People Like Us (59 page)

“How come Elias Renthal called Laurance Van Degan from prison with a tip to get out of the stock market?” asked Constantine de Rham. Everyone knew that Laurance Van Degan had felt that his sterling reputation had been tarnished in both the business and social community by his endorsement of Elias Renthal, especially at the Butterfield, and had publicly turned his back on Elias Renthal during the months of his disgrace.

“Listen, Constantine, Elias Renthal is first and foremost a businessman, and he probably wants to keep a finger in the pot. He’ll be getting out of prison in a year or two,” said Lord Biedermeier. He removed his pincenez and cleaned the lenses with a napkin, so that he could survey the crowd at Clarence’s. He noticed that despite the economic hardships that might be coming on the nation, the restaurant was filled to capacity. He noticed also that, because of his luncheon companion, Constantine de Rham, people who might ordinarily wave hellos to him, like Lil Altemus, chose not to cast their eyes in his direction.

“I thought he couldn’t trade anymore. I thought he was barred for life,” insisted Constantine, who enjoyed other people’s ill fortune.

“You’re right, he can’t trade, and he is barred for life, but that’s not to say he can’t get someone else to trade for him. Max Luby, for instance. Max trades; Elias calls the shots.”

“He won’t be giving any more society balls,” said Constantine, with grim satisfaction.

“No, he won’t be giving any more society balls, and he won’t ever get inside the front door of the Butterfield again, even as a lunch guest, but when he makes a new fortune, and he will, people will start seeing him again. Even Laurance Van Degan. They’ll have lunch, at some obscure place, and pretty soon everyone will have forgotten. It’s the way of the world.”

Constantine wondered but did not say that no one had ever taken him up again. It was as if Lord Biedermeier read his thoughts. “Even you, Constantine. People will see you again. Write a book.”

“About what?” asked de Rham.

“Playboys, my dear Constantine, are very fashionable this year. There is an enormous interest in Ali Khan and Rubirosa, and you are their heir. Look at the Monaco Princesses. The public can’t get enough of them. That is why I thought that you perhaps would want to talk about the accident in Paris when that beautiful young girl lost her head. And all the rumors that have plagued your life,” said Lord Biedermeier.

“But those rumors were utterly false,” said Constantine, indignantly.

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Lord Biedermeier.

“They were never proved.”

“It doesn’t matter. People who haven’t spoken to you in years will be all too glad to have you to dinner again if you have a hit book. All this happened years ago when you were very young. You didn’t understand what you were getting into. Think about it. The public loves reformation.”

“But I don’t know how to write,” said Constantine.

“The least of our worries. If you could read the marvelous manuscript Elias Renthal has just handed in about life in prison, and he didn’t have to write a word of it. I simply sent an author to visit him once a week in Allenwood, and they talked and talked. It will guarantee him acceptance when he gets out of prison.”

“Hmm,” said Constantine.

Ruby Renthal was the first to say that only her dentist or her gynecologist could entice her to make the trip to town, for semiannual checkups, and it was the former who brought her to the city on the same day that Gus Bailey returned to New York. They met in the waiting room of Dr. Chase’s office.

“Gus, my God!” said Ruby, surprised when Gus walked in.

“Hello, Ruby,” replied Gus, as surprised as she. For an instant they looked at each other. When she held out her hand, he took it and leaned to kiss her on the cheek.

“I didn’t know you were out.”

“Just. The courts don’t take your first shooting seriously these days,” he said.

“Oh, Gus, don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking. It’s the truth. I got less time than Elias.”

“I wrote to you,” she said.

“I know.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“I thought I’d brought you enough notoriety already.”

“Gus, for God’s sake, you saved my life.”

“I didn’t really. You had a gun.”

“Let me tell you something about that famous gun, Gus, and I don’t mean that it used to belong to Queen Marie of Rumania. I always carried it because Elias wanted me to carry it, but what Elias never knew was that it was never loaded. I couldn’t bear the idea of carrying a loaded gun.”

Gus looked around him in the waiting room, aware that other patients were looking at them.

“Have you already been to the doctor, or are you going?” he asked.

“What do you have in mind?” she answered.

“A little lunch maybe?”

“You’ve got me.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Ruby called into the receptionist’s office and said, “Tell Dr. Chase I’ll call back for another appointment.”

“But he’s ready for you, Mrs. Renthal,” said the receptionist. “Mrs. Lord is just leaving.”

“I’ll call back,” she repeated, taking her mink coat off the coat rack and following Gus out the door.

In the elevator, she said to him, “I watched you on television.”

“A ghastly kind of fame, isn’t it?”

“At least he didn’t die.”

Gus nodded. “Do you know what I think, Ruby?”

“What?”

“I think at that last second when my eyes met his, that Becky, from wherever she is, pushed my arm just enough to the side so I didn’t kill him.”

“Looking after her father, you mean?”

“Right, that wasn’t the way. I realized it as I was pulling the trigger.”

“You’re not sorry it turned out this way, are you?”

“Not anymore. I was obsessed for three years with that man. Nothing mattered but that I kill him. That was all I could think of. That obsession has lifted, thank God.”

“How much time did you serve?”

“I got a year. I served nine months.”

“Do people talk to you?”

“I don’t know. You’re the first person I’ve seen. But I don’t care if they don’t. It’s time for another beginning.”

“Good for you, Gus. I’m a great believer in new beginnings.”

They looked at each other.

“Do you see Elias?”

“Oh, sure. I go to visit.”

“Do you see the old crowd?”

“Heavens, no.”

They laughed.

“How about Clarence’s for lunch?”

They laughed again. “Perfect.”

