Compliments of a Friend

by Susan Isaacs

  “I’m only repeating what the reporter told me,” Nancy snapped. “According to him, Polly told the cops that when she pulled her business out of Panache, Vanessa was shattered.”

  Shattered? Fine, shattered. For the next few days, having other fish to fry, I gave the cops the benefit of the doubt and let Vanessa rest in whatever peace suicides are permitted. I taught my three classes at Saint Elizabeth’s, then put on my other hat and recorded an interview with a retired gardener, an eighty-five-year-old man who had come to Shorehaven from Calabria to work in the greenhouses of one of the grand old estates in nearby Manhasset.

  But by Saturday night of that week, sometime after watching Radio Days for the hundredth time and discovering (and devouring) seven miniature Mounds bars left over from Halloween, as well as reading an article in a history journal on the formation of the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903, I decided Vanessa Giddings’s demise still needed looking into.

  So on Sunday, I went into the city, to the Acadia-Fensterheim Gallery in SoHo.

  GROUP SHOW proclaimed a banner hanging outside. The group in question included two finger paintings by Ryn, the newest Mrs. Giddings—a tidbit I’d come up with after going through a half-dozen issues of ARTnews at the library.

  I hate when people contemplate a work of art, say an abstract-expressionist painting, and then make nincompoop remarks like “My three-year-old could do the same thing.” Nevertheless, I spent five minutes in the high-ceilinged, white-walled gallery studying Ryn’s Purple Opinion and saw nothing in the swirl of four fingers and one thumb that Kate or Joey could not have brought home from the Temple Beth Israel Nursery School.

  “Like it?” a man’s voice inquired.

  He was in his twenties, with the requisite SoHo shaved head and unshaven face, so I concluded his question was not a pickup line. He was either an Acadia-Fensterheim employee or an admirer of Ryn’s oeuvre. I nodded with what I hoped was a combination of enthusiasm and reverence.

  “Are you familiar with Ryn’s work?” he asked.

  “No. Is her name some reference to Rembrandt van Rijn?”

  He glanced around: It was only the two of us. “The truth? Her name’s Karyn with a Y. Her last name is—was—Bleiberman.”

  “And now?

  “Now it’s”—he lifted his head and pursed his lips to signify snootiness, although he did it in an appropriately ironic Gen-Whatever manner—“Giddings.”

  I gave him an I-get-it nod and inquired: “How much is the painting?”

  Apparently, it wasn’t de rigueur to actually speak of price, but he was kind enough to hand me a list. Purple Opinion was going for sixteen thousand.

  I said: “I hope this doesn’t sound incorrigibly crass, but …”

  “You’re saying, isn’t that somewhat high for a painting made with fingers? She’s not Chuck Close, right?”

  He looked to see if I’d gotten his reference, so I nodded in comprehension of what I was not comprehending.

  “It’s not high at all, to tell you the truth,” he went on. “Ryn spends an incredible amount of time prepping the canvas to give it the appearance of paper.”

  I offered some vague sound of comprehension, like “Aaah.”

  We both gazed respectfully at the purple whorls.

  “Is she from around here?” I asked.

  “Well, she has a studio in Red Hook, but these days”—he smiled and shook his head with a clearly unresolved mix of disdain and awe—“she’s living on Long Island. She’s married to a rich older guy …”

  He hesitated for an instant, perhaps unsure whether it was chivalrous to say “older” to someone as old as I.

  “They have a mansion,” he confided.

  “A mansion?” I repeated, wowed in the coolest manner I could muster.

  “It has a stable!” he said. “And he gave her a five-carat diamond ring. Like, is that a statement or what? Not that any of those things would make a dent in Ryn’s consciousness. You know? She’s like almost overly ethereal. But so real. I mean, when I spoke to her after she first saw the place, you know the only thing she mentioned? The quality of the light.”

  “So she works out there?”

  “Well, right now she’s not working.”

  “Taking a rest after this?” I inquired, waving my hand toward Purple Opinion and Green Certainty.

