The First Wives Club (15 page)

She pictured Bill in his office, preparing to take compliant suburban Elise to lunch, secure in the belief that he had gotten away free and clear. She imagined him there, in the office she had decorated discreetly in muted tones of blue, with William Taft Atchison—Partner etched on the door in gilt.

Thanks to her, he had been named a partner, albeit a lesser one, in the distinguished law firm of Cromwell Reed. Today, she could see him hiding behind the paneled door, surrounded by the little, comforting totems of his hobbies and power, those cliches of WASP old family he held on to so dearly.

But the handcarved duck decoys, the leather golf bag, the polo mallets, wouldn’t help him today. Nor would his enormous mahogany desk, his array of crystal paperweights, or his collection of antique Japanese china, no, not even the sterling silver picture frame with her picture she had given him that sat at the corner of his desk.

As the car pulled up to the front entrance of the imposing skyscraper on Wall Street, Elise had the door open before her driver got out.

Annie leaned out the window as Elise turned to face her. “He wasn’t good enough for you, Elise.

And Gil wasn’t good enough for Cynthia. So go in there and let him have it.

Eor all of us.”

“This one’s my pleasure. Don’t go way, it’s not going to take very long.”’ Then Elise walked resolutely through the revolving doors, hearing them swoosh behind her from the force of her push. Once in the elevator, she jabbed the button for the forty-fifth floor.

Elise saw Bill jump as she threw open the door to his office, crashing it into the cherrywood paneling. She stood in the doorway, taller than he, while she watched his face turn white, bloodless. “You dickless excuse for a man. Of all the contemptible things you have done to me, this is the lowest.”

She took two hard strides toward his desk, arms akimbo. Bill’s secretary was hovering near the door, not knowing what to do. Elise gestured to her without turning around, so she stepped back over the threshold, but continued to watch.

Elise blew a wisp of her usually perfectly coiffed hair off her face and said, ‘Not man enough to face me to tell me you were leaving? I had to see your empty closets to find out? Where’s the note, Bill?

Even Nelson Rockefeller left a note, you worm.”

She saw the moisture break out on Bill’s upper lip. He struggled with a cottony mouth, then finally managed to speak, his voice strained, high-pitched. “Calm down, Elise. Let’s not have a scene. I was going to talk with you over lunch.”

The lock on the door must have broken, because the secretary couldn’t get it to stay closed. Elise could see out of the corner of her eye the knot of secretaries gathering in the hall. Bill noticed them, too.

“Let’s just talk about this like mature adults,” he pleaded.

“Mature,” she yelled. “You want to be mature?” He gestured to the door.

Ignoring his signal, she continued, “Almost twenty years, Bill. Two decades of lies and infidelities and humiliation. I loved you. I gave you a home, I gave you my body, I gave up my career for you. All I wanted was to be normal, and maybe to be loved. We could have had so much more, too. I never asked for your gratitude, I never threw my money in your face, not even when it bought you this partnership. I was a good wife to you. I deserve better.”

Bill edged around the desk, but Elise followed. ‘Just tell me this, Bill, and then I’ll go. I just need to know. Why now? Why now, after years of your affairs and one-night stands and mistresses and women calling our home in the middle of the night. After all the secretaries and maids and waitresses. Why now?” She noticed him try to head her off, but she continued around the desk, and he backed away. Then her eye fell to the silver picture frame. She paused.

Her picture had been removed, and in its place, the smiling face of another woman—a much younger woman—someone vaguely familiar.

“This time I’m in love,” he said.

Elise stared at him for a moment. She strode around his desk to the credenza.

She picked up a handcarved duck decoy, turned, and smashed it into the picture of her replacement. Bill jumped at her sudden move, at the shattering noise. She saw his face go ashen, his mouth drop open.

At that, Don Reed, the firm’s senior partner, stepped through the doorway with a placating smile on his face. Before he could get a word out, Elise turned to him and in a voice as deep as Mercedes McCambridge’s in The Exorcis, growled, “Get out!” He immediately did just that.

Bill leaned forward to touch his fingertips to the desk, as if to balance himself, to keep from falling. “Elise, please, this is neither the time nor the place. Let’s talk about this later, at home.”

