Gossip

  Chapter 7

  Grace must have been about three when, in some fit of misguided hope, I invited Avis and Dinah to lunch together. It was auction season and a particularly busy day for Avis, as I now know, but she had graciously accepted, realizing that I wanted to repay her in some small measure for her generosity to me. I’d spoken of Dinah to Avis, but she didn’t seem to remember much about her; the older girls at school rarely do remember the younger ones if they hadn’t had a special relationship. It was all the more flattering that Avis had remembered me when it was Dinah who was so vivid. I reasoned that we were all New Yorkers now, and both Dinah and Avis were so accomplished in their different ways, and we had shared that boarding school experience that seemed more and more anachronistic with every passing year. Dinah said it was as if we’d all gone to sleep one night in the world of Edith Wharton and awakened the next morning at Woodstock. Surely that was the basis for a bond. How wrong could it go?

  Dinah and I were already seated when Avis arrived, out of breath, at the brasserie near Beekman Place that I had chosen. I noted with a slightly sinking heart that Avis was wearing a pleated plastic rain hat of a kind that my grandmother kept folded in every purse and raincoat pocket. Dressing like your WASP grandmother was not a thing Dinah was likely to miss or to be kind about. Avis signaled her apologies to us where we sat with our big glasses of beautiful straw-colored wine, looking forward to a long relaxed natter. She wrestled out of her wet coat and rubber rain boots and handed them to the coat check girl.

  “I’m incredibly sorry,” Avis said when she reached the table. She kissed me and shook the hand Dinah held out to her. “One of those phone calls where you say, ‘I really have to go,’ and the person says, ‘Just one more thing,’ and then pins you there for another twenty minutes. And then of course there were no cabs.”

  “We just got here,” I said.

  “It’s so nice to see you, Dinah. It’s been eons.”

  “Nice to see you too,” said Dinah.

  “Will Madame have a glass of wine?” said the waiter at her elbow.

  “Just water, please. Thank you so much.”

  I wished she’d ordered wine. There was a brief silence, during which I did not allow Dinah to catch my eye. I began to recall the things I knew about both these women, Dinah’s satirical nature and Avis’s reserve, to name two, that might have suggested to me in advance that this lunch might not work out the way I had pictured it.

  “So,” said Dinah. “You’re an art dealer.”

  “Yes. I was at Sotheby’s, or Southby’s, as people kept telling me. Park Bern-ay.” It was pronounced BerNETT: short e, hard t. It was Avis’s attempt at a humorous sally, but Dinah didn’t respond. “Now I’m with the Gordon Hall Gallery.”

  “And what’s that like?”

  I recognized Dinah going into interview mode, a way of controlling a conversation that gave her complete cover.

  “Busy.”

  “But fun?”

  Avis looked for a moment as if she’d never considered whether her work was fun. Dinah got tired of waiting.

  “You had an independent study with Mrs. Maffet your senior year,” she said.

  After a surprised pause, Avis said, “Yes. We did Spanish paintings. How on earth did you know that?”

  “You told me.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. You told me that when you went to the Prado and saw Philip the Fourth you burst into tears.”

  A pause. I knew Avis had burst into tears in one of the Velázquez galleries, but she’d told me it wasn’t so much at the paintings as at the thought that she might never get back to the Prado. I could see her wondering why on earth would she have told that to Dinah Kittredge? And when?

  “Dinah remembers everything people say,” I offered. “It’s terrifying.”

  “Tools of the trade,” said Dinah.

  “You’re a journalist,” said Avis, enthusiastically trying to change the subject.

  “I write drivel for the occasional shelter rag,” said Dinah. Another silence. Is there anything quite as off-putting as insincere self-deprecation?

  Gamely, Avis said, “Well, I envy you your memory, mine is terrible.”

  I protested. “You have an incredible memory for images. And music.”

  “But words are so important,” said Avis. Even to me she seemed stiff, as if she couldn’t stop being what Dinah expected her to be.

