Gossip

  She put a finger on my wrist briefly, looked at me very directly, and said, “Please.”

  “Well then . . . of course, that would be lovely.” I watched her walk toward the elevators without another glance at the Halstons. She had not come in to shop. I was still watching, noting how still she stood and how self-contained she was, as if she never entirely lost the sense that even holding a pose in the corps de ballet while the premiers danced, she was part of the performance. She didn’t shift her weight or check her sleeve for lint the way most people do when alone.

  Then my debutante arrived, with her very determined mother.

  Serena took me to La Grenouille, which worried me for two reasons. French food is rich, and I usually eat only fruit during the day. And, I only got an hour off for lunch.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, seeing me glance at my wristwatch. “Marjorie is a great friend; you have permission.” Marjorie Bachman, my boss.

  So now I was worried for a third reason. La Grenouille cost a fortune. What did she want from me?

  She ordered for us, and I can remember to this day what we ate; I’d never tasted food like that in my life. I also remember how easily she made the time pass, how she made me feel witty and likeable and as if there needn’t be a hidden agenda beyond the pleasure of my company.

  But there was, of course. It arrived with our coffee soufflés. (With a pitcher of crème anglaise, if you’re wondering, and a plate of tiny petits fours.)

  “I don’t know if you’ve met Simon Snyder?” she said, a question. In fact, Simon was one of the things in Dinah’s life I envied. He and Dinah shared a completely congruent sense of humor. I always think of one of the Sunday salons, when Dinah and Simon collapsed in a corner, undone by the giggles. The collector Victor Greenwood was there that day with a Swedish actress, and I think there was a Hindu swami as well. Allen Ginsberg came with a poet Dinah knew from Vassar, and after a while he took off all his clothes and recited, quite beautifully I thought. Everyone wanted to know what Dinah and Simon found so funny, and neither of them could explain it without setting each other off again. Later I learned that a self-important impresaria someone had brought and no one had liked was found to have pissed in her chair. Ruined the upholstery, of course, but Richard would have it redone.

  “A really beautiful man,” said Serena of Simon. “Such a profile. And, of course, so amusing.”

  I agreed. Serena made a tiny hole in her soufflé and poured in a slim stream of the crème. Showing me, in the politest way possible, what to do with it. She took a microscopic bite.

  “I have learned lately that there’s another side to Mr. Snyder,” she said. “Not a nice one.”

  Uh-oh. I’d suspected I wasn’t going to like this, and I didn’t.

  “One way or another, he . . . well, he met an old friend whom I knew very well before I came to New York, who apparently was indiscreet. Mr. Snyder asked me rather pointedly how my husband would take the news that my previous love, before I met him, was a woman.”

  I sat silent. Serena mistook my silence, and went on. “And that she wasn’t the first . . . or the last. I made the mistake of making it clear that my husband would not take it well.”

  I still didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m not a public person,” she said with sudden passion. “We live quietly. Why should anyone care about our lives?”

  Which was perhaps disingenuous. They may have lived quietly for zillionaire philanthropists, but there were always going to be a few hundred thousand people who wanted to know why a man with net worth in the high eight figures had married Serena and not somebody else, and at least half of them for no reason at all would hope to learn it wasn’t going well. But surely her frustration was understandable.

  Serena said, “He wants me to pay him not to print it.”

  “What?”

  Why do people say that when they’re surprised? I had heard her . . .

  “Yes. And . . . Loviah, I have children. They love their father. They love me. My husband loves me. But he would divorce me if . . .”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  She raised a hand. “Be sure, I can. To know would be bad enough for Leo. To see it in the paper, to know his friends all knew . . . Unforgivable.”

  We sat looking at each other. I was shocked and distressed, because I had finally guessed why she was telling me.

  “I know I’m to blame. It’s never all right to do wrong because you think no one will find out. I betrayed my husband, and I may deserve to be punished. But not this way, not by him. And I doubt I’m the only one Mr. Snyder has done this to.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “I can pay Mr. Snyder. I already have, more than once. What I find I can’t bear is never knowing when he is going to pop up again, and how much he’ll want the next time.” Another spell of silence, and then she said what I knew she would: “What I’d like you to do, if you will, kind Loviah, is arrange a meeting for me with your friend Dinah Wainwright.”

