Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “You’re about to lose an earring, love,” the young man says. “No, the other one.”

  “All the books here are the same color. How do you tell which book is which?”

  “By reading the titles, love. You can read, can’t you?”

  “Asshole.”

  2

  As her other guests arrive, Mimi greets them one by one at the library door and leads them to be introduced to the Mireille Couple, who stand in front of the mirrored bookcases in an impromptu receiving line, rather like a bride and groom, smiling, now, their soon-to-be-famously-seductive Mireille smiles. No one would ever believe that the word asshole had been spat moments earlier from Sherrill’s carefully parted lips. These, of course, are tutored smiles, carefully practiced in front of mirrors and Polaroid cameras, improved upon by dentists and modeling coaches. A word should be inserted here about Mimi’s own smile, which is quite different. It, too, has evolved as a result of a certain amount of practice—we all should practice our smiles from time to time—but Mimi’s smile is a curiously intimate smile, a communicative smile, a smile that seems to have words in it. When Mimi smiles at you, her smile seems to take all of you in, saying, in the process, that you have never looked better, healthier, prouder, more sure of who you are and where you came from; that you, this perfect new you, impeccably put together as you have always wanted to see yourself, are the only person living in the world whom Mimi has ever wanted to see or talk to. Naturally, there is also a reverse effect. When Mimi turns this smile away from you, as she must, you feel that you have been left floating in some limbo, without a friend left in the world. The patroness of that smile has fallen in love with someone else.

  “Aunt Nonie,” Mimi says, “I want you to meet our special guests of honor, Sherrill Shearson and Dirk Gordon. I’ll tell you why they’re going to be so special to us as soon as everybody’s here.… Oh, and here’s Jim Greenway, who’s also special. Jim’s going to write about us in Fortune magazine and so, of course, you’re all under strictest orders to say nothing but the nicest things about us. Mr. Greenway isn’t interested in family skeletons.”

  “Not true. I like family skeletons,” Jim Greenway says.

  “Ah,” Mimi says with a look of mock disappointment. “Then you’re in for a letdown, I’m afraid. This family doesn’t have any skeletons.”

  “Oh, but we do! We do!” cries Granny Flo in her piping voice.

  “Well,” Mimi says with that rich and easy laugh of hers, “if anyone knows which closets they’re hiding in …” Turning from Greenway, she says, “And you must be Mr. Williams, Aunt Nonie’s friend.”

  “Business associate,” he says.

  “How exciting! Later, you must tell us all about it.”

  Felix moves among the guests, taking drink orders, and a maid in a black uniform appears with a tray of canapés.

  “What’s that?” Sherrill whispers to Dirk.

  “It appears to be artichoke bottoms stuffed with caviar.”

  “Ooh, caviar!” She helps herself to one and takes a tentative bite. “Oooh, it’s salty.”

  “Yes, I rather expect it would be.”

  Speaking to whomever might happen to be within earshot, and gazing straight ahead of her with dead, dull eyes, Granny Flo says, “My daughter’s real name is Naomi, after Naomi in the Bible, but everybody has always called her Nonie. When she was a little girl, she was such a stubborn little thing, and I was always saying to her, ‘No, Naomi, no, no, no, no, no.’ And after a while, before she did anything, she’d look at me and say, ‘May I do that, Mama, or is that a nonie?’ And I’d say, ‘No, that’s not a nonie,’ or, ‘Yes, that’s a nonie,’ whichever thing it was she wanted to do, and that’s when I decided to call her Nonie. My husband, Adolph Myerson, used to say I was good at naming things. My newest daughter is only two years old. Her name is Itty-Bitty. That’s right, I’m eighty-nine, and I have a daughter who’s just two years old! She’s my little Yorkie, and she’s as itty-bitty as they come. She weighs just two and a half pounds. She follows me around, wherever I go, and because I’ve lost my eyesight I have to be careful not to step on her, but she seems to understand because she stays just behind me, making little sounds for me to tell me where she is—whiff-whiff-whiff. I thought of naming her Whiffy, but I didn’t. I named her Itty-Bitty. I used to live in a big place, but now I live in a hotel. Itty-Bitty is the only dog who’s allowed to live at the Carlyle. Now my friend, poor Mrs. Perlman, on the other hand.…”

  “Mother, do shut up!” Edwee says.

