People Like Us (39 page)

At home, his evening shirt was ready to be slipped into, the diamond-and-ruby studs and cuff links that Consuelo had given him for a wedding present in their proper holes. His white tie was even already tied and had only to be clipped on. His black silk stockings were in his black patent-leather evening pumps. Everything was in readiness. Only his fear of telling Yvonne that he was going off without her had to be dealt with.

“You’ve trimmed your beard, Constantine,” said Yvonne, suddenly.

“Yes, yes, I have,” answered Constantine.

“Have you had a manicure, too?”

“Yes, at the same time.”

“Anyone would think you’re going to the Renthals’ ball.”

“So likely,” replied Constantine, nervously.

“I can’t stand another evening of sitting home and watching television,” said Yvonne, sulkily. Several times she had tried to get Justine’s eye to wave at her, but Justine had not responded to her smiles.

“What do you have in mind?” asked Constantine.

“What about a movie?”

“Which?”

“I don’t know which.”

“Perhaps Chick Jacoby will have a newspaper,” said Constantine, an idea beginning to form in his mind.

“Chick Jacoby is not here tonight,” answered Yvonne, bitterly. “Chick Jacoby is at Maisie Verdurin’s dinner before the Renthals’ ball, at Maisie’s table even, seated between Mrs. Frazier and Mrs. French.”

“How in the world do you know all that?” asked Constantine.

“Maids,” said Yvonne, wearily.

“There is a film on Fifty-eighth Street that I wouldn’t mind seeing,” said Constantine.

“Which?” asked Yvonne.

“I don’t remember the name, but it’s supposed to be terribly good.” At last, he had figured out his plan.

During the grapefruit sorbet, Bernie told Justine that he wanted a divorce.

Justine, stunned, simply stared at her husband. She sat at the table for several minutes without saying a word and didn’t even hear Michael, the waiter with the little ponytail whom she liked and regularly chatted with, when he asked her if she wanted regular coffee or decaffeinated. Instead, she stood up and walked through
the restaurant, past the table where Constantine de Rham was paying his bill, to the ladies’ room, where she threw up, rinsed out her mouth, reapplied her lipstick, removed and flushed down the toilet the seven rubrum lilies that Bobo had taken so long to set in her hair.

When she sat down again at her table, she said, quietly, “I haven’t even written my thank-you notes yet.”

“What thank-you notes?” asked Bernie.

“For the wedding presents.”

“Oh.”

“Is it Brenda Primrose?” asked Justine.

“Brenda Primrose?” replied Bernie, in a voice that stated the utter absurdity of the idea.

“Hubie told me he saw you dining with Brenda Primrose at an obscure restaurant in the Village.”

“In the first place, Justine, how in the world would Hubie Altemus even know who Brenda Primrose was?”

“He didn’t, by name. He recognized her from the wedding. He said she was beautiful with horn-rimmed spectacles. It was I who put the name to her. I told him she wrote your copy.”

“She does not write my copy,” said Bernie, annoyed. “I write my own copy. She does my research.”

“Split hairs at this point. Is it Brenda Primrose?”

“It is not Brenda Primrose.”

The waiter brought their decaffeinated coffee.

“Michael,” said Justine, who had been raised to observe public appearance before all else. “Could you bring me some Sweet ‘n Low?”

“Yes, Mrs. Slatkin,” said Michael, taking a slightly moist packet from his shirt pocket.

“I never understand why Chick Jacoby is so stingy with the Sweet ’n Low,” said Justine. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“Justine, your tears are falling in your grapefruit sorbet,” said Bernie, glancing around to see if they were being observed.

Justine looked out the window of the restaurant until she was pulled together.

“It pains me if I have hurt you, Justine,” said Bernie.

“Is your decision to leave me irrevocable?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s not prolong this conversation.”

“This is the movie that you wanted to see?” asked Yvonne. “I thought you despised this kind of movie.”

“It’s meant to be awfully good, I hear,” replied Constantine.

“I love horror movies myself,” said Yvonne.

“Would you like popcorn?” asked Constantine.

“A big box,” said Yvonne.

