Shades of Fortune (20 page)

“You own over four percent of us already. That's a lot of shares.”

He whistles, as though genuinely surprised. “No kidding! Have I got that much? Well, kiddo, I'm a rich guy now, and when I buy I tend to buy big. Anything wrong with that?”

“No, but when you acquire as much as five percent of a company, SEC regulations require that you file a public notice of intent.”

“Yeah, I guess I did know that.”

“You're sure you're not planning some sort of takeover bid? Because if you are—”

“Takeover? Why would I want to take you over? What do I know about the beauty business? The beauty business is something I know zilch about. But I do know that whatever it is you're wearing, you smell awfully nice. Is that the new stuff?”

He is trying, she knows, to draw more information out of her, and to change the subject, all at the same time. “Shall we look at the menu,” she says coolly, picking it up.

“I know what I'm going to have,” he says. “A bowl of Kellogg's Raisin Bran flakes and a glass of cranberry juice.”

“
Bran flakes
—at Le Cirque?”

“Don't you remember?” he says. “When you used to come over to my apartment at the grungy end of Riverside Drive? You were always bringing me things like bran flakes and bottles of cranberry juice. The bran flakes, you said, were because I needed roughage. The cranberry juice was supposed to be good for my liver.”

“That must have been during my health-food phase,” she says. “I've grown much fonder of caviar since then. Shall we start with some of their Beluga?”

“And my socks. Remember how you were always rearranging my goddam socks? You said my socks should be lined up in the drawer according to color. I guess that was your organizational ability showing through, even then.”

“Probably.” If he is hoping to evoke a girlish blush from her over these intimate memories of a long-ago relationship, he has taken the wrong tack. That eighteen-year-old girl of thirty years ago was an altogether different person, a girl she barely remembers.

“You still wore braces on your teeth. Remember how you hated those braces? I thought they were kind of cute.”

“Really? Was I still wearing braces then? Well, perhaps.”

“We've both come a long way from those days, haven't we, kiddo? In those days, you were just a shy little thing, half afraid of your own shadow. And I was so—”

The maitre d' appears again, carrying the telephone in his hand, but Michael motions him away with a wave. “No more calls, Charlie,” he says.

“—And I was so much in love with you.”

“I'm going to have the veal,” she says.

Further downtown, at a less fashionable eating place, Granny Flo Myerson is having lunch with her friend Rose Perlman. They are lunching at the coffee shop at Altman's. “You can trust Altman's,” Granny Flo said when making the date. “I don't think their menu has changed one bit since I was a girl. Now that Schrafft's has gone, all that's left is Altman's.” They have both ordered the tomato surprise. The surprise is that the tomato is stuffed with cottage cheese.

“I didn't intend to lunch out today,” Granny Flo is saying. “What I'm trying to do is avoid Edwee. He keeps calling me and
calling
me, wanting to come by and
see
me. He called this morning,
insisting
he had to see me today. I told him no, I can't, I'm busy. I told him I'm going out to lunch and don't know when I'll be back. That's when I called you, in case he came by anyway, got the hotel to let him upstairs, and caught me in a lie. We can spend the whole afternoon here, if you'd like, and do some shopping. You can tell me what we're looking at. Is this my salad fork? Yes. Edwee wants to put me in a nursing home.”

“
What?
He can't do that, can he, Flo?”

“That's what he says he's going to do. He says he's going to have me put on probation, or something like that. He's got these forty lawyers working on it.”

“But that's
awful
, Flo! You need to see a lawyer—fast. Isn't your granddaughter's husband some sort of big-shot lawyer?”

“Yes, but everybody says that Mimi's mad as hell at me. I said something that wasn't particularly nice to Alice the other night.”

“Who's Alice?”

“Mimi's mother, Alice.”

“Oh, yes. The one that drinks.”

“That's right. Honestly, Rose, I think you were smart or lucky, or maybe both, never to have had children. Sometimes I wish I'd never had any. But tell me something, Rose. With no children, what do you do for aggravation?”

“How is your grandmother?” Michael says. “As ditsy as ever?”

“Oh, yes. Granny never changes.”

