The Rothman Scandal (2 page)

“Remember the little blonde,” Alex said. “Send me a few more shots of her.”

“That's Melissa. She's okay if you shoot her straight on, and from the waist up. But she's got a rear end you could land a helicopter on. Full length, she goes to hell in a handbasket.”

“I liked her face. She's got a foxy look. She looks like she's going to go to the party. And when she gets to the party, she'll have a good time. I'm working on a party issue.”

“Okay,” Lucille Withers said, standing up, and when Alex Rothman also rose the top of her head reached roughly the height of Lucille's shoulder.

“And I wish you'd come to my party tonight,” Alex said. “All sorts of people are going to be here. The Kissingers. Richard Avedon. Dina Merrill. Won't you change your mind?”

“Hell, no, honey. You don't want an old belle like me at your party. You're going to be having all the Beautiful People. I'll read about it in
Women's Wear
. Besides, I don't have a party dress. Never did have one, in fact.” They moved together toward the door and out into the entrance gallery.

“I'd like to introduce you as the woman who discovered me,” Alex said.

“Bullets. I didn't discover you. You discovered yourself, Lexy.”

“Please come, Lulu. Wear just what you're wearing now. In New York these days, it's pretty much anything goes.”

“No, no. I've got to get back to my hotel. Got some phone calls to make.”

“Where are you staying this time, Lulu?”

“Say, I've found a swell little place,” she said. “It's called the Arnold Arms—on Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard, at One Hundred and Sixteenth Street. Thirty-five dollars a night. Not bad, I say.”

Alex giggled. “But Lulu, that's in
Harlem
,” she said.

“That so? Now you mention it, I did see a few darky dudes hanging around the lobby this morning. But don't worry. No Nigra is gonna mess with Lulu.” She brandished her large case to demonstrate how she would deal with an attacker. It was another of their private jokes. Though Lucille made plenty of money, she refused to pay what she considered to be New York's outrageous hotel and restaurant prices, and on each trip she searched for a hotel that would be less expensive than the last, and for the kind of diner where you could get a decent hamburger for $1.49.

At the elevator, which opened directly into the apartment, Alex pressed the button, and the giantess lowered her huge hawk-shaped head to give Alex a peck on the cheek. “I'll send you some more Melissas,” she said. “But don't forget the helicopter pad.”

Alex looked down at Lucille's feet. “You and your orthopedic shoes,” she said, and giggled again.

“They're Red Cross. They're the best. My mother used to say that high heels made a girl's uterus tip—not that my uterus is much use to me anymore. But you wouldn't put high heels on a girl my height, would you?”

The elevator door slid open. “Say, now you-all take care, ya hear?” Lucille said, while Frank, the elevator man, held the door.

Alex squeezed her hand. “And you-all come back real soon, ya hear?” As the elevator door was closing, Lulu threw her a wink.

“Love ya, Lulu!”

“Love ya too, Lexy! Bye!” came the disembodied voice from the descending elevator car.

2

On Alex Rothman's terrace, twenty stories above the East River, the florist's people were setting out the centerpieces on each of the twenty-five round, pink-draped caterers' tables, and the banquet manager from Glorious Food was delivering his instructions to the two dozen waiters, still in their shirtsleeves, who were lined up in front of him like soldiers on a parade field. “This will be a seated dinner for two hundred and fifty people,” he was saying, “with music and dancing. Guests are expected to start arriving at eight o'clock, and between eight and nine you will be alternately passing hors d'oeuvre trays and taking drink orders. The bar is over there”—he pointed to the white wrought-iron gazebo—“and the bartenders are Buddy, here, and Jerry. There will be ten hors d'oeuvre trays, and when you pick up a new tray from the kitchen try not to offer it to the same group of guests you've just passed it to. Keep circulating from group to group. There are some important people coming tonight, and I don't want any glitches. At approximately nine o'clock, start suggesting that guests go to the tables. There will be no place cards. Mrs. Rothman likes her guests to sit wherever they like. The first course will be a lobster bisque.…”

Other people, on stepladders, were attaching clusters of pink and white balloons to the awning posts and to the top of the gazebo, and a willowy young man wearing a golden ponytail and a turtleneck to match was wielding an electric hair dryer on a long cord to force open the tulip buds in the centerpieces.

