Peter waved to a group by the piano at one end of the living room: Tony and Betty Winters were talking to a cluster of movie stars, William Garth, Delilah, and Amy Howell. The women, even the normally dowdy Betty, were dressed. Delilah, with her long black hair draped down her back, was almost naked, swathed from her left shoulder to her groin in skintight white, her nipples darkly oozing through the fabric, her legs snaked by gold lamé, like a Roman soldier. Amy Howell looked like a child wearing a man-sized gangster’s suit, utterly covered by thick, woolly Japanese-designed clothes, her shoulders padded, her waist bound briefly, then billowing out and down to the ground. Normally cautious Betty had on a red jump suit and a short, unevenly cut hairdo; the look, instead of seeming punk to Diane, reminded her of middle-aged Jewish ladies in their weekend stretch pants. But that group, given its bohemian stature, wasn’t Diane’s problem. A glance at the corporate wives and dates truly made Diane feel unequaclass="underline" they looked like Bendel’s manikins come to life. In her work clothes dress, with her big nose and horn-rimmed glasses, Diane thought she might be mistaken for — for what? I am a lawyer. That would be no mistake.
Brian Stoppard and Paula Kramer stood among the corporate people, their son and daughter huddled between the legs of the grown-ups. The boy was six, Diane knew, the girl three. Paula saw Diane and Peter, and came toward them just as they were handed their drink orders. Paula had her children reluctantly in tow. The boy, especially, hung back, his head down, his mouth closed in a sullen, shy pout. “Hi, glad you could make it,” Paula said breathlessly.
“I didn’t realize it was such a big party,” Diane said. “I wouldn’t have come like this.”
“Didn’t Brian tell you?” Paula was amazed. She shook her head of frizzy hair. “He’s perverse. You look lovely. Have you met Sasha and Rachel? Now that you’re new parents, I thought you might like to see the future. Sasha, Rachel, this is Diane and Peter Hummel.”
“Hello!” Peter said, and put out his hand to Sasha, who regarded it like a loathsome vegetable on a plate.
“How old’s your son now?” Paula asked.
“Six months. He turned over yesterday!” Diane announced.
“Uh-oh.” Paula laughed. “Your life is over.”
“He did?” Peter asked Diane. He still had his hand in Sasha’s face.
“Yes, I told you,” Diane answered defensively. She might not have. Peter’s lack of interest in fatherhood was unfashionable, and it would reflect badly on her if Paula Kramer knew Diane tolerated it. “He’s only done it the one time.”
“Shake Peter’s hand,” Paula urged her son, Sasha.
Sasha put out his small hand limply. Peter shook it gently. “Where do you go to school, Sasha?”
Now the boy looked up, sure of himself. “Hunter,” he said, naming a free public school in Manhattan specially created for bright children.
Hunter? Diane thought. Stoppard makes six hundred thousand a year; Paula’s a best-selling writer. What the hell are they doing taking up a place at Hunter?
“It’s great!” Paula said. “You have to get your boy in. Best school in the city.”
“Better than the private schools?” Diane asked.
“Sure, you don’t get that miserable homogeneous population of spoiled rich kids,” Paula said eagerly. “Besides, at Hunter everybody’s there on merit. They studied pointillism in kindergarten! It’s amazing.”
“Well,” Peter said diffidently. “You have to be something of a genius to get in. I don’t think Byron’s in that class.”
“Oh, they’re not geniuses,” Paula said. “Patty! Hi!” she called out to another celebrity, Patty Lane, entering just then. “If your boy is normally bright and you read to him a lot, he’ll score great on the test and get in. Excuse me.” She rushed on and moved to the door, pulling her children with her.
“Why the hell did you say Byron’s not smart?” Diane whispered.
“I didn’t,” Peter said. “I said he’s not a genius.”
“How do you know what he is?”
Peter closed his eyes, irritated. “He’s not a genius.”
“Peter!” Tony Winters called. He waved them over. Diane felt her stomach flutter at the prospect of meeting the movie stars. Because of Peter’s job, Diane had met celebrities, although they were of the theater, not film, and she had even witnessed the surprising flattery they bestowed on Peter in hopes of getting money for particular projects, but this group, Garth and Delilah especially, had been world-famous since Diane was a teenager. To see their faces in reality, in her boss’s living room, her husband beside her, wearing her boring clothes, was bizarre. Betty made the situation stranger by asking, as Diane and Peter approached, “Did Byron turn over again?”
“No” was all Diane could manage in answer to Betty under Delilah’s bored stare.
“I just heard about this,” Peter said.
“She didn’t tell you!” Betty exclaimed.
Because he wouldn’t care, you fool, Diane thought.
Tony made the introductions and added, to get the conversation going again, “I’m trying to convince Bill to return to the stage.”
“In a play of yours, I hope,” Peter said.
Betty, meanwhile, both to Diane’s relief and irritation, maneuvered Diane aside from the stars and began to babble about children. They talked on the phone regularly now, but it wasn’t a comfort. To each step in Byron’s development, Betty said, “Oh, I remember that. Wait until he starts—” and then she’d name something better yet to come. Like everything else in New York, even mothers talking about their babies were a competition.
“Do you know what Paula told me?” Betty whispered now. “Sasha, her son, goes to Hunter. They were studying Seurat and pointillism in kindergarten!”
“That must be her standard speech to the wives,” Diane said. “She just told me the same tiring.”
“Oh, my God!” Betty said with a squeal of pleasure. “I thought it was directed at me because Nicholas didn’t get in.”
“To Hunter? Nicholas’s old enough to apply to school?”
Betty stepped back and looked at Diane under lowered brows in mock astonishment. “My dear, you have to apply a year ahead of time. And if you want to have any hope of getting your child into a decent school, you must get him into one of the feeder preschools at the age of two.”
“You mean this starts at one year old!” Diane said, her astonishment genuine.
“Haven’t you been reading all the pieces in the Times and Town Magazine?”
“I was skipping them! My God, I have a six-month-old! I thought I had time!”
“Are you mad, woman?” Tony Winters said, leaning into their conversation without warning. “One slip now and your child ends up a bum on welfare in twenty years.”
“What’s this?” Delilah said.
“Oh, the New York private school madness,” Tony explained to the movie stars. “The yuppies have made the mediocre education of New York not only more mediocre, but it costs more and the pressure is worse.”
“Really?” Peter said. “When my mother moved me here as a teenager, I don’t think there was much pressure to get in.”
“Maybe for you,” Delilah said. “It’s tough in L.A. too. No problema if you got a series on the air.”