Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “If I have to send him people he’s already fired, he’ll never notice. His house is run like a subway turnstile. When a client can’t keep good help, it’s invariably his problem, not yours. That’s the golden rule of this business. Never forget it.”

  “I wonder what he’s really like?”

  “Take my word for it, you wouldn’t want to know,” Nancy McIver said scornfully. “The real question is, who does he think he is?”

  “Bruno de Lancel? Marjorie, that’s a ridiculous suggestion,” Cynthia Beaumont said to her secretary.

  “I thought that with Larry Bell canceling dinner at the last minute, it was worth a try,” Marjorie Stickley replied.

  “Damn Larry Bell! A strep throat is no excuse. Is he incapable of making a little effort? How does he expect me to get an extra man at such short notice? Nobody would have noticed—I wasn’t planning to look down his blasted throat with a stethoscope.”

  “Perhaps he was afraid he’d be contagious,” Marjorie ventured, as her employer, Cynthia Beaumont, raged back and forth in her sitting room, looking wrathfully at the ruined seating plan for her carefully planned, black-tie dinner party.

  “Not him! He’d give people leprosy if he knew they’d never find out. He’s just worried about his own precious health, the selfish wretch. What does he care about my dinner?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Beaumont, you know it’s going to be the party of the season,” Marjorie said as soothingly as possible. She knew, after years of being a social secretary to a number of New York’s most important hostesses, that nothing could so upset even a highly sophisticated and secure woman as the last-minute defection of an extra man. There wasn’t one of them who could face up to the dreaded prospect of seating two women next to each other, although, in her private opinion, men added little gaiety or charm to a party as they sat back and waited to be entertained, while any vivacious and interesting extra woman could be counted on to sing for her supper.

  “What to do, Marjorie? What to do? It’s a catastrophe! And we only have a few hours left. Do you suppose that Tim Black might be—no, he just announced his engagement. Cross him off my list permanently, I never liked him anyway. What about—never mind, I swore I’d never ask him again, after he got so revoltingly tipsy and made an indecent remark to Mrs. Astor at the last party. Oh, why do I ever try to give a dinner in December? I should know by now that from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day there isn’t a single halfway presentable extra man who has a free night.”

  “But it’s Mr. Beaumont’s birthday celebration,” the social secretary protested. Even in busy New York society, this particular annual occasion was sacred.

  “Well he’ll just have to change it next year, that’s all. I won’t go through this hell again. Now, Marjorie, be creative!”

  “I’ll go to my office and ring up every single warm body on your emergency list.”

  “Try all our doctors and our dentist too. Maybe one of them is single, or getting divorced. I’ll call James Junior at Princeton myself.”

  “He’s in the middle of final exams, Mrs. Beaumont.”

  “Surely he could make a little sacrifice for his mother? Oh, it’s too utterly maddening to have five sons, and four of them married right out of college. What’s the point! Why did I bother to give birth to those ungrateful brutes? Just think, if none of them had married, I’d have my hands on the four best-looking young extra men in the city—five, when James Junior graduates. But no, not even one of them bothered to consider me or my problems. Ingrates! All they care about is their own happiness. Today’s young people have no sense of duty, tradition, family. You’re lucky you have no children, Marjorie. You’ve been saved a lot of pain.”

  “Maybe I’d have had a girl, Mrs. Beaumont.”

  “An extra woman? God forbid! I’ll try to dress while you phone.”

  “I’d still like to try Bruno de Lancel.”

  “Marjorie! How could I possibly ask him at the last minute—I plan a party around that man. One thing I’ll say for Bruno de Lancel, he’d never cancel at the last minute unless he were on his deathbed. He’s too well bred to dream of it. What marvelous manners he has.”

  “You did ask me to be creative, Mrs. Beaumont.”

  “Creative in a reasonable way. I didn’t expect your Christmas list. And anyway, he’d be insulted to be asked for the same night, to fill in when someone else has dropped out.”

  “He’s been here so often that surely he’ll understand. Any good friend would. It should be quite all right.”

