In the Drink (22 page)

“We certainly have,” I said, feeling a bone-deep exhaustion at the thought of all that lay ahead in this conversation. I squeezed my eyes shut for a split second and then opened them again, a few times, ticlike. “I’m not sure how that happened on Friday, Jackie.”

“Well, it was terribly upsetting.”

“I know it was.”

“It can’t happen again.”

“It won’t.”

“Now,” she said briskly, “about that scene we’re working on—”

“You read it?”

“You know, I haven’t had a spare minute all weekend, with getting ready for that girl and organizing all the—”

“No, that’s good, that’s great! Where is it? I’ll get right to work on it.”

Jackie’s answer to this was a stream of enthusiastic, gesticulating Italian, to which I nodded and smiled politely until someone directly behind me answered her in a light, girlish voice, and I turned to behold a tiny young woman wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of white boxer shorts; her hair was unbrushed and she wore no more makeup than I did but even so, she was as lovely as a princess in a Renaissance painting. Her hair, skin and eyes were the same warm shade of pale brown, her forehead was round and high, her hair rippled in gold-shot waves to her waist. She was perfectly proportioned, but in miniature: she couldn’t have been much over five feet
tall. Her shins and forearms were small and delicate as a child’s.

“Oh, Claudia, this is Lucia, my great-niece,” said Jackie in her flat American tones, then, without missing a beat, introduced me to Lucia in Italian.

Lucia smiled politely back at me. “Hi, Claudia,” she said thickly, the words sounding uncomfortable in her mouth. “My English is very bad, forgive me, please. Nice to meet you.”

“She’s going to take an English class,” said Jackie. “She wants to go to NYU, but I don’t want her going all the way down there, spending all her time with all those interracial students.”

I said blithely, “Maybe Goldie could look into it.” I was almost giggling. The welter of dread I’d been in all weekend! All that poetry! That dark night of the soul!

“Goldie,” said Jackie, going back to her face in the mirror. “I’m not sure she would know. She doesn’t have your sophistication, Claudia; she’s not educated like you.”

Interesting how everything had shifted. “She’s smart, though,” I said primly, as if Goldie were outside eavesdropping.

“She’s impossible,” said Jackie, lowering her voice as if she also felt Goldie on the other side of the door. “Just impossible. She doesn’t understand at all what it means to be a woman in my position, with my responsibilities, not the way you do, Claudia.” She was romanticizing me already, and I was enjoying it far more than I should have. “That perfume! I told her if she didn’t go in and wash it off immediately I’d be sick. It smells like a saloon in here.”

Lucia watched Jackie throughout this diatribe with a blank, polite expression, balanced on one leg like a stork, running a hand up and down one arm and then, as soon as Jackie stopped talking, she asked a brief question that had the word
“caffe” in it. When Jackie answered her in the affirmative, she was off.

Jackie began powdering her face with slow, precise little pats. “What am I going to do with her? Her father will never forgive me if anything happens to her. He was Giancarlo’s favorite nephew.”

“You said something about a dinner party,” I said.

“Yes, but who would I invite? I don’t know anyone her age. Well, Bitsy has a granddaughter a little older than Lucia; maybe she could bring some of her friends. Could you call her and ask her if she—”

“Maybe Goldie will,” I said. Amazing how easy it was to be bossy once you got into the swing of it. “Gil Reeve is expecting the final chapters next month. I was thinking: what about the unknown woman in the limousine? We haven’t seen her in about eighty pages, since Ali was shot, remember?”

“Ali,” said Jackie.

“The Moroccan guy, Fatima’s husband. He was shot in the back and fell off the roof of the castle.”

“Oh, Ali! But who was the woman in the limousine? I don’t—”

“She could be an Argentinean, the daughter of a Nazi.” Nazis were Jackie’s favorite villains, along with Communists, Arabs and dope smugglers. “Her father escaped to Buenos Aires in 1945 and renamed himself Martinez, but privately he raised his daughter on Nazi ideology, which he never gave up.”

“That’s good,” said Jackie.

Of course it was good. “And Ali’s wife Fatima was their housemaid in Buenos Aires. She found some secret documents revealing his Nazi identity and linking him with war crimes.”

