“That's some routine,” Dorothy said.
“You know, Sam Goldwyn insisted that each Goldwyn Girl had to have beauty, personality, talent, self-confidence and ambition,” Estelle said. “White hair and eye bags weren't part of the contract.”
“Well, you girls don't have to worry,” Diane said. “You look fabulous.”
“Pfff,” said Dorothy, who was recovering from an eyelift, her third.
“So, Diane, what's the story with Vladimir?” Estelle said.
“So, Estelle,” Diane said with a smile, “let's talk about the name of the theater.”
“I was talking to Chris,” Estelle continued. “And it appears that after a long stalemate, Vladimir's wife in Cuba is granting him a divorce.”
Diane tried to keep her face together.
Estelle and Chris were privy to this information, but Diane was not?
“I was thinking ‘the Estelle DeWinter Greenblatt and Herbert Leonard Greenblatt Theater at the Bedford Street Cinémathèque,’ ” Estelle said.
Dorothy shot Diane a look. “Is the marquee big enough for all that?”
“We'll make the letters smaller,” Diane said. “Let's move on. I'd like to make sure that all the principals are here for the opening. Will you two busy socialites consult your calendars and give me possible dates in September?”
Diane sat flipping through magazines as Dorothy and Estelle discussed the opening gala while having their nails done. InStyle magazine was precipitating a flashback to her unfinished graduate school thesis comparing contemporary celebrity worship to ancient Roman religious practices. She'd left grad school before the advent of InStyle. But here, surely, was the contemporary equivalent of a Roman ritual: an authorized mediator (the magazine) prescribed rites and offerings (“Stella McCartney T-shirt, $375”) to the people, so that wishes would be granted (“Get Gwyneth's Hot New Look for Spring!”) and affliction-specific prayers could be answered (“Fabulous Jeans to Minimize a Droopy Butt!”). If you bought the table settings and followed the menu, you, too, could give a perfect Asian theme party like Madonna. Perhaps you could be Madonna.
Dorothy asked, “Was he trying to make you jealous with that aging French tart?”
“Whatever,” Diane said, wondering which god she should make an offering to in order to speed up her application to the co-op board to buy a fourth-floor studio with kitchen alcove in the Gramercy Park area. Vesta, goddess of the home? Mars, god of war? The apartment was unlisted, as of now—Paul knew someone, had done something to keep it secret. When she walked in, saw the view of treetops from the nice, if small, hot-pink-painted kitchen, she'd said yes before even looking at the closet space or bathroom. Paul dialed his omnipresent cellphone and commenced negotiations with the seller in a polished fashion. He was leaning on the windowsill, with one hand in his shiny black hair; she noticed again how magnificent his features were. He wheeled around to give her the thumbs-up with a triumphant smile, keeping his voice steady and normal.
He put his arm around her and steered her to the living room, where he sat down with her on the sofa and held her hands. “Now we just have to get past the board,” he told her, and repeated the list of items she would need to put together for the co-op board package. She had assembled these letters and documents four months earlier, at his suggestion. “We just have to hope that she doesn't get cold feet and decide to list the place before we get a contract,” he said, and crossed his fingers before kissing Diane goodbye on both cheeks.
It occurred to her that she had spent more time with Paul than she had with Vladimir. Paul had made it clear that she was his favorite client, even if he never made a cent from her. Paul was funny, gorgeous, expressive and Jewish. In a different generation, she would have married Paul. They probably would have had two teenagers by now.
“I think you might like to meet my nephew,” Estelle was saying.
“That's a great idea,” Dorothy said, and patted Diane's hand, smudging coral nail polish in the process. This meant that Miss Vail's polish had to be redone.
Was it the essence of the star—as displayed on the face of the star—that the audience fell in love with? Or was it the face itself? And if the face itself was succumbing to forces of nature, did you still want to watch it? According to Catherine Merveille, the answer was oui: the audience wanted to watch her real face as a conduit of her authentic self. Of course, this was not the ruling local aesthetic. And not just for women: Connie had once confided that she'd never gotten over seeing her childhood crush Ray Milland playing the aging, disapproving patriarch in Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970).
