Searching for Grace Kelly (15 page)

No, she'd hang in a bit longer, see if she could get him to cough up the introduction.
Autumn
, she thought.
If he doesn't come through by autumn, I'll move on. Tell him I'm too busy, picking up extra shifts at the Stork. Or perhaps that there's someone from England who's come back into the picture
. She'd figure it out.

They'd only taken a few steps back on the sidewalk after dinner when Vivian felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, pretty lady.”

She whirled around to see the speaker's face, then instantly flung herself into his arms. “Oh, Act!!” she screamed. “Darling Act! Oh, cheers! How are you?!”

They pulled apart and he appraised her lovingly. “Still beautiful, still breaking hearts, I can see that,” he said, smiling excitedly at her. “You look great, kid!”

Vivian turned to Nicky, now standing a few feet away. He'd just lit a cigarette. “Oh, Nicky, come over here. This is—”

The man stuck out his hand. “Jimmy. Jimmy Stewart. But everybody calls me Act. Because I got the same name as the actor, you see? Vivian and I, we used to work together at the Stork. Nice to meet you.”

Nicky looked warily, shook his hand briefly. Vivian explained that Act had left the Stork a few months ago to take a job with Toots Shor, and that they were old friends and he was a great guy and, oh, the fun they'd had. For the next few minutes, they caught up on each other's news, Vivian chuckling throatily upon hearing the rumor about the former Stork hat-check girl who'd evidently been invited onto Ari Onassis's yacht. “He has no idea what he's in for,” she said. “He'll throw her overboard before the second drink.”

“And she'll
still
be talking!” Act roared.

Vivian found herself devolving into girlish giggling, something she generally abhorred. She couldn't even blame the wine—hadn't they just come from a no-alcohol-serving Indian restaurant? She turned to Nicky to share in her giddiness when his cold stare stopped her in her tracks. She turned back to Act, leaned in for the briefest peck on the cheek. “So lovely seeing you, darling,” she said. “Must run.”

Act was still saying something—actually, semi-shouting as they walked away—but Vivian kept her head high and eyes forward. She slid her arm into Nicky's, picked up the pace. This had happened once before, with another man she knew whom they'd run into at a fish restaurant. Nicky had darkened almost instantly, pouted for a good hour afterward, until she'd figured out he'd been jealous, the subsequent ridiculous allegation of flirting dripping from his lips like drops from a leaky faucet. She chalked it up to the fact that he'd been embarrassed by his own emotions, which made her happy. He should have been embarrassed. That was yet another thing about Italian men. They all wanted to leer at any décolletage or shapely set of legs within twenty yards, but
you
were supposed to be like a thoroughbred at the races, locked into your blinders and greeting any of the male species with strictly perfunctory
hello
s and
how-are-you
s. Except your dad, perhaps. Dads were probably permitted a bit of affection. Not that he had to worry about that with her.

What had she done in that case to break the spell? She racked her brain to remember. A bawdy joke? No. Didn't matter. What she wanted to do was to tell him to bugger off, walk back to the Barbizon, pick up Laura and Ethel, and go to a lounge and flirt with men as they all got good and pissed.

Odd, she thought, that she would strike up a friendship with those two. So different from her they were, and yet she had to admit she was enjoying them. She'd never had close girlfriends growing up—she wasn't the kind of girl other girls warmed to. She was the girl their boyfriends did.

Perhaps it was an opportunity for her, for the first time, to impart some wisdom, to be a teacher, or the big sister that Mary and Emma couldn't be to her. It was rather thrilling, if she was being completely honest with herself. Laura was a diamond who had no idea she was a diamond, a pretty girl who had been kept in a very lovely cage for her entire life, and who now, fluttering around Manhattan like a nascent dove, spent half her time darting her eyes all around her, fearing she was going to do something wrong or inappropriate and earn the family name a red slash in
Burke's Peerage
. Or whatever the American version of
Burke's Peerage
was. The other half of the time Laura spent loathing herself for how she was spending the first half. All she needed was a little push. Permission to be unguarded. To not know every answer.

