During the months of January and February that year, the Businessmen’s Lunch Posse struck five more Manhattan eateries, but not just at lunchtime. They swept into Le Cirque, the Post House, Aureole, and Lutèce in broad daylight but hit La Grenouille at night, where an indignant young sous-chef ran out of the kitchen with a cleaver aloft, naively intending to “defend the establishment’s honor”—as it was later reported by his coworkers—only to be blown away in a shit storm of nine-millimeter slugs.
The detectives on the case, in this time of dwindling city services, were able to deduce little beyond the perpetrators’ ethnic persuasion, basic modus operandi, and unfailing good taste in victims. The posse members, for their part, grew more brazen about sampling the cuisine wherever they struck, snatching tidbits of ginger carpaccio off a plate here, grilled monkfish there, and offering instant reviews—“Yo, this shit is fine as a motherfucker!”—as they made their rapid and disciplined exit to the van waiting outside.
“Shorn Like Lambs!” one tabloid newspaper put it after the Lutèce caper, quoting a Brooklyn community organizer who gleefully referred to the gang’s exploits as “New York’s newest, most politically inventive growth industry.” It became necessary for restaurants to hire private armed security guards, and those who couldn’t afford it watched over empty dining rooms, cried over spoiled produce, and ultimately saw their businesses die.
Yet, life as it was practiced on Kettle Hill Farm in West Rumford, Connecticut, 56.3 miles from the Plaza Hotel, took on a merrier air than it had known in many years. To Maggie’s happy surprise, Hooper and Alison both actually found intern positions at MTV and Calvin Klein, respectively, and began a regimen of commuting into the city as soon as the holidays, with all their bothersome festivities, drew to a close.
Lindy Hagan, with a clean bill of health, a future to consider, and a somewhat battered worldview, did not return to California. Instead, she took a place in the household as a sort of psychological reclamation project for Maggie, with most encouraging early results. She put on ten pounds, and in the right places too, for Maggie maintained a rigorous schedule of daily workouts. In turn, she helped Maggie and Nina with the business of Good Taste and seemed to relish her simple duties—as an improving patient relishes the little victories of occupational therapy in one of the better sanitariums. Hardly a whiz in the kitchen, Lindy could be counted on for rudimentary production tasks like baking muffins in quantity, deveining snow peas, and filling cored cherry tomatoes with curried crabmeat. Altogether, the household fell into an easy and amiable rhythm that fostered a general striving toward brighter futures for all concerned.
Kenneth Darling remained absent and incommunicado. A few preliminary letters arrived from his attorney, full of threats and promises of withering legal battles to come. Maggie’s lawyer reassured her that they represented little more than bluster, though, and said that behind all the tough talk her husband could easily be viewed for the pitiful helpless wiggling white worm that he was.
It was a Thursday afternoon in late January, during an odd interval with no one else in the house, when Maggie herself stumbled psychologically. Lindy was in Westport enjoying a session with her new psychiatrist, Dr. Irwin Klein (author of The No-Fail High Self-Esteem Diet). Nina was off solo, handling a simple afternoon tea for thirty at the Ridgefield Historical Society, the kids were at work in the city, the maids done for the day and gone. There were no photo shoots, no editorial wrangles, no product endorsement sessions, no dinner guests, not even any phone calls from the environmental charities about their tiresome rain forests and interminable whales. For the first time in weeks, Maggie was completely alone.
Gazing out the kitchen window at the sleeping garden and the windblown snow and the long, blue shadows, she felt herself slipping helplessly into that silent void between all the thousandfold chores and obligations of her life. The void frightened her and the stillness of the snowy landscape amplified her fear into a kind of free-falling despair. She longed at that moment to be enfolded in a man’s strong arms to keep from pitching into that void, and it occurred to her more than fleetingly, for the first time in weeks, that there was absolutely no man in her life. She suddenly craved one, craved all the brawn and musk and stupidity and courage of a man.
This longing, this physical hunger for enfoldment, resolved into a clear picture of Maggie’s predicament, like a reflection on the surface of a pond once the wind dies down, and her fear and despair clarified into a thrall of simple loneliness. She looked out at the wintry garden beds and saw her future in the cold blue barren snowdrifts. And, as sometimes happens in those odd moments when our little lives call out to the vast looming void where the true spirit of the world dwells, the void answered—Jung would have called it an instance of synchronicity—this time, happily, in the very longed-for form of a man’s voice.
“Swann here,” the voice seemed to sing at the distant end of the phone wire.
“Uh—” Maggie struggled for words as the fearful void reeled back in her consciousness. “Um, yes? Maggie Darling, speaking.”
“Frederick Swann. Remember me, Mrs. Darling?”
Suddenly, Maggie was combing her thick silver-blond hair with her fingers. “Frederick Swann the … performer?”
“Oh, I like that. Hadn’t thought of myself quite that way before. Mrs. Darling, I wish to scold you. Three weeks have passed since our chance encounter and you have not answered my note. I am bereft.”
A pregnant interval ensued before Maggie burst out laughing. “Don’t you … have groupies?” she struggled to say.
“Oh, I see. You imagine that I’m hip-deep in adolescent kitty cats. Well, I suppose I could be, but that is not to my taste, Mrs. Darling. You are more to my taste.”
“I’m … very flattered, Frederick.”
“Swann. Swanny to my intimates.”
“You are very swanlike.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“It was intended to be.”
“Yet if anyone is swanlike, it is you, Mrs. Darling—and conversely, ‘liked by Swann.’”
“I hardly know what to say.”
“Say you’ll have supper with me tonight.”
“It’s rather short notice, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I should not like to give you any time to reflect on the proposition, because I’m afraid that you’ll find any number of reasons to wrinkle your lovely nose and say no thank you. What do you say?”
“I say I’m too old for you.” She laughed again.
“Nonsense,” Swann retorted as though disposing of a little fluff of lint. “I suppose you’d like to argue the point, though.”
“I don’t like to argue about anything.”
“Splendid. Then you’ll dine with me tonight?”
“You are persistent.”
“Oh, just please say you will.”
“I … will,” Maggie said impulsively, horrifying herself.
“Good. I’ll send a car.”
“Where do you propose to dine?” she said, falling helplessly into his cadence of speech.
“Why, here, of course. The Royalton. The car should arrive at your establishment at roughly seven o’clock. Dress for comfort. Any questions?”
“Yes. Do you know that I am a married woman?”
“I have intelligence, Mrs. Darling, that some time ago you showed your husband the door, that you are, these days, married as a matter of legal circumstance, and there it ends. Do I have this correctly?”
“That’s a fair, if glib, summary. Who told you that?”
“Let’s just say I made inquiries. The source is reliable. I’m thrilled by the prospect of our evening together. Till later, then, Mrs. Darling. Good afternoon.”