Diary of a Yuppie Page 9

  “It’s not usual for Sylvia to ask to bring a man. You should be much complimented.”

  “Oh, but I am!”

  “Well, I hope you’re as nice as you look. Because I want somebody nice for Sylvia. She’s had a hard time, that child. And she deserves a prince charming.”

  “Well, I can’t claim to be a prince.”

  “But you’ll provide the charm? Conceited fellow! Very well, we’ll settle for that. But remember, if you don’t treat her well, you’ll have me to cope with!”

  “Do I look such a creep, Mrs. Low?”

  “No, you look like an angel. That’s what worries me. And Sylvia tells me you’ve left your wife.”

  “As a matter of fact, she left me. And not even for another man. I guess she just couldn’t stand me.”

  “Dear me, what did you do? But never mind. You can tell me at dinner. I’ve put you on my right.” And leaving me thus dazzled, she turned to greet another guest.

  As Sylvia moved from lady to lady—it was her custom, I discovered, to keep largely to her own sex in the cocktail hour—I had ample occasion to take in every detail of the great chamber. It was, as I now realize, my first impression of perfect Louis XV, unless it should have been called Pompadour, being free of the stateliness and pomposity of so much of the royal decoration of that century. The colors were a blend of sky blue, gold apricot, pale peach, mauve pink, pomegranate, blue green, and I don’t know what else; the curtains and panels and upholstery on which they were displayed were shiningly clean. I noted that the high maintenance of everything, paint, gilt and varnish, suggested that no human had ever set a clumsy hand on them. And yet it all still welcomed. Cupids smiled and flung garlands; warblers seemed to twitter; angels beamed from fleecy clouds. The central painting, by Boucher, over a “rose Pompadour” divan, showed the famous mistress of the king, with huge dark enigmatic eyes, gliding over blue ice in a marvelously wrought sleigh drawn by two little blackamoors on skates, her hands complacently folded in an ermine muff. Sylvia told me later it was a replica of the one at the Frick.

  Mrs. Low, evidently, emulated the Pompadour. But wasn’t there a hint of the blue stocking in such perfect taste? I thought I could see why the king had turned to hot whores like Du Barry.

  In the dining room, candles lit and gleaming, under huge green and yellow tapestries of Alexander the Great’s victories in India, we seated ourselves at a long table of twenty places laden with crystal wine glasses, silver gilt plates and the porcelain centerpiece of a Roman chariot race. Mrs. Low again gave me her grave attention.

  “You may be surprised, Mr. Service, that I take so personal an interest in your friendship with Sylvia. The dear girl has been very much on her own. Her courage and character in difficult times have been great indeed.”

  “I’m quite ready to take your word for that, Mrs. Low.”

  “My word? Aren’t you ready to take your own?”

  “Well, you see, I only met her this morning.”

  “This morning!” Mrs. Low’s frank surprise was now converted into a throaty chuckle. “Well, well, it seems the cautious Sylvia can change her spots. You must have made a swift impression.”

  Seeing that it was no longer appropriate to speak to me as a possibly reluctant suitor who needed a push, my hostess now inquired about my life and antecedents, and in a few minutes possessed herself of an astonishing amount of information. Perhaps at one point in her long and eventful career she had been a personnel officer for a corporation. When the conversation changed, I turned to my other neighbor, a Hungarian cosmetics manufacturer, and listened as sympathetically as I knew how to the story of how she had cornered the market in a hair dye. I think our hostess must have been listening with her right ear, for before she rose when the meal was over she murmured to me:

  “I think we’re going to like you, Robert.”

  When the men joined the ladies in the parlor, I was glad to see that I was allowed to sit with Sylvia. Sipping my glass of champagne, I felt suddenly at ease and happy.

  “Most of them work, don’t they?” I asked, looking about at the guests. “Even the wives.”

  “What did you expect? Lascivious aristocrats, reclining on sofas? A Roman orgy?”

