Shades of Fortune (5 page)

Yes, as the young model commented, it is a nice place that Mimi and Brad Moore have here, and it works, both as a showcase for Mimi's considerable talents and as a home. It works as a home because so much of what it contains has a story like that of the Sèvres vase. Cole Porter, Noël Coward, and Richard Rodgers have all played that Bösendorfer piano in the living room, and when, in the middle of a particularly spirited arpeggio, Sir Noël managed to fracture the ivory of the highest C, Mimi refused to let him worry about the split key. “It will always remind us,” she told him, “that we had the fun of listening to you play in this room.” And when Andy Warhol's cigarette rolled out of an ashtray and burned a hole in a
faux marbre
tabletop, and he offered to have the top refinished for her, Mimi said, “Never! That's a
Warhol
burn.”

And the apartment works as a showcase on nights like tonight when, dressed for a party, filled with off-season flowers, lit with recessed lighting behind cornices and within bookcases, glowing with candles that have been artfully placed to catch the return gleam of mirrors, the whole apartment, room after room, full of shimmer and shadows, seems to float on some powder-puff cloud high above the Central Park lake, a theatrical artifice on invisible wires.

And of course, as a final touch of theatre, there is Mimi's plan to surprise her family—and fellow stockholders—by introducing them not only to her new scent but also to the pretty young models, her stars, who will sell her product, and so the evening will have something of the quality of a backers' audition. This in itself of course is a gamble, which is where we started off describing Mimi. This tactic may fall flat on its face. The young woman seems dull-witted, and the young man seems like a snot. But we shall see.

“Is that a real oil painting?” Sherrill Shearson asks.

“Yes. That's my grandfather, Adolph Myerson, who started the company.”

“He looks … ooh, sort of mean!”

“He does look a little, well,
dour
, doesn't he? But he took this business very seriously. I was always terrified of him. I just can't take the business
quite
that seriously. To me, it's a business that's all about fantasies—hopes, wishes, dreams. Dreams of looking better, younger, healthier, happier, richer—and perhaps even feeling better about yourself if you can dream that you look that way. Wouldn't you agree?”

“Well, I never really thought about it all that much, actually,” the girl says. And then, “Hey, isn't that painting kind of … lopsided?”

“You mean the subject doesn't occupy the center of the frame. Yes, and there's a story behind that which I don't have time to go into now.”

Now Mimi must mingle with her other guests, and she moves away.

“I didn't appreciate that crack about Mexican restaurants,” the girl says. “If this is supposed to be polite society, I call that effing rude.”

“You're about to lose an earring, love,” the young man says. “No, the other one.”

“All the books here are the same
color
. How do you tell which book is which?”

“By reading the
titles
, love. You
can
read, can't you?”

“Asshole.”

2

As her other guests arrive, Mimi greets them one by one at the library door and leads them to be introduced to the Mireille Couple, who stand in front of the mirrored bookcases in an impromptu receiving line, rather like a bride and groom, smiling, now, their soon-to-be-famously-seductive Mireille smiles. No one would ever believe that the word
asshole
had been spat moments earlier from Sherrill's carefully parted lips. These, of course, are tutored smiles, carefully practiced in front of mirrors and Polaroid cameras, improved upon by dentists and modeling coaches. A word should be inserted here about Mimi's own smile, which is quite different. It, too, has evolved as a result of a certain amount of practice—we all should practice our smiles from time to time—but Mimi's smile is a curiously intimate smile, a communicative smile, a smile that seems to have words in it. When Mimi smiles at you, her smile seems to take all of you in, saying, in the process, that you have never looked better, healthier, prouder, more sure of who you are and where you came from; that you, this perfect new you, impeccably put together as you have always wanted to see yourself, are the only person living in the world whom Mimi has ever wanted to see or talk to. Naturally, there is also a reverse effect. When Mimi turns this smile away from you, as she must, you feel that you have been left floating in some limbo, without a friend left in the world. The patroness of that smile has fallen in love with someone else.

