He got up and crossed his office to the tank. A sharp rap on the glass startled one giant tetra, but the other fish merely regarded him with logy disdain. He’d been rapping on the tank a lot lately.
Lily unbuttoned her blouse and wished she’d had the foresight to turn off the overhead light. How long had it been since she’d undressed in front of a man other than Barnett, who had seldom looked up from his research reports as she disrobed at night? Between breaking up with Larry at nineteen and marrying Barnett at twenty-five, there had been several men, but her body had been flawless then and undressing had been part of the turn-on for her, the bestowal of the prize. Now, despite all the squats and crunches and missiles launched at her abdominals, it was something to be gotten through.
Larry seemed to feel no such qualms. He undid only the top two buttons of his oxford shirt and pulled it over his head, as if he couldn’t wait to be naked. Well, he was a man—men could go to seed and it didn’t seem to matter, though he looked, she had to admit, wonderful, a bit fleshier than the last time they’d been undressed together, but the basic structure was still intact: tall, long-legged, narrow-shouldered and -hipped, a bit furrier now at the chest and thighs but his back, thank God, was smooth.
It had started with a chaste kiss in the Broadway Nut Shoppe (to which she’d hurried from the Banana Republic—fruits were the theme of the day, apparently). “When do you close?” she’d whispered to him. It was the money at work, the fake money, her money. She felt reckless and powerful and anxious and horny as all hell.
“Twenty minutes.” When she frowned, he quickly added, “Actually, we’re closing early today.”
He flipped the hanging sign on the front door to WE’LL BE BACK SOON as she walked to the back room. When he rejoined her, her blouse was off.
“Now, this brings back memories.”
Back then, Larry’s father would occasionally leave then alone in the Nut Shoppe after school while he went down the block to the bank. Within moments they’d be naked in the back room, Lily’s back pressed against the wall, Larry’s hands cupping her ass, drawing her up and into him; five minutes later they’d be back behind the counter, dressed but still panting.
He unfastened her bra, loosened her belt, unzipped and unbuttoned her pants, then pulled them and her panties down in one smooth movement. She almost lost her balance.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to rush you, but it’s not like twenty years ago,” he said. “I need to strike while the iron is hot.”
She glanced down at his iron, which was unquestionably hot, and hurriedly kicked off her pants and panties.
Peggy was watching the remaining moments of the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour (as she still thought of it, even though one of them, McNeil or Lehrer, she could never remember which, had left the show years ago) on the small television in her bedroom, her sole remaining zone of privacy, when Lily knocked on the door.
“Okay if I come in?”
“Wait, I’ll get dressed,” Peggy shouted, then added, “Monroe, you old goat, get off me and put some clothes on.”
“Oh…I’ll come back.”
“I was joking. Come in.”
Lily entered looking tentative. Did her daughter really imagine they were having sex? It was gratifying to be thought sexually active at seventy-six, even by one’s daughter, but Lily’s obliviousness to her father’s deterioration was unsettling. The man could hardly move his bowels without assistance—did Lily really think he was up for sex, no pun intended?
“I was wondering if you’d had dinner.”
“You-know-who fed the children some sort of gristly stew with the mashed potatoes dumped right on top.”
“Shepherd’s pie,” Lily said.
“Well, she didn’t offer us any, not that I would have touched it.”
“I thought we might go out for a bite.”
“Out?”
“My treat.”
“Did you win the lottery?”
“I think I can still afford to take my parents to dinner once in a while.”
Peggy forced herself not to respond. Only that afternoon Lily had raided her pocketbook for forty dollars. Now she seemed like a different woman.
“What happened to you all of a sudden? Where have you been all afternoon, robbing a bank?”
“Oh…” She glanced away, but an embarrassed smile pulled at the edges of her mouth. “I was in the park. There was a beautiful grosbeak…”
“We used to know a Grosbeak from temple,” Peggy said, rather than point out that Lily’s binoculars had never left the apartment. One thing about living in a bunker; it was a cinch keeping track of everything and everyone. “Well, okay, but just the two of us. I don’t think your father’s up for a night out.”
Twenty-one
Rosemary felt disoriented as she surveyed the dinner menu at Hoyle’s. Braised beef cheeks, pan-sautéed skate on polenta, roasted free-range quail. Hoyle’s had been her regular haunt during most of her career at Atherton’s, famous for the spicy inter-table art-world chitchat and bland food, but the menu had completely changed in her eight month absence.
“I don’t recognize any of this stuff,” she told Lloyd. “What happened to the meat loaf?”
“That menu was older than most of the stuff we sell,” Lloyd said. “Anyway, the chef died and they—”
“Eddie Garnett?”
“At the stove, with his hand on a sauté pan. Heart attack, apparently. They found him covered with béchamel sauce. I mean, who even wants béchamel sauce anymore?”
“He made creamed spinach when I was pregnant, just for me.”
“Anyway, merci buckets for coming, you know how Esme Hollander adores you.”
Rosemary put down the menu.
“What does she have?”
“I don’t know. She’s being her usual mysterious self, stringing us along for a free dinner. Don’t you hate it when rich people act cheap? It’s so discouraging.”
