The LeBaron Secret (10 page)

And then—Wednesday, it was, of last week—she had asked him as he left for work, “Do you think the Jap would have time to address the last of these invitations for me?” It had always been their little joke, calling his Oriental secretary “the Jap.” He had referred to her as “the Jap” often, many times before. Their joke.

“Do you mean Miss Chin?” he had said.

“Yes—the Jap.” But he had always known who the Jap was before.

Was it the Jap? But that would seem too much of a cliché, the obvious suspect, the secretary at the office. That was who it always was in soap operas and in comic strips, and short stories in
McCall's
. Surely Eric would have better judgment, better … taste. Of course, one heard a lot about male menopause, male mid-life crisis.

And now … tonight. He knows they are having a lot of people in for cocktails, important people—Herb Caen, the columnist, the William Crockers, the Jimmy Floods, the Tobins, and so on. And yet—where is he? It is now ten after six, and guests are invited for six-thirty.

Her nails are dry now, inside and out, and with a soft badger brush Alix applies a touch more blush to her cheeks, blends it in, and studies her reflection in the cool glass as Katie places the choker of twisted pearls at her throat and adjusts the emerald clasp. Alix reaches for the rheostat switch and dims, just slightly, the makeup lights that frame the mirror, thereby increasing her self-allure. I haven't held up badly, she tells herself. I've held up better than a lot of people I can think of. At thirty-six, I can still fit easily into the Jacques Fath I wore at my coming-out party. I've held up better than, for instance, Ann Getty, for all her money—Ann Getty, whom I happen to hate. I could have an affair, too, if I wanted to. If I wanted to, I could have an affair with … Peeper.

Why not? He'd probably do it, and so would I.

This is not a new notion of Alix's.

Having an affair with her husband's twin brother is an idea that is not without a certain … piquancy. She has always wondered just how identical the twin brothers
really
are. Are they identical in—
that
way, too? Often, seeing Peeper in his swim trunks, lounging by the pool, or bouncing on the diving board, or doing a handstand on the grass—showing off—she has thought: If only he would drop his trunks for me, then I could see if they are identical in
every
way. Of course, it would take more than just dropping his trunks to tell. There would have to be quite a bit more than that—
a lot more
. His swim trunks, even those skimpy bikini kind he sometimes wears, tell her nothing at all. It would be interesting to find out. She is pretty sure she could find out, and pretty sure he wouldn't mind.

That
would show Eric.

Maybe tonight, she thinks, I'll make a little move in that direction.

“If you don't need me for anything else, ma'am, I think I'll see if I can help out downstairs.”

“Thank you, Katie. You don't think the shoulder straps of this are too narrow?”

“You look just lovely.”

Yes, she says to her lonely, lovely reflection in the glass, I will seduce Peeper, and I will begin tonight, and he will cooperate, and it will be only, simply fair. In her private rationale, she is entitled to an affair with Peeper. With Eric, she has always felt that she possesses only half of a matched pair, like owning a single earring, or inheriting only half of Aunt Sarah's Spode. And instantly in the mirror the scene is transformed from her suburban dressing room to the summer moonlit terrace by the pool, where the two of them are alone. Smiling, he lets her slide the bikini briefs down the length of his body with its smooth swimmer's muscles, and she finds him, as she knew she would, in a state of violent, stallion arousal. She sits on the moonlit chaise beside him, and kisses it. “You are so lovely!” he whispers, and cups one of her breasts in his hand, brushes his lips against the nipple as she studies his swollen member in her hand, so like Eric's, and yet somehow wildly
different
. Alix leans forward toward the mirror, and the ivory-handled hairbrush falls into her lap, and she presses the handle against herself, just as Peeper is pressing himself against her now. In the mirror now her face is flushed with sexual excitement, which makes her beauty seem only more luminous. Between her legs, the handle of the brush presses more persistently.

