The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  He turned to her. “You wanna go back?” he yelled. “All right, Goddammit, we’ll turn around and go fucking back if that’s what you want to do!” But, of course, reversing direction in the middle of a traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway was out of the question, and Mel merely wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand, and added, “Shit!”

  “Why are we quarreling?” she asked quietly. “I thought this weekend was for relaxing, having fun, not worrying about anything.”

  “Goddammit, I am not quarreling! You’re the one who’s being a pain in the ass!”

  All at once there were tears in her eyes. She opened the glove compartment and groped inside. “Do you have any Kleenex in here?” she whispered.

  “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing … my sinuses … this heat … this air …” The red scarf was hot against the back of her neck, and she untied it to fluff up her hair.

  “Now what are you going to do? Blow your nose in that scarf? That happens to be a Hermès scarf, and I happen to have bought it for you! Do you know how much that scarf cost me? Three hundred and fifty dollars!”

  She hurled the scarf out the window.

  “What the hell—?” The car was not moving, and Mel shifted into park, opened the door, and got out and crossed in front of the car to retrieve the scarf from where it lay on the highway, beneath the door on the passenger side. As he returned with the scarf, she remembered that she had chosen it that morning because he had given it to her, and because it matched the color of his car.

  “What the hell’s eating you, Alex?” he asked, as he climbed back into the car. “What the hell’s eating you?” He placed the scarf almost tenderly in her lap. Then he said, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s just this Goddamn traffic.”

  She felt two tears stream down her cheeks. “No. It was that Goddamn woman,” she said.

  “What Goddamn woman?”

  You see? she told herself. He’s already forgotten. “The woman in the tollbooth! If she hadn’t kept gabbing with you, we’d be way past this accident, or whatever it is that’s causing this mess up ahead.”

  “Aw, don’t blame that stupid old bag,” he said.

  But she knew that it was more than Marsha Bernice Apfelbaum who was causing the tears. It was also Herbert, and Joel, and Otto, and Henry Coker, and Mark Rinsky, and Fiona Fenton, and Mona Potter, and the fiasco that her beautiful party had turned into, and even the people in the runabout who had been swallowed by the East River in front of her eyes, and everything else. Every big shot in town is going to be after you now, Lexy, Lucille Withers had told her, and she had a lunch date with Rodney McCulloch on Monday, and he was certainly after her for something. But she had taken over Mode when she was in her twenties, and now she was in her forties, and she all at once felt too old to move on to anything new.

  Mel handed her his hanky. “Here, give your nose a good blow,” he said. “I’m really sorry, darling. I really am. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I love you, Alex.”

  “Well,” she said, accepting his handkerchief, “I guess that’s nice to know.” She blew her nose noisily, and the car inched forward again.

  Love, she thought. Love came in such a variety of sizes, shapes, and flavors. No two loves were alike. And, since love did not occur all that often in one’s life, it was important to examine each specimen very carefully.

  She and Mel Jorgenson didn’t live together in the conventional sense, though some people assumed they did. True, he often spent the night at 10 Gracie Square, and kept some of his clothes and toilet articles there, and she often spent weekends with him at Sagaponack, and kept some of her things out there. They had often talked seriously about marriage. But it wasn’t the idea of getting married that gave them pause. It was the idea of being married. Being married entailed so much sacrifice, so much compromise. Alex knew that she was independent-minded, headstrong, stubborn, and had a quick temper. She knew she had a low flashpoint. Throwing his silk scarf out the window, for instance, had been a childish thing to do, and she had been immediately ashamed of herself for doing it. People who were married shouldn’t behave like that.

  And both of them, they often reminded each other, had been badly bruised by marriage—Alex by Steven’s unhappy death, and Mel by that rancorous, well-publicized divorce. He was only permitted, by court decree, to visit his two children on certain court-specified Saturday afternoons and holidays and, under those rigidly imposed restrictions, he often said he would rather not see his children at all, would rather let them pass out of his life altogether, and relegate them to some previous, all-but-forgotten existence. Or best-forgotten existence, because who could really forget the bitterness of all that?

