Lace II

  Oblivious of the three seated women who watched, Lili was also near to tears as she remembered her deep-rooted restlessness, the profound anxiety and uncertainty that had shadowed her adult life. Now she instinctively recognized it as a sense of loss—sad and constant—even though it was for a woman that Lili had never known, her vraie maman, as Lili used to think of her mother, in the little Swiss village where she had been raised by the local seamstress. “Mother?” Lili said the word softly, as if forming it for the first time, and then tried it again. “Mother.”

  The two women drew back, gave tearful laughs and simultaneously said, “You’re not what I expected!” Then Judy added, “How did you find us?”

  “It wasn’t difficult,” said Lili. “I hired a detective. He discovered that my mother had been one of four teen-age girlfriends who had been students in Switzerland, and then he followed the trails until he identified you.” She turned to the green-eyed woman in the mulberry suit. “You were the most difficult to track down, Kate, because the world is full of Katherine Ryans. But, once he did find you, my detective couldn’t discover which of you four was that teen-age mother, which is why I arranged this confrontation.” She hesitated, and nervously bit her lower lip. “I hope you’ll forgive me; I do so hope you’ll understand why I had to know who my parents are, why I had to know who I am.”

  The last thing Kate had expected to feel for this sex goddess was a sudden rush of affection and pity. Gently she said, “We do so hope, Lili, that you will understand why Judy couldn’t keep her baby. In 1949, a sixteen-year-old girl from a poor family, who had to earn her own living, couldn’t also look after a baby.”

  Anxiously, Judy said, “Did you … were you … did your foster mother look after you?” She added in a rush, “I can never forgive her for taking you to Hungary, after the Russians occupied it.”

  Lili said, “I shall always love Angelina. She loved me and she never lied to me; she always told me that one day my vraie maman would come for me.”

  “She did come for you.” The elegant blonde in the blue silk dress spoke, for the first time, in an unmistakable French accent. “We knew you were on holiday in Hungary and when we heard there’d been a revolution, Judy flew over to Europe and we went straight to the Hungarian border. The situation was chaotic: a hundred and fifty thousand Hungarian refugees were pouring over the Austrian border into camps for displaced persons. We visited every one of them. But nobody could trace you.” Maxine remembered Judy’s frenzy and self-accusation as they stood in the snow outside hut after hut, waiting to see yet another refugee committee official.

  As Judy remembered her constant self-accusation for having abandoned Lili, for not having done enough to find her, she sat down heavily on the apricot-silk sofa and buried her face in her hands; her little gulps, splutters and sniffs were the only sounds to break the silence.

  Kate picked up the ivory telephone, and said, “Champagne is what you celebrate a new baby with, isn’t it? D’you think they have any Krug ’49?”

  “I would prefer you to order our champagne,” said Maxine firmly. “Ask for a magnum of Chazalle ’74.”

  After a great deal of emotion and champagne, Pagan suddenly said, “How is the press going to react to this news? Do you think we should keep it secret?”

  “It’s bound to get out somehow,” said Maxine, “we’re all public personalities as we all live our lives in the spotlight. Why, within a week, someone would have overheard a telephone conversation, stolen a letter, and sold the story to the National Enquirer for a meager fifty dollars.” She turned to Kate. “You’re a journalist, right?”

  Judy remembered the cruel descriptions that she had quite enjoyed reading about Lili, as maliciously enjoyable as any tidbit about Elizabeth Taylor, Farrah Fawcett or Joan Collins. “We’ll be able to set the record straight, Lili, we’ll print your true life story, as told by you.”

  “No!” Lili looked frightened and anxious. “You know the lies, the filth that’s published about me, they’ll all just dredge it up from their files again.”

  “Don’t worry, Lili,” said Kate. “I’m the editor of VERVE! magazine, so you can control the story. We’ll print whatever you want. She turned to Judy for confirmation. “If we get in first with an exclusive story and splash it big enough, we’ll have scooped the rest of the world; nobody will want to run it after that.”

  Lili said, “It’s quite a story.”

