Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

austere, from her face (which was very long and rectangular, like a gift box for a bottle of booze, except instead of a ribbon on top she had a thin figure eight of gray-brown hair tacked down by a couple of bobby pins) to her dress, which looked as if it were made out of a humongous brown Kleenex held together by a narrow brown belt.

She was Sy’s age, fifty-three. Maybe when they were twenty-one they’d looked like a couple, but now, had he been alive and had they stayed married, she would have had to handle embarrassing references to her son; they had separated not only into different worlds but into different gener-ations.

Like Felice, her Park Avenue living room was outmoded.

But it wasn’t austere. First of all, it was so big you could play basketball in there, except you’d

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break your neck because it was so chock-full of stuff. The place looked as though someone had bought out the entire inventory of a store specializing in dark, ugly antiques. There was no faded, restful old-money homeyness like at Germy’s, just a lot of very high, overstuffed, heavy furniture with claw feet. It would have taken five moving men just to lift one of her hideous black carved-wood chairs. The pictures were heavy too, fancy gold-framed oil paintings of fruit and pitchers and dead rabbits.

“When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Spencer?”

My left shoe squeaked every time I shifted my weight. She hadn’t asked me to sit.

“About ten years ago.” Even in the early-afternoon glare, the room was so shadowy it was hard to make out her features—except for her teeth. They were double normal human size; it looked as if she’d had a transplant from a thorough-bred mare. Felice was so aggressively unattractive that, considering her surroundings, you knew it was her, and not Mr.

Spencer or Mr. Vanderventer, who owned the sixteen-foot-high ceilings and everything under them.

“Did you ever meet or speak with his second wife, Bonnie Spencer?”

“I saw them together briefly, once, in front of Carnegie Hall. Sy introduced us.” Outside Felice’s window, the only bright spot in the room, Park Avenue stretched out like a parade ground for the rich. The island in the middle of the street had huge tubs of bright-gold flowers; they gleamed like piles of money. Past the traffic, over at the curb, elderly doormen opened limousine doors and helped out the rich and able-bodied.

“During the time you knew him, did Sy ever mention a man named Mikey LoTriglio?”

“I believe so.”

“What did he say about him?”

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“I don’t know. Something about their fathers having been in the meat business.” She said “meat business” with distaste, as if Sy had been in wholesale carrion. “I never paid attention to that aspect of his life.”

I gave it another five minutes, but all I could get was that Felice had married Sy because he could quote all of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” She’d divorced him because she finally found out he was more interested in “social advancement”

than in poetry. And all right, yes, since I’d asked (her upper lip curled, covering about half of her giant teeth), because she caught him cheating. Who with? With her first cousin Claudia Giddings, a trustee of the New York Philharmonic.

He told her he’d fallen in love with Claudia, that he wanted to marry her, but of course he never did.

The trip to Manhattan looked like a waste. What had I gotten? Corroboration that Sy couldn’t keep his pants on, especially when there was someone screwable who could boost either his status or his career. And that Germy had been right on the money: Sy was a chameleon. A refined poetry-spouter to Felice. An “I care” Down-to-Earth Human Being to Bonnie. A cool, masterful mogul to Lindsay. And not just to women: somehow, he became whatever anyone wanted him to be. A remote God of Cinema to Gregory J.

Canfield. A congenial producer-pal to Nicholas Monteleone.

A blood brother to Mikey. A savior to Easton.

I walked down Park Avenue to stretch my legs and let my shoe desqueak, twenty-five blocks from Felice’s brown fortress of an apartment house to a silvery glass-and-granite office building. Nature had given up on this part of Manhattan and was hiding out in Central Park. On Park Avenue, there were only

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too-flawless horticulturist’s gold flowers, and a thin, bleached-out strip of sky. Jesus, I hated New York.

Well, maybe not hated. When I was a kid I’d gone on a class trip to the top of the Empire State Building and to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and I’d let out an

“Oooh!” of honest delight. But after that, I could never figure out what to do with myself in the city, except that I always felt I should do something— like take advantage of Culture.

Once I’d been down at NYPD Headquarters on a case and then had taken a couple of subways uptown and wound up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it was so big. And I’d had to check my gun with security. The guy there had treated me with a combination of suspicion and contempt, like I was some Bible Belt anti-smut loony who was going to shoot the dicks off the Greek statues. Finally, I’d found myself in a room full of Egyptian mummies, and when I’d asked where the pictures were, a guard, who I’d actually smiled at because he looked like an older Dave Winfield, had said, “‘Pictures’? Do you mean ‘paintings’?” That had been it for Culture.

And just walking through the streets, either I’d see nothing but the homeless, and sick whores, and drug deals going down, or—today, as I pushed open the heavy door of the office building—swanky, Sy-like people saying, throatily,

“Hiiii” to each other. I always felt like a rube. All dressed up with no place to go. And no matter what jacket I put on in Bridgehampton, when