7

“Who’s that handsome young man I keep seeing with your daughter?” asked Baba Timson, during bridge.

“A handsome young man with Justine?” replied Lil Altemus, surprised, but delighted. “You don’t mean Herkie Saybrook, do you?”

“Oh, no, not Herkie,” said Baba. “Everyone knows Herkie.”

“Not Thayer Good, I hope?” said Lil.

“Heavens, no. Handsome, I said. Thayer Good looks like a premature baby at thirty-five.”

“I don’t know,” said Lil, who intended to find out. “It’s your bid, Loelia.”

Late at night, after Bernie took Justine home, or early in the morning, when they both woke up, Justine telephoned Bernie, or Bernie telephoned Justine. They seemed never to run out of things to talk about.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea how much money I’m going to inherit,” said Justine. “I come from the kind of family that never fills the women in on things like that. My brother and I each have a trust, rather ample, and we live on that until Grandfather Van Degan dies, when we’ll come into something, and then the rest, I suppose, when Mother dies.”

“You don’t have to tell me all this, you know, Justine. I can pay the bills. I intend to pay the bills,” said Bernie.

“Music to my ears,” said Justine. She laughed at her joke. “I’ve heard since I was five years old to beware of everyone, even the girls I went to school with, because they were only interested in the money. It’s an awful way to grow up, you know, distrusting everyone.”

“I’m never really gonna understand people like you,” said Bernie.

“You know something, Bernie? You’re my least suitable suitor, in terms of family and that kind of thing, but you’re also the only suitor I’ve ever had who really didn’t give a damn about the money. The things I could tell you about Jean-Claude St. Cloud, for instance, whom my mother had all picked out for me.”

“I guess I’m just filled with middle-class values,” said Bernie.

“More music to my ears,” answered Justine.

“A couple of things I want to talk about, speaking of middle-class values,” said Bernie.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to live in the same building your mother lives in, and, I have to tell you right now, I hate cabbage-rose chintz.”

Justine laughed again. “Okay,” she said. “Goodbye to Fifth Avenue, and good-bye to Cora Mandell and cabbage-rose chintz. But I don’t want to live in your building either, and I don’t want the minimal look.”

“A deal,” said Bernie.

“One other thing, so everything’s out in the open.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m a spoiled girl, Bernie,” Justine said. “I adore you, worship you, in fact, can’t get enough of you, love to look at you, every part of you, but I’m not going to get up every morning to fry your eggs, over easy, when I have a perfectly good cook who can do that sort of thing far better than I can.”

“Good. I hate to talk when I’m reading the Times.”

“We’re going to get along great, Bernie.”

“Here’s to us, kid.”

“Want me to come over?” she asked.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“I know.”

“I’m not shaved, and I stink,” he said.

“All the better,” she answered.

“I need a fourth for bridge,” said Lil Altemus, over the telephone. “I’ve got Matilda, and Nonie, but Loelia has backed out on me. Loelia’s always backing out on me these days, and that boring Baba Timson has an appointment with her daughter’s analyst that she won’t break. Be here at two, will you, or earlier if you want lunch. Matilda’s coming for lunch.”

“I can’t, Mother,” said Justine.

“Why?”

“Just because I can’t.”

“What am I going to do?”

“I hear Rochelle Prud’homme has taken up bridge with a vengeance.”

“That’s what Matilda said, but I don’t think Rochelle Prud’homme is quite right for our little group. You can’t talk freely in front of people like that.”

“I thought you liked Rochelle Prud’homme.”

“She does do wonderful things for charity, but this is just old friends playing bridge.”

“It’s Matilda who got Rochelle to learn bridge.”

“And why would Matilda do that, for heaven’s sake?”

“Because Rochelle Prud’homme wants to play bridge with Lil Altemus and Loelia Manchester.”

Lil listened, but as a matter of principle, she refused to show undue interest in anything Justine related, preferring to receive her information from other sources. “And why can’t you play?” she asked.

“Because I am otherwise engaged.”

“People are talking about you and that television announcer.”

“I think we should talk about it, Mother.”

“This is not at all right, you know, Justine. I’m sure he’s very nice and all that, but, darling, listen to your old mother, these things have a way of just not working.”

“Oh, please, Mother. Don’t say listen-to-your-old-mother to me. You don’t know how hilarious that sounds coming from you.”

