“What’s the new chauffeur’s name?”
“Why?”
“What’s his name, Billy?”
“Lee.”
“Lee,” she called out to the front seat. “We’re not going home. We’re going to El Morocco.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Yes, we are. I’m not going home with you in this mood. And, Billy?”
“What?”
“Tomorrow tell what’s-his-name to take his rosary beads off the rearview mirror. I can’t stand that look.”
Way over east on Seventy-second Street, near the river but not on the river, in a block of fancified tenements occupied mostly by poor friends of the Astor family, who owned the block, as they owned a great many blocks in the city, my light burned late that night in the fifth-floor walk-up friends of friends of an Astor connection had arranged for me to call my home. My name, Basil Plant, appeared in the vestibule next to the buzzer system. The apartment, called a railroad flat, was tiny and somewhat squalid. A typewriter, reams of paper, a bulletin board with pink and blue and white file cards thumbtacked to it, and a wastebasket too full of discarded pages announced my writer’s life.
In those days, as now, I never went to bed, no matter how late, or how drunken, or how drugged the evening had been without recording first my impressions of the people I had met in my multifaceted existence, seeing it all as bits and pieces of a giant mosaic that one day would fit together in a literary Byzantine pattern that would explain my life.
My bathroom cabinet was filled with the small bottles of Listerine, guest-sized tubes of toothpaste, and unused bars of Floris soap I took each weekend from the guest-room baths in the rich houses I was beginning to visit. I was always looking for economies. Ann Grenville was right when she said I wrote slender volumes no one read. The bitch. Even my aspirin bottles were purloined, and from one of them I took the four aspirins I invariably took before retiring after an evening of too much drink.
I was still smarting from Mrs. Grenville’s snub, because I would have liked to become her friend. I like social climbers. They interest me. But she resisted me, right from the beginning. Neither my inquisitiveness nor my wit appealed to her. I looked at myself in my bathroom mirror. What I saw was a slender, fragile-looking, almost androgynous young man with a shy manner and a sweet smile. The loss was hers, I decided.
“Dinner at Bertie Lightfoot’s,” I wrote in soft pencil on a lined yellow tablet in my small, neat, and precise handwriting. “A last-minute replacement. Bertie gave me instructions to be interesting, and witty, and earn my bread and butter. It was his usual crowd of high-society people, the type who go out every night. On one side Natasha Paley, a Russian princess who works for Mainbocher. On the other the beautiful Mrs. Grenville of the social columns, who helped make Bertie Lightfoot the great success he is today. Brightly painted, she looked into her compact seven times during dinner, readjusting her face. She seemed to be engaged in secret smiles and looks with an Englishman called Harry Kingswood at the next table. My presence mattered very little to her. She picked up my place card, so as to read my name, and said, ‘Bertie tells me you’re a writer, and quite interesting,’ and then sat back as if waiting for me to entertain her.
“I said to her, trying to hold up my end of the conversation, ‘Weren’t you in show business once?’ I knew for a fact she danced in the line at the Copa. ‘Briefly,’ she answered, redoing her lips at the same time. ‘But my family was furious, and then I married Billy Grenville,’ conveying the impression she had been a rebellious deb. Then she snapped shut her compact, signaling the end of that conversation. I felt about her that her life began when she became Mrs. Grenville. She made no effort to conceal her boredom with me. So I got drunk. All that marvelous wine of Bertie’s, Lafite-Rothschild.
“There is something about Mrs. Grenville, beneath her Mainbocher dress and perfect pearls, that made me think of a tigress in heat. I feel wantonness beneath her social perfection. I think she is bored, at least sexually, with her husband. Billy Grenville is very handsome. He doesn’t have that overbred look so many of those North Shore people have, as if their mother and father were first cousins. Mrs. Grenville is a very silly girl.”
Billy felt, in time, like a hostage, imprisoned in the relationship, and, like a hostage, he befriended his captor, but merely for the sake of survival. There were plans, furtive to be sure, for escape.
