People Like Us (34 page)

“She was playing nursie, leading him to his table.”

“A strange pair,” said Ned.

“I’m sure she’s the one who shot him,” said Matilda.

“It’s a theory,” said Gus.

There was a pause in the conversation. Gus, curious, wondered what the purpose of the visit was.

“What time are you off, Gus?” asked Matilda.

“Almost immediately, in fact,” said Gus. “I’m going to Maisie Verdurin’s, and you can’t be late at Maisie’s. In at eight. Out at eleven. Like clockwork.”

“Loelia and Mickie are going to Maisie’s too,” said Matilda to Ned.

“Lucky Maisie,” said Ned. There was a note of bitterness in his voice.

“Listen, Gus,” said Matilda. “My son’s here from Santa Barbara. He’s turned my little hovel upside down. Would you mind very much if we stayed on a bit after you left?”

Gus looked up and immediately understood the situation. Ned, turning away, went back to examining the books on Gus’s coffee table. Gus smiled at Matilda.

“No problem,” said Gus, taking his glass into the kitchen, and Matilda followed him.

“We’re having dinner around the corner, at that little French place, whatever it’s called, and we thought we could wait here until our reservation at nine,” Matilda went on quickly. “I mean, it’s so cozy here.”

“No problem,” repeated Gus.

Matilda turned on the tap in the sink and rinsed out Gus’s glass. “Don’t you
dare
say loose woman to me, Gus Bailey,” she whispered.

“Who said loose woman?” asked Gus.

“You’re thinking it.”

“No, you are,” said Gus, laughing.

“He’s so forlorn since Loelia,” said Matilda.

“You know where the rubbers are,” said Gus.

“You are
awful!
” she said, pretending to pound him with her fists. “I could ask that nice elevator man of yours to lock up after we leave.”

“Sure,” said Gus.

“Would you like to come out to the country over the weekend?” asked Matilda, in a normal voice, returning to the living room.

“I’ll be away,” answered Gus.

“Another one of your mysterious trips? This man, Ned, I’m sure he’s leading a double life. One of these days we’re going to find out he’s not a writer at all, but an assassin.”

* * *

“Gus, I was thrilled with the piece you wrote about us for the
Times Magazine
,” said Ruby Renthal, at Maisie Verdurin’s dinner.

“Thanks,” said Gus.

“You were a pal not to repeat some of those damn fool things I said,” said Ruby.

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“A lot of you guys say you won’t and then you do,” said Ruby. Gus noticed that people stared at Ruby Renthal the way they stared at film stars.

“If I had, I wouldn’t have gotten invited to your ball, and I want to go to your ball,” said Gus. They both laughed.

Lest anyone had not picked up on the change in status of Elias and Ruby Renthal, Maisie Verdurin, whose dinners were always a barometer of exactly who was successful in the mercurial world of big business, seated Elias Renthal on her right that night, the place of honor that she usually reserved for cabinet ministers and former presidents. As Ruby Renthal was every bit as important a social star as her husband was a business star, Maisie had been in a quandary all day at exactly how to seat Ruby at no less elevated a place than Elias’s, especially as the invitations to their ball were out and they had become even greater objects of curiosity.

Finally Maisie had broken one of her own rules never to seat husbands and wives at the same table and placed Ruby across from her between the chief executive officers of an airline and a petroleum company.

“I have never seen Mrs. Renthal wear the same dress twice,” said Rochelle Prud’homme to Maisie. Rochelle, who had resisted the Renthals’ rapid rise, had now fallen into line, praising them on every occasion, especially as they were giving the grandest party of the decade. “I hear Ezzie Fenwick tells her what to wear.”

