Gossip (8 page)

“Yes, but—”

“Think of the look on Marylin's face when you tell her,” she said. Oh, she is so good at knowing people's weaknesses.

“What do I know about running a business?”

“And you're too dumb to learn?”

I remember feeling that Dinah was going to tell me to jump off a cliff and I was going to do it. She likes action. She likes it when things happen and she gets to watch. And I like to please her.

I jumped.

Chapter 9

E
ven
I
knew how badly Grace Metcalf wanted a dog. Or a cat, but her mother was allergic to cats. Her father loved animals but was certainly going to be no help in taking care of one, and Avis didn't see how a nine-year-old . . . ten-year-old . . . eleven-year-old could take care of raising and training a puppy and walking it at all hours by herself, even if Grace
was
unusually responsible for her age.

Since she'd become a full partner with Gordon Hall, Avis traveled a great deal. “I'm so sorry, darling. I hate to be away from you,” she would say, kissing Grace good-bye as she headed for the airport to fly to Dublin, or Amsterdam, or Basel. It wasn't ideal, but it was challenging work, which she welcomed, and she needed the money, since Harrison had lost the last of his investment clients.

Victor Greenwood was collecting Old Masters with a vengeance by the mid-1980s and talking about founding his own museum, when he wasn't flirting with the Metropolitan in New York, or the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, where he had grown up, or the Art Institute of Chicago, where he had gone to school and made his first units, as he referred to a hundred million dollars. All of these institutions dangled seats on their boards and hoped he would give them his increasingly impressive collections.

The art world was bemused by the obviously congenial relationship that had grown between the famously abrasive collector and diffident and proper Avis Metcalf. Clearly there was something about her that appealed to Greenwood, and he, who had gotten very rich by trusting no one but himself, apparently trusted her. Whether they understood it or not, once that world knew that Victor Greenwood saw something special in Avis, others began to take an interest in what she was interested in, and certain sellers wanted connections to the people who were buying through her.

“I'll be back on Tuesday . . . on Friday . . . for the weekend . . . for your birthday, we'll do something wonderful. What would you like most? Think about it, I'll call you when I get there and we'll make a plan.” Grace and her friends spent a lot of time slouching around Bloomingdale's after school, trying on makeup and pretending they were in the market for Judith Leiber handbags. Or she'd take the subway to see Belinda, who would take her to dinner at Serafina or sometimes to the theater even on a school night. On her twelfth birthday, Belinda, airily ignoring Avis's strictures, gave Grace a tiny poodle puppy. Grace named him Jelly.

The whole family fell in love with Jelly. He was noisy but smart and very clownish. Grace paper-trained him in the kitchen, following instructions from a dog-training program she watched on television. When Jelly chewed apart one of her dancing school shoes—she found him in her bedroom lying half on top of it, gnawing on the instep strap and looking up at her with large innocent eyes—she went around the house spraying Bitter Apple on everything he liked sinking his little needle teeth into. Jelly chewed up the legs of two of her mother's antique dining room chairs so that they looked as if they had been attacked by borer worms. Avis just laughed and sent them out to be refinished. And when Jelly lost control of himself after he ate something disgusting on the street and it disagreed with him, Avis patiently followed him around the apartment with a roll of paper towels and a gallon of Nature's Miracle. Because of allergies Avis had never had a pet of her own, and she'd never imagined she would love a dog as much as she did this one. She even let Jelly sleep on Grace's bed; he started the night curled on a towel near her feet but by morning was always up on the pillow beside her head, doing his best to worm his way under the covers.

Avis was in London negotiating with the heirs of a grand collection of Bronzino drawings when Jelly was killed.

He had just been groomed. He'd been washed and fluffed and perfumed, and it was said afterward that that may have been the problem: he didn't smell like a dog. In any case, Grace was walking him home from the groomer's at twilight on his pretty red leather leash when a man approached listening to his Walkman and paying no mind to his Akita strolling untethered behind him. With no warning, the Akita jumped Jelly, and in one garish melee of canine screaming clamped its jaws around the puppy's throat and shook him until his neck broke. It took only seconds, but for Grace it lasted hours; it felt as if it would never stop, and went on feeling like that as it replayed inside her head for hours, then days.

While Grace screamed, a woman ran across the street to them, yelling at the owner of the Akita, “Grab his tail, pull him off!” She gave the bigger dog a kick in the ribs and when it loosened its grip on Jelly as it wheeled to bite
her,
she was able to wrench the tiny body from the Akita's mouth. She held Jelly, limp as a warm bloody plush toy, and looked at the fragile horrified child who stood sobbing before her, still holding the other end of Jelly's leash. She whirled on the Akita man and yelled at him.

