The deal was worth the downside. On any given night during the season there were upward of a dozen A-list dinners in Manhattan. There were only four society columns—no more than a hundred twenty column-inches to cover the entire who-was-there and who-wore-what. Competition for those inches was murderous, and ambitious hostesses were willing to pay ten thousand to get mentioned, twenty to get a photo run of themselves in designer décolletage.
Thanks to Dizey’s constant touting of
Annie MacAdam, New York’s premier party giver
, Annie was perceived as one of the luminaries and arbiters of the New York social scene.
“All I want,” Dizey said, “is to see Leigh Baker’s face when she realizes she has to spend an evening in the same room with Avalon Gardner.”
“I’ll have to tell her that he’s coming,” Annie warned. “I’m not going to let her be surprised.”
“Tell her.” The gloat in Dizey’s voice was unmistakable. “What do you bet she gets so rattled she falls off the wagon?”
Annie had noted for some time that Dizey, who rarely picked up a phone in one hand without a loaded shot glass in the other, had a voyeuristic interest in the drinking problems of famous women.
“A wise hostess never bets on her guests’ sobriety,” Annie said quietly.
“
SOMETHING HAS BEEN
on my conscience, Leigh darling.” Annie MacAdam’s voice came over the telephone line high and flat, with a sort of florid falsity.
“And what’s that?” Leigh sipped her coffee. The liquid slipped down her throat with a comfortable warmth. The maid had brought breakfast in bed—coffee, dry whole-wheat toast, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. To compensate for all the delicacies that were not there, a speckled blue orchid floated in a fingerbowl.
“When I sent out the dinner invitations,” Annie was saying, “I had no idea that they were going to parole that unspeakable Delancey boy or that Avalon Gardner was going to defend him in Dizey’s column.”
There was no transition. Suddenly Leigh had crossed over the zone of gray sleepiness into full-color wakefulness. “How does Jim Delancey’s parole affect dinner?”
“It affects
my
dinner, because I invited Avalon Gardner.”
Leigh felt as if she had been kicked in the lungs. “Just tell me one thing. Have you invited Jim Delancey?”
“Gracious, what kind of hostess do you think I am?”
“You’re up to the minute, Annie, and I have no idea what the latest chic is.” Leigh hated the feeling of being one heartbeat away from a raving argument. “For all I know, it’s a great social coup nowadays to have a convicted murderer at the table.”
“I wouldn’t consider inviting that boy. But if under the circumstances you don’t care to face Avalon—”
Leigh could hear sirens coming from the back of her brain. “
Face
him? What the
hell
are you talking about?”
“Be that as it may,” Annie MacAdam said, “whoever has to face whomever, I’m calling to tell you that I will
absolutely
understand if you’d rather not see Avalon—and I wouldn’t dream of holding you to your acceptance.”
“Why are you dumping all this on me? Why can’t you ask
him
to cancel?”
“Leigh darling, I have—and he won’t. I’m sorry. You have every right to be upset, of course.”
Through the quiet cool of the bedroom, traffic along Fifth Avenue sent up a faint muffled vibration.
“I’m not upset. Not in the least. And Waldo and I have no intention of changing our plans. We’re coming, of course.”
“
HERE—TASTE
.” Annie’s daughter, Gabrielle, held out a wooden spoon dripping …
something.
Annie hung up the kitchen extension phone. She turned and looked at her daughter, at the chubby pink face framed in mouse-brown ringlets; she looked at the spoon. She backed off a step. “Are you serious? It looks like a special effect in a horror movie.”
“It’s your party, it’s your dessert.” Gabrielle’s face suddenly had that petulant little-girl pout it took on when she thought she was keeping her hurt feelings to herself. “I’m only trying to help.”
Annie worked up her courage and tasted. The flavor was good. Far better than the caterers were capable of—and a lucky thing, since Annie had knocked their price down twenty percent and told them she’d handle her own dessert. “It’s delicious. But I’m not going to put a mess like that on my guests’ dessert plates. You’ve got to spruce it up.”
Gabrielle was silent.
How the hell
, Annie asked herself,
did I ever inherit a divorced, overweight live-in daughter at this stage of my life
?
“At least get it to stick together. I’ll tell you what—we’ll use pastry shells.”
“You’re not going to put my mousse in pastry shells.” Gabrielle thumped the Pyrex mixing bowl down onto the counter.
