Nothing but Gossip (2 page)

“What are you wearing tonight, darling?” She took a ladylike drag of her cigarette. She was somehow able to limit herself to ten a day. I had struggled to keep it down to forty.

“The black gabardine Saint Laurent Richard bought for me in Paris last week,” I said, clipping on a diamond earring.

“I don’t think I’ve seen that. I’ll bet it’s lovely.”

“Yes, it is. What are you wearing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll dig up something. Your father has come up with a dozen excuses why he doesn’t want to go to this shindig tonight, even though he’s on the board. I know it’s because of the proxy fight. I guess it’s turning vicious.”

“What proxy fight?”

“Rutherford Oil. That’s what this party is all about, Lilly. It’s Rutherford Oil stockholders. Their annual meeting is on Wednesday. That’s why you were invited, because you’re a stockholder. I thought you knew that.”

“No, I just thought we were invited to meet the Gilhoolys’ houseguests.”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call them
houseguests
. They’re
Russians
.”

And we all know Russians could never be houseguests.

“The proxy fight has something to do with Russia. Well,” Mother said, bringing our conversation to an abrupt conclusion, as though she were the only one with anything to do and she’d just spent more than enough time talking to a complete imbecile, “I’ve got to scoot if we’re going to get there. Don’t be late.”

Alma and Wade Gilhooly’s dinner was one of the few parties we’d attended lately that was not in Richard’s and my honor, and that was before the out-of-town guests, including all of Richard’s family, arrived on Wednesday, when all the stops would really get pulled. I hadn’t been the center of so much attention since I got caught in bed with the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. It was terrific.

Our wedding was in six days.

I
grew up with Alma Rutherford. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bradford Rutherford, lived in the large Georgian house next door to our city house in Roundup, where we all gazed like kings and queens across the wind-blown grassy field known as Mountain View Park, where a few cottonwoods held on to the dirt for dear life, at the graceful elegance of the Wind River Range in the distance.

The mountains floated just beyond Roundup’s wacked-out skyline to which every cross-eyed, wall-eyed, jug-eared, happy-go-lucky, slatheringly insane architect who couldn’t find work anywhere else in the world was evidently welcome to contribute, and evidently encouraged to discover how many different types of architecture—Greek, Gothic, Colonial, or Georgian Revival; High Victorian Gothic, Queen Anne, Italian Villa, Second Empire, Regency, Tudor, or Federal; Salt Box, Dutch, or Spanish Colonial; Mission, Prairie, Stick, or Shingle; or maybe just International—he or she could fit into one building. They all succeeded brilliantly.
Roundup cannot be mistaken for any other city on earth.

Alma had an older half-sister, Mercedes, whose mother had died in childbirth. But Mercedes had distanced herself so completely from us smaller girls that it was almost as if Alma were an only child. I envied her singular status, especially when I figured out that my parents had big plans for my brothers—running the family banks, newspapers, railroads, oil fields, and ranches—and none for me, beyond marriage and motherhood.

In spite of our growing up next door to each other, playing jacks, and trading secrets as little girls, our personalities were so dissimilar we’d never grown close.

Alma’s room, always neat and tidy, felt to me like a heavy-handed birthday cake with clotted buttercream icing, overtrimmed with ribbons and bows, ruffles and flowers. Stuffed animals and dolls were heaped on her bed, dolls in costumes from around the world stood on the bookshelves, and the whole affair always smelled faintly of unclean field-hockey shin guards.

My room, on the other hand, was a compendium of books—from
Misty of Chincoteague, Thunderhead
, and
My Friend Flicka
to full collections of Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens, my great-grandmother’s collection of Royal Worcester teapots, and every type of beauty, health-care, and fragrance product ever mentioned in
Seventeen
magazine.

I’ll never forget it: Alma’s rug was apple green and everything else was pink, the full spectrum from shell to shocking. You would have thought she was from Texas.

As a girl, Alma was as buxom as her room, a big-boned, full-toothed Mr. Ed blonde whose milkmaid looks came from her mother, a postwar Danish import as sturdy as a giant wheel of Gouda. Alma’s money
came from her father, who was an oilman but not a gambler, which was probably why Mrs. Rutherford agreed to marry him, because from what I know about Danes—which I admit is limited to aquavit—they don’t seem like high-risk-takers, something we Westerners have raised to an art form.

