Deadly Rich (33 page)

“Wonderful silk, isn’t it?” Annie said. “Sorry, nothing’s for sale but the apartment.”

Tori turned and saw herself in the mirror, caught in the arms of the plumply carved cherubs that formed the gilded frame. Something about her face was tired, preoccupied, wan. It was like seeing herself fifteen years from now.

“What’s the bathroom like?”

“Bliss.” Annie crossed to the bathroom door and flicked on the light. “This is the only bathroom that Philip Johnson ever designed for a client, and it was as a personal favor. Don’t you just want to
live
in it?”

Tori’s eyes did a quick scan of the sunken onyx bathtub-built-for-two, the enormous twin sinks, side by side on streamlined pedestals that seemed to grow out of the wall, the twin his-and-hers toilets with a coy chest-high screen between them, the mirrored wall with a marble counter running its length, the cabinets and laundry hamper built beneath, flush to its edge.

Why am I doing this
? she asked herself, and she could only think that she was doing it because it was important for this not to be important.

“Annie, would you mind if I used the facilities?”

“Darling, help yourself—piddle in both of them.”

Annie scooted out, and Tori locked the door and turned on the cold water in one of the sinks. It ran with a silky sound.

For a heavy moment she held herself motionless. She felt she was standing on a boundary that she could cross only once.

And then in one decisive step she was over it.

She yanked open the hamper. A pile of almost fresh bed linen spilled out onto the tile floor. The sheets smelled strongly of Rigaud.

She crushed each pillowcase to her nose. Beneath the Rigaud a scent of Zack’s sandalwood struck her like a slap in the face.

She crouched there in silence, breathing, just breathing.

Around her sandalwood hung in the air, suspended, like a sound.

Carefully she studied the pillowcases.

Two hairs were clinging to one of them. She lifted them off—a long chestnut hair, a short darker hair.

Tori held the dark hair up to the light, then carried both to the toilet and flushed them down the drain.

She stuffed the bedclothes back into the hamper. It took three shoves to get the door to stay closed. She turned off the water and unlocked the bathroom door.

“All ready,” she sang out. “Sorry to take so long.”

She looked around the bedroom and was startled to realize Annie had left her alone. At almost the same instant she experienced something far more startling: a rush of memories that were not hers. She could see two bodies on the bed, floating easily, timelessly through the patterned exchanges of lovemaking.

She blinked.

The images vanished, leaving the bed darker, duller, as though the silk had turned to canvas. There was no shimmer, no vibration of light.

She flicked the switch on the bedside lamp. Nothing happened.

“Annie?” she called.

The silence in the room was suddenly flat and harsh.
The air-conditioning
, she realized.
It’s stopped.

She crossed to the window and stared down into the street. Beyond the double glazing, traffic moved with eerie soundlessness on the avenue eight stories below.
Then it couldn’t be a power failure
, she realized:
the streetlights wouldn’t be working.

She crossed quickly to the bedroom door. The gallery seemed stiller, warmer than an instant ago. She sniffed. A sweet pungency hung in the air. It hadn’t been there before. The smell was familiar. Guerlain.

Somehow she took a wrong turn and found herself in an enormous, empty kitchen with two double sinks and two double refrigerators.

“Annie?” she called.

The situation was laughable and at the same time just a little bit frightening. What kind of a real estate agent would take a client to view a listing and then turn off the electricity and disappear?

Certainly not Annie MacAdam.

Tori jumped at a clicking noise somewhere behind her. A door had shut.

She turned and waited, reaching out with her ears. Ten beats of silence passed. The sound repeated itself. She realized it was coming from the back stairs: someone was running the service elevator.

She stood calming her nerves, folding herself in a curtain of concentration.
It’s only a New York apartment. It’s not the Black Forest.

She turned and retraced her steps.

The smell of Guerlain hung stronger in the front hall. She came to the library and stopped. Annie sat sprawled in the shadow of a leather wing-back chair. Her purse was open on her lap and her eyes were shut.

At first Tori thought she might be meditating, but Annie’s hand lifted, holding an atomizer, and spritzed the air in front of her nose.