  As Maxine poured champagne, all four women listened to the quiet voice of Lili reciting the tale of her life since 1956, the success story of the Paris porn model who became an international movie star, the sad story of an exploited, lonely girl as incapable of controlling her own destiny as the autumn leaves that fluttered from the trees below them in darkened Central Park.

  * * *

  It was two o’clock in the morning before Kate let herself into her apartment. She stood in the doorway of her huge living room, rubbing her tired eyes as she looked across at the man who lay asleep on the thirty-foot-long, beige suede sofa that ran along one wall. Above the sofa hung a collection of antique paintings and engravings of tigers. On the floor below the man lay a pair of loafers, a pair of socks, a crumpled copy of the Wall Street Journal, and a silver salver upon which was a slice of cold, leftover pizza and a half-empty glass of beer. Tom would never be a gourmet, no matter how many elegant meals she served him, thought Kate, as she tiptoed over to her husband and gently shook him awake. “Bedtime, darling,” she whispered, as he leaned against her, blinking, then suddenly hugged her in a hard grip. “How’d it go, darling? Did you reach an agreement with Tiger-Lili?”

  “Tell you in the morning. Everything’s fine, but right now I’m exhausted and I just want to be in bed. How I wish that someone would invent a machine with a button that you press and suddenly you find yourself undressed, showered and in bed with your teeth cleaned.”

  “With me.”

  “You’d be an optional accessory. Very expensive.”

  * * *

  In her softly lit bathroom at the Plaza Hotel, Maxine carefully broke open three glass ampoules, mixed the clear liquids together, then patted the solution carefully around the delicate skin of her eye socket. She used a pink cream to remove her makeup, a clear solution to exfoliate her skin and a white preparation to stimulate cell renewal while she slept. Along the fine lines of her forehead, no more definite than the veins on a leaf since her face-lift, she traced a tiny paintbrush dipped in a solution of synthetic collagen. Finally, her generously rounded right buttock, smooth as a peach thanks to regular treatments to dispel la cellulite, received a slimming injection. Carefully, she hung up her blue silk dress, then Maxine wrapped herself in an oyster-silk peignoir edged with point-de-Chazalle lace. She brushed her hair with a hundred strokes, then climbed into bed, opened her maroon leather traveling office and dictated half a dozen memos to be telexed to her secretary on the following day. Then, in her large, loopy handwriting, she thanked Judy for making her so welcome in New York and wrote an encouraging note to Lili. She always wrote her thank-you notes at night, when she was still feeling grateful, no matter how late the hour. Maxine never considered it an excuse to neglect her body, her business, or her gift for expedient politeness.

  * * *

  Pagan sprawled across her old-fashioned brass bed in her room at the Algonquin and again tried to direct-dial her husband.

  It was two in the morning in New York, which meant seven in the morning in London, so with luck she’d catch Christopher just before breakfast, she thought, as she looked around the small pretty room. Her Jean Muir pink coat was thrown carelessly over the rose-velvet armchair and her discarded underwear was scattered over the malachite-green carpet.

  “Darling, that you? How are the dogs? Is Sophia doing her homework directly when she comes home from school? Are you helping her with geometry? … Sorry, it doesn’t seem like twenty-four hours, it seems weeks since I saw you last, darling.… Yes, I’ve met Lili, but I don’t want to talk about it o
n the telephone.… No, we didn’t discuss the possibility of a donation to your laboratory, darling, you’re even more tactless than I am.… No, there simply wasn’t a chance to discuss the importance of cancer research.” She pushed her heavy, wavy mahogany hair away from her face and wriggled her long-legged, lean, naked body into a more comfortable position on the lace blanket cover. “…Yes, I know I forgot to pack my nightclothes, but nobody’s noticed, darling, I’ll hide in the loo when they bring breakfast up.… Oh, damn, did I really forget the grocer order again? Thank heaven for Harrods and Globe Car Service.…” Eventually, in a carefully casual voice, Pagan said, “How are you feeling, darling?” After his heart attack, she always worried when she was away from Christopher.

