People Like Us (19 page)

“Oh,” said Loelia, again keeping the surprise out of her voice, “I’m staying here at the Rhinelander too, at least until I find a new apartment. Perhaps when Ruby gets back from London, the four of us can have dinner here in the hotel one night.”

“That would be just swell, Loelia,” said Elias. “Give my best to Mickie.” Elias couldn’t wait to get to the telephone so that he could call Ruby in London to tell her to get her ass home so that they could have dinner right out in public with Loelia Manchester and Mickie Minardos.

“You paid
how much
for those fucking tables?” shouted Elias Renthal over the telephone to his wife in London.

“You can’t lose money on eighteenth-century French furniture, Elias. I swear to God,” shouted Ruby back over the telephone.

“How much?”

“You heard what I said the first time.”

“I couldn’t have heard right.”

“You’ll love them, Elias. I swear to God. On either side of the fireplace, with the Monet with the water lilies overhead. Wait till you see them.”

“Inlaid, aren’t they, with ram’s heads on the legs?”

“What do you know about ram’s heads?” asked Ruby, surprised.

“Only what Loelia Manchester told me when I had tea with her this afternoon,” replied Elias.

“What? You had tea with Loelia Manchester? Tell me everything.”

“I’ll tell you all about it when you get home.”

“Are you sending the plane for me, or am I taking the Concorde?”

“Whichever’s fastest.”

“Elias. Is it okay about the consoles?”

“I don’t even know what the fuck a console table is, Ruby.”

“Is it okay?”

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

“You know what I’m going to do to you, Elias, when I get home, don’t you?”

“I know, but I want to hear you say it.”

“Your favorite. Both of them in my mouth. At the same time. Just the way you like it.”

Mickie Minardos was in a quiet rage. He threw down the newspaper and leaped to his feet, pulling the belt of his green silk polka-dot dressing gown tighter around his slender waist. Loelia, seated at her dressing table, watched him in the mirror and noticed that his face was pink and his lips were pursed tightly together.

Since Florian Gray, in revenge for Mickie’s verbal attack on him, had referred to Mickie in his column as a cobbler rather than a shoe designer, the word
cobbler
had caught on. He was told from time to time, always causing him great pain, that many of Loelia’s friends, including her husband, now referred to him, behind his back, as the cobbler.

What Florian Gray had no way of knowing was that Mickie Minardos’s father, back in his provincial town in Greece, was the village cobbler for all of Mickie’s youth. Then Demetreus Minardos, who knew nothing of society and the grand life, achieved a certain local fame by designing a sandal popular with the working classes that utilized the rubber from discarded tires as soles and sold for less than the equivalent of a dollar. With the windfall, or what seemed like a windfall to old Demetreus Minardos, he was able to send his son, named Dimitri, but called Mickie, to a better school in Athens than any that existed in the place where they lived, and later, to Paris to study. Mickie’s aim was to “do something” in the theater, but the something was undefined.

In Paris, attractive Greeks had always enjoyed a popularity, because, as Bijou McCord Thomopolous, the great hostess, who had married several Greeks, said, “They are such wonderful dancers, and they know how to treat their women.” Mickie Minardos, who was
a wonderful dancer, and an admirer of beautiful feet, began his career as a shoe designer, until the time came when he could “do something” in the theater. Before New York and Loelia Manchester, he had enjoyed the companionship of several fashionable ladies, among them Bijou McCord Thomopolous.

It was a curious aspect of Mickie’s makeup that, although he felt shame about his father’s profession, he had achieved great success in a more glamorous version of it. When interviewed by the fashion press, Mickie Minardos always described his father as a banker, which he did become, in a small branch of a small bank in the provincial town where his sandal factory was, giving the impression to the interviewer that banking, rather than the unmentioned cobbler business, was the source of the family fortune. A misprint in the fashion pages of the
Times
called his father a baker rather than a banker, and the mistake sent him into paroxysms of grief, as a baker was to him even lower on the social scale than a cobbler. He demanded a retraction from the
Times
and got one.

