One afternoon Loelia was on her way to meet her realtor, Helene Whitbeck, to look at an apartment on Fifth Avenue that had just come on the market. Helene said it might be the ideal place for Loelia and Mickie to live after they were married. When she stepped into the Rhinelander elevator, Elias Renthal was standing there. She was impressed that he took off his hat when he spoke to her.
“I’m Elias Renthal, Mrs. Manchester,” he said, making a slight but courtly bow.
“Yes, of course,” Loelia replied. “Howareyou?”
Elias could see right away that Loelia was unhappy and, when the elevator came to the lobby, he asked her she wanted to have a drink in the bar, which was always quiet at that time of the afternoon. Loelia was amazed to hear herself say that she wouldn’t have a drink but she would have a cup of tea. She hoped that Elias didn’t know that it was she who had blackballed him from being elected to the board of directors of the New York Art Museum, even though he had been a generous contributor. Since then, she had heard from Jamesey Crocus and others that he had become very polished in the interim. “That wife of his, Ruby, is sandpapering the edges,” Jamesey had said.
In no time at all Loelia and Elias were talking as if they were old friends, and Loelia poured out her heart to the famous financier about her troubles with Ned and the divorce. Loelia became so engrossed in her conversation that she forgot all about her appointment with Helene Whitbeck, who was waiting for her in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue apartment building.
“I can’t believe he’d hold me up for money,” Loelia confided to Elias about her husband. “Ned really never had any interest in possessions. I told him he can have the house in the country, and the house in Bermuda, and he wants them, but he also wants I-don’t-know-how-many million on top of that. Imagine Ned acting like that after all these years. It’s not as if Ned doesn’t have any money of his own.”
“His pride’s hurt, and he’s being vindictive,” said Elias.
“I’m deeply sick of hearing about Ned’s pride being hurt,” replied Loelia. “After all, we are not the first couple in the world to get a divorce.”
“Why not call his bluff? Why not offer him more than he’s asking? It’s not how much you pay them,” Elias said, “it’s how you pay it out to them.”
“I don’t understand what that means, Mr. Renthal,” said Loelia.
“Let’s say, for instance, you offer Ned twenty million in alimony,” Elias began.
“Twenty million!” exclaimed Loelia. “Please, Mr. Renthal!”
“A ballpark figure. Now hear this through,” said Elias patiently, taking a cigar from a case. Elias enjoyed talking about money. It was the one area of conversation in which he bowed to no man in his opinions. He opened the button of his gray pin-striped suit and made himself comfortable. Loelia noticed, while he was lighting his cigar, how much better dressed Elias had become than when she first met him. His suit was beautifully cut, and his pale pink shirt with white collar and cuffs and discreet rose monogram on his chest, and his enamel-and-gold cuff links could all have been things Mickie Minardos might have worn.
“However much money it is, you have no choice in the matter if that’s the only way Ned’s going to divorce you so that you can marry Mickie. You don’t give him the five million or the ten million bucks all at once. You spread it out. You work it out so you pay him a million a year for ten years, or even half a million a year for twenty years, but you can afford a million a year with your kind of money.”
She wondered how he knew how much money she had, but she felt sure that he did know. In time she would discover about Elias Renthal that he knew exactly how much money everyone had.
“Understand?”
She did understand. She could afford a million a year. Suddenly it was all beginning to fell into place. She wondered why her expensive lawyers had not come up with so simple a solution as Elias Renthal had come up with in ten minutes.
“And then,” Elias continued.
“Yes,” said Loelia.
“In a year or so, Ned will meet someone and probably remarry, and then, when he’s happy again, he won’t hold you to this agreement. After all, everyone says Ned’s a gent.”
“Yes, of course,” said Loelia. It had not occurred to her until that moment that Ned would fall in love again and even marry again. She had only imagined him alone, or with the children. “Do you live here in the Rhinelander, Mr. Renthal?” Loelia asked when she was gathering up her gloves and bag.
“No, no, Ruby and I are just camping out here while Cora Mandell is doing over the new apartment we bought from Matilda Clarke. We thought we’d be in in time for Easter, but you know what a perfectionist Cora is. She’s got nineteen coats of persimmon lacquer on the living-room walls, and the rugs are being woven in Portugal, and things like that take time. Not to mention all the faux marble,” Elias added with a grin that charmed Loelia. “She’s got some guy she brought over from Rome just to paint all the faux marble. The truth of the matter is, Loelia, I never heard of any of these absolutely essential refinements like persimmon lacquer and faux marble six years ago, and now they’re dictating our lives.”
Loelia laughed. “And Mrs. Renthal? How is she?”
“Her name is Ruby. And I’m Elias, Loelia.”
“Yes, of course, Elias.”
“Ruby’s over in London bidding on a pair of eighteenth-century console tables at the Orromeo auction.”
“Oh, yes, I heard about those tables from Jamesey Crocus. Inlaid, aren’t they, with ram’s heads on the legs?”
“I dunno.”
“Sad about the Orromeos, isn’t it?”
“I dunno.”
“They’ve lost everything.”