Estelle wanted the Grand Reopening to be on September 18. Estelle had stopped working at the age of twenty-eight; thus she was immortalized in celluloid at what Paul Veyne once called “the canonical age,” the age at which one has achieved full maturity, but before time has altered the facial features.
“Nothing sooner than September twenty-ninth,” Dorothy insisted. Dorothy had continued working, playing spinsters, mothers and grandmothers. “The invitation will get lost in the backlog of mail when people come back home from Labor Day weekend.”
Estelle deferred to Dorothy: Dorothy had recently played an egomaniacal matriarch in an episode of Law & Order; she was more current.
Bette Davis went directly from vamp to camp in grotesque films such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962) and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1965). On the other hand, Katharine Hepburn won three of her four Best Actress Oscars after the age of sixty. But not for playing “the girl.”
The theater was closed for electrical wiring, and Diane took the rest of the day off. Something was happening around her eyes, in addition to the usual bluish circles—the structure underneath the skin was beginning to slide downward. She sought advice at a cosmetics counter in SoHo. A tall, languid saleswoman not much younger than Diane said, “Some of our clients with mature skin like this product.”
Mature skin? Mature? She slid off the stool in a huff. At a different counter, she found someone older than herself and submitted to the woman's ministrations, watching in the mirror as a more professional, fully awake Diane emerged. She dropped a small fortune on eye cream, makeup and brushes.
Outside, she caught a look at herself in a storefront in SoHo: a painted matron in gaudy, unnatural colors amid a sea of teenage sprites. What if she ran into someone she knew? Fear and cowardice were written all over this carefully applied new face.
She walked uptown toward Union Square, wiping off the paint and contemplating the intersection of fate and human choice. What would have happened if Fred MacMurray had decided to just stick to playing the saxophone? What would have happened if Carole Lombard hadn't had a car accident at the age of eighteen that forced her to develop a personality for fear that the nearly undetectable scar on her face would end her career in pictures? What would have happened if Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor's third husband and reputedly her “one true love,” hadn't died in a plane crash?
Spring was everywhere; every tree was bursting into song under a crisp blue sky. What would have happened if she hadn't run after Vladimir at that first meeting? If she hadn't pushed for him to get the contract? If she hadn't asked to stay in his apartment, hadn't set up a phone call with his wife, made offers to employ his son? What would have happened if she had married Eric Mandell, her graduate school boyfriend—a good man, a generalist who, seven months after they broke up, married a talent agent and sired two kids right off the bat and apparently went into computer animation somewhere in greater Los Angeles? What would have happened if she had followed Paolo, the Italian sound engineer, back to Cinecittá? She bought a pair of turquoise Capri pants in an uplifting sixties swirl pattern that reminded her of her youth. She wore the pants out of the store, leaving her jeans in a trash can on the corner.
At the appointed hour, as if girding herself for battle, she yanked opened the door of the establishment the blind date had chosen. She saw him at the bar, a Rach
el classic: an investment banker in his mid-thirties with suspenders, tweezed eyebrows and a smirk. She tried not to judge; everybody has something to teach you. The key was figuring out how to steam through the small talk and bullshit to find whatever that thing was. She introduced herself, and waited to hear the Specialty. As the drinks arrived, he told her that he'd been sexually abused by his stepmother, who had seduced him at the age of seventeen. So much for small talk.
Diane looked across the restaurant at all the regular people who knew and liked each other already, and was viciously jealous.
She pulled the rudder of conversation firmly in another direction. This guy could learn a thing or two from her.
“Did you know that Jimmy Cagney spoke Yiddish?”
“I didn't know that.”
“He grew up on the Lower East Side. He said that if he hadn't learned Yiddish, the family would have starved. Because he was the youngest and good with languages, the family designated him as the Yiddish speaker, and he did all the shopping.”