“What’s the matter, darling?” asked Loelia finally, knowing that her beloved was upset.

“Nothing,” Mickie replied. Already, in the months they had been living together, she had discovered that Mickie was inclined to sulk when he became angry and tended to deny anger when questioned about it.

“Darling, I can see that you’re upset over something. What is it?”

“Florian Gray.”

“Him again,” said Loelia. “Now what has he said?”

“Don’t read it.”

“Of course, I’ll read it. What difference does it make what people like that say? The only one of those people who matters is Dolly, and Dolly has been lovely to everyone.”

“He calls me a cobbler again and says my father was a baker, instead of a banker, when he had to have seen the retraction in the
Times
.”

“So what?” said Loelia. It always amazed Mickie that Loelia was unaffected by criticism of him.

“He says your friends don’t accept me.”

“Oh, puleeze, Mickie. It’s too ridiculous.”

“He says your mother is saying she will disinherit you if you marry me.”

“I assure you, Mickie, that if my mother were ever to make such a statement, which she would not, it would never be to a gossip columnist from a tabloid newspaper. So calm down. It’s simply not true.”

“It is true that your friends won’t accept me.”

“But it was you who said that my friends were very dull. Narrow-in-their-outlook is what you said. You said people like Lil Altemus and Matilda Clarke and all the Van Degan clan were the most boring people in the world.”

Mickie Minardos turned away from Loelia. He had said what Loelia said he said about her friends and relations, but he hadn’t meant it. He had also said that the New People were more interesting by far than the old families, but he hadn’t meant that either. In his heart, the world of Loelia Manchester was the part of New York that he most wanted to enter.

“One of these days they’ll see how talented I am, and they’ll be fighting to have me,” he said.

Loelia heard the petulance in his voice. She looked at Mickie intently in the way a woman looks at a man she loves, but in whom she discovers an unpleasant trait that she had not known he possessed.

“Darling, you are considered to be the most successful man in your field in New York. Tell me how many shoe designers there are who have your sense of style.”

“I’m going to break his face, that little pipsqueak Florian Gray, the next time I run into him.”

“I adore you when you act tough, Mickie.” She stood up and turned to him. “How do I look?”

“Turn around,” he said.

Loelia assumed a model’s pose and whirled around.

Mickie eyed her critically, as if she were his creation, and she watched his face for his approval.

“Almost perfect,” he said. “Sit down a minute. Here, let me do your eyes again. You need a little more green shadow to go with the color of your shoes.”

16

When Jorgie Sanchez-Julia failed to show up for two scheduled interviews with Gus Bailey, Gus decided to abandon the story he was planning to write, which dealt with the growing trend of rich and elderly widows and widowers to leave their entire fortunes to late-life mates. Or, at least, he decided to abandon that part of the story that dealt with Jorgie Sanchez-Julia, a thirty-year-old Spanish gigolo who had married a crippled Washington millionairess almost fifty years his senior and then inherited her entire fortune, down to family heirlooms, much to the consternation of her children.

“Tell Jorgie to shove it,” Gus told the young lady who answered the telephone in Jorgie’s suite at the Rhinelander, when he called to complain that he had been kept waiting over an hour for the second day in a row.

The next morning a large bouquet of roses from Lorenza’s shop arrived at Gus’s apartment in Turtle Bay, together with a contrite and charming note from Jorgie Sanchez-Julia, saying that he had been unexpectedly called to Washington the day before. Gus didn’t believe that Jorgie had been called to Washington, but he did believe that Jorgie, who loved publicity, did not want to pass up the opportunity to be interviewed, so a third appointment was set.

It surprised Gus that Jorgie wanted to meet at
Clarence’s rather than in the privacy of Gus’s apartment, or in his suite at the Rhinelander, or in a less conspicuous restaurant than Clarence’s, as Jorgie Sanchez-Julia was involved in a court battle over the money that he had inherited. Gus, his back to the room, flicked through the pages of his looseleaf notebook and read some previously written notes, while Jorgie Sanchez-Julia watched with inner excitement but a sullen expression the passing parade that lunch at Clarence’s always was. Gus noted that Jorgie had a spoiled, full-lipped, pouting mouth, sallow skin, curly blond hair, and wore a Spanish suit that showed to full advantage his slender hips, waist, and rump.