“You’re just asking for trouble, Justine, with people like that.”

“Have lunch with me tomorrow at Clarence’s, and we’ll talk.”

“Christ, I hate sex with condoms,” said Bernie Slatkin, removing his and flushing it down the toilet.

“Oh, God, another intellectual conversation,” said Brenda Primrose, as she pulled on her pantyhose.

“It just never feels as good,” said Bernie.

“The way you cat around, Bernie, it’s that or nothing with me,” said Brenda. They had been on-and-off lovers for several years, with never a thought of love. Brenda Primrose did the research for Bernie’s newscasts. She was smart. She was flip. She was sexy. They both understood their relationship perfectly.

“I don’t cat around anymore,” said Bernie, defensively. “I’ve reformed.” It was a sensitive point with him. He had been warned by a senior executive at the network, who admired his work, that a promiscuous reputation was not the best one for a successful newscaster with political ambitions.

“Since when?” asked Brenda. “Three minutes ago?”

Bernie paused. It was the reason he had asked her over, to tell her about Justine, but then, sex happened, as it always seemed to happen when they were alone, in his office, in his apartment, wherever, even in an elevator once, always quick, always lustful, never romantic. Then they went back to work, as if nothing had happened, and in her off hours, she had dates with other men, and he had dates with other women, with no need for explanation on either side.

“Since I, uh, became, uh, engaged to be married,” he said, The words engaged to be married came out as one word, engagedtobemarried. He quickly turned to look in a mirror to button his shirt and tie his tie so that he could face away from her for that moment.

“Since you what?” she asked.

“Became engaged to be married.”

“Who did you become engaged to?”

“She’s called Justine Altemus.”

“Laurance Van Degan’s niece?”

“Yes.”

Brenda walked over to the mirror, took hold of Bernie’s arm, and pulled him around to face her. For an instant, they looked at each other. He smiled at her his little-boy smile, as if expecting her congratulations. Then she slapped his face, very hard. “You bastard, Bernie,” she said.

“Hey, that hurt,” he said, surprised, putting his hand up to the spot where she slapped him.

“That was the point of the slap, Bernie,” said Brenda, angrily. “To hurt. So like you.” Bernie had never seen her angry before, or at least angry with him before.

“What the hell are you talking about, Brenda?”

“You had to wait until after you came twice before you told me you were going to get married?”

Bernie, embarrassed, winced. Then he walked to the bar. “Want a drink?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she said. She finished dressing and went over to the same mirror he had just used and readjusted her lipstick and started brushing her hair. Watching Brenda from behind, Bernie was struck, as always, by how perfect her legs were. She was the first of all the girls he knew to start wearing the new short short skirts, even before the fashion leaders let the world know it was the right look for the right girl with the right legs.

“Here,” Bernie said, handing her a glass of wine.

Brenda took a sip. “You’re going to have to get better wine than this, Bernie, if you’re going to marry the Van Degan heiress.”

“I didn’t even know who she was when I met her,” he said.

“You don’t read Dolly De Longpre’s column.”

“I didn’t then. I do now.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“In an elevator.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“No, no, no, not like that. We were both leaving a party at Maisie Verdurin’s, and she gave me a ride home.”

Brenda nodded. “I’m not hurt, Bernie, but I do feel a bit used. I realize I’m just the office fuck, but us office fucks have feelings too.”

“Office fuck, indeed,” said Bernie. He hugged her.

“Congratulations,” she said, finally.

“Thanks, Brenda. I’m really going to make this marriage work.”

Brenda didn’t believe him, but she nodded. She knew he was an alley cat. She knew that six months after his marriage he would be on the prowl again.

“Have you told Sol and Hester yet?” she asked. Brenda Primrose had once met Bernie Slatkin’s aunt and uncle, who brought him up, when they came to the studio to watch him broadcast, and she always called them Sol and Hester when she mentioned them to Bernie.

“Not yet.”

“I don’t think they’re going to be thrilled with a shiksa for a niece-in-law, do you?”

“When they meet Justine, they’ll like her,” said Bernie.

“Sure, Bernie. Probably about as much as Mrs. Altemus and Laurance Van Degan are going to like you.”