“Interesting. So my stepmother has been calling me lately,” the blind date said again.
She leaned forward. “This is not the appropriate forum for that story.”
A look of anger passed across his face. “And what would that be?”
“You're in therapy?”
He opened his mouth, and then nodded.
“So talk about it there. Check, please?”
“You're dismissing me because I was abused as a child?”
“That doesn't sound like sexual abuse—that sounds like a letter to Penthouse.”
She dropped a bill on the table and left the restaurant without a backward glance.
She took the No. 1 train uptown. Had she been hasty? Had she been rude? She had no patience anymore. She had once spent an entire summer in despair over the movie Stevie (Robert Enders, 1978), in which Glenda Jackson portrayed the British poet Stevie Smith, who turned down a proposal from a lightweight, anyone-for-tennis type, only to spend the rest of her life alone, starving for affection.
Diane stopped at a corner bodega for a sandwich and some flowers to brighten up the private eye's lair.
“You don't need these wrapped, right?” the cashier said. So it was visible: she was alone and depressed—who else could she be buying flowers for?
“Oh, but I do want them wrapped. Nicely,” she emphasized, looking at her watch, as if she were late for a date. Diane was sick of defending herself in her mind as a legal entity. No husband? No children? Forty years old and unwilling to accommodate the only single man in the room? The counterman wrapped the flowers in silver paper indifferently, as if he didn't believe her. Every last stranger was a life critic.
Back at the Commodore Club, Diane faced the TV in her room, switching channels with the remote control, drowning out the sounds of the city entertaining itself and the couple in the next room with kitchenette entertaining each other. She was thinking about the studio with the hot-pink kitchen in the same way she had yearned for Vladimir in the fall, when he wasn't calling her. It was unrequited love for an unlisted apartment. And as with all unrequited love, the energy had nowhere to go, so it rained back down on her, saturating her with prosaic, unfulfilled wishes, intensifying the want. How many apartments could fall through? Could she bribe someone to get this new apartment? What would it take?
At midnight, she dialed Paul's cellphone with a shaking hand. His voice mail answered.
“Paul, it's Diane,” she whispered. She might come unglued at any moment. “I will pay anyone any amount of money for the Gramercy Park area studio. I must be approved, Paul. I cannot go on like this anymore. ENOUGH.”
JUNE
UNTIL HE SAW Javier in the flesh, Vladimir wouldn't believe he was coming. Anything could happen. They might revoke his exit permit, or cancel the flight; he might have gotten lost in the Miami airport. Vladimir had no sense of Javier's abilities. He knew he'd been expelled from school, but insubordination in Cuba didn't indicate a lack of intelligence. He waited in a small knot of people at the end of a long passageway at LaGuardia, wondering if they would recognize each other.
Vladimir had to smile: Javier was the last person off the plane; he wore combat pants, a blue T-shirt and a bewildered expression. His hair was in short curls and he seemed to be moving in slow motion. There was instant recognition. They embraced awkwardly among the crowds in the passage, and proceeded together to the baggage claim.
Javier retrieved a small, old-fashioned gray-blue suitcase that Vladimir remembered from his own childhood. It weighed a ton, and Javier insisted on carrying it himself. Vladimir steered him to the taxi line and they chatted lightly about air travel for a few minutes until it was their turn. A cab pulled up.
“We're taking a taxi!” Javier enthused.
“Get in,” Vladimir said, and gave the driver his address.
Javier immediately tried to start up a conversation in English with the driver, but the man was talking on the phone and wasn't interested. As the cab merged into traffic on the highway, Javier pulled something out of a shoulder bag.
“Here's something from Mom,” he said, switching back to Spanish and handing Vladimir an envelope. Like everything else that came from Cuba, the envelope was open for all the world to see.
It was the divorce papers.
“Did you see this?” Vladimir asked.
“No,” Javier said, looking out the window. He was a terrible liar.
“Your mother didn't tell you what this was?”
“Oh, yeah,” he admitted. “You're divorced. Congratulations.”