  “…No, I hardly slept at all last night, you know I mustn’t take sleeping pills or anything addictive. But tonight I’m prepared to enjoy a sleepless night. I’ve bought this absolutely gripping book called Scruples.…”

  * * *

  Judy had also spent a sleepless night. Huddled under the red-fox spread of her big, luxurious, peaceful bedroom, she restlessly gazed at the peach-colored walls and matching wild-silk curtains, at the pretty Victorian oil paintings of peaches and grapes, apples and apricots that hung from the walls. She was almost glad that Griffin wasn’t here; he’d had to fly to the West Coast for a couple of days to launch a new decorating magazine, the first of his many publishing ventures to be based in San Francisco. Only the previous evening, Griffin had asked Judy the question that she’d been waiting to hear from him for ten years. Although Griffin was a major shareholder of VERVE! and although they’d been lovers for over ten years, there had always been a subject that she was forbidden to discuss. That subject was Griffin’s home life. Everyone in the media world knew that it had been clearly established years ago, before he’d met Judy, when that tough, clever bastard, Griffin Lowe, was still being seen around town with the best-looking models and young actresses in New York, that none of them stood a chance: Griffin would never leave his wife and three children, because he’d fought too hard to climb his way up the ladder of success and he wanted all of it, the successful, respectable life that he’d established as well as his notorious, amorous adventures.

  And then, a few days ago, Griffin’s wife had left him for another man; they were going to Israel together, to start a new life on a kibbutz. The long-suffering Mrs. Lowe had walked out on her handsome, rich, debonair, double-crossing husband.

  What was equally surprising was that Griffin had immediately asked Judy to marry him. What was even more surprising was that, after hearing the words for which she’d waited ten years, Judy found that she didn’t want to marry Griffin. Griffin had developed a habit of cheating on his wife and therefore she wasn’t too sure that she wanted to become his wife. Old habits die hard.

  * * *

  Silhouetted against the russet shade of the bedside light, the slim naked figure looked like an alabaster Praxiteles; slowly his fox-shaped face broke into an intimate smile. “No, darling, it’s absolutely safe; Lili’s out there playing the biggest role of her life.” Softly he laughed into the ivory telephone. “I’ll be back in Paris on Saturday … promise, darling … you can save it for another couple of days … you’d better.…” The man’s head jerked up as the door was flung open and Lili stood there smiling. Hastily, the man said to the telephone, “Sorry, this is suite 1719. I think you’ve got the wrong number.” He replaced the telephone and held out both his arms to Lili, who hurled herself into them. “You were right, Simon! It worked just as you said it would!” She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him full on the lips. “At last I know who I really am, at last I know who my mother is!”

  Simon Pont was an actor. A good stage actor who needed an audience to produce his best work, who hated movies and only occasionally made one, strictly for the money. He and Lili had lived together for two years and it was Simon who had originally persuaded Lili to search for her mother. A quiet, intelligent, thirty-five-year-old, he seemed secure enough to handle Lili with firm indulgence, seemed to understand that she needed more protection and attention than most men are prepared to give a woman. It was Simon who had given Lili the reassurance she had needed, and it was he who had realized that Lili needed to trace her mother in order to firmly establish her own identity. Simon had pointed out that if Lili found her real parents, then she might stop looking for substitute parents to love in almost everyone with whom she became involved—which is why she was so vulnerable to the exploiters, the con men and the con women that the rich and the famous invariably attracted.

  Now Simon held Lili to his handsome naked body and licked her ear with his long, curly tongue. “Tell me who your mother is, darling. Lady Swann?”

  “No, not Pagan Swann; it’s Judy Jordan. She admitted it almost at once, but I remembered what you’d said—that they’d be bound to pin it on the only woman who wasn’t married and didn’t have to explain me to a husband!”

  He pushed the white silk from her shoulder, and nipped the golden flesh with his little wide-spaced teeth. Lili wriggled. “So I suddenly asked Judy who my father was and—just as you said—the other three all snapped round to look at Judy, so I knew that she was telling the truth, that she really is my mother.”