  “He’s not that kind of friend. If he were American, I’d say yes, he’d be glad to lend a hand, but you know how … cold … he is. I’ve never felt I knew him better than the first time I met him, yet I’ve seated him on my right more times than I can count. His marvelous manners don’t include talking about himself. However, one can’t deny that he’s absolutely divine looking, very, very rich, and unmarried—plus the title, of course—so he can be as uncommunicative as the Sphinx for all I care, as unapproachable as the Pope without an audience, as formal as the Queen of England … wait a minute … the Pope … perhaps Cardinal Spellman? What do you think, Marjorie?”

  “As an extra man at the last minute—no, somehow I shouldn’t think so, Mrs. Beaumont.”

  “Oh, I suppose you’re right.” Cynthia Beaumont sighed in vexation, but it was just these little nuances that Marjorie Stickley was so terribly good at. It paid to have the best social secretary in town, even if she earned twice what any other secretary did. Even if the Cardinal were free, and she’d bet he was, it wouldn’t be fitting.

  As Cynthia Beaumont emerged from her bath, and began to put on just enough makeup to cope with the florist who was arriving to start decorating the house, Marjorie returned, brimming with triumph. “I’ve got Bruno de Lancel. He said he’d be delighted to come.”

  “How fantastic! What a treasure you are! You’ve saved my dinner. What did you say? How did you put it?”

  “Ah, that’s just my little secret, Mrs. Beaumont. Now I must go and tell the florist that you’ll be with him in a few minutes or he’ll have a nervous breakdown.”

  As she vanished down the corridor toward the dining room, the social secretary reflected on her own Golden Rule: The worst someone can say is “No, thank you.” She’d built a long, satisfactory career and a comfortable nest egg on making phone calls her employers were basically too timid to make for themselves. Society women—sometimes she could almost feel sorry for them. But not often. As for Bruno de Lancel, his reputation for being stiff and standoffish had made so many hostesses terrified of him that it had been an even bet he’d be free tonight. It was all right for him to be a snob, society understood that, but not with people who were just as good as he was. Who, she wondered scornfully, did he think he was?

  Bruno left the bank early on Friday afternoon and walked up to J.M. Kidder Inc., for the fourth fitting on a new riding jacket he had ordered months ago.

  “So you’ll be going down the Main Line to hunt, Viscount de Lancel?” Allensby, the ancient head fitter, asked pleasantly.

  Bruno grunted noncommittally. He couldn’t understand why a tailor could possibly consider that his comings and goings were any concern of his.

  “We take care of a lot of gentlemen from the Main Line. Always have. Good hunting there, they all tell me.”

  Bruno snorted. If you considered good hunting going out with a bunch of dull, pompous stockbrokers, lawyers and businessmen from a collection of tedious suburbs, men who knew nothing of noble sport, men who had never spent an entire day chasing over their own lands, then he supposed it must be considered good hunting. In any case, it was the pitifully best hunting within a few hours of New York—Fairfield was a joke—and life without hunting was unthinkable.

  “The collar still isn’t cut right, Allensby.”

  “Now, now, sir, I recut it after your last fitting. This is an entirely new piece of cloth. Look how well it hugs your neck.”

  Bruno moved his neck
backward and forward and twisted his head from side to side, managing to make the brilliantly cut collar gape a fraction of an inch as he pulled away from it. “No, it won’t do. It simply won’t do at all. Rip it off and start all over again.” He struggled out of the jacket and threw it on a chair. “Call my secretary when you’re ready for another fitting.”

  “Yes sir,” Allensby said agreeably. As he took the coat away, he thought of his own Golden Rule: Only a certain kind of man would ever take out his temper on his tailor, and that kind of man wasn’t worth worrying about. The Frenchman, with a title he seemed to think mattered here, could have as many fittings as he wanted; such contingencies were built into the price of the jacket from the beginning. The old firm had survived generations of difficult customers, although never one with such a fine torso. He’d be a pleasure to fit, Allensby thought scornfully, if he weren’t such a bastard. Just who on earth did he think he was?