It was hard to know how to take this. Vladimir felt heavy machinery clicking into gear: It was possible that he had spoken to his son for all of half an hour in the course of the last year. And this had not been an unusual year.
“So tell me what's new.”
“This is new! New York is very, very new!”
As the Manhattan skyline appeared over the Triborough Bridge, Javier drank in the city. The cab rocketed down the FDR Drive and the boy peered out at the gritty and glamorous panorama of the East River and asked: “What's that? Is that a haunted castle? What's that?” The traffic slowed, and the driver turned off the highway, taking side streets through the East Village. The sight of Cooper Union, where he'd prepared for certification exams, brought Vladimir back to his own first days in New York, when he'd spent hours in the street, studying steel, stone, cast iron and neon.
As they stopped at a light, he looked over at Javier, who had a rapt expression, as if he were in thrall, or in love. The cab started up again.
“Is it true about Michael Jackson?” Javier asked.
VLADIMIR GAVE JAVIER a tour of the apartment. Javier seemed genuinely impressed by the building, the lobby, the view and the furniture that Vladimir had designed. He showed Javier a section of his closet and a drawer in his bureau that he could use. He showed him the bathroom, and Javier opened the medicine cabinet. Before Vladimir could tell him it was rude to go through other people's medicine cabinets, he asked, “What's this?”
He held up one of the expensive skin products that Terry had insisted he use. “I don't know. A woman bought me those. I don't really use them.”
“Diane?”
“No. One of Diane's predecessors.”
Javier nodded, looking at him directly. What was the kid thinking? What had María told him? Would he hold it against him, the fact of his personal life?
“When can I meet Diane?”
“Diane. Well, Diane and I are sort of… over.”
“Oh,” Javier said. He seemed disappointed.
“But I see her all the time. At the movie theater.”
“Can I meet her anyway? I'd like to see the theater. And since she sent me my invitation letter, I'd like to work for her. It's the least I can do.”
Vladimir smiled. That sounded like something Alicia might say.
Vladimir bent to wash his hands. Javier looked like a younger version of him, with María's round brow
n eyes. He wondered how much of María had been passed on to him.
“So you have a new girlfriend now?”
Was Javier taller than he was? “Who wants to know?”
Javier looked wounded. “Just asking.”
“Well, not that it's any of your business, but no,” he said, drying his hands.
They walked out of the bathroom. “What's this?” Javier asked, pointing to a pile of mail on the table by the door.
“Mail.”
“Mail!” he said, astounded.
Vladimir laughed. “Prehistoric man has awakened in modern times!”
“Go ahead and laugh. I'm the newest model from Cuba.”
“Are you hungry?”
“We just established that I'm coming from Cuba. What do you think?”
“How about a steak?”
“You're kidding, right?”
“There's a place that I think you'd like.”
“A restaurant?”
“Yes. Why don't you take a shower before dinner?”
“Okay!”
“Do you have anything to wear?”
Javier inhaled.
“Don't worry,” Vladimir said. “We'll get you some new clothes, maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, how about this?” He pulled a shirt and jacket out of the closet and laid them on the bed. “You want pants, too?”
“The whole uniform,” Javier said, holding the jacket up to his body, looking in the mirror, nodding seriously. “Is this what people wear to restaurants in New York?”
“Yes. So, would you like to take a shower?”
“Okay!” Javier said, and didn't move.
It was a three-month visa.
Vladimir felt crowded already.
In a loud, clubby steak house in Midtown that had left a lasting impression on him when a client had treated him to dinner his first year in New York, Vladimir led his new son through rituals that had become second nature to him. The waiter handed Javier an oversized leather-bound menu; he took it in his hands as if it were a breakable object that he didn't know what to do with. He looked much older in Vladimir's blazer and button-down shirt. On the other hand, he was wearing four rings on his fingers, a rope bracelet on one wrist, a beaded bracelet on the other wrist, and several necklaces that hit his chest at different points—not exactly a mature look.
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