Rosemary felt disoriented as she surveyed the dinner menu at Hoyle’s. Braised beef cheeks, pan-sautéed skate on polenta, roasted free-range quail. Hoyle’s had been her regular haunt during most of her career at Atherton’s, famous for the spicy inter-table art-world chitchat and bland food, but the menu had completely changed in her eight month absence.
“I don’t recognize any of this stuff,” she told Lloyd. “What happened to the meat loaf?”
“That menu was older than most of the stuff we sell,” Lloyd said. “Anyway, the chef died and they—”
“Eddie Garnett?”
“At the stove, with his hand on a sauté pan. Heart attack, apparently. They found him covered with béchamel sauce. I mean, who even wants béchamel sauce anymore?”
“He made creamed spinach when I was pregnant, just for me.”
“Anyway, merci buckets for coming, you know how Esme Hollander adores you.”
Rosemary put down the menu.
“What does she have?”
“I don’t know. She’s being her usual mysterious self, stringing us along for a free dinner. Don’t you hate it when rich people act cheap? It’s so discouraging.”
Thrifty Esme Hollender appeared a few minutes later. She was one of the those tiny, quiet, ancient women, invariably swaddled in layers of jackets, sweaters, and scarves and laden with bags and packages of unfathomable content, who somehow manage to cause a commotion when entering a room, emanating, like a small child, the prospect of overturned china and raised voices.
She took several wrong turns in the large and crowded dining room, having peevishly waved off the maître d’s offer of an escort. She found their table after a slow tour of the restaurant and proffered a pink cheek, which Rosemary dutifully pecked. It felt like fine calfskin. Lloyd aimed for the same cheek but Esme, getting up on tippy-toes, reached around his neck, her arms still burdened with bags, and directed his lips directly onto hers.
“You’re looking well, Esme,” Lloyd said when he’d extricated himself, a gash of scarlet lipstick across his mouth. As she unburdened herself of the bags, he discreetly napkinned his mouth.
“I feel well,” she said, lowering herself into the chair with a long, aspirated sigh. “Where’s the waiter with my drink?”
A waiter appeared almost instantly with a glass of sherry, half of which she took care of in one swill. She was a small, birdlike woman in her eighties, always fussily coifed like a First Lady from an earlier era, with skin so smooth and almost translucently pale, she brought to mind some exotic, milky species, newly discovered in a rain-forest cave, that had never seen sunlight. She had on her usual getup: a floral-patterned silk dress, pearl choker and earrings, and a watch encrusted with so many improbably large diamonds, it was a miracle she could hoist the sherry to her lips.
Esme was the daughter of the late Frederick Packard, who’d invented an obscure valve or gauge that was still an indispensable part of the internal combustion engine. His autobiography, published in the 1950s and entitled The Importance of Unimportance, became a Bible of sorts for people on the make in the postwar boom. Rosemary had trudged through it while courting Esme Hollender. She learned that one had a lot more pricing control and security in making a small, “unimportant” component of a much larger entity, such as an automobile engine, than an important one. After the book’s publication, the U.S. Patent Office was briefly flooded with applications for newfangled gaskets and grommets.
Frederick Packard’s only child, Esme, was plain in every sense, but she had a large enough fortune to attract a presentable, if reputedly homosexual, husband, who devoted his life to satisfying his obsession with art glass. Neither Esme nor her two grown children had much interest in the stuff, so when Alden Hollender died four years ago, Esme had contacted Atherton’s for an estimate of the collection’s potential worth. She was staggered to learn that Alden’s folly might attract five million dollars at auction, but she’d been coy about letting the collection go, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of obsequious attention and free meals from Lloyd Lowell.
“I’ve brought you something!” she said with a coquettish lift of her penciled eyebrows.
“Reeeally?” Lloyd’s tongue made a quick tour of his lips. “Might I see it?”
She reached for a small shopping bag on the floor, but the arrival of the waiter distracted her. He recited the day’s specials, took her order for another sherry and Rosemary’s for a club soda, and left them alone.
“I can’t help thinking I’m betraying Alden, even contemplating selling the collection.”
