Jack and Susan in 1953 (10 page)

Monsieur Marcel's chaos was organized. When one of the six women in the ring was finished, she got down from her perch and sailed majestically out—the pinnacle of coiffured fashion. Susan climbed into a chair as yet another woman came through the door, to wait
her
ten minutes till a chair was free.

“Susan!”

She didn't even have to turn, she knew the voice. And in the mirrored wall she could see the reflected visage of Elizabeth St. John Mather.

Susan, pretending she hadn't seen or heard, did not immediately respond. Then she arranged herself comfortably in her smock, prepared a tight little smile, looked up again, and said, “Hello Libby. What a coincidence.”

Before the two young women could engage in any further conversation, Monsieur Marcel was behind Susan, asking wearily, “Which do you want? The Botticelli, the Bellini, or the Michelangelo?”

The fashion of the day was Italian cuts. A shaggy sculpture of curls, with deep waves on the crown, and spit curls to frame the face. While waiting in the shampoo room, Susan had seen eight women walk out with the same hairdo.

“What's the difference?” asked Susan.

“Well,” said Monsieur Marcel, “the Botticelli and the Bellini are exactly the same. The Michelangelo comes with silver streaks.”

“Then the Bellini,” said Susan.

Monsieur Marcel peered at Susan's face in the mirror. “Turn,” he said, and she gave him her profile. “It will look very good on you,” he announced. He held out his left hand and from one side of the chair his assistant placed in his grasp a comb. He held out his right hand and the assistant came around the other side to place in his hand a pair of scissors. The assistant melted away. Monsieur Marcel began cutting. Monsieur Marcel didn't converse with his customers; Susan didn't mind.

“Monsieur Marcel,” said Libby, having risen from her chair and now standing in front of Susan, braving the hairdresser's iciest, most forbidding smile. “Do you mind if I talk to my friend while you design?”

“Very much,” said Monsieur Marcel politely.

Crushed, Libby backed away.

“Thank you,” Susan said quietly to Monsieur Marcel. Susan had never seen Libby obsequious before, but really thought that she preferred Libby brash.

In five minutes, Monsieur Marcel had finished. Susan liked what she saw in the mirror; the Bellini suited her.

“Now,” said Monsieur Marcel, “we'll let it rest for a moment or two and then we'll come back to you for a final shaping.”

Then, as luck would have it, when Monsieur Marcel had finished with the woman in the next chair and sent her packing, Libby Mather took her place.

“I'm
dying
to talk to you,” Libby whispered as she climbed up onto the perch. “Poodle,” she instructed Monsieur Marcel, “basic poodle.”

Monsieur Marcel unwrapped Libby's turban, tossed it at his assistant, and went to work on Libby's head. Italian haircuts didn't suit blondes, and Libby had the sense to know it.

In ten minutes Monsieur Marcel had finished temporarily with Libby and moved on. Libby immediately leaned over toward Susan, and caught Susan's eyes in the mirror.

“I couldn't believe what happened to Jack yesterday,
I couldn't believe it
. And you were there, you saw the whole thing. I was so upset when I heard—
so upset
.” Libby was whispering, because Monsieur Marcel didn't approve of conversation in the inner sanctum. It distracted him from design.

“Jack was lucky,” said Susan quietly. “Next time he runs out into the middle of a busy street he might get killed.”

“What a terrible thing,” said Libby sadly, shaking her head. “Do you think Jack is mad at your friend?”

“My friend?”

“Mr. Havana.”

“Rodolfo?”

Libby nodded vigorously.

“I don't know if Jack is mad at him or not. How would I know what Jack thinks about anything?”

“You used to be so close,” said Libby. “And it's funny—isn't it—how all of a sudden you've come right back into his life after four years? Where have you been hiding all this time?”

“I haven't been hiding anywhere, Libby. I guess we just haven't been traveling in the same circles.”

“But now we're running into each other
everywhere
,” said Libby.

“Things happen that way,” Susan replied vaguely.

“Well,” said Libby, “if Jack isn't mad at Rodolfo then I want to invite you and Rodolfo over to my place next Saturday night.”

Susan looked at Libby curiously. “I'm not sure it would be a good idea, Libby—the four of us…”

“Oh,” said Libby with a careless wave of her hand, “the four of us and about four hundred others. If Jack and Mr. Havana don't want to talk to each other, they won't have to.”

“You're having a party for four hundred people?” Susan asked, trying to calculate the cost, even assuming that Libby was exaggerating by a factor of four. Four was Libby's usual standard for exaggeration, Susan remembered.

“Well, about a hundred really. My closest and nearest and dearest friends, they all have to be there. And I want you, too,” she added, as if Susan didn't quite fit into the category of closest and nearest and dearest. “And Mr. Havana,” as if Rodolfo were quite beyond the pale. “
Everybody
has to be there…”

“They do?”

“Of course,” said Libby. “When I announce my engagement.”

Susan opened her mouth to reply, but before she had a chance to say anything Monsieur Marcel interrupted their whispered tête-à-tête with a weary, “Ladies… please…
my designs are suffering
.”

It was an unfortunate coincidence that the Cuban consulate was on East Sixty-sixth Street. It was nearer Fifth Avenue than Jack Beaumont's apartment, but the address made Susan think of Jack when she did not wish to do so.

There were seventeen at dinner, and Susan was universally admired. For once, with Monsieur Marcel's Italian haircut, Susan had managed to mount the crest of tasteful fashion. She wore her best black dress, and her most translucent pearls. With her white skin and inky black hair she was a feminine version of the austerely black-and-white Monsieur Marcel. Susan Bright, moreover, spoke excellent Spanish, and foreign diplomats are very impressed to meet an American who knows some language besides English.

