Judith Krantz (45 page)

“The day we met, you told me I was a dickhead. Is that better than a shit, or worse?”

“It depends on my tone of voice—don’t bother to split hairs, you’re both,” Jazz said with a generous smile.

“You’re too kind,” Casey replied, and for the rest of dinner they engaged in a volley of talk too tiny to be called small.

On the way out of Spago, Jazz found herself embraced by a lovely blond girl who looked ten months pregnant. They talked for a few minutes in the crush around the bar, and then parted.

“Not possibly another cousin,” she informed Casey. “That’s why I didn’t introduce you.”

“But what a raving beauty. Is she an old friend?”

“Yes, Daisy Shannon. She’s having her second set of twins.”

“Good Lord, Princess Daisy. It’s lucky Pat likes kids.”

“Oh, you know Shannon?”

“We do some business together from time to time.”

“Small world.”

“Isn’t it?”

Jazz and Casey drove back to her apartment in a charged silence, an uncomfortable silence, an uncompanionable silence. She couldn’t think of any way to break it, and after a while she decided that there was no reason to do so. She felt righteously aggrieved that after all the immense trouble she’d gone to to dress up like a Christmas tree, to salute the festive season, Casey Nelson had decided that he had a reason to be jealous of Sam Butler. After all, it wasn’t as if she were spoken for, as if she belonged to Sam.

Casey escorted her to her door. Jazz put her key in the lock, opened the door, and was about to give
him the basic absolute minimum thank-you-for-a-lovely-evening, when he put a restraining hand on her shoulder, gathered her in his arms and brought his reckless mouth down squarely on hers. He’d kissed her for minutes before Jazz, out of breath, was able to break away and put a little air between them.

“May I come in?” Casey asked urgently.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Couldn’t I just come in for a minute? It would be nice to talk without everybody in Spago joining the party. We’ve hardly been alone all night. I promise never to take you there again.”

Jazz looked up at him, sorely tempted. Those furrows on his brow, those freckles, those lips … but she’d been out with Sam last night and she was having dinner with him tomorrow and … and … no, it was positively not a good idea.

“Casey, I wish I could let you try to seduce me, now that we’re not under my father’s roof, but I’m not that kind of girl,” she said softly, regretfully caressing his lips with the tip of her finger.

“What! I haven’t heard anyone say that in years.”

“Takes you back, doesn’t it?” Jazz agreed sweetly. “Good night, Casey. Sleep well. And thank you for a lovely evening.”

Jazz shut the door behind her, shaking with silent laughter. She wasn’t that kind of girl, not now, not ever. Never would she get involved with two men at once, back to back as it were. But could she ever be a hundred percent sure, in her heart of hearts, absolutely and positively, what terrible, awful, unthinkable thing she might just possibly have been tempted to do if she hadn’t remembered what a mess her closet was in?

M
r. and Mrs. William Malvern Jr. were sitting at the table in the kitchen of their Fifth Avenue apartment, drinking their second round of martinis. The chicken-and-rice casserole, which their housekeeper had left for their dinner on her day off, was slowly heating up in the oven, for neither of them had managed to master the operation of their microwave.

Even in the kitchen, with an apron around her waist and a pair of comfortable shoes on her feet, Valerie maintained her brilliantly simple and severe look, although she didn’t bother to wear her unnecessary glasses at home.

“Valerie, I never thought I’d say this, but—alone at last,” Billy Malvern drawled out the last three words with a particularly unfortunate Anglo-Saxon attempt at a French accent.

Valerie didn’t deign to look at him down her too-pointed nose. “If you’re trying to let me know how thrilled you are that my mother is out tonight, don’t trouble. I’m as relieved by her absence, Billy, as you
are, perhaps more. It’s always easier for you to deal with her. After all, she’s not your mother.”

“I don’t believe in taking cheap shots, Val, but you’re tempting me.”

“Look, I’m aware that she’s stayed on longer than she usually does. But what can I do, throw her out in the street? If only Fernie would get rid of Nick, she could go there. In any case, Mother is definitely leaving next week.”