“Oh yes,” she said, “and Ali and Fatima are blackmailing her, and so she has to kill Ali, and maybe we should have her
kill Fatima too. Write all of this down immediately so we don’t forget.”

I fetched a pad and pen, and soon we had hammered out both the next chapter and an understanding that I would stay at home and write and that she would pay me by the chapter rather than by the hour. As we were wrapping up our negotiations, her phone rang; it was Mr. Blevins, checking in for their daily chat. Jackie gave a guttural laugh at something he said; I gathered I hadn’t caused him any permanent damage. I glanced at her, struck by certain smutty undertones in that laugh, wondering for the first time whether she’d ever slept with him. She was so discreet with me about how far she actually went with these men she dated, and of course she had always scornfully deemed Mr. Blevins too far beneath her for serious consideration. But for the first time it struck me that they might, for all I knew, be lovers; I remembered that day when they were doing the fox-trot and drinking champagne at five in the afternoon, the masterful way he’d held her body against his, how she’d told me gaily and innocently that they were only practicing. It occurred to me now that I had almost certainly underestimated her. And him.

She hung up and gave the phone a satisfied little pat. “Well,” she said. “Mr. Blevins wants me to spend a week in Southampton with him! Imagine! At my age.”

She had once dated a famous financier, some hoary old Wall Street lion I’d never heard of, a white-maned oily-voiced wheeler-dealer with big fake gleaming choppers; she’d told me with girlish prurience that he couldn’t “become erect” any more, so he had to use a pump. I had simply assumed that she knew this through hearsay; I now saw that I had been naive, as usual. She’d slept with him! She’d slept with all of them! And she was over seventy! Well, why shouldn’t she?

“It sounds like fun,” I said, grinning.

She laughed. “Oh, it wouldn’t be. It would be so boring to be stuck in that big house in the middle of nowhere with Mr. Blevins. I don’t know why the Americans think so highly of Long Island; it’s nothing compared to Marbella or the Riviera. And why does he have to moon around me like that? I wish he’d discuss interesting topics. All he ever says is that I’m
beautiful
and he
adores
me, as if that were interesting in any way. Well, it isn’t! Now,” she said sternly. “I hope you haven’t forgotten Lucia’s appointment at Frances Gray’s modeling agency at eleven o’clock today. Frances values punctuality above everything else, she’s very English.”

“We’ll be on time,” I said as I gave a swift but penetrating glance around the room. Those pages weren’t in here, at least not where I could see them. I gave a cursory but thorough search through the rest of her apartment: she must have squirreled them away, because I didn’t see them lying about. Oh, well, no use getting into a lather at this point in the game—if they weren’t in sight, she wouldn’t remember them, at least not if I knew her. She had an aerobics class at eleven, and at one she was meeting Lucia and some of her cronies at Mortimer’s for lunch. Once she and Lucia were out of the way, I could find and destroy them and make a clean getaway with her laptop. It all seemed safe enough for now. As I passed the dining room doorway, I heard Goldie laughing, saying something about Susie Lefkowitz and prom night.

I went down the hall to collect Lucia, and found her in the guest room brushing her hair. She had decked herself out in a spanking-clean pair of jeans with a crease ironed into the front of each leg and a white T-shirt several sizes smaller than the one she’d slept in. She still wore no makeup. She looked like a very clean, very pretty ten-year-old. “One minute, Claudia,” she said. She made a face as the brush snagged on a tangle.

Her equanimity nonplused me. If I had been fresh off the boat, about to have an interview at a modeling agency, I would have been in a vastly different mood and outfit. I might have even thought to put on a little lipstick. Of course, it helped to be the daughter of an Italian marquis or whatever he was, but I’d never seen anyone so purely and unquestioningly sure of herself. Her attitude toward me, polite and even casual, was without the slightest hint of real equality, which put me strangely at ease; she obviously carried in her bones the knowledge of the precise gradations of behavior toward the just-replaced American secretary of an American-born relative. Although she was nine years younger than I was and had just arrived for the first time in the city I’d lived in for years, Lucia was in charge and I was given the command, wordlessly, through a slight rearrangement of the molecules of the air, to be deferential only when necessary, and otherwise to treat her with a detached but casual courtesy, laughing at her jokes if she cared to make any, helping her in any way she required. I found this incredibly refreshing after three years under the irrational dictatorship of her great-aunt. I breathed easily as I waited for her to finish her minimal preparations. She didn’t seem to mind being watched; she seemed to inhabit a rarefied state far beyond self-consciousness.

