People Like Us (54 page)

Aware suddenly that he was being stared at, Marv Pink turned and looked at Gus, whom he had not seen since Lefty Flint’s sentencing three years earlier. The two men stared at each other from car to car. Marv Pink raised his hand in a gesture of greeting, and his
iridescent cat’s-eye pinky ring flashed in the California sunlight.

Gus Bailey did not give any indication of recognition.

46

Within hours after Ruby Renthal put the vast apartment where she no longer wished to live on the market, the billionaire Reza Bulbenkian offered her twenty million dollars for it as a gift for his bride. Helene Whitbeck, the real-estate broker, said she had never had such an immediate reaction to an apartment in all her years in the business and thought that the famous ball of the Renthals had added to the cachet of the apartment.

After Bulbenkian divorced Babette, his wife of thirty years, at the same island resort where Bernie Slatkin had gotten his twenty-four-hour divorce, he immediately married Yvonne Lupescu, thirty years his junior, at a hastily improvised candlelit ceremony in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which had been swathed in purple orchids and gardenias, Yvonne’s favorite flowers, by Lorenza, for the occasion. Although the Cardinal did not officiate, because of all the divorces, he was present at the ceremony and at the small but lavish reception that followed at the Rhinelander Hotel.

Yvonne had hurried on the marital commitment, while Babette Bulbenkian was losing her nine pounds and six ounces at her fat farm in Arizona, following a confrontation scene between Reza and Constantine de Rham, who had burst in on the lovers in conjugal union in Constantine’s house on Sutton Place.

Reza, in order to escape any unfavorable or even scandalous publicity, agreed to pay Constantine de Rham a sizable amount, after Constantine threatened to go to the police to tell them of Yvonne’s part in his near fatal shooting.

Yvonne laughed and laughed. “It is simply this mad person’s imagination, my darling,” she said to Reza. “There is no truth whatever to what he says.” However, she did not discourage her new fiancé from making his settlement on Constantine.

Reza’s toupee was now gone. “I adore bald men,” Yvonne told him. His teeth were now capped, also at the suggestion of his bride. Gone, too, were his black suits, replaced by smarter clothes made up in haste by Mr. Sills. Prodded by Yvonne, Reza made his offer for the Elias Renthal apartment, as soon as Ruby put it on the market, with a view to establishing himself and his new wife as top-flight social figures in the city.

“Look, Reza, we won’t even have to change the drapes,” said Yvonne, fingering the persimmon damask curtains of the drawing room, as if to prove to him early on that she was a woman who knew how to economize.

“Mrs. Renthal has marvelous taste,” interjected Helene Whitbeck, the real-estate broker, who was showing the apartment.

Yvonne sniffed. “Ruby Renthal doesn’t mean anything socially anymore,” she replied.

The Bulbenkian purchase of the Renthal apartment came to naught however. The cooperative board of the exclusive building, embarrassed by the publicity brought on by Elias Renthal’s financial disgrace, let it be known that the Bulbenkians would be turned down by the board if they should apply. Florian Gray printed in his column that the Bulbenkians had been turned down by the building.

“We’ll sue,” screamed Yvonne.

“Sue,” replied Mrs. Sims Lord, who was the president of the co-op board and known to be fearless in her dealings with upstarts. It became known among the sort
of real-estate brokers who dealt in dwellings for the very rich that the board wanted only people like themselves to live in that building from now on and had even voted to break up the enormous apartment into three smaller apartments, which people with lesser fortunes but more breeding than the Renthals and the Bulbenkians could afford. Or, as Mrs. Sims Lord said at a dinner that very night at Lil Altemus’s, “We’ve had quite enough of the billionaires, thank you very much.” To which Lil Altemus replied, “Hear, hear.”

Undeterred by the rebuff, Bulbenkian purchased a house of embassy proportions that had long been shuttered on Park Avenue.

The crowds turned out in record number for the three-day viewing that preceded the auction of the four thousand lots that made up the contents of the Elias Renthals’ forty-one-room apartment on three floors that they had purchased from the estate of the late social figure Sweetzer Clarke. So great was the public interest in the magnificent possessions of the convicted financier and his elegant wife that lines formed around the block of the auction house on York Avenue, and people waited for as long as three hours to simply march by the treasures, while guards admonished them to keep moving so everyone would have a turn before closing time. The
New York Times
said, in its front-page coverage of the event, “The Renthals collected it all in record time. Now they will dispose of it in even less time.”

Antiques dealers, private curators and museum curators, and collectors of eighteenth-century French and English furniture arrived in New York from London, Paris, and Tokyo for what had come to be known as the Renthal sale, in the way that their ball had come to be known as the Renthal ball. At night various charities took over the showrooms, and the rich of the city, unwilling to wait in line with the hoi polloi, paid hundreds of dollars each to view what the poor could see for free, with the certain knowledge that their admittance
fee was going for a good cause. Ruby Renthal, who had become reclusive, declined to be present at any of the charity events.

“Oh, please, Ruby, come,” begged Maude Hoare, who was chairperson for the evening benefiting the Hospital for Plastic Surgery.

“I can’t. I’m sorry,” said Ruby.

“You’d be an extra added attraction for the evening,” said Violet Bastedo, who was chairperson for the evening benefiting Ballerina House, a home for indigent dancers.

“I’m sorry,” said Ruby.

“Damn her,” they both said later.