According to art world scuttlebutt, Alden had betrayed her with half the call boys in New York. Rosemary wondered if Esme didn’t perhaps have designs on Lloyd himself, another homosexual with a keen eye for art nouveau.
“And then there are the children. They grew up surrounded by these things. So much beauty…” She smiled wistfully and drained her sherry just as the waiter arrived with its replacement.
The “children,” two “private investors” in their late fifties living off vastly diminished trust funds set up by their grandfather, had contacted Lloyd, separately, to enlist his aid in prying the collection from their mother.
“You could donate a few pieces to the Met in their names,” Rosemary suggested, not for the first time.
“You look tired, Lloyd,” Esme said, placing a hand on his. “What’s been keeping you up nights?” She pursed her lips provocatively.
“The art nouveau market’s red-hot,” Rosemary said, doing her part to steer the conversation back to the mission at hand.
“There’s no sense of tradition anymore,” said Esme. “My father wasn’t much of a collector, but I treasure the few things he left me. He was too busy building his business to dwell on aesthetics. Have you read his autobiography, The Importance—”
“You mentioned a vase…”
“Oh, yes.” She reached to her left, but once again the waiter appeared, this time to take their food orders. Esme glanced at the menu and ordered a Porterhouse steak with truffles, by far the most expensive item on the menu. She’d leave Hoyle’s with all but two bites packaged in a doggie bag.
“Vase?” Lloyd said the moment the waiter left them.
“No thank you.” Esme raised her sherry glass. “I’m still working on this one.”
“VASE!” Lloyd pointed at the bag on the floor.
“Would you like to see it now?”
His jaw pulsed with frustration.
Esme picked up a plain shopping bag, but the two sherries had apparently weakened her grip. Rosemary dove for the bag and managed to catch it just inches from the ground. Inside, she saw a luminous profusion of colored glass: green and purple leaves, lilac and white flowers, a lemony yellow background.
“Not my cup of tea at all,” Esme said as she signaled the waiter for a refill.
“Is it…” Lloyd took a deep, steadying breath. “Signed?”
“There’s some bit of raised writing on the bottom. Begins with a G, with an accent at the end. French, je pense.”
“Gallé,” Rosemary said.
“That’s it! Think it’s worth anything?”
“We’ll have to examine it carefully,” Lloyd said, his voice already thick with desire.
“Well, examine it.” Esme gave the bag an unnerving thwack with her right hand.
Rosemary didn’t dare pull out the entire vase, not in Hoyle’s. It could break, for one thing. Even more risky would be exposing it to the voracious dealers in the room. If it really was Gallé, they’d follow Esme home and propose marriage to extricate it from her.
“Safer to wait until I’m back at the office,” Lloyd said as Rosemary rewrapped the towel around the vase. “Emile Gallé was a well-known glass designer in the later part of the nineteenth century. He’s considered a European Tiffany. We’ll call you as soon as we’ve done a full appraisal.”
The rest of the meal was torture. Lloyd barely touched his fish—his only hunger now was for the vase. If the piece was in fact by Emile Gallé, and if the entire vase was in the same condition as the section he’d seen, it would pay for a hundred meals with Esme Hollender. A Gallé vase in fine condition could be the centerpiece of the winter or spring sale. And once Esme saw how much the vase went for, she’d almost certainly let Atherton’s have the rest of the collection.
“I’ll call you in a day or two with our appraisal,” Lloyd told her on the sidewalk.
“Perhaps we should set up a lunch to discuss it,” she said as she tottered to the curb. “Or maybe another dinner.”
Lloyd hailed her a cab and saw her into it.
“Phillips had an eighteen-inch Gallé vase in their spring show,” he told Rosemary as the cab took Esme away. “It went for two-sixty,” he practically whispered.
“Amazing.”
“There’s still a lot of money around,” Lloyd observed with a sigh. “Speaking of which…I got a very curious phone call from a mousy-voiced man from the SEC of all places.”
Rosemary knew right away where this was headed. “Positano?”
“He said they’re looking into all purchases of Positano stock on certain dates. Including the date I bought, which was right after our take-out lunch in your hallway–slash–dining room,”
“Did he say why?”
