50 (21 page)

Once a week Doug and Macklin met for breakfast at the Regency Hotel, where Doug gave a verbal report on his progress. The Regency at breakfast was dense with highly successful businessmen whose names were featured regularly in the financial media.

“Look at them,” Macklin said, referring to the other businessmen in the room. “We have an obligation to relieve them of some of their money legitimately, by providing services they can use and by charging them as much as the traffic will bear. That’s how they get
their
money.”

“Steve, this has been on my mind. The suits my lawyer negotiated. I’m very embarrassed about that. Suits!”

“Note that many of the suits in this room hang with a minimum of wrinkling. Custom-made. Also, and on this you’ll have to take my word, there is not a man in here who wouldn’t have attempted to get the best possible deal for himself, and if it included suits, it would have been suits.”

“What did you think when Kleinman made the proposal?”

“I thought he was a good lawyer. He wasn’t getting anything out of me, so he took a wild flyer. But he didn’t go far enough.”

“Oh, you would have gone for shirts, too?”

“You could have had an overcoat.”

“Steve—”

“Really. Now with the ten-thousand-dollar bonus I’m going to give you for the tennis and softball tie-ins, you can buy yourself your own overcoat.”

“Suits. An overcoat. A bonus. My life has become a game show.”

Karen came to the apartment with her safari photographs. Through judicious editing by Karen and/or Susan, in only one picture appeared the Great White Bankroller. The trip looked like the standard spectacular edition, and the father of city zoos nodded his head and made appropriate remarks knowing that even if he could afford to take his daughter on a safari, and with this job it had become a possibility one day, she already had been on a safari with Broeden, grinning in his Banana Republic hat.

Doug returned to his place on a Saturday after jogging with the dog, and Karen was on the phone talking rapidly. She completed her conversation and came running to see Doug.

“I have the most stupendous news,” she said.

A measure of the continual dread he lived with concerning Broeden, his first thought was that he had been outmaneuvered again—what’s left, ballooning in the south of France?

“I was called into the office today. Lana Krupcek was there. She used to coach in Eastern Europe and now she works with American gymnasts. I’ve been chosen. I’m one of three girls from our group, only twelve in the entire East. You go to a boarding school in Wilmington, Delaware, and that would start in the fall, but first in the summer there’s a camp in Colorado. And you’re trained for the U.S. National Championship and after that you can even try for the Olympics! If you’re going to college, they get you into a college with a good gymnastics program and you can compete while you’re in college. She said I had excellent skills and I need competition, but I’m exceptionally promising! Me, Dad. And she’s a world-famous coach.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“I have a few weeks to decide, but I have to let them know because of the school. Room and board is on scholarship. I would have gone to camp anyway, but this is a specialty camp.”

“Congratulations, darling.”

And I lose you now, two years before I expected to?

He phoned Susan after Karen had gone to sleep.

“What about this gymnastics?”

“She has a big decision to make.”

“Is that something?” Broeden said, coming on the line. “That’s our girl.”

“I thought we had another two years,” Doug said, ignoring Broeden.

“I know.”

“A great girl,” Broeden said, in his own sphere.

“We’ll talk.” And Doug ended the conversation.

She was just starting kindergarten. It seems like just a few years ago. Did I go with Nancy six months? It seems like a month. How do you slow this down? How much of all this am I actually getting?

Doug and Ann were scheduled for two black-tie events in the same evening, the first a cocktail party at the Macklins’, followed by a dinner party hosted by friends of Ann’s. The cocktail party was for a sculptor from the Southwest Jane Macklin had discovered. Doug and Macklin were in a corner, Doug telling him about a presentation he was going to make for a tie-in with a sporting-goods company. The president of the company had been an investor in the North American Soccer League.

“The man is a shark,” Macklin said. “I wouldn’t mind an arrangement where I could pick his pockets a little bit.”

“This is the street boy coming out in Steve,” Jane Macklin responded, overhearing.

“Which street?” Doug asked.

“Twenty-ninth and Seventh,” Steve Macklin answered.

“Really?” Doug said.

“I came from Twenty-sixth and Eighth,” Jane Macklin volunteered.