  As he left the tailor’s, Bruno looked at his watch. He still had almost two hours before he had to begin to dress for dinner. A short walk away, there was a woman waiting for him, curled with the proud grace of a rare and valuable cat, in front of a fruitwood fire. There would be low music in the air, and on her face, with its pouting, full mouth that drew the eye as if it were a barbaric ornament, there would be a look of impatience. She was lazily lush, with creamy, marvelously abundant flesh, dark brown nipples as large as quarters, a mouth that would rather suck than talk, and a full bottom that had been shaped to invite the delicious punishment Bruno was so expert in inflicting. She had urgent, vicious, inventive hands, this woman who was one of the great ladies of the city, not quite forty, and enormously rich in her own right. She had belonged to him for three months.

  Bruno considered the fact that at this very minute the woman was ready for him, ready to let him do anything to her that he pleased, for earlier in the day he’d phoned and told her in explicit detail how he wanted her to caress herself before he arrived. He could see the way her thighs must be spread apart so that she could reach down easily to touch herself, with the moist and knowing fingers she had been licking. He knew that she would be stretching restlessly and biting her lip to keep from reaching any premature spasm.

  If he entered that room and flung himself down on the couch and said that he was tired, that he wanted nothing more than for her to bend her head over him and bring him to slow satisfaction with only her wide, waiting mouth, she would do so. If he lay on the couch and didn’t touch her, if he just waited until she made him hard with her clever hands and then told her to straddle him and take him into her body, and if he gave her harsh orders to raise and lower herself until he obtained the release he had come to her for, she would obey without a word. If he told her to lie on the rug and pull up her skirt and raise her knees and spread her legs for him, and if he then entered her and took her as quickly and selfishly as any schoolboy, she would be grateful. If he told her to stay in her chair while he stood in front of her and opened his trousers and shoved himself into her mouth, she would give him exquisite pleasure and never protest. If he merely sat on the edge of a chair, a spectator, and told her to touch herself until she writhed with her own pleasure, she would comply.

  She was that kind of woman. She was at the age he had always preferred. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was to be treated like a whore. No other man in New York had ever dared to treat her as he treated her, and as yet, Bruno had only begun to do to her all the humiliating things he knew she craved. She was his creature.

  That was precisely the problem, Bruno thought as he turned away from that scented room where the woman was waiting, and walked toward his own house. He could predict every one of her secrets. They weren’t new to him. He had almost reached the age of those experienced women he had always preferred, and as each year passed, it became more and more difficult to find a woman whose most private and forbidden fantasies weren’t twice-told tales. Seldom, now, was he excited for long by any new woman, particularly among the society women of New York, whose attitudes toward sex were so often tame and banal, without subplots, lacking the dark and forbidden scenarios that were to be discovered among the women of Paris.

  Yes, he blamed them, these richly glittering American women with clean-scrubbed, disappointingly hygienic imaginations, for his lack of desire. He felt no welcome stirring in his groin at the thought of that woman who was waiting for him at this very minute, ardent, avid and wet. He envied her arousal. At least, tonight, when she realized that he wasn’t coming to their rendezvous, she would find some way to relieve the lust that had been welling in her since his phone call this morning. She was lucky, she’d enjoyed hours of itching excitement, hours that, for him, had been as barren of anticipation as his whole day, as the predictable dinner party that faced him.

  What could there possibly be to look forward to in this city, he asked himself as he walked unseeing through the thrilling streets of New York before Christmas, where, for everyone else, a dozen promises zinged through the snapping air; where, for everyone else, brightly lit windows competed with each other for attention; where, for everyone else, there was a rush of energy and vitality to be discovered at the crossing of every street.

  New York. An ugly, ugly city, without charm, without intimacy, without history. The buildings were too tall or too short and, in all cases, too new. All their proportions were wrong, uninteresting, clumsy. The streets were too straight, too narrow, too regular, a grid of boredom. There were no trees—even that excuse for a park was enclosed within a severe rectangle—there were no hidden courtyards, no unexpected cul-de-sacs, no places where you could turn a corner and be forced to stop dead in your tracks by the power of a view. There was no necessary riverbank winding through the city, without which any urban landscape was only half-alive. People who considered themselves elegant were content to live in apartment houses on a dark, too-wide street called Park Avenue, where anyone who was curious could gape at their windows, for there were no walls to protect their privacy.

