The First Wives Club (17 page)

Annie knew Elise, who had gone to Madeira, didn’t like the scandal of the headmistress and the Scarsdale diet doctor to be mentioned. Brenda smiled at Annie. Did she know that, too?

“Do you think Jean Harris could help me lose weight?” Brenda inquired innocently. “Maybe it would be worth it.”’ Annie watched Elise lose her patience. The three of them were falling apart, losing their focus. Elise was right, but the approach, perhaps, needed some alteration. “Stop this. Cynthia is dead. Don’t you see how serious this is?” Annie bit her lips to keep them from trembling.

‘What does it take for you to say enough’? Don’t you see? This isn’t just about Cynthia! It’s about all of us. Don’t you see it?” she cried. ‘We’re leaking. They’ve punctured us, and we’re leaking and dwindling down to nothing. Society says that’s just fine and we aren’t even standing up for ourselves.”

Annie couldn’t help it. “I have less reason than either of you for getting angry. Aaron wasn’t as bad as Morty or Bill.”

“Yeah, that’s what you think,” Brenda said.

“No, that’s what he thinks,” added Elise.

Elise paused. ‘I’d like to put a motion on the floor. I think that it’s time for what goes around to come around. Let’s talk about the total destruction of these men. Emotional, financial, social. We make sure their marriages fail, their businesses go sour, their friends desert them. They did it to us. We can do it to them. We’ve got the leverage. That’s the plan. I say we wipe these dickweeds out.”

“I like it,” said Brenda. “But perhaps it’s not quite strong enough.”

She turned to Annie. ‘What do you think?”’ “I’m not sure,” Annie said, her tone puzzled, ambivalent. “You’re kidding, right? You’re either crazy, or joking.” Annie looked at Elise, but Elise didn’t smile.

“Elise, Brenda. Do I understand this correctly? Vengeance?

You’re proposing that we’re in this together, out to get our respective exes?”

“Yes,” Elise said, adjusting herself to sit even taller in her chair.

“Who was it I heard say, Only the weak seek revenge. The strong seek justice’? I propose to convene the charter meeting of the First Wives Club.” Elise picked up her coffee spoon and, using it like a gavel, tapped the table. She looked at Annie. “Are you in?”

Annie sat very quietly.

“Come on, Annie. Don’t be a pussy,” Brenda urged.

”I’m in,” Annie said grimly, nodding her head.

“The motion on the floor is that the charter meeting of The First Wives Club’ has been convened. This motion has been seconded and thirded, and passed,” Elise said.

“Yippee!” exclaimed Brenda. The three women lifted their glasses and in mock solemnity, clinked them together in a toast.

”Now,” continued Elise in her new role as madame chairwoman, “someone has to place a motion on the floor outlining the goals of the club.

Brenda?”

“I make a motion that we wipe the floor with the jerks.” With a knowing look at Annie, she added, “All of them. I want to see Morty broke, dead broke. That would be the one thing in this life he couldn’t Madame chairwoman turned to Annie, “Annie?”

”I want Gil powerless. No power. No status.”

Elise quickly spoke up, “And Bill put to pasture. Finifo as a lover boy.

Symbolically, of course.”

Annie struggled with her next thought—the struggle of a good girl.

Then Annie sighed with acceptance and said, “And I want to see Aaron abandoned, betrayed and abandoned.”

Elise smiled, her pleasure deep and real. “Good girl,” she said. “And tomorrow night, we get to see all our targets together in one room at the AIDS benefit.

Like ducks in a row. It will be the beginning of their ends.”

“Or, to put it another way, the end of their new beginnings,” Brenda said.

They clinked their glasses in another binding toast. “To us,” Elise said. “To the First Wives.”

“Here, here,” Annie said, and smiled. “Can our motto be We don’t get mad, we just get elen’?”

“Oh, please,” begged Brenda, “can’t we do both?”

Balling the Jack.

“Tout New York, tout New York, dear,” cooed Gunilla Goldberg as she stood in the entrance to the Pierre’s ballroom, looking over the crowd and allowing them a good look at her. Gunilla was, as the French would say, “of a certain age,” but in her case, there was no way of determining what that ‘certain age” was, thanks to surgery, cosmetics, diet, and exercise. Her champagne blond hair was combed in the society pageboy, held in the back by a bow-shaped diamond clip that had become her trademark. As usual, she wore a flamboyant dress, tonight’s a Lacroix of silk chartreuse moire, with a full ruffled black velvet skirt that ended at knee length. Her brown eyes were enhanced by dyed eyelashes, and the carefully waxed arch of her eyebrows gave the impression that Gunilla was always surprised.

