Authors: Dazzle
“Yes, sir.” Could a man of sixty-five be having a midlife crisis?
Back at the deserted hacienda, few of the lights were on. Susie, who had a nature that was frugal in a few small ways, could never leave the place at night without saving electricity. Jazz drove the Jeep she had commandeered as close to the back gate to the patio as she could so that she wouldn’t risk getting any of the still-wet chili inside any room but her own. She navigated the garden paths carefully, holding the dress up with both hands, found her way to the covered veranda that led to all the family bedrooms and, pushing open her door with her elbow, went into her own
room. She’d left a light on by the bed, but trust Susie to have turned it off, she noted, annoyed, as she stepped inside. In the dark she took four steps toward the bathroom. A violent pain slammed into her shin just below her left knee. She teetered for an instant on her high heels, still trying to hold up her dress, before she fell forward onto a mass of hard, angular objects, hurting an elbow and an ankle.
“I DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS!” she informed the silence in a shriek. Slowly she picked herself up from the ambush, letting her dress drop, and with her hands stretched protectively in front of her, sweeping the darkness for any further obstacles, she groped her way toward her bed table and switched on the light.
A pile of Vuitton suitcases, the ungiving, hard-sided kind with lethal metal corners, lay in a careless heap on the floor of her room.
“ ‘I just dumped my bags at the house,’ ” she said out loud. “I just dumped my bags …
just … dumped
…! Does this look like a guest room, dickhead? Answer me! Does it?” She looked around the room fiercely. As usual, when she was home, she neatened up after herself as she’d been taught to do as a child. Tonight she’d been especially careful since there was always the possibility that some of the guests might come back after the party for a last drink and a tour of the landmark adobe. After she’d dressed for the evening, she’d put all her accessories away in the top bureau drawer, and the bathroom was equally, impersonally neat.
“Yes, Jazz, it does indeed look like a guest room, a very nice guest room, particularly to the dim, subhuman mind of cretinous cousin Casey,” she muttered as she rubbed the shin where, fortunately, the layers of pleated fabric had prevented a bruise from forming, although it hurt like hell.
Jazz managed to release herself from the ruined Grès gown and rolled it up tenderly in a towel. She pulled the combs out of her hair, found her brush and lashed and bashed at her Spanish confection ruthlessly
as she stood in front of the closet door and considered what to put on. Jeans and a shirt would do on any other night, but not for the Fiesta. She changed her beige pantyhose for a pair in gold, and quickly she grabbed a hanger from which hung, on tiny straps, a short, shapeless little piece of gold cloth. She slipped it over her head and, in an instant, Jazz was reborn, all tits, all ass, all gams. Glorious old-time Hollywood gams, Betty Grable gams, Ginger Rogers gams, Cyd Charisse gams, the kind of great gams that are the stuff of dreams.
The piece of cloth turned into Calvin Klein’s newest slip mini-dress, as short as a dress can be, the most fiendishly difficult-to-wear item in American design, a garment brought out every season, always in a different fabric, but otherwise identically styled, a dress seemingly designed to mock every woman whose body is less than perfect. A dress that challenged all women, especially those who should never wear it.
Jazz had been born to wear that dress, and after she had photographed it on a model for an Absolut ad, she had called the designer in New York and got him to send her one months before it went on sale all over the United States. She reached into a pot that she’d bought at the Soap Factory on Melrose, and threw a handful of gold dust over her hair, which now rippled down her back like autumn sunshine in the woods. “Go the distance,” she muttered to herself, not without a touch of pleasure. She changed her white sandals for a pair in gold, and hung long, dangling, flashy, fake yellow diamond earrings from her ears.
Jazz left her room in a state of maximum disorder, stalked back to the Jeep, and within minutes she was back at the party. She surveyed the crowd for a moment before plunging back into it. Her eye was abruptly caught by the back of a woman’s head, a woman with red hair cut so short that it almost looked like a boy’s, a woman she hadn’t noticed earlier. Surely there was something that tickled her memory in the particular poise of that head, in the long line of that neck, in the lovely shape of those shoulders?
Yet, just as surely, Jazz knew that whoever that woman was, she had no connection with any previous Fiesta. She was from another world than that of the ranch. As she walked forward, curious, she noticed that her father was talking with unusual animation to the woman whose face she hadn’t yet seen.