“But let me tell you something about that old belle,” he says. “The old belle is crazy like a fox. When I was helping her break up that place in Maine, she had her head over my shoulder every minute, counting every penny. And when I was selling the Madison Avenue house for her, she suddenly said to me, ‘What about the air rights?' I mean, is that crazy, or is that smart?
Air rights!
She knows about air rights, for Chrissake!”

“And now you've bought Grandpa's Palm Beach place.”

“That's right. So you heard about that.”

“Well, it was in the
New York Times
. I also heard that Grandpa's foundation wanted ten million for it, and that you got it for four-point-two.”

He wrinkles his nose. “It was more than that,” he says. “Look, that place had been on the market for years. Nobody wanted it. It wasn't that I was trying to jew them down, kiddo. I made an offer. The foundation dropped their price. I upped my offer. We met in the middle. I bought it the way anybody else would buy a house. In fact, I felt I was doing the old man's foundation a favor, by taking it off their hands.”

“You probably were.”

“But it's funny. I was thinking of you the other day—the day you called me, in fact. It was like thought transference. About the house.”

“What about it?”

“The place is pretty run-down, standing empty all those years. It needs a lot of work. I was thinking, maybe I'll see if Mimi can help me put it back together the way it was in the good old days.”

“You wouldn't like it the way it was. It was hideously ugly. It was filled with palm trees, and there was a dining room table made out of mosaic from St. Peter's in Rome. It was the ugliest table I've ever seen, and Grandpa liked to boast that it cost fifty thousand dollars. That's all the furniture was—ugly and expensive.”

“Then maybe you could help me fix it up the way it
should
look. Think about it, kiddo. You've always had great taste. You always had taste, and you always had class. Could you, Mimi? Come down to Palm Beach for a few days, be my guest, and help me pick out some things? Me, I've got no taste, and no class. I never will. But you do. Would you give me a hand with the place?”

“I hardly think that would be appropriate, Michael.”

“Why not?” He shrugs. “Well, think about it, anyway.”

“Why would you want such a big place? Just one person. Why would you need twenty bedrooms?”

“Sentiment, maybe. Maybe I thought it would be nice to own a little piece of something that was yours.”

“But it wasn't my place. It was Grandpa's place. I was never in it more than once or twice. And Grandpa wasn't very nice to you, if you remember.”

His gaze at her is open and steady. “So you do remember some things,” he says. “That's right. He wasn't nice to me at all. Or even to you.”

“Is it to own a little piece of me that you're buying up Miray shares?”

“Could be,” he says. “It's possible.”

“Or is it to get revenge on Grandpa?”

Jutting his chin and tossing back the wayward lock of hair, he says, “Also possible. You won't know which, will you, unless you take me up on my invitation to Palm Beach.”

“That's out of the question, Michael.”

“Because of that shegetz you married? I still find you very attractive, you know. You're still the most beautiful, desirable woman in the world to me. Nobody else ever came close. Nobody else made me eat bran flakes. Nobody else made me see white stars.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Myerson,” Patrick, the Carlyle's doorman, says, holding open the cab door. “But I'm afraid your mother has gone out for the afternoon.”

“I know that, Patrick,” Edwee says. “But there are a couple of things she wants me to see to in the apartment.” He presses a folded bill into Patrick's gloved hand.

“Thank
you
, Mr. Myerson!”

George is on the front desk. “Good afternoon, George,” Edwee says. “Mother had to go out to lunch, and she asked me to check on a couple of things in the apartment. Can I borrow a key?”

“Certainly, sir.” Another folded bill is pressed into George's hand and acknowledged with a smile.

Upstairs, Edwee lets himself into the apartment, and immediately Itty-Bitty appears at his mother's bedroom door and begins to bark, a series of sharp, high-pitched yips.

“Oh, shut up, you stupid animal,” Edwee says.

This visit amounts to something of a feat of daring on Edwee's part. Or perhaps one should say a series of feats, for this is not the first visit he has made to the apartment, alone, when he was certain she was elsewhere. He has attempted, in fact, to establish something of a pattern of visits, and it is part of a plan so that, if Patrick and George are ever questioned about it, they will say, truthfully, “Oh, Mr. Myerson visited his mother's apartment often.” That way, responsibility for the breach of security will fall on their shoulders, not Edwee's.