Her husband, Sol Goldberg, the financier, had already entered the glittering room, but Gunilla waited a moment for her new young friend Khymer Mallison to look about while Gunilla drank in the scene. The Pierre ballroom had three large crystal chandeliers suspended down the center, their Austrian crystal lit like frozen waterfalls. Flowers, white spray roses and delphiniums, were centered on each table, bursting upward like great floral fountains. Wall sconces cast just the right over-the-shoulder light illuminating the perfect tans, perfect makeup, perfect jewels, of the assembled. Glasses tinkled, waiters undulated through the crowd. The dance floor was just beginning to fill up. It was, Gunilla knew, perfect timing for an entrance.

It was the fourth annual benefit party for AIDS relief, and anyone who mattered in New York was there. The women’s society mafia had succeeded in selling out all the tables. AIDS relief was becoming too fashionable to miss, Gunilla thought. Always on the cutting edge, she had seen it coming.

The three endless weeks in Vevey had been worth it, she decided. She was glowing, and her strapless Lacroix showed off her perfect creamy skin, her new freshness. She turned to Khymer, her decadesyounger protege, and emiled, her perfect, even teeth glinting. “Now I’ll show you how it’s done,” she purred, and sashayed across the ballroom floor, nodding and smiling to everyone that mattered.

“Look what le chat dragged in,” Melanie Kemp, society interior decorator, murmured, sotto voce, to her friend and business partner, Susan. Many such women who had been born into New York society continued to mock Gunilla’s affected French, her overdone apartment, and her over-the-top couture. Behind her back they even called her Gummy Bear because of the story, surely apocryphal, that she met her first husband when she was still a call girl, and when she took out her dentures and serviced him, he fell in love. Since then she’d remarried twice, always to shorter, richer men. Now she was important on the charity board social circuit, where ‘scene and be seen” was a way of life.

No one now dared call her Gummy Bear to her face. She had worked hard, become almost a fixture in New York society. If there were rumors that her husband Sol had a new interest, well, society would wait and see if he did anything to cement his ties to the new young thing.

“Yes, she has arrived,” admitted Susan, a rather horsey-looking but chic society blond. “And she’s with that Khymer Mallison.”’ “Don’t you mean Climber’ Mallison?” Melanie asked cattily. Melanie and Susan had their hair blonded at the same salon that Gunilla patronized. Khymer now went there, too. In fact, Khymer followed every one of Gunilla’s suggestions, from her hairstyle to working out with Bernie and Roy.

The girl was everywhere. “Climber.” That’s what they called her on Page Six last week.

Everyone in New York read the gossip columns, but only the very socially secure admitted it. And both Susan and Melanie were that, they had family money, society husbands, and fun careers. It was too wonderful to be paid to spend other people’s money.

“Oh, you’re just bitter because Duarto got her job,” chided Susan’s husband, Charles. It was true that the girls had tried to get the contract to decorate the Mallisons’ new town house, but had been scooped. “l think Khymer’s very nice, very energetic.”

“Oh, please,” said Susan, rolling her eyes. ‘So has Gunilla finished her work on Shelby Cushman and gone on to Khymer?” Gunilla was famous for adopting social wannabes as they appeared on the scene and helping with their launch.

The uncharitable said it expanded her power base, since the new money who made it—that is, found acceptance in the New York social scene—owed her favors.

Everyone knew her most recent “adoptee” was Shelby Cushman, the wife of Morty Cushman, the Morty the Madman retailer on TV. In fact, as Susan watched, Gunilla waved Khymer off to social Siberia, a table under the Pierre’s balcony, while she herself climbed to the dais and sat beside Shelby Cushman, the very picture of Southern gentility, who was ensconced there with her heavyset husband.

“Gunilla looks good,” Melanie admitted.

“She ought to. A thousand monkeys gave up their glands for her.”

”Is that where she’s been? i thought she was at a Zen retreat.”

“Yes, and the Easter Bunny is coming to your house next week. Grow up, Melanie. Wake up and smell the Shalimar.” Susan turned and looked across the dance floor to another table. ‘Speaking of Zen, here comes the avatar himself.

Now he’s what i call young and energetic,’ Charles,” she cooed to her husband.