Thrifty Esme Hollender appeared a few minutes later. She was one of the those tiny, quiet, ancient women, invariably swaddled in layers of jackets, sweaters, and scarves and laden with bags and packages of unfathomable content, who somehow manage to cause a commotion when entering a room, emanating, like a small child, the prospect of overturned china and raised voices.
She took several wrong turns in the large and crowded dining room, having peevishly waved off the maître d’s offer of an escort. She found their table after a slow tour of the restaurant and proffered a pink cheek, which Rosemary dutifully pecked. It felt like fine calfskin. Lloyd aimed for the same cheek but Esme, getting up on tippy-toes, reached around his neck, her arms still burdened with bags, and directed his lips directly onto hers.
“You’re looking well, Esme,” Lloyd said when he’d extricated himself, a gash of scarlet lipstick across his mouth. As she unburdened herself of the bags, he discreetly napkinned his mouth.
“I feel well,” she said, lowering herself into the chair with a long, aspirated sigh. “Where’s the waiter with my drink?”
A waiter appeared almost instantly with a glass of sherry, half of which she took care of in one swill. She was a small, birdlike woman in her eighties, always fussily coifed like a First Lady from an earlier era, with skin so smooth and almost translucently pale, she brought to mind some exotic, milky species, newly discovered in a rain-forest cave, that had never seen sunlight. She had on her usual getup: a floral-patterned silk dress, pearl choker and earrings, and a watch encrusted with so many improbably large diamonds, it was a miracle she could hoist the sherry to her lips.
Esme was the daughter of the late Frederick Packard, who’d invented an obscure valve or gauge that was still an indispensable part of the internal combustion engine. His autobiography, published in the 1950s and entitled The Importance of Unimportance, became a Bible of sorts for people on the make in the postwar boom. Rosemary had trudged through it while courting Esme Hollender. She learned that one had a lot more pricing control and security in making a smal
l, “unimportant” component of a much larger entity, such as an automobile engine, than an important one. After the book’s publication, the U.S. Patent Office was briefly flooded with applications for newfangled gaskets and grommets.
Frederick Packard’s only child, Esme, was plain in every sense, but she had a large enough fortune to attract a presentable, if reputedly homosexual, husband, who devoted his life to satisfying his obsession with art glass. Neither Esme nor her two grown children had much interest in the stuff, so when Alden Hollender died four years ago, Esme had contacted Atherton’s for an estimate of the collection’s potential worth. She was staggered to learn that Alden’s folly might attract five million dollars at auction, but she’d been coy about letting the collection go, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of obsequious attention and free meals from Lloyd Lowell.
“I’ve brought you something!” she said with a coquettish lift of her penciled eyebrows.
“Reeeally?” Lloyd’s tongue made a quick tour of his lips. “Might I see it?”
She reached for a small shopping bag on the floor, but the arrival of the waiter distracted her. He recited the day’s specials, took her order for another sherry and Rosemary’s for a club soda, and left them alone.
“I can’t help thinking I’m betraying Alden, even contemplating selling the collection.”
According to art world scuttlebutt, Alden had betrayed her with half the call boys in New York. Rosemary wondered if Esme didn’t perhaps have designs on Lloyd himself, another homosexual with a keen eye for art nouveau.
“And then there are the children. They grew up surrounded by these things. So much beauty…” She smiled wistfully and drained her sherry just as the waiter arrived with its replacement.
The “children,” two “private investors” in their late fifties living off vastly diminished trust funds set up by their grandfather, had contacted Lloyd, separately, to enlist his aid in prying the collection from their mother.
“You could donate a few pieces to the Met in their names,” Rosemary suggested, not for the first time.
“You look tired, Lloyd,” Esme said, placing a hand on his. “What’s been keeping you up nights?” She pursed her lips provocatively.
“The art nouveau market’s red-hot,” Rosemary said, doing her part to steer the conversation back to the mission at hand.
“There’s no sense of tradition anymore,” said Esme. “My father wasn’t much of a collector, but I treasure the few things he left me. He was too busy building his business to dwell on aesthetics. Have you read his autobiography, The Importance—”
“You mentioned a vase…”
“Oh, yes.” She reached to her left, but once again the waiter appeared, this time to take their food orders. Esme glanced at the menu and ordered a Porterhouse steak with truffles, by far the most expensive item on the menu. She’d leave Hoyle’s with all but two bites packaged in a doggie bag.
“Vase?” Lloyd said the moment the waiter left them.
“No thank you.” Esme raised her sherry glass. “I’m still working on this one.”
“VASE!” Lloyd pointed at the bag on the floor.
“Would you like to see it now?”
His jaw pulsed with frustration.
Esme picked up a plain shopping bag, but the two sherries had apparently weakened her grip. Rosemary dove for the bag and managed to catch it just inches from the ground. Inside, she saw a luminous profusion of colored glass: green and purple leaves, lilac and white flowers, a lemony yellow background.
“Not my cup of tea at all,” Esme said as she signaled the waiter for a refill.
“Is it…” Lloyd took a deep, steadying breath. “Signed?”
