A Certain Age (16 page)

"Don't you ever return your phone calls?"

"Max!"

"Did you see today's paper?"

"No."

"If you had returned my calls, I could have warned you. I just want you to know, I was the one who got Gus to turn it into a blind item. He wanted to run it with your name on it."

"What are you talking about?"

"Get the paper. You want me to fax it to you?"

"No!" She tried to sound as if she were completely indifferent, though she felt panicky.

"Believe me, I'm sure everyone's seen it in your office by now. Want me to read it to you?"

"No. I'll get it later."

"So why didn't you call me back? Didn't you go home last night?"

"First you insult me, and then you think I'm going to return your phone calls?"

"Insult you? How did I insult you?"

She honestly couldn't remember. "It doesn't matter."

"So, you want to have dinner tonight?"

"With who?"

"With me!"

"Oh."

"Remember, I did you a big favor. I spoke to Gus yesterday, and if it wasn't for me, that item in his column would have been a lot worse."

"Aren't you generous to do me a big favor. I never asked you to do anything for me, Max. I don't even know what you're talking about. Excuse me, I have to go now." She hung up the phone as coldly as possible. Then she walked down the hall to Soma's office. Sonia, a researcher, weighed nearly three hundred pounds. She sat in an armchair as if it were part of her, sunken beneath her lap. A little typing table on wheels was pulled up close in front. "Hi, Sonia. Did you see if Marge came in yet?"

"I didn't see her. I saw the paper, though. That was you, wasn't it? It had to be you, I figured." She looked at Florence with gleaming hatred. "They're going to flip out around here! Did anybody say anything to you yet?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. If you see Marge, tell her I had to run across the street to the store for a minute. Do you want anything?"

"Are you going to the deli? I'd love one of those lo-fat cheese Danish."

She knew Sonia hated her and that it was inevitable, just as she couldn't help but hate Ibis, the movie starlet. Even if she hadn't weighed three hundred pounds, Sonia would have hated her. That was how the system was organized. Women judged and evaluated themselves—and one another. Only when they found they were roughly on the same rung of the ladder could they ever possibly be friends. And it was trickier still when it became clear that two women on approximately the same rung might decide they were in competition for the same thing. Then friendship was automatically ruled out. Still, in the face of Sonia's gleeful fury, she had to do something to protect herself. "You know, those lo-fat cheese Danish have, like, three hundred and fifty calories."

"Get me a plain bagel, then, with one of those little cups of

whipped cream cheese on the side," Sonia snarled. "And a tea with lemon, no sugar."

Florence crossed the street to the deli. While she was waiting for the order, she surreptitiously opened the paper on the shelf below the counter to the gossip page.

. . .
WHICH
aging filly-about-town reeked havoc over her Hamptons weekend? In less than twenty-four hours the blond auction-house assistant director in estate jewelry managed to seduce her hostess's husband and nearly drown the couple's daughter. Her hostess—and former friend—is that infamous magazine editor, now said to be bent on revenge . . .
KEEP YOU POSTED!

Her hands were covered in perspiration. It really wasn't so bad. Honestly, it could have been much worse, she supposed. At least Quayle's wasn't actually mentioned by name, so she didn't see how Marge could complain. After all, maybe people would think it was somebody at Sotheby's or Christie's. Nobody lost his or her job over so trivial a thing. And it wasn't the kind of item that would put anybody off going out with her. Men were willing to tolerate far worse. There was that porn star—or stripper—who had married that society billionaire. And there was the girl found on the boat with the politician.
His
political career had been ended, but she got married to a rich businessman and disappeared into a normal life with children. Only someone as silly as that Charlie Twigall might take such an item seriously. And he had made up his mind against her even before it came out.

"Hey! Blondie!"

"What?"

"I've been talking to you for five minutes. Here's your order. You want anything else? That was you today in the paper, wasn't it? I knew as soon as I saw it this morning."

Of course, Rasheed would know it was her; she came into the deli just about every morning, and he knew she worked across the

street. Besides, that was what those gossip columns were for: to feed the workers—at least those who could speak English—with glimpses into a different world, like Cinderella not being allowed to attend the ball.

At the cash register she grabbed a handful of chocolate nuggets stuffed with hazelnuts and cherries, wrapped in gold foil, a dollar twenty-nine apiece. "We reading about you this morning!" Benny leered. She opened a candy and crammed it into her mouth. What difference did it make, they were always leering; some of the time she thought she would even miss it if they stopped. It was her daily reality check, or unreality check, to be leered at. She took some bills out of her dark green leather satchel and flung them onto the counter.

"You got a phone call. He didn't leave his name." She and Sonia answered each other's phones if they were there. Only people who knew her had her direct extension. If someone had been making a business call, it would have come through the switchboard. She handed the bagel and tea to Sonia and gave her the last chocolate, still wrapped in foil, slightly squished and sticky from her hand. "And Marge came through on a rampage. She had to go to a meeting. She wants to see you when she's out."

She went back down the hall to her office, realized she was practically scuttling along the wall and forced herself to stop and walk calmly. Surely there were appointments she could go on to take her out of the office for the rest of the day? A demented-sounding woman had called the previous week, saying she had a large collection of Russian jewelry that had belonged to the Romanovs, which she was interested in selling but didn't want to take out of her safe-deposit box. At the time, she figured the woman was just a nut case and had told her she'd get back to her. Or the other woman who kept phoning—an hour away out on Long Island—who had sent some snapshots of things that might be worth a bit; it was impossible to judge from the photos.

