The Debutante Divorcee (14 page)

T
hat December, the last thing on anyone’s mind as they opened Valerie and Tommie Gervalt’s Christmas card was Christmas. Valerie had taken the personalized greeting card up a very competitive notch. Smiling from a photograph on the front of the card was her three-year-old daughter, Celeste. She was wearing a pale blue tweed Emily Jane coat, of the type only found at Harrods in London. She had a gray beret on her head, and her feet were clad in black lace-up boots that looked as though they came straight from the costume department of
Little House on the Prairie.
Celeste was standing next to a pillbox-hatted busboy on the front steps of the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendome. Underneath the photograph were the words:

“Her kid looks like a hobgoblin,” chuckled Hunter when he saw it. We were having breakfast together at
home the morning after he’d gotten back from Europe, and enjoying opening the pile of cards that had arrived that morning in the mail. “Valerie is New York’s finest example of unvarnished social climbing,” he declared.

“Here, open this one,” I said, handing Hunter a bright red envelope. “And I’ll open this.”

“Oh my,” mused Hunter as he handed me the card he had just pulled out of the envelope. It was a Christmas card from Salome. The cover photograph, of herself in her Christian Lacroix wedding gown, was beautiful. She’d had her ex-husband, and the minister, Photoshopped out of the picture. Inside, she’d had the following words printed, graffiti-style:

Happy Holidays!
Love,
Me, Me, and Me

Next I opened my envelope. Almost as unvarnished as Valerie’s card in its display of gorgeousness was the missive inside. It was from Sophia and her five sisters. It featured a shot of the girls (all, naturally, Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes) waving from the back of a 1960s pickup truck in Colorado.

“How pretty,” I said. “They’re all so beautiful.”

“No one is as beautiful as my wife,” said Hunter, looking at me lovingly.

Hunter’s return last night had not, through a con
scious effort on my part, been marred by the seed of doubt Lauren had planted in my mind about the pendant. (So what if Sophia was sending boho-glam Christmas cards. It didn’t mean a thing.) I had decided to remain optimistic about the jewel—and my marriage. Hunter would produce the trinket at Christmas, I was sure of it. He’d gotten home late last night, looking tired but well, and given me a wonderful cream fur stole that he’d bought when he’d stopped off for one day in Copenhagen. We’d sat up late watching
Letter-man
, catching up, and making out.

Between kisses, I gave Hunter a rambling account of the Moscow trip, and told him how Lauren had decided to fall in love, inconveniently, with an engaged man. Hunter was intrigued by the story and asked endless questions about why Lauren liked Giles so much and what I thought of the two of them as a potential couple. Of course, I reminded Hunter, they couldn’t be a couple—he was getting married. Lauren was right, I thought as I’d drifted off in bed later that night. There was no point saying anything about that photo of him with Sophia in London. I fell asleep, contented, in Hunter’s arms.

Now, there’s nothing like a Christmas card depicting blissful family life to drive a stake straight through the heart of even the merriest divorcée. About a week after Thanksgiving, Lauren called, completely freaked out. Louis, her ex, had sent out a card with a picture of himself, a strange woman named Arabella, and their
newborn son, Christian. Lauren had seen it on Alixe Carter’s mantelpiece, and flipped.

“We’ve only been divorced four months!” she cried. “He hasn’t even had time to meet someone, let alone have a child. It must have been going on before we separated. I can’t believe it.”

What incensed Lauren most was that the photograph had obviously been taken in one of the Royal Suites of the Gritti Palace in Venice. Louis and his new family looked rather like a clan of minor royals posing for
Hello
magazine.

“He just had that kid to upset me,” said Lauren, in a moment of monumental self-obsession. She found their blatant display of happiness to be “completely unacceptable. It’s so…
nouveau riche
. Christmas is ruined.”

At this point Lauren went into divorcée crisis mode. Louis’s Christmas card so disturbed her that she was rumored to have been spotted wandering down Gansevoort Street in her nightdress and socks at 3
A.M.
one night looking for Louis. She received invitations for Christmas to Cuba, Rajasthan, and Palm Beach—and accepted all of them. Finally, she fell into a deep depression because, try as she might, she couldn’t complete her challenge: she couldn’t seem to nail down Make Out Number Three, or connect her own surround sound, despite spending nine hours one Saturday attempting it.