  Unexpectedly, Dinah gave a snort of laughter.

  “You ladies ready to order?” was a welcome interruption. I ordered steak frites because it was the most expensive dish on the menu, so they would have whatever they wanted. Dinah ordered steak frites as well, and Avis ordered a lettuce salad.

  Avis said, “I read about a woman who died and came back. One of those near-death things? She was looking down at her own body on the operating table.”

  “And she saw a long white tunnel?” asked Dinah. I could hear the sardonic undertone, meaning, Please, lady, don’t be completely predictable.

  “Not at all,” said Avis. “What she saw were the words people used as they yelled orders at each other. She saw the words themselves as if they had lives of their own, or weight or size. She said that if people understood how powerful words are, they would use them much more carefully.”

  “I thought sticks and stones would break my bones but names would never hurt me.”

  “Apparently that’s wrong.”

  “My god, what’s next?” said Dinah. “A stitch in time doesn’t save nine?”

  Dinah the Mean. I’d forgotten that that Dinah might appear. Avis looked down at her silverware. She is incapable of being deliberately rude, and there was no polite way to respond. Three is such an unstable number, I thought unhappily. Why had I thought this would be comfortable for anyone except me?

  The food arrived, and I decided, not quite hopeless yet, to launch a change of subject.

  “Doesn’t it seem a century ago that we were all locked up at Miss Pratt’s? To me it seemed like something out of Jane Eyre.”

  “Oh,” said Avis gratefully, “that’s just what I thought! I was so homesick I wanted to weep, most of the time.”

  “My home wasn’t much to long for, but I certainly badly wanted something else. To be grown up, probably, but I blamed the school.”

  Avis and I were warming to our topic. She said, “I was used to having the city as my backyard. I missed the Met, I missed the symphony, I missed the art house cinema on weekends.”

  “I thought the whole thing was kind of a hoot,” said Dinah.

  I knew perfectly well she had hated every minute of it. Avis, caught up short, didn’t seem to know what to do.

  “You did not,” I said.

  “I did. I decided to see if I could break every rule in their pompous little book without getting kicked out, and except for never having a boy in my room, I think I did it.”

  Avis looked bewildered. “You smoked?”

  “Practically every weekend.”

  “Where?” She seemed actually shocked.

  “In the woods, up on the skater’s loop.”

  “You didn’t drink,” I said.

  “Yes, I did. A friend from Yale sent me a cough syrup bottle full of gin. Lollie Ford and I drank it in the bathroom one Sunday while you were all at hymns.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well,” I said, “the world has changed so much, it all seems quaint now. Think of life before the Pill, or Our Bodies, Ourselves, or Ms. magazine. Before women could be doctors and lawyers—”

  Avis broke in, “Isn’t it true? And it’s not just women in professions . . . in our parents’ world, the professions themselves weren’t really acceptable, were they? Somehow gentlemen lawyers were all right, but when you were growing up, did your parents know doctors or schoolteachers socially?”

  My heart had sunk into my shoes. I was saying to myself, Dinah, don’t say it, please don’t say it, when Dinah said, “My father is a schoolteacher.”


  As soon as the dishes were cleared, Avis left us, with apologies.

  “Probably late for her Colonial Dames meeting,” Dinah said as we watched her leave the restaurant in her wet raincoat and pleated bonnet.

  I said, “That’s not fair.”

  There was another stiff silence until the waiter came with our coffees and a crème brûlée for Dinah.

  As she dug in, Dinah said, “I’m sorry, but to tell a gossip writer that words are weapons? Bombs or something?”

  “She was trying to pay you a compliment. You’re a writer. She just meant to say she admires what you do.”

  “My god, if doctors and teachers are ‘the help’ in her scheme of things, what does that make writers?”

  “You know that’s not what she meant. She meant that was her parents’ world and she’s glad that it’s dead and gone.”

