Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [119]
Down they step from their boats—Lacroix rustling Givenchy, Ungaro fluttering past Lagerfeld, Rhodes glittering near Valentino, Ferre flitting past Saint Laurent.
Darling, darlina, tesoro, my love, my darling, my sweetest, sweetie, you calculating little cunt. . . .
Here we all are in Italy, with all the people we always see in New York! We will not talk to them here any more than we talk to them there. We are here to be seen. We are here because it is the finish line of a race we have been running since we were two. (How did we get into this race, anyway? We sure don’t know.) We are here because we’re here. Is that perfectly clear?
Since I grew up poor in Washington Heights, this sort of thing ought to impress me more. And it did at the start, when my face became a ticket to ride, my name an open sesame, my paintings the magic combination that released the lock.
A world of winners! Then why are they so grim? And why so harried, married, nervous? Shouldn’t being rich be fun?
I’ve read F. Scott Fitzgerald. I know the rich are different from you and me. But they seem so nail-bitingly tense, so frantic, so fearful. Perhaps in the twenties they had fun. Now being rich seems like a job. Where did the adjective “idle” go?
A rail-thin greyhound of a socialite (with leathery ocher skin, prominent hips, jaw, elbows, nose, knees) floats in wearing a red Valentino and rubies, on the arm of a ruby-nosed fag. She is Mrs. Rentier, the famed “Slim” Rentier—famous for her slimness, her ruby-nosed walker, the exercise coach she keeps on Ninth Street, the banker husband who never goes out. He’s in the air-conditioned den on Park Avenue, watching tapes of old Super Bowl games and fondling the Pakistani houseman (Ismail, age twenty-two). Tonight he seems smarter than all these sweating hordes.
And here comes Mrs. Leventhal, the size-two socialite from Beekman Place, Pound Ridge, and Port Antonio. She’s the charity disease queen of New York—a hotly coveted title. And she’s here with her designer, whose new collection her husband is financing, the punky adorable midget Mij Nehoc (Jim Cohen spelled backward), who wears a white Nehru jacket, a hoop in his left ear, an emerald stud in his right, and emerald satin harem pants with emerald slippers whose toes curl, phallically, up.
Mij Nehoc’s last collection out-Lacroixed Lacroix. He brought out Maori models in baskets for skirts, coconut halves for bras. The Back-to-Nature Noble Savage Look, Vogue called it. (“After too many seasons of frippery, nature looks terribly fresh again, and natural materials have won the day!”)
And here is Lady Eglantine Brasenose from Melbourne, the widow of the shipping king of the South Pacific. And Prince and Princess Rupert of England, known from Kensington to Mustique to Hong Kong for their open marriage. And Pia Le Quin, the voluptuous, tawny American actress who nearly married a Rothschild. But didn’t. (Her career came first—although her career’s in the toilet, as they say in Hollywood.)
And here comes Renzo Pisan with his principessa, who has organized this fete along with her opposite number from New York—the very slim, almost embalmed-looking Mrs. Rentier, society mummy!
Renzo is no mummy. Even in his “smoking,” he exudes sex, sex, sex: his eyes half closed, his piqué dress shirt discreetly twinkling with antique diamond studs, a gray silk cummerbund at his slim waist, a gray silk tie at his golden throat, a “smoking” cut to show his snake hips and his broad shoulders, and gray silk loafers to let him dance, dance, dance. (Ballare, ballare, ballare—sounding in Italian almost like what it most resembles.)
The principessa is toweringly tall and stately in a yellow silk Ungaro sheath, rampant with huge fuchsia flowers. Her golden hair entwined with jewels, her scrawny lifted neck ablaze with canary diamonds, her arms enslaved