Mike Kilkullen looked up and saw his daughter approaching. Jazz waved, he waved back, beckoning to her, his expression suddenly changing to a look Jazz didn’t understand, a look that mixed the amused welcome she expected with something else that seemed to be a kind of—was it anticipation, was it confusion, could it be embarrassment? The woman turned around.
“Red!” Jazz yelled and rushed toward her, flinging her arms around her and hugging her tightly. “Red, my darling Red, I would have recognized you right away if you hadn’t cut your hair, what on earth are you doing at this hoedown?”
“Mike invited me,” Red answered, returning Jazz’s hug.
The two women fell silent for an instant, gazing searchingly at each other, looking for signs of change, as women do who haven’t seen each other for six years. Jazz had been twenty-three when they last worked together during the leaping early stages of her professional progress. Red Appleton had been one of the greatest models of the early 1970s and a top fashion editor by the 1980s. At the peak of her magazine career she had been about to retire to married life.
“Red, where
have
you been?” Jazz demanded. “You just vanished, totally disappeared into the jet-set zoo.”
“Cap Ferrat, St. Moritz, and a dozen other low-life, high-rent places.” Red spoke in a Texas drawl that had been imitated by half the girls in the business. She had been everybody’s pet, an all-time favorite model, a brilliant editor, and always the center of fun on every shoot, good-natured, unflappable, and without ego.
“Where are you off to now?”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m never going to pack another suitcase. I’ve bought a divine place on Lido Island.”
“You? Living in Newport Beach? You, a neighbor! I can’t believe it. How come? Where’s that husband of yours?”
“He’s a chapter out of an old paperback I left on a plane.” Red grinned that huge Texas grin that nobody could imitate.
“Divorced?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, welcome back!” Jazz was delighted. She and Red had shared the one thing that two women who are able to feign just about anything, as all women can, cannot ever feign: genuine liking. She’d vaguely resented Red’s obscenely rich husband because he had taken Red out of the magazine business in which she’d been a star, and whirled her away into a life of migratory pleasure-seeking. But then Red, so independent in most ways, had always had one weakness: she’d been a sucker for older, bossy, dominating men.
“Dad, you’re full of surprises tonight. Where did you run across my darling Red? Or is she another long-lost cousin too?”
“We met at a party,” Mike answered.
“When?” Jazz asked, startled. Her father almost never went to parties.
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“Well, you could at least have told me,” she said, obscurely annoyed. “I didn’t have the slightest idea that Red was living here.”
“I didn’t know she was ‘your darling Red.’ Am I supposed to make weekly reports to you on my social life? Now listen, Jazzbo, you run along and have fun. Red’s my date, she couldn’t get here earlier, and now we’re going to dance till we drop.” Mike Kilkullen grasped Red firmly and walked toward the dance floor with her. Red fluttered her hand at Jazz over her shoulder as she allowed herself to be led away, bending gracefully into Mike Kilkullen’s side.
Jazz stood openmouthed. His “social life”? Her
father didn’t have a social life, not that she knew of. He didn’t go to parties. He didn’t invite one of the most beautiful women in the world to his annual family-and-old-friends Fiesta.
He’d never brought a date to the Fiesta
. A couple of weeks ago? How many times had they met in the interval? What was going on? Could anything be going on? Could anything
not
be going on? Why shouldn’t something be going on? Her father was still a magnificent man. Red was what? At least into her forties, in any case. And divorced. Thus available. And she’d always been a total sucker for men who told her what to do. Her father told everybody what to do. Red only went for men much older than she was. He was that for sure. SOMETHING WAS GOING ON.
Well. Well. Well. Jazz’s head and heart did a zigzag, flip-flop, upside-down twisting turn as she considered what she had just learned. She struggled to be fair. To be broad-minded. Was there a single reason she could think of why her father shouldn’t have invited Red to be his date tonight? Wasn’t this his party, his ranch? Didn’t he have every right to a social life? Wasn’t he entitled to the pleasure of—flirting—with a beautiful woman? Surely Red had let him know that they were old friends. But that didn’t make it a crime that he hadn’t told her about knowing Red for two weeks, during which time she, his darling daughter, must have spoken to him by phone on a half-dozen occasions. He had a right to some privacy, didn’t he?