“Aunt Nonie,” Mimi says, “I want you to meet our special guests of honor, Sherrill Shearson and Dirk Gordon. I'll tell you why they're going to be so special to us as soon as everybody's here.… Oh, and here's Jim Greenway, who's also special. Jim's going to write about us in
Fortune
magazine and so, of course, you're all under strictest orders to say nothing but the
nicest
things about us. Mr. Greenway isn't interested in family skeletons.”

“Not true. I like family skeletons,” Jim Greenway says.

“Ah,” Mimi says with a look of mock disappointment. “Then you're in for a letdown, I'm afraid. This family doesn't have any skeletons.”

“Oh, but we
do!
We
do!
” cries Granny Flo in her piping voice.

“Well,” Mimi says with that rich and easy laugh of hers, “if anyone knows which closets they're hiding in …” Turning from Greenway, she says, “And you must be Mr. Williams, Aunt Nonie's friend.”

“Business associate,” he says.

“How exciting! Later, you must tell us all about it.”

Felix moves among the guests, taking drink orders, and a maid in a black uniform appears with a tray of canapés.

“What's
that?
” Sherrill whispers to Dirk.

“It appears to be artichoke bottoms stuffed with caviar.”

“Ooh,
caviar!
” She helps herself to one and takes a tentative bite. “Oooh, it's
salty
.”

“Yes, I rather expect it
would
be.”

Speaking to whomever might happen to be within earshot, and gazing straight ahead of her with dead, dull eyes, Granny Flo says, “My daughter's real name is Naomi, after Naomi in the Bible, but everybody has always called her Nonie. When she was a little girl, she was such a stubborn little thing, and I was always saying to her, ‘No, Naomi, no, no, no, no,
no
.' And after a while, before she did anything, she'd look at me and say, ‘May I do that, Mama, or is that a nonie?' And I'd say, ‘No, that's not a nonie,' or, ‘Yes, that's a nonie,' whichever thing it was she wanted to do, and that's when I decided to call her Nonie. My husband, Adolph Myerson, used to say I was good at naming things. My newest daughter is only two years old. Her name is Itty-Bitty. That's right, I'm eighty-nine, and I have a daughter who's just two years old! She's my little Yorkie, and she's as itty-bitty as they come. She weighs just two and a half pounds. She follows me around, wherever I go, and because I've lost my eyesight I have to be careful not to step on her, but she seems to understand because she stays just behind me, making little sounds for me to tell me where she is—
whiff-whiff-whiff
. I thought of naming her Whiffy, but I didn't. I named her Itty-Bitty. I used to live in a big place, but now I live in a hotel. Itty-Bitty is the only dog who's allowed to live at the Carlyle. Now my friend, poor Mrs. Perlman, on the other hand.…”

“Mother, do shut
up!
” Edwee says.

Now everyone is here except Brad Moore and Badger, and small conversational groupings have developed in the room. Except for Alice, who stands alone, looking nervous and a little frightened, waiting for her valium to give her a boost of chemical courage, enough to join a conversation. Mimi notices her mother's discomfort and starts to move toward her, then decides against it. One of the tenets of the Betty Ford Center is that people like her mother should learn to cope with situations on their own. So she settles for a smile of reassurance in her mother's direction from across the room. Her mother's response is a hunted look.

“Yellow tulips!” Granny Flo exclaims, her eyes fixed on empty space in front of her. “Mimi? Where did you find yellow tulips in
August
, Mimi?”

“Your eyesight must be improving, Mother,” Nonie says. “How did you know these were yellow tulips?”

“I've learned to see with my nose,” her mother says. “When you lose your eyesight, your other senses get better. I've lost my eyesight, but I can see with my nose! I smelled tulips, and I smelled yellow.”

“I didn't realize tulips had any odor at all.”

“You see, Nonie? That's where you're wrong.”

Mimi takes all this in. Another remarkable thing about Mimi is her ability, even at a distance, to follow the drift of a number of different conversations at the same time, to filter them out, as it were, and to discern their implications, even in a much more crowded room than this one. At her dinner parties, she is able to observe, and hear, all her guests at once and, whenever situations seem to be approaching rocky or dangerous shoals, to avert unpleasantnesses with a swift, bright change of topic.

