The Slipper (61 page)

There was a knock on the trailer door.

“We're ready, Miss Martin,” an assistant called.

Carol stepped outside. A makeup man rushed over to add a bit of powder and rouge and freshened up her lipstick, and she patiently endured it, feeling nothing. The hairdresser fussed with her hair and finally stepped back, satisfied. The wardrobe woman arranged the billowy cascade of white fox furs on her shoulders. Carol thanked her politely, thanked them all. She stepped into the blazing flood of lights and took her spot and felt the heat brushing her cheekbones, her brow, and yes, she was dying inside, but she had a job to do. Norman was gone. Oh God. Oh, dear God.

“Ready, Carol?” David inquired.

Carol nodded and the boy with the clapper stepped in front of the camera and clapped it and Carol gazed into the camera and the camera was John's mother and she wasn't going to let her break them up, no, she loved John, she was going to fight for him.

“No, Mrs. Marlow,” she said, “I'm not a tramp. I was selling perfume behind a counter at Saks when he met me, yes, but—”

She stood under the sweltering lights in the white satin and white furs, and she did her job. This is what you have always wanted, she told herself. This is what you have worked for all these years. Carol did her job, and no one knew her heart was breaking.

17

Luis Montoya was tall and dark and handsome and determined to prove to her that what they said about Latin Lovers was really true. Señor Montoya was a diplomat, very wealthy, very distinguished, horny as hell, too. He had been trying all evening to get her out into the gardens, and once out in those gardens with all the secret nooks and crannies and hidden bowers a girl was as good as gone. Nora smiled sweetly and said no, she didn't care to see the moonlight and roses and mosaic tiles. Luis looked crestfallen. He looked absolutely gorgeous too in his black tie and tailored tuxedo with that big red-and-silver sash slanting across his chest. Nora didn't know what the sash signified but it was bound to mean something important, just like those decorations he was wearing. Luis was a big cheese, no question about it, as handsome as Fernando Lamas and even sexier with those enormous brown eyes and that pencil-thin mustache.

Nora took another sip of her champagne, glancing around the spacious room. It was packed with a posh crowd, diplomats from half a dozen embassies, Mexican socialites and American millionaires, the men in elegant formal attire, the women dressed to the hilt and with a chic that would put Paris to shame. Mexico City was extremely cosmopolitan and ultrasophisticated, at least on this level. Tonight's affair was being thrown by an American oilman and his wife, and their home was a veritable palace in Mexican motif, white stucco, red tile roof, colored mosaic tile everywhere. Real Renoirs and Utrillos hung on the walls along with exquisite Mexican rugs. The food was superb. The champagne was the best. A typical night on the diplomatic circuit. Nora wasn't certain whom this party was being given for—a German count? a Swedish explorer? an Argentinian textile tycoon?—but everyone was busy making points or making each other. Señor Montoya was still trying his damnedest to make her.

“Look, sweetie,” she said, “I love your looks and your shaving lotion is divine, but no sale.”

“I do not understand,” he said plaintively. “You do not like me?”

“I think you're a living doll, Señor Montoya. I just don't happen to feel like being banged on some cold marble bench behind a clump of rosebushes while guitars are strumming in the distance. Call it perverse. I like to know a guy a couple of days before I let him screw me.”

Some of that oozing Latin charm disappeared. The huge, soulful brown eyes turned cool.

“You American girls like to shock with your frank language and your breezy freedom. You have emasculated your American men and turned them into a race of overgrown boys whom you rule with ease, but when you meet a real man you become frigid and afraid.”

“Nice try, love,” Nora retorted. “Now I'm supposed to show you I'm not frigid and afraid, right?”

“It's worked before,” he confessed.

“It's not gonna work this time. There must be at least fifty gorgeous women here at the party tonight and I'm sure at least half of them would cheerfully trot out into the gardens with you. Why don't you give one of them a thrill and let me drink my champagne in peace.”

“Half of them I have slept with already,” he said. “They do not have for me the—how is it you say?—the challenge. The thrill of the chase, this is what excites a man. What he can have without effort, he does not want.”