Elias shuddered. There were very few things in life that could make Elias Renthal shudder, but the thought of losing his fortune, as the Orromeos, whoever the Orromeos were, had lost theirs, was one of the things that could make him shudder.
“How?” he asked.
“How what?”
“How did the Orromeos lose all their money?”
“The usual thing that happens several generations down the line,” replied Loelia.
“Spoiled brats that don’t work? Like that?” asked Elias.
“I suppose. Too many divorces. Nothing depletes a fortune like divorce these days.”
“As we were just saying,” agreed Elias.
“When is Mrs. Renthal, I mean Ruby, coming back?” asked Loelia.
“She’ll be back in time for Justine Altemus’s wedding. Ruby wouldn’t miss that event for all the tea in China,” said Elias, stubbing out his cigar.
“Oh, I didn’t know Ruby was a friend of Justine’s,” said Loelia, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice.
“She’s not. Never met her.”
“Oh, Bernard, then, of course. You’re friends of Bernard Slatkin’s.”
“No, don’t know Bernie Slatkin either, except on TV, of course.”
“You’re not a friend of Lil’s, are you? I’ve never seen you at Lil’s, have I?”
Elias laughed. “We’re not planning on crashing, Loelia, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Of course that’s not what I’m thinking, Elias!”
“I’m involved in a couple of business deals with Laurance Van Degan, and he arranged for Ruby and me to get invited.”
“Oh,” said Loelia, again keeping the surprise out of her voice, “I’m staying here at the Rhinelander too, at least until I find a new apartment. Perhaps when Ruby gets back from London, the four of us can have dinner here in the hotel one night.”
“That would be just swell, Loelia,” said Elias. “Give my best to Mickie.” Elias couldn’t wait to get to the telephone so that he could call Ruby in London to tell her to get her ass home so that they could have dinner right out in public with Loelia Manchester and Mickie Minardos.
“You paid how much for those fucking tables?” shouted Elias Renthal over the telephone to his wife in London.
“You can’t lose money on eighteenth-century French furniture, Elias. I swear to God,” shouted Ruby back over the telephone.
“How much?”
“You heard what I said the first time.”
“I couldn’t have heard right.”
“You’ll love them, Elias. I swear to God. On either side of the fireplace, with the Monet with the water lilies overhead. Wait till you see them.”
“Inlaid, aren’t they, with ram’s heads on the legs?”
“What do you know about ram’s heads?” asked Ruby, surprised.
“Only what Loelia Manchester told me when I had tea with her this afternoon,” replied Elias.
“What? You had tea with Loelia Manchester? Tell me everything.”
“I’ll tell you all about it when you get home.”
“Are you sending the plane for me, or am I taking the Concorde?”
“Whichever’s fastest.”
“Elias. Is it okay about the consoles?”
“I don’t even know what the fuck a console table is, Ruby.”
“Is it okay?”
“Yeah, it’s okay.”
“You know what I’m going to do to you, Elias, when I get home, don’t you?”
“I know, but I want to hear you say it.”
“Your favorite. Both of them in my mouth. At the same time. Just the way you like it.”
Mickie Minardos was in a quiet rage. He threw down the newspaper and leaped to his feet, pulling the belt of his green silk polka-dot dressing gown tighter around his slender waist. Loelia, seated at her dressing table, watched him in the mirror and noticed that his face was pink and his lips were pursed tightly together.
Since Florian Gray, in revenge for Mickie’s verbal attack on him, had referred to Mickie in his column as a cobbler rather than a shoe designer, the word cobbler had caught on. He was told from time to time, always causing him great pain, that many of Loelia’s friends, including her husband, now referred to him, behind his back, as the cobbler.
What Florian Gray had no way of knowing was that Mickie Minardos’s father, back in his provincial town in Greece, was the village cobbler for all of Mickie’s youth. Then Demetreus Minardos, who knew nothing of society and the grand life, achieved a certain local fame by designing a sandal popular with the working classes that utilized the rubber from discarded tires as soles and sold for less than the equivalent of a dollar. With the windfall, or what seemed like a windfall to old Demetreus Minardos, he was able to send his son, named Dimitri, but called Mickie, to a better school in Athens than any that existed in the place where they lived, and later, to Paris to study. Mickie’s aim was to “do something” in the theater, but the something was undefined.
In Paris, attractive Greeks had always enjoyed a popularity, because, as Bijou McCord Thomopolous, the great hostess, who had married several Greeks, said, “They are such wonderful dancers, and they know how to treat their women.” Mickie Minardos, who was a wonderful dancer, and an admirer of beautiful feet, began his career as a shoe designer, until the time came when he could “do something” in the theater. Before New York and Loelia Manchester, he had enjoyed the companionship of several fashionable ladies, among them Bijou McCord Thomopolous.