  “Something like that. I hadn’t realized to what extent New York society had become a working one. And I suppose they’re all great successes at whatever it is they do?”

  “Oh, yes. Ethelinda’s nostrils are very sensitive to the stink of failure.”

  I nodded towards Mrs. Saunders, wife of the editor of Town Voices. “I suppose she doesn’t work.”

  “She’s not a failure, though. She caught Saunders.”

  “But isn’t the real money hers?”

  “That makes her even less of a failure. At Ethelinda’s you don’t have to have earned your success. You simply have to have it.”

  “What about me? Or is your success so great that your escort is admitted without question?”

  “Oh, I’m not a success here. What are you thinking of? I’m simply supposed to be coming along. They always need recruits from the next generation. The toll of death and Florida is so high. And I think I’ve gone up a notch for bringing you. They like handsome young men who are clearly going to make it.”

  “Is it that clear?”

  “Clear enough. You should have heard Ethelinda about you. And suppose you don’t make it? What have they lost? Failure is quickly disposed of.”

  “It sounds like a hard world.”

  “Do you know a softer one?”

  “No, I don’t think I do. But suppose they take me in. Suppose I become a regular at this sort of gathering. What’s in it for me?”

  “Well, in the first place they’re amusing. Probably more so than any other group in town. Because they have brains and do different things. You don’t have one of those stultifying common denominators, like a profession or a suburb or even a cause. And secondly, you’ll probably pick up a fair number of good clients.”

  “Do people really change lawyers because they meet someone they like at a dinner party?”

  “You never can tell. Law and medicine have gotten so complicated that the best lawyers and doctors make terrible mistakes. These people hate mistakes. And the men, particularly, are inclined to grouse about it after a few drinks. Keep your ears open.”

  “As you do?”

  “Oh, I’m always working. My office hours are my waking ones.”

  “That sounds like a terrible strain.”

  “You get used to it. For example, I’m perfectly happy and at ease right now. Yet I’m always aware of Mrs. Russo across the room. She’s on the board of the Belvedere Hospital, and I know they’re planning a drive.”

  “So you’re ready to pounce?”

  “I’m ready if she’s ready. But I happen to know she doesn’t like to talk business at a party. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be awake.”

  “How did you get started in all this, Sylvia?”

  “My father taught in a small backwater college in New Hampshire. He was able to get me a scholarship there, and I succeeded in marrying a boy from New York who couldn’t get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. People don’t realize that the social advantages today are in the lesser-known schools. The Ivy League is full of poor geniuses who may become great. And who may not.”

  “I can’t believe you’re as worldly as you try to appear.”

  “I’m not. Or at least I wasn’t. Tommy Sands came of an old and impoverished family that I found impossibly romantic. When we married, I had to go to work to support him.”

  “He did nothing?”

  “He sold bonds when he could. He had no carry-through. Anyway, the poor darling died of leukemia when we had been married only five years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So was I. But I should probably have been less so had it occurred later. He was beginning to drink.”

  “Ethelinda wouldn’t have liked him.”

  “As a matter of fact, she did. None of us is
wholly consistent. And then, he had charm.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t remarried.”

  “I have no rules about that. You’d better think twice before asking me.”

  “Oh, I shan’t ask you.”

  She laughed. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I’m still in love with Alice.”

  “Don’t you know that’s the surest way to make yourself attractive to a woman?”

  “So help me, I’m naive!”

  She looked at me almost as gravely as our hostess had. “I don’t know if you are or aren’t. You’re a funny one, my friend.”

  When I took her home I asked if I could come up for a nightcap. She hesitated.

  “You’ll have to be very quiet and not wake up Tommy.”

  “Oh, I can be like a cat.”

  “Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Upstairs in her small beautiful apartment, crowded with every kind of bibelot, with red-lacquered Chinese furniture and scroll paintings, she told me to mix myself a drink while she checked on her son. When she returned she was clad in a white silk nightgown and a blue kimono.