  And, she sometimes wondered, did a man like Mel really want to be married to a woman who came home from an office every night with a briefcase filled with manuscripts to read, page proofs to correct, headers to rewrite, designer sketches to study, composite photos from modeling agents to pore through, advertising and circulation figures to compare against the competition?

  Perhaps, in the end, he would be better off settling for one of those blondely beautiful, nubile, sexually artful, Hostess Twinkie types. Or a sleek, rich, postdebutante type who dabbled in helping her rich friends decorate their apartments—not a mature, forty-six-year-old widowed career woman, past childbearing years, with a grown son. Perhaps he should settle for something saucy and twisty with cute little boobs that were of just the size to be cupped in a man’s two hands—something just the opposite of his first wife, the one he called The Mouse.

  Some mouse. She turned out to be The Mouse That Roared when it came to the divorce. She demanded, and got, twenty thousand a month in alimony, plus child support and tuition, plus custody of the children, plus the court-ordered stipulation that he could spend no more than four hours with each child during any visitation period, plus the house, plus the car, plus the furniture, plus the paintings, the books, the silver, the china, the Steuben glass, the orientals, and the Saint Bernard. Plus, plus, plus. So much for mice.

  Yes, in the end, he would probably opt for a noncareer-type wife. Steven was different. Steven had needed a strong woman, a woman who would take his hand and help lead him along the way. Mel needed a woman who would find the traffic report on the radio when he wanted it. Mel needed …

  Suddenly she guessed why he was in a foul mood. If she hadn’t had her appointment with Henry Coker that morning, they could have left for the Island at least two hours earlier, and missed all this. It wasn’t the woman in the tollbooth’s fault. It was her career again, interfering with his life. He was still scowling through the windshield at the congestion of traffic ahead of them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’ve been acting like a bitch. Forgive me?”

  “I’m just worried that the car will overheat. Then we’ll really be stuck.”

  “I know.”

  “And Cronkite really needs his water in this heat.”

  “Of course he does. We’ll get his bowl refilled first chance we get. I could use something cold to drink myself.”

  “Look,” he said in a let’s-get-down-to-business tone of voice. “It’s now three thirty. We’re still in—what do you call this neighborhood, anyway? Rego Park? We’re still in Rego Park. The Van Zuylens want us at seven. What would you say if—I mean if we ever get out of this, and this jam-up’s got to end somewhere, doesn’t it? What if we go straight to Southampton, and to the Van Zuylens’, without stopping at Sagaponack? It’d save us twenty minutes in each direction if we did it that way.”

  “Like this?” she said, fingering her shirt. “In jeans, and one of Joel’s old shirts?”

  “It’s a beach party,” he said. “Very casual. Swimsuits. T-shirts. Bare feet.”

  She started to say that, after the long, hot drive, she would be looking forward to a bath, but she said nothing. Then, as though he had read her thoughts, he said, “You could take a dip in the pool when you get
there. Maggie always keeps her dressing rooms stocked with suits. All sizes.”

  “As a matter of fact, I tossed an extra suit in my bag.”

  “Besides, I thought that whatever the editor-in-chief of Mode wore, it automatically became a fashion statement.”

  “Co-editor-in-chief of Mode,” she said.

  “Now remember. We promised.”

  “What would you do with Cronkite?” she asked him. “Take him to the party? Remember that Maggie has a real thing about dogs.”

  “He could stay in the car, as long as we leave the windows partway open and he has his water dish. I’d check on him every hour or so.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  “There’ll be parkers at the party. They’ll check on Cronkite, too, for a ten-buck tip.”

  Now, all at once, they seemed to be approaching the scene of what was causing the massive traffic tie-up. “My God!” he cried. “Will you look at that? Do you believe this?”