  I didn’t tell Dinah what it was about. She said yes because she likes knowing famous people, but she was going to like this even less than I did.

  We had one of two choices. We could meet someplace discreet, which would raise questions if anyone happened to see us, or we could meet at the center of Serena’s universe, where everyone she knew would see and no one would think it odd. We chose the latter, the Upper East Side canteen for people who wore the kinds of clothes Mrs. Bachman and I sold. It was also the hub of social gossip for the people Dinah wrote about.

  There was a very noisy table in the middle of the room that suited us nicely, giving cover. We settled in, Serena exchanged air kisses with several friends. A society walker and publicist came over to greet Dinah, and Mrs. William F. Buckley stopped to speak to Serena and me, which was nice of her, though it made Dinah look at me sharply. She wanted to know how we’d met, but I didn’t explain, so Dinah excused herself and crossed the room to chat up an aging movie diva at the bar, just to show she could.

  When Serena finally came to her point, late in the meal as she had with me, Dinah listened intently but otherwise held her poker face. She asked questions like the journalist she was. How were the approaches made? she asked. How much money had Serena paid Simon? How exactly were the demands couched? How was Serena accounting for the money at home?

  Serena handled it all with perfect cool. She didn’t try to protect herself, she never faltered or fudged her account. And if I realized that in her attempt to escape one professional trader in information, she was delivering herself to another, hung by her hooves and ready for slaughter, Serena certainly did too. For a time during the meal I grew afraid that Dinah might react by protecting Simon and selling out Serena. Dinah loves knowing things about others that no one else knows, and of course the knowing wasn’t what interested her. It was letting others know that she knew.

  Work changes you. Mine has changed me. Work changes everyone, builds certain skills and habits while others atrophy. And as I’ve said, Dinah loved her job.

  This is what she said when she finally spoke. “Can you explain this? Why are some gay men so bitchy about lesbians?” The word jarred Serena, and she looked down at her plate.

  The waiter came and I ordered coffee; the other two seemed paralyzed. After he’d come and gone, Dinah said to Serena, “Is there a number where I can reach you?”

  Knowing that Mr. Tate, mostly retired, worked from home and a call from Dinah would be very hard to explain to him, I said, “Call me. I can call Serena.” Serena shot me a look of pure gratitude, glanced at her watch, and said “I have to run. Thank you for coming, please stay. Order whatever you want.”

  Dinah watched Serena sign a chit and hand it to the bartender. “House account,” she said. “Let’s order champagne.” I thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t. She ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and profiteroles. When the bottle came, she leaned back in her chair, raised her glass to me, and said, “I?
??m pretending we’re rich.”

  The aging movie star came over and joined us. She’d clearly taken a drop or two. She had recently married well, a Wall Street tycoon whose name you would recognize, and was trying to learn a new role. When she’d settled herself on the banquette and tossed her vermilion hair, she said to Dinah, “Who do you have to fuck in this town to get on the board at the Met?” Dinah roared with laughter. And, of course, knew the answer, not that the mechanism was quite the one the movie star had suggested.

  A week or so later I had a phone message from Serena, and rang the house. When her husband answered, I said, “This is Loviah French from Saks, for Mrs. Tate,” and Mr. Tate said cheerfully, “Uh-oh, this phone call is going to cost me money.” In fact it did. Serena came in the next day and bought a Norell suit from me. She was thin and tense and didn’t look well. She asked if I’d heard from Dinah. I hadn’t and didn’t know what to say.

  Then one evening as I was about to leave for the day, Dinah appeared in the door of my little cubicle and said, “Do you have a minute?” I did. “Good,” she said. “Buy me a drink.”