Now the second part of her fantasy begins, for Eric has joined them, and one of them has entered her from the front and the other from behind, and now she is complete, filled up with both of them. But of course this would never happen. Eric would never participate in such an outrageous, orgiastic tripling—sober, hardworking Eric and merry, carefree Peeper, the two opposing halves of that same split cell—but Alix can imagine it, anyway. In her imagination, there are no limits to the distances the three might go.

No, she will have to settle for Eric and Peeper separately.

And of course Eric will find out about it. She will have to confess it to him, and he will react to the news with a murderous frenzy of jealous rage—rage! But she will blame Peeper. In a torrent of tears, she will say, “But, darling, he forced me to! I must have been out of my mind to let him, but he looks so much like you I couldn't seem to resist him—it was all so sudden, I felt so helpless! Oh, darling, forgive me—it will never happen again, I promise you!”

(But it might happen again. That would show Eric again.)

But Eric will not forgive her, ever, and in his rage he will kill Peeper, and now that familiar feeling of disorientation and anomie settles upon her, as the rest of the dreary scenario plays itself out, a feeling of cockroaches crawling around her heart.

Now Peeper is dead, and Eric has divorced her. She has gotten to keep the house, an arrangement that is almost standard in these cases. Eric has given her custody of the girls, and a large financial settlement. But what future does a thirty-six-year-old divorced woman with two teenage daughters have in a place like Burlingame—while Eric has gone off and married whoever she is?

But wait. Eric will be in prison. But perhaps not. A sympathetic judge—male, of course—will acquit him of the murder of his brother, or recommend leniency. Eric was the wronged party, it was a crime of passion. Temporary insanity.
Gentlemen of the jury, I charge you that the defendant is an upstanding member of this community, a pillar of his church, with no previous record of criminality. Standing before you is a decent, God-fearing citizen, driven to a murderous rage by the lustful, willful actions of his former wife. I therefore recommend
…

And so Eric will go off and marry whoever it is, and she will be left all alone in a big house in Burlingame, a divorced woman with two grown daughters, invited nowhere, a social pariah whom no man except a common gold digger will want to marry. She will lose her membership in the Burlingame Country Club. This is also standard in these cases. The club wants no single or divorced women. The widows of deceased members are bad enough. The club is obligated to keep those women on. But to single women and divorcees there is no such obligation. The Francisca Club will drop her, too, for during the divorce and murder trial the scandal of her adulterous behavior will have made headlines in all the papers. E
x-DEB BEDDED DOWN BROTHER-IN-LAW!
S
OCIALITE SEDUCED HUBBY'S TWIN!
And so she will end up all alone, hovering somewhere at the brink of middle age, friendless and clubless in an affluent country-club suburb of married couples, while he …

She will consider moving to the city, as others in her situation have done, and where they find the situation exactly the same. And where they find each other. And so they travel together, take cruises together, these lonely, untethered, aging women, looking in vain for husbands. They have their faces lifted, they color their hair. In the end, they may marry their hairdresser, and let his boyfriend move in with them.

But still. But still. Perhaps she will have an affair with Peeper, and
not
let Eric find out. But where would be the fun—where would be the sweet taste of revenge—in that?

“Hi, honey.” His voice from the next bedroom interrupts her lubricious reverie and its dispiriting aftermath, and the ivory-handled hairbrush slides from her lap and lands on the white carpet with a soft plop.

“Darling, you're late! People are due here any minute.”

“Sorry—got tied up on the phone.”

“Well, hurry and get yourself
guapo
. I'll see you downstairs.”

His head appears in her dressing-room door. He is tying his tie. “I forget,” he says. “Did we invite Melissa tonight?”

“Darling, you know we agreed not to. We agreed that even if she is your sister, an extra single woman is a drag”—telling him exactly what she has been telling herself.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Herb Caen wants to write this party up. We don't want it to be a drag.” Privately, she is thinking that she cannot stand Melissa. She is also thinking: He didn't use to forget who we invited to our parties.