She zipped up her red silk bomber jacket, ready for her interviews; I seemed to recall that these were called something like “go-sees,” but couldn’t bring myself to refer to them as such even privately because it smacked too much of something, I wasn’t sure what. We went down to the street, where Ralph hailed us a cab. I gave the address of Frances’s agency, which was less than fifteen blocks away; it would have been faster to walk, I realized, but oh well. We still arrived with three minutes to spare. When the driver hit the meter, I wondered whether I should pay, as her great-aunt’s servant or
whatever I was, but Lucia solved it for me by taking out her wallet. “I have,” she said.

We rode the elevator up to the twentieth floor, where we found ourselves in a bright little waiting room littered with fashion magazines. We sat silently in two small red armchairs until a chesty brunette came through a door with her hand outstretched. A cuticle-shaped curl was pasted to her forehead over her left eyebrow, and she wore a mustard-colored suit whose jacket had a plunging neckline that showed plenty of cleavage and no blouse. “I’m Andrea,” she said.

“I’m Claudia,” I said, “and this is Lucia.”

“I figured,” she said with a quirk of a smile. I snuck a glance at myself in the mirror and experienced that ancient feeling I always got during work hours: I belonged to Jackie, even here, and it showed, even now that my days of drudgery were essentially over. I wore a black skirt and a white blouse, black hose and a pair of cheap, badly made loafers I’d found in a bargain shoe store off Canal Street. I looked like an usherette at a small-town movie theater; my posture was all pulled into itself and my face was frozen in an expression of bland diffidence, as if I were acting on behalf of someone else, which I was.

Andrea sat down next to Lucia, who handed over her portfolio without a word, as if she had done this many times before. The two of them murmured, knee-to-knee, in Italian, as Andrea turned pages. I looked at some of the pictures: an ad for perfume, showing Lucia standing in the doorway of a barn, streaming sunlight catching dust motes and illuminating her hair. Why was she wearing that black evening gown in that barn? It suggested an illicit rendezvous with a farmhand or a large handsome bull. Next came another perfume ad, this time with Lucia in a white dress on a swing, her knees fetchingly exposed, her skirt tossed up just so to show a swatch of white
panties. What could that perfume possibly smell like? In the next one, Lucia was in a skimpy bikini on a beach somewhere, sticking her little rump out in a totally unnatural posture. She looked indescribably silly. Who stood like that? There was a red sports car in the background, parked on the sand with the driver’s door flung open, as if Lucia had driven herself right onto the beach, leapt from the car, walked ten yards, then exhilarated by the thrill of it all, stopped to thrust her hip sideways and smile provocatively at the ocean. The picture made no sense unless you took into account the presence of the photographer, which completely destroyed the illusion.

Andrea lingered over this one, stroking Lucia’s glossy image with a manicured pointer finger. Her blood-red fingernail was as long as a small dagger; she wielded it deftly and ostentatiously. I could tell that she loved her fingernails and admired them, posed them against certain backgrounds when no one was looking, and tended to them in her leisure hours. They were her pets. Maybe even her lovers, for all I knew. I caught another chastening glimpse of myself in the mirror, and immediately wiped the supercilious look off my face. It was useless to pretend I was above all this; on the contrary, Lucia and Andrea were speaking a language I didn’t understand, besides Italian, some essential, universal code that had nothing to do with actual words.

After a while, an older woman with silvery hair tied with a Chanel scarf materialized from an inner sanctum and perched on the edge of the chair next to Andrea; Frances Gray was obviously much too busy to sit all the way back. The whole process repeated itself in English, the low murmurs over the photographs, Lucia’s graceful, blasé presentation of herself. Frances put out a hand (her nails were blunt and colorless: she was powerful enough to forsake polish) and lifted Lucia’s T-shirt to peer at her torso through stylish tortoiseshell bifocals.
Lucia submitted to this, as she did to everything, as if she understood that it wasn’t personal, they were all there for the same purpose, namely to figure out what to do with her, how best to use her to sell things.