“Laurance knew all this was going to happen,” said Lil, who was lunching at the window table with her friends Matilda Clarke and Cora Mandell and Ezzie Fenwick, who had just told them about the fight over money at the Bulbenkians’ house the night before. “Laurance has been saying for some time that the market was at an unsustainable high level.” Lil Altemus quoted her brother more than any person in her life. She spoke with the ease of someone whose fortune would remain intact throughout any financial crisis. “Laurance got out of the market a week ago, and, of course, I did too, and so did Justine.”

Ezzie, who had lost money, at least on paper, was testy that day and spoke of canceling a trip to Egypt that he had planned. When Michael, everyone’s favorite waiter at Clarence’s, placed his plate in front of him, Ezzie lifted his dark glasses and examined the plate with his good eye, which was not the eye that looked like a poached egg.

“I want tartar sauce with my crab cakes,” said Ezzie, loudly. “That’s not tartar sauce. That’s mayonnaise.”

“We’re out of tartar sauce,” replied Michael, with the courtesy and tact with which he was known to deal with difficult customers.

“Out of tartar sauce? How can you be out of tartar sauce?” asked Ezzie, raising his eyebrows in assumed exasperation.

“We are,” said Michael.

“Then tell the chef to make some more, or send to the market and buy some more,” ordered Ezzie.

“Yes, sir,” said Michael, retreating to report to Chick Jacoby the latest incident from the quarrelsome Ezzie Fenwick.

“
Never
let them have the last word,” said Ezzie, as if giving his friends a lesson in deportment, before resuming his account of the Bulbenkians’ fight, which Lil had interrupted.

It was then that the reclusive Ruby Renthal, so long out of sight, and the just-released-from-prison Gus Bailey walked into Clarence’s, without a reservation. “My dears, you will not
believe
who just walked into this restaurant,” said Ezzie, all good humored again. Ezzie’s companions, and everyone else in the front part of the restaurant, where all the good people, as Ezzie called them, sat, turned to look at the curious duet who stood quietly just inside the door waiting for Chick Jacoby to hurry forward to greet them.

“You watch,” said Ezzie, in his nasal voice. “Chick will move Lord Biedermeier and Constantine de Rham over to his own table, as if he’s giving them a big treat, and put Ruby and the jailbird there.”

Of the three women with Ezzie, only old Cora Mandell, who had decorated the spectacular Renthal apartment, waved a greeting. Ruby smiled back but made no attempt to speak to the others, as she sat at the table just vacated by Lord Biedermeier and Constantine de Rham.

“Talk to me, Gus,” Ruby said.

“About prison?”

“Make any friends there?”

“I wrote a book there.”

“Ezzie Fenwick always said you were going to write a book.”

“For once he was right.”

At that moment Matilda Clarke appeared at their table.

“Gus Bailey!” she said.

“Hello, Matilda,” said Gus, rising.

“Ages,” she said.

“Ages,” replied Gus. “You know Ruby.”

“Hellohoware?”

“Well, Gus, tell me everything,” said Matilda.

“I’ve been in prison.”

“Oh, I know. I think you’re a national hero.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Listen, Gus, Maisie Verdurin is having one of her dinners on Thursday, and it might be her last for a while, because no one’s going to be buying paintings for a while, with the crash and all. Would you like me to arrange it so we can go together?”

“Can’t on Thursday,” said Gus.

“Then come to the country for the weekend. I’ve got Justine Altemus and Herkie Saybrook. They’re an item, I hear, although Lil denies it vigorously. He’s so much better for her than the TV announcer. Sweetzer always said, ‘Stick with your own kind,’ and he was right. You’ve simply got to come, Gus. We’re going to Rochelle’s on Saturday night.”

“Can’t this weekend,” Gus replied.

“Not off on one of your mystery trips, are you?”

“No, my mystery trips ended with the bullet I put in Lefty Flint.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Matilda. “Branching out? New directions? That sort of thing?”

“Something like that,” answered Gus.

“Well, all right,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Us single ladies do what we can.” She moved back to Ezzie’s table.

Gus and Ruby looked at each other.

“You did that well, Gus,” said Ruby.

“I can’t get back into all that. I never fit in in the first place,” said Gus. “It just kept my mind off what was going on in my life that I couldn’t do a damn thing about at the time.”

“What are you going to do now that you’re back?” asked Ruby.

“I’m just here to sell my place, go to the dentist, close out a chapter. I’m moving on.”

“Where?”

“Maybe just a block away. It doesn’t matter. All that I know is that this ain’t it.”

Michael, the waiter who served the front part of the restaurant, came up to take their orders. “Welcome back, Mr. Bailey,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Nice to see you, Mrs. Renthal,” he said.

“Thank you, Michael.”

“Let me tell you the specials for today.”

Ruby and Gus looked at each other.

“Listen, Michael,” said Gus.

“Yessir.”

“We’re not going to stay.”

He looked over at Ruby. She was smiling at him.

“Why are you smiling?”

“That’s just what I was going to say,” she said.

Ruby rose from her seat. She looked over to Chick Jacoby at the bar and blew him a kiss. Then she walked out the door, followed by Gus.

For a while they walked down Lexington Avenue without speaking. At the corner of 72nd Street, Gus raised his hand and signaled a taxi. When the car stopped in front of him, he turned to Ruby and they looked at each other fondly.

“S’long, Ruby,” he said.

“Bye, Gus,” she answered.

“Will you be okay?”

“Oh, sure. And you?”

“Sure.”

“Luck.”

“Same.”

As Gus got into the taxi, Ruby turned and walked across the street.

By Dominick Dunne

Fiction

ANOTHER CITY, NOT MY OWN
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AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN
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PEOPLE LIKE US
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A SEASON IN PURGATORY
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THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES
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THE WINNERS

Nonfiction

FATAL CHARMS
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THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO
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