There was a tiny spasm in Annie’s heart.
This is my daughter,
she thought.
My own daughter, my only child. And she’s hurting.
“I’m sorry if I seem tactless, but you have to grasp that there’s an all-or-nothing factor attached to New York entertaining. It’s an arena where you win big or lose big; and the bigger you win—and believe me, I’ve won very, very big—the bigger you have to
keep
winning.”
Gabrielle was staring at her mother, and there was suddenly something hard and unreachable in her eyes. “You truly don’t give a damn about anything going on in the world—except giving parties and going to parties and meeting people you think are extraordinary.”
“And they
are
extraordinary,” Annie said. “Because do you know what most people are in this life? They’re extras! And do you know what you’re going to turn into if you don’t get a grip on yourself?”
“I’ve no idea. Tell me.”
“If only you’d try—” Annie dropped into a kitchen chair. Suddenly she was exhausted. “You have a look that’s all-American, perky, healthy. You could be spunky. You could be flirty. Add a little dignity and a little mystery and style, and people would find you very worthwhile.”
“Why should I care how people I don’t even know find me?”
“Because you could make something of yourself—besides a whale.”
THE PARTY WAS IN FULL SWING
. The room glinted with the movement of evening dresses and precious stones and tuxedos, but Gabrielle felt she was alone, lost in a deep forest of black trees.
She squeezed through the crowd, looking for a wall. She found a space beside the Chippendale secretary that her mother had borrowed from Gurdon-Chappell.
“I need something amusing,” she heard Gloria Spahn say, “something versatile.”
Her mother and Gloria Spahn were standing on the other side of the secretary, chatting with Zack Morrow, the real estate conglomerateur and owner of the
New York Tribune.
He was good-looking, he was unmarried, and he was on the cover of
New York
magazine this week.
“But you should wear some of Fenny’s designs!” Annie said. She unclipped a cameo brooch from her dress and handed it to Gloria.
“Fenny designed this?” Gloria said, turning it over in her hand. “But you know, this isn’t at all bad.”
Gabrielle stood there, waiting to be included. Waiting for her mother to take her hand and draw her into the circle and say to Zack Morrow,
Do you know my daughter
?
She’s unmarried too.
“Fenny!” Annie sang out.
Fennimore Gurdon, an overweight man with waved white hair and a humorous red face, joined the group.
“Hello, all.” He gave a casual wave of his champagne glass. He was wearing antique mother-of-pearl studs in his boiled shirt and one was beginning to pop out.
“I was just telling Gloria about your brooches,” Annie said.
Gabrielle stepped forward. A waiter’s arm intervened, cutting her off from the group.
Gloria Spahn set her empty champagne glass on the waiter’s tray and took a fresh one. “How long have you been designing such great jewelry?” she asked Fenny.
Suddenly Gabrielle felt bad about herself. She felt a sense of waste, of ugliness, of overweight. The black Gloria Spahn that her mother had lent her felt tight at the hips and bunched-up under the arms.
Don’t panic
, she told herself.
Concentrate. Focus on each breath. Turn the mind inward. This moment will pass. It will pass.
“Are you okay?” Annie whispered to her, looking annoyed.
“Excuse me,” Gabrielle said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Annie watched her daughter bumble off through the crowd.
“I wish you hadn’t let Gabrielle wear my dress,” Gloria said. “It wasn’t cut for her.”
“Relax,” Annie said. “You have plenty of beautiful dresses here tonight, no one’s going to notice Gabrielle.”
Fenny Gurdon had overheard them, “Tori’s dress is stunning. That’s one of yours, isn’t it, Gloria?”
Annie followed the direction of Fenny’s gaze across the room to where Tori Sandberg, tall and slim in one of Gloria’s pale apricot sheaths, was moving through the crowd.
“You must be very proud of Tori tonight, Zack,”’ Annie said. Zack and Tori had been living together for almost seven years.
Zack looked startled. “Why? I mean, why tonight?”
“Because she looks beautiful.”
“Anyone looks beautiful,” Fenny Gurdon said, “in one of Gloria’s designs. Christ,
I’d
look beautiful in one.”
Annie’s eye took in the bustle and energy and
haute couture
eddying through the room. Her ear tuned in on all the chitchatting, the laughing, the music of life in the only lane that counted.