“Help me out here, Jorgie,” said Gus. “How old were you when you married Mrs. Acton?”

“Countess Sanchez-Julia,” corrected Jorgie. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth.

“But certainly she was Mrs. Acton when you married her?”

“I was twenty-six.”

“And the countess was how old?”

“Oh, seventy something or other. Geraldine, you know, never talked about age. She was so young in heart,” answered Jorgie, his eye on the door of the restaurant where fashionable people kept coming in.

“And the title of Countess came from where?”

“Papal,” replied Jorgie. “Geraldine was rewarded by His Holiness for her philanthropic endeavors.”

“Ah, yes, papal. Tell me about the Countess’s limp,” said Gus. “Did she always have a limp?”

“She was born with a clubfoot,” answered Jorgie. “Look, there’s Yvonne Lupescu coming in. Do you know her? Used to be one of Madam Myra’s girls. Carried her whips in a custom-made Vuitton bag. Such a dominatrix she is. Oh, my dear, the things I could tell you about that one.”

Gus, working now, looked up from his notes to register what Jorgie had just said.

“I didn’t know Mrs. Lupescu was one of Madam Myra’s girls,” he said.

“Used to be,” Jorgie corrected himself. “You know of Madam Myra then?”

“Yes,” replied Gus. “Ms. Myra she’s known as in New York.”

“How very amusing,” said Jorgie. “I must remember that.”

Gus tapped his pencil on the tabletop to get the subject back to the point of the lunch. “But your wife, the Countess, the late Countess, danced so well for a woman with a clubfoot.”

“I taught her how to dance,” said Jorgie. “Geraldine loved to dance. You see, I brought joy into her life. Those twins of hers, those playboys, paid no attention to their mother at all. Wait for her to die, that’s all they thought, so they could get the money. If I hadn’t come along and swept her off her foot, they would have put her in an old ladies’ home. I gave her a wonderful life. Now they say about me that I exerted undue influence on her to leave me all her money. It was Geraldine’s choice. I was as surprised as everyone eke when the will was read.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Gus, writing down Jorgie’s words.

“She was a wonderful woman,” said Jorgie.

“Is it true that the pair of Renoir paintings were copies and you sold off the originals during her last illness?” asked Gus.

“Heavens, no!” replied Jorgie, laughing merrily at the absurdity of Gus’s questions. “How do these terrible stories start?”

“There’s something I’d like to ask you. Rather personal.”

“You ask me, Mr. Bailey.”

“Gus.”

“You ask me, Gus.”

“Did you, uh, have to make love to the Countess?”

“Oh, yes, on a regular basis. Geraldine was very attracted to me.”

“I see.” Gus sipped his water, as if it were a drink. “Tell me, Jorgie. Isn’t it difficult to make love to a septuagenarian lady with a limp?”

Jorgie Sanchez-Julia smiled and shook his head. “I have never met the person, woman or man, I couldn’t get it up for, Gus,” he said. He thought for a moment, and then added, with a slight wink, “if the price was right.”

“This is on the record, I assume,” said Gus.

“On the record means what?” asked Jorgie.

“Hello, Jorgie,” said Yvonne Lupescu, coming up to the table. “I didn’t know you were in New York.”

“Hello, Yvonne,” Jorgie said unenthusiastically, holding out his hand to her without rising.

“Up,” said Yvonne, with a thumbs-up gesture for him to rise. “That’s no way to greet a lady.”

“I just arrived on the Concorde yesterday,” said Jorgie, rising lazily and winking at Gus to cover his lie. He kissed Yvonne in a lackluster manner on both cheeks, at the same time looking around the restaurant. They were both young and attractive, but indifferent to each other physically. “And you?”