“You should face charges, letting that dog off its leash!”

“She's never done anything like this before!”

“I'm calling animal control. This dog should be put down!”

“She's a sweet gentle dog! She's never done anything like this!”

They went on in a furious tangle that resembled the fight that had just finished. Anger was easier for both of them than facing Grace's grief. Grace dropped the leash she still held and took Jelly's body from the yelling woman, sobbing, “I'm sorry, Jelly, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

After the woman had extracted the name and address of the Akita man, she walked Grace home.

“You don't have to,” Grace muttered between ragged tear-filled breaths.

“Yes, I do. You're more upset than you know, and I want to talk to your mother.”

“She's away.”

The woman got into the elevator with Grace and her mangled little burden. The woman wore a good gray suit, Belgian loafers, and black tights that had been torn in the fight. Her hair was crisp and short and perfectly cut, an unnatural shade of chestnut. “Is your father home?” she asked Grace.

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

They entered the apartment together, and Grace led the way to the den where her father slumped in his usual chair. Mozart was on the stereo, and Harrison seemed to be asleep. There was a large glass of clear liquid and melting ice on the table beside him. Grace's crying had left her voice choked and hoarse.

“Daddy,” she said loudly, and Harrison shook his head and opened his eyes.

He surveyed the scene before him. Grace. Holding something black and messy, there were smears on her coat. A lady he'd never seen before.

“This is my father, Harrison Wainwright,” Grace said to the lady.

“I'm Casey Leisure, Mr. Wainwright,” said the lady briskly. Harrison was struggling to his feet. He managed to get upright and stay that way, then fairly steadily crossed the room to shake hands, saying, “Harrison Wainwright, good to know you.”

“Your daughter has just had a horrible experience. Her dog was killed in the street. She needs someone to talk to, she should probably have some Valium and go to bed. And someone needs to deal with. . . .” She took Jelly's body from Grace, who began sobbing again. For a moment it seemed the lady was going to start weeping herself. Grace needed a handkerchief and covered her face with her bloody hands, and now Mrs. Leisure had blood on her coat and hands as well.

Finally Harrison said, “What do you think we ought to do?”

Mrs. Leisure said, “Oh, for heaven's sake. Is there anyone else in the house?” There wasn't. “Is there someone we can call?”

“Belinda,” said Grace.

Mrs. Leisure stayed until Belinda arrived, dressed for a dinner party. Belinda thanked Mrs. Leisure, called the vet, canceled her plans, and waited until someone came and took Jelly away. Then she took Grace home with her for supper and the night.

Chapter 10

M
y first three years with the shop were harder than I could have imagined. People did back me, but taking money from them worked changes in our friendships. I don't have a natural head for business, and I made a drastic mistake in my first choice of bookkeeper. I seemed to live on airplanes, as I sought out fresh talent in Paris and Milan, then Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Stockholm. Why should the Ladies Who Lunch come to me for designers whose clothes they could buy at Bergdorf Goodman, or whose shows they could go to themselves? I didn't know the answer. At first. More serious was, Why
should
they come to me, only to find I was not in the shop but in Oslo?

That's another story. I learned, and my backers stuck by me, with only one painful exception. And Dinah remained a steadfast booster, though sometimes I wondered if she wouldn't have taken just as much pleasure if I had failed as she took in seeing me succeed.

The first year I was totally in the black and beginning to repay my seed money was 1991, the year Nicholas started high school. His brother, RJ, had gone to Andover, where he played lacrosse and squash. Nicky, however, wanted to stay in the city, and that was fine with Dinah. He had no interest in sports, although he wasn't bad at tennis. If RJ was his father's son, Nicky was Dinah's. Passionate, dramatic, hot-tempered, talented, funny, they were each other's best audience. Like Dinah, he was ambitious. He played Joe in the school's production of
Most
Happy Fella,
and we went to every performance; he was like a young Joel McCrea. He still had those beautiful long eyelashes and deep-set smoky blue eyes. His dancing was deft—Dinah turned to me at one point on opening night with tears in her eyes. “I thought I knew everything about him,” she said. “When did he learn to do
that
?” His singing was even better, a shining supple tenor. The second night, Dinah brought a casting director and two producers she knew to the performance. They were warm in their appreciation, and the casting director said afterward that Nicky could talk with her about how to get an agent. I think Dinah was surprised that she didn't instantly offer to cast him in the next Woody Allen movie.

RJ went on to Yale, his grandfather's alma mater. Nicky could have followed him there; he had the grades, but he wanted someplace more focused on the arts. He chose Bennington, a small liberal arts school in Vermont, which delighted Dinah because it famously had the highest tuition in the country.