He opens the door to his mother's kitchen, and a roach scuttles across the floor and buries itself in a crevice beneath the sink. Even at the Carlyle—roaches. Since roaches are not known for celibacy, Edwee is certain that this one has numerous relatives housed elsewhere in the building's innards. The whole city is roach-infested, he thinks, even the best addresses. And this gives him an idea for an article, perhaps for
Art & Antiques
, on how New York has fallen off in recent years, to the point where even the finest buildings have become afflicted by these crawly creatures.

“Far from eremitic,” he writes in his mind, “the universal roach thrives today against a backdrop of brocades and bibelots, mousseline and marquetry, undaunted by the grandeur of
le gratin
.” He likes it. It scans. He likes those alliterations—“brocades and bibelots,” “mousseline and marquetry.” He must write that down when he gets back to his desk.

Itty-Bitty still yaps at him shrilly from the kitchen door.

He is still toying with the idea of somehow putting his mother out of her misery. Some sort of poison would seem to be the best way. He opens the door to her small refrigerator. All that it contains is a bag of Goldfish crackers. It would seem difficult to inject poison into a cracker. Perhaps he could prepare some delicacy for her in his kitchen and present it to her. But would she eat it? No, she would probably be suspicious, since he has never cooked anything for her before. Then there is her drinks cart in the living room with its various decanters, but the trouble is that his mother does not drink. The liquor is there for friends who visit her, and of course for the hotel staff who obviously help themselves to it. A poisoned decanter of whiskey would only end up polishing off one of his mother's friends, or one of the night maids.

He returns to the living room, with Itty-Bitty yapping at his heels.

There is the Goya, his Goya.

He thinks: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828); street fighter, possible murderer, heavy drinker, vagabond part-time bullfighter, cartoonist, influenced by Tiepolo, discovered by Mengs, official court portraitist to four successive monarchs of Spain, who never seemed to notice how he mocked them in his work, how degenerate and ineffectual he made them look, how mercilessly he satirized them on his canvases, turning them into parodies of grandeur—genius.

This particular portrait is of the Duchess of Osuna, one of several she commissioned him to do, indicating that she must have admired the way he portrayed her—looking arrogant and stupid, and far from beautiful, with small, dull eyes, a large nose, a small, cruel mouth and bony outsize hands covered with rings. How had Goya been able to keep from laughing out loud at Her Grace when he had her in that pose? Genius again. “
Usted es divina
…
divina,
” Edwee can hear the Master murmuring to his subject.

That masterpiece belongs to him—and now Philippe de Montebello has seen it and must be itching to get his hands on it. It seems almost an obscenity that the eyes of the Metropolitan's director should ever have come into contact with that painting—those grasping, greedy eyes.

Now Edwee does something he has never done before. Moving a set of library steps to the wall, he climbs to the top step and lifts the painting from the wall. It is not easy. The portrait of the duchess is about a meter in width and two meters high, and, in its frame, it is heavy. But Edwee manages to get it down, sets it on the floor, and places it with its face against the wall. He has never seen the back of the painting before, and now he studies it.

The back of the canvas is dusty and threaded with tiny cobwebs. It has not been off the wall in fifteen years, and, indeed, the space on the wall where it hung is marked by a pale rectangle against the yellower paint. The back of the canvas, as well as the frame, is covered with squiggles of almost indecipherable handwriting, some of it in Spanish, some in English: verifications, notations of provenance and ownership, as well as official customs and export duty stamps in French and English. This painting, Edwee knows, is one of three his mother purchased from the art dealer Joseph Duveen and his aesthetic sidekick, Bernard Berenson. His mother had disliked Duveen, distrusted him, suspected him of charging inflated prices—which was certainly true—but had been forced to use him to acquire certain pieces that she wanted. Some of this writing may be in Duveen's or Berenson's hand, Edwee supposes, and he removes the small magnifying glass he always carries in his vest pocket and examines the various notations more closely. Much of the ink is very faded, but he suddenly spots, sure enough, the handwritten words, “vrai—B. Berenson.” The authentication.