Ethel, she was another story. Cackling like a hen with the other Barbizon wallflowers, cold-creaming their faces nightly to the texture of mayonnaise in the hopes of attracting dreamboat dates who never materialized. They watched too much telly, ate too much sugar, and read too many glossy magazines, all the while laughing at the Women they were inevitably becoming. But Ethel was a good egg. Vivian had her work cut out for her there; it was like trying to tame a puppy who always leapt on you every time you entered a room. Not that Ethel ever greeted Vivian any way but coolly. But Vivian wasn't fooled. Ethel's offhanded greetings belied a naked, desperate yearning to be liked that Vivian recognized all too well in the girls who watched the Barbizon comings and goings like a pack of convent nuns. But perhaps things were turning for Ethel—
Actually, I must start calling her Dolly
, she thought,
I'm being rather unkind
—with her potential bulky beau at the coffee shop last Sunday. She hadn't seen either of the girls since.
Must get a report
.

She heard the rumble of the Seventh Avenue subway beneath them.

Rescue.

Vivian galloped ahead down the sidewalk, perching on a grate just as the whoosh of the train sent a gust of air bursting up from underground. For a few seconds her pleated skirt went swirling around her, as she pouted her lips and attempted to halfheartedly push the dress downward. “Well?” she shouted in her best kittenish voice. “Am I like Marilyn now, sweetie?”

Even as he walked closer, his face becoming more and more prominent, she couldn't read his expression. Was that a mischievous smirk creeping up, just barely, from his lips?
Oh Christ, do I even care?
Gorgeous or no, theatrical agent contact or no, this was all getting to be too much bloody work. Living with his mum was one thing. Mollifying his jealous mood swings were another.

To her surprise, he put his hands firmly around her waist and lifted her straight off the ground, his face breaking out into an odd expression she couldn't quite identify. He did a full turn, swinging her around the sidewalk like a little girl. “You like that, honey? You like being Marilyn for me?”

Before she could answer, he carried her into an adjacent alley, forcefully throwing her against a cool brick wall and pinning her. With the shadows cast from the streetlights, he was almost completely silhouetted, though his black eyes glittered in the darkness. His breath was hot, labored; his chest seemed to almost be heaving. There was an air about him—something primal.

He pressed his body against hers, shoved his hand up her skirt. His fingers, rough and urgent, threaded underneath her corselet, and she gasped, her head crashing back into the bricks, as she felt two of them plunge inside her.

“You like being bad for me. C'mon, baby, tell Nicky,” he whispered, his lips now on her neck, his fingers probing coarsely. Pain zinged through her body. “Tell me how you like to be bad.”

He said it with fire, with lust. With hatred. Her heart beat uncontrollably, both revulsed and enticed by his emotional violence. She wanted him to stop. She didn't want him to stop. This was frightening. This was thrilling.

All she had to do was scream, kick him in the nuts, and it would all be over. And in that thought—the thought that she was not a prisoner, that she had a choice to make—she lost the battle with herself.

“Yes, darling, oh yes,” she whispered back, her free hand crawling up underneath the back of his shirt, scratching him, clawing at him, branding him. “I want to be bad for you.”

Pretty, glittery, and odd. This was
Mademoiselle
to Laura, or at least the
Mademoiselle
she had been exposed to in the brief period she'd been working inside it. Pretty because it was so very much so: delicate glass vases of bright yellow tulips and daisies dotting the desks, women in pencil skirts and tailored shirts and shiny patent-leather shoes briskly walking up and down halls, their hair pinned in clever updos or worn down in short bangs, all copied from Alexandre of Paris with meticulous care. The thrumming
click-clack
of typewriters and heels on linoleum produced a peculiar lilting concert of femininity that served as the magazine's soundtrack.

Had she truly only been here two weeks? It was hard to believe her apprenticeship was hurtling toward its close—she felt as if it only had just begun. The thought depressed her. How would she ever be able to leave the verve of the city, leave Dolly and Vivian and the Barbizon, to return to the staid world of college in New England?

How can I leave Box?

