Trading Up (60 page)

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And then, what happened next was exactly like a big scene in a movie, except that it was better because it was
real
.

“Thank you, ah . . .
Scooter,
” Comstock said, as Scooter placed the screenplays on the conference table in front of him. He knew that Comstock was trying to be on his best behavior, because he actually remembered his name for once. He was just turning to walk out the door when the man at the other end of the conference table stopped him. Scooter knew instantly that it was George Paxton by the way he was sitting—with his legs apart as if he already owned the place. “Hold on, Scooter,” George said. “Why don’t you stick around for a minute? I think you might enjoy this.”

Scooter looked at Comstock, who had that crazy look in his eyes that everyone in the office knew meant you should run in the other direction, but as George Paxton was clearly running the meeting, there was nothing he could do.

“Now then,” George said, nodding at Comstock.

“Right,” Comstock said. He pointed to a piece of paper. “Here’s a list of the screenplays we’ve commissioned in the past three years, and here,” he said, patting the pile of screenplays, “are the screenplays that have come in . . .”

“Is that so,” George Paxton said. He looked over the list (everybody had the same list in front of them), and then he said, “I’d like to see the screenplay by Janey Wilcox, if I may.”

“It’s not one of our best,” Comstock Dibble said. He had his requisite box of Kleenex tissues in front of him; he pulled out a hunk and began mopping his face.

“In fact,” he said, “you could say it’s a complete disaster. But we decided to take a chance on a woman who possibly had more talents than her, ah, very obvious ones . . .”

Everybody laughed, and Comstock tried to divert George’s attention.

“Scooter?” he said. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and show Mr. Paxton the screenplay by Darren Star. Now, this, George,” he said, “is absolute
genius
. . .”

“I’m sure it is,” George said genially, pressing his palms together. “But I’d still like to see the screenplay by Janey Wilcox.”

“Darren’s is . . .” Comstock faltered.

“Janey Wilcox . . . ?” George said, raising his eyebrows.

And then, of course, according to the now legendary tale, George had stood up and flipped open the Janey Wilcox screenplay, and had read aloud the famous line from
Chinatown:
“My daughter, my sister, my daughter, my sister . . .” It was all such a
farce,
Mimi thought, shaking her head as she glanced back at the newspaper. What nobody could understand now was how Comstock could have been so stupid. But George explained—over and over again at the intimate dinner 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:25 PM Page 322

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parties they’d been attending instead of following their usual social calendar—that it wasn’t unusual for seemingly successful people to suddenly crack. Especially if they were doing something illegal. They kept pushing the envelope farther and farther, taking bigger and bigger risks, and the longer they got away with it, the less they bothered to cover up their mistakes—as if they were subconsciously trying to get caught. History was littered with hundreds of characters like Comstock Dibble, George said, and with the stock market beginning to slide, he suspected that they’d be seeing a lot more “Dibble Dog” behavior in the future . . .

Mimi sighed and looked at her watch again, wondering how much longer she was going to have to sit there. It was now going on half an hour . . .

Gingerly opening the robe, she looked down at her belly. She was beginning to show, and pretty soon she’d have to start telling people. She was finally three months pregnant, and even though, at her age, you weren’t supposed to tell anyone until after your first sonogram (in case there was something wrong with the baby and you had to have an abortion, which she couldn’t even begin to contemplate), Janey had somehow known two weeks ago, when they’d had that final showdown at Christian Dior.

Mimi stared at the door, painted a clinical gray, willing it to open. It didn’t, of course, and she examined her fingernails instead. She hadn’t seen Janey since that afternoon in Paris, but she’d heard she was still in the city. That was typical Janey, she thought: Any sensible person would have immediately left town, like Mauve Binchely, for instance. Mauve had gone to Palm Beach, where she was holed up at her mother’s house, and both she and her mother were hysterical. The mother had grown up with the old-fashioned edict that a lady is in the papers only three times in her life—on her birth, her marriage, and her death—and in a scant two weeks, Mauve had surpassed that quota by ten. As Comstock Dibble’s (now former) fiancée, she’d been mentioned in nearly every story, and the
Post
had dubbed her

“the Slinky Socialite.” That was making Mauve crazy, too—she kept asking people exactly what “they” meant by it. But actually, Mimi thought, it was quite kind, considering what Mauve
really
looked like.