  Simon pushed Lili’s dress from both shoulders, and gently flicked one sandalwood nipple with his finger and thumb. Lili wriggled again, “Listen, Simon, she wasn’t some rich bitch who’d just dumped me because she couldn’t get an abortion.” Simon tugged at Lili’s white belt as she continued. “Judy was poor, from one of those grim Baptist families in West Virginia, a scholarship student in Switzerland, working her way through college by waiting on tables. And she was only sixteen when it happened.”

  “And who helped it to happen?” Simon’s voice was gentle. “What about your father? Who’s he?” He tugged again at Lili’s belt, and the white Grecian tunic slithered to the floor. Simon pressed her naked body against his and stroked Lili’s hair.

  “That part’s sad,” said Lili, sorrowfully. “He’s dead. He was an English student that she met in Switzerland, but he was drafted into the British army and died fighting the communists in Malaya. He never even knew she was pregnant.”

  “Do you believe that?” Simon put his arms round Lili and grasped her buttocks.

  Lili thought for a moment. “There was something odd about the way she told me. Pagan Swann started to say something, then thought better of it.”

  “What about the rest of his family?”

  “I haven’t asked Judy yet. There was so much to talk about. It’s a really strange story. Apparently all four girls paid Angelina for my keep. Judy didn’t dare to tell her parents, you see. Judy intended to come to Switzerland for me as soon as she was able to support me by herself. But she was only a twenty-two-year-old secretary when I disappeared.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t get an abortion.” He rubbed himself against Lili’s big soft breasts.

  “She couldn’t have done that in Switzerland in 1949. It was illegal and dangerous.”

  He trickled his finger up her spine. “So now, can we start a family of our own?”

  “What, right now?”

  “Right now.” Gently he pushed her backwards onto the gray-silk bedcover. She always felt safe with Simon, Lili thought as he began to kiss her. She trusted him. There was no need for him to dominate her, envy her or exploit her, because he was a successful actor in his own right. And she knew that he had her interests at heart. Why else should he have encouraged her search for her mother?

  * * *

  After her sleepless night, Judy didn’t feel tired. She felt contented and apprehensive. A fizz of anticipation colored all the chores of planning future issues of her magazine, because the future was now the future for both Judy and her daughter. She picked up the telephone. “Dick?” she said, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice as she spoke to New York’s most famous portrait photographer, “I want you to take a very special picture for me
.…”

  Next, she called her florist. “Do you have tiger lilies?” she asked, her voice quivering. “Then please send every single one to Mademoiselle Lili at the Pierre, and put a card with it saying … “With all my love, Mother.” As she hung up, she savored that word. All her life she had thought of a mother as someone like her own mother—disappointed and inwardly desperate. The picture of that ineffectual woman, setting out for Chapel every Sunday, flashed into Judy’s mind. Sin and its avoidance were the only things in which her mother had seemed interested, and when Judy’s father had plodded home from the grocery store to break the news that he had lost everything, all her mother had done was to kneel and pray; she had merely accepted the disaster, and hadn’t tried to fight it. Motherhood, to Judy, meant drudgery, dependence and the sublimation of all the joy of living into faith in an unforgiving God. But now that Judy herself was a mother—truly a mother—with a living daughter to prove it, the notion of motherhood began to become exciting. Her morning rushed by in a froth of delight.

  “D’you suppose there’s a new man in Mrs. Jordan’s life?” wondered the junior secretary as, one after another, the magazine’s senior staff came out of the pastel-painted office looking startled, but pleased, because for once their proposals had been received with uncritical enthusiasm. “Did you know that Griffin Lowe’s wife walked out on him last week?” the senior assistant whispered as she stood up to take in Judy’s morning mail. “I think that’s why she’s lit up. When your lover’s wife finally concedes after ten years, it must feel pretty good.”

  * * *

  Every Friday, Kate the editor and Judy the publisher of VERVE! had a weekly editorial conference for all staff. It always took place over lunch in Judy’s office. The ten men and women who created the magazine pulled up lucite chairs and hurled ideas at each other for an hour and a half over the long table, cold meats, cheese and sodas. Judy found the Friday conference an excellent way to channel the thoughts of her staff for the weekend, and Monday always produced a satisfying stack of memos which crystalized the ideas that had been thrown about during the Friday brainstorming session.