Diary of a Yuppie (11 page)

I was to see a lot more of Mrs. Sands that day, because after our conference my client drove directly home to Greenwich and suggested that I give our fund raiser a lift downtown in a cab. She had promised the director of the museum that she would first visit a loan show of old ecclesiastic treasures: chalices, reliquaries, ciboriums and the like, and I accompanied her to the large, dark, unpeopled central gallery.

She walked slowly but without stopping past the glass cases of glittering objects. We paused at last before a missal bound in silver gilt and studded with large semiprecious stones.

I broke our silence. "Doesn't it make you feel that God must have been an old Jewish banker living on Fifth Avenue behind a Beaux Arts front?"

Again her faint smile seemed to confirm our sympathy. "Well, J. P. Morgan went in for this kind of thing, too. But he lived in a brownstone on Madison."

"When he ran his fingertips over those stones, do you suppose he thought of God?"

"As you imply,
his
god."

"A god who likes the bones and teeth and nails of his saints immured in gold and studded with opals!"

"Is your god so different, Mr. Service?"

"Do you ask that because I'm a lawyer?"

"Let's just say I ask it."

"I don't suppose I really have a god. Have you?"

"I'm perfectly prepared to have any god who can convince me he is one."

"But he hasn't so far?"

She didn't answer me, but continued her tour of the cases.

On the way downtown in the taxi we became more personal. She told me that she was a widow and lived with her ten-year-old son in an apartment on East Ninety-fourth Street. I informed her in turn of the state of my marriage. When we arrived at her house, she paused for a moment before getting out, apparently considering something. Then, with her hand on the door she said abruptly:

"I'm dining tonight with a friend of mine, Ethelinda Low. Perhaps you've heard of her? She's a kind of Mrs. New York. She always lets me bring a man. Would you care to come?"

"I'd like to very much."

"Good. Pick me up at eight. Black tie."

She told me about our hostess later, in the cab on our way to the party. Mrs. Low, like Odette in
Swann
, of obscure, indeed, unfathomable social origin, had started her career more or less as a kept woman and then had married, first, a restaurateur, second, a Brooklyn contractor, and finally, twice widowed, old Sidney Low of railroad fame. She was a woman of colossal energy who had brought to the management of the great fortune that her third husband had bequeathed outright to her a mind, in someone's phrase, "unclouded by the usual American fetishes about the spending of money acquired by sweat, will or altar." According to Sylvia, she had earned the total respect and even admiration of New York society.

We found our hostess standing by the doorway of her living room, formally receiving her guests. Gray-haired and brown-skinned, but very tall and straight and endowed with the most serene blue eyes I had ever seen, Mrs. Low in no way suggested her beginnings. She had converted such youthful spirits as might have been needed in earlier days to an almost awesome respectability. Yet at the same time she impressed me as a person who had no desire to appear as anything than what she evidently now was: a wise, rich, sensible, down-to-earth woman. I was later to learn that all of her stepchildren and step-grandchildren had fallen utterly under her spell and visited her submissively to be berated for their follies or approved for their good conduct, like the descendants of Louis XIV with his formidable morganatic spouse, Madame de Maintenon.

My hostess waited until Sylvia, who had greeted her with a quick kiss, had moved out of hearing, and then addressed me with a grave candor.

"It's not usual for Sylvia to ask to bring a man. You should be much complimented."

"Oh, but I am!"

"Well, I hope you're as nice as you look. Because I want somebody nice for Sylvia. She's had a hard time, that child. And she deserves a prince charming."

"Well, I can't claim to be a prince."

"But you'll provide the charm? Conceited fellow! Very well, we'll settle for that. But remember, if you don't treat her well, you'll have me to cope with!"

"Do I look such a creep, Mrs. Low?"

"No, you look like an angel. That's what worries me. And Sylvia tells me you've left your wife."

"As a matter of fact, she left me. And not even for another man. I guess she just couldn't stand me."

"Dear me, what did you do? But never mind. You can tell me at dinner. I've put you on my right." And leaving me thus dazzled, she turned to greet another guest.