“He was completely unhelpful. I told him I’ve lost my shirt on Positano, wished I’d never heard the name—I’m sorry, Rosemary, but it’s true. He wasn’t exactly sympathetic.”
“What did he want?”
“A list of people I know who either work for Positano or do business with Positano or who know people who work for or do business with Positano.”
“That would be me.”
“I spoke to a lawyer friend. He told me that it was highly unlikely I’d be sent to jail for losing money.”
“Jail?”
“Insider trading, my dear. All of our best customers are doing it.”
Rosemary couldn’t quite manage a smile.
“I need to talk to Guy about this.”
“Probably a good idea.”
“It’s the last thing he needs, something else to worry about. His board of directors is trying to ram a new chief operating officer down his throat, our renovation is behind schedule and way overbudget—”
“New chief operating officer? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Guy hates having someone else to—”
“For the stock price.”
“For God’s sake, Lloyd.”
“Don’t get all exasperated on me, Rosemary. How much longer can I go on living in a rent-stabilized studio? I keep waiting for real-estate prices to go down—I mean, everything else has.”
“It’s a very nice studio.”
“Don’t patronize me, Miss Powder Room. Real estate keeps going up while my savings move in the opposite direction. I used to think I’d schlep out to Brooklyn if I had to or even Queens. I mean, Queens. The way things are going, I’ll end up commuting by plane from Syracuse. Not to mention I was counting on Positano for my retirement.”
“You’re thirty-six.”
“Which is seventy in gay years.”
“I need to get home.” She flagged a cab and got in. As it drove off she watched Lloyd cross Madison, taking small, cautious steps and cradling the vase as if it were a newborn.
Ensconced in a prime booth at Chez Nous, Lily discreetly opened her purse and gave the plump wad of counterfeit twenties a reassuring squeeze.
“Let’s order a bottle of wine,” she said.
“A glass of Chablis will be fine for me.” Peggy hadn’t stopped glancing around the restaurant from the moment they’d been seated, her expression an unflattering mix of squinting distrust and pursed-lipped hostility. “I always figured this place would look…fancier. You read about this one and that one eating here.”
“No one looks at anything but each other.”
“Still, the carpet looks older than your father. Would it kill them to spring for new window treatments?”
Lily had felt a frisson run through Chez Nous as she entered, her first appearance there since Barnett’s arrest. None of her friends were there that night, if friends was the right word for people who hadn’t bothered to call her since the trouble began, much less invite her anywhere. But she recognized a few faces, and knew from the wave of averted glances and lowered cutlery that trailed her to her table that she’d been recognized as well. Jake, the maître d’, had sat them at a prominent booth just beyond the bar area, a gesture not of loyalty but of provocation: He’d always relished the minor humiliations he was able to inflict on New York’s social grandees, and seating the impoverished wife of a fugitive—out with her mother, no less—at a table of honor would put several noses out of joint.
Lily took a sip of the good Chardonnay she’d ordered and, surprising herself, cooed with pleasure.
“It’s that good?” Peggy sniffed her glass before tasting the wine.
“I’m just glad we came. I used to feel so tense coming here, like I was presenting myself for a panel of judges each time I walked in. Tonight I really didn’t care.”
“Then why did you ever come here?”
“To prove that I could make the judges like me.”
“You were such a confident little girl, so pretty, and an A student. I don’t know why you always felt you had to prove something.”
Lily observed her mother drinking wine, blissfully unaware that she might have played even a small role in forming Lily’s craving for approval. She’d been an A student because Peggy viewed A-minuses as only marginally less tragic than teenage pregnancy.
“Let’s order,” she said. “The Dover sole was always tolerable.”
Peggy hadn’t fully realized how much wine she’d had until she set off for the ladies’ room. The floor rose to meet her feet with each step, like that time on the Caribbean Princess when they ran into a storm off the coast of Belize. She spread both arms to keep her balance. How silly she must appear—how embarrassed Lily must feel, watching her lurch along, and she was watching, Peggy felt certain, always on guard for the poor choice of word or fork that would betray the unsophisticated roots from which she’d sprung like some sort of genetic mutation. Inside the bathroom, one stall was occupied. She entered the other one. A good evening, all in all; she’d forgotten what fun Lily could be. How long since they’d had a meal together, just the two of them? Too long. Nice to be out with someone who hadn’t yet qualified for Medicare, talking about things other than grandchildren and prescription drugs and how this store or that one overcharged. A flush from next door, then the sound of someone else entering the small bathroom.