“Jane and I may look like the other guys and live like the other guys, but we didn’t start out like the other guys.”

The dinner party at a town house in the East Seventies was for the benefit of Music Artists, a program to develop American recitalists. Ann was a patron. The hosts, Dr. and Mrs. Baldwin Fairly, a sophisticated-looking couple in their 60s, seated the guests at tables of eight throughout the house. Doug and Ann were seated when the latecomers to their table arrived, tan, smiling. Mrs. Fairly introduced them.

“Dr. and Mrs. Mitchell Breen, Paul and Elizabeth Dawson, Ann Townsend and Doug Gardner, I’d like you to meet Susan Brook and Jerry Broeden.”

Broeden was surveying the room, presumably to see if he and Susan were being seated at a prominent table, and he missed the introductions. Doug and Susan acknowledged each other, and then Broeden, startled, saw Doug seated one couple away.

“How are you doing, folks?” Doug said to Susan and Broeden.

“Do you know each other?” Ann asked.

“Yes,” Susan said.

“From where?”

“From marriage,” Doug answered.

“Don’t you just love these excruciatingly awkward situations?” Ann said.

“It is excruciatingly awkward. I’ll grant you that,” Doug replied, and he, Susan, and Ann were able to smile. Broeden did not. Doug sensed that Broeden was offended to see Doug there, that Broeden had put on the tuxedo, the dress shirt, the studs, had taken the trouble to get ready for this event, and had found Doug on his turf.

The Music Artists program occupied the conversation at the table, and in the middle of polite talk Broeden made a transition so grinding, that to Doug it was like hearing truck brakes screeching. The Dawsons said they had recently returned from a vacation to Japan where they attended several concerts, and suddenly Broeden was holding forth about Japan. He spoke about the difficulty of doing business with the Japanese, the time it takes while their customs are observed, but he showed
them,
opening three Flash stores in record speed.

“Japan is nothing much,” Broeden stated.

“The entire nation?” Doug said.

“And their designers are supposed to be so great now,” Broeden continued. “We can give them lessons.”

“I thought the Japanese were in the forefront,” one of the women said.

“My daughter is a young designer, a teenager, and she can design circles around them,” Broeden declared.

Your daughter is a young designer?

Broeden rolled on, eventually giving up the spotlight to conversation about travel and terrorism, Broeden reentering with his opinion that no terrorist was going to restrict
his
right to travel, Doug imagining Karen being hauled by Broeden through an airport under siege so Broeden could argue his point personally with Iranian terrorists.

Ann and Susan talked briefly; Susan was also a patron of the music program. On the way home after the dinner, Ann said to Doug, “I liked her. She’s very nice. She made a mistake with you.”

“Thanks. But you’re assuming it was only hers to make.”

Two days later a story about the dinner appeared in
The New York Times,
listing the names of notable guests. After seeing so many column items about Susan and Broeden, Doug had reached an odd kind of parity with them. They were mentioned in the
Times
piece, but so were he and Ann.

“The man who used to come to the beach house with his clothes in a shopping bag gets on the style page of
The New York Times?
” Jeannie said to Doug on the phone.

“Would you like to do my publicity?” he said teasingly.

“You don’t need me. Mister Chic. Well, you’ll be my showpiece. I have a new friend. A widower, retired, grown children. A real gentleman. He buys his
underwear
at Bergdorf.”

“That’s beyond me.”

“You never know. His name is David Whitley. I’ve been seeing him awhile. I didn’t want to say anything before this because I was afraid I might jinx it.”

“That’s great, Jeannie.”

“I have other news. Not so great, but also juicy. Last night, David and I were at a restaurant way downtown. And there was the beloved Jerry Broeden. With a girl, Doug. Probably a model. So young she’d make Brooke Shields look geriatric.”

“It may have been a business dinner.”

“Holding hands? I felt like walking over and saying, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Broeden. I’m in publicity. Would you like a column item out of this?’ ”

“Can we give him benefit of the doubt?”

“No way. Cutesy stuff. Giggling.
He
was giggling.”

“It sounds about right for him.”

