VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “Do you recognize this man?” Cardozo held out the photograph of Jodie Downs.

  Ash Canfield’s blue eyes gazed out from under a fluff of graying hair. Her eyelids were heavy and low, the eyes sunken in, dark and lifeless, like ice cubes made of stagnant pond water. The whites of her eyes were startlingly luminous. She had developed night sweats after detox and had spent three weeks in intensive care, battling 106-degree fevers. Her doctor hadn’t allowed Cardozo to visit till today, when her fever was down to 101.

  “Who is that?” She had a blank, baffled look.

  Next, Cardozo showed her the photo of Claude Loring. “Do you know this man?”

  Ash had been cranked up to a sitting position. The pillows she was propped on kept slipping awry. She was wearing a beaded ivory silk satin nightgown over white satin pajamas.

  “He … should … dress … better.”

  An IV had been inserted into a vein in her forearm and from it a tube looped up to a steel pole, where a plastic bag of glucose hung. The clear fluid seeped drop by drop into her bloodstream. Through another tube oxygen ran from a wall outlet into her nose.

  Cardozo held out the photo of the black leather mask. “Have you ever seen this mask?”

  She smiled. “Halloween.”

  “You saw this mask on Halloween?”

  “Mary,” she said. “Mary Queen. Queen of Scots.”

  A medicine tray on the table beside the bed held a collection of pills that looked like the purse of a hophead on a spree. There were little paper cups of Valium and phenobarbital, enough to make even an elephant feel vague.

  Cardozo leaned closer and spoke very clearly. “Did anyone ever borrow your lipstick? Or steal it? Did you ever lose it?”

  Ash’s breathing became more rapid. She stared at him, and now she was smiling.

  “She’s no good today,” Babe said from the chair in the corner of the room. Her face was worn and exhausted and pale.

  Cardozo didn’t want to look at that. It hurt him too much to look at the pain she was feeling for her friend.

  There was a knock on the open door, and without waiting for an answer, a well-dressed woman came into the room. Long-faced and tanned, with crisply waving auburn hair, she moved tall and slim and light, with a horseback rider’s grace.

  She crossed to the bed and kissed the top of Ash’s head, laying her cheek for an instant on the damp, downy hair. “How are you feeling, Sis?”

  Ash smiled.

  “Dina,” Babe said, “this is a friend of Ash’s and mine—Vince Cardozo. Vince, Dina Alstetter—Ash’s sister.”

  Mrs. Alstetter smiled politely at Cardozo. She had keen, take-in-everything blue-gray eyes. There was something urbane and intelligent in the set of the mouth.

  “How do you do.” She had the sort of New York voice that insinuated all sorts of money and ease, and she gave Cardozo the feeling that she wanted something—maybe nothing more than to be alone with her sister, but still she wanted it very badly.

  She began pulling goodies out of a Channel 13 totebag, holding them up for Ash to see.

  Ash’s gaze moved slowly, following each object: a beautifully wrapped package of Opium perfume. Hugely oversized magazines and newspapers—the newest Interview, the newest W. A half dozen ripe pears, sitting in a basket of excelsior. Walkman cassettes, which Mrs. Alstetter named as she brought them out and set them on the table. “Bobby Short, Bobby Short, and a Furtwängler reissue—Schubert. Just the stuff you need to get well again.”

  She lifted the cover from Ash’s untouched dinner.

  “What kind of specials are they tempting us with today? Looks like roast pork with sweet red cabbage and …”

  She dipped a pinkie into the other vegetable and tapped her tongue to the tip.

  “Squash puree. Any of that appeal to you?”

  “She wasn’t hungry,” Babe said.

  “We’ll see.” Mrs. Alstetter took the knife and fork and began expertly dissecting the meat into baby-bite pieces. She held a piece of pork to Ash’s lips.

  Ash shook her head.

  “She won’t touch a thing,” Babe said.

  “Okay, starve yourself to death.” Mrs. Alstetter stuck out her tongue at her sister. “Feel like talking?”

  Ash shook her head again.

  Mrs. Alstetter took the copy of W, deposited herself in a chair, and lit a cigarette.

  “You shouldn’t,” Babe said. “Ash is on oxygen.”