Richard, along with his parents, his wife, Charlotte, and their three daughters, came to Nicky's high school graduation, and Dinah was perfectly charming to them, inviting everyone back to her apartment for a celebratory lunch along with her own parents and me. The food was Moroccan, as Dinah had recently been sent by
Architectural Digest
to write up a house in Marrakech. None of us had even seen a tagine before. I noticed that Dinah left her diaphragm case in the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom, the one most often used by guests in the dining room, just to be sure that no one on Richard's team thought she was a lonely spinster.

His first three years at Bennington, Nicky's girlfriend was a six-foot-tall Somali dancer named Nala. Dinah loved her. She taught Dinah Somali home cooking; they went on field trips together to the ethnic markets of the outer boroughs, and on one of these, she described to Dinah being “circumcised” when she was six. She taught Nicky African drumming and left him her drums when she graduated and went home. They're still at the apartment, in Nicky's childhood bedroom. Nala is married now and works for a bank in Amsterdam. She often stays with Dinah when she comes to New York.

Nicky was a theater major. He acted, he designed sets and lighting, he studied directing, and he wrote plays. Dinah was always in the audience when a show of his went up, whether he was onstage or had merely designed the posters. His college friends soon used the New York apartment as if they lived there, and Dinah presided with great contentment, as long as they didn't smoke, bought their own beer, and didn't talk to her in the morning until she'd had her coffee. One evening I walked into the apartment to find Nicky at the piano playing and singing the role of Sportin' Life, as a group of his friends sight-read the score of
Porgy and Bess
. It was a happy time.

During his junior year at college, both Nicky and Nala had internships in New York for their work-study term, and lived with Dinah. Nala worked in the office of a city councilman. Nicky was less serious; I believe his job that year was at a talent agency where they can't have had much real use for him. Whatever he did there, it left him plenty of free time to drop in to gossip with me and Mrs. Oba. He liked helping me dress the windows and was very clever at it. He'd stage little dramas. He posed a mannequin in a moss-colored cut-velvet tea gown at a typewriter with a stack of reference books beside her and the entire floor of the window filled with crumpled balls of typing paper. When we saw how interested people were, the mannequin began to write a story. Every few days, Nicky would add a paragraph to the page in the typewriter:
“Michel, you promised!” cried Evangeline, heartbroken. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Michel replied, lighting a Gauloises.

When he couldn't think what would happen next, he'd crumple the paper, throw it on the floor, and begin a new page. I sold three copies of that tea gown, and it wasn't cheap, and so many people were stopping by every day or two to see how the mannequin's novel was going that we even got a mention in Liz Smith.

I remember one evening that winter at Dinah's. Nala had made a fiery stew with chilies and peanuts that had left us gasping. Dinah rushed to the kitchen for beer for all of us. When she could talk, she said, “Beer is full of sugar, it quiets the heat. Julia Child taught me that.” And Nicky dropped his fork on the floor.

Recovering my own voice, I said, “Dinah, you're amazing. How on earth do you know Julia Child?”

“Her nephew Jon is a friend of mine. Haven't you ever met him here? Auntie Julia has made mayonnaise in this very kitchen,” she said.

Actually, I'd have loved to meet Julia Child, and I think Dinah knew it. Oh well.

The conversation jogged on until Dinah happened to mention something she'd said to Jane recently.

“Jane?” Nala asked politely.

“Oh, sorry,” said Dinah. “An American actress. Jane Fonda.” Nala and Nicholas dropped their dessert spoons. Nala began to laugh, a delicious rippling giggle.

“All right, what?” said Dinah. She loved being teased by Nicky.

“My brother,” said Nala in her charming accent. “At Cambridge, he sang in the choir at his college. If anyone name-dropped during the service, the choristers dropped their pencils. One day a visiting priest said in his homily, ‘I was having tea with the queen . . .' and the whole choir dropped their hymnbooks.”

She was a joy, Nala. We all took it hard when she moved back to Amsterdam, and we still drop cutlery when Dinah drops names. And it was years before Nicky took up with another girl.

M
eanwhile, Richard Wainwright, born with a silver spoon, was no longer having an easy time of it. Remember all through 1999, the hysteria about the Y2K bug that was going to run riot in cyberspace when the calendar rolled to 2000? Richard had a truly ancient Volkswagen beetle that he restored himself and still drove around the village only partly for reason of style. In 1999 he got it a license plate that said
Y1K,
which even Dinah conceded was witty.

“Year One K Bug.” You understand the problem. Nicky said that people in Ardsley kept asking Richard why his license plate said Yick, so he gave it up. What an innocent time that seems now, when a big computer crash was the worst national disaster we could think of.

