The First Wives Club (18 page)

The evening had two purposes, to raise money for AIDS hospice care and to honor Gil Griffin, of all people. His funding, rumored to be $100,000, had underwritten part of the evening. The program listed all the attendees, and their contributions, but from experience Annie knew that much of what was published was untrue, Khymer Mallison, for instance, was listed as giving $25,000, but Duarto had told them she had simply sent her old, declasse furniture to the AIDS hospice and put that overrated value on the castoffs.

Still, some money would be raised, and Annie supposed that was better than none. As for Gil Griffin, whatever he had donated hadn’t been given out of charity. It was simply a good buy. Annie did enough benefit work to know that one hundred grand wasn’t enough to buy him a prestige table at some of the more established charity balls, but the annual AIDS ball was a relatively new benefit arena—only in its fourth year—and he’d invested where it showed.

Gil Griffin was elegant and composed, she admitted, ensconced in the center of the head table, his new young wife, Mary Birmingham, on one side, Gunilla Goldberg, the ball’s chairlady, on the other. He sat there, his head tilted in the birdlike way he had, and accepted wellwishers’ congratulations. This would be an evening of congratulations and self-congratulations, Annie knew. But the real purpose of the evening for most of the attendees was to play the New York game, to show off what they had and to compare it with others who had as much or more. Cynthia’s empty place at the table seemed a mute rebuke.

New York society had grown since the days of The Four Hundred, but not by too much. You saw the same people at every soiree, the old money, the new money, the Eurotrash and minor royalty, the bicoastals.

Sometimes the lines blurred or merged, but the faces remained the same.

When a society marriage blew up, it was difficult starting over in front of this audience. Annie knew that. Once again she scanned the room and wondered where Aaron was.

Duarto bent forward from his seat and leaned across the table. He was eyeing Kevin Lear and his beautiful companion. They had been clients of his. And part of every society decorator’s job was entertaining his clients, inviting them to parties and introducing them to the right people. ‘When they stay weeth me een Connecteecut one weekend, che forgot her diaphragm,” he confided. “Che tole heem they could only have anal eentercourse, but he refuse. He say that’s how lawyers are conceived.” Duarto laughed, then turned to greet Lally Snow, another of his clients.

She was sheathed in a skintight, poison green, clinging silk jersey, with a puff of organdy ruffles at the neck. ‘ciao. cara,” Duarto enthused as each air-kissed the other. As she waltzed on, hobbled by the dress, he whispered, “The original serpent een the garden. They say the liposuction was flubbed.

Che can never wear a short dress or a bathing suit again. The scars.”

“A small price to pay,” sighed Brenda Cushman. She looked down at her pendulous breasts and spreading stomach. “How much do you think they can Hoover out?” she asked. Annie knew Brenda was on a new diet and could only eat tropical fruits. She was also taking special new pills made of crushed garlic and papaya enzyme. “I’ve lost eleven pounds, but I smell like a Sicilian pineapple,” she confided to Annie.

Across the table, Annie could see Elise with the senior senator from Maryland, Roland Walker. Elise’s uncle Bob Bloogee had arranged this last-minute date for her with his old widower friend. Elise looked slim and regal and cool as ever, Senator Walker, however, wore an ancient dinner jacket that had kept up with neither the times nor his weight. A sprinkling of dandruff covered his shoulders. Elise, for just a moment, allowed herself to think of Room 705, of that young man’s delicious kisses, of the feeling of his arms around her.

Elise caught Annie’s eye, raised an eyebrow, then indicated the next table with a slight flip of her head.

Bill Atchison was seated there, with Phoebe Van Gelder and the Van Gelder family, along with some other people, among them Celia Reed, the dried-up old wife of Bill Atchison’s senior partner at Cromwell Reed.

Annie looked back at Elise and smiled. For years that frumpy woman had bored Elise at these obligatory functions. Now Annie was pleased to see Celia blithering on about something into Bill’s captive ear. She was one of the few people who could manage to render boring even the spiciest gossip. Annie didn’t have to strain to hear Celia’s annoying, strident voice.

“Well, they announced the engagement, even though everyone knew that he was a blatant homosexual. Just blatant. It was the title, of course.