  They had both expected an accident of colossal magnitude—dozens of automobiles piled up together or overturned, police cars with rotating bubble lights, fire engines, ambulances, sirens, roadside flares, lanes blocked off with orange cones. Instead, what they saw was a blue Toyota up on the median divider with a very obviously flat left-rear tire. Two dismayed-looking women—one older, one younger—stood outside the beached vehicle, and the younger woman was holding a baby in her arms. The baby was howling and waving its tiny clenched fists, obviously wanting its bottle. They appeared to be grandmother, mother, and three-month-old.

  “So this was it!” Mel wailed, slamming the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. “Traffic slowed down for hours, so people could rubberneck two women with a flat tire! Of course nobody’d offer to help them. Think I should stop? I can change a tire in five minutes, if they’ve got a spare.”

  “Oh, darling, do you think so?” she said. “I mean, if word got out that Mel Jorgenson was changing a tire in the middle of the Long Island Expressway, you’d have people stopping for autographs. You’d have traffic backed up from here to New Jersey.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But I’m gonna do something.” He picked up his car phone and began punching numbers into the handset. Already, as the scene of the disaster fell behind them, traffic was beginning to resume its normal speed.

  “Hello, Al?” he said, and she realized he was calling a garage he used. “Al, it’s Mel Jorgenson—I’m out here on the L.I.E. about—yeah, I see an exit sign now—I’m a mile west of the Grand Avenue exit, Rego Park. There’s a couple of women with a flat tire on the median, blue Toyota. Will you get somebody out here as fast as you can to take care of them? Yeah, give it everything you got—your siren, your flashing lights—and put it on my bill.”

  Now they were just speeding along. With the top down, and the wind blowing in her hair, Alex retied the red silk scarf, pulling her hair back in a tight ponytail again. They passed Jones Beach without delay—the beach crowd was beginning to leave by now, heading back in the opposite direction toward the city—and Alex felt her buoyant mood returning. All the problems that the city held for her were receding farther and farther behind her, and she could smell the ocean.

  Soon they were off the expressway, on Route 27, heading for Riverhead and the various Hamptons. At a service station, they stopped, used the rest rooms, filled Cronkite’s water bowl, and Mel brought out two cans of ice-cold Coke to the car.

  “That was wonderful, what you did,” she said.

  “What’d I do?”

  “Calling for help for those women. Nobody else would have done it.”

  “One of them had a baby, for Chrissakes!”

  “When you do something like that, I fall in love with you all over again,” she said. “Nothing seems wrong anymore.”

  He pulled out of the service station with one hand on the steering wheel, and the other cupping his can of Coke.

  “Straight to the Van Zuylens’?” he asked.

  “Straight to the Van Zuylens’. We’re going to be a little late as it is.”

  They did not slow up again until they reached the Van Zuylens’ entrance gate in Southampton, and joined the line of expensive automobiles that was proceeding down the long graveled drive toward the front door where the car-parking boys scurried efficiently about. It was seven fifteen. They had been on the road for more than eight hours, which was surely something of a record for a trip to the Hamptons.

  18

  “Finisterra,” the Van Zuylen estate on Gin Lane in Southampton, was one of the legendary residences on Long Island’s South Shore. It had been much changed since Maggie Van Zuylen purchased the property in the 1960s, at a distress-sale price.

  Maggie had started by completely gutting the interior of the main house, and adding the great double staircase that swept upward, with handrailings especially created for her by Steuben Glass, from the dramatic front entrance hall with its floor of polished chrome squares. Then she decided that she didn’t care for the house’s exterior, either. When the house was built in the 1920s, it had been in a vaguely Mediterranean style, with a façade of pink stucco. And so, as soon as the interior rooms were completed, the exterior façade was removed, and replaced, in a classic Georgian style, with geranium-colored brick that had been sun-baked in Siena, and six white marble columns were added across the front of the house. The windows of the house were custom-made in Belgium. The slate roofing tiles had come from a château outside Épernay.