  Now everyone is here except Brad Moore and Badger, and small conversational groupings have developed in the room. Except for Alice, who stands alone, looking nervous and a little frightened, waiting for her valium to give her a boost of chemical courage, enough to join a conversation. Mimi notices her mother’s discomfort and starts to move toward her, then decides against it. One of the tenets of the Betty Ford Center is that people like her mother should learn to cope with situations on their own. So she settles for a smile of reassurance in her mother’s direction from across the room. Her mother’s response is a hunted look.

  “Yellow tulips!” Granny Flo exclaims, her eyes fixed on empty space in front of her. “Mimi? Where did you find yellow tulips in August, Mimi?”

  “Your eyesight must be improving, Mother,” Nonie says. “How did you know these were yellow tulips?”

  “I’ve learned to see with my nose,” her mother says. “When you lose your eyesight, your other senses get better. I’ve lost my eyesight, but I can see with my nose! I smelled tulips, and I smelled yellow.”

  “I didn’t realize tulips had any odor at all.”

  “You see, Nonie? That’s where you’re wrong.”

  Mimi takes all this in. Another remarkable thing about Mimi is her ability, even at a distance, to follow the drift of a number of different conversations at the same time, to filter them out, as it were, and to discern their implications, even in a much more crowded room than this one. At her dinner parties, she is able to observe, and hear, all her guests at once and, whenever situations seem to be approaching rocky or dangerous shoals, to avert unpleasantnesses with a swift, bright change of topic.

  In one corner of the room, Nonie’s young escort, Roger Williams, has pulled Nonie aside and is saying to her, “What was all that business in the car about? Between your mother and your brother?”

  “Mother and Edwee have been going at each other like that for years,” she says. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Your brother doesn’t like me.”

  “Makes no difference. Edwee’s not the least bit important to our plans. As I told you, the only person you need to make a good impression on is Mother.”

  “I gather your mother has an important art collection?”

  “I suppose so. It’s sort of a mishmash. She’s got some Thomas Hart Bentons, a few Impressionists—a couple of Cézannes, an Utrillo, some Monets, a Goya portrait of some Spanish countess. She got a lot of things in the Depression when they were dirt cheap. She got her four Picassos at a time when Picasso would give you a painting if you bought him dinner.”

  He whistles softly. “It sounds as though some of those might be pretty valuable today.”

  She shrugs. “Maybe so. Art is the one thing I don’t know much about.”

  He nods, frowning slightly, having noted that art is “the one thing” she knows little about.

  “Anyway,” she whispers, “I slipped into the dining room a few minutes ago and changed the place cards. Mimi won’t notice. I placed you next to Mother, so you can work on her. The way we discussed.”

  He nods again.

  “Even though she’s blind, she’s a pushover for younger men.”

  In another part of the room, Jim Greenway is saying to Mimi, “One thing that interests me is what caused the famous rift between your grandfather, Adolph Myerson, and his brother, Leopold, and what caused Leopold to leave the company in nineteen forty-one, never to return. What was it, d
o you know?”

  “I really don’t. It all started before I was born, and in nineteen forty-one I was only three years old. I have only the dimmest recollection of Uncle Leo. There are cousins, of course—Uncle Leo’s children and grandchildren—and some of them are still Miray stockholders. But I’ve never met them. The rift, as you call it, was that complete. Sad, but whatever it was left us a divided family.”

  “Where’s Nonie?” her grandmother suddenly cries, though no one is standing in her immediate vicinity. “Someone take me over to my daughter, Nonie. I want to talk more to that young man she brought. Is she having an affair with him, or what? Does anybody know?”

  In the little silence that follows, Mimi says brightly, “Quick, everybody: come to the window and look at the lake. It’s covered with seagulls. That means there’s a storm out at sea. Whenever there’s a storm on the Atlantic, the seagulls fly in and settle on the lake. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  There is a general movement toward the library window, and a great deal of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the sight of the lake afloat with birds. “Isn’t it nice to have reminders that, after all, we live in a seaport?” Mimi says.