“Why not just open the white ones, and leave the pink ones in the bud?” Alex suggested.

The young man with the dryer looked skeptical. “Think anybody'll notice?” he said.

“Some people will. Not everybody will, but in this group some people will.”

“Who is this dame, anyway?” she heard one waiter ask another.

“The
dame
happens to be the lady standing right behind you, beanhead.”

Alex turned and flashed a smile at both of them. “Dot's-a me,” she said. Coleman followed her about the terrace with a pad and pencil, taking notes, for Coleman was more than Alex's butler and majordomo. He was her part-time social secretary, friend, and, tonight at least, almost her cohost. “That tablecloth is a little crooked,” she pointed, and he made a note.

“I just called the weather report,” he said. “Zero chance of rain. Zip precip, but it may get a little breezy after the sun goes down.”

“Breezy? Do we have clothespins for the—”

“Clothespins are ready if we need them. And did you know there'll be a full moon tonight—rising at eight forty-seven? That should make it pretty out here.”

“Is it true that people do crazy things on nights with a full moon?”

“This full moon was ordered especially for your party. It took some doing, but when I explained to the moon people the nature of the occasion, they agreed to rearrange their schedule.”

“That waiter needs a shave. Can you tell him so politely? Maybe let him borrow your razor, and use your bathroom.”

Coleman made another note. “The NBC television crew is on its way. They need a little time to set up their equipment.”

“Anything else?”

“Cindy Adams called. She has the flu, but she's going to do the story anyway. She wants to know what you'll be wearing. I told her I'd call her back.”

“This is Bill Blass—cotton challis pants and top with a cowl neck. Three-quarter sleeves, and an Old Pawn belt. She may not know what that is. Old Pawn is silver and turquoise jewelry that the Navajo Indians used to make and pawn at trading posts out west. They pawned it for booze.” She touched the heavy belt. “Can you imagine pawning this beautiful stuff for booze? This one has a squash flower design. It dates from about eighteen sixty.”

He jotted down all this information. “Shoes?”

She extended one small foot. “Turquoise slingbacks. Perry Ellis. Oh, and I have a turquoise cashmere shawl that I may throw over my shoulders if it gets chilly.”

“Turquoise—to match your turquoise eyes?”

She laughed. “Please don't tell her that, darlin',” she said. “What about the fireworks?”

“Everything's set. You give the signal to the band, the band moves to the north corner of the terrace and starts to play ‘Happy Days.' That's my cue to push the button that will signal the fireworks barge on the river.”

“Have we thought of everything, darlin'?” Planning a party like this one was like laying out a military campaign—at least when Alex Rothman planned a party.

“I think so.” He consulted his watch. “Six fifty-eight,” he said. “You have over an hour until launch time. Why don't you go into the library and relax? There's champagne on ice in the cooler.”

“You know I can't relax before I give a party.”

“Don't worry. I'll take care of everything. Tonight your only job is to be the most famous woman in New York.”

“Like Andy Warhol said—famous for fifteen minutes.”

“Just one thing,” he said. With one hand, he reached up and lifted one small strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. Then, holding the hair in place with one hand, he reached in his jacket pocket with the other and produced a can of Spray-Net, and quickly sprayed the errant strand into place. “Now you're perfect,” he said. Among other things, Coleman was her part-time hair and makeup stylist.

He had been with her for fifteen years. Sometimes she noticed him gazing at her with a look of such soulfulness and longing that she wondered whether he was in love with her.

As she moved across the terrace toward the glass doors, she saw one of the waiters struggling to tie his black bow tie. “Need help?” she asked him.

“I can never learn to tie these damn things,” he said. “And the boss said absolutely no clip-ons.”

“Here.” She took the two ends of the tie. “You—tie—this—exactly as you would—a shoelace,” she said, straightening the knot and flattening the bow into place against his white shirtfront.

“My old lady won't believe this,” he said. “The great Alexandra Rothman having to tie her waiter's bow tie.”

“You tell your old lady that this old lady did it,” she said.