“Great point. I'll be sure to use it in my article.
Cosmo
readers will love it. I'm writing an article about American girls away from home. How they react to a new culture and how they adapt, how they change, what happens to the old attitudes and standards when their family and friends aren't around to look over their shoulders.”

“And what does happen?” he inquired.

“A lot. You'll have to read my article. In the meantime, do me a great big favor and fuck off.”

Señor Montoya's handsome face tightened angrily, his flat cheekbones burning a bright pink. He was Mexican aristocracy, from one of the oldest, wealthiest families, an esteemed diplomat to boot, and he wasn't used to being turned down. He muttered a very uncomplimentary word under his breath and marched off to seek new prey. Nora smiled to herself and raised her champagne glass. She must have attended over a dozen of these piss-elegant diplomatic affairs during the past three and a half weeks, and at each one of them there had been a suave handsome Latin male who tried his best to get into her pants. She was American and she was a new face and therefore she was up for grabs. Screwing the naive American girls seemed to be the favorite sport of these arrogant Latin men with their smooth manners and worldly charm. A number of girls fell for it, she had discovered, but not all of them were that wide-eyed and naive. Nora had interviewed over a hundred girls for her article, and she had learned that the majority of them were more than capable of coping with that particular menace. Her readers would be delighted to learn that American girls living and working away from home were holding their own.

Actually, she had finished her article over a week ago, but she didn't intend to send it to New York until after she flew home, two days from now.
Cosmopolitan
had put her up in one of the city's grandest old hotels, had provided introductions to the crème de la crème of the diplomatic and business community and were paying all her expenses as well. Nora was having a ball, and she didn't intend to leave until it was absolutely necessary. It had been marvelously stimulating, interviewing all those girls, older women as well, and it had been a joy to get back to her typewriter in the afternoon when everyone else was taking a siesta, great to pound the keys again, to write something besides a laundry list for a sullen would-be genius. This trip had been a blessing. She was well rid of James Hennesey, the sod, and it was wonderful to be free and on her own again.

Seeing her standing alone, Ted Andrews hurried over. Ted was twenty-seven years old and had clear blue eyes and light-brown hair and the handsome, clean-cut features of a grown-up Boy Scout. Ted was a diplomatic aide at the American Embassy, her official escort tonight, and Ted took his duties very seriously.

“Can I get you something, Miss Levin? Would you like another drink?”

“I'm doing fine, Ted.”

“Would you care to see the gardens?”

“Jesus, not you, too!”

Ted looked puzzled. Nora grinned.

“Sorry, love. It appears the gardens hold a particular allure for most of the gents here tonight, but I should have known that's not what you had on your mind. You'd probably actually show me the mosaic fountain.”

“It's quite impressive,” he told her. “I'd be glad to—”

“You run on back to Andrea and enjoy yourself, pet. I'll just finish this champagne and nibble some more canapés.”

“I feel dreadful, neglecting you this way.”

“You haven't been neglecting me. I've been circulating. I promise not to send in a bad report to your boss. Just make sure you get me back to the hotel when it's all over with. I plan to have several more glasses of this delicious champagne.”

Ted was clearly relieved. “If you're sure you don't mind—”

“Scram, sweetie.”

Ted was very much in love with Andrea Johnson, one of the secretaries Nora had interviewed, a lovely, vulnerable blonde whose heart had been broken earlier on by a wealthy Latin much like Luis Montoya. Ted had broken into her apartment when he smelled gas, had hurled a chair through the window and cut off the gas and rushed Andrea to the hospital, consoling her in the weeks that followed her attempted suicide. He joined her now, dancing attendance on her. She tolerated his attentions, but it was clear she still pined for the handsome rogue. Would Ted win her over? Would he make her forget the heartbreaker? Nora was quite intrigued.

She was intrigued with Lilian, too.