He'd asked her to dinner during the week but she'd begged off; he'd settled for a cute, if brief, after-work date in the coffee shop. She hadn't mentioned her impending departure, and he'd never asked—boys never thought of or worried about things such as the actual logistics of a fledgling romance. She'd replayed the night at El Morocco more often than was no doubt healthy, but there was so much she wanted to preserve in her mind, details and smells and snippets of conversation she wanted to box up—ha!—and unpack on a cloudy day in the future. Intellectually she realized she had already been given so much on this brief sojourn in Manhattan, more than some girls ever experienced in a lifetime. Yet it didn't feel temporary or like a lark. It felt like a start.

Two weeks in, the college apprenticeship at
Mademoiselle
had been a dervish of parties and events, she and the other editors a makeshift sorority winding their way through New York. She'd been amazed and disappointed at how much of their collective “work” had revolved around dressing up and simply appearing, graceful mannequins being glided into a luncheon here, a book party there, a gallery opening over here.
Picture, please. Over here, please
. Just last week they'd spent an entire afternoon in the Central Park West salon of some forbidding dowager, sipping tea from Wedgwood cups and looking over the hostess's impressive collection of Colonial-era letters. (Who knew Martha Washington had such lovely penmanship?) One of the girls whispered that the itinerary was originally supposed to have been a visit to the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Baroness Rothschild de Koenigswarter, but that had been scrapped; the baroness was evidently still too broken up over the death of the saxophonist Charlie Parker, who had succumbed in her residence. For her part, Laura wished they could have gone to the Fifth Avenue mansion of the mysterious Russian financier Serge Rubinstein, inside which he had been found strangled in January.

That night it had been a performance of
Inherit the Wind
at the National Theatre. She'd confessed to Box that she had been hoping for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
at the Morosco. “Oh, so
that's
the kind of girl I'm dealing with,” he'd joked. He'd promised to take her next week.

During the days it was busywork, messengering, and inventory taking, reams of papers that needed to be filled out cataloging the never-ending parade of dresses, gloves, shoes, hats, slacks, and scarves that cluttered the office's halls and closets, each hoping to be selected for one of the magazine's fashion pictorials or the holiest of grails, the cover. Yesterday they'd all been herded into the conference room to “vote” from a series of finalists for the image that would appear on the cover of their vaunted college issue in August, though it was an open secret that the vote, like their input into anything else to do with the magazine, actually meant nothing. Mrs. Blackwell would decide what the cover would be, just as Mrs. Blackwell decided everything at
Mademoiselle
, down to what brand of lotion was stocked in the powder room.

“Oh, I do hope I'm not intruding on your lovely daydream,” Cat Eyes snapped, tossing a pile of folders onto Laura's desk. For the life of her, Laura couldn't understand this steadfast, virulent animosity, which had first reared its head at the initiation that first day, continued right past the luncheon at Barnes & Foster, and only intensified since. There were more than a dozen college editors here for the four-week apprenticeship; why had Laura been the one elected to receive all of the sarcasm and derision?

“Not at all,” Laura replied evenly. Cat Eyes would be the one thing she would definitely
not
miss. “Do these need to be filed?”

“They
need
to be taken to Mrs. Blackwell's office. If her secretary isn't there, just leave them in her in-box. Then you can go.” She clomped away.

Well, at least it's Friday
, Laura thought. Tomorrow she would—

Tomorrow. Saturday.

She'd completely forgotten.

She'd made the date with Pete the bartender to go to the beach. To be precise, Vivian had made the date for her to go with Pete the bartender to the beach. After brunch on Sunday, Laura had decided she didn't care what Vivian thought, that she needed to cancel. Better to concentrate on just one guy, she'd reasoned, especially when she was only going to be in New York for two more weeks. But then she'd forgotten to actually call Pete. And now it was here, tomorrow, and no doubt he'd secured transportation and a picnic basket and God knows what else, and she couldn't in good conscience ditch now.

I should make Vivian go
, she thought as she walked down the hall with the files, toward the posh corner office of Betsy Blackwell.