“Even Sally Rothenburg agreeing to sell me Princess Letizia’s heart hasn’t cheered me up,” she complained
miserably to me in a room full of beaded dresses at an uptown Christmas cocktail party one night. “Louis has
wrecked
Christmas for me this year. I’ll never recover. I honestly think the stress has given me an incurable disease, like polio. Can you get me another glass of champagne?”

For a girl with polio, Lauren’s recovery was miraculous. The day after the cocktail party, Lauren received a hand-delivered note from Giles Monterey. It read:

A meeting with Giles was just the thing to cheer Lauren up, though I hoped her infatuation with him was passing. He was not available, and even if he had been he was too elusive for my liking.

Lauren’s aesthetic preparations for her business meeting, as she called her assignation with Giles, were, she said, more labor-intensive than those for her own wedding had been. Her main obsession was that her makeup artist achieve perfect “Hooker Eyes,” the secret of which was black kohl flown in from Egypt. After careful consideration, the outfit selected consisted of Lauren’s favorite skinny cream pants, a feather-light black knitted mink jacket, and, underneath, a cobweb
light tulle top. She left her hair loose and wavy, having decided, on the basis of no evidence at all, that a blowout wouldn’t appeal to Giles. She called me every thirty minutes that morning to report her progress, makeup-, outfit-or mood-wise, the latter of which I can report was violently upbeat. She left her house at 12:15, accompanied by a discreet security guard hired to protect the jewel. Lauren was convinced she was headed for a professional and romantic success: she was determined to get the Fabergé cuff links and score Make Out Number Three simultaneously.

You can imagine my surprise when Lauren showed up at Thack’s studio at five that afternoon, her face pale and smudged with traces of mascara. She had been crying.

“So much for Hooker Eyes. I look like any old call girl,” she said when she arrived.

“God, you’re dramatic, I love it,” said Thack when he saw her. “It’s so inspiring. I could make you a dress just for weeping in. Emmy,” he called out to his assistant, “make a note: Hooker Eyes for the next show.”

“Thanks, Thack, you’re a dear,” sighed Lauren, dabbing at her eyes with a scrap of fuchsia silk from the cutting table. “Gosh, this would make lovely handkerchiefs. Hi everyone,” added Lauren, waving at the group of interns embroidering in one corner. They shyly nodded back and stared at Lauren, no doubt just as inspired as Thack by her particular brand of glamour.

“What happened?” I asked, getting up from my desk. It was piled with a stack of paperwork, and I needed a break. “I’m going to order tea for everyone,” I said, dialing the deli downstairs.

“He didn’t show,” said Lauren weakly. She flopped onto the only sofa in the studio, which was overflowing with sample fabrics and the odd sleeve and ruffle.

“Can you send up tea for everyone in the studio? It’s Sylvie…OK, thanks,” I said, putting down the phone. Then I turned to Lauren. “What are you going to do with the heart?” I asked.

Lauren sighed. Her face was wracked with disappointment.

“Oh, he has the heart, all right. I guess his lucky fiancée will have it soon.”

A lone tear squeezed itself from Lauren’s eye. It rolled along the side of her nose and stopped on her lip, where it perched, tragically.

“Sorry, I’m such a loser.” She half-cried, half-laughed, wiping the tear away. “I don’t even know the guy, and look at me!”

Monterey, it turned out, had sent an envoy to collect the jewel. As we drank our tea, Lauren recounted how an immaculately groomed Russian man, probably in his late twenties, Lauren thought, had appeared, claiming he was to take the heart on behalf of Monterey. He had produced the Nicholas II cuff links from a velvet pouch inside his jacket, plus a letter stating the change of plan. Lauren’s security guard had handed
over the jeweled heart. The whole transaction was over in five minutes, and Lauren hadn’t even gotten a raw oyster, let alone a Make Out, out of it.

“I hope Sanford liked the cuff links after all that thwarted romance,” mumbled Thack through a mouthful of pins. He was carefully pinning a piece of lilac paper tafetta to a dressmaker’s dummy.

“That’s the awful thing. I go to all this trouble, and then I show up at Sanford’s suite at the Mark and everything just…it was absolutely…awful, awful.”