As Sylvia moved from lady to lady—it was her custom, I discovered, to keep largely to her own sex in the cocktail hour—I had ample occasion to take in every detail of the great chamber. It was, as I now realize, my first impression of perfect Louis XV, unless it should have been called Pompadour, being free of the stateliness and pomposity of so much of the royal decoration of that century. The colors were a blend of sky blue, gold apricot, pale peach, mauve pink, pomegranate, blue green, and I don't know what else; the curtains and panels and upholstery on which they were displayed were shiningly clean. I noted that the high maintenance of everything, paint, gilt and varnish, suggested that no human had ever set a clumsy hand on them. And yet it all still welcomed. Cupids smiled and flung garlands; warblers seemed to twitter; angels beamed from fleecy clouds. The central painting, by Boucher, over a "rose Pompadour" divan, showed the famous mistress of the king, with huge dark enigmatic eyes, gliding over blue ice in a marvelously wrought sleigh drawn by two little blackamoors on skates, her hands complacently folded in an ermine muff. Sylvia told me later it was a replica of the one at the Frick.

Mrs. Low, evidently, emulated the Pompadour. But wasn't there a hint of the blue stocking in such perfect taste? I thought I could see why the king had turned to hot whores like Du Barry.

In the dining room, candles lit and gleaming, under huge green and yellow tapestries of Alexander the Great's victories in India, we seated ourselves at a long table of twenty places laden with crystal wine glasses, silver gilt plates and the porcelain centerpiece of a Roman chariot race. Mrs. Low again gave me her grave attention.

"You may be surprised, Mr. Service, that I take so personal an interest in your friendship with Sylvia. The dear girl has been very much on her own. Her courage and character in difficult times have been great indeed."

"I'm quite ready to take your word for that, Mrs. Low."

"My word? Aren't you ready to take your own?"

"Well, you see, I only met her this morning."

"This morning!" Mrs. Low's frank surprise was now converted into a throaty chuckle. "Well, well, it seems the cautious Sylvia can change her spots. You must have made a swift impression."

Seeing that it was no longer appropriate to speak to me as a possibly reluctant suitor who needed a push, my hostess now inquired about my life and antecedents, and in a few minutes possessed herself of an astonishing amount of information. Perhaps at one point in her long and eventful career she had been a personnel officer for a corporation. When the conversation changed, I turned to my other neighbor, a Hungarian cosmetics manufacturer, and listened as sympathetically as I knew how to the story of how she had cornered the market in a hair dye. I think our hostess must have been listening with her right ear, for before she rose when the meal was over she murmured to me:

"I think we're going to like you, Robert."

When the men joined the ladies in the parlor, I was glad to see that I was allowed to sit with Sylvia. Sipping my glass of champagne, I felt suddenly at ease and happy.

"Most of them work, don't they?" I asked, looking about at the guests. "Even the wives."

"What did you expect? Lascivious aristocrats, reclining on sofas? A Roman orgy?"

"Something like that. I hadn't realized to what extent New York society had become a working one. And I suppose they're all great successes at whatever it is they do?"

"Oh, yes. Ethelinda's nostrils are very sensitive to the stink of failure."

I nodded towards Mrs. Saunders, wife of the editor of
Town Voices.
"I suppose
she
doesn't work."

"She's not a failure, though. She caught Saunders."

"But isn't the real money hers?"

"That makes her even less of a failure. At Ethelinda's you don't have to have earned your success. You simply have to have it."

"What about me? Or is your success so great that your escort is admitted without question?"

"Oh, I'm not a success
here.
What are you thinking of? I'm simply supposed to be coming along. They always need recruits from the next generation. The toll of death and Florida is so high. And I think I've gone up a notch for bringing you. They like handsome young men who are clearly going to make it."

"Is it
that
clear?"

"Clear enough. You should have heard Ethelinda about you. And suppose you don't make it? What have they lost? Failure is quickly disposed of."

"It sounds like a hard world."

"Do you know a softer one?"

"No, I don't think I do. But suppose they take me in. Suppose I become a regular at this sort of gathering. What's in it for me?"

"Well, in the first place they're amusing. Probably more so than any other group in town. Because they have brains and do different things. You don't have one of those stultifying common denominators, like a profession or a suburb or even a cause. And secondly, you'll probably pick up a fair number of good clients."