  “I won’t wave it in her face.”

  The fourth cigarette was one third ash when the doctor came into the room, trailed by an assistant and a nurse. “Now, now, Mrs. Alstetter, no smoking while your sister’s on oxygen.”

  “Sorry.” She stubbed out her cigarette.

  The doctor greeted the others with the sort of friendliness that wasted no time, then leaned over his patient. He lifted Ash’s wrist and timed her pulse against the digital second readout of his gold chunk of a Rolex watch.

  He patted Ash’s arm encouragingly and whispered something to the nurse, who made a notation on the patient’s chart.

  “Could I trouble you people to leave the room for a moment?” he said.

  In the hallway Cardozo watched Dina Alstetter light another cigarette.

  “Ash isn’t looking well,” Babe said.

  Dina Alstetter’s lips pulled together into a thin, frustrated line. “She’s getting the best treatment—Dr. Tiffany’s tops, he’s state of the art.”

  “What’s the matter with your sister?” Cardozo said.

  “Would you believe that after all the blood tests and X rays and biopsies and bronchoscopies, all the EKGs and CAT scans, they still don’t know for sure? There’s a possibility of Tourette’s syndrome.”

  Cardozo had a cousin with Tourette’s who broke into facial tics and uncontrollable cursing at odd moments; but the man weighed a hefty two hundred twenty pounds. “Isn’t the weight loss a little out of line with Tourette’s?”

  Dina Alstetter nodded. “Some kind of brain disorder is bringing on the seizures, but if anyone knows anything more than that, they’re sure as hell not telling me. I’m not next of kin, you see.” Bitterness curled her voice. “Dunk is next of kin. He gets the news, not me. It’s so damned unfair. Dunk and Ash are practically divorced and he’s still next of kin.”

  “What are the doctors telling Dunk?” Babe said.

  “Who knows? The bastard’s in France, can you believe it?”

  The doctor and his team came out of Ash’s room.

  “How’s she doing?” Dina Alstetter asked with a bright tone and an anxious, uncertain smile.

  Judging by the doctor’s expression, and discounting for the medical profession’s ability to maintain a poker face, Cardozo estimated that Lady Ash’s prospects were somewhere between negligible and none.

  “She’s tired,” Dr. Tiffany said. “You’d better let her rest.”

  Dina Alstetter absorbed the lack of information quietly. “May we say good-bye?”

  “Of course. Just don’t take too long.”

  With hugs and assurances Babe kissed Ash good-bye. “See you tomorrow, sweetie. Be good.”

  Dina Alstetter stood staring at her sister, and then, slowly, her eyes began to tear over. “You two go along,” she said. “Don’t wait for me. I want to sit with Ash.”

  Halfway to the elevator, Babe said, “She’s acting as though Ash were already dead.”

  “How long has Ash been this way?” Cardozo asked.

  “I honestly can’t say. It’s all been so damnably gradual. Ash has always been crazy—you’ve seen her, you know how she can be—infantile rages, no discipline, no realism at all. When she was a child, everyone said ‘It’s a stage; she’ll grow out of it.’ Then they said ‘It’s adolescence, she’ll grow out of it.’ Later they said ‘It’s her drinking,’ and no one said she’d grow out of that. Then her conversation got more and more bizarre. She’d change mood or subject right in the middle of a sentence. Go from laughter to tears, from the K
ing of Siam to the cost of living in eight syllables. Everyone said ‘See what happens when you do too much coke?’ In the last few months it got far worse. There’ve been times she didn’t recognize people, or couldn’t find the word for something that was right in front of her, or called things by a completely wrong word—like giraffe for coffee. There wasn’t even Freudian sense to it.”

  “Have the doctors ruled out stroke?”

  “They haven’t ruled it out, but they say there’s got to be something more. Stroke wouldn’t explain the weight loss.”

  It was sunny outside the hospital, with puffs of white clouds looking like splats of Reddi Wip in the blue sky. The winds of autumn were here, nipping like little dogs, and the trees were beginning to give up their leaves.

  Babe turned up the collar of her coat. Crossing to the parking lot, Cardozo took her arm. They stopped at the gray Rolls.

  “You love her very much,” he said.

