilden. A reporter friend of Gus’s had told him that Win Burch, Kyle Cramden’s lawyer, had a close relationship with a junior member of Toby Tilden’s staff.
“That explains a lot,” said Gus, resigned. He then reminded himself that Stokes was in his corner and his legal fees would be paid for. I could hug Stokes, he thought before drifting off into the most restful sleep he’d had in some time.
CHAPTER 4
WHEN IT CAME TO NEW YORK RESIDENTIAL real estate at a very high level, there was no one wiser that Maisie Verdurin. Fifteen years earlier she had been a respected art dealer and gallery owner who became fascinated by the real estate business and the riches that could be made from it. Her switch from one high-powered career to another was highly publicized and rated a cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.
It was Maisie who arranged the secret meeting with Ruby Renthal in the tearoom of the Neue Galerie on Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, which at one time was the New York residence of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was for three decades the most notable figure in New York society. Maisie and Ruby pretended to run into each other at the Christian Schad exhibit. “Hello. How are you? How lovely to see you. Don’t you adore that picture of the chic dyke with the monocle standing at the bar in Berlin? Elias would be simply mad about that picture. Let’s have a cup of tea.” They sat in the far corner of the nearly empty tearoom.
“It just occurred to me that the very first major painting Elias and I ever bought back in the old days was from you,” said Ruby.
“I remember it well,” said Maisie. “A Monet of water lilies. That was when you first came to New York.”
“I loved that picture,” said Ruby, taking a sip of her tea. “We had Cora Mandell paint the walls of the living room where it hung over the fireplace the same color pink as the inside of the lilies.”
“What ever happened to it?”
“Storage, I suppose,” Ruby answered with a sigh.
Maisie smiled, lifting her teacup to her lips. Then she looked at Ruby squarely.
“Not for long. We’re here to talk about where you and Elias are going to hang that Monet, and I think I’ve got just the place. You know the old Tavistock mansion on East Seventy-eighth, between Fifth and Madison?”
“It’s a bit run-down, don’t you think?”
A broken-down mansion was not at all what Ruby had in mind for the new life she envisioned for herself and her husband, who was still a billionaire several times over, despite the enormity of his fines. Ruby very definitely knew the ten buildings in New York where she wanted to live—four on Fifth Avenue, three on Park Avenue, one on Gracie Square, one on Sutton Place, and one at Fifty-second Street and the East River.
“You’ve got to be practical, Ruby,” said Maisie. “You’re in quite a different position in New York now than you were before Elias went to prison for seven years. The buildings you want to live in don’t want someone with a prison record to blacken their exclusivity. I don’t care who you know on the board, the boards on those buildings are not going to accept you, and it’ll be all over town that you got turned down and then it’ll be in Toby Tilden’s column in the Post that you’ve been blackballed by the ten best buildings on the Upper East Side. That’s not going to be a good start for your return to New York.”
Ruby turned red. It embarrassed her to hear this, but she knew that it was true.
Maisie knew what she was talking about. Several months earlier she had taken it upon herself to meet with Lil Altemus, who was still the president of the board of her Fifth Avenue apartment house. She had only to speak the name Renthal to get a negative reaction.
“Never!” said Lil Altemus firmly. “Never, never, never. That man has been in prison.”
“But isn’t it true that you are leaving the building, Lil?” Maisie asked.
“If you must know, yes,” replied Lil, rolling her eyes. “I am being downsized by my nephew, who handles my money now that my brother, Laurance, is incapacitated by his stroke. But be that as it may, I am still the president of the board and will be so until I leave. Further, I can assure you that my successor and friend Binkie Bosworth will give you the same answer.”
“What if Elias Renthal were willing to buy your own apartment for five million more than what you are asking?” suggested Maisie.
“I wouldn’t sell it to him in the first place, and I really do need the money,” said Lil. Maisie liked her honesty. Not many people in Lil’s kind of life would admit that they were broke, she thought.
“And in the second place, Elias Renthal would be turned down by Binkie Bosworth and the whole board.”
Maisie treaded lightly.
“Elias Renthal has served his time,” she stated gently. “From what I gather, he was a model prisoner, admired by both the guards and the prisoners.”
“Good for him. Hurrah! Hurrah! Applause, applause,” said Lil, clapping her hands in fake praise. “I will never forget that my father died in the Renthals’ house on the night of their ridiculous butterfly ball, and he laid my father, Laurance Van Degan, one of the most important and distinguished men in the city of New York, on the pool table and locked the door so that it wouldn’t ruin his two-million-dollar party. Let’s talk about something else, Maisie.”
Maisie, who was known to be expert in selling problematic rich people to buildings with difficult boards, knew when she was beaten.
“LISTEN, RUBY, it’s better that you hear this from me, an old friend of yours and Elias’s, rather than from
some hoity-toity society lady who’s dabbling in real estate and will tell the girls at lunch at Swifty’s that you turned red when you heard you wouldn’t be found acceptable in any of the buildings you wanted to live in. I heard it directly from Lil Altemus, who was the head of her board.”
“Lil Altemus!” cried Ruby, with contempt in her voice. “Who cares what her opinion is anymore? I saw her standing in line for the Madison Avenue bus the other day.”
“Lil’s a terrible snob, I know, but she’s old school and she once mattered a great deal in New York. She’s going through bad times,” said Maisie. “I’ve always been fond of Lil.”
“Hmm,” replied Ruby. She couldn’t wait to get even with that broke bitch for blackballing her and Elias.
“Who’s the new head of the board now that Lil can’t afford to live there anymore?”
“Binkie Bosworth, and she thinks the same way that Lil does,” said Maisie.
“It’s not prison-prison, you know, where Elias is in Las Vegas. There are no bars on the windows. He has a little room, not a cell, and he has his own television, and all the latest DVDs, and he gets the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post every day, and he never misses reading Kit Jones’s and Dolores De Longpre’s columns. I mean, there are no killers or rapists there, or anyone like that,” said Ruby.
“It’s still prison, Ruby,” said Maisie in a matter-of-fact manner. “Elias will have done seven years by the time he gets out. Having been in prison for seven years is going to be the first line of his obituary when he dies no matter what amount of good works he intends to do when he is released. Prison is part of your life now, for the rest of your life. He’ll never be in a room where someone’s not going to ask him about it, or, worse, whisper about it to other people while he’s there. No one’s going to forget it, so deal with it, make it work for you.”
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