Lilian, currently holding court across the room in crushed gray velvet and a fortune in amethysts, was a sleek, tanned brunette with violet eyes from Waxahachie, Texas, who had come to work as a secretary for an oil company based in Mexico City, married the boss a year later and was now one of the American community's grandes dames. Lilian was throwing tonight's bash. She was celebrated for her parties. She was also, she had confessed to Nora during a lengthy interview, bored out of her mind. Her husband devoted twenty-four hours a day to the business, and Lilian was left with nothing but time and money, far too much of both. She had had a score of lovers in the past twelve years, the latest, a virile blond tennis pro, currently occupying the guest house beyond the gardens. Lilian was thirty-nine. The pro was twenty-seven. He gave her private lessons on the tennis court out back and was well paid for his services both on and off the court.

Sven, the pro, resplendent in white dinner jacket and black tie, was chatting amiably to a trio of adoring young women, one of them a seventeen-year-old nymphet with glossy brown hair, pouty red lips, determined blue eyes and a figure that might easily stop traffic. It was admirably displayed in a strapless white satin gown much too bold for a girl her age. Teresa was the spoiled and pampered daughter of one of the embassy's head honchos, and she clung to Sven's arm tenaciously. Would the little slut snare him away? Would the restless and amoral but sympathetic Lilian lose yet another lover?

“Bored?” Ellen McCann asked.

Nora snapped out of her revery. “What—I—I'm sorry. Did you say something, Ellen?”

“I was just wondering if you were bored. You've been standing in the same spot for the past seven minutes, staring into space.”

“I was thinking,” Nora said.

“About a man?”

“About—I
think
I was thinking about a new novel.”

“Really?”

“I—I'm not sure yet.”

Ellen smiled. Ellen was the private secretary of a prominent American diplomat stationed here in Mexico City. After their interview, Ellen had become a chum, taking Nora to the National Museum to see the Aztec Calendar Stone and to Chapultepec Castle and driving her out to San Juan Teotihuacán to see the Pyramid of the Sun. Ellen's story was just as intriguing as Andrea's and Lilian's. A plain, painfully shy girl from Boise, Idaho, Ellen had come to Mexico City a few years ago to work as a typist at the American Embassy. Away from the stultifying, repressive influence of her overbearing parents, she had bloomed. Rigorous dieting had melted away superfluous poundage. Contact lenses had taken the place of her thick glasses. Her drab brown hair had been tinted to a rich chestnut, loose flowing waves replacing the tight braids worn in a coronet atop her head.

Her shyness vanished, too, and Ellen had quickly lost her virginity. She had fallen in love with the married forty-three-year-old American diplomat for whom she was now working, and he had fallen in love with her. Unable to get a divorce, he had set her up in a small, comfortably furnished apartment, and Ellen was blissfully content as a Back Street wife. Or was she? She spent every workday in the office with him and he visited her several evenings a week, but was that really enough? Was Ellen as happy as she claimed to be? Was any woman—particularly one as charming and attractive as Ellen—really content to settle for only half?

“You're off again,” Ellen said.

“Hunh?”

“Staring into space. That novel must really be taking shape.”

“I think it is. I think I've got all my major characters, and I've got their stories, too.”

“Just be sure you change the names,” Ellen said wryly.

“I will,” Nora promised.

Nora finished her champagne, ate a couple of fancy canapés and forced herself to circulate. Most of the people here tonight she had met earlier at other parties. George Michaels, Ellen's boss, was talking to a colleague and kept glancing up discreetly to keep track of Ellen, watching as she moved from group to group. His gray-green eyes were sad as he looked at her. He paid no attention at all to his wife, a tall, sullen redhead in black satin and diamonds who had already had too many Scotches. Jesus, Nora thought, I wish I had my notebook with me. I
will
have to change the names, of course, and rearrange some of the facts, but it's a natural. Ross will flip over the idea—he'll want me to knock out an outline right away—and Terry Wood will be mad for it.

Nora talked with a genial Swedish explorer with blond beard and discovered that yes, tonight's affair was in his honor, Lilian's husband's company was financing his next expedition. He had lean cheeks, piercing blue eyes and thick, unruly blond hair to match his beard. He said that he'd heard the mosaic fountain out in the gardens was something to behold and asked Nora if she'd like to see it. She politely refused. I should never have worn this black lace dress, she thought. I shouldn't have worn the red rose in my hair, either. Every man at the party is horny tonight. It must have something to do with the climate. Good for a girl's morale, though, even if she's not in the mood to play.