MOST TUESDAYS BEA Sayles came into the city for a session with her psychotherapist. That taken care of, she met up with Cassie Vail, an old Miss Porter’s classmate. Companionably, each felt a hint of pity for the other’s path in life. Cassie, the Manhattanite, was unmarried. Enough said. Bea came from an old Catholic family with a wonderful compound on the water in Noroton, Connecticut. They lived off ground rent from the ATT building and a few other ancient plots of land downtown. So, lots of money and history. But Bea had ended up with a philandering lawyer who made her live at his family’s place in New Jersey. Out there all she had for friends were the awful, suburban Westerbrook crowd. And she wasn’t skinny anymore.
Cassie often had tickets to a Met blockbuster, and they would spend an hour poring over Carolingian illuminated manuscripts or Italian parade armor before having a late lunch/early dinner at a perfectly ordinary diner on Madison Avenue. A paunchy Albanian, tipsy with fatigue after a long day, greeted them. “My lovely ladies!” His slightly demented gaze wandered over the floor and the greasy ceiling, but he deftly twirled menus into their hands with the flair of an illusionist. Cassie fretted whether “no mayo” was registering in his brown-eyed inattention. But at the perfect moment he focused and gave her a smug wink. Mostly a lunch place, The New Amity Restaurant was empty at five, except for three exhausted Dutch tourists studying their menus with funereal expressions.
“Maybe people are too much for him. He’s been holed up in New Jersey an awfully long time,” Cassie said. “I knew him for years when we were younger and he just never registered. A dreary loner, I thought. Nelson talked about an imperious streak—always shutting people down in conversation—expecting everyone to listen to him like footmen. Total dominance is still his thing. It seems. Even with the boy, for heaven’s sake.”
“So male,” Bea murmured. “That’s where we have to watch out, Cassie. I see it in you. I really do. You get all—” Pursing her mouth, she made a kewpie doll expression of tractability that caused Cassie to shout with laughter and breathe, “I don’t!”
“Yes, you do! And you have to watch out, because it just isn’t you. Not at all.”
“I’m almost mad at him for upsetting my life like this. I was in a nice, spinsterish state. Really more content than I’d been in years. Doing things!”
“I’d hardly have called you a spinster,” Bea flattered.
“Sweetheart!” Cassie shrugged urbanely. The Albanian swirled their iced tea glasses to the table as they watched in silence. He plucked straws from a sheaf in his vest pocket and, with another magical flourish, laid them across the mouths of the glasses, totally absorbed in his artistry.
“But I was getting used to my life. And then I just determined—I determined—I determined to spend time with this man. It was perfectly willful. It wasn’t about love, of course. It’s just that he’s interesting. Clubbable. Makes me sound awful, I suppose. But it’s nice to go out as a couple. And it’s nice when the man can pay his own way. More than, in his case. But—well, now I can’t stop. Which I know is the worst possible sign. I’m walking off a cliff. There’s some kind of not-love emotion involved. Oh! And I’ve got rabbits running over my grave just talking about it.” Her shiver resolved in a visible twitch of her shoulders.
“That might be a good sign,” Bea said doubtfully. She’d always disliked Oliver Van Nest. The soon-to-be-ex-wife was some kind of tony foreign bimbo. She knew them a little from afar. Cassie was shaking her head in despair. Bea’s chin jutted. “Poor baby! I hate to see you go through this. What are the rules of the road? You have to have a frank conversation. Get it all on the table. If he won’t bring it up himself—”
“It’s as if I’m going at it on two levels. I don’t mean I’m ambivalent. My two levels are—well, number one: my usual cool fifty-something-year-old self. Her assessment is we can go to some benefits, and maybe there’ll be a bit of money and companionship. Even travel. And then, level two: there’s this on-tenterhooks, afraid-to-speak-up, teen-agery, bad-man-obsessed me. Maybe I never got it out of my system when I was supposed to. Honestly, he can be a bit of a freak.”
“He’s freaky?”
“No. No, I’m exaggerating.” Cassie thought about Oliver doubting Rudolf Hess had ever existed. And the Holocaust business. She knew exactly how awful she wanted her plight to sound, so she tucked those items away. “Though his interestingness is, I have to say, and it’s the same with the boy—a little bit crazy, I do find it exciting. Like living with an artist, though he’s the opposite of the artist type. Except for his beads.” She posed her forearm to display a massive bracelet of loops and loops and loops of tiny black beads. Oliver had strung it for her. After hanging a moment, the bracelet’s riotous ropes of caviar galumphed from her bony wrist almost to the crook of her elbow.
Bea didn’t have much of a reaction, aesthetic or otherwise. “I thought he was the type who spends all of his time on his investments.” Self-consciously she added, “I wish Preston would get into that. Spend time at the house.”
Cassie admitted, “Actually, No. He has bankers—trust people—who take care of everything. I don’t get the feeling he’s much of a businessman himself. I mean, he reads the statements, probably. And keeps up.” She hid the arm with the bracelet in her lap. “But—and you must know this—anybody who had anything in the market over the past twenty years, they’re rich as Croesus now. You didn’t have to do a thing. I liked buying art unfortunately.”