  Edwee moves toward his sister. “Well, that was a charming outburst from our mother, wasn’t it?” he says. “And, speaking of affairs, are you ready for a bit of on dit?”

  “What’s that?” she says.

  “Note that the master of the house has not appeared yet. Well, it seems that Brad Moore has some woman on the West Side.”

  “Has some woman?” she asks, looking puzzled.

  “Is keeping a woman. In her twenties, I’d say. Certainly younger than Mimi. Not bad-looking, in a cheap way.”

  “How do you know this, Edwee?”

  “I was lunching the other day at Le Cirque with Nancy Reagan and Betsey Bloomingdale and another friend, and who should I spot in the farthest, darkest corner of the restaurant? Brad Moore. In very serious conversation with this woman. Their heads were bent together. His hand was on top of hers. She was obviously unhappy. She was weeping. Well, what do you think of that?”

  “How do you know she’s from the West Side?”

  He makes a vague gesture with his right hand. “She had that West Side look. You know—bangs.”

  “Bangs.”

  “A déclassé look. So. Who should be the first to tell our dear little Mimi what’s going on, you or I?”

  “Well, I—”

  Edwee suddenly presses his index finger to his lips. “Ssh!” he says. “He just walked in.”

  Sure enough, Brad Moore has just arrived and greeted his wife with a kiss, and is moving around the room shaking the hands of the male guests and kissing the cheeks of his female in-laws. He is followed very shortly by his son, Badger, who looks, as always, happy and alert and is tugging at the sleeves of his dinner jacket as though he had just tossed it on in the elevator.

  Her guest list complete, Mimi makes a small signal with her hand to Felix, who touches a small button beside the library door. Mimi waits for a few moments to let the scent penetrate the room and is grateful that no one is smoking. Soon the Mireille fragrance will fill the air, and Mimi, ever the practiced impresario, moves toward the center of the room to make her announcement.

  Edwee is still whispering to his sister. “Can you get rid of your young man when this is over?” he says. “I need to talk to you. Alone. As soon as possible. Can you drop by my house for a few minutes after we leave here?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Now Mimi is about to make her little speech, and she begins, “Family, friends …”

  But her grandmother beats her to the punch. “I smell something!” she says loudly. “What is it? It’s perfume. Who’s wearing it?”

  Mimi laughs and claps her hands. “Good for you, Granny,” she says. “Family, friends … the fragrance you may be noticing in the air means that the Miray Corporation is about to embark on an exciting new venture. We’re about to launch our first perfume, and you are the first people outside our boardroom to be exposed to it. You are my special guinea pigs. Sample bottles are at each of your places at the dinner table, but this is the premiere. Now I need you to tell me, honestly, what you think.”

  All noses now are poised in the air to catch the scent.

  “Woodsy,” someone says.

  “Yes, piney.”

  “No, more floral, I’d say.”

  “Beautiful.”

  There is more ooh-ing and ah-ing, and then, led by Mimi’s husband, there is a loud round of applause followed by congratulatory noises.

  “What’s in it?” someone asks.

  “Oh, a bit of vetiver, a touch of clove, verbena, some lemon. But I’m not going to give you the complete formula. That’s a secret, locked in the boardroom safe.”

  “I think it’s more exciting than Giorgio!”

  “Do you? Well, that’s one of the big guns out there that we’re hoping to take on.”

  “What are you going to call it, Mimi?”

  “We experimented with literally hundreds of different names. And in the end we ended up deciding to call it … Mireille.”

  “Lovely!”

  “That’s her real name, you know, Mireille,” Granny Flo says to no one in particular. “Mireille Myerson. She was named after my husband’s company. Miray—Mireille. Get it? I gave her the nickname Mimi when she was a tiny baby because she made a little sound that was like mi-mi-mi-mi-mi!”

  “Now that’s not true, Granny,” Mimi says. “I renamed myself Mimi when I was fourteen, after seeing a performance of La Bohème.”