“No fool, that sister of yours. By the time Liddy makes her next visit, Fern will be embroiled with another impossible young husband, so we’ll have to take her again. I see it coming.”

“Oh, shut up and drink, Billy. Stop whining.” Valerie lifted her inadequate chin and glared at her husband. “Can’t you talk about something agreeable? I’m rather pleased about going to the Rosemonts’ party tomorrow—it should be the party of the year.”

“I’d be more pleased if Rosemont would throw a little business my way. It seems to me the least he could do, the way you and Fern have become such great pals of Georgina’s.”

“Jimmy Rosemont does his own investing,” Valerie said dryly. Jimmy Rosemont hadn’t become one of the richest men in the world by taking advice from brokers like Billy, she thought. And just what, she wondered, was going on with Fern and Georgina? They had lunch together twice a week, seeming as close and giddily foolish as two schoolgirls sharing secrets. Obviously, Georgina didn’t have a clue about Fern and her husband. What a fool she must be, not to guess. Or perhaps Georgina was just so sure of herself that it had never even occurred to her. In any case, since the show house, both of the Rosemonts had been more than kind to both of them, even including Liddy in several of their smaller dinner invitations, in spite of the fact that the introduction to their father had, as Valerie had expected, led to nothing.

“I wonder what the Rosemonts’ party is going to cost?” Billy said, fretfully peering into his glass. “A
hundred and fifty people at a sit-down dinner at home with dancing afterwards—what do you think, Val?”

“I can’t imagine. A few years ago I could have made an educated guess, but now the best caterers, florists and party decorators have become so unbelievably greedy that it could cost almost anything. Of course, Georgina’s style isn’t pretentious, it doesn’t have to be. Doing it at home is always preferable, if you have the space and can afford it.”

“And they can.”

“And they can.”

The Malverns sat silently. In the early years of their marriage, twenty-one years ago, when Billy’s income had been half a million dollars a year, and they had been indisputably rich, they had found the subject of other people’s money delectable, a never-failing occasion for self-congratulation, larded with condescending pity for their less-fortunate friends who had to make do on salaries, who had to pay taxes, unlike Billy, whose money was all in tax-free municipal bonds.

They had spent hours estimating the net worth of their friends, speculating on who among them was in line for an inheritance, who had a trust fund that couldn’t be broken, who was living over his income and who was lucky enough to live under his income and still spend freely.

As Valerie was guiltily aware, this kind of discussion was the old-money equivalent of talking the vilest kind of trash, far worse in every way than almost any social sin, but she had indulged in it nonetheless, since Billy, whose money was only one generation old, couldn’t guess how obscene it was. Billy thought these orgies of gleeful discussion both instructional and fascinating.

For Valerie, the speculations were as pornographic as they were irresistible. Her Philadelphia values were deeply offended, but she was only part Philadelphia. She had been influenced deeply enough by Liddy Kilkullen’s money hunger, and her sense of
having been cheated out of what was owed her, to enjoy the reassurance that Billy’s wealth gave her.

Now the Malverns could only circle wearily around the subject. Billy’s lack of success in business, in addition to his sharply diminished income caused by the sale of some of his bonds, created a gnawing imbalance in their marriage as Valerie earned more and more of what they lived on.

It had been a decade since the Malverns had felt the sensual glow of being more secure than the people they knew, for the way Manhattan’s new society spent their riches made the Beverly Hillbillies look like Cabots and Lodges.

Old money, unable even to attempt to compete, had retreated. Either its possessors resolutely stuck together and disappeared gracefully from social sight, or, like Valerie, they joined the parade and put up a reasonable show of welcoming the newcomers, with the pragmatic excuse that New York’s cultural and charitable institutions needed the absolute monarchs of new money, who had not the slightest trouble in buying themselves entry everywhere.

Valerie got up to poke irritably at the casserole, which was taking its own good time. She didn’t dare turn the oven up higher than 350 degrees because she was afraid the rice would dry out, but the inside of the dish was still barely warm. She poured them both fresh martinis and sat down at the kitchen table again, wishing they could leave the casserole and sit in the drawing room like civilized people, but she was certain that if she did, dinner would burn. They’d both been too tired tonight to bother to go out, and she’d be damned if she’d descend to sending out for food.