  “Getting ready to have a baby. She’s due any second. I mean, when we had the opening two weeks ago, we were all praying she wouldn’t …”

  He shuddered as if envisioning a pool of amniotic fluid on the gallery’s polyurethaned oak floor.

  I thanked him and, price list neatly folded in my handbag, hurried off to catch the 4:18 back to Shorehaven.

  It wasn’t until eleven that night—defeated by the lower left-hand corner of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle—that it occurred to me that when Stan Giddings married Ryn, she had been close to six months pregnant. A pregnant piece of information, but what did it mean? Having spent twenty-eight years married and only two widowed, I still wasn’t used to having some late-night question pop into my head and not be able to ask, What do you make of this? Even if the reaction was the usual, mumbled, nocturnal I dunno, or even an antagonistic What business is it of yours, Judith?—it was a response. I could then begin either to start silently speculating or to think, Beats the hell out of me, and drift off to slep.

  Plainly, Bob would not have taken well to my inquiring into the death of Vanessa Giddings. Like the last time around, twenty years earlier, when I got involved in investigating the Fleckstein murder: At his best, he’d been exceedingly aggravated with me. At his worst, enraged and downright nasty. For him, my business was to be his wife. A historian? Why not? He lived in an era in which powerful men’s wives did not churn butter. They held jobs, the more prestigious the better. A PhD in history lacked the cachet of a doctorate in neuroscience, but it was, on the whole, an asset. But a wife who fancied herself a gumshoe? That was barely a step above whoredom.

  But even if I couldn’t have asked Do you think Ryn’s six-months-pregnant marriage means anything? without getting a snide rejoinder, I still couldn’t bear the loss of him. Late Sunday nights hurt the most. I yearned to be a wife, to hear Bob’s sleepy voice murmuring “G’ night” as he turned over, to sense the warmth of his body across a few inches of bed, to smell the fabric softener on his pajamas. Of course, if I’d have left Bob and married Nelson? He and I would be riveted, sitting up discussing … Stop!

  Over the years, I’d become my own tough cop, policing myself from crossing the line from the occasional loving or lustful memory of Nelson to hurtful fantasy: What is he doing now? Still married? Is he happy? Would it be so terrible to call him and offhandedly say, “You just popped into my head the other day and I was wondering … Stop!

  The next morning, on my way to Saint Elizabeth’s, I dropped by the house of my semi-friend Mary Alice Mahoney Hunziger Schlesinger Goldfarb—the woman who talked more than any other in Greater New York and said the least. Annoying? Truly. Vacuous? Definitely. Stupid? Indubitably. However, somehow her pea brain was optimally structured for the absorption and retention of every item of Shorehaven gossip that wafted through the atmosphere, no matter how vague.

  So I asked her: “How come Stan Giddings waited until Ryn was six months pregnant to marry her?”

  “It’s a looong story,” Mary Alice began.

  Awaiting the arrival of her personal trainer, she was decked out in cornflower blue Spandex shorts and tank top with a matching cornflower blue terry headband. Clearly, and of course irrationally, she was proud of her body. Her arms had the approximate diameter of the cardboard tube inside a roll of toilet paper. Her hip bones protruded farther than her breasts.

  “A very long story.”

  “I have to get going in ten minutes, Mary Alice. I have a class.”

  “My trainer is due then. Connor? You know him?”

  When I shook my head, she rolled her eyes to let me know how unhip I was.


  “I mean, he’s only the most well-known trainer on the North Shore. God, you’re an intellectual in an ivory tower! Vanessa used him, you know.”

  She sighed. Not a mere exhalation of air, but the drawn-out vocalization of a lousy actress reading [sighing] in a script.

  “What can I tell you? Vanessa knew Ryn was”—Mary Alice gazed ceiling-ward, searching for the right words—“avec child, like the French say.”

  Toujours.

  “She wanted to put the pressure on Stan.”

  “To get a good settlement?”

  “Well, of course,” she responded, a bit impatiently.

  Ours was not a natural friendship. Like cellmates, Mary Alice and I had come together while doing time—in our case, as class mothers two decades earlier.

  “Naturally,” she went on, “Vanessa signed a prenup.”