  Nowadays a pregnant woman wouldn’t drink or smoke unless she wanted her friends to call the police, but autres temps, autres moeurs. We walked up Fifth Avenue, dodging the tourist throngs of summer, to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. When we had settled into the cool semidarkness and had our vodka gimlets before us, Dinah had lit a cigarette, and I said, “So?”

  “I just resigned,” she said.

  I was stunned. “From your job?”

  “Well, duh.” She raised her glass to me and took a deep swallow. Then: “Of course, I hoped your Mrs. Tate was a fantasist. There was nothing odd in Simon’s office files. But I couldn’t figure out what her game was, if that story wasn’t true. Two days ago, Simon happened to leave his briefcase under his desk when he went to lunch. I happened to look into it.”

  She lit another cigarette from the butt of her first. “He had a number of files with no names on them, but one of them was Serena’s. There were what looked like verbatim quotes from a woman named Luisa who had clearly known Serena very very well. Names, dates, everything. Simon’s memory for dialogue is scary accurate, I’ve learned the hard way. Him and Truman Capote. Let’s hope he’s not planning a nonfiction novel.”

  “What kind of dialogue was it? A woman scorned?”

  “I doubt it. I think she was just enjoying the reaction she was getting and didn’t realize who she was talking to. Simon is very charming, you know.”

  “And Serena wasn’t the only one?”

  Dinah shook her head.

  “Bald-faced blackmail?”

  “Well, he wasn’t putting it like that. He was inviting them to ‘invest’ in a new magazine he was starting.”

  “I take it you confronted him.”

  “This morning.” She put her face in her hands, pressing her eyelids with her fingertips. “It was horrible.” Her nail polish was chipped. “He called me vicious names. He said everyone in our business does it. I said they don’t, and pointed out he could go to jail. He said I just wanted his job. I said I didn’t. He said ‘Prove it.’ ”

  My Dinah. I could see the scene.

  “He said that if anyone ever, ever heard about this, Serena’s name would be all over Liz Smith in a New York minute. I said I didn’t want to ruin him, I just want him to stop.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  She shook her head. “People who do things like that believe that everyone else is just like them. The only way to prove there was a principle at stake was to quit. So I did.”

  “Even though you do want his job.”

  She nodded.

  “Didn’t the suits want to know why you were going?”

  “Not really. They will tomorrow. Today they just wished me well and assumed I want to stay home with my children.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Stay home with my children. Another Women’s Libber bites the dust.”

  The next morning, in Simon Snyder’s last column for “The Fishwrap,” he announced he was moving west to a new field of endeavor, then sang an aria to old friends, good times, and how much he had loved New York. Simon at his best.

  There are five people other than Simon and Dinah and me who knew for sure what had happened. Dinah went to them one by one and gave them their files back. One man actually wept. And to this day, Dinah misses that job, and that friendship. You never really get over someone you’ve laughed with like that.

  Still, at the time, one felt that when one door closes, many more open. Dinah’s quitting looked like a temporary hitch in an inevitable upward trajectory. Dinah was a star. She could write, she could talk, she could cook, she knew everyone. She was happily married to a good man. Why shouldn’t it all just get better and better? We rarely recognize these turning pylons in life when we round them, though they’re easy enough to spot in retrospect.

  Nicholas was born on a morning in late September 1975. New York was golden, with the fresh snap of new beginnings in the air, of back to school, of clean slates. The trees were beginning to turn, but flowers still bloomed in the sidewalk beds along the side streets. I used my lunch hour to run up to Lenox Hill to greet the new arrival, and took Dinah a blue satin bed jacket. She asked me to be Nicky’s godmother, and I cried.

  He was a beautiful baby. He had a mad shock of dark hair, like Dinah’s, and his skin had none of the scaly stuff or red blotches newborns often have. Of course I was prejudiced from the first; I felt a rush of something I’d never felt before when I held him. Mother Nature working her little tricks. His tiny fingers with their miniature nails grasped my thumb and held fast, and it made me giddy, it was so sweet.