“Excuse me,” Annie said.
The Duke and Duchess of Argyll had just come through the front door.
“Hi, your Graces!” she called out.
LEIGH TRIED HER BEST
to listen. The young man was telling her about the Astor who couldn’t wear pearls because her sweat was acidic and corroded them horribly. But the voices in Annie MacAdam’s living room were all shouting in a sort of multichannel stereo, as though to make themselves heard above a roaring wind, and the volume controls in Leigh’s head were set very wrong. The background was drowning out the melody.
“They have to be fed to a goose,” the young man was saying.
Leigh tried to muster a shuddered outbreath of caring. An interested smile. “A goose?”
Behind her she could hear a man saying, “He’s such a rotten driver he hit a
Rockefeller
while he was on antidepressants.”
She didn’t even have to turn to know it was Dick Braidy. After three years of marriage Dick’s voice had left a scar on her brain that four years of divorce had not healed. She could come into a room full of people and her ear would tell her immediately if he was there.
“It’s a riot to see him on the talk-show circuit, pushing the book about his breakdown, because the one detail he leaves out of his confession is speed—the doctors got him out of his depression with Swiss synthesized crack and now he
lives
on it.”
Leigh heard a woman cackle loudly, and it was not a kindly cackle at all.
“In theory,” the young man was telling Leigh, “the goose shits the pearls out clean. But Mrs. Astor’s pearls
killed
Carrier’s best goose. Lloyd’s of London insisted on an autopsy, and what do you think they found?
Malaria.
Mrs. Astor’s sweat had infected her pearls!”
“Malaria.” Leigh stretched a smile over her uncertainty. She reached for some kind of comment.
Dick Braidy’s voice cut in from behind her. “Lulu Rockefeller’s leg was crushed.
Smithereensville.
They helicoptered her to Columbia Presbyterian because it’s the closest place where they do decent microsurgery.”
“Your glass is empty,” the young man said. “What are you drinking?”
Leigh glanced at her empty glass. She felt the need to get much farther down the slope of uncaring than Perrier with ice and lime could ever take her.
Wouldn’t it be nice
, she thought,
if I had enough courage or weakness, or whatever it takes, to ask for Johnnie Walker and diet Pepsi.
She remembered the analyst who had told her it showed low self-esteem to put Pepsi in Johnnie Walker.
“Sparkling water with a little lime.” She handed the young man the glass. “Thank you.”
Watching him pry his way through the crowd, she felt invisible, as if all the people around her were connected with one another by waves of insider trivia, and she was just so much spillover.
A hand touched her shoulder. She turned and saw Dizey Duke in royal blue and too much jewelry, looking like a Christmas tree that had intercepted a flying blond wig.
“Leigh hon,” Dizey said. “Keep your sunny-side.”
“Sorry?” Leigh said.
“Up.”
Leigh met Dizey’s gaze. A fine glaze of sweat had begun to highlight the soft ridges of Dizey’s face. It was a round face, plump and as eerily unwrinkled as a pumped-up balloon.
“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Dizey said. “You’re a real sport.”
“Because I haven’t thrown my drink in Avalon Gardner’s face? Hang around. The evening’s young.”
Dizey shrugged. “Who cares about Avalon Gardner?”
“I care about anyone who defends Jim Delancey.”
“Oh, Avalon’s a senile old pussy.”
“Then why have you been printing his senile remarks in your column?”
“Journalists don’t take sides.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You don’t seem to be taking sides either. You spent a good ten minutes being polite to Ron Zaporta. Everyone was commenting.”
“Ron who?”
“The hair colorist at the Pierre. You were just talking to him.”
“Is there some reason I shouldn’t talk to him?”
“Well, it’s up to you—but he
is
Honey Ogilvie’s beard.”
“Dizey, I hate it when you use this tactic. You’re acting as though I know or care who Honey Ogilvie is or why she needs a beard.”
“Honey Ogilvie directs New York City Outreach to the United Nations Commission on the Homeless.” There was something openly probing, almost malevolent about the gaze Dizey was aiming at Leigh. “I hope I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know. She’s here with Waldo.”
“No, Dizey.
I’m
here with Waldo.”
“You’re the
official
story, but—” Dizey’s pale blue eyes glanced significantly toward the corner of the living room.