Alma and my older brother, Elias Caulfield Bennett IV, dated as seriously as one can at eighteen, but when Alma was twenty, she eloped with Harker M. “Wade” Gilhooly, the assistant golf pro at the Wind River Country Club. And boy, did it ever hit the fan.

I’d been off in Laramie at the time, whooping it up at the university, so I’d never met him, but Mother said he was just what he sounded like: a red-haired, red-skinned, red-tempered, hard-drinking, hard-hitting, loudmouthed, foulmouthed, fortune-hunting womanizer, who had neatly extricated himself from service in Vietnam by marrying one of America’s richest girls.

Once her parents recovered from the shock of the union and realized that there would be no annulment, no buyout, no payoff, that the newlyweds were sticking together, Mr. Rutherford bought his new son-in-law a Chevrolet dealership in Billings and shipped the happy couple out of state as quickly as possible, threatening to wrap Wade’s golf clubs around his neck if he ever showed his face in Roundup again.

I explained all this to Richard as we left the ranch, the Circle B, in my younger brother Christian’s big new Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. The two huge turbines whined as the copter lumbered up from the meadow in front of the house like a bulldog rising from a nap. But once airborne, we hovered delicately in the cool, cloudless September sky, executed a precision quarter-turn, paused for a split second as though to gather our skirts
together, and shot off toward town like a Saturn rocket. A speck of indigo flashing across the setting sun.

“I sure did luck out on that deal,” my brother Elias said, reaching over to take one of the Glenfiddichs on the rocks I’d poured for him and Richard. Elias is two years older than I am and still looking for the right girl, whom we all suspect he may have found in my secretary. “I hear Alma looks sort of like a big old wrinkled hog now. But you’re not completely right about Wade. He’s a nice guy, and he did serve in ’Nam.”

“What? You’re kidding.” I poured myself a Jameson’s as the Wyoming hill country raced beneath us. We clinked our yellow plastic mugs.

We used to stock dozens of bright red mugs emblazoned with the Circle B brand all over the ranch, wherever people might conceivably be drinking outdoors, which was basically everywhere, as well as in the helicopter, the jets, the barns, the trucks, and the wagons. But the customized cups became collectors’ items for people we’d never heard of (and some we had) and disappeared quicker than we could order them. Finally, when my mother came upon a boozed-up, toothless, unwashed derelict who made his home in a series of Maytag appliance boxes beneath a viaduct by the Wind River in downtown Roundup and who had a dozen Bennett family Circle B Ranch mugs hanging by a thong from his suspenders like a gigantic, noisy, gaudy, red plastic charm bracelet, she called Christian, who she evidently felt wasn’t busy enough running the newspaper and the railroad, and told him to handle it. None of us ever asked Mother what she was doing down there under the viaduct having a conversation with the fellow in the first place—some Junior League do-gooder deal probably, handing out toothbrushes and dental floss as
though that would solve all his problems—we just took her word for it.

“Yeah, he went in about the same time I did; of course, he was in the Air Force.” Elias, now a general in the Marine Corps Reserve, paused, giving us time to reflect upon what torpid louts the Marines found the boys in blue, although they seldom came out and said so. “And I ran into him a couple of times in Saigon. He was some general’s aide. Last I heard, he was ending up his tour as the golf pro at Clark in the Philippines until he got caught in some motel in Angeles City in bed with the commandant’s wife. Immediate honorable discharge. No scandal, just mercy boocoo and ore vore.” Elias gave me a conspiratorial look over the tops of his dark glasses. “Sound familiar?”

I knew he was referring to the judge.

“Sounds pretty smart to me,” Richard said. He stretched his long blue pinstripes across the aisle and crossed them at the ankles. The well-worn leather of his black dress cowboy boots glowed with such patina, Holbein the Younger could have painted them onto his feet. They creaked comfortably. How come my boots never look like that? I wondered vaguely. Mine always look dried out and cracked and caked with dusty, straw-sprung manure, sort of like I’d just dragged my saddle all the way across Oklahoma. He brushed an invisible speck from the knee of his trousers.