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Maisie had replied. “I think she’s the chicest woman in New York.” Maisie did not add that she had never had clients like Elias and Ruby
Renthal for buying art, even though she could not bear Jamesey Crocus, who had now become their private curator. As Elias’s walls, both in town and country, were now filled with works of art, his collecting spree had abated somewhat, except for the occasional swap, when a finer specimen of a painter’s work came on the market. Maisie, ever on the lookout for new walls to fill, had taken an interest in Reza Bulbenkian, another of the New People whose wealth was incalculable, and invited him and his wife Babette to the same party that the Renthals were attending, but she seated them at less exalted tables than her own. The Bulbenkians were also rising in society, although in adjacent groups of lesser smartness than the group that had taken in the Renthals, and they were not often mentioned in social conversation, except in that month each year when Mr. Forbes brought out his list of the four hundred richest people in America, on which Reza Bulbenkian’s name kept rising.

“Who in the world is this Reza Bulbenkian?” Loelia had asked Ruby, looking up from the magazine.

“You see him at benefits,” answered Ruby. “He always buys several tables, or whole rows of seats, and fills them with people you never saw before.”

“With the hair in his ears, that one?” asked Loelia.

“Exactly. And the wife who weighs about three hundred.”

With that, the Bulbenkians were dismissed until the following year, except, of course, on Wall Street, where he was discussed almost as much as Elias Renthal.

Maisie placed Reza Bulbenkian at what she considered her third best table, next to Yvonne Lupescu, and she placed Babette, who had been married to Reza for thirty years, in the little room in the back, next to Constantine de Rham, who was responsible for introducing the Bulbenkians to Maisie, just as he had been responsible for introducing Elias Renthal to Maisie. Maisie knew that the dream of the Bulbenkians’ life was to be asked to the Renthals’ ball, but she had declined to
intercede in their behalf, agreeing only to have them to the same party and let them take it from there.

“Marvelous, your toupee,” said Yvonne Lupescu to Reza Bulbenkian, in an effusive tone, as if she were complimenting him on an exquisite article of clothing, and then continued, pretending not to notice the look of discomfort on his face, “No one would ever know.”

Bulbenkian had heretofore paid no attention to his dinner companion, casting looks instead at the table where the Renthals were seated, in the hopes of catching Elias Renthal’s eye to wave a greeting to him. Now, furious, he turned to Yvonne, picked up her place card to familiarize himself with her name, and saw that she was a baroness. Thereafter he gave her his full attention, not only to quiet her enthusiasm over his toupee, which he thought no one, not even his wife of thirty years, had ever detected, but because Baroness Lupescu proved to be an enchanting dinner companion, whose diamond-ringed fingers found their way to the bulge between his legs beneath Maisie’s pristine white tablecloth at the same time that she was telling him stories of her grandmother in the court of King Zog of Albania.

At Maisie’s table, Ruby Renthal held her dinner companions in her thrall. “At the White House the other night, the First Lady seated me next to the Vice President,” she said to the table at large. “I said to him, ‘You’ve got to change your glasses, sir. No one is ever going to be elected President of the United States who wears rimless glasses.’ ”

“You didn’t say that to the Vice President?” asked Maisie Verdurin, aghast, as the rest of the table laughed at the audacity of the beautiful Mrs. Renthal.

“Oh, I did, and he’s going to change them. You mark my words, Maisie. Just keep watching him on the news.”

“How was the White House?” asked Maisie, wistfully. She longed to be invited there.

“So pretty, the whole thing,” said Ruby. “The First Lady had rose geranium in the finger bowls, Maisie. We must all try that.”

Looking across the table, Elias Renthal caught Ruby’s eye and winked at his wife. She smiled back at him. What Elias knew, as surely as he knew that he was the fifth richest man in the United States, was that he had married the perfect wife. When he had been married to Gladyce, and before that, when he had been married to his first wife, Sylvia, his social life in Cleveland was confined to an occasional party for a special event, or dinners in restaurants with business associates and their wives. Being in society, as he now was, was a different thing altogether. He and Ruby were out every night, usually “dressed to the nines,” as he put it, and, although he grumbled about never staying home, he liked being invited everywhere almost as much as Ruby did. Ruby, who was born for society, had taken on the airs of someone who had always been rich. She understood the intricacies of the overlapping groups in the two thousand people who went out to dinner every night. With neither Gladyce nor Sylvia could he have risen to the heights that he had risen to with Ruby by his side.