“There’s some bit of raised writing on the bottom. Begins with a G, with an accent at the end. French, je pense.”
“Gallé,” Rosemary said.
“That’s it! Think it’s worth anything?”
“We’ll have to examine it carefully,” Lloyd said, his voice already thick with desire.
“Well, examine it.” Esme gave the bag an unnerving thwack with her right hand.
Rosemary didn’t dare pull out the entire vase, not in Hoyle’s. It could break, for one thing. Even more risky would be exposing it to the voracious dealers in the room. If it really was Gallé, they’d follow Esme home and propose marriage to extricate it from her.
“Safer to wait until I’m back at the office,” Lloyd said as Rosemary rewrapped the towel around the vase. “Emile Gallé was a well-known glass designer in the later part of the nineteenth century. He’s considered a European Tiffany. We’ll call you as soon as we’ve done a full appraisal.”
The rest of the meal was torture. Lloyd barely touched his fish—his only hunger now was for the vase. If the piece was in fact by Emile Gallé, and if the entire vase was in the same condition as the section he’d seen, it would pay for a hundred meals with Esme Hollender. A Gallé vase in fine condition could be the centerpiece of the winter or spring sale. And once Esme saw how much the vase went for, she’d almost certainly let Atherton’s have the rest of the collection.
“I’ll call you in a day or two with our appraisal,” Lloyd told her on the sidewalk.
“Perhaps we should set up a lunch to discuss it,” she said as she tottered to the curb. “Or maybe another dinner.”
Lloyd hailed her a cab and saw her into it.
“Phillips had an eighteen-inch Gallé vase in their spring show,” he told Rosemary as the cab took Esme away. “It went for two-sixty,” he practically whispered.
“Amazing.”
“There’s still a lot of money around,” Lloyd observed with a sigh. “Speaking of which…I got a very curious phone call from a mousy-voiced man from the SEC of all places.”
Rosemary knew right away where this was headed. “Positano?”
“He said they’re looking into all purchases of Positano stock on certain dates. Including the date I bought, which was right after our take-out lunch in your hallway–slash–dining room,”
“Did he say why?”
“He was completely unhelpful. I told him I’ve lost my shirt on Positano, wished I’d never heard the name—I’m sorry, Rosemary, but it’s true. He wasn’t exactly sympathetic.”
“What did he want?”
“A list of people I know who either work for Positano or do business with Positano or who know people who work for or do business with Positano.”
“That would be me.”
“I spoke to a lawyer friend. He told me that it was highly unlikely I’d be sent to jail for losing money.”
“Jail?”
“Insider trading, my dear. All of our best customers are doing it.”
Rosemary couldn’t quite manage a smile.
“I need to talk to Guy about this.”
“Probably a good idea.”
“It’s the last thing he needs, something else to worry about. His board of directors is trying to ram a new chief operating officer down his throat, our renovation is behind schedule and way overbudget—”
“New chief operating officer? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Guy hates having someone else to—”
“For the stock price.”
“For God’s sake, Lloyd.”
“Don’t get all exasperated on me, Rosemary. How much longer can I go on living in a rent-stabilized studio? I keep waiting for real-estate prices to go down—I mean, everything else has.”
“It’s a very nice studio.”
“Don’t patronize me, Miss Powder Room. Real estate keeps going up while my savings move in the opposite direction. I used to think I’d schlep out to Brooklyn if I had to or even Queens. I mean, Queens. The way things are going, I’ll end up commuting by plane from Syracuse. Not to mention I was counting on Positano for my retirement.”
“You’re thirty-six.”
“Which is seventy in gay years.”
“I need to get home.” She flagged a cab and got in. As it drove of
f she watched Lloyd cross Madison, taking small, cautious steps and cradling the vase as if it were a newborn.
Ensconced in a prime booth at Chez Nous, Lily discreetly opened her purse and gave the plump wad of counterfeit twenties a reassuring squeeze.
“Let’s order a bottle of wine,” she said.
“A glass of Chablis will be fine for me.” Peggy hadn’t stopped glancing around the restaurant from the moment they’d been seated, her expression an unflattering mix of squinting distrust and pursed-lipped hostility. “I always figured this place would look…fancier. You read about this one and that one eating here.”
“No one looks at anything but each other.”
“Still, the carpet looks older than your father. Would it kill them to spring for new window treatments?”
Lily had felt a frisson run through Chez Nous as she entered, her first appearance there since Barnett’s arrest. None of her friends were there that night, if friends was the right word for people who hadn’t bothered to call her since the trouble began, much less invite her anywhere. But she recognized a few faces, and knew from the wave of averted glances and lowered cutlery that trailed her to her table that she’d been recognized as well. Jake, the maître d’, had sat them at a prominent booth just beyond the bar area, a gesture not of loyalty but of provocation: He’d always relished the minor humiliations he was able to inflict on New York’s social grandees, and seating the impoverished wife of a fugitive—out with her mother, no less—at a table of honor would put several noses out of joint.
Lily took a sip of the good Chardonnay she’d ordered and, surprising herself, cooed with pleasure.
“It’s that good?” Peggy sniffed her glass before tasting the wine.
Closing Costs Page 21