A Manhattan-born Morgan Guaranty banker who’d turned just as gray and gaunt and frantic and feral as all the rest of those poor suckers who have to live in that town, Richard had finally cashed it all in and moved West to run the Roundup Opera, one of the world’s top companies. He’s also a champion team roper, champion lover, and serious get-down cowboy party guy. And rich.

Every time I look down at my ring finger, I can’t believe it. That diamond is so big, if I had two, I could shoot craps. It sat there on my hand like a beacon in a lighthouse. I’d waited so long to get the right ring from the right guy, I hadn’t taken it off since he’d put it there three months before.

All my life I’ve accepted only the best. And when it comes to love, the real thing—and I’m speaking character, integrity, passion, and chemistry here, not diamonds—I’d been willing to wait forever, which it was beginning to look as if I was going to have to do, until Richard showed up last year and things simply fell into place.

“We’re about there,” I told them as I looked out the window and watched the green links of the Wind River Country Club unroll beneath us like a high-speed golf documentary. We came to a dipping pause above the whopper of a concoction the Gilhoolys had constructed on the edge of the tenth fairway.

America’s Mountain West—Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah—has no look of its own beyond log cabins and tepees. And unlike downtown Roundup, a structural free-for-all, architects have recently developed and assigned us a residential style, which we locals refer to as Santa Fe Gumdrop Yodel. It is taught in architectural schools as a joke, as one more hilarious example of what gullible, tasteless Neanderthals we are here in the provinces. Gumdrop Yodel characteristics include high, heavy, thick-lipped archways for all windows and doors, except for those in the shapes of circles and octagons and triangles; universal grayness in a maximum of three shades of stucco (the gray is evidently to remind us of cloudy days, which we seldom have); and rough wooden beams shooting out here and there around the roof line like straw stuck in a board
during a tornado, to provide the Southwestern touch. All topped off with gray, glazed-tile roofs. It’s a silly, graceless style, but the people who move here from the East don’t know any better and think it’s great because they can see the sky for the first time in their lives.

Alma and Wade had taken Gumdrop as far as it could conceivably go in their twelve-thousand-square-foot, one-story sprawl that squatted in the sun like a dirty plaster of paris model. And, as the chopper began its shuddering descent, Alma stood with a hand shading her eyes at the edge of the flat, emerald lake of a lawn, between the putting green and the lap pool. The windy wash plastered her shiny pink caftan to her big, sturdy body. Wade was nowhere in sight. Probably in the powder room banging one of the guests.

A
number of dressy couples chatted in small groups by the pool among gigantic pots of red geraniums, and Alma, who already seemed a little bombed, took Richard and me around to make certain we met some, but not all of them. I assumed the ones she wasn’t introducing us to were on the other side of the Rutherford Oil proxy issue. The stockholders included a gaggle of oil people, RV dealers, Wall Street types, golf junkies, former U.S. senator Duke Fletcher, media time salesmen, and the Russians. Six of them.

“I’d like you to meet Sergei and …” it sounded as if she said Sergei five more times. She kissed each one familiarly on the cheek as she presented them. They reminded me of Steve Martin in
The Jerk
. Gucci thugs. Hairy-pawed yetis, sasquatch siblings from the Far North with slanted brows and bad teeth, who rocked and rolled as they spoke and eyed the women as if they were sausages in the local
GUM
, or whatever they call their markets.

“You visit Siberia?” Sergei One inquired as his hand
headed for my bottom. “Furs are very beautiful there. You like lynx? You like vodka?”

What did he think? That we lived in gangster television shows? That “American Justice” on A&E was real life, that all American women were round-heeled mob girls you could buy at cocktail parties?

“Sergei, my dear.” I removed his hand. “Let me explain something to you. Life in America is not one big Bill Kurtis gangster documentary. Do not handle the women, particularly this one, or you will find your family jewels hanging out the back instead of the front.”

He smiled sheepishly, showing off his teeth, each one rimmed in gold as precisely as an expensive dinner plate. “Sorry, we just arrive America today. Want to be friendly.” His voice was thick and guttural, as though he needed to clear his head and throat and spit, and the Rs rolled off his tongue as if from a stutter machine. “You man’s secretary maybe, or wife?”