When he returned to their seats with the box of popcorn, Yvonne was already immersed in the film and only nodded her thank you when he handed her the box.

“I’m going to go to the men’s room,” he whispered to her, after looking at the film for ten minutes.

She merely nodded again, her eyes glued to the screen.

The theater was only a five-minute walk from his house on Sutton Place. He raced there, as fast as he could race, recovering as he was from the bullet wound in his stomach. It took him only minutes to change from his blazer and slacks to his tail coat and trousers. He buttoned his ruby-and-diamond studs and cuff links, snapped on his white tie, combed through his beard, eyed himself admiringly in the mirror, and left his house. He wanted to be gone from there in the event that Yvonne missed him in the theater and returned to the house herself to look for him. He had at least an hour and a half still before the ball started, and the problem now was where to wait until the dinner parties that preceded the ball were over.

“I’m just not happy, Justine,” said Bernie. They were
sitting now in the living room of their apartment, one of the few times since their marriage began that they had been home, just the two of them. He talked about political aspirations that he had, saying, truthfully or not, that his alliance with a family as rich and powerful as the Van Degans would be inconsistent with his own liberal views and that now, before children, the marriage should be terminated. Home, away from public view, Justine sat on the arm of a sofa, her mouth hanging open, in a near catatonic state. How, she wondered, had she not suspected that she was losing her husband.

“I love you, Bernie,” she said, finally, as the tears started to pour out of her wounded eyes. “I love you with all my heart and soul and mind and body. Please don’t leave me, Bernie. Please.”

“Don’t cry, Justine,” said Bernie, when he saw the tears welling up in her eyes. “Please don’t cry.”

Bernie felt helpless with tears. Anger he could have dealt with, but not tears. Many women had screamed at him and called him terrible names when he broke off relations with them, and it was like water on his back. For the sobbing woman in front of him, who was his wife, whose heart he was breaking, he felt compassion. He put his arms around her, patting her more than embracing her, a signal of the ebbing of love that she did not understand.

“I love you so much,” she said over and over, putting her tear-stained face next to his, as if her declarations could revive his lost ardor.

“I wish I knew the right words to comfort you,” he said. While he was talking, she stared down at his hands. What beautiful hands he has, she thought. She could remember when those strong hands had fondled her breasts and between her legs, with the gentleness of a feather. She longed to touch the hairs on the back of his wrist. Her desire for him was so great she felt as if she were going to swoon.

“Are you all right, Justine?” he asked.

“What?”

“You look ill.”

“Fuck me, Bernie,” she whispered.

“Justine,” he said, amazed.

“Please, Bernie. Please. Just one more time. Please.”

“Justine, it’s not going to do any good. It’s over.”

“I know, Bernie. Please. Don’t leave me in this state. Just once. Please.”

She began kissing the backs of his hands. She put her own hands on his chest and started rubbing his nipples through his shirt. She brought her hands down to his trousers. She wanted to rip them open and get to the part of him that she had dreamed about for the weeks that he had been indifferent to her.

“Justine, for God’s sake. Don’t do this to yourself.”

She slid to the floor and threw her arms around his legs, pushing her face into the fly of his trousers. She looked up at him, tears streaming down her face. He could not bear to see her in such a state and felt pity for her. Slowly, he reached down and lifted her up by placing his hands under her arms and carried her to the sofa.

He raised her dress up to her waist and slowly pulled her pantyhose down her legs to her shoes. When he placed his hand between her legs, she was wet with desire for him. He took off the jacket of his dark suit, unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, and let his trousers drop to the floor. As Justine stared at his legs, he kicked off his trousers and pulled down his undershorts, but he did not remove his shirt or tie, shoes or socks. Standing over her, he allowed her to bring his penis to erection with her hands and mouth, but he did not touch her breasts or kiss her lips. When he was ready, he lifted her legs and entered her, without speaking a word. He pushed in to the limit of himself and then he partially withdrew, and then he pushed himself in again, and again, and again, with long and even strokes. He did not rush her. Sex was a thing he understood, and he withheld his own climax until she had achieved hers,
with gasps and muffled screams. When his climax followed, he did not pretend to not enjoy the feeling it brought, and Justine watched his face, his closed eyes, his slack mouth, as he quietly moaned and flooded her insides with the seed of a child. Finished, he did not immediately withdraw from her, but remained inside her as she ran her fingers over his buttocks and down between his legs.