  “I doubt it.” Dinah laughed her big rattling laugh, but it wasn’t warm. “Jeez, I’m sorry I never met her parents. They must have been a treat and a half. Why does she always look as if she just smelled something on your shoe?”

  “She doesn’t. She’s just a little more formal than we are.”

  “Form follows function.”

  “Dinah, this woman is a friend of mine,” I said, finally showing an annoyance that Dinah rarely saw, since we both knew that I relied on Dinah far more than the other way around. I added, “Besides, I agree with her. Words are weapons.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. And lunch was delicious, thank you. The rain’s stopped. I’ll walk you back to work.”

  Avis had to work quite late that night, I learned the next day, as she had to bid on two different lots for her most important client. There was a Rembrandt portrait in the sale, one that had been lost for centuries, given away to satisfy debts when the artist declared bankruptcy. It had been rediscovered in 1910 when a British dealer spotted it in a bedroom at a country inn near Amsterdam. Since then it had come up for public sale once, and would after that night most likely go to a public collection; there were very few late Rembrandts still in private hands.

  With virtually no comparables, it had been tricky to predict what it would fetch, Avis explained when she called to thank me for lunch. If Greenwood hadn’t gotten it, there was a Goya he was interested in, and she was also bidding on an altarpiece for a client in Europe. What she didn’t say, but I realized with regret, was that the time she had taken for lunch probably meant she hadn’t been able to get home to see Grace before the auction began. I hoped she’d at least been able to call to kiss her good night over the phone.

  Chapter 8

  Naturally, Dinah and Avis crossed paths from time to time, as we all did in the village that is the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There was the odd cocktail party or book fair sponsored by Miss Pratt’s, and the Brick Church Christmas carol party that filled its whole block of Park Avenue, or the members’ evenings at the Met Museum. There was a period when the only place to get the French sunblock our dermatologists made us wear was at Clyde’s Chemist on Madison. But Dinah developed a painfully accurate imitation of Avis’s speech patterns after my ill-starred attempt to bring them together, so I stopped mentioning Avis to Dinah.

  Sometimes Dinah would ask after my friend Mrs. Gotrocks, although I explained that Avis earned her own keep; Harrison’s money was all in trust for his children and grandchildren; he just got an allowance. Avis continued to ask kindly after Dinah and she often praised Dinah’s work to me if she’d read a piece of hers in some magazine. Once she even made an introduction for her to a society friend whose apartment Dinah wanted to write up. It wasn’t done through me; Dinah called Avis herself and asked her for the favor.

  Magazine writing was Dinah’s solution to how to work but not make enough money that Richard might petition the court to reduce her alimony. She liked best writing about food, both cooking and eating, and had a biweekly restaurant column in New York magazine. She wrote about exotic cuisines and dining out on a budget. Three or four of us would go to deepest Queens or Brooklyn to eat Thai food, or Vietnamese, or Ethiopian, all still quite exotic to New Yorkers in the early 1980s, and order everything on the menu. For years my refrigerator was perpetually crammed with third-world leftovers.

  Some people think it’s a dream job, but I could never have done what Dinah did. Could you? Eat tripe and brains and big fried ants? Dinah would try anything. And I hate having to eat when I’m not hungry. Dinah is always hungry, it was one of the things that made her so much fun. She did, of course, put on weight. Even after the column was canceled she still worked the beat; she liked to try foods she’d never tasted before and then duplicate them at home. I remember a Chinese sauce she worked on for years before she was sure she’d gotten it right. She claimed that the secret ingredient was mayonnaise.

  Dinah enjoyed being the go-to girl when you wanted to know the hottest little undiscovered bistro, but the writing that paid her best was for the house-and-garden crowd. Her apprenticeship in the women’s pages ghetto served her well. Dinah is shrewd about knowing what makes a design really sing, finding new words for things that have been described a hundred times before. It’s thankless work; you’re trying to do with words what is being done better by pictures right there on the same page in living color. Watch women under the dryers at hair salons and try to find someone reading the copy in those magazines. You’ll wait a long time. Maybe that’s why the magazines have to pay the writers so much.