Anyway, in the fall of 2000 Richard came into the shop. I remember that I'd been up in my flat with the deliveryman, stacking the first bundles of the season's firewood. I came back down to find a tall, slightly stooped man in a knockoff Burberry barn jacket idly studying the costume jewelry in the case that acts as a sales desk. I didn't know him until he turned to face me, smiling.

“Richard!” We embraced. “What brings you here?”

“Are you busy?”

“As you see.” We were not.

“You're sure?”

“I have a client coming at two-thirty, but I'm free as air until then. Come upstairs.”

We exchanged small talk while I heated a kettle for tea. When we were both seated with our cups in my little sitting room, he said, “Do you think Dinah would see me? Sit down to talk?”

We all
saw
one another at graduations and weddings and such events, and had even had dinner together at Dinah's the year before when RJ and his wife were in town for a theater weekend, so he meant something different.

“Has something happened? Your health? Charlotte or the girls?”

“Everyone's fine.”

I waited.

“Dinah's doing pretty well, isn't she?” he asked.

“Her knee is hurting her.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

“Well. We both know she's too heavy.”

“Yes. I meant . . . financially?”

I didn't answer, so he went on.

“Someone told me lately what that magazine she writes for pays. I had no idea. I mean, I was impressed.”

“She's very good at what she does. Of course they don't all pay as well as that.”

“No.”

“And freelance is freelance. You never know when your last job may be.”

Naturally I knew where this was going.

“Colette and Mary are both in college, as of September.”

“Where is Mary going?”

“Wheaton.”

Having not had the pleasure myself, that exhausted my supply of conversation on the topic.

“I have to admit, I'm stretched pretty thin,” he said.

I said I could imagine.

“Would you mind . . . would you ask Dinah if she'd have lunch with me? She'd take it better if it came from you.”

I considered. “You may overestimate my influence, but I'll try. Do you want me to tell her what it's about?”

“I imagine she'll guess, don't you?”

“Yes, I do.”

I
asked her. She said, “I can guess what
this
is about.”

I agreed.

“Do you think I should?” she asked. She clearly didn't want to.

“He says his margins are pretty skimpy, and I believe it. Scary, at our age.”

“Not my problem.”

“No. But how do the boys see it, do you think?”

She'd come over to have lunch with me in the apartment. I'd bought sushi, and she'd brought a beetroot salad and a tin of homemade lemon squares.

“Do you mean they think I'm mean?”

“I have no idea. But they don't mind Charlotte and they love their sisters, and I'm sure they notice.”

“Notice what?”

“If Richard's family is eating chili dogs and cutting their own hair, and you're eating foie gras and renting a house on Martha's Vineyard.”

“Richard is cutting his own hair?”

“Looks like it to me.”

W
e both knew that she could afford to take reduced alimony, and the wound to her amour propre of Richard's leaving was decades old; she'd endured others far more recent.

I don't know what went wrong at their lunch, but something did. Richard came to the shop afterward, looking glum. Apparently sentences like “You should have thought of that before you started fucking that popsie” had been uttered. I don't know.

“She got furious because Charlotte doesn't work. But she
does
work, she's got her real estate license and she does the best she can. There's a lot of competition in the suburbs,” he said unhappily.

“What did Dinah say to that?”

“Tough.”

Well, I knew
that
Dinah. The Dinah who'd grown up on the wrong side of the walls of Canaan Woods, whose mother still bought most of her clothes at what she called Salvation Armani, Dinah whose mother had sold real estate and done it very well, in an era when nobody's mother worked. That she had chosen to marry Richard in spite of and because of what he represented to her had always struck me as touching. But it was far too late to ask Richard to see it that way. Once he told me that she'd started in about his trust fund, I knew he was cooked. He looked sunk.

“How serious is it?” I asked him. The financial situation.

“Well, of course, I can take on more debt.”

“Could your parents . . . ?”

He shook his head. “They lived through the Depression. My father gets that pained expression and starts to chew his mustache when he even thinks about debt; he doesn't even approve of mortgages. And they're spending more than they really should themselves these days. My mom needs full-time care, you know.”

“I didn't. I'm sorry. Is she still at home?” Richard's mother had to be deep in her nineties.

“Yes, nursing home for one. You can imagine what
that
costs.”

I could. And of course, it
was
their money.

“Well,” he said, “time to make some changes.”

“What will you do?”

“I guess I'll see if I can go back to Wall Street. I've had a call or two from headhunters in the past.”

“Oh, Richard.” I knew how much he'd come to hate the commute, and how happy he'd been when he had started his own business in Westchester. He ran a family office for eight or ten high rollers he knew, looking after the investments, insurance, estate planning, and such that they didn't have time to attend to themselves. It wasn't sexy, but it required skill, judgment, and absolute integrity, qualities that are not all that easy to find in this wicked world.