She rises now, in front of her mirror, adjusts the thin shoulder straps of her new Dior, and smooths the front of the dress. There is a slight feeling of wetness between her legs, but there is no time to change now, and besides, this is the dress she told Herb she would be wearing. She mists her hair and earlobes with a few more dashes of L'Air du Temps, and prepares to go downstairs and be the delightful, gracious, beautiful, and always popular Peninsula hostess that Herb Caen will tell his thousands of
Chronicle
readers that she is.

Half an hour later, the Eric LeBarons' cocktail party is in full swing.

“Darling, you look gorgeous!”

“Darling, so do you!”

“… And then we go to Acapulco for two weeks, and from there we fly directly to Cancun …”

“How old
is
Ann, anyway? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”

“I love your hair.”

“There's a new little man at Magnin's, who …”

“And so I said to her, ‘If you're going to do this in a tent …'”

“Who's that man standing by the piano, talking to Molly Tobin?”

“My dear, I've no idea!”

“He looks slightly—windblown, don't you think?”

“Yes, a little too blow-dried.”

“… The minute you get to Las Brisas, you should call …”

“Alix, darling, how
cute
of you to have your two little girls helping to pass things!”

“Seriously, I think it's important for them to learn how to run a cocktail party.”

“Is that her own hair, or a wig?”

“Her! Why, that little tramp has been down on everything except the
Titanic!
”

“I
love
it!”

“And so I said to my product manager, ‘You can't just put that red horse up there on the roof and have it sitting there, flapping its wings. It doesn't
mean
anything. It doesn't
say
anything.'”

“This is what Alix calls her ‘A Group.'”

“Hmm.”

“I sold mine at thirty-three and five-eighths, but now—”

“Her doctor told her that whenever she had a craving for a cigarette she should have a drink, and
now
look at her!”

“It's a wig. Her hair was short when I saw her last week at the club.”

“Just how rich
are
the LeBarons, anyway?”

“You've heard the story of how Peter Powell LeBaron got his middle name—”

“They call the Washington Street house the Dago's Palace.”

“… a barrel of wine in the portrait gallery …”

“Wasn't that a riot about Assaria LeBaron in her jet?”

“Just took the controls, and—
whoosh
, under the bridge!”

“She must be quite bonkers.”

“They say that if you cross her she'll chew you up and spit out the pieces.”

“Where did she
come from
—does anyone know?”

“Well, her maiden name was Latham, which means nothing to anyone. Anywhere.”

“I've heard that she was some sort of dancer, or show girl, and that Peter Powell LeBaron had to marry her.”

“Oh, I've heard that too, for years. They went off to Europe on their honeymoon, and came home with—”

“Melissa. Five months later.”

“Oh, I think it was longer than that—a year, maybe, but still. At the time, everybody thought it was awfully peculiar. I mean, getting pregnant on your honeymoon is one thing, but then doesn't one usually come
home
to have the baby? I mean, to make it an American citizen and all that.”

“Poor Melissa.”

“Actually, I like Melissa, but …”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

“They say that for years Assaria LeBaron has been having an affair with Gabe Pollack. Who owns the
Gazette
.”

“But isn't he a little—
minty
, as they say?”

“Minty?”

“Hush, darling—Alix is coming toward us. Alix, darling, how lovely you look!”

And so on. And so on.

The young man with the windblown-looking hair has approached Eric with his hand outstretched. “My host,” he says. “Hi, I'm Archie McPherson.”

“Eric LeBaron,” Eric says. “Good to meet you, Archie.”

“Nice of you and your wife to let me tag along,” he says. “You have a beautiful home, and this is a swell party.” A pause, and then, “Actually, I knew you and your brother at Yale.”

Eric studies the young man's face, trying to connect it with some face from the past. “We knew each other at New Haven? I'm sorry, but …”

“Oh, you didn't know me,” Archie says. “But I knew you. Everybody knew the LeBaron twins. You both ran with the Choate and Hotchkiss set. You were both Zeta Psi and Skull and Bones. I was just a scholarship kid from a public high school in Willimantic, Connecticut, so I didn't run with the right crowd. You and your friends used to look right through guys like me when we passed each other on the Quad.”