  Mary Alice, on her fourth marriage—this one to Lance Goldfarb, urologist to Long Island’s best and brightest—obviously knew about prenuptial agreements. She took the blue sweater that had been draped over a chair and arranged it artfully around her skeletal shoulders.

  “I mean, someone with Stan’s resources isn’t going to go into a marriage without protection, is he?”

  “He obviously went into Ryn without protection.”

  “Can you believe that? Well, I can, as a matter of fact. He’d had two kids with his first wife but they weren’t working out. Bulemic or dyslexic or something. And Vanessa couldn’t have any. Or wouldn’t. Whatever. Anyhow, Stan was absolutely dying for a family.”

  “Isn’t that a little risky? I mean, getting your girlfriend pregnant while you’re still married to someone else.”

  Mary Alice blew out an impatient gust of air.

  “Grow up, Judith.”

  “What am I being pathetically naive about?”

  “About that. Sooner or later, he’d get out of the marriage without fatal damage because he had an airtight prenup. And that if Ryn had the baby before they were married, big damn deal. She’s an artist. Do you think artists care about having a child in or out of marriage?”

  “You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “But Stan’s not an artist, so he would want the baby to be born in wedlock. Ergo, Vanessa would have figured time was on her side.”

  Mary Alice gave a weary nod that said: Finally, she’s getting it. It’s annoying to be patronized by a birdbrain.

  “Right,” she said. “Ryn didn’t need her lawyer to tell her it was time to put the squeeze on Stan. Trust me. Vanessa got the picture, too. And she wound up with the house and the pied-à-terre on Central Park West and enough cash to choke a horse, except she needed it because she was going to redecorate plus get the works: face lift, tummy tuck, tush tightening, and lipo, lipo, and more lipo. Maybe implants. Cheekbones, I think. Could have been boobs. I can’t remember which.”

  “Did she get all that done?” I asked.

  The last time I’d seen Vanessa, a couple of months before she died, she hadn’t looked as if she needed anything tightened or implanted, though for all I know I might have been looking at the results.

  “No, no, no. She met someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you want some ginger tea?”

  “No thanks. Whom did she meet?”

  “His name is Tony. Like in the Tony awards.”

  Mary Alice’s white-blonde hair was pulled up into a pretty topknot, and she twisted a loose strand around her index finger, a gesture that led me to believe Tony was not unattractive.

  “What’s Tony’s last name?”

  “Tony Marx.”

  “As in Karl?”

  “What?”

  “M-a-r-x or M-a-r-k-s? Never mind. Did you ever meet him?”

  “No. I mean, yes. See, Vanessa also got the country club membership as part of the settlement, which I hear just about killed Stan because his grandfather had been a founder. Very, very rare for the wife to get the membership, which shows you how much Stan was willing to give to get out of that marriage. He and Ryn still have the loft—like eight thousand square feet—in some fabulous part of Brooklyn, but they’re living in the grandfather’s house now. He’s dead. The grandfather. Father, too, I think. Way out in Lloyd’s Neck. Practically a château I hear. It’s called Giddings House, but it needs major fixing up. It’ll take years. That’s why Vanessa never wanted any part of it. Anyhow, I know someone like you with a PhD. doesn’t take country clubs seriously, Judith, but they mean a lot to people. Anyhow, Lance and I were there as Jim and Ellen Shay’s guests …”

  She gave her wedding band, a knuckle-to-knuckle diamond dazzler, a twist. “They don’t accept Jews as members, you know.”

  She paused, waiting for a response.

  I offered none, so she explained: “Lance is Jewish.”

  “I guessed it, Mary Alice. The ‘Goldfarb’ was a clue.”

  “That’s why we were there as guests.”

  “So you just happened to see this Tony there with Vanessa?”

  “Right. Well, we chatted for a few minutes. He was wearing a sports jacket in the teeniest houndstooth. I mean, when you first looked at it, you’d think charcoal gray, not black and white. Cashmere. Stunning detail. You could tell—”

  “What does Tony do?”

  “He owns a car dealership.”

  “What kind?”

  “Volvo. He kidded around and called it Vulva. Well, I guess not to his customers.”

