“Who’s Binny Harbison?”
“A designer. I heard he died three years ago.”
Now the woman in the gown appeared. She put a cigarette to her mouth. Both Binny Harbison and Lew Monserat offered lights. The woman took a light from Binny. She crossed to one of the Queen Anne chairs and sat.
Babe’s face was suddenly an oval of concentration. Her gaze played over the hard jaw, the high forehead, the widely spaced dark eyes, the aquiline nose. “There’s something …”
The woman leaned back against the chair, watching the column of smoke from her cigarette drift up into the unstirring air.
“There’s something wrong with her hair,” Babe said. “It’s fake. She’s wearing a wig. Could you stop the film?”
Babe peered at the TV screen.
“The picture’s so bad. Even the nose could be false. But still there’s something …”
Babe got up and went to the door. “Mathilde, could you come here a moment?”
A white-haired Frenchwoman with a swatch of blue cloth in one hand and a pair of pinking shears in the other stepped into the room. Babe introduced Mathilde Lheureux, her assistant, and Cardozo said how do you do.
“Do you recognize that dress?” Babe asked.
Mathilde approached the TV screen. “You designed that dress. It is red, with hand-stitched sequins.”
“Of course.” Babe took Cardozo through a workroom where eight women were working sewing machines and into an office. She shut the door. “Excuse the confusion,” she said, “we’ve hardly moved in.”
She went to the deep bookcase that held art folders. Tall, moving lightly, she was showing more and more of the grace that had been locked up in her for seven years. She studied labels, found the folder she wanted. She unlaced the strings and laid it open on the drafting table. She turned sheets of paper with a little snap.
“This one,” she said.
Cardozo looked down at a delicate sketch of a faceless woman in a gown that was warm, ripe red, the color of a perfect strawberry.
“I designed it for Ash Canfield,” Babe said. “She wore it to my party the night I went into coma.”
Babe felt silence, motionlessness in the house. Every piece of furniture seemed to say Ash is gone. She looked about the room, seeing the moody Corot woodscape over the fireplace, all the small doodads and objects that had been Ash’s enthusiasms and now, without her, seemed pitiful and meaningless, like abandoned pups.
“First stop, a drink, yes?” Dunk said.
“Isn’t it a little early for that?”
“You know what the Countess Rothschild used to say—‘Oh, well, what the hell’”
He mixed martinis, strained them carefully into two glasses, and garnished them with garlic olives. He came across the livingroom and handed Babe one. They settled onto facing couches.
She studied his face, the squarely set eyes, the bobsled nose and dimpled chin, the long curling lashes, all the physical details that had been Ash’s obsession. And Dina Alstetter’s. And, once upon a time, hers too. It seemed peculiar: Ash gone, the obsession surviving.
“It’s sweet of you to come by,” he said. “You look more and more terrific every day.”
There were dark lines under Dunk Canfield’s eyes, accentuated by his deep tan, and they seemed to speak of weeks of sleeplessness. A yachting cap sat rakishly atilt his hair, bleached from the Corfu sun.
“How are you, Dunk?”
“It’s been one of those days. It’s been one of those lives.” His posture sagged and his head hung forward. “I loved her. I was a rotten bastard to her, but I loved her. We weren’t always the best lovers or the best friends—as you well know—but damn it, we knew how to have fun. She was my best playmate ever. And we were just getting back together. And this time it would have worked. I know it would have.”
Babe was silent.
“I walk through these rooms—they feel so lonely, so empty.”
“What are you doing with yourself? Aren’t you getting out at all?”
“I was out with Vicki the other night—she took me to some of the discos—it’s not a lot, but it’s a toe in the water. I really don’t feel up to dinners, meeting people, making chitchat. There’s always that obligatory I’m-so-sorry and I’m so tired of it. And every damned little thing reminds me of her. I order Château-Margaux and I remember when she and I last drank it. I play a record and it’s her favorite. I try to read and the words on the page start a chain of associations and I wind up thinking of her. Look what I found, going through her things.”
Dunk pulled a pack of glossy photographs out of a manila envelope and handed them to Babe.
She looked at them—candids of Ash, appearing rather tipsy in some airport or other. One showed Ash dancing on a VIP lounge couch, a gaggle of nuns staring in open shock.
“Our trip to Bavaria, remember?” Dunk said. “When we all went to Caroline’s schloss and at Shannon they announced ‘Boarding all passengers on Aeroflot to Moscow and all passengers on Mr. Getty’s jet to Bad Nemetz.’ It’s one of those silly moments you never forget.”
“I remember.” Babe remembered being embarrassed, but it was obviously one of Dunk’s golden moments and she wasn’t going to say anything to tarnish it.
“Speaking of mementos …” Babe opened her own envelope and handed Dunk her sketch of the red gown. “Do you remember the dress I designed for Ash?”
He shook his head. “I got rid of all her clothes. The day after she died I phoned the Junior League thrift shop and told them to send a truck.”
Cardozo held the door for Babe.
The air inside the Junior League thrift shop smelled of floor wax, camphor, and the perfumes of forty different millionaires’ wives. The women floating up and down the aisles did not seem to be shopping so much as strolling, enjoying a break in lives that were all intermission to begin with, pausing to examine a froth of petticoat or an onyx bookend. They had a bored air, but there was a seriousness in their boredom, as though they were pursuing highly competitive careers.
“How do you tell who’s selling and who’s buying?” Cardozo whispered.
“The saleswomen are wearing originals,” Babe said.
Cardozo glanced along the racks of dresses and evening gowns, seemingly crushed together helter-skelter, all exuding an aroma of last decade’s chic; shelves of figurines and glasses and vases; stacks of books coming apart at the bindings.
“Garth, look!” a woman cried. “Depression glass candlesticks!”
Babe examined the sleeve of an oxydized mink that had gone the color of an old toupee.
A young woman approached. She wore slacks and a silk blouse with a patterned scarf, her reddish-brown hair pinned behind one ear with an emerald clip. “May I help you?”
“Who takes deliveries?” Babe asked.
“Cybilla handles those. I’ll see if she’s free.”
Everyone in the store looked free to Cardozo.
By the window, he observed two women discussing a flared rust-and-black patterned dress.
The younger woman was thin and blond, bright-eyed, agitated, a princess with a small p, doing coke or possibly prescription speed, worried about her age, her body, her left contact lens.
Her opponent was a tall, slender woman with steel-gray hair softly waved over an intelligent face.
They were disagreeing. It was clearly a collision of life-styles.
Cardozo understood what the young blond woman did not: the Junior League boutique was not Crazy Eddie’s; you didn’t hondle with the help, who in any case were not help but Park Avenue volunteers.
The woman in slacks spoke to the gray-haired lady, who came smiling across the shop.
“Great to see you, Babe. You’re looking just terrific.”
“So are you, Cybilla.”
“We’re going crazy. Three cartons of tip-top junk just came in from Truman Capote’s old garage and we’re understaffed.”
“Cybilla,” Babe said, “this is Vincent Cardozo. Vince, Cybilla deClairville—a good friend of my mother’s and mine.”
Cybilla raised her left eyebrow. She held out a perfectly and unobtrusively manicured hand. One gold band and nothing else. “You look familiar to me, Mr. Cardozo. Have we met?”