47 47In prison, it hurt Elias Renthal when he heard that his apartment had been sold, even though Ruby had told him on the way to prison that she didn’t want to live there anymore. The apartment represented everything that he had ever strived for in his life, and he had always enjoyed the astonished looks on the faces of even the most established and wealthy visitors when he showed them through it. It hurt him even more when he heard that it was being divided up into three smaller apartments, making it forever irretrievable and squashing the daydreams he sometimes indulged in of resuming his former life after his release from Allenwood, a better and wiser man.
It enraged him that Reza Bulbenkian and his new wife, the former Yvonne Lupescu, should have purchased all the furniture and paintings that he and Ruby had collected so lovingly and that they were already starting to entertain on a lavish scale in their new mansion on Park Avenue, rivaling the life-style that the Renthals had made famous. Elias loathed Reza Bulbenkian and told his three bridge companions of crooked things that he knew Reza had done in business and gotten away with. Then he added, “so far,” meaning that his practices would eventually catch up with him, too. The congressman, the rock-and-roll executive, and the cement-company owner laughed. They loved hearing Elias’s stories. Elias also told them that Yvonne Bulbenkian used to be one of Ms. Myra’s girls, before she took up with Constantine de Rham, and carried her whips in a custom-made Vuitton case. “Imagine, a former hooker running New York society,” he said.
Most of all Elias missed Ruby. More than anything in the world, he wanted to make it up to Ruby for the embarrassment and the ostracism that he had caused her. He never remembered her as she was when he first met her, a pretty stewardess with a sassy manner. He thought of her coming down the stairway of their apartment on the night of their ball, dressed in white and wearing all her diamonds, and marveled each time he thought of her as the great lady she had become.
“Max comes to visit,” Elias said to Ruby one day when she drove up from Merry Hill to see him.
“Good old Max,” said Ruby.
“Max saw Loelia Manchester at the opera.”
“Max at the opera? What next?” replied Ruby.
“He said he thought Loelia was unhappy.”
“Heavens,” said Ruby.
From the time of her arrival, Elias knew there was something on Ruby’s mind, all during the time they were talking of other things, like Max Luby and Loelia Manchester.
“Elias,” said Ruby, finally. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“What’s that, Ruby darling? Anything you want. Anything.”
Then Ruby asked Elias for a divorce. She brought with her the papers for him to sign. Elias was devastated by Ruby’s request but was not totally surprised. The congressman’s wife had divorced him. The wife of the head of the record company had divorced him. The head of the cement company was already divorced. His hand shaking, he signed the papers.
“At least you didn’t break the news to me through a lawyer,” he said.
“You know I’d never do that to you, Elias,” she answered.
“My friend the congressman read about his wife’s divorce in the newspaper.”
“Or that.”
“I know.”
“Don’t remember me badly.”
“I won’t. Count on that.” Ruby took out a handkerchief from her bag and wiped a tear from her eye. Then she began gathering up her things and put the papers he signed into her bag.
“Well, good-bye,” she said, rising at the end of the visit.
“We’re allowed to kiss,” said Elias.
“Oh, yes, of course.” She smiled. As he leaned toward her, she averted her face a fraction of an inch so that his kiss landed on the side of her mouth rather than full on her lips, like a son at boarding school saying good-bye to a departing mother. Elias understood. Each avoided the other’s eye. For a few moments they simply stood there.
“I read in Dolly’s column that Loelia married Mickie,” said Elias, wanting to forestall her departure.
Ruby nodded. “I read that,” she answered.
“What do they call her now, Loelia Minardos?”
“Apparently.”
“Don’t sound so snappy as Loelia Manchester.”
“I suppose not.”
“You don’t see Loelia?”
“No.”
Elias nodded. “I wonder if she paid Ned all that money he was asking.”
“No,” said Ruby.
“How come?”
“Ned would never have taken money from Loelia. It was just to keep her from marrying Mickie that he asked for all that money. Now he doesn’t care.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s what I heard.”
Lord Biedermeier visited Elias in prison and reported at a dinner party later that same evening, at Maisie Verdurin’s house, that Elias had wept when he talked about the divorce. Feelings against Elias still ran high, and the consensus was that Ruby Renthal had done the correct thing.
“Ruby just dropped out of sight,” said Maude Hoare. “I don’t know a soul who sees her.”
“Poor Ruby,” said Aline Royceton.
“But why in the world did you go to visit Elias?” asked Maisie.
“Oh, I was always fond of Elias,” replied Lord Biedermeier.
Lord Biedermeier did not say to the group at his table that he was hopeful of securing a second book from Elias, on the prison life of a billionaire, even promising him someone willing to make weekly visits to Allenwood to ghost-write it for him.
“A sort of De Profundis,” Lord Biedermeier had said to Elias in the visitors’ room, shifting his position to see him better through the mesh screening that separated them.
“A sort of what?” asked Elias.
“De Profundis. De Profundis,” Lord Biedermeier said, clapping his hands in mock exasperation, as if everyone in prison would know about Oscar Wilde’s final prose written during his incarceration. “Listen to this, Elias,” he said, quoting, loosely, from Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, that Lord Biedermeier had jotted down on the back of an envelope in the limousine on his way to the prison in Pennsylvania. “ ‘I have disgraced my name eternally.’ ” Lord Biedermeier gestured toward Elias to show that he, too, had disgraced his name eternally. “ ‘I have made it a low byword among low people. I have dragged it through the very mire, and turned it into a synonym for folly.’ You see Elias, you could change folly to greed.”
But Elias Renthal, whose name had indeed become a synonym for greed, could not think of De Profundis that day. Elias Renthal could only think that he had lost Ruby Renthal forever. He could only look blankly at Lord Biedermeier.
“Keep a journal, Elias. Write everything down, the day-to-day of what happens here. Get to know the most serious offenders. What a book it will make!” He clapped his hands, and his pince-nez fell off. “Start reading the Bible every day. You know the sort of thing, I-found-God-in-Allenwood. The public will eat it up, and everyone will be on your side by the time you get out. There’s a whole great big life waiting for you out there. Oh, perhaps not with the Van Degans and that set, but there’s other fish to fry in life than Laurance Van Degan who, by the way, in case you hadn’t heard, had to resign as president of the Butterfield.”
Elias looked up. “Because of me?” he asked.
“Apparently,” replied Lord Biedermeier.
“Holy shit.”