  Few do it as well as Dinah, but she was far more interested in writing a cookbook and even had a contract for a while, though it was canceled when she took too long and the market changed. She was doing too many things at once. Next she was going to write a life of one of Andy Warhol’s Factory Girls, but the woman got annoyed with Dinah’s disorganization and withdrew permission for Dinah to use her diaries, and the diaries were pretty much the whole point for the publisher.

  Dinah had recovered her balance, however. She had a new beau named Fred, one of the rotating band who went to the restaurants with her. He was an architect doing mostly interiors whom she met when she wrote up a house he designed. He was a bit of a fusspot but devoted to her. They’d been together something like five years when she showed up without him at a new Mexican fusion place we were trying. She was defiant.

  “Is Fred coming later?”

  “No,” said Dinah and ordered enough food for six people.

  “Are you two all right?”

  “No. I mean yes, we’re both fine, but we’re not together at the moment.”

  “Oh Dinah! I’m so sorry!”

  “Don’t be. He’ll be back.”

  The room was bright, a sunburnt yellow, with loud mariachi music issuing from a speaker right above our heads to convey the impression that the room was full of life, though fairly empty of customers. The waiter brought us enormous margaritas, one pink and one blue.

  Dinah looked dubious. “What did we order?”

  “One has cassis.”

  “What’s the other one? Antifreeze?”

  I tasted it. “Grapefruit.”

  “Really?” She switched glasses with me and sipped. She stooped over and rummaged in her bag on the floor. When she had made her surreptitious notes, she sat up again and applied fresh scarlet lipstick.

  “I think we should order one of each flavor,” she said. There had been about seven on the menu.

  “No.”

  “Wasn’t one made with chocolate?”

  “Dinah, what happened with Fred?”

  “He wants to get married.”

  “To you.”

  “Of course to me.”

  She said it as if it were simply tedious of him. How did people get people to propose to them all the time?

  “Why isn’t that good?”

  A raft of appetizers arrived, and Dinah fell upon them, full of clinical interest. Avoidance patrol.

  “Hey. Honey?”

  She finished her margarita and started on mine.

  “He’s never had children.
He doesn’t relate to the boys.”

  “Does he want children?”

  “He says he does.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I have children.”

  “Lucky you.”

  She looked at me sharply. I was sorry I’d said it.

  She said, “I’m not saying never again. But not right now. And I don’t see Fred as a father, frankly.”

  “That’s an awfully big decision to make for somebody else.”

  “Well, he agrees with you. But he’ll be back.”

  We chewed in silence for a minute; then Dinah disappeared into her purse again. When she resurfaced, she said, “So how are your friends, the Gotrocks?” and I let the subject of Fred drop.

  Weeks later I ran into Fred at MoMA. It was an evening preview of an Anselm Kiefer show, and I was waiting for my friend, when I saw a familiar ursine figure planted before a painting with his feet apart and hands clasped behind his back. He was alone. When he turned from the post-Apocalypse landscape he’d been contemplating and saw me perched on a bench in the middle of the room, what interest he’d had in the art evaporated. He took a seat beside me and began talking about Dinah. He was furious. I had to keep reminding him to lower his voice, as all around us artistic women in black costumes of their own devising involving knits and netting and deep black smudges around their eyes, turned to look askance as his torrent of words interrupted the reverent hum of culture being consumed.

  “What did she tell you? You were with her that night at the restaurant? I was supposed to go with you, I was at the apartment, we were going together. What did she say?”

  “Not very much. She seemed upset.”

  “Upset? She should be upset! You think she was upset? What did she tell you, why did she say I wasn’t there?”

  With my eyes I indicated the art lovers turning to stare, and he said, “Sorry,” in a lower tone. “She didn’t tell you what happened?”

  I shook my head. He plunged onward.