“How have you been?” A woman’s voice, naturally.
“I’ve been wonderful. You?” Another woman’s voice. Both had that silky lilt Lily had picked up somewhere between high school and Park Avenue.
“Did you see who’s sitting in the first booth?”
“I almost choked. I’d heard she’d moved away.”
“Only to the West Side. Who’s that she’s with?”
“Must be her mother.”
“Who knew she had one? I think she’s put on weight.”
“Well, some people eat under stress. I’m the opposite. I lost five pounds planning the leukemia benefit.”
“You should write a book, The Leukemia Diet!”
“You’re terrible. I’m surprised she’d come back here. I mean, everyone knows about her husband.”
“One of his former partners called Seb and practically begged him to keep our money in the firm.”
“I meant the girlfriend, not the money.”
“Did you know her?”
“No one did. But Seb saw her photograph in the Times a few weeks ago, on some business matter. Francine Sparkler, one of those severe-looking finance types, all business until they get into the bedroom, and then they’re all about 24/7 blow jobs and positions that would give Olga Korbut a hernia.”
“Stop.”
“Listen, after Seb came back, I lost seven pounds just from the…I mean, we were at it all night, two, three time a week, and it wasn’t like the old days, when I could just lie back and wait for him to be done. And that was on top of the weight I lost while he was gone.”
“The Cheating Husband Diet.”
“I mean, these girlfriends do things. They have to, I suppose. Where were we? Oh, Francine Sparkler. Apparently, she used to advise Barnett on what stocks to buy. But Seb’s attorney’s partner is now her attorney, and one hears things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, just that the Feds have been all over her, thinking she knows where Barnett is. I hear they’re convinced she’s sending money to him, wherever he is.”
“I thought he absconded with the millions he took from the firm.”
“Well, that’s one theory, I suppose. The other is that she’s supporting him. Still, I miss her in a way, Lily Grantham. You could always count on her at parties to keep the conversation moving. And the men liked her. If you put her at their table, they were less likely to whine about having to stay till after dessert.”
“No one could laugh at a bad joke like Lily Grantham. Seb always used to say that she…”
The silky voice dissolved a second before the door closed. Peggy got right up and left the bathroom, neglecting even to wash her hands.
“Francine Sparkler,” she mumbled as she made her way back to the table.
“Are you feeling okay?” Lily asked when she sat down. “I was about to go after you.”
“Francine Sparkler.”
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. First write the name down. Francine Sparkler.”
The McDonald’s near Penn Station was half full. No, it was half empty, Guy decided as he waited for Derek Ventnor to arrive. The lighting bathed the mostly solo diners in a sallow gloom, a great equalizer, in a way: Everyone—black, white, Asian, Hispanic—looked identically jaundiced, members of one race: the depressed.
Was he depressed? Mentally Guy tore off a piece of foolscap and drew a line down its center. On the left he drew a plus sign and under it wrote “marriage, twins, Positano, new apartment.” Then, on the right column, he drew a minus sign and wrote, after a long hesitation, “marriage, twins, Positano, new apartment.” He reviewed the right column from the bottom up: The renovation was a nightmare, Positano was running on fumes, the twins, after several weeks of sleeping through the night (if “night” could be defined as the fidgety interval between the end of the eleven o’clock news and 5:15 A.M.), had recently formed a perfectly synchronized and very noisy partnership whose sole objective was to keep their parents in a constant state of bleary-eyed consciousness, and he and Rosemary, thanks to all of the above, had slipped into a mostly silent, occasionally bickering, and completely sexless…relationship seemed too positive a word—more like détente.
And yet if the right-hand column essentially negated the left, that didn’t add up to depressed, just…equilibrium? Survival? Just getting through the day, the week, the month, the year—an animal or bird doing whatever it took to survive, over and over and over again.
“My man!” Ventnor looked right at home in the sickly gloom. “You’re not eating?” he said.
“I prefer Burger King,” Guy said.
