This party for Deedee’s charity was in a very beautiful garden, an enclave of formal greenery near 105th Street, quite unlike the rest of New York. Worth seeing, certainly. It had allées of fruit trees and grassy terraces and a fountain of dancing bronze maidens. The boy was saying, “People get married here, although I wouldn’t say it was a really sexy garden.”
“Who is saying that a wedding must have to be sexy?” Liliane said.
“I’ve never been married myself. I bow to your greater knowledge,” he said.
Liliane gave him a look. The boy had a good head, squarish and somehow graceful, with brownish hair gelled back from his forehead.
“I was married in a mosque,” she said.
Generally, people switched the subject when you mentioned mosques. He asked if he could get her more punch, another tidbit?
Deedee came by when she was alone. “We did well, I’m very happy,” she said. “Look how many people. For a great cause.”
A woman behind them wore a lovely, broad-brimmed straw hat, trimmed with whimsical flowers. She certainly didn’t look as if she were thinking about lepers, but why should she be? Weren’t her dollars worth more than thoughts? Liliane was of that opinion, although she hadn’t always been.
The boy was back with an Indian sweetmeat, a delicious lump of what he said was chickpea flour and sugar and clarified butter. “I totally stuffed myself on these when I was living in India,” he said.
“Did you like it there?” she asked.
“No and yes. It’s mind-boggling. You have to keep five hundred contradictions in your head at once to even pay attention there.”
Liliane was starting to like him better.
“Don’t even ask how many calories these have,” Deedee said. “But you don’t have to worry.”
“She certainly doesn’t,” Rudy said. “It’s a French secret, isn’t it? I think they are a superior race.”
Rudy lingered with his assistant, Veena, after the guests were gone and the caterers were folding up the chairs. “Success!” she said. “Good turnout.”
“These things cost too much money,” he said. “Low profit. We’re not a big outfit.”
“Oh, we’re always in a squeeze. What else is new?”
“Yes,” Rudy said. “Mighty me. I’ll carry us all.”
His oldest friends would’ve laughed themselves silly at his carrying anyone anywhere. They thought he was a doofus in a suit, a slacker who’d managed to disguise himself as employed. Little did they know he was a professional. Who wants to be conned by a sharpie? No, the modest young fellow is the one you want to write a check to. That was what disarming meant: didn’t know what hit you.
He used to bring his girlfriends to galas, and they had liked dressing up and getting the glamour of it. He was just as glad he was single at the moment. Liliane was going to require undistracted attention. She was arch and wary (how had she captured the sheikh?), an unlikely pal for Deedee, and he didn’t have long to cultivate her.
His boss, Mary the Figurehead, was now stepping across the grass to literally pat him on the head. She was a bulky, mild-voiced woman in beige linen. “Well done,” she said.
“Oh, you say that to all the boys,” Rudy said. It was never a mistake to flirt just slightly with her. She was chief executive, though most of the decisions were made on the ground without her, in India and Bangladesh.
“I’m always so glad you’re with us,” she said, which was bullshit, it was just the way she talked.
HH was not in good shape, in truth. In South Asia, the rainy season was just starting again. Last year’s flooding rains had washed out no less than four of the organization’s centers, and the rebuilding wasn’t anywhere near finished on three of them. His email was full of pleas from the managers, piles of painful details, as if he were the one to persuade. Please do not forget us, they liked to say.
One of Rudy’s girlfriends had referred to what he did as “a high-stress job,” and he’d ditched her after that. Dear managers, your pesky suffering is so stressing me out. Right. All the same, he was probably drinking more since he’d been doing this. And a few other things.
When he left the gala, he walked across the park (how beautiful the last mellow daylight was, he loved his city) to get the Brooklyn-bound subway to his apartment in Fort Greene. There he collapsed on his sofa in front of the news, and when he woke up what felt like many years later, his cell phone said 11:03 p.m., an hour at which there was nothing to do but get up and splash water on his face and go out into the night.
At a bar a few blocks away, he swilled down beer and listened to an okay but not thrilling neo-punk group that blasted out monotonous chants and then broke into a pretty close imitation of the Sex Pistols (he had loved them when he was ten) screeching how they wanted to destroy the passerby ’cause they wanted to be anarchy. Surely this wasn’t all that was left of the anarchists of the world. This fabulous shrieking. Had anybody occupying Wall Street remembered to sing those songs? He hoped so. Rudy could see why revolution was no longer a faith, but the results of that were not all good, as the Occupiers had pointed out quite eloquently. He sort of hated rich people himself, and he probably saw the best of them.
He left when the band did a loud and louder brain-blitz that didn’t feel like pleasure. He was getting too old for this shit. But it was too early to go to bed, and he walked a few blocks to a club that booked untrendy jazz and oddball blues, old-timers and upstarts, a place almost ruined when the Times ran a feature on it. So it was mobbed with assholes now, so what? Assholes had a right to like music.
When he walked inside, it was indeed packed. He liked the mixed audience — a Latino kid with an eentsy beard and a hooded sweatshirt next to a dame from a different neighborhood in pearls (pearls!) and satin slacks. A piano player who looked six years older than God was doing great things with “I’m a King Bee.”
At the end of the set, people shuffled around, and Rudy got a good seat at the bar. At a table near him two older women were cracking each other up as they ordered drinks. One of them could not seem to pronounce, “One more Rob Roy on the rocks,” and he saw (could this be right?) that her friend in pearls, laughing away, was Liliane. How had she gotten here? Was this place in guidebooks now, drawing Euro-trash? “Hello, hello,” he called across to her.
It took her a second to get who he was. “Oh, my friend from the garden,” she said.
“How nice to see you again,” he said. ”How very, very nice.”
Liliane had been having an excellent time. She was with a truly old friend, an American whom she had known in her twenties. Barbara had spent a year in Paris as a college student, and for this trip had been miraculously located again through email by Emile, smart boy that he was. In their youth the two women had spent many vivid evenings picking up men together. Barbara remembered quite a few details that Liliane had mercifully forgotten. The current Barbara was stringier and paler — Liliane would not have known her — but as the evening went on, her younger face began to surface. She had kept something of her looks, in a messy, New York way.
They were not as drunk as they were acting, but they were not sober either. Why should they be? Barbara’s husband had gone home to sleep, and Liliane kept thinking she saw an ex-lover at one of the tables, an American clarinet player she’d once stolen some cash from. It was never him, and she wasn’t even picturing him at what would be his real age, but she kept thinking what she would say if it was. That money wasn’t doing you any good anyway. He’d been an alcoholic, he was probably dead by now. When last seen, he was playing his clarinet for spare change in the Métro.