She detested the imploring tone in his voice. “Home? Whose home, Bill? You moved out. We don’t have a home together, remember?” She whipped a golf club from the bag leaning against the wall and, with a swing worthy of Babe Didrikson, shattered the Lalique shade on the desk lamp.

Bill just stared.

Another swing shattered the glass case of his beloved Imari. ‘You used me and discarded me.” Tossing the golf club to the floor, she walked to the door, crunching over the broken glass, and pushed her way through the mob of partners and secretaries that were now blocking it.

“You’re not going to get away with this, Bill. I can’t let you. Not this time.”

As she sauntered to the elevator, Elise heard Don Reed, the head of the executive committee of the firm, say, ‘Bill, we’d like to have a word with you in my office.”

Elise tapped gently on the door of her mother’s bedroom, then opened it softly. Her mother’s nurse stood up from the bedside chair and turned and smiled.

“Hello, Mrs. Atchison. We were just talking about you.” The nurse came closer to Elise and said in a low voice, ‘I’m afraid she couldn’t remember you were coming. I had to remind her.”’ Patting Elise’s arm she added, ‘She’s been in and out all day, poor thing.”’ Then she stepped out through the door and said, “Call me if you need me. I’ll be right next door.”’ Elise walked over to her mother and placed her hand on the satin comforter, avoiding the plastic drip that snaked down into her mother’s painfully thin arm. Elise never knew, week to week, if she would find her mother fully aware or floating in a world of dreams and the past.

Elise saw her mother’s eyes open when she stroked her cheek. ‘Mother, it’s Elise.”

“Well, of course it is. It’s Monday, isn’t it?”

Elise released the breath she realized she was holding and sat down.

‘That’s right,” she said with a smile. “It’s Monday, so it must be Elise.” Elise leaned forward, kissed her on her forehead, and said, “So, how are you, Mother?”

“Old and tired. And how are you, my dear?” she asked, searching Elise’s face.

Old and tired, too, Elise thought. And so alone. I hope I don’t look too awful. I hope she can’t see the loneliness in my eyes.

“Just fine, Mother. And I’ve brought you something.” The last time Elise was here, her mother had become agitated when Elise identified herself. Her mother had cried, “No, my Elise is just a little girl.”

Elise reached into her bag and brought out a flat package wrapped in brown paper. She undid the string and took out a silver-framed photograph. She hoped that a current picture of herself would help her mother remember, it was too painful to have her mother not recognize her. “Can you see it without your glasses?”

“Of course.” Her mother squinted as she tried to discern the figure in the picture, Elise sitting on the lawn of her house in East Hampton.

“It’s you.

How lovely.”

“Yes, it was taken out at the beach last summer. I think I look rather good, don’t you, Mother?”

“Is that for a movie?”

Elise looked up suddenly. “Movie?” she asked.

“You’re still going out to Hollywood, Elise? What a dreadful place.

You must be very careful.”

“I haven’t been to Hollywood for years. That was when I was very young, remember? I live here now. In New York. I’m not going anywhere.”

Elise’s mother closed her eyes and shook her head slowly from side to side.

“They’ll be after your money, Elise. They’ll want you to put your money in your pictures. You mustn’t do that, darling. That would be too humiliating.”

Elise felt a chill run down her back. She knew it wouldn’t do any good, that these lapses in her mother’s memory came and went with a will of their own, but Elise had to try. “Mother, darling, I went to Hollywood a long time ago, and I’m back now. I’m here to stay. I’m older now, Mother.”

“Men live off beautiful women in Hollywood,” her mother continued, not hearing Elise. “A rich, beautiful woman wouldn’t have a chance.

They’ll use you, my dear, and tell you they love you. But it’s the money. Always the money.”

Elise caught her breath, stifling a sudden sob. She swallowed, then said, “I’m careful, Mother, but sometimes, I feel I’m too careful. I have to take a chance.”

”You’ll never get over it, Elise. They’ll humiliate you, take your money, then cast you aside. Look what they did to your cousin Barbara.

The poor darling, living over there in Africa, strange men swarming all around her.

They feed her drugs, and take her money.” Her mother’s voice became louder, and she opened her eyes and stared intently at Elise. “Don’t let them drag you down, my dear. Keep your dignity. That’s all you’ll ever have, after all, your honor. Always do the proper thing.”

Elise felt her throat tighten and hoped that her mother didn’t notice.