  She had done much more. In the basement, where the original owner’s pistol range had been, she created an indoor tennis court. Outside, on the grounds, Maggie had supervised the construction of her English water garden, where a series of man-made streams, ponds, and waterfalls led down the terraced hillside on which the house stood, past the grass tennis court and a croquet lawn to the swimming pool, and the pool house, which Maggie also built. Beyond the pool house lay the ocean, and at the edge of the beach was Maggie’s beach house, a sort of miniature version of the main house, with an arched loggia facing the sea. The beach house contained men’s and women’s changing rooms for the beach, and also doubled as a guest house, with two guest suites, each with a bedroom and bath, a sitting room, dining room, and kitchenette. Each time Alex Rothman visited “Finisterra,” it amused her to remember that it had all been paid for from a fortune made with a popular brand of mouthwash, called Breath-o-Kleen.

  Maggie had designed “Finisterra” for entertaining, and the entire estate had been laid out so that guests, entering for the first time, would make their way from one architectural or landscaping surprise to another, for Maggie expected an appreciative gasp at every turn in the house, at every new vista in the garden. Guests tonight approached the main house up the long gravel drive, where they were met by the parkers, then up the wide marble steps and between the white columns, into the entrance hall with its chrome-tiled floor and the Steuben staircase. “I didn’t know Steuben made staircases,” someone murmured. “Neither did they, till I ordered it!” Maggie Van Zuylen laughed her big laugh. Then they made their way through the principal rooms on the ground floor, where they could pause to admire some of the major paintings from Maggie’s collection—the four Braque still lifes, Picasso’s Arlequin au Violon, Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl, Seurat’s The Bathers, Gauguin’s la Orana Maria, Cezanne’s L’Éstaque, Monet’s Grapes and Apples, and, one of the many gems of the collection, which hung in the mauve-silk-covered dining room, the famous Danseuse sur la Scène, by Degas. The version that hung in the Louvre, Maggie liked to explain, was a copy.

  Then they moved out into the garden, down the series of terraces with their accompanying waterway, past Maggie’s collection of specimen rhododendrons and azaleas—now, of course, in full bloom—the hedges of hybrid hydrangeas, the parterres planted with boxwood and yew, through the trellised rose garden, past the grass tennis court and croquet lawn, past the pool and pool house, and on through the beach house to the beach, where tonight’s party was being held. In
the women’s changing room, it was suggested that the women leave their purses and shoes, for dinner would be served out on the sand, under the stars.

  On the beach, tables had been set up, lighted by Hawaiian torches. Under a white tent, a dance floor had been erected on the sand, and a five-piece jazz combo was playing, while strolling musicians in bright shirts moved among the guests with guitars and ukuleles playing Hawaiian tunes. “Look at that!” someone gasped, pointing to a spot, near the water’s edge, where an elaborate sand castle had been built, complete with moat, towers, minarets, belvederes and battlements and flying buttresses, nearly twelve feet high. Toy soldiers, in full battle regalia, and in perfect scale with the castle, guarded the castle’s ramparts and gates. Maggie had had the castle floodlighted, and more floodlights were beamed directly into the foaming surf.

  “Who in the world built your sand castle for you, Maggie?” someone asked.

  “I had my florist do it,” Maggie said. “It took ten men.”

  “I didn’t know florists built sand castles.”

  “Neither did he, till I ordered it. When the tide starts coming in at ten o’clock, it’ll all be washed away, which should be fun to watch, shouldn’t it?”

  At one end of the beach, over a driftwood fire, a whole pig was being roasted, turned on a spit by barefoot, white-coated members of Maggie’s staff. In another spot, a large pit had been dug in the sand. All day long, Maggie’s staff had been heating stones over charcoal until the stones were white-hot. Now the hot stones were being placed across the bottom and along the sides of the pit, and the stones were being covered with fresh wet seaweed which sizzled on the hot stones and sent bursts of live steam into the air. Now, on top of the steaming seaweed, more barefoot, white-coated men were tossing live lobsters, handfuls of steamer clams and mussels, fresh corn on the cob, pieces of cut-up chicken, and new potatoes in their skins. Then came another layer of seaweed, and a final layer of hot stones to complete the clambake.