Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [63]
I am polite. I make vague promises. Then, spotting someone I know, I cross the room.
It’s Wayne Riboud—the Nevada biker who has become the flavor of the month by meticulously reproducing dollar bills, yens, francs, and lire, and trading them for necessaries like food and clothing. It has become quite fashionable in New York to hang money on the walls. None of your arcane symbolism here. Pass the buck: that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
“How are you, kid?” says Wayne, peering down my cleavage.
“Still living.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse.”
“Kid split?”
“Mmm.”
“Who with?”
“Does it matter?”
“No,” says Wayne. “Endings are all the same: the bimbo, the bills, the blues. God, people bore me. Why can’t they love one another for a change?”
“Can you?”
“No. Can you?”
I laugh. “I honestly don’t know, Wayne.”
“You wanna split?”
“Where?”
“We could dance. Nell’s—if it isn’t over yet. Somewhere. We could take a garbage scow around Manhattan, hear Bobby Short at the Carlyle.”
“Not the way you’re dressed.”
“We could split to the country. Your place or mine?”
Wayne does a sort of Groucho Marx imitation of lust.
“I gotta circulate first.”
Wayne nods and makes for the loo. I wander over to talk to André’s best friend, Lionel Schaeffer, who is such a grubber yung that he makes André seem like Percy Bysshe Shelley.
“Leila, pussycat,” says Lionel. “Long time no see. What’s up?”
“What’s up with you?”
I shouldn’t have asked. Lionel begins a recitation of everything he’s bought in the last two months. Two companies. One old master. A villa in Beaulieu. An apartment in Beijing. (“Beijing is the next place,” says Lionel.) Jon Bannenberg is redesigning his schooner, Lion’s Share. (Most men name their boats after their daughters or wives; Lionel named his after himself: a key to his character.) “I’m only in New York for one day. Tomorrow I leave for Paris to go ballooning with you-know-who, then I’m off to London to meet with Jon about the tub”—his mock-deprecatory title for his boat—“then to Venice for some cockamamy charity ball at some cockamamy palazzo rented by some cockamamy friends of Lindsay’s.” Lionel has won the shiksa sweepstakes with this marriage. He indicates his third wife, Lindsay, a thirty-five-year-old who is fast turning into a replica of his second wife, Lizbeth, and his first wife, Shirley: emaciated charity ballers both. (Is photography the reason that anorexia has become equated with beauty? These women photograph well, though they look terrifyingly like death’s-heads in the flesh. Has the image become so much more important than the thing itself?)
Isadora: Yes! And you’ll never be thin enough.
Leila: Or rich enough.
“Leila!” sings Lindsay.
“Lindsay!” sings Leila, embracing Ms. Bones.
Lindsay is dressed in a short Lacroix with a bell-shaped cerise skirt over black petticoats and gold upholstery braid all over the black velvet bolero jacket. She looks as if she was dressed by Scarlett O’Hara out of the window drapes at Tara. She is about two heads taller than Lionel, who, with his bulgy blue eyes, his implanted hair, and his perfectly tailored suit, could be in any business at all—from crack to art, from publishing to movies to finance.
The truth is, he made his fortune in the news business, inherited chains of newsstands from his father, Izzy Schaeffer, who traveled everywhere with a little man called Lefty Lifshitz, who packed a rod. Izzy and Lefty were not unknown to Meyer Lansky, though to hear Lionel