Lauren had, slightly showing off, told Sanford about the escapade to Moscow to acquire the cuff links, but Sanford had cut short Lauren’s excited account of Monterey at the polo match.

“It was so weird…like he was jealous or something,” said Lauren. “Can I smoke?”

“Just this time,” said Thack. “If I can have one too.”

Lauren pulled out her little green lizard case and handed Thack a platinum.

“How divine,” he said, regarding it and lighting Lauren’s cigarette and then his own. He took a drag, then, exhaling, went on, “Of course he’s jealous. Sanford’s infatuated with you, and you’re infatuated with someone who isn’t Sanford. Moguls can’t take rejection like normal men.”

“Then he kissed me,” continued Lauren, wrinkling her nose at the thought of it. “Against my will. He was shaking, like he was
afraid
. But I guess if you’ve been married for twenty years, you probably haven’t made
out in forever…it must be terrifying. The whole thing was so embarrassing. He just moved his tongue from left to right, and right to left, horizontally. It was this mechanically weird kissing, and all I could think of was, did he have garlic mashed potatoes tonight? I guess every girl should have a Mogul Make Out once in her life just so she knows what she’s
not
missing.”

By this stage, everyone in the studio was hooting with laughter. But suddenly Lauren’s cheeky demeanor vanished.

“What happened?” I said, sensing her bleak mood.

“He said if I didn’t agree to have an affair with him, the friendship’s off.”

“How bizarre,” I said.

“It’s really sad,” said Lauren. “I thought he was a really…you know…solid friend.”

At this, Thack tutted, shaking his head.

Lauren took a long drag of her cigarette. She looked at me wistfully and said, “He says he wants to divorce his wife and marry me! I can’t bear it. I can never see Sanford again. I was so naïve, letting Sanford hang with me, and thinking he was cool with only that. He’s such a great man, but he’s not…Giles Monterey, is he? There’s nothing worse than romantic disappointment, is there? I was hoping for a make out session in Grand Central with Mr. Moscow and all I got was a lousy pair of Fabergé cuff links and a kiss with a waterbed. This is the worst Christmas ever.”

I, on the other hand, found Christmas enchanting this year. It wasn’t always so. Christmas as a single girl had become grimmer and grimmer, but now the season seemed delightful, charming. This year I found the midtown traffic gridlock caused by the lighting of the Rockefeller Center tree enchanting, the endless “
jingle-bell-jingle-bell-jingle-bell-TARGET!!!”
tune on TV filled me with festive spirit, and the prospect of
Barbara Walters’ Ten Most Fascinating People
gave me a warm and mushy feeling inside. Being married made the whole thing bearable: there were no lonely Christmas parties, no wrapping presents alone, no who-am-I-going-to-kiss-on-New-Year-type anxieties. The only thing that occasionally marred my mood was wondering about that sketch of the S. J. Phillips jewel: Hunter had never even mentioned it. Not so much as a hint. As the lights went up all across the city, twinkling white up Park Avenue, glowing a chic pink in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman, I told myself—again and again—that it was destined to be my Christmas present.

Although it was a little early for a tree, I’d bought ours a few days after Thanksgiving from a Vermont family selling trees on lower Fifth Avenue. Hunter and I merrily spent the first Sunday in December decorating the pine with pale pink grosgrain ribbons, old-fashioned clear glass balls, and white vintage canaries.
(Can you believe ABC Carpet now has a whole section devoted to antique tree ornaments? Obviously, irresistible. Obviously, daylight robbery.) As we did so, I recounted Lauren’s latest romantic disaster.

“I feel a little sorry for Lauren now,” I said. “I think she really likes this Giles Monterey guy. Can you pass me that silver tinsel?”

Hunter handed me the glittery decoration, saying, “
Very
interesting. You think she wants to marry him?”

“She says she isn’t interested in marriage and that it’s all about business and her Make Out Challenge, but you should have seen her when he didn’t show up that day at the Oyster Bar. She was beside herself. I honestly think she’d marry him. If he wasn’t engaged.”

I sat back and regarded the tree. “Doesn’t it look pretty,” I said.

“It’s lovely, darling. I thought you said Lauren would never marry again,” said Hunter.

“This guy, I don’t know, it’s different. Mind you, if he got all interested and was suddenly available, she’d probably freak out and say she
wasn’t
interested.”