“Annie. I’m ready to go.”

Annie opened her eyes and smiled. “There you are.” She stood and dropped the Guerlain back into her purse. “You’ll let me know quickly, won’t you? It’s going to be a very sought-after apartment. Dizey’s putting it in her column.”

“
THEY SHOULD HAVE A DRESS CODE
for these things,” Dizey Duke said. “Look at Gloria Spahn. Tits the size of South
Africa
and they’re falling out of her dress.”

Zack Morrow looked to his right. Men’s starched shirts and women’s bare shoulders made bright bobbing triangles and diamonds glittered against tanned skin as two hundred fox-trotting couples spun across the floor of the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom.

“Other way,” Dizey said. “She’s dancing with the mayor. You’d think the chairperson of the event would set an example. She looks like a cable-TV hooker.”

Zack looked to his left. The dress on Gloria Spahn was part gold bikini and part gold leotard, and she looked as lean and fit as a stripper.

Tonight’s event was the fourth annual New York Ball for the Homeless. The design firm of Gurdon and Chappell had fashioned a decor out of shopping bags and cartons and crates from Carrier, Tiffany, Saks, and any other merchant who had contributed packing material. For the fourth year since PEN had fired her from its fund-raising committee, Gloria Spahn was serving as chairperson.

“Gloria
is
setting an example,” Zack said. “She’s wearing a quarter million, and except for ten dollars, it’s all on her neck.”

Something tapped Zack Morrow on the shoulder. Without releasing Dizey’s left hand, he looked behind him into the eyes of Gloria Spahn’s husband.

“Gotcha,” Stanley Siff said. He was wearing antique emerald studs the size of the Hope diamond in his boiled shirt. “Double-cut.”

“Isn’t this fun,” Dizey said acidly. “I haven’t double-cut since Amanda Burden was a deb.”

“Don’t blame Stanley,” Annie MacAdam said. “I put him up to it.”

“
Vaya con Dios,
Dizey.” Zack handed Dizey to Stanley. He took Annie’s hand and spun her in time to the music. Lester Lanin’s band was playing an irresistibly up-tempo arrangement of “It’s Gonna Be a Great Day.”

“I take it you love the apartment?” Annie said.

“What apartment is that, Annie?”

“Now, don’t you get sly with me. You and Gloria looked at it twice last week. And again today.”

“It’s a beautiful apartment. We loved it.”

“Annie MacAdam Associates aims to please. And how did Tori like the apartment?”

“You’ve lost me, Annie. What apartment are we talking about now?”

“We’re still talking about the Vanderleeuw apartment.”

“Tori hasn’t seen it.”

“Oh, yes, she has.” Annie slowed and left Zack marking time to the music. She pulled her compact from her gold-sequinned purse and powdered a little of the shine off her nose. “I took her there not more than an hour after you and Gloria vacated.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because she phoned and asked to see it.” Annie redrew her lips. “The way she examined that bathroom you’d have thought she was going to put it on the next cover of
Matrix
.”

Zack stared at Annie. He didn’t speak.

Annie’s glance glided like smoke along his face. “I take it you’re just going to let me ramble on and smile your most beguiling smile.”

“I didn’t know I had a beguiling smile.”

Annie snapped her purse shut. Her feet took up the beat again. “You do and you use it, you handsome dog.”

“
WHY DID YOU LOOK
at that apartment?” Zack said.

Tori glanced up. She hadn’t heard him come into the bedroom. He stood in the doorway, still dressed in his dinner jacket. They’d been to separate dinners. It was one of the bylaws of their relationship that they had one night off a week from each other’s friends.

She shot him a questioning expression, trying very hard to look as if she honestly couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “What apartment?”

“Annie MacAdam showed me an apartment on East Seventy-second Street. I told her I didn’t like it. Tonight at the Homeless Ball she told me you’d been to see it. Why?”

Tori laid the new issue of French
Vogue
facedown on the chaise longue. She rose. “Annie isn’t being quite straight with us. She told me that you loved the apartment. If she’d told me you didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Wait a minute. I want to get the time sequence straight. You looked at the apartment because Annie told you I loved it?”