It was Ann who suggested to him that horses, the Grenville stables, Jacaranda Farm, twenty-five hundred acres in the Blue Grass country, the producer of three Kentucky Derby winners, would be his salvation.
“But I’ve never been seriously interested in horses,” he protested. “That was always Grace’s domain.”
“Well, become seriously interested in horses. You own the farm, not Grace. Your father left it to you. I’ll take care of Grace. It would be madness to just let the reins slip through your fingers, as you let the bank slip through your fingers.”
It bothered Billy when she enumerated his failures to him. He looked off, away from her, out the window, thinking back to the days of his youth when his father made him, Saturday after Saturday, walk through the stables and paddocks, greeting people, talking horses, looking at horses, and the queasiness in his stomach returned to him that always returned to him when he thought of his greatly admired father.
“Look at Alfred Twombley,” said Ann, citing the example of one of Billy’s lifelong friends to prove her point. “He’s made the most marvelous life for himself in racing. He works hard. He makes money. Everyone respects him. Why can’t you do the same thing?”
Grace Grenville Grainger was in well-cared-for early middle age. Horses and dogs had always interested her more than people and society, and she lived a country life, happy that the business of the Grenville stables had fallen to her when her brother was indifferent to the management of his inheritance. “The thrill is in breeding rather than racing,” she was fond of saying.
Grace made no preparations for visitors; they could take her as she was, or leave her, she didn’t care. Not bothering to check her appearance in a mirror, or pick up fallen newspapers off the carpet, or puff up crushed cushions, she was on the floor cleaning up after her new puppy when Billy and Ann entered her living room.
“Grace, how could you?” cried Ann.
“How could I what?” replied Grace.
“Be down on your hands and knees like that, cleaning up.”
“I’m cleaning up dog shit.”
“Even so. Get someone to do it for you,” said Ann.
The implication was quite clear. People like them, Grenvilles, did not do servants’ work. It was not lost on either Grace or Billy that Ann had become more Grenville than the Grenvilles.
“I like this room, Grace,” said Billy.
He was making conversation, Ann knew, dreading having to tell her that he was here to reclaim his inheritance. They were seated at opposite ends of a long sofa, slipcovered in well-worn chintz, facing a fire. All the bookshelves were untidily filled with horse books, dog books, and detective novels, some horizontally atop the vertical ones, and other books filled tabletops. The fireplace bench was heaped with magazines and newspapers, rendering it useless for sitting. A cracked Lowestoft plate, which they were using for an ashtray, on the cushion between them, was glued together rather messily. The glasses on the drink table, where Ann went to mix herself a Bloody Mary, were a mismatched lot, from a jelly glass to a chipped Baccarat goblet. The room annoyed her; only someone as rich as Grace could get away with a room like this. She knew that Billy was next going to say that it looked lived in.
“It looks lived in,” he said.
Ann lit another cigarette and kept silent. She concentrated on how she would redecorate the room if it were her house. Her bracelet dropped off her wrist and fell on the floor by the fireplace. Grace picked up the fire tongs, retrieved the bracelet, and handed it to Ann on the end of her tongs. Grace sensed, before the conversation began, that there was a
motive in the unexpected visit.
“There’s a marvelous man on Second Avenue in the Eighties, Mr. Something, I have it written down, who could repair this plate for you so the crack wouldn’t show,” said Ann.
“What a lot of bother,” said Grace, who didn’t care about the crack. Among themselves the sisters laughed at the grandeur of their sister-in-law.
Ann felt slighted, as she always did by her husband’s sisters. Her makeup suddenly felt stale and caked on her face after the long drive. She was no longer in a good humor.
“Billy, why don’t you go outside and look at the horses. I want to talk to Grace,” said Ann.
Later Grace, who heard the language of the stables, and used it occasionally, to the hysterical dismay of her sisters, called their sister-in-law a cunt. What she actually said was that Ann gave new meaning to the word.
So it was that Billy Grenville began his new career in racing and breeding as the head of the Grenville stables.