  “Is it here on the Island?”

  She nodded.

  “How serious was Vanessa about him?”

  “How serious?”

  Mary Alice chewed her thin but well-glossed lower lip, then smoothed over the chewed area with her pinky.

  “It’s serious in that he’s very, very attractive. But not so serious because he only owns one dealership.”

  I must have looked confused because she exhaled impatiently: “Forget that he’s not in Stan Giddings’s league money-wise. He wasn’t even in Vanessa’s league. So how serious could she be about a man who couldn’t earn as much as she could? No, she’d let the relationship play out, which might take her through the summer. That way, she’d have someone for mixed doubles, then in September she’d just get busy with her business or whatever, then go away after Christmas and come back and get her plastic surgery over with so that by the next summer she could really be a contender. You know very well what I mean, Judith, so don’t look like ‘Duh?’ Contender: be eligible for a really important guy.”

  “So then why did she kill herself?” I asked.

  Mary Alice shrugged.

  “Maybe what everyone’s saying is right. Losing Stan and Sveltburgers just took too much out of her. When all you want is to die of a broken heart and you don’t, what do you do?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Commit suicide!” she said brightly.

  Just as I opened the door to leave, Connor the trainer ambled in. He was an exceedingly muscular but very short man, not much longer than his gym bag. Yes, he said slowly when I asked him, he had seen Vanessa the morning of her death. Not only had she not been in the zone, she’d actually cut their session short when she looked out the window of her workout room and spotted a silver Volvo, an S80, pulling into the driveway. When I asked if he’d seen who was driving the car, Connor gazed up at me suspiciously. Fortunately, Mary Alice gave him a she’s-okay pat on the deltoid, so he conceded: the boyfriend.

  “Tony?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Tony.”

  That afternoon, I got stuck in a particularly noxious history department meeting, which ended with Medieval European shaking her fist at Modern Asian. The day after that I had three weeks’ worth of oral history videos at the library to contend with, so I didn’t get to Volvo Village until the following morning. I felt I was losing not only time, but ground. If there was anything fishy about Vanessa’s death, the person or persons responsible had had more than enough time to execute an exquisite cover-up.

  I suppose dealing with the American pub
lic in the highly emotional arena of car buying can make someone inured to surprise. So Tony Marx did not think it at all odd that I wanted to trade in my 2012 Jeep for a 2013 Volvo or that I wanted to talk about Vanessa.

  “I don’t know if Vanessa ever mentioned me …” I said.

  “Of course she did,” he lied courteously, clearly never having heard my name.

  “I’m so upset,” I told him. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “I know.”

  Except for a bit of a paunch, he was a sleek man in his early forties, with the sort of lifelong, worked-at tan that ultimately transmutes skin into leather. In Tony’s case, it was still a soft, not-too-creased leather, pecan colored.

  “You’re looking to unload the Jeep for a T6 AWD, Judy?” he asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “All-wheel drive.”

  “Right.”

  His dress was conservative-gray suit, white shirt, maroon rep tie—the getup someone selling safety and solidity would put on. He—though, tall, slender, graceful, and sloe-eyed—had to keep his inborn flash under control. He should have been selling Maseratis.

  “Vanessa told me you were the man to see about a car.”

  He nodded.

  “She seemed to think the world of you,” I went on.

  I expected him to nod again and move on to the turbo charger, whatever that was, but instead he swallowed hard.

  “Was she … ?” I began. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t ask.”

  “It’s okay,” he responded. “Depressed? Yeah. But not like, you know, depressed-depressed.”

  “Not suicidal?” I asked softly.

  “No! I mean, when they told me, I thought it was some sick joke. Except I knew it was real because it was a couple of cops who came and told me. Asked me questions. They had to. Because she died at Bloomie’s, not, like, in a hospital.”

  “Was she depressed about the Sveltburger business?”

  His head rocked up and down, a single, emphatic Yes.

  “Depressed, angry. Why shouldn’t she be angry?”

  The showroom lights that brought out the gleam of his Volvos made his dark brown hair shine. His eyes appeared moist, too, but I couldn’t tell if it was the lighting or a glaze of tears.