The Mesdames Cooper and Matthau, having heard their fill, self-consciously prepared to depart.
Mrs. Cooper said: "D-darling, there's the most m-m-marvelous auction at Parke Bernet this afternoon-Gothic tapestries."
"What the fuck," asked Mrs. Matthau, "would I do with a Gothic tapestry?"
Mrs. Cooper replied: "I thought they might be amusing for picnics at the beach. You know, spread them on the sands."
Lady Ina, after extracting from her purse a Bulgari vanity case made of white enamel sprinkled with diamond flakes, an object remindful of snow prisms, was dusting her face with a powder puff. She started with her chin, moved to her nose, and the next thing I knew she was slapping away at the lenses of her dark glasses.
And I said: "What are you doing, Ina?"
She said: "Damn! damn!" and pulled off the glasses and mopped them with a napkin. A tear had slid down to dangle like sweat at the tip of a nostril—not a pretty sight; neither were her eyes—red and veined from a heap of sleepless weeping. "I'm on my way to Mexico to get a divorce."
One wouldn't have thought that would make her unhappy; her husband was the stateliest bore in England, an ambitious achievement, considering some of the competition: the Earl of Derby, the Duke of Marlborough, to name but two. Certainly that was Lady Ina's opinion; still, I could understand why she married him-he was rich, he was technically alive, he was a "good gun" and for that reason reigned in hunting circles, boredom's Valhalla. Whereas Ina… Ina was fortyish and a multiple divorcée on the rebound from an affair with a Rothschild who had been satisfied with her as a mistress but hadn't thought her grand enough to wed. So Ina's friends were relieved when she returned from a shoot in Scotland engaged to Lord Coolbirth; true, the man was humorless, dull, sour as port decanted too long—but, all said and done, a lucrative catch.
"I know what you're thinking," Ina remarked, amid more tearful trickling. "That if I'm getting a good settlement, I ought to be congratulated. I don't deny Cool was tough to take. Like living with a suit of armor. But I did… feel safe. For the first time I felt I had a man I couldn't possibly lose. Who else would want him? But I've now learned this, Jonesy, and hark me welclass="underline" there's always someone around to pick up an old husband. A1ways. " A crescendo of hiccups interrupted her: M. Soulé, observing from a concealed distance, pursed his lips. "I was careless. Lazy. But I just couldn't bear any more of those wet Scottish weekends with the bullets whizzing round, so he started going alone, and after a while I began to notice that everywhere he went Elda Morris was sure to go-whether it was a grouse shoot in the Hebrides or a boar hunt in Yugoslavia. She even tagged along to Spain when Franco gave that huge hunting party last October. But I didn't make too much of it—Elda's a great gun, but she's also a hard-boiled fifty-year-old virgin; I still can't conceive of Cool wanting to get into those rusty knickers."
Her hand weaved toward the champagne glass, but without arriving at its destination, drooped and fell like a drunk suddenly sprawling flat on the street. "Two weeks ago," she began, her voice slowed, her Montana accent becoming more manifest, "as Cool and I were winging to New York, I realized that he was staring at me with a, hmnnn, serpentine scowl. Ordinarily he looks like an egg. It was only nine in the morning; nevertheless, we were drinking that loathsome airplane champagne, and when we'd finished a bottle and I saw he was still looking at me in this… homicidal… way, I said: 'What's bugging you, Cool?' And he said: 'Nothing that a divorce from you wouldn't cure.' Imagine the wickedness of it! springing something like that on a plane! — when you're stuck together for hours, and can't get away, can't shout or scream. It was doubly nasty of him because he knows I'm terrified of flying—he knew I was full of pills and booze. So now I'm on my way to Mexico." At last her hand retrieved the glass of Cristal; she sighed, a sound despondent as spiraling autumn leaves. "My kind of woman needs a man. Not for sex. Oh, I like a good screw. But I've had my share; I can do without it. But I can't live without a man. Women like me have no other focus, no other way of scheduling our lives; even if we hate him, even if he's an iron head with a cotton heart, it's better than this footloose routine. Freedom may be the most important thing in life, but there's such a thing as too much freedom. And I'm the wrong age now, I can't face all that again, the long hunt, the sitting up all night at Elmer's or Annabel's with some fat greaser swimming in a sea of stingers. All the old gal pals asking you to their little black-tie dinners and not really wanting an extra woman and wondering where they're going to find a 'suitable' extra man for an aging broad like Ina Coolbirth. As though there were any suitable extra men in New York. Or London. Or Butte, Montana, if it comes to that. They're all queer. Or ought to be. That's what I meant when I told Princess Margaret it was too bad she didn't like fags because it meant she would have a very lonely old age. Fags are the only people who are kind to worldly old women; and I adore them, I always have, but I really am not ready to become a full-time fag's moll; I'd rather go dyke.
"No, Jonesy, that's never been part of my repertoire, but I can see the appeal for a woman my age, someone who can't abide loneliness, who needs comfort and admiration: some dykes can ladle it out good. There's nothing cozier or safer than a nice little lez-nest. I remember when I saw Anita Hohnsbeen in Santa Fe. How I envied her. But I've always envied Anita. She was a senior at Sarah Lawrence when I was a freshman. I think everyone had a crush on Anita. She wasn't beautiful, even pretty, but she was so bright and nerveless and clean—her hair, her skin, she always looked like the first morning on earth. If she hadn't had all that glue, and if that climbing Southern mother of hers had stopped pushing her, I think she would have married an archaeologist and spent a happy lifetime excavating urns in Anatolia. But why disinter Anita's wretched history? — five husbands and one retarded child, just a waste until she'd had several hundred breakdowns and weighed ninety pounds and her doctor sent her out to Santa Fe. Did you know Santa Fe is the dyke capital of the United States? What San Francisco is to les garçons, Santa Fe is to the Daughters of Bilitis. I suppose it's because the butchier ones like dragging up in boots and denim. There's a delicious woman there, Megan O'Meaghan, and Anita met her and, baby, that was it. All she'd ever needed was a good pair of motherly tits to suckle. Now she and Megan live in a rambling adobe in the foothills, and Anita looks… almost as clear-eyed as she did when we were at school together. Oh, it's a bit corny—the piñon fires, the Indian fetish dolls, Indian rugs, and the two ladies fussing in the kitchen over homemade tacos and the 'perfect' Margarita. But say what you will, it's one of the pleasantest homes I've ever been in. Lucky Anita!"
She lurched upward, a dolphin shattering the surface of the sea, pushed back the table (overturning a champagne glass), seized her purse, said: "Be right back"; and careened toward the mirrored door of the Côte Basque powder room.
Although the priest and the assassin were still whispering and sipping at their table, the restaurant's rooms had emptied, M. Soulé had retired. Only the hatcheck girl and a few waiters impatiently flicking napkins remained. Stewards were resetting the tables, sprucing the flowers for the evening visitors. It was an atmosphere of luxurious exhaustion, like a ripened, shedding rose, while all that waited outside was the failing New York afternoon.
The End