In the library, she drew the curtains closed, and the room was dark, except for the museum light above her portrait, and the house was silent except, from the distant terrace, for the faint sound of the musicians as they began to bring their instruments into tune in a series of F-sharps. She stepped to the cooler, lifted the bottle from the ice, and poured herself a glass of champagne—liquid courage. “A person always needs a little liquid courage before a party,” her husband Steven used to say. Steven's problem was remembering names. “I can't even remember my best friends' names when I see them in the middle of a mob of people,” he used to say. Alex's problem was different. She would have no difficulty remembering the names of her two hundred and fifty guests tonight because she would be seeing them all in their proper
context
. It was when she encountered familiar faces
out
of context that she was thrown off guard. A year ago, for instance, she spent nearly six months seeing her dentist twice a week while he performed some extensive crown and inlay work. Week after week, this young man had spent hours with his boyish face bent over her open mouth while she familiarized herself with every contour of that face. Yet, when she encountered him one day at the small leather goods counter at Saks, and he greeted her warmly and by her first name, she had absolutely no idea who he was. She had mumbled something about how well he was looking, only to realize later that she had spent two hours with him just the day before! How do you account for that?

She found herself studying the Bouché portrait, asking herself that question. It had been a long time since she had really looked at the portrait, and she wished again that she had stood firm against Bonbon, M. Bouché's tiny white toy poodle. For one thing, Bonbon lent an aura of artifice, or sentimentality, to the painting. For another, it dated the portrait, time-freezing it in the early 1970s. Dogs, like everything else, go in and out of fashion. Since those days, entire breeds appear to have vanished from the animal kingdom. Who ever sees a cocker spaniel anymore? Whatever became of chow-chows, Saint Bernards, Boston bulls, even collies? Scotties are similarly extinct, while the noble Bedlingtons and Afghan hounds are decidedly endangered species, destroyed by popular acclaim as surely as if by acid rain. Toy French poodles, particularly the itsy-bitsy white ones, are a rather special case. One still sees them, Lord knows, but in all the wrong places—in the Indiana couple's farmhouse, on your cleaning lady's Christmas card, or being walked on West 49th Street after dark by ladies of easy virtue. In their place, where women of fashion walk their dogs, have come Shi-tzus, Yorkies, and maybe corgies. Was there an idea for a
Mode
story in this phenomenon? Alexandra quickly dismissed it as frivolous. That was the way Bonbon made her look in the portrait—frivolous.

But Bouché had insisted. He often included Bonbon in his portraits of beautiful women, and Bonbon was more than a cute prop. The dog, he explained, provided a crucial compositional element in the painting. Look how the animal's triangular shape, with its rear legs tucked under its chin, and curled under Alexandra's right arm, echoed the corresponding triangle of Alexandra's left elbow as it rested on the arm of her chair, her slender fingers curved upward to touch her cheek, the fingers forming another triangle. The composition was based on a subtle series of interrelated triangles, he explained. The triangle of her right shoulder, crooked to hold the dog, was balanced by the triangle of her right knee as it crossed her left, and then there was the triangle of the delicate cleavage of her breasts, answered by the triangular shape of the subject's face. And the significance of the triangle? Ah, but didn't Mrs. Rothman know? The triangle is the simplest, strongest geometric form in nature, as the Egyptians knew when they built the Pyramids, as the Indians knew when they carved their arrowheads, as Bucky Fuller knew when he designed his domes! What is the shape of a feather, or a bird's wing? Examine a fly's wing under a microscope, and what will you see? Triangles within triangles.

“My darling Mrs. Rothman, I assure you that Bonbon is
essential
,” he said. “Look how his pearl-colored eyes echo your earrings! Now erase that little frown for me, and look beautiful for me again, my darling lady.” And he picked up his brush again.

She hadn't argued with him. After all, he was charging her nothing for her portrait. He was painting it out of gratitude for the commission she had given him to illustrate some fashion pages for the magazine. In those days, he was not well known in America, and was eager for the exposure. And, she thought now a little guiltily, she had used him only once again. Such are the penalties of becoming fashionable. She remembered when she had been the first to introduce her readers to the hairstyles of Vidal Sassoon, and where is Vidal Sassoon today? Rich, but his hair products sell at K mart, and are giveaways in hotels. Ralph Lauren will be the next to go that way, just wait and see.
Look beautiful for me again!