Lil Altemus looked up and watched her daughter enter the restaurant. Lil resented Justine’s height and often blamed her single status, although she was only thirty, on the fact that she had towered over most of the boys in Mrs. Godfrey’s dancing classes at the Colony Club when her age group was growing up in New York. Mostly, however, Lil Altemus resented Justine’s height because she felt it would have far better suited her son. Still stubbornly mistaken about Hubie, Lil insisted that he would eventually find a woman, even encouraging him to pursue this one or that one, and she once gave him her discarded engagement ring, a rather large diamond from her own failed marriage, when she thought, incorrectly, that he might have found his life choice in the unlikely person of Violet Bastedo.

Lil watched as Justine, on her way to the table, stopped to speak to a trio of young married women whom she had come out with who were lunching together. Justine had never, like the Millingtons’ daughter, taken to dope. Nor had she ever, like Emerald de Grey’s daughter, become radical and slept with NYU associate professors with ponytails. And, thank God, she hadn’t become a dyke, like poor Baba Timson’s Nan, whom Baba never spoke about anymore. Lil could find nothing to fault in Justine’s perfect appearance, but, used to faulting her, she stared and then squinted at her daughter’s hair in such a way that Justine’s hands went immediately to her coiffure, as if the wind outside had mussed it, although there had been no wind outside.

“Who’s that great fat man with the foot-long cigar?” asked Lil, after her daughter was seated. Lil Altemus often pretended she didn’t know things she knew very well, and she knew perfectly well who the great fat man with the cigar was.

“He’s called Elias Renthal,” answered Justine, who knew that her mother knew.

“The one who bought Matilda’s apartment? Looks horrid. Brown shoes with a blue suit. His wife is the pushiest woman ever. Ruby, she’s called. She asked me to have lunch. I mean, I know her about as well as I know this waiter.” She waved her hand in the direction of the waiter who was placing a glass of white wine in front of her. “First she served a cheese soufflé, and then a chocolate soufflé for dessert. Can you imagine? Even her Rigaud candles were the wrong color. Get Matilda going on the Renthals sometime.” She sipped her wine.

“Why did you go if you feel like that?” asked Justine.

“I was raising money for the new stroke center for the hospital, and all my friends said they simply couldn’t give another cent, and Mrs. Renthal couldn’t get her checkbook out fast enough so, of course, I had to go. It’s what’s called a once-only. Chick Jacoby really shouldn’t allow him to smoke cigars in here.” Lil waved her napkin back and forth in the air, as if to clear it of the offending cigar smoke.

“Chick Jacoby wouldn’t have the nerve to tell Elias Renthal to put it out,” said Justine.

“I wonder how he got such a good table,” said Lil.

“Rich, rich, rich, Mother. Or, Big Bucks, as Bernard Slatkin would say. Richer even than the Van Degans, I hear.”

Lil Altemus had a horror of what she referred to as the New People, and her own immense fortune had always protected her from having to fraternize socially with any of them, except when she asked them for money for one of her charities. Recently, however, with the publication of Mr. Forbes’s annual list of the four hundred richest people in America, she was aware that her still immense fortune was less immense than the fortunes of such New People as Elias Renthal “and his ilk,” meaning the Bulbenkians, and the Zobel brothers, and the Jorsts. The feeling was unsettling.

“Imagine anyone wearing a pale blue gabardine suit,” said Lil, still staring over at Elias Renthal. Then she added, “Who’s Bernard Slatkin?”

“He’s the man I’m going to marry,” answered Justine.

“Goodness,” said Lil.

Justine expected a great furor of protestations from her mother, and possibly a scene. Bernard Slatkin possessed none of the requisites that Lil Altemus, who never let anyone forget that she was born a Van Degan, adhered to in past suitors for her daughter’s hand. Surprisingly, Lil was, if not exactly enthusiastic, at least not defiant in her opposition to Justine’s choice. Justine was, after all, thirty, or, to be precise, practically thirty-one. The kind of boys she had grown up with, gone to dancing school with, spent weekends with at Yale or Princeton, and who now worked downtown, in banks or brokerage houses, almost never married girls as rich as Justine Altemus was going to be. As one after another of them had drifted into solid if less spectacular marriages, Lil’s greatest fear was that Justine would fall into the clutches of one of the fortune-hunting foreigners who preyed on American heiresses. Every time she thought of her childhood friend, Consuelo Harcourt de Rham, she shuddered at her sad fete. The sight of Consuelo’s widower, Constantine de Rham, several tables away, spending Consuelo’s money on a blond strumpet half his age, wearing for too many jewels for daytime, may have softened Lil’s opposition to Bernard Slatkin.