  “She’s my childhood. She’s my youth. She’s all the years I missed.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I hate to say what I’m thinking. I hate myself for thinking it.”

  “Think it. Say it.”

  She stared at him, her eyes wide, her head slightly lowered. “The way she was today—it’s something new, and it’s bad … and it’s not going to go away.”

  He put a finger under her chin. “Hey, what ever happened to hope?”

  Her mouth opened a little wider, and she nodded just a little.

  He reached for her quickly and she clung to him, pressing her face into his chest.

  42

  IN ROOM 1227 OF the Vanderbilt Pavilion, Dina Alstetter sat on a small armchair two feet from the bed, watching the IV drip into the anorexic bundle of bones that her sister had become.

  She stubbed out her seventh cigarette.

  She loaded a fresh cassette into her recorder and pulled the chair nearer to the bed. There was no sound in the sickroom but the faint whirring of the tape.

  She held the recorder two inches from Ash’s mouth.

  “Ash, can you hear me? This is important. Please try to focus. I have to ask you something.”

  There was a stab in Gordon Dobbs’s heart when he saw Ash looking so tiny in that bed, smiling her heartbreaking, lopsided little grin.

  She must have lost forty pounds, he calculated. Her hair was a gray-blond wisp bound with tortoiseshell clips. Shock welled up in him, and he put more wish than conviction into his greeting.

  “Ash—great to see ya, hon.”

  There was a deep haze in the blue skies of what had been her eyes and he wasn’t sure she recognized him.

  He slid into a chair near the bed.

  Ash was still smiling at him with that eager, childlike quality of hers, as though he were the magician at a birthday party who was going to pop a furry white miracle out of a top hat for her. He adjusted the press in his trouser legs and reached across to pat her hand.

  He decided to begin with fluff. There was nothing like fluff for teasing smiles out of an invalid.

  He talked to her about debs, show biz, newcomers, duchesses and gossip columnists, the two news anchors on different networks who were having a hot lesbian affair that was the talk of Mortimer’s.

  He was trying very hard to be an easy person to be with, but she looked at him as though his clothes were slipping off.

  “What happened to Mama’s dog?” she said.

  He blinked, his face aching from the ready-to-guffaw expression he was powerless to keep it from taking on. “How many guesses do I get?”

  She stared at him.

  The impulse to flee was beating in his veins.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  Whatever she meant by that, he decided to take it as a cue for a description of the week’s top parties—the usual smorgasbords of pedigrees, brains, fame, and nouveau Nueva.

  She seemed to be following, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Look, I figured I could stop at Integral Yoga and get two pounds of tofu,” Dobbsie said, “or I could dig up some really fun yummies. So guess where we’re going. We’re going to Archibald’s! Faith Banks has reserved us the front table! Shall we start with an aperitif?”

  He clapped his hands, and Felicien, the maître d’ from Archibald’s, entered, carrying a silver tray with a bottle of Evian and two small glasses. Sal, his young assistant, brought the ice and lime and laid two formal lunch settings—one on Ash’s hospital table and the other on a portable buffet table for Dobbsie. With a flourish, Felicien poured two glasses of mineral water.

  Dobbsie raised his glass. “Health.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Ash said.

  The appetizer was petite pastry shells heaped with gray beluga caviar, each topped with a quail egg. He watched Ash, wanting to be able to tell Tina Vanderbilt how well she was handling a fork. She didn’t touch her food and she didn’t chuckle once at his stories.

  “There’s a new game,” he said, “making up names for people—but it has to be an article of clothing. Are you ready? The Von Auersbergs are the Newport blazers. Isn’t that too much? Well, you remember those parties they gave at Clarendon Court last summer. The Pendletons are the Saratoga breechers, that’s cheating a little, but Merce de la Renta thought it up and it really fits. The Fords are the Grosse Pointe loafers. Get it? Okay—who are Bill and Pat Buckley?”

  No reaction.

  “I’ll give you a hint. Stamford.”

  She sat in a deep lethargy, saying nothing.

  Dobbsie wolfed his dessert, fresh raspberries with crème Chantilly flavored with just a zeste of Benedictine—a secret he’d coaxed out of the chef at Grand Vefour in Paris. He managed to keep a semblance of patter going, but it was like playing both sides of the tennis net at once.