Kevin Lear was handsome, tall, and well built, famous as both an actor and a Zen Buddhist. In a town like New York, where everyone was blase about the movies, he had the superstar gleam that was strong enough to turn heads. He crossed the floor to the head table, propelling before him his fiancee, a model twenty-one years his junior. His hand was lodged below the small of her beautiful back, exposed by her puce bias-cut gown all the way down to well below the start of the vertical crease of her buttocks. Many eyes were drawn to the attractive couple.

Annie, seated at a table near the front, turned to follow their progress. As she watched, two of the star’s fingers dipped and then disappeared into the girl’s crease.

Very appealing, Annie thought dryly. Very Zen. She thought of a variation of the Zen koan, What is the sound of one hand, slipping?

Would he now shake hands with that hand? She averted her eyes and surveyed the table. Chris, she was relieved to see, was busy talking to Jerry Loest about one of the complicated shoots that the agency was about to attempt. Silly to try to protect him, anyway. He was almost twenty, not a little boy anymore, she reminded herself.

Across from her, Brenda Cushman sat fanning herself with the party program, looking overweight and overheated, both of which she was.

Jerry Loest had leaned over to Brenda and was talking about the agency.

Brenda was listening intently as Jerry explained how costly it was to bring in new business. Although she kept fanning, Annie heard Brenda say, “Morty made a bundle in spite of his overhead.” And Brenda should know if anyone does, thought Annie.

Perhaps it had been a mistake for the First Wives to attend the gala.

Annie could hardly bear it. Would Aaron appear? And would he be with Leslie? Did everyone in the room know how stupid and blind she’d been?

Well, after all, she couldn’t hide forever, and it was a good cause, Annie thought, though she had come to despise these affairs. All gossip and boredom.

It depressed her that this crowd of talented, monied people couldn’t do any better than this at entertaining themselves. No one really enjoyed this preening and gossiping, did they? What was the point?

She looked around the room for the dozenth time. Where was Aaron? She looked out across the ballroom. Some couples were dancing, but most stood in chattering groups round their assigned tables. The first course had already been served and cleared, and now the waiters, laden with heavy trays, were making their way back to tables. The meals at these affairs were always lackluster. People didn’t come to feed, except in the jungle sense. And it is a jungle out there, she thought.

Then she looked past Chris, past Jerry and his wife, past Elise and the senator, to the two empty seats at their table. Who hasn’t yet arrived? she wondered. Then she remembered.

Cynthia had bought these seats. Annie had urged—begged—Cynthia to come. And in the rush since the funeral, she had forgotten. So, apparently, had Brenda and Elise. Until now. Annie met Brenda’s eyes, then Brenda bit her lip, her face paling. Gone but not forgotten, Annie thought, her irony cutting deeply at herself. Only two weeks and I’m so wrapped up in my own life, I practically forgot Cynthia ever existed. She looked away from the ghostly chairs, and her eyes filmed with tears.

“Oh, look,” cried Duarto, who was seated next to Brenda. He seemed to be drinking more than usual tonight, Annie thought, but she knew that his lover had died only a few months ago, and to her he seemed desperate in his gaiety.

More misery, she thought. She watched Duarto as he eyed a newcomer and whistled his appreciation. “Eet’s the cowboy,” he said in his thick Spanish accent. Annie turned to see Oscar Lawrence, the designer noted for his luxurious western wear, move up to the dais and take a seat with his wife.

Across his forehead was a garish new scar, complete with stitches.

I hear he was in a polo accident,” Brenda said.

Well,” said Duarto, licking his lips. “He say he fell off a horse when he was riding eet, down een Virgeenia at the Wolverton Hunt, but I hear eet wasn’t polo and eet wasn’t hunting.”

”Dressage?” asked Annie.

“No, cara. Fellatio. He was working on a stallion een hees own stables and eet seems the brute deedn’t like hees technique.”

“Oh, Duarto!” Annie looked over at Chris, but he was still engrossed in comparing close-ups to long shots with his ‘uncle” Jerry. Eunice, Jerry’s wife, giggled.

“I swear I heard eet from one of hees grooms.” Duarto tsked. “Such excitement!

But they’ve always said Oscar loves rough trade.”

“Duarto,” sighed Brenda Cushman, “sometimes I’m afraid life is passing me by.”

“Better than running you over,” he told her, taking another long sip of his drink. “Look at those steetches!”

Annie couldn’t laugh. In fact, she could hardly sit still for the cynicism.