Yes, yes and yes, to all of the above, but what about that look he’d given her as she approached them? She had thought at the time that it was embarrassment or confusion and perhaps it had been a little bit of both, but mostly it had been—pride.
And why not pride? What man wouldn’t be proud to escort Red Appleton. She mustn’t jump to crazy conclusions on no basis, and it wasn’t any of her damn business anyway, and even if something was going on, so what, why shouldn’t it, Jazz told herself severely. She thrust her heart back in its place, grabbed her questioning brain and slammed it shut, arranged a
smile on her face and, resolutely turning her back on the dance floor, studied the tables, deciding which group to join.
Not far from where Jazz stood, Casey Nelson was seated, calmly eating dessert with Valerie on one hand and Fernanda on the other. Both of them were bending toward him in obvious fascination. Of course, Jazz thought, if Charles Manson were out on parole and could still get it up, Fernanda would be making goo-goo eyes at him, but Valerie always reserved her interest in new people until she had an inkling of how they could be useful to her.
Jazz slipped through the crowd, refusing all invitations to dance, and eased herself into a chair at what seemed to have become the family table. She was a mistress of the art of joining a group without disturbing it, making herself almost invisible until she wanted to be noticed. She set herself to an imperceptible study of this new joker in the pack.
After what her father had told her, she’d have to consider him as more than an aberrant irritation who would disappear in the morning. He wouldn’t last long, of course. This was, had to be, some sort of experiment on her father’s part, a momentary whim about this investment-minded tugboat heir out of the Bad Apple. Perhaps he even had a subconscious notion he could make this unlikely lad—who had to be thirty-two or thirty-three if she was any judge, and she was—into a substitute for the son he’d never had. Jazz brightened, and the panic she’d felt a few minutes before oozed away. Of course! That was it! Casey Nelson was a Kilkullen male. Only by a relatively minor tributary of the bloodstream, but still there was that essential connection. Hot damn, she had it!
He didn’t look like a Kilkullen except for his hair, she thought, flicking her eyes at him for an instant in a way that couldn’t attract anyone’s attention. His crisp, dark red hair that curled here and there was family hair; Mike Kilkullen had had hair like that before it turned white. But no Kilkullen had ever looked like a grown-up lion cub, with a forehead that furrowed
in intensity as he spoke. This Nelson person had a thick sprinkling of freckles on the kind of white skin that would probably burn easily; heavy, unruly, red-gold eyebrows over bold hazel eyes and a nose that was rather too broad at the base. To her trained eye his features were both obstinate and generous. He probably wouldn’t photograph interestingly, his face was too blunt, too no-bullshit, without enough angles, yet, if you just looked at him, there was a certain individuality that the camera could seek out. Not the distinction of the almost decadent, old-school British look that was still sought in male models, but a conservative, old-fashioned kind of—for want of a better word—decency. Didn’t he know that just plain decency was out? Just like his bloody Ninja luggage?
“Oh, Jazz,” Valerie said, turning to her and putting a proprietary hand on Casey Nelson’s arm. “Have you met our newfound cousin, Casey Nelson?”
“We’re old cronies,” Jazz said. “In fact, Casey seems to be sleeping in my room.”
He looked up and noticed her for the first time since she’d sat down. “I’m sorry … again … I thought it was a guest room.”
“Understandable mistake. That makes two tonight, Casey … so far.” Jazz threw him a gratuitously wanton smile, a shameless, thoroughly naughty smile she reserved for special occasions, just to keep in practice. It was a pity to waste one speck of gold dust on her sisters.
“I’ve just been telling Casey that I know his father, Gregory,” Valerie said, refusing to sound puzzled at Jazz’s acquaintance with Nelson. “He’s president of the committee for the Madison Avenue Settlement House. You remember, Jazz, it’s that dreaded charity thing I have to do every year.”
As to many decorators, the coveted culmination of Valerie’s year was the invitation to create a model room for the Madison Avenue group. The settlement was an Old New York, society-backed charity devoted to after-school education for gifted but poor
children. Each year the committee took over the finest empty house on the real-estate market and asked a selected group of eager decorators, who would tear each other apart for the honor, to design one room apiece.