  “I mean, you see Henry Kissinger’s Frau curtsying to this princess who is dressed so grotesquely, and you have to ask yourself, who is fooling whom? Well, they’re not fooling us old foxes, are they, hon.”

  There didn’t seem much purpose in continuing what had become a monologue, especially when the audience had drifted away to some other universe.

  He wiped his mouth and carefully folded Mrs. Banks’s beautiful Pierre Deux napkin.

  Ash was staring, of all things, at a lipstick tube. It shocked Dobbsie to see what an effort thinking had become for her. Her brow was drawn painfully, her eyes were blinking.

  “Dobbsie,” she said, “you know everything. Who was it who was asking me about this lipstick?”

  “I don’t know, hon.” He leaned close, but didn’t kiss her. “Bye-bye—kiss kiss. Don’t worry about the dishes, Felicien’s man will be in to pick them up. Love you much, hon, come back to us soon.”

  Stepping into the hallway, Dobbsie felt he’d come out of a sweat-box. He loosened his silk cravat. His shirt must have shrunk a full size in there.

  Felicien’s man—everyone knew his name was Sal, but they called him Felicien’s man—was waiting in the hallway, reading the princess of Yugoslavia’s memoirs.

  “You can clear the plates,” Dobbsie said.

  He found Dina Alstetter in the hallway, smoking a cigarette.

  “And look at you, Deenie, in your green plaid Scaasi suit all jazzed up with that platinum Bulgari squiggle pin.”

  “We have to talk.” She seized his arm.

  The visitors’ waiting room was a ferociously cheery place cluttered with striped blue and yellow chairs and matching inflatable animals. There was a pot in the coffeemaker. Dina closed the door, leaning her weight on it.

  “I talked a lot of froufrou,” Dobbsie said. “That story about Alice Mason—I could have used that in a column, but I gave it to Ash instead and people are going to just adore her for it.”

  “I wanted you to see for yourself how sick she is,” Dina said. “They’re saying her blood gas is very low—she’ll have to be put on a respirator.”

  “Jesus—is she terminal?”

  “There’s no wa
y she can recover.”

  Dobbsie poured himself a Styrofoam cup of coffee that he absolutely did not need and dumped in two teaspoons of sugar that he absolutely should not have had.

  “That bastard Dunk hasn’t visited, hasn’t phoned, hasn’t written. He’s dumped her.”

  Cream, Dobbsie decided. What the hell, go for it. “I must say, even for Dunk, that’s remarkable.”

  “He can’t be allowed to get away with it. Promise you won’t let him.”

  The one subject Dobbsie had ever known Dina Alstetter to wax a tad tiresome over was her brother-in-law—all because Dunk had taken her to bed a few times and then married her sister. Why couldn’t Dina forgive Dunk his preferences and let the story die, instead of constantly drawing the whole world’s attention to what was really a rather pedestrian jilt-and-switch? A woman who had published in The New Yorker had no business obsessing over a man who had gone to Harrow on scholarship.

  “Deenie dearie, what the hell control do I have over Dunk?”

  “You can put it in your column—after she’s dead.”

  The little nightlamp cast a pale circle of light around the sick woman.

  Her breathing made a sound as though her ribs had cracked, each inhalation digging a splinter of bone deeper into her lungs.

  Dina Alstetter sat motionless, slightly slumped in a chair with her hands folded in her lap.

  Babe knelt next to Ash, whispering “I’m here,” stroking her arm, staring at that thin, beautiful, very old, and strangely, unexpectedly wise face. It was the face of Ash at thirty-six, but it was also Ash at ninety-six, Ash who had leapt in two weeks to that brink of farewell.

  The gray New York dawn slid through the canted blinds, striping the hospital bed where Ash Canfield lay in coma. She had developed embolisms in both lungs. Beneath the blue satin De la Renta robe her body was covered with monitoring electrodes.

  Her temperature registered 105.5 Her pulse made a faint, irregular blip on an amber screen. The respirator beside the bed forced air through a tube into her throat and down into lungs that had long since given up all effort.

  Ash was moving her lips, trying to force sound out.