  New York society. A perfect reflection of the city, too noisy, too gaudy and too giddy, without charm or history, open to anyone who could afford the entrance fee. A society that would never comprehend and pay proper attention to the claims of family, to heritage. A society he could not even relate to the word aristocracy. An elaborate joke that had the pretension to take itself seriously. He wondered if any of his overanxious hostesses had the slightest idea of what he thought about them. Probably not—they were too stupid to expect his utter scorn, and his manners were too automatic to hint at it. Just as well, for they were the only people available. The French colony was made up of hairdressers and head waiters.

  The only redeeming quality about New York was that it was not a European city. He could not have endured living in the second-rate, self-absorbed, yet provincial Europe of Rome or Madrid, with Paris only a few hours away, forbidden to him. At least here, in this completely sterile exile, the main topic of the city was money, and money, unlike sex, would never cease to fascinate him, never grow predictable and stale; its pursuit could never become devoid of interest. Even as he accumulated more and more of it, he never asked himself for what purpose, when it couldn’t even buy a decent valet, for money was totally good, in and of itself.

  As Bruno approached his house, to which he never invited anyone, a house that he had decorated in exactly the same manner as the house in the Rue de Lille, he wondered if there would be a letter from Jeanne.

  The housekeeper at Valmont had remained loyal to him. She wrote regularly, from her retirement cottage in Epernay, to tell him the news of the family, and he responded faithfully, for she was his only means of knowing what was going on in Champagne. Paul de Lancel was only sixty-four, and the Lancels were a long-lived family. His Lancel grandparents had both been in their eighties before they died. Yet accidents happened every day to people with equally good genes; car accidents, riding accidents, neglected infections, even a fall in the bathroom. Disease could strike wit
hout warning. His uncle Guillaume had died relatively young.

  Yes, he knew that soon—if not today, then soon, for it would drive him mad to think otherwise—there had to arrive a grieving letter from Jeanne that would give him back his life.

  Freddy perched on Tony’s desk on a Friday afternoon in March of 1950 and looked at him hopefully. “Tony, let’s go for a drive. Jock and Swede are nailed to their desks, but there’s no reason why all the bosses have to be in at the same time. It’s such a lovely day.”

  Tony looked up from the empty blotter at which he’d been frowning when she came into his office.

  “Go for a drive? Where to? What scenic wonder lures you? The amazing view of the Hollywood sign? The flat beige sands of Santa Monica? Don’t you really mean that you’d like to hop into your new Bonanza? Don’t you mean go for a plane ride, not a drive?”

  “No, I mean a drive,” Freddy said patiently. He was in a vile mood. Too much whiskey at lunch or just general bloody-mindedness? It was impossible to say for sure this early in the day. “Come on, we can put the top of my car down. I’m dying to get out of this place. It’s not that much fun anymore, with everything running smoothly and business so good. Do come on, darling.”

  Tony sighed reluctantly, but he got up and followed her out to the parking lot of their new main office building at the Burbank Airport, and sat listlessly as she drove back from the San Fernando Valley over the hills into the Los Feliz neighborhood.

  Freddy drove straight up a street that she seemed to have picked at random, and parked in front of a house at the top of the hill, a typically Californian version of a Spanish hacienda, that rambling old house with balconies and two courtyards which she’d bought in November, not quite five months earlier. She’d insisted on a short escrow, and the day after the escrow closed she’d had a contractor with two crews working overtime putting the house back into perfect order, while a decorator was busy full-time, working on the furnishings. The avenue of old orange trees that lined the driveway was in fragrant blossom, and a landscape architect had finished pruning every tree and restoring the garden that Freddy remembered so well, turning over and enriching the neglected soil, planting wide beds of English primroses and tiny purple violas. Pansies were everywhere, their yellow, white and dark ruby faces mingling with the smaller blue dots of the impertinent forget-me-nots. In another month the bushes of the rose garden, on which the buds were already swelling, would be in their first bloom; all the lawns were green with newly laid turf. The house had been entirely repainted, and the red tiles of the roof were in perfect condition. She turned off the motor.