“Oh!” said Lil Altemus, covering her face with her catalogue, as she and Ezzie Fenwick jockeyed for position in front of Elias Renthal’s pool table that had once belonged to Edward VII.

“What’s the matter, Lil?” asked Ezzie.

“Daddy died on that pool table,” Lil said, touching the faded green felt on which Ormonde Van Degan had expired on the night of the Renthal ball.

“Oh, right,” answered Ezzie, whose eyes were eagerly scanning the crowd for people to wave to. He did not wish to be reminded that Lil and her stepmother Dodo had walked in on him passing information that Elias Renthal was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission to the gossip columnist Florian Gray at almost the same moment that Lil had discovered her father dead on the pool table.

“Look, Ezzie, aren’t those the console tables that Ruby gave to the White House?” asked Lil Altemus. “Over there. With the rams’ heads.”

“They were returned to the Renthals by the White House,” answered Ezzie.

“Because of the scandal, you mean?”

“Because they were inauthentic.”

“No!”

“Yes. Jamesey told me.”

They exchanged looks, as if to say, “What can you expect, from people like that?”

At the last moment, the auction was canceled. Reza Bulbenkian made an offer for the entire contents of the vast apartment. At a hastily called meeting between the auction house and Ruby Renthal, the decision was made to accept Reza Bulbenkian’s offer. The auction house felt that the enormous offer made by the financier could very well be in excess of the profits from an auction of the possessions of a disgraced figure, and Ruby Renthal felt that it would halt the avalanche of publicity connected with the sale that put her name and photograph in the newspapers every day.

“How did you manage to halt the auction?” a reporter asked Reza Bulbenkian, at the news conference set up by the auction house and Reza to announce that the sale had been canceled.

“You can buy anything you pay too much for,” said Reza, nodding his head, like a wise sage of finance.

The antiques dealers who had traveled to New York from around the globe for the sale hissed and booed the decision.

“I am so happy with Reza,” said Yvonne Lupescu at the news conference, linking her arm in his and smiling up at him, as if saving the day. Unlike Ruby Renthal, Yvonne had no desire whatsoever to shun the press. She waved to the cameras. On her finger was a diamond the size of the diamond that Ruby had dropped into the Mediterranean. “Reza is the man I have been waiting for all my life.” They hoped, she said, to be able to start entertaining in their new home in two weeks.

To her hairdresser, in private, she added, “He’s rich. He doesn’t drink and, thank heaven, he doesn’t want to be beaten.”

47

In prison, it hurt Elias Renthal when he heard that his apartment had been sold, even though Ruby had told him on the way to prison that she didn’t want to live there anymore. The apartment represented everything that he had ever strived for in his life, and he had always enjoyed the astonished looks on the faces of even the most established and wealthy visitors when he showed them through it. It hurt him even more when he heard that it was being divided up into three smaller apartments, making it forever irretrievable and squashing the daydreams he sometimes indulged in of resuming his former life after his release from Allenwood, a better and wiser man.

It enraged him that Reza Bulbenkian and his new wife, the former Yvonne Lupescu, should have purchased all the furniture and paintings that he and Ruby had collected so lovingly and that they were already starting to entertain on a lavish scale in their new mansion on Park Avenue, rivaling the life-style that the Renthals had made famous. Elias loathed Reza Bulbenkian and told his three bridge companions of crooked things that he knew Reza had done in business and gotten away with. Then he added, “so far,” meaning that his practices would eventually catch up with him, too. The congressman, the rock-and-roll executive, and the cement-company owner laughed. They loved hearing Elias’s stories. Elias also told them that Yvonne Bulbenkian used to be one of Ms. Myra’s girls, before she took up with Constantine de Rham, and carried her whips in a custom-made Vuitton case. “Imagine, a former hooker running New York society,” he said.

Most of all Elias missed Ruby. More than anything in the world, he wanted to make it up to Ruby for the embarrassment and the ostracism that he had caused her. He never remembered her as she was when he first met her, a pretty stewardess with a sassy manner. He thought of her coming down the stairway of their apartment on the night of their ball, dressed in white and wearing all her diamonds, and marveled each time he thought of her as the great lady she had become.

“Max comes to visit,” Elias said to Ruby one day when she drove up from Merry Hill to see him.

“Good old Max,” said Ruby.

“Max saw Loelia Manchester at the opera.”

“Max at the opera? What next?” replied Ruby.

“He said he thought Loelia was unhappy.”

“Heavens,” said Ruby.

From the time of her arrival, Elias knew there was something on Ruby’s mind, all during the time they were talking of other things, like Max Luby and Loelia Manchester.

“Elias,” said Ruby, finally. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What’s that, Ruby darling? Anything you want. Anything.”

Then Ruby asked Elias for a divorce. She brought with her the papers for him to sign. Elias was devastated by Ruby’s request but was not totally surprised. The congressman’s wife had divorced him. The wife of the head of the record company had divorced him. The head of the cement company was already divorced. His hand shaking, he signed the papers.

“At least you didn’t break the news to me through a lawyer,” he said.

“You know I’d never do that to you, Elias,” she answered.

“My friend the congressman read about his wife’s divorce in the newspaper.”

“Or that.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“I know.”

“Don’t remember me badly.”

“I won’t. Count on that.” Ruby took out a handkerchief from her bag and wiped a tear from her eye. Then she began gathering up her things and put the papers he signed into her bag.