It was a curious aspect of Mickie’s makeup that, although he felt shame about his father’s profession, he had achieved great success in a more glamorous version of it. When interviewed by the fashion press, Mickie Minardos always described his father as a banker, which he did become, in a small branch of a small bank in the provincial town where his sandal factory was, giving the impression to the interviewer that banking, rather than the unmentioned cobbler business, was the source of the family fortune. A misprint in the fashion pages of the Times called his father a baker rather than a banker, and the mistake sent him into paroxysms of grief, as a baker was to him even lower on the social scale than a cobbler. He demanded a retraction from the Times and got one.
“What’s the matter, darling?” asked Loelia finally, knowing that her beloved was upset.
“Nothing,” Mickie replied. Already, in the months they had been living together, she had discovered that Mickie was inclined to sulk when he became angry and tended to deny anger when questioned about it.
“Darling, I can see that you’re upset over something. What is it?”
“Florian Gray.”
“Him again,” said Loelia. “Now what has he said?”
“Don’t read it.”
“Of course, I’ll read it. What difference does it make what people like that say? The only one of those people who matters is Dolly, and Dolly has been lovely to everyone.”
“He calls me a cobbler again and says my father was a baker, instead of a banker, when he had to have seen the retraction in the Times.”
“So what?” said Loelia. It always amazed Mickie that Loelia was unaffected by criticism of him.
“He says your friends don’t accept me.”
“Oh, puleeze, Mickie. It’s too ridiculous.”
“He says your mother is saying she will disinherit you if you marry me.”
“I assure you, Mickie, that if my mother were ever to make such a statement, which she would not, it would never be to a gossip columnist from a tabloid newspaper. So calm down. It’s simply not true.”
“It is true that your friends won’t accept me.”
“But it was you who said that my friends were very dull. Narrow-in-their-outlook is what you said. You said people like Lil Altemus and Matilda Clarke and all the Van Degan clan were the most boring people in the world.”
Mickie Minardos turned away from Loelia. He had said what Loelia said he said about her friends and relations, but he hadn’t meant it. He had also said that the New People were more interesting by far than the old families, but he hadn’t meant that either. In his heart, the world of Loelia Manchester was the part of New York that he most wanted to enter.
“One of these days they’ll see how talented I am, and they’ll be fighting to have me,” he said.
Loelia heard the petulance in his voice. She looked at Mickie intently in the way a woman looks at a man she loves, but in whom she discovers an unpleasant trait that she had not known he possessed.
“Darling, you are considered to be the most successful man in your field in New York. Tell me how many shoe designers there are who have your sense of style.”
“I’m going to break his face, that little pipsqueak Florian Gray, the next time I run into him.”
“I adore you when you act tough, Mickie.” She stood up and turned to him. “How do I look?”
“Turn around,” he said.
Loelia assumed a model’s pose and whirled around.
Mickie eyed her critically, as if she were his creation, and she watched his face for his approval.
“Almost perfect,” he said. “Sit down a minute. Here, let me do your eyes again. You need a little more green shadow to go with the color of your shoes.”
16
When Jorgie Sanchez-Julia failed to show up for two scheduled interviews with Gus Bailey, Gus decided to abandon the story he was planning to write, which dealt with the growing trend of rich and elderly widows and widowers to leave their entire fortunes to late-life mates. Or, at least, he decided to abandon that part of the story that dealt with Jorgie Sanchez-Julia, a thirty-year-old Spanish gigolo who had married a crippled Washington millionairess almost fifty years his senior and then inherited her entire fortune, down to family heirlooms, much to the consternation of her children.
“Tell Jorgie to shove it,” Gus told the young lady who answered the telephone in Jorgie’s suite at the Rhinelander, when he called to complain that he had been kept waiting over an hour for the second day in a row.
The next morning a large bouquet of roses from Lorenza’s shop arrived at Gus’s apartment in Turtle Bay, together with a contrite and charming note from Jorgie Sanchez-Julia, saying that he had been unexpectedly called to Washington the day before. Gus didn’t believe
that Jorgie had been called to Washington, but he did believe that Jorgie, who loved publicity, did not want to pass up the opportunity to be interviewed, so a third appointment was set.
It surprised Gus that Jorgie wanted to meet at Clarence’s rather than in the privacy of Gus’s apartment, or in his suite at the Rhinelander, or in a less conspicuous restaurant than Clarence’s, as Jorgie Sanchez-Julia was involved in a court battle over the money that he had inherited. Gus, his back to the room, flicked through the pages of his looseleaf notebook and read some previously written notes, while Jorgie Sanchez-Julia watched with inner excitement but a sullen expression the passing parade that lunch at Clarence’s always was. Gus noted that Jorgie had a spoiled, full-lipped, pouting mouth, sallow skin, curly blond hair, and wore a Spanish suit that showed to full advantage his slender hips, waist, and rump.
“Help me out here, Jorgie,” said Gus. “How old were you when you married Mrs. Acton?”
“Countess Sanchez-Julia,” corrected Jorgie. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth.
“But certainly she was Mrs. Acton when you married her?”
“I was twenty-six.”
“And the countess was how old?”
“Oh, seventy something or other. Geraldine, you know, never talked about age. She was so young in heart,” answered Jorgie, his eye on the door of the restaurant where fashionable people kept coming in.
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