“How’s it going with your new client?” Billy inquired, hoping to change his wife’s mood.

“I may not take on Sally Evans,” Valerie answered.

“But you told me she was ready to spend almost anything … what’s wrong with her?”

“She’s a third wife … as if a second weren’t bad enough. Sally’s all of twenty-six and Mr. Evans is
sixty-two … she used to work for him, although in what capacity she won’t say. She’s well put together in a vulgar kind of way, I’ll say that for her, but she has the delusion that because her husband owns a big chain of Midwestern grocery stores, she’s going to be welcomed into what she calls ‘the charmed circle’ by having a marvelous apartment and wearing the right clothes. It’s hopeless, of course. She’s so ignorant that she doesn’t have a clue that a net worth of a hundred million will sound like the life savings of the manager of a family drugstore to the women she wants to get to know.”

Nor did she realize, Valerie thought, that the media had declared open season on the style of the new-money circles to which Sally Evans aspired. At about the time of the Malcolm Forbes birthday party, as nearly as she could figure, the ostentation of the newest billionaires had started to be ferociously attacked by the same journalists for whom they had been a favorite subject only months earlier.

Media voices of a new decade, finally able to express their repressed covetousness, had dubbed the 1980s the “Decade of Greed and Glitz.” The wives of the new-money men had pulled up their recently erected drawbridges against a continued invasion of any more of their own kind, hoping to become “establishment” if they minded their manners, lowered their profiles ever so slightly, turned to “good works” in the Lady Bountiful tradition, and hung in without complaint as they were pummeled in the press.

It might take a period of delicate readjustment, in which the spending of money was varnished by a coat of social conscience, but people of privilege knew that the media couldn’t exist without them. Readers everywhere felt momentary pangs of loss at the righteous bashing of the rich and famous, but soon they recognized that their favorite newsmakers had not been swept away in the tide of recently assumed journalistic virtue. Given the immutability of human nature, short of a revolution, there would be plenty of delicious excess to look forward to in the 1990s.

“How did this prize land on your doorstep, anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” Valerie answered shortly. She couldn’t tell Billy that her potential new client had tried to hire other, better known decorators, and had been told that they were too busy, any more than she could tell Billy that her room at the show house, for all the pretense she had put up for her family, had not been a success.

It had been entirely ignored by the press, although the only reason for her having put so much time and effort into the project was to gain publicity and clients. The crowds at the show house had passed it by quickly, in their search for the spectacular, the lavish, the thrill of the never-before-seen, all of which Georgina’s room had provided. Valerie realized that she’d made a mistake in judgment. Her twins’ bedroom had been too whimsical, too pastel, too well bred; all that girlish tulle and dried flowers had made women think they could throw together such a room themselves.

“Are you going to give her the heave-ho?” Billy probed.

“I haven’t decided,” she said, quickly drinking half a martini. If only, Valerie thought, Billy didn’t think he had to demonstrate supportiveness of her work by asking maddening questions that she had no intention of answering.

In other days—as recently as five years ago—she would have given Sally Evans the back of her hand, but times had changed drastically with the explosion of New York riches. Only the decorators with major names were passionately sought after now, like that young man Peter Moscino, who boasted so odiously in
Women’s Wear Daily
that he didn’t work for the people who
had
only fifty million dollars, but for the people who wrote checks for fifty million dollars.

The fact that he was probably telling the simple truth didn’t make his statement any less disgusting, Valerie thought, nor did it change the fact that her
reputation as a society decorator had simply stopped being enough to lure clients anymore. People might be afraid of the press, but they still wanted decorators who created excessively lavish interiors, and excessive in any direction was something she couldn’t be, any more than she could be original.

At the moment, if facts were faced, she didn’t have another single potential client in line except Sally Evans, who had opened their interview by saying, “I want instant background and I want drop-dead chic and I want it to look like
me
, not as if I’d had a decorator at all. My husband has said that we can shop Europe together as much as we want—I need three chateau fireplaces and rooms and rooms of
boiserie
.”