In one corner of the room, Nonie's young escort, Roger Williams, has pulled Nonie aside and is saying to her, “What was all that business in the car about? Between your mother and your brother?”

“Mother and Edwee have been going at each other like that for years,” she says. “It doesn't mean a thing.”

“Your brother doesn't like me.”

“Makes no difference. Edwee's not the least bit important to our plans. As I told you, the only person you need to make a good impression on is Mother.”

“I gather your mother has an important art collection?”

“I suppose so. It's sort of a mishmash. She's got some Thomas Hart Bentons, a few Impressionists—a couple of Cézannes, an Utrillo, some Monets, a Goya portrait of some Spanish countess. She got a lot of things in the Depression when they were dirt cheap. She got her four Picassos at a time when Picasso would give you a painting if you bought him dinner.”

He whistles softly. “It sounds as though some of those might be pretty valuable today.”

She shrugs. “Maybe so. Art is the one thing I don't know much about.”

He nods, frowning slightly, having noted that art is “the one thing” she knows little about.

“Anyway,” she whispers, “I slipped into the dining room a few minutes ago and changed the place cards. Mimi won't notice. I placed you next to Mother, so you can work on her. The way we discussed.”

He nods again.

“Even though she's blind, she's a pushover for younger men.”

In another part of the room, Jim Greenway is saying to Mimi, “One thing that interests me is what caused the famous rift between your grandfather, Adolph Myerson, and his brother, Leopold, and what caused Leopold to leave the company in nineteen forty-one, never to return. What was it, do you know?”

“I really don't. It all started before I was born, and in nineteen forty-one I was only three years old. I have only the dimmest recollection of Uncle Leo. There are cousins, of course—Uncle Leo's children and grandchildren—and some of them are still Miray stockholders. But I've never met them. The rift, as you call it, was that complete. Sad, but whatever it was left us a divided family.”

“Where's Nonie?” her grandmother suddenly cries, though no one is standing in her immediate vicinity. “Someone take me over to my daughter, Nonie. I want to talk more to that young man she brought. Is she having an affair with him, or what? Does anybody know?”

In the little silence that follows, Mimi says brightly, “Quick, everybody: come to the window and look at the lake. It's covered with seagulls. That means there's a storm out at sea. Whenever there's a storm on the Atlantic, the seagulls fly in and settle on the lake. Isn't it wonderful?”

There is a general movement toward the library window, and a great deal of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the sight of the lake afloat with birds. “Isn't it nice to have reminders that, after all, we live in a seaport?” Mimi says.

Edwee moves toward his sister. “Well,
that
was a charming outburst from our mother, wasn't it?” he says. “And, speaking of affairs, are you ready for a bit of
on dit?
”

“What's that?” she says.

“Note that the master of the house has not appeared yet. Well, it seems that Brad Moore has some woman on the West Side.”

“Has some woman?” she asks, looking puzzled.

“Is keeping a woman. In her twenties, I'd say. Certainly younger than Mimi. Not
bad
-looking, in a cheap way.”

“How do you know this, Edwee?”

“I was lunching the other day at Le Cirque with Nancy Reagan and Betsey Bloomingdale and another friend, and who should I spot in the farthest, darkest corner of the restaurant? Brad Moore. In very
serious
conversation with this woman. Their heads were bent together. His hand was on top of hers. She was obviously unhappy. She was weeping. Well, what do you think of that?”

“How do you know she's from the West Side?”

He makes a vague gesture with his right hand. “She had that West Side
look
. You know—bangs.”

“Bangs.”

“A déclassé look. So. Who should be the first to tell our dear little Mimi what's going on, you or I?”

“Well, I—”

Edwee suddenly presses his index finger to his lips. “Ssh!” he says. “He just walked in.”

Sure enough, Brad Moore has just arrived and greeted his wife with a kiss, and is moving around the room shaking the hands of the male guests and kissing the cheeks of his female in-laws. He is followed very shortly by his son, Badger, who looks, as always, happy and alert and is tugging at the sleeves of his dinner jacket as though he had just tossed it on in the elevator.