The phone was ringing. With any luck it would be Raffaello. It was almost lunchtime; she could coax him to come back to the office and tell Marge that he wanted her to appraise some of his family's stuff. He was so glamorous and aristocratic in appearance; Marge always swooned over that sort of man—at least it would delay her wrath for a day.

"Hello—this is Tracer Schmidt—we met last night? I was with Max Coho? I was wondering-—maybe you wanted to come over tonight and have a drink? Or ... we could meet someplace?"

Florence hesitated. "What is this in reference to?" she said after a pause. She hadn't meant to be bitchy; still, if this girl was going to try to pry something out of her, had read the gossip page, she wanted no part of it.

"Well . . ." Tracer was embarrassed. "Nothing, really. I mean, I just thought it would be nice to have a drink, and talk . . . and . . . actually ... I wanted to ask you about your friend . . . Darryl?"

"I really don't know anything about him. But—" She hesitated. "Sure! I'll come by your place. About six?"

She had not had a close girlfriend since Allison. Even they had not been all that intimate. They shared an apartment (she had moved out of her grandmother's place for a while, until her grandmother became ill and she realized that in order to hang on to the apartment she was going to have to live there); they went out every night picking up men. They did things together, borrowed each other's clothes, but had very little to say, nothing in the way of confidences, though occasionally they would spend evenings at home of giggling and giddiness.

But anyway, meeting Tracer for a drink wasn't the same as becoming friends, and more than likely it would end there. She picked up the phone and called the woman out on Long Island who had been trying to get Florence to look at her jewelry for six months. Virginia Clary—Maspeth. Too ill to travel into the city. Florence didn't even know if it was possible to get to Maspeth by

train. She would have to take a taxi—the car service charged a four-hour minimum to go outside the city—and see if she could hand in her expenses this month without too much bitching from Marge. She grabbed her things and went back down the hall. "Are you going to be around later on, Sonia? Can I call in to you for my messages?"

"If I'm here."

"Fine. I had an appointment to go and look at some jewelry which I can't get out of. Please tell Marge I'm sorry."

"Are you coming back today?" Sonia had a little sneer.

"I'm going to try. She's out on Long Island, though, and I don't know how easy it's going to be to get back. Tell Marge I'll call in this afternoon."

"I wish you'd tell her yourself."

"Yes—and she'd tell me to go. This poor woman's been trying to get me to look at her things for six months. I made this appointment with her ages ago."

She took the back stairs and went out the back entrance hoping to avoid Marge. John de Jongh was coming around the corner, carrying a small bouquet wrapped in yellow tissue and clear cellophane. When he saw her he flinched, looking sheepish, and thrust the flowers at her. "Florence!"

"Hi, John." She drifted into weariness at the sight of him.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine." The flowers were like puffs of velvet—chunky, expensive white tuberoses and yellow freesias, which, in combination, sent out a blast of fragrance so thick it was almost a drug.

"I was ... I was just going to drop off these flowers for you. Our offices are just around the corner. I tried to call you earlier, but your secretary said you weren't in yet. I thought ... if you were in, and free, you might want to get a bite to eat?"

"I'm supposed to be on my way to Maspeth."

"Um ... so why don't I take you? My car's in the lot just around the corner—I'll just tell my secretary to clear my calendar. Maspeth—that's not far. We can stop for something to eat along the way and that'll give us a chance to talk. I've . . . I've got some exciting news . . . about the restaurant."

3

It was late afternoon
when she woke. He was still asleep. He had claimed they were lost, taken her to lunch in the restaurant of a hotel near the airport, then begged her to come up to a room. He made her put the room on her credit card, telling her he would bring her the cash the following day. It was just that she had felt so sorry for him. He had the desperate hunger of a man addicted to crack cocaine, something devouring him from inside. She couldn't bear to see something, someone, so tormented, like an animal with fleas gnawing frantically at itself. Maybe it was simply

a weakness on her part. Her body meant so little to her, except as a commodity that nobody seemed to want to buy or own; she might as well hand it over to him for a few hours at a reduced rate. No doubt she was partly responsible for his agony.

In books by Jane Austen and Edith Wharton there were always women wandering around suffering for love, determined to stick to a lifetime one-sided commitment to some guy they had seen only for a few days and never even kissed. She couldn't understand it. There were a billion or more people on the face of the planet, very nearly as interchangeable as one alligator with another. If John de Jongh was obsessed with her, it wasn't really anything to do with her personally; and if she felt herself drawn to him, it didn't mean that the following week, or day, or hour, she couldn't dismiss him and move on to someone else. He grabbed her around the waist as she slid over to the edge of the bed and sat up. "Where are you going?"

"Nowhere. To the bathroom."

"How are you feeling?"

"Okay."

"I feel fabulous! I feel like I just played a few games of squash and I was in such good shape I'm not even tired."

"I haven't been to the gym or exercised in ages."

"This was exercise, wasn't it?" He half sat up, leaning back against the headboard, pulling the sheet over him. "I wish I had a special name for you. For some reason I can't call you Florence. I don't know why. You just don't look like a Florence to me. It's too much like a friend of my grandmother's, I guess."

"But you named your daughter Claudia."

He looked momentarily blank, as if he had forgotten who Claudia was. "That's different. Anyway, it was Natalie who named her, not me."

"How is she?"

"Fine! Natalie's thinking of sending her away to school, which I'm opposed to. I said, 'Wait until she gets a little older.' I don't see what the problem is. I think Natalie feels she spends too much time on her own, since both of us are so busy. Natalie says at a

boarding school she can get extra help with her learning disabilities."

"But ... is she still in the hospital?"