  “She’s lying,” Granny Flo says cheerfully. “I named her because she was always going ‘mi-mi-mi-mi-mi.’”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” Mimi says. “What matters is that we—you, me, all of us who are stockholders—are going to be in the fragrance business for the first time. And Dirk and Sherrill, who are our special guests tonight, are going to be the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man in all our print advertising and television commercials.”

  There are more congratulatory sounds.

  “Frankly, it smells a little cheap, if you ask me,” Edwee whispers to his sister.

  “But knowing Mimi, it’ll have a fancy price tag.”

  “Oh, we can be sure of that.”

  Now the conversation becomes general again, with much emphasis on analyzing the new scent.

  “I smell the lemon in it.”

  “And cinnamon, too, I suspect.”

  “Rose oil, too.”

  Mimi finds her mother, who has been standing alone and somewhat apart from the others, and says, “Now, aren’t you glad you came, Mother? Isn’t this turning out to be a nice sort of family reunion?”

  “I hate all sorts of family reunions,” Alice says. “I hate this one no less than all the others. No less and no more.”

  The reporter, Jim Greenway, turns to Mimi and touches his glass to hers. “I wish you luck—no, not luck, success—with your new fragrance,” he says.

  “Thank you, Mr. Greenway.”

  “Please call me Jim. And tell me, when you took over the company twenty-five years ago, after your father’s death, did you ever think you’d be so successful?”

  “Never. I was terrified. Just as I’m terrified now.”

  He laughs. “Then terror is the secret of your success?”

  “Absolutely. Terror is the secret of every success. The opposite of terror is complacency, and complacency is the secret of every failure.”

  “I like that,” he says.

  “And you may quote me,” she says, touching his elbow and laughing the pebbly laugh.

  From the doorway, Felix announces, “Dinner is served, madam.”

  Entering the dining room, Mimi immediately notices that the place cards have been changed, and she also knows immediately who must have done it. But she decides to let the seating remain as it is, though she can’t refrain from a slight feeling of annoyance at Aunt Nonie. Nonie is always creating
mischief like this. Let it pass, she thinks. She will not let it disrupt the planned flow of her evening. Now, in the dining room, fingering their Mireille samples, everyone is exclaiming over the packaging.

  “Elegant.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Sophisticated. I love the colors. Black and gold.”

  “And the bottle. A perfect teardrop shape.”

  “Look—the bottle is by Baccarat!”

  “It certainly looks expensive,” Edwee says.

  “Thank you, Uncle Edwee.”

  “Suggested retail is a hundred and eighty dollars an ounce,” young Brad says.

  “I’d pay that.”

  The soup course is served, and Felix moves around the table, pouring the wine. From the head of the table, Bradford Moore turns to his mother-in-law, who is seated on his right, and says, “It’s wonderful to see you, Alice. You’re looking positively radiant tonight.”

  Alice, who actually still looks a bit uncomfortable, despite her valium, covers her wineglass with two fingers of her right hand before Felix can fill it and says, “Why do people keep telling me how wonderful I look, Brad? Is it to remind me of how awful I looked before?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way at all, Alice,” he says. “You always look wonderful.”

  “No, I don’t. You know I always don’t.”

  “Alice is so sensitive,” Granny Flo says to the table at large. “That’s always been Alice’s problem.”

  Hearing this, from the other end of the table Mimi says brightly to everyone, “Once we’d settled on the black-and-gold color scheme for our packaging, we wanted the perfect models—one dark, one fair. And voilà! Sherrill and Dirk!” She lifts her wineglass. “I’d like to propose a toast: to the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man!”

  “Hear, hear.”

  And, half-rising, young Brad says, “And I’d like to propose another: to my brilliant, beautiful, and sexy mother. Here’s to you, Mom!”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “Thank you, Badger.”

  In Nonie’s new arrangement of the seating, her young friend Williams is now placed at Granny Flo’s right, to take advantage of her good ear. “It’s such an honor to be seated next to you, Mrs. Myerson,” he says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”