“Slatkin,” said Lil. “I don’t know that name.”

“It’s not in the Social Register, Mother,” answered Justine.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“He earns a great deal of money, Mother.”

“A television announcer, someone told me.”

“No, he is a broadcaster. On the evening news.”

“Not the little Chinese?”

“No, Mother, that’s the weatherman, and he’s Korean, not Chinese. Bernie is one of the anchormen.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Is he the one with the dimple or the one with the toupee?”

“The dimple. He’s very handsome, Mother.”

“Of course he is, darling. Where in the world did you meet such a person?”

“At Maisie Verdurin’s.”

“Mrs. Verdurin has all those celebrities to dinner, doesn’t she? I’m forever reading about her in Dolly’s column. What were you doing at Mrs. Verdurin’s?”

“We’re here to talk about the man I’m going to marry, not about Maisie Verdurin.”

“What do you suppose old Cora Mandell and Ezzie Fenwick are being so intense about at the next table?” asked Lil.

“Mother!”

“I’m listening, Justine,” said her mother, sharply. “Forgive me if I can’t absorb it all in a flash. This is quite important news, and, after all, we don’t know anything about Mr. Bernard Slatkin, now, do we?”

Justine knew, before her mother even said it, that she was going to say, “Who is he?” She also knew that her mother meant, “Who is his family? What are his schools?”

“Who is he?” asked her mother.

“His parents are dead. He was raised by an aunt and uncle, Sol and Hester Slatkin. Sol is in the printing business. They live in New Jersey. Weehawken.”

“Hmm,” said Lil.

“Bernie went to Rutgers on a scholarship,” said Justine. She loved saying, “He went to Rutgers on a scholarship,” as if it added to the worth of him, a romantic asset to his history. In all her life she had never known anyone who had gone to school on a scholarship, and she found the idea glamorous. Even the names Sol and Hester evoked images in her mind of Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty, and huddled masses, although Sol and Hester Slatkin were several generations removed from Ellis Island and lived comfortable lives in comfortable circumstances. “He waited on tables in a fraternity house,” Justine continued, her voice filled with excitement. “And then he went to law school for a year, I forget where, but he dropped out, because he was mad-keen to be in television news. First he was an on-the-air reporter covering City Hall, and then he filled in for a week as anchorman when Charlie Walsh broke his leg, and there was such a favorable reaction to him, I mean, people wrote in about him, he’s so good-looking, wait till you see him, and then they made him a coanchorman full time after Charlie went to Los Angeles.”

“Hmm,” said Lil.

“He’s not after my money, if that’s what you’re worried about, because he earns a fortune, an absolute fortune.”

“They all earn a lot of money, those announcers, don’t they?”

“He’s an anchorman, Mother, not an announcer, and he writes all his own copy. He’s very successful.”

“I meant an anchorman,” said Lil.

“I want a big wedding, Mother, with bridesmaids, and a reception at the Colony Club, and, you know, the works,” said Justine.

“This is so nice, Justine,” said Lil. She shaped her lips into an obligatory smile, but Lil’s lips were very little involved in her smiles. Instead she raised her eyebrows and blinked her eyes shut several times in rapid succession in a manner that suggested, somehow, mirth. “You know, of course, there will be things to discuss with Uncle Laurance down at the bank.”

“Yes”

“When will I meet Mr. Slatkin?”

“As soon as you say. You won’t be difficult, will you, Mother, if Daddy gives me away?”

“Of course not, darling, as long as that tramp he’s married to doesn’t come within my sight lines and is seated somewhere at the back of the church,” said Lil.

“Oh, Mother, I’m so thrilled. And you’re going to love Bernie. He knows everything about Libya and nuclear disarmament and all those things. He’s fascinating.”

“Justine.”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Mr. Slatkin, uh—”

“Please call him Bernie.”

“Yes, of course, Bernie.”

“What about him?”

“He doesn’t wear one of those little beanie hats, does he?”