She would be very disappointed in me now, Elise thought, if she knew.

And as much as Elise ached for her mother’s kindness and understanding, she could never let her mother know of Bill’s betrayal and of her terrible indiscretion at the Carlyle. And how living honorably was no insurance against loneliness.

She looked over at her mother, who was now beginning to nod off, her tissue-thin eyelids fluttering closed. Very softly, Elise said, “Mother, it’s late and you should get some rest.”

Elise placed her framed picture on her mother’s night table, next to the array of pills and potions that took up most of the surface. “I’ll see you next week, darling. Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?”

Her mother didn’t open her eyes but muttered, “Tell Grandpere I want to ride my pony.”’ Elise rose and kissed her on the cheek, tears now filling her eyes, feeling more alone at that moment than she had ever felt in her life… . “Yes, I will. I’ll tell him.”

Annie had been surprised when Elise telephoned to ask her to lunch at Le Cirque. Why lunch? And why Le Cirque? Though Elise had more money than any woman Annie knew, she also knew that Elise wasn’t eager to spend it. Le Cirque charged six dollars for a half a pamplemousse, making it surely the only twelve-dollar grapefruit in Manhattan. Maybe they did it just for effect, since no one was going to order that as an appetizer when there were all those marvelous other starters.

If Annie was surprised by the invitation, she was truly shocked when Brenda called to tell her she was invited, too. Annie had been sitting at her desk, trying to put a few of her thoughts on paper. She wasn’t even sure if she was trying to write a story or a poem or just keep a journal. In fact almost nothing had transferred from her mind to the paper. She had committed herself to sitting down every day for one hour, even though she simply stared at a blank page for most of that time. But thank God, at least she was trying. The problem was, the minute she sat down a fierce tide of depression had swept over her, leaving her blank, empty. When the phone rang, breaking the numbing silence, she jumped, then sighed with relief.

“What gives, Annie? Elise has invited me to lunch at Le Cirque. Has she decided to slum?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Annie replied.

“I wonder if it has anything to do with Bill. Did I tell you that Angela told me that he’s had three secretaries in the last year? He absolutely harasses them. She says that one girl, a summer intern, swore he wagged his weenie at her.”

“Come on, Brenda. Is that what the new summer interns at Cromwell Reed talk about? Bill may be a compulsive, but he’s an attractive man. I can’t imagine he’s been reduced to exposing himself to get laid.”

”You never know what turns em on. As far as I’m concerned, all men are dogs.”

Annie felt the emptiness in her chest, the silence that her life was now.

Brenda must have heard it because she asked, “How’s it going, without Sylvie home? How are you filling the time?”

“I’m fine. I was thinking of starting a novel.”

“Great! I started one back in college.”

“Really?”

“Sure. It was War and Peace, but I got bored reading it.”

Annie laughed. Brenda always got her to fall for it.

“So, about lunch,” Brenda prompted. “Why would she invite me?”

“Who knows? I guess we’ll soon find out.”

“Angela also told me that Elise showed up at Cromwell Reed the other day, that there was a huge scene.”

Annie tried to picture the scene again as Elise had described it to her in the car ride home. She couldn’t help but smile. “And?” she simply asked.

”In Bill’s office at Cromwell Reed. And in the hall. In a purple leather dress, no less. Angela says that the marriage isfinito.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Annie told her. And a relief that Brenda had found out from someone else.

“God, she ate dirt for so many years. What could have made her break now?”

Brenda wondered.

Annie felt the anger move into the empty space in her chest. She sighed, trying to expel it. It was outrageous, the way these men behaved. It was beyond bearing.

“Who knows? Maybe it was Cynthia’s death,” Brenda postulated. “Maybe it was Bill’s latest. Apparently he took the little babe to the firm’s Partner Dinner the other night. And she’s a Van Gelder, Phoebe Van Gelder, so maybe Bill figures to turn one heiress in for a newer model.

Except this newer model is running on cocaine.”

“Brenda, how do you know all this?” Annie asked, partly irritated, partly amused.

”Today’s Post,” Brenda admitted. “There was a blind item in Suzy.

You know, What beautiful conceptual artist from one of the gilt-edged families played wife at the Cromwell Reed sock hop’? And they played footsie, too.” I figured it out all by myself. And Duarto gave me the tip about the nose candy.”