Ann Grenville stood outside the Colony Restaurant, under the green awning, and kissed the cheek of her mother-in-law and then the cheek of her sister-in-law Cordelia, with whom she had just lunched. As Alice Grenville’s car drew up, Ann pulled back slightly the sleeve of her mink coat and quickly glanced at her watch.
“Wherever are you going, Ann?” asked Alice. “That’s the third time in the last half hour I’ve seen you glance at your watch, and you made us gulp down our coffee.”
“Doctor’s appointment, Mère,” Ann answered.
“You’re awfully eager to get there,” grumbled Alice, allowing Charles, her chauffeur, to assist her into the car. “Are you coming with me, Cordelia?”
“Yes, Mère. Goodbye, Ann.”
As Alice Grenville’s car headed for Madison Avenue, Ann took off in the direction of Park Avenue. Halfway to the corner, she looked back and saw that the car had turned uptown. She reversed her steps and headed back toward Madison Avenue, crossed, and walked swiftly toward Fifth Avenue. From her handbag she took out a pair of dark glasses and put them on, although there was no sun in the sky that day.
The Hotel Fourteen was her idea. She knew, from experience, that they asked no questions and catered to a clientele that was unlikely to have heard of her or any of the people in her group. It was next door to the Copacabana, and it had served, on more than one occasion, during her show-girl days, as a locale for a between-shows tryst with one of the garment manufacturers she sometimes saw when she was in financial distress.
She walked straight through the small lobby to the elevator as if she were registered as a guest. In an earlier period of her life, she had found the hotel elegant, but, with an eye grown familiar with elegance, she saw now that it was too gold, too red, too vulgar, but exactly right for the purpose at hand.
She stepped out of the elevator at the sixth floor and knocked at the door of Room 612 with a gloved knuckle. In an instant the door opened; its occupant had been waiting for her knock.
“Don’t tell me I’m late,” she said, walking in, dropping her mink coat off her, and dragging it along the carpeted floor. “Just ask me what I feel like.”
“What do you feel like?”
“I feel like a call girl.”
He laughed, bowed courteously, and kissed her hand. She felt the wetness of his tongue on the back of it. “Mrs. Grenville,” he said.
“Lord Kingswood,” she replied.
“A drink?”
“Let’s not waste time on drinks.”
“Good.”
He wrapped his arms around her.
“Oh, I have been waiting for this,” she said.
“And I.”
“Oh, Harry, how did you know I like to be kissed on my throat, just like that,” she said, her head back, her hands on his head, as he kissed up and down her lovely neck. “Oh, yes, handsome Harry, that is so nice. I do love the sound of kissing.”
“Get undressed,” he whispered.
“Unzip me,” she answered, turning her back to him. With knowing fingers, he undid the hook and eye of her Mainbocher dress and slowly unzipped the back of her down past the hooks of her brassiere. “No, no, darling, I’ll take off my own brassiere, thank you very much. You just sit down over there and watch. Oh, and Harry?”
“Yes?”
“You get undressed too. And I mean really undressed. None of that socks-on, shirt-on English stuff. Take off everything.”
“Unbutton my fly for me,” he answered.
“You English ought to learn about zippers,” she replied, kissing him, as her expert fingers undid the seven buttons. “Oh, my God.”
“What?”
“An uncoaxed erection.”
Nothing excited Ann Grenville more than to watch a man see her breasts for the first time. They were, she knew, perfect, and the look of lust that came over Harry Kingswood’s face at the sight of them and the expectation of touching them filled her with passion that matched his own.
“Harry?”
Harry Kingswood’s face was buried between her breasts, too occupied to reply, but his bare shoulders made an answering gesture.
“You’re not in any great hurry, are you?”
He shook his head, his tongue traveling from the bottom of one breast to her large excited beige nipple.
“Oh, good. I hate wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”
She lay back in the center of the double bed in Room 612 of the Hotel Fourteen and watched as this direct descendant of the fifth wife of Henry VIII entered her with the precision of an expert and for an hour held back his own arrival until she had been thrice satisfied.