She lay where she was as she watched him dress. She understood the finality of his lovemaking and did not beg him again not to leave her. Dressed, he talked briefly about his clothes, and possessions, and when they should be picked up.

“Good-bye, Justine,” he said, finally.

“Good-bye, Bernie,” she replied. She stared after him as he walked out of the living room, into the hall, and out the front door. She did not move from her position as she listened to him ring for the elevator. She heard the elevator arrive at their floor, heard the heavy door open, heard the night elevator man say “Good evening, Mr. Slatkin,” heard Bernie reply, “Good evening, Willie,” heard the elevator door close. Only then did she rise from the sofa. She walked to the window that looked down on Park Avenue, hid a bit behind the green drapery, and looked down to the street below. She watched him come out from under the canopy of the building, saw him turn to say good-night to the doorman and walk up Park Avenue to the corner. She dropped the curtain, raised the window, and leaned out as she watched him hail a cab, get in, and take off. She did not know where he was going to spend the night. She only knew that it was not going to be with her, that night, or ever again. “Good-bye, Bernie,” she said again, this time to herself. Walking back to turn off the lights and puff up the cushions before Bonita, her maid, came in the morning, she saw the white stain, still wet, of Bernie’s seed on the green damask of her sofa.

In the Presidential Suite at the Rhinelander, the First
Lady, exhausted from a visit to an orphanage in Harlem, a home for teenage runaways in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the briefest, quickest lunch at Clarence’s with Adele Harcourt, the
grande dame
of New York, an inspection of the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and an address before the New York Council on Alcoholism, was awakened from her rest by a call from a presidential adviser, telling her that it was inadvisable for her to attend the ball that evening, if that was her plan, of Elias and Ruby Renthal, as Mr. Renthal was the subject of a secret investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into illegal use of insiders’ information.

Meanwhile, at the other end of New York, another dinner was about to take place, of a very different sort, but it was not without social overlaps. In the weeks past, since his Easter encounter with his mother, Hubie Altemus had absented himself from the world, seeing no one except for several visits from his increasingly worried sister, Justine. Juanito had taken over the management of the gallery in SoHo, irritating the regular staff with his newly acquired authority, but, for Hubie, the business was at least being seen to with his own interests at heart. He had stopped returning telephone calls or seeing friends.

On the night of the Renthals’ ball, which he had declined, and which he would have declined even if he had not been afflicted, he felt a desire to see some friends and asked four gentlemen of similar inclinations to dine with him at his apartment over the gallery. Hubie was an excellent cook, and his little dinners were usually sought-after invitations, for, although he chose to disassociate himself from the upper-class world in which he had been raised, his china, his silver, his napery, the table at which his guests dined, and the Charles X chairs on which they sat bespoke another existence than the corner of Houston and Greene streets would usually evoke.

The idea of the dinner party was, he knew, a
mistake, almost from the beginning of the evening. Juanito, who had been most solicitous of Hubie’s welfare in the past weeks, seized upon the dinner party as an excuse for a much needed night off for himself, and, dressed in jeans and leather jacket, with his diamond earring screwed into his ear, he departed the loft before the arrival of the first guest, Boy Fessenden, whom Juanito loathed, referring to him always behind his back as Girl Fessenden. Boy Fessenden had been a roommate of Hubie’s at one of the many schools he had been asked to leave, and their friendship had survived, despite Juanito.

Opening the door, Hubie was able to read in Boy’s eyes the extent of the devastation of his own features. He had learned to pass mirrors without looking into them; even shaving, he could now concentrate on his stubble and razor without examining his whittled-down, almost indented, cheeks that, in healthier times, he had often sought to reduce by dieting. He knew later, when he was in the kitchen, where he declined culinary assistance, that Boy and the others were talking about him in whispered tones.