In turn, Susan was impressed. The Cuban consul treated Rodolfo intimately, drawing him aside several times before dinner, and disappearing with him into a study for half an hour after dinner. Susan herself was treated like—there was no other way to describe it—like a prospective daughter-in-law.

The consul's wife was a handsome, middle-aged woman, who dressed very much as Susan's mother used to dress when Susan was a young girl. Susan liked her for that. While Rodolfo was closeted with the consul, the consul's wife stood with Susan in the bowed window of the drawing room. They drank cups of black coffee laced with rum. Beyond the lace curtains was Sixty-sixth Street, and from where Susan stood, she could see a little bit of Central Park. The consul's wife said to Susan, “We are very fond of Rodolfo. I hope he is good to you, for you are a very nice girl. I have met your uncle in Havana. He is a kind man and he spoke to me of you. He said that one day, you will inherit all his estates. Then, Miss Bright, you will be extremely rich indeed.”

J
ACK'S BRUISES PROGRESSED through a spectrum of color in the course of the weekend. He watched the changes in his mirror. He grew to be great friends with Woolf because Woolf was always there beside him as he gazed at his damaged reflection. He tried to get Susan on the telephone, but she was either never at home or not answering. Libby commiserated fulsomely on the phone with Jack's pain, but she did not visit him. She was busy planning the party for the following Saturday night, and anyway
nothing
could persuade her to visit that dreadful apartment on that terribly uninteresting street. Jack went out with Woolf on Sunday morning and bought all the papers that he could find and took them back to his apartment and read them through. Woolf amused himself by tearing to shreds each section of newspaper as soon as Jack finished it. When Jack had finished reading the papers it was dark out and the room was covered with shredded newsprint, and Jack had nothing to do except think about the fact that in one week he would be engaged to Elizabeth St. John Mather, the fifth richest single woman in America, while he was still in love with Susan Bright, who had no money.

Jack made himself a pitcher of Clammy Marys—clam juice, vodka, and tomato juice, with a dash of Worcestershire sauce—and sat in the darkness and tried to figure out what was best to do, what was possible to do, and what he would probably end up doing after nothing else worked.

Jack went to work Monday morning with strict instructions for Woolf not to do anything awful in his absence. It was fortunate that most of Jack's bruises—now a rich shade of aubergine—were hidden beneath his suit. He was unable to hide the stiffness of his gait, however, and he told everyone at the office he had fallen out of a window over the weekend.

Jack tried to get hold of Libby as soon as he got to his desk—not to tell her over the telephone that he had no intention of marrying her, but to set up a dinner, over which he would tell her that he had no intention of marrying her. Libby wasn't home.

Late Monday afternoon, Jack telephoned Susan, not to tell her he was still in love with her, but to set up a dinner, over which he would tell her he still loved her. Susan wasn't home.

Very late Monday afternoon, Jack's boss came in and instructed Jack that he was to go to Boston for a few days on business. An ex-governor of Massachusetts had just died, and the governor's family was kicking up a row about the investments that had been made in his name by Jack's predecessor in the firm—a man who had been fired for making bad investments. Jack couldn't refuse, though he did point out that he had just fallen out a window and couldn't be expected to be at his best.

“Miss Mather has invited me to her home on Saturday night,” said Jack's boss. “She said we were to expect an important announcement. I'm very happy for you and Miss Mather. It is a coup. But it was an expected coup, my boy.”

Suddenly, getting out of town for a few days didn't seem such a bad idea.

Why was it that when something particularly awful was happening in one's life, one's body was never in top condition? How could Jack think about being in love with S.B. and getting married to E.M. when he had trouble raising his arm to shoulder height?

Woolf's farewell to Jack at the expensive kennel on Second Avenue was a reproachful snarl. The snarl was contemptuously repeated when Jack promised that he would be back for Woolf on Friday at the latest.

Jack took the train to Boston on Monday night. He met with the ex-governor's children early on Tuesday morning, and with difficulty persuaded them that his firm was not a band of incorporated thieves, and that the investments—though peculiar, and not of the usual sort—were basically sound. Some of their inherited holdings even gave promise of surprisingly energetic rises if the Shah of Iran could remain on the throne for a few years. With many long-distance calls to his home office, and daily meetings with the governor's family—meetings that were complicated by the fact that since leaving office, the governor had been married three times, and that his third wife was younger than the children of his first marriage—Jack passed the time in Boston.

Jack Beaumont was a hard worker, and always dedicated himself to the task at hand. Now he was straightening out the tangled strands of the lives of a dozen people he had never met—and didn't particularly like now that he had—while his own life threatened to crash down around his head on Saturday night.

It was one thing that he should marry imprudently—if marrying a woman whose net worth was written with nine figures on the left side of the decimal could ever be called imprudent—and quite another for Susan Bright to do something of the same sort.

Jack ate alone in the evening, and he went to movies at the University Theater. He saw
Lili
twice, because when he squinted his eyes, Leslie Caron reminded him of Susan. He closed his eyes altogether when Zsa Zsa Gabor came on as the aerialist, because she reminded him much too much of Libby Mather.

Jack finished up his work in Boston late on Thursday night. He took the early morning train back to New York on Friday arriving in time to have a bad lunch around the corner from his apartment. He went into work for a few hours, made his report on the pacification of the heirs, then fetched Woolf from the kennel.

As punishment for abandonment, Woolf pretended not to remember who Jack was. Jack took Woolf home, mixed a Rob Roy for himself, and got on the telephone.

Neither Libby nor Susan was at home—or at least neither of them answered.