  “You’re a remarkable man, Mr. Service. You’ve made me break every rule I’ve made for myself in the past six years. I asked you out to dinner the same day we met, and now I’m going to let you spend the night. Or a part of the night. If you care to, that is. I’m following a hunch. Who knows? It may turn out to be the idea lousy. And then again it may not.”

  It definitely did not turn out to be the idea lousy. Sylvia as a lover managed to be both hot and cool, moving her slim body with astounding grace. At our moment of climax, however, she let out a cry that was soon followed by a knock at the door.

  “Are you all right, Mummy?” a boy’s voice called.

  “Yes, darling, only a nightmare,” she responded with perfect equanimity. “Go back to bed, dear.”

  But immediately afterwards she made me dress in the dark and depart on tip-toe.

  “Did you pretend I was your wife?” she whispered.

  “No!”

  “Thank you.” And she gave me a quick parting kiss. I knew that a novel and extraordinary thing had entered my life.

  12

  THE NOVEL THING certainly changed my humdrum, existence in the next three months. As I look back over them it seems that I had little time to think, only to be. I certainly had no opportunity to make notes in this journal. At the office I was as busy as ever, and many of my evenings and weekends were still devoted to law work, but the balance of the former were now dedicated to accompanying Sylvia on her nocturnal rounds. We went to dinner parties, to openings, to charity balls. In the interims we managed to make love, not in my room at the Stafford, which I had given up when Sylvia dubbed it “tacky,” or in her apartment, where her son was not again to be disturbed, but in the small, furnished floor of a brownstone that I had found and sublet. I thought it adequately attractive, but Sylvia was never content with it, and every time she arrived it was with a print or a jar or a bed cover, something, anything, to tone up its “dullness.”

  I don’t know why she bothered. She never came to the little place except to do one thing, and that, as often as not, was done in the dark. Sylvia became a different person when she made love. She never spoke or uttered a sound unless it was such a cry of satisfaction as had awakened her son; she might have been going through some sort of gymnastic exercise, necessary for her well-being but not to be acknowledged or even spoken of. Was it love? Anyway, I felt that she cared very much about pleasing me. And I always knew at parties that, even though she never seemed to be looking at me, she was aware of everything I did. It was clear that I had come to play an important role in her life, but she wouldn’t discuss it—just as she wouldn’t discuss anything abstract: religion, an afterlife, the deeper meaning of things. Sylvia lived for the here and now as did no epicurean I had ever known, and she was quite as serious about it as my hero, Marius. With her the moment not only had to be lived for; it had to be created. As she used to say, if a poor widow with a child to support didn’t look after herself, who would?

  Well, wouldn’t I? Wasn’t that what she had to be thinking? Wasn’t I being groomed to be the consort of Sylvia Sands? What kept me from worrying too much about it was the peculiar confidence that she inspired in me that, whatever she wanted and however near she might come to obtaining it, she would never insist. She might say in the end: “Well, here it is. Do you want it or don’t you?” and if the answer was in the negative, she might simply shrug, perhaps with a bit of a frown, and turn to other fields. This quality in her struck me as gratifyingly unfeminine, for I still believed that women were more designing in the sexual game than men. I found that I trusted Sylvia as I should have trusted one of my own sex.

  The society into which she introduced me is difficult to define, except that it was obviously the highest in town. There are many New York societies. There are the descendants of old families who huddle over backgammon and bridge tables in the Union, Knickerbocker and Colony clubs; there are the worlds of the cultural institutions and of academe; there are tycoons of unfathomed new wealth, who tend to dwell in semi-isolation, surrounded by little “courts.” Sylvia’s society included some of the very rich, but not necessarily the richest, with a few old names and a lot of new, and it seemed loosely united by the determination, at least in its women, to look beautiful, even in advanced age, and to live beautifully, with the best in art and decoration. But its members also contributed substantially to the cultural and charitable institutions of the city, and they managed the businesses that affected public thought: broadcasting, newspapers, theatres, publishing firms. They were much written up in the media, and they tended to speak of one another in hyperbolic terms: “Isn’t Ethelinda wonderful?” or “Don’t you just adore Lila?” I wondered if ever before had an upper class been so civic-minded. Even if they were so only because it had become the thing to be, they were still beneficent.