She leaned back against the examining table and closed her eyes. The person who had fared the worst was Janey Wilcox—the paper had dubbed her “the Model Prostitute”—and even if it wasn’t entirely true and Janey wasn’t technically a hooker (except, maybe, for that one summer with Comstock), there wasn’t a thing either she or Selden could do about it. Janey was a public figure now and she pretty much had to take whatever they dished out.

But
still
—Mimi couldn’t help feeling a little bit sorry for her. No one deserved to be called a prostitute in the press every day, unless it was a profession that they 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:25 PM Page 323

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had willingly chosen, like that Sydney Biddle Barrows woman, who was known as the Mayflower Madam. But “madam” was much better than being called a plain-old prostitute, because it at least implied that you had some business sense, and the
real
problem with Janey, it seemed, was that she had no sense at all . . .

This, anyway, was what Mimi explained to people when they asked her what Janey Wilcox was really like.

And knowing Janey, Mimi thought, she probably didn’t care. Janey had probably already turned it around in her head, and had convinced herself that it was actually some kind of compliment . . .

In any case, during those few minutes at Christian Dior, she certainly hadn’t behaved the way a normal person would have, Mimi thought, glancing at her watch again. Not that, given the circumstances, there probably was a “normal” way to act.

But still, if
she’d
been in that situation, if she’d just found out from Harold Vane that she’d been called a whore on the cover of the
New York Post,
the last thing she would have done was to get into a taxi and go to Christian Dior. She would have been too hysterical. And at first, Janey had looked terrified. But then she’d gotten that weird blank look in her eyes, as if she’d disappeared into another world and some kind of cyborg had taken over her body . . .

“Mimi,” Janey had said in that musical voice as she came into the fitting room.

But her accent was too heightened, as if she were playing at being herself, and her eyes were wild. Mimi had jumped in terror, causing the fitter—a small uniformed French woman named Colette—to prick her finger with a pin.

And Mimi, who was shocked to see her there, looked at her watch and cried,

“Janey . . . !”

And then they had stared at each other, both wondering how much the other one knew . . .

It was a hideous scene, and Mimi shuddered at the memory. She could have forgiven Janey
anything,
Mimi thought, touching her belly—anything but that incident with Zizi. She would have excused the screenplay scandal, she would even have forgiven Janey for having sex with
George,
which, she suspected, if Janey hadn’t already, she would soon. But Zizi was an entirely different story. Zizi was her
love
. . .

The night before the scandal broke, Mimi had secretly seen Zizi in her hotel room at the Plaza Athénée. Despite what Janey thought, she hadn’t known that Zizi was in Paris until she’d run into Harold Vane at Hermès that afternoon, where he was buying a new saddle. Janey was in the hotel, having given the excuse that she needed to make some important business calls, so Mimi had gone out alone. Harold told her that he and Zizi were at the Ritz—and that they were leaving in two days for Deauville to look at some horses.

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She had sworn that she wouldn’t pursue Zizi, but given her condition, a sense of honor demanded that she tell him that he might be the father. She didn’t want anything from him, nor did she intend to leave George. But the news caused something in Zizi to break, and he had finally explained why he had left her.
“Whore,”
Janey Wilcox had called him. And all he could think was that he didn’t want to end up like
her
. . .

