dress swooped down almost to the point of no return, and her naked skin was like a spill of milk, kept from running over the edge by Nick’s large palm.
Charles covered his cheek with his right hand—the same hand that Miss Byrne had just touched with her limp and slender fingers—and said that bastard always got the best-looking women.
I watched Nick’s back disappear into the crowd, and I was about to tell Charles that he didn’t need to worry, that Nick didn’t really look all that happy with his companion and Charles might want to give the delectably disinterested Miss Byrne another try in an hour, but at that exact instant a voice came over my shoulder, the last voice I expected to hear at the Paris Ritz on this night in the smoldering middle of July.
“My God,” it said, a little slurry. “If it isn’t the baroness herself.”
I thought perhaps I was hallucinating, or mistaken. It wouldn’t be the first time. For the past two years, I’d heard this voice everywhere: department stores and elevators and street corners. I’d seen its owner in every possible nook, in every conceivable disguise, only to discover that the supposed encounter was only a false alarm, a collision of deluded molecules inside my own head, and the proximate cause of the leap in my blood proved to be an ordinary citizen after all. Just an everyday fellow who happened to have dark hair or a deep voice or a certain shape to the back of his neck. In the instant of revelation, I never knew whether to be relieved or disappointed. Whether to lament or hallelujah. Either way, the experience wasn’t a pleasant one, at least not in the way we ordinarily experience pleasure, as a benevolent thing that massages the nerves into a sensation of well-being.
Either way, I had committed a kind of adultery of the heart, hadn’t I, and since I couldn’t bear the thought of adultery in any form, I learned to ignore the false alarm when it rang and rang and rang. Like the good wife I was, I learned to maintain my poise during these moments of intense delusion.
So there. Instead of bolting at the slurry word baroness, I took my deluded molecules in hand and said: Surely not.
Instead of spinning like a top, I turned like a figurine on a music box, in such a way that you could almost hear the tinkling Tchaikovsky in my gears.
A man came into view, quite lifelike, quite familiar, tall and just so in his formal blacks and white points, dark hair curling into his forehead the way your lover’s hair does in your wilder dreams. He was holding a lowball glass and a brown Turkish cigarette in his right hand, and he took in everything at a glance: my jewels, my extravagant dress, the exact state of my circulation.
In short, he seemed an awful lot like the genuine article.
“There you are, you old bastard,” said Charles happily, and sacré bleu, I realized then what I already knew, that the man before me was no delusion. That the Paris Ritz was the kind of place that could conjure up anyone it wanted.
“Stefan,” I said. “What a lovely surprise.”
(And the big trouble was, I think I meant it.)
“Experience is simply the name
we give our mistakes.”
OSCAR WILDE
Palm Beach • 1966
1.
The Mercedes-Benz poses on the grass like a swirl of vintage black ink, like no other car in the world.
You’d never guess it to look at her, but Miss Pepper Schuyler—that woman right over there, the socialite with the golden antelope legs who’s soaking up the Florida sunshine at the other end of the courtyard—knows every glamorous inch of this 1936 Special Roadster shadowing the grass. You might regard Pepper’s pregnant belly protruding from her green Lilly shift (well, it’s hard to ignore a belly like that, isn’t it?) and the pastel Jack Rogers sandal dangling from her uppermost toe, and you think you have her pegged. Admit it! Lush young woman exudes Palm Beach class: What the hell does she know about cars?
Well, beautiful Pepper doesn’t give a damn what you think about her. She never did. She’s thinking about the car. She slides her gaze along the seductive S-curve of the right side fender, swooping from the top of the tire to the running board below the door, like a woman’s voluptuously naked leg, and her heart beats a quarter-inch faster.
She remembers what a pain in the pert old derrière it was to repaint that glossy fender. It had been the first week of October, and the warm weather wouldn’t quit. The old shed on Cape Cod stank of paint and grease, a peculiarly acrid reek that had crept right through the protective mask and into her sinuses and taken up residence, until she couldn’t smell anything else, and she thought, What the hell am I doing here? What the hell am I thinking?
Thank God that was all over. Thank God this rare inky-black 1936 Mercedes Special Roadster is now someone else’s problem, someone willing to pay Pepper three hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of keeping its body and chrome intact against the ravages of time.
The deposit has already been paid, into a special account Pepper set up in her own name. (Her own name, her own money: now, that was a glorious feeling, like setting off for Europe on an ocean liner with nothing but open blue seas ahead.) The rest will be delivered today, to the Breakers hotel where Pepper is staying, in a special-delivery envelope. Another delightful little big check made out in Pepper’s name. Taken together, those checks will solve all her problems. She’ll have money for the baby, money to start everything over, money to ignore whoever needs ignoring, money to disappear if she needs to, forever and ever. She’ll depend on no one. She can do whatever the hell she pleases, whatever suits Pepper Schuyler and—by corollary—Pepper Junior. She will toe nobody’s line. She will fear nobody.
So the only question left in Pepper’s mind, the only question that needs resolving, is the niggling Who?
Who the hell is this anonymous buyer—a woman, Pepper’s auction agent said—who has the dough and the desire to lay claim to Pepper’s very special Special Roadster, before it even reaches the public sales ring?
Not that Pepper cares who she is. Pepper just cares who she isn’t. As long as this woman is a disinterested party, a person who has her own reasons for wanting this car, nothing to do with Pepper, nothing to do with the second half of the magic equation inside Pepper’s belly, well, everything’s just peachy keen, isn’t it? Pepper will march off with her three hundred thousand dollars and never give the buyer another thought.
Pepper lifts a tanned arm and checks her watch. It’s a gold Cartier, given to her by her father for her eighteenth birthday, perhaps as a subtle reminder to start arriving the hell on time, now that she was a grown-up. It didn’t work. The party always starts when Pepper gets there, not before, so why should she care if she arrives late or early? Still, the watch has its uses. The watch tells her it’s twenty-seven minutes past twelve o’clock. They should be here any moment: Pepper’s auction agent and the buyer, to inspect the car and complete the formalities. If they’re on time, and why wouldn’t they be? By all accounts, the lady’s as eager to buy as Pepper is to sell.