Lally wanted her daughter to be Princess Guliano. The whole thing was about to start, I mean the guests were already seated, when they found out that he’d run off with the best man. Can you believe it?” she questioned Bill and the rest of the table. The Van Gelders seemed bored, Bill only nodded.

“Lally should have recognized a phony, anyway. There aren’t any Venetian princes. Only counts. Everyone knows that,” sniffed Celia Reed. Elise and Annie stifled their smiles.

Elise had told Annie that Celia was originally a barkeep’s daughter from Cincinnati, and whatever social graces she possessed had been learned after she married Donald Reed, a member of an old New York family. Annie wondered if everyone in Cincinnati knew the vagaries of Venetian nobility.

Elise grimaced, shot Annie a look, then raised her eyes toward heaven.

Then they both laughed.

Brenda, however, wasn’t laughing. er eyes were focused on Shelby sitting next to Morty at the head table. And I look like a Sicilian matzo ball, she thought. Even seated, Brenda could see how thin Shelby was. Brenda released a small sigh. When Brenda first met Morty, she had been thinner, but never as thin as Shelby. And time had taken its deadly toll. But how do all these other women do it? she wondered.

But wait a minute. It was only the women who were thin. The men —most of them over thirty-five—were overweight. Brenda considered that fact for a moment.

Even in this respect, the men had the power. It didn’t matter that they were balding and out of shape. They had the money, they had the power. It didn’t matter how they looked.

But the women. They were all whittled down to matchsticks. She looked over at Elise, who, she guessed, weighed little more now than she had at her debutante party. But of course, Brenda thought, I’ve never seen Elise eat more than three or four forkfuls at a meal, and never dessert. And Annie, always counting calories and exercising. What a way to live! Surveying the room, however, she had to admit that none of the other women of any age seemed to be losing the fat fight as obviously as she was.

Again she eyed her full bosom and large stomach. What I wouldn’t give to be able to walk into a dress shop and not be humiliated by bitchy saleswomen. To be able to come out of the ocean without running to cover up with a wrap. Yeah, and to be able to lift my leg parallel to the floor. But I can’t, so what’s the big deal? she tried to tell herself.

Your husband left a fat woman for a thin one, that’s the big deal.

Brenda cared little for the opinions of the people who surrounded her in the ballroom. But she knew that when their eyes shifted from Shelby to her, and back again to Shelby, all they could know was that Morty Cushman had left his fat wife for a thin one. Knowing that mortified and upset her. And when Brenda was upset … Where’s the next fucking course? she thought, scanning the room for the waiters.

Across the table, Elise closed her eyes for a moment and wondered if she’d make it through the evening. She was already through the single bottle of mediocre champagne that had been provided. Perhaps if she danced. But the senator wouldn’t budge, so she’d have to have a drink.

A double.

Elise knew Bill was capable of almost anything, but Phoebe Van Gelder was not exactly his type. She was sitting at Bill’s side, young, pretty, and bored.

But a bit too outre for Bill. The outlandish outerspace jewelry, and that plastic or rubber dress. Was that what they wore downtown?

Phoebe looked as sick of the evening as Elise herself was.

She heard Bill say, as he turned from Celia to Phoebe, “I suppose you wouldn’t consider a waltz with me?” He added, “That is, if you do waltz.”

”I do, but only with the right partner,” she told him.

“And who is the right partner?” he asked.

“A man who sweeps me off my feet.”

Elise watched them as their eyes met, locked. People from other tables were watching as well. In nightmarish slow motion, Bill extended his right hand, grasping Phoebe around her tiny waist, he drew her up to him, then led her onto the dance floor.

”Well, isn’t that perfectly romantic?” Elise heard Celia gush.

“Perfectly,” Celia’s husband agreed.

Elise finished her last gulp of champagne. Without a real drink, Elise thought, I’ll die. Well, she’d go to the powder room, just to move, to get away from that deadly little table. The main course was over. Now there was nothing but dessert to wait for. She excused herself from the senator and swept toward the door.

As she walked down the curving staircase of the rotunda, Annie Paradise called softly from behind her, “Elise, wait for me.”

”I was just going to the ladies’,” Elise said, hooking her arm through Annie’s. “Then I’m going to the bar if you’ll come with me. I’ve got to have a moment’s respite from the barbarians at the next table. And the senator. He might hold the record for filibustering in the Senate, but he hasn’t said one word at the dinner table.”