"Do people really change lawyers because they meet someone they like at a dinner party?"

"You never can tell. Law and medicine have gotten so complicated that the best lawyers and doctors make terrible mistakes. These people hate mistakes. And the men, particularly, are inclined to grouse about it after a few drinks. Keep your ears open."

"As you do?"

"Oh, I'm always working. My office hours are my waking ones."

"That sounds like a terrible strain."

"You get used to it. For example, I'm perfectly happy and at ease right now. Yet I'm always aware of Mrs. Russo across the room. She's on the board of the Belvedere Hospital, and I know they're planning a drive."

"So you're ready to pounce?"

"I'm ready if she's ready. But I happen to know she doesn't like to talk business at a party. Still, it doesn't hurt to be awake."

"How did you get started in all this, Sylvia?"

"My father taught in a small backwater college in New Hampshire. He was able to get me a scholarship there, and I succeeded in marrying a boy from New York who couldn't get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. People don't realize that the social advantages today are in the lesser-known schools. The Ivy League is full of poor geniuses who
may
become great. And who may not."

"I can't believe you're as worldly as you try to appear."

"I'm not. Or at least I wasn't. Tommy Sands came of an old and impoverished family that I found impossibly romantic. When we married, I had to go to work to support him."

"He did nothing?"

"He sold bonds when he could. He had no carry-through. Anyway, the poor darling died of leukemia when we had been married only five years."

"I'm sorry."

"So was I. But I should probably have been less so had it occurred later. He was beginning to drink."

"Ethelinda wouldn't have liked him."

"As a matter of fact, she did. None of us is wholly consistent. And then, he had charm."

"I'm surprised you haven't remarried."

"I have no rules about that. You'd better think twice before asking me."

"Oh, I shan't ask you."

She laughed. "How can you be so sure?"

"Because I'm still in love with Alice."

"Don't you know that's the surest way to make yourself attractive to a woman?"

"So help me, I'm naive!"

She looked at me almost as gravely as our hostess had. "I don't know if you are or aren't. You're a funny one, my friend."

When I took her home I asked if I could come up for a nightcap. She hesitated.

"You'll have to be very quiet and not wake up Tommy."

"Oh, I can be like a cat."

"Maybe that's what I'm afraid of."

Upstairs in her small beautiful apartment, crowded with every kind of bibelot, with red-lacquered Chinese furniture and scroll paintings, she told me to mix myself a drink while she checked on her son. When she returned she was clad in a white silk nightgown and a blue kimono.

"You're a remarkable man, Mr. Service. You've made me break every rule I've made for myself in the past six years. I asked you out to dinner the same day we met, and now I'm going to let you spend the night. Or a part of the night. If you care to, that is. I'm following a hunch. Who knows? It may turn out to be the idea lousy. And then again it may not."

It definitely did not turn out to be the idea lousy. Sylvia as a lover managed to be both hot and cool, moving her slim body with astounding grace. At our moment of climax, however, she let out a cry that was soon followed by a knock at the door.

"Are you all right, Mummy?" a boy's voice called.

"Yes, darling, only a nightmare," she responded with perfect equanimity. "Go back to bed, dear."

But immediately afterwards she made me dress in the dark and depart on tip-toe.

"Did you pretend I was your wife?" she whispered.

"No!"

"Thank you." And she gave me a quick parting kiss. I knew that a novel and extraordinary thing had entered my life.

T
HE NOVEL THING
certainly changed my humdrum, existence in the next three months. As I look back over them it seems that I had little time to think, only to be. I certainly had no opportunity to make notes in this journal. At the office I was as busy as ever, and many of my evenings and weekends were still devoted to law work, but the balance of the former were now dedicated to accompanying Sylvia on her nocturnal rounds. We went to dinner parties, to openings, to charity balls. In the interims we managed to make love, not in my room at the Stafford, which I had given up when Sylvia dubbed it "tacky," or in her apartment, where her son was not again to be disturbed, but in the small, furnished floor of a brownstone that I had found and sublet. I thought it adequately attractive, but Sylvia was never content with it, and every time she arrived it was with a print or a jar or a bed cover, something, anything, to tone up its "dullness."