Ruby had not resisted earlier that day when Elias told her he had settled a portion of his fortune on her. That way, he told her, in the unlikely event of adversity, the money that was in her name would be secure.

“We are a team,” he said to her.

“A great team,” she agreed. At that moment in time, she was the happiest that she had ever been in her life, and no man could have attracted her in the way that her husband did.

Although Ruby claimed not to understand a thing about business, she had taken to reading the financial pages with the same relish with which only last year she had read the society columns. She would have been able to tell anyone, if anyone had thought to ask her, which they didn’t, that Sims Lord & Co. had closed at thirty-seven and an eighth the day before the takeover, fallen immediately to twenty-four, and then risen to
forty-six, and that Elias, even on that relatively small buyout, had profited by twenty-four million dollars.

Maisie Verdurin, the evening’s hostess, had been struck dumb by the grandeur of Ruby Renthal’s conversation about the White House. She waited an appropriate length of time while Elias Renthal, on her right, explained to the table the modus operandi of his takeover of Sims Lord & Co., the kind of conversation that usually took place at Maisie Verdurin’s tables. When Justine Altemus Slatkin, who had been unusually silent throughout the evening, accidentally knocked over a glass of red wine and the waiters came scurrying to place napkins over the wet tablecloth, Maisie, unconcerned about Justine’s accident, said casually to Elias, “I didn’t realize Ruby was so friendly with the First Lady.”

“Oh, yes,” said Elias proudly. “The First Lady is very fond of Ruby, ever since Ruby’s gift to the White House.”

“Her gift?” asked Maisie.

“She gave her console tables, the ones she bought at the Orromeo auction in London, with the inlaid rams’ heads, to the White House for the redecoration of the Green Room.”

“My word,” said Maisie.

“After the First Lady came to lunch at the apartment, Ruby just gave them to the White House. She said the country had been good to her and she wanted to give something back to the country.”

“The First Lady went to Ruby’s apartment for lunch?” asked Maisie.

“If I tell you a little secret, Maisie, you won’t let on to anyone, will you?”

“Me? Never!” said Maisie.

“Because if this got out—”

“My lips are sealed. Talking to me is like talking to the dead,” said Maisie.

“The First Lady might, just might, come to the
ball, if she can readjust her schedule so that she can visit an orphanage in Harlem on the same day.”

“My word,” said Maisie.

Of all the news that went around Maisie Verdurin’s tables that night, the death of Baron von Lippe in Brussels from AIDS, the divorce of the Herkie Saybrooks, the death by overdose of the Wagstaffs’ daughter, and the rumored merger of the airline and the petroleum company, whose CEOs had graced Maisie’s table, none was more repeated the next day than the news that the First Lady might, just might, be coming to the ball of the Elias Renthals.

32

In the Ambassadors’ Club of the airline, Gus watched as the film star Faye Converse entered, causing excitement and stir, even among the corporate executives waiting for their planes. Faye Converse, a star for as long as most people could remember, still created a glamorous havoc in her wake, although her screen appearances had dwindled to the occasional mini-series on television. Finally, seated, a soft drink brought to her, she engaged in conversation with a young companion, probably a secretary, Gus thought, who nodded assents and occasionally wrote something down on a list.

“Is that you, Gus?” Faye called out, having caught his eye.

“Hello, Faye,” said Gus, rising to go over to her.

“Leave it to you not to make a fuss over me,” she said.

They both laughed.

“You look great, Faye,” he said.

“That’s better,” she said. “You know how I like
compliments. If I hadn’t spotted you, I bet you wouldn’t have gotten up to speak to me.”

“Oh, yes, I would have. I was just waiting for your usual hubbub to quiet down.”