After the necessaries, and the dollar left for the ladies’ room attendant, they crossed the rotunda and swept into the Cafe Pierre bar, past the highly polished mahogany trimmed in glistening brass to the stools at the end. Annie scanned the trompe l’oeil sky on the ceiling and glanced at the small faux windows, marveling as she always did at this touch of whimsy. Elise was at once both authoritative and coaxing, impossible to resist. Her years as a film star had given her a patina that time hadn’t dulled. Heads turned. Elise is still very beautiful, Annie thought. She projects an air of importance or mystery or something that hovers around her like a cloud.

At the bar, Elise ordered a double vodka, Annie had white wine.

“Well,” Elise said, “I’m not sorry poor Cynthia missed this. It must be horrendous to have your husband not only deceive you, the press, and his firm, but then turn around and marry the girl. Well, at least Aaron didn’t show up with his doctor.” Elise shuddered. She was too humiliated to mention Bill and Phoebe.

“And now Gil and Mary Birmingham are ensconced up there, as if he’s a prince.”

Elise shook her head. ‘Just out of curiosity, who had Cynthia asked to escort her?”

”Roger Trento,” Annie said.

”Who’s he? I think I know his name.”’ “The tennis pro at the club,” Annie admitted. She saw Elise wince.

“No wonder she killed herself,” Elise muttered, and ordered another drink.

For a moment Annie considered Elise’s comment. Aside from Chris, Annie herself had had only one other option for an escort for tonight, Maurice Dingman, a friend of Jerry Loest’s, who was twenty years her senior, plus being fat and dull. What would she do for an escort if she didn’t have Chris to fall back on?

“I better get back to my son.” She sighed, kissed Elise, and got up, ready to leave the bar. She stopped suddenly, her hands clutching the bar behind her.

There, sitting together on one of the tiny divans that lined the wall, were Aaron and Leslie Rosen. He was dressed in a tuxedo, a white silk, fringed scarf thrown carelessly around his neck. His dark hair gleamed, his skin shone, his teeth flashed as he smiled. Annie allowed herself a moment to take in the tete-a-tete, then turned from it, as her father had taught her to turn from the scene of any disaster. She walked up the two shallow steps of the Cafe Pierre and across the rotunda. Holding tightly to the banister, she ran up the stairs to the ballroom.

Control yourself, she thought. You know that he is living his own life. Stop it. You had to see them out together like this sometime.

Better sooner than later. Act normally, she commanded as she crossed the ballroom floor.

As Annie sat down at the table, Duarto was still talking. “We’re all balling the jack, man,” he was saying. “Thees eesn’t honoring Gil Griffin. Eet’s honoring hees jack.”

“His what?” Chris asked.

“Hees jack, hees cash, hees dinero, hees money. Eet’s all about money.

No one gives a sheet for the AIDS victims, for the sick, for the homeless. Not these people. Not een thees city. These parties are all about jack. Who got eet, who gives eet.” Tears filled his eyes.

“No one cares that Richard died. No one even visited heem.” He turned to Brenda. “No one but you, cara. I weel never forget you for that.”

Duarto lifted Brenda’s hand and kissed it. Then he held it up to Annie. “She came to see heem every day. She brought heem fruit, and meat loaf and lasagna.”’ He wiped his eyes and turned to Brenda.

“You’re a terrible cook,” he told her.

“I know, but I give good takeout.” She patted Duarto’s hand.

Now those who were on the dance floor were being asked to leave, to finish their dessert, stop their chatter, and take their seats. It was time for the serious talk. From the dais, Robert Hazzenfus took the microphone. On the board of several of the city’s hospitals, half a dozen clinics and medical wings bore his name. There was another benefit of his philanthropy, it was widely rumored that one of the rooms in his enormous penthouse was fitted out as a complete oh-gyn office. Several people swore that each week he had two prostitutes come up, and one dressed as a nurse and assisted while he examined the other. Annie doubted that the story was true, but it had certainly persisted.

Elise caught Annie’s and Brenda’s eyes as the others in the room turned their attention to those seated at the head table, and with a sweep of her graceful hand encompassing Bill, Morty, Aaron, and Gil, she said in a deep, throaty whisper, ‘To First Wives.” Simultaneously, as if rehearsed, both of the others lifted their glasses in silent agreement.