“Did he really think if he goes to a restaurant nobody was going to see him?”

“Where does he get to be in my Karen’s life, the bastard?”

He tapped the table with his fingers out of tension.

“What?”

“I guess a part of me still feels proprietary, because I was also thinking, What is he doing to my Susan?”

Jeannie invited Doug to a buffet dinner at her apartment, where David would be making his debut. Doug brought Ann, who was appearing for the first time before his friends. David Whitley was in his 60s, white-haired, trim. In his own honor he was wearing a tuxedo and when he smiled he had what Doug considered to be debonair teeth. About forty people were present. The Kleinmans arrived and were introduced to David and Ann. Sarah Kleinman began to physically shrink, to withdraw into her unfashionable skirt and sweater, looking at Ann in her exquisite tailored suit, and Doug sensing this, feeling for Sarah, hugged her and stood with his arm around her.

“I know how long some of you have known each other,” David said. “I feel you’ve kept Jeannie company until I could arrive in her life.”

“Bob, you can go off your diet tonight,” Jeannie said.

Bob looked over at the lavish buffet.

“All due respect, the cholesterol at that table—I’d be one forkful away from death.”

“They used to have court jesters,” Doug explained to David and Ann. “Bob is our court depressive. No matter how depressed you might be, you feel cheerful around him, because he’s even more depressed.”

“Sarah, I have a special kosher meal for you tonight,” Jeannie said. “I ordered it from El Al.”

Sarah took the tease in good spirit, laughing with the others.

“Look,” Jeannie said, turning around a diamond ring that had been concealed in her hand. “Engaged!”

People were congratulating her and she circulated among guests, showing the ring.

Bob came over to Doug at the side of the room.

“This Ann is a very rich lady, I understand. The kind who asks for a pre-nup. See me before you do anything big.”

“You’re going to get some suits out of her for me?”

“Doug, I’ve got to tell you something,” he said sotto voce. “Yesterday I was with Connie after work. When I got home at night and took off my shirt, Sarah noticed my undershirt inside out, which it wasn’t in the morning. Thinking fast, I told her you and I went to a steam room. So if she brings it up, cover for me; okay?”

“No. Don’t enlist me in your affair.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is I consider Sarah my friend. She’s been very loyal. And I suspect if I called her and said, ‘I can’t explain, but meet me in twenty minutes at Forty-second and Lex with three hundred dollars,’ I’d like to think she’d be there.”

“Would she do that for me? She would. Would Connie, though? This is a good test of trust, Doug. I find this very meaningful—” and he began to brood.

“You will never be found out in this affair from being so joyful in it.”

Jeannie came over to them and said, “So what do you think of David?”

“He’s very sweet,” Doug answered. “The care he was taking to acknowledge us.”

“Isn’t he splendid?”

“He is. You’re marrying Maurice Chevalier.”

“Has he asked for a pre-nup?” Bob said.

“A what?” Jeannie replied.

“A pre-nuptial agreement. I’d better look into that for you.”

“Bob, we’re celebrating. We’re not in court,” she said.

“I’m very happy for you,” Doug told her.

Jeannie put her arm through Doug’s and said, “It was just dumb luck.”

Karen was still undecided about how a gymnastics commitment would affect her. She talked to Doug about her choices and he presumed if Karen was talking to him, she was also talking to Broeden. With what he knew of Broeden’s values, he was concerned about the advice she would receive from that quarter. Doug offered to look into the matter for her and he researched it as if he were working on a story for a newspaper. He called people who worked with the American Olympic gymnastics teams, he spoke to athletes, college coaches, he compiled a listing of the best-regarded gymnastics programs on a college level, and then turned to the art side, making inquiries about art institutes and college art programs.

“It’s a dilemma,” he said to her a few days later. “Athletes only have a few good years in gymnastics. If you’re world class, that becomes your living, competitions, endorsements. Being on that level would have to affect your art training. But you can always go back to it later.”

“And if I want to go to a college and do both?”

“The problem is, the colleges with the good arts programs aren’t usually the ones with the good gymnastics teams. You’ll probably have to decide between disciplines.”