  Sylvia, as I soon perceived, had only one real entrée into this world, and that was Mrs. Low, but that was quite enough. She had been almost adopted by the old lady; they talked on the telephone every morning, and people had learned that at large parties the great Ethelinda liked to be assured of a small circle of intimates of whom Sylvia was definitely one. And “great” Ethelinda was rightly called. It was not only the way she gave away chunks of the fortune that Low had left her outright and that, childless, she had no reason to hoard; it was the almost formidable exquisiteness of the great gilded shells that she had constructed for herself in New York, Southampton and Palm Beach, and in the happy hand she showed in filling them with amusing and active people. Ethelinda was without illusions and without pretensions; she had a sharp eye, a rough tongue and a kind heart. There were friends of her late husband, I heard, who sneered at her origins and expressed amazement at the people who flocked to her door, but Ethelinda’s group gave only moderate marks to background and lineage. Such assets were never tickets of entry by themselves.

  She was certainly very candid about her plans for Sylvia.

  “I am going to set up a charitable trust on my death,” she told me one night at dinner. “I promised my husband that I would do so, and of course I shall be good to my word. He had already looked after his children and grandchildren, so I needn’t be concerned with them. I shall feel free to leave legacies to my friends, but mostly of works of art. I am leaving Sylvia the little Boudin beach scene that she admires, but more importantly I plan to make her a trustee of my trust. It will be she who will be doing me the favor. That girl will have an x-ray eye to spot the phonies among the applicants.”

  Sylvia was pleased, later that night, to hear that Mrs. Low had confided to me her plans for her will. She was quite aware of them herself. She was also aware, I discovered, of the difference between a foundation, whose directors might receive only a nominal compensation, and Ethelinda’s proposed charitable trust, whose fiduciaries would earn substantial commissions.
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br />   “You’re really getting on with her wonderfully,” she said approvingly. “But we have to remember that although she talks about changing her will, she hasn’t done so yet. Gil Arnheim, her lawyer, keeps putting it off.”

  “He’s probably put himself in the old one as a trustee and doesn’t want to share with you.”

  “Well, he might not so much mind sharing. What he’s afraid of is being replaced.”

  I did not altogether like the faint menace in Sylvia’s tone. Now why was that? Was I being a male chauvinist? Why should she not be just as calculating as I? She should, of course. I changed to a lighter subject.

  “Do you think Ethelinda’s taking the trouble to correct my language is a sign of favor?” I asked.

  “How did she do that?”

  “When I said I was taking you to my parents’ ‘home’ for the weekend, she said, ‘You mean, their house.’ And she wrinkled her nose when I referred to the new curtains in her living room as ‘drapes.’ Is there a special vocabulary for society?”

  “I suppose that dates Ethelinda. I wouldn’t worry about it. When she had to break her way in forty years ago, the old Knickerbocker families could still be pretty silly about terminology. But even then, if they liked you, you could call an evening dress a ‘formal’ and get away with it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I call an evening dress a ‘formal’?”

  “Go ahead, if you want. A handsome young man who’s getting on can say almost anything.”

  “What about a handsome young woman?”

  “Oh, women always have to do better.”

  “That doesn’t seem very fair.”

  “I don’t bother with what’s fair and unfair. All I need to know is the rules.”

  “So you think I can just relax and be myself?”

  “I’d put it even more strongly. I think you must relax and be yourself. It’s the only way to crack the world you’re trying to crack.”

  “So there is a world I’m trying to crack?”

  “Of course there is, silly. You’re not ‘in’ with a handful of dinner parties. Any extra man can be asked to dinner.”