And then the story of how Janey engineered her way into his apartment and tried to seduce him came spilling out. Mimi was terrified. Not by the fact that Janey had wanted to sleep with Zizi, but in the way she’d been so calculating about it—

concocting that story about being freaked out about her sister (especially since it was painfully obvious to almost everyone that Janey didn’t really care about her sister at all, except to use her), and then making up that story about how her sister needed the apartment.

Mimi was astonished that Janey could be so vindictive. At first, she couldn’t accept it. There must be some mistake, she thought. But her womanly instincts told her that it was true, and her thoughts ran the gamut from pure hatred of Janey—

thinking that she was capable of nearly anything, including murder—to her own error in having taken Janey under her wing. Despite the fact that people kept warning her that Janey had taken money from men, and that she’d broken up a few marriages, that she even had sex with men in bathrooms, Mimi had stubbornly insisted that Janey was actually a nice girl who was no more than the unfortunate victim of vicious rumors, her only real crime being her beauty. And Mimi had fallen right into the trap: Ever since she was a child, she’d always chosen the slightly broken-down girl to be her best friend. There was Mauve Binchely, whom the other girls had made fun of, and Pippi Maus, who had drinking and drug and sex problems, and now there was Janey Wilcox, who came saddled with an unsavory reputation.

Mimi even remembered hearing something long ago about how Janey had spent time on the yacht of a very rich Arab . . . But who knew if that was true? Mimi’s flaw was pride and stubbornness: It was almost as if, in choosing these women as her friends, she wanted to prove to everyone else that they were wrong and she was right, that these women did, indeed, have value.

Well, Mauve and Pippi had been her friends for years, and despite their apparent quirks, they were steadfast companions. But Janey had deliberately tried to hurt her, and Mimi felt as wounded as if she’d been betrayed by a lover. No, indeed, what Janey had done was
worse,
because one never expected that kind of behavior from a girlfriend—whereas with a man it was always a possibility. But one
knew
that going in . . .

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with her. Oh, she would still have to see her from time to time—with Janey married to Selden now, she was unavoidable. But she would make it very clear that they could no longer be friends, at least not for a while . . .

And then the interview had not gone
at all
the way she’d expected.

It was drizzling when she left the hotel at 12:30 p.m. The air was sharp—as cold and damp as her heart. As she hurried down the boulevard, she inwardly railed against Janey Wilcox. Did she think that Mimi was so weak and so vulnerable that she would let her get away with it? For certainly, she had to know that Zizi might tell her eventually—and with a small cry of recognition, she suddenly realized that
that
was why Janey had tried to get Zizi out of her apartment! It was such a clumsy maneuver it was nearly pathetic. And for the fifth or sixth time that morning, she questioned what she was about to do. Perhaps it would be better to say nothing—

after all, the deed was done and more than two months had passed; it had no bearing on her life now. She had silently forgiven other friends for transgressions, but then she remembered that no friend had committed a crime quite so egregious.

And as she hurried across the boulevard to Christian Dior, she realized it wasn’t necessarily what Janey had done in the past that was a problem, but what she might do in the future . . .

“Bonjour Madame Paxton,”
the receptionist said brightly. “You are here for your fitting?”

“Oui,”
Mimi replied. “And I have a friend coming at one. Her name is Janey Wilcox. Be sure to let her up?”

“Very good, madame,” the receptionist said, standing up to push open a door behind her. “The fitting is in the Saint Laurent showroom . . .”

“Yes, thank you. I know where it is,” Mimi said.

And then she had hurried along the subtle pinkish beige corridor to the room where Yves Saint Laurent had shown his first collection. Although she naturally hadn’t realized it at the time, it was somewhat of an irony that the fitting had taken place in that room. For after Yves Saint Laurent had shown his first collection as a fashion designer, the boulevard outside had been filled with paparazzi and fans. It had been one of those great moments in history, when a man makes his name . . .

But the room, in particular, was nothing special to look at. It was long and narrow with high ceilings and louvered French windows and a mirror along one wall, painted and carpeted in that same soothing pinkish beige that whispered money and class.