“You should have said something.” Ventnor shrugged and toddled off to the back of the restaurant. He returned several minutes later. “You bring the check?” Ventnor asked as he began to unwrap a half-dozen Styrofoam and paper containers.
Guy handed him the ten-thousand-dollar check and added the name Derek Ventnor to the right column of his mental foolscap, which tilted the scale decisively toward “depressed.”
“I have this friend,” Ventnor said as he deposited the check in his shirt pocket. He went at his burger, consuming nearly half of it in one raptorous bite, his mouth dilating impressively to accommodate the intake. “Actually, he’s more of a colleague,” he added through a mouthful of burger and roll.
Guy felt a surge of nausea at the thought of what a “colleague” of Ventnor’s might want.
“He runs a Web site, one of the top twenty most-visited sites, in fact.”
It seemed unlikely that Ventnor’s colleague was Jeff Bezos.
“A porn site?”
Ventnor made a “duh” gesture.
“He’s having trouble scaling.” He aligned three plastic packets of ketchup, ripped off their tops in one brutal movement, and squeezed the contents onto a pile of waiting fries. “At a certain point you gotta monetize your traffic or you’re just a destination with no revenues. This fellow, he showed me his books the other day, you wouldn’t believe the churn he’s got.”
“I’m sure your astute advice is precisely what he needs to turn his business around.”
“I’ve given him a few pointers. But the thing of it is, we’re talking a gay site. Not that my friend is gay, don’t worry. But gay is where the bucks are. More disposable income, no kids, and they have more time to surf the Net without worrying that the wife is gonna catch them whacking off to beaver shots when they said they were planning the family vacation on Expedia. And then you have the closet cases, married guys who live out their fantasies on gay sites. I’ve thought about getting into gay myself—not the straight gay scene, as in two women performing for men, I already got that covered—I mean the gay gay scene, as in two men. Or three men or twenty men or an army of men—group scenes are very big in that world, you know. And they got toys you wouldn’t believe.” Ventnor crammed a fistful of ketchupped fries into his mouth. “So here’s the thing.”
Guy braced himself mentally and, gripping the edge of the table with both hands, physically.
“My friend, he spends like half his time sending e-mails to his clientele. He sends each one himself, it’s a friggin’ nightmare. And his click-through rate is like less than five percent. I told him about Positano and he’s big-time interested.”
“I’ll send him a brochure.”
“See, that’s what we don’t need in this instance. I already sold him. He’s ready to sign a license agreement. My point being, I’d like a commission.”
“We don’t pay third parties a—”
“Fifty percent.”
“Out of the question.”
“I listened to your second-quarter conference call on the Internet a while back. Even with a fifty percent commission, you’ll make money on the deal. Your gross margins are, like, seventy-eight percent.”
Positano’s gross margins were precisely seventy-eight percent. Wasn’t the Internet a wonderful thing? Not to mention the SEC’s new full-disclosure policy, which meant that anyone, even a greedy pornographer, could listen in on a company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts. What used to be a clubby quarterly ritual was now a spectator sport, all in the interest of fairness. The notion that Ventnor had been listening to him recite Positano’s second-quarter numbers and business strategy was profoundly creepy—no doubt two of Ventnor’s performers were fucking in the background as he cheerily talked up the company’s prospects for margin improvement.
“We don’t pay third-party commissions,” he told him again.
“I’m not your typical third party. If I decide to make our relationship public—”
“Twenty-five percent,” Guy said. His head rang with the creaking and groaning of his principles giving way.
“Fifty.”
“Thirty.”
“Fifty.”
“Thanks for being flexible.”
“Listen, porn is what the Internet’s all about. You’ll never make it unless you figure that out. You think AOL and Yahoo are any different? They’re portals to sex sites. Okay, so there’s eBay and a few travel sites, but trust me, while the wives are selling shit from the attic on eBay, their husbands are looking at pussy…or dick.”
Guy stood up. “Who do I send the contracts to?”
“To me. I’ll handle everything. Hey, I gotta earn my commission.” Ventnor’s smile drove Guy’s spirits, already depressed, to a new, NASDAQ-style low.
“Send me an e-mail with the details,” he said, and walked away.