  The christening was at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on the Upper East Side, which many of its members like to call the Church of the Overly Dressed. Richard was a regular communicant. He’d been a cradle Episcopalian, lapsed like so many of us in his teens, when we had all the answers and knew we would live forever, but RJ’s birth had changed that. It wasn’t Saul on the road to Damascus, he didn’t talk about Jesus or faith or anything, but it was important to him. Anyway, it was lovely. Richard’s parents and brother came from Chicago, and Dinah’s family came down from Canaan Hamlet. When our part of the service arrived, Stewie Brumder and I went up to the font with Dinah and Richard. I carried the baby, who wore the same long, lace Wainwright family christening dress RJ had worn, still smelling of mothballs. When the priest took the baby in the crook of his arm and began to work his voodoo with the holy water, Nicholas opened his eyes and looked startled, but too interested to cry. My grandmother always said babies should cry at christenings, it’s the sound of the devil leaving them. But she also said that a broken mirror meant seven years of bad luck, and referred to an unforeseen difficulty as “the nigger in the woodpile.” Nicholas was angelic, sunny, and easy, except when he wasn’t.

  Dinah was besotted with him. She had nursed RJ for a month or two, but then she’d gone back to work and left him with a Haitian nanny. She nursed Nicky for almost a year. There was a great deal of talk in those years about feeding on a schedule or “nursing on demand.” I don’t remember how RJ was raised, but Nicky was definitely on demand. Dinah didn’t see any point in thwarting him in anything.

  RJ was having a hardish time adjusting to the new arrival. On one evening visit I rode up in the elevator with the plumber; RJ had flushed an orange down the toilet. His first words to his brother, when he came home from the hospital, were “Here, baby—eat soap.” He was a sturdy three-year-old by then.

  After Nicky was born, Dinah’s Sunday salons changed. She started including families, and the event evolved into a cheerful madhouse of little boys rampaging through the living room while more and more of the grown-ups debated whether television, even Sesame Street, was a blessing or a curse, and how young a child could be sent to day care, and fewer and fewer wanted to talk about the new production of Uncle Vanya or whether Ford was rig
ht to have pardoned Nixon. Nicky started walking, then talking; RJ started preschool.

  And then there was the spring morning I was walking to work and came upon Richard Wainwright leaving the Cabot Hotel with a young woman who was definitely not his wife.

  It could have been a power breakfast, but why at a tiny hotel on a side street? And the girl wasn’t dressed for business; she was wearing a long skirt and flat sandals and a newsboy cap which, I must say, became her. And there was the way they kissed good-bye as Richard put her into a cab.

  What a bite of poisoned apple. As the cab pulled away, Richard straightened, smiling, and looked at the spring sky and the flowering trees on the street, scattering white petals on the sidewalk like a shower of warm snow. For a moment he was a man on top of the world. Then he saw me standing across the street, thunderstruck.

  What would you do?

  There was no right answer. No one is thanked for bearing news like that. What did I know about what went on in that marriage? And of course there was my own situation. I was in no position to tell tales.

  But. I was Dinah’s friend. How could it be right for me to know something so important about her life that she didn’t know? What did the office of friendship require in this case?

  I went to visit Dinah and the boys that weekend. Nicky was now two and a half. His hair had stayed dark and his eyes had stayed blue, and he had the world’s longest eyelashes. We took the children to Carl Schurz Park and talked while Dinah pushed Nicky on a swing and five-year-old RJ raced around whooping. She was talking, I remember, about wanting to get back to work. She had some book ideas; we always thought someday she’d be on the best-seller list. Making the rounds of talk shows. Maybe having a talk show of her own. I asked if Richard had been out of town that week. Just for a night, she said. He was working on a deal in Toronto.

  I asked if he supported her going back to work. She seemed surprised by the question. Whatever she did was fine with Richard. Richard was Richard.

  And when Richard came home that afternoon and found us sitting together in the kitchen, drinking tea while the boys played with Legos at our feet, he looked at me as if I were a poltergeist, rattling the silver spoons in the drawer and causing the lights to flick on and off in his marriage. Dinah noticed nothing unusual. Richard made an excuse and left the apartment again, as if he didn’t expect the place to be still standing when he got back.