Tori felt something constrict in her stomach. Zack rarely questioned anything she did, and he almost never questioned it in the tone of voice he was using now. “I don’t remember the exact time sequence, and this really isn’t worth going into. Somehow our signals got crossed. No one’s to blame, and let’s not make it a big deal. Please.”

“I made my start in this town in real estate. I began with nothing—two tenement buildings on Avenue B that even the junkies wouldn’t live in. One thing I don’t need is help deciding whether or not I like an apartment. You’ve got terrific taste, and God knows I’ve relied on you for it, but I know the kind of home I want to live in. I know
exactly
.”

She realized that this was the moment to confront him, to ask point-blank if he was having an affair. She realized too that she’d stepped on his macho, that he was in exactly the kind of mood where he’d say yes and tell her to get the hell out of his life.

“It was an impulse,” she said. “I happened to be in Annie’s neighborhood. I thought the magazine could do an article on New York apartments and how they affect life choices.”

He wasn’t buying it. “I don’t like being checked up on.”

Tori sensed a great empty space between her and Zack, more space than there was in the entire room. Something was at stake here, and it wasn’t just an apartment. She knew she could buy time with a lie or an evasion, and she knew she’d hate herself if she tried. “I didn’t mean to check up. I called your office and your secretary said you were looking at real estate. I was curious.”

“Do I call your office and get curious when your secretary says you’re out?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

Zack snapped the gold cuff links out of his shirt and dropped them into the Limoges saucer on the dresser. His shirt studs followed the cuff links with three distinctly separated pings.

Early in their relationship Tori had noticed that Zack dropped his jewelry into ashtrays and saucers. She’d given him a Vuitton stud box to break him of the habit. The stud box was right there on his dresser, and she took it as an intentional slight that tonight he was ignoring it. He was sending a message that whatever control she possessed over him was purely by his permission.

“Are you having an affair?” she said quietly.

He turned. “We agreed on a relationship with no strings and no checking up. For seven years I’ve kept my side of that agreement.”

“For seven years I’ve never done anything you needed to check up on.”

“That was your choice.”

“It’s Gloria Spahn, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. He undressed down to his Jockey shorts.

“Are you in love with her?”

“Why don’t you ask me who was at the Homeless Ball?”

“Who else was at the Homeless Ball, besides Annie?”

“People. The usual.”

He went into the bathroom, and a moment later the shower pattered like bullets against the curtain.

Tori sighed and got into bed. She left her light on low, a signal that if he wanted to wake her, she’d enjoy the interruption. She snuggled down under the thin cover and closed her eyes.

She could hear Zack singing in his easy, untrained baritone as he rinsed the last five hours off his body. Even angry, he enjoyed his shower. He reminded her of an animal, never letting emotion bar him from the physicality of life. Sometimes she loved that trait in him. Tonight she didn’t. It meant there was a zone he could escape to that was closed to her. It meant she was alone.

She asked herself what she was doing in her life, what had she achieved and what lay ahead. She had founded
Matrix Magazine.
A modern magazine with a feminist slant, appropriate to its time and place. After seven years the magazine was in deep trouble.

She had built a relationship with Zack. A modern relationship, appropriate to its time and place. She had lived with him, loved him, hated him, battled him, gotten pregnant with his baby, aborted his baby by mutual consent, taken him for granted, allowed him to take her for granted. After seven years the relationship was in danger. She and Zack were peeling apart from each other like old weather stripping from a window.

She heard the shower stop, and then came the nightly water music of teeth being brushed and the last piss of the day being flushed away.

Finally Zack came out of the bathroom. She peeped one eye open. The extra hours with his personal trainer were paying off: new muscles ridged his back, and his waist had gotten leaner.

He climbed into bed. The springs bent under him, momentarily pulling her toward him, then recovering.

He read a book and she pretended to be asleep.

A quarter hour later his light went out. Within minutes the deep, regular breathing signaled that he was fast asleep. She lay there unable to sleep, listening to the whisper of other people’s plumbing in the walls.