“My God,” she whispered when they had concluded. “And the missionary position! It’s nice getting back to the basics.”
Harry Kingswood laughed, at the same time fondling her breast.
“Let’s hear it for love in the afternoon!” said Ann. “Do I look beautiful?”
“You do.”
“I feel beautiful. What are you doing tomorrow afternoon, and the next, and the next?”
“I hope I’m going to be meeting you in Room 612 of the Hotel Fourteen.”
She lifted his hand from her breast to kiss it and noticed the time on his wristwatch. “I have to dress, Harry. I still have to have my hair done. Billy and I are going to Eve Soby’s party tonight, and Billy gets furious if I’m late.”
“I’m going to Eve Soby’s, too,” said Harry.
“If you feel a hand between your legs under Eve’s tablecloth, it’ll be me,” said Ann, dressing.
Harry Kingswood looked at Ann in delight. Each understood they were embarking on a love affair, without commitment or any thought of upsetting either of their marriages.
“The shooting season starts next month. Have you told Billy about coming to England yet?”
“I will tonight.”
“I wish you wouldn’t sit on the bed. It’s been fixed for the party, and you’re wrinkling the coverlet,” said Ann irritably.
“Too bad you’re not fixed for your party,” answered Billy, turning on the satin-and-lace coverlet, wrinkling it more.
“I’m not well,” she replied, in self-defense.
“You stayed out all night dancing and drinking, and then you took a handful of sleeping pills at dawn.”
“I did not.”
“Do you ever think about this ridiculous marriage we have?”
“Billy,” she said. Her voice was now placating. “There are people arriving any minute for cocktails. There’s the bell now. Please go down and greet them. It’ll take me twenty minutes at least. My eyes are all puffed.”
“You’re full of sleeping pills.”
“Please, Billy. Our friends are arriving.”
“Your friends. I think I’m going to walk out the front door as they’re walking in and go to the Brook Club.”
But he didn’t. “How very pleasant this is,” he said, entering his living room, to greet the already arrived Harry Kingswood. They were to have drinks there and dine at Maud Chez Elle, a r
estaurant then much in fashion, and go on to dance at El Morocco. Billy and Harry had the outward camaraderie of two members of the same class who recognized each other’s equality, but there remained, nonetheless, an unease between them.
When finally Ann entered the room, fastening a bracelet—late, sure, unhurried, beautiful—for the evening of revelry ahead, Billy was astonished, as he always was astonished, at how she was able to pull herself together. Later, after midnight, he disengaged himself from the celebrants at El Morocco, waving goodbye to Ann and Harry Kingswood on the dance floor, and went home. He was, those days, up early and out at the track at Belmont for the morning workouts.
Billy often said that some of his best ideas came to him at breakfast. It was for that reason that he liked to breakfast alone, very often staring off into space while sipping his coffee or munching his toast. It was at such a moment that his troubled feelings connected the fact of Harry Kingswood’s visit and his wife’s duplicity. With the taste of strawberry preserve still in his mouth, he bolted from the room.
Upstairs, in their darkened bedroom, all signs of daylight were shut out, and would be for hours to come. He watched his wife in restless sleep, her arms embracing a pillow, one strap of her satin-and-lace nightgown fallen from her shoulder. On her bedside table were no clues of duplicity, if that was what he expected to find, only an apothecary of prescriptions, and lists and notes of things to be done, for her relentless pursuit of social life, when her day would finally begin.
“Why are you staring at me?” she asked, without opening her eyes, or changing her position, which was faced away from him.
“I’m not staring at you,” he answered, backing away from their wide bed as if he had been caught stealing.
“Yes, you are,” she said, from her sleep.
“I forgot something,” he mumbled with a note of apology in his voice and withdrew from the room, not having spoken what he intended to speak. A new maid, observing the morning rules of silence, nodded to him as he left the room but did not speak either.
Outside the house the chauffeur, Lee, waited with the car and all the morning papers for Billy to read on his way out to the track.
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles Page 15