Bea had indeed seen her fortune blow up since Reagan, but so much of it was roped-off in complicated generation-skipping trusts, it didn’t feel like real money. She fixed her gaze on a yellowing blue photograph of Santorini. “Did someone tell me he was CIA a long time ago? Back when it was all gentlemanly?”
“That would be exciting.” Cassie was surprised. “But I wouldn’t think of Oliver and ‘security clearance,’ not in the same breath.”
“You were the one who said he was exciting. Exciting how? Like exciting—sexually?”
Cassie was casual, “Hah! No. That’s not really part of it.”
“Nothing, huh?”
“Well—” She thought of his bizarre touches. She shrugged.
“Things are allowed to be slow,” Bea reassured her.
“Right. Slow,” Cassie echoed.
“On the other hand, for women there’s also that awful allure and suffering of not being touched. Not something you want to get into. I’ve talked about it with Dr. Berman.”
“I’m too old for that. It isn’t that anyway.”
“The kid was adopted.”
“Bea! Oliver’s not a eunuch. Supposedly the reason they had to adopt wasn’t on his side anyway.” Visibly, Cassie debated saying more. The story sounded so implausible—implausible coming from Oliver, at any rate. “I have an inkling from what he’s told me that it was her who insisted on adopting Darius back when. Her who couldn’t have kids. He hinted that she had some strange ovarian I-don’t-know-what. Supposedly her ovaries don’t work except to produce huge, huge—excessive—abnormal—amounts of estrogen. Which means—” A laugh escaped her. “She’s—I guess—more of a woman. Her skin glows, and she has this intense sex appeal men pick up on. It makes her ultra-feminine, except, of course, she can’t have children, or couldn’t. Does that sound at all plausible?”
“My God!” Bea stared, delighted. “I think her skin did glow. I used to see her at Westerbrook. Big glasses like Jackie Onassis.”
“For whatever it’s worth,” Cassie shrugged.
“But that means—it’s flattering! That means you’re the successor to the Iranian Venus! Unless it’s just coconut oil or something.”
The two women cackled. The laughter sputtered back and forth in girlish colloquy. “Ishtar!” They howled. They tried to eat, but laughed. Their eyes teared up from the scratch of dry toast in their throats. On the heels of laughter, however, a wounded expression came over Cassie’s face. Ironing her paper napkin against her thigh, she let drop, “I haven’t told you the worst.”
“What?” Bea asked in the smallest possible voice.
“I bought—” Embarrassment stole Cassie’s breath. The bracelet reappeared with a rustle. Her forefinger pressed a crumb of bacon. “I’ve bought him a very, very extravagant present. A way-too-much, way-too-soon sort of a thing.”
“Why on earth—?”
“And it’s beyond my means.”
“Oh, Cassie! How far?”
“Very far,” she said.
“You have to take it back! Whatever it is.”
“I’m not going to. I’m going to give it to him.” She broke the crumb of bacon with determined pressure.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Oddly enough.” She gave Madison Avenue a look, her deep-seated hauteur peeping out, directed at nothing in particular. “A couple of days before the boy came down from Choate, Oliver and I stopped by the Carl Hagen gallery? Well, Oliver admired this trompe l’oeil thing—”
“Cassie! You’re off your rocker.”
“It feels right. It feels splashy. I want to be splashy for a change. I’m sick and tired of—”
“But it’s too forceful. You’ll jinx it or scare him away.”
“No. That’s just it. I have an intuition it’s right. I think he’ll be touched. He’s insanely rich. Or so they say. Why is money always rumors?” she laughed. “But rich people feel deprived because everybody tells them they’re not supposed to want anything. Well, for heaven’s sake, Bea, everybody wants. And, I want to make him think of me. In a big way.”
“I don’t know—how could you even afford something like that?” Bea fretted.
“I couldn’t. Carl said he’d take something of mine, one of Colin’s things, in trade. So really it cost nothing—”
“You actually did a deal with Carl? Carl himself? That’s so high-powered somehow! Cassie, I love that.” Bea crossed her arms in admiration.
“I just asked him.”
“But it’s so sophisticated. I love that. I would never have dared bring it up. People always look at me and think ‘retail’ or ‘Short Hills Mall’ or something. Mom was never that way, but I am. I think you’re a marvel. Of course, the other part—with Oliver—a present like that—you’re also totally insane.”
“Jibbering! Whoo-hoo!”
Bea said carefully, “You do know they’re only separated? Oliver and the Iranian Venus?”
“Oh, of course.”
“And that they still live together? I’m just making sure. Since you do know, I wish you’d please tell me what the story is. They’re separated and together and another man moved into the house?”
“Stan, yes, the other man.” Cassie waved away old news.
“What on earth is that about? That’s exciting, I suppose. In a sex comedy way.”
“No, it’s just a convenience. Oliver and I have talked about it.” They hadn’t, really. “I mean, everybody involved is grown up. It’s just a kind of overlap while people are divorcing and rearranging themselves. Oliver doesn’t seem to care in the least about Stan. Or her at this point. Admittedly, it’s awkward in a gossipy, suburban sort of a way, but isn’t the place enormous?”
“It certainly is,” Bea said, a little wounded, feeling that Cassie had lashed out by using the word suburban.