Cinderella

Her next client was one of Jackie’s favorites—frail, famous, and remarkably flexible. Dead rich, of course. And the house too, one of the older ones, was beautifully done with baskets and chintz and peeling antique wicker.

Jackie finished the Red Bull and put it down on the floor of the old Subaru, for her, the saddest car in East Hampton.

Unlike all her other clients, Beverly never kept her waiting, nor did she take calls or forget the moves she had been doing all summer. Her workout clothes were good and she smelled mostly of Fracas, which was now Jackie’s scent when she went out. Beverly’s chef never came to her for menu approval in the middle of a session and he always brought Jackie a cool beverage to sweat on the table before they began. The cash was in an envelope when the secretary brought it out to reschedule when there had to be a change.

Beverly had given her magazines and review copies of the books she got. Sometimes, she even asked a question about Jackie’s life. She was famous for her piercing questions and the concerned expression that would crumple her face when it could still move and for her voice, which everyone knew right away.

“This,” said Jackie in answer to what she wanted from life, and she spread her taut arms to take in the lawn, the dark pool and, far off, the blue hydrangeas. This was the kind of landscape she drove to six times a day. She would take almost any man who could provide it, and she made this known, carefully, to some of her clients.

“Who are you seeing next?”

“Lester Grant for a knee replacement. I’ve talked to Ali, the wife.”

“Of course.”

“No, really what is it? What do you know? Please tell me.”

“There may be problems there, so I hear.” She smiled a strange somewhat challenging smile that Jackie was quick to understand.

“Here take this.” Beverly threw a pale blue shatoosh over Jackie’s shoulders. “Remember, Speak low!” she always said this. She watched her walk away, the swing of her dark pony tail. She could have walked right onto the set of any TV game show to turn the letters or sweep her arm lovingly over a new SUV.

And then Jackie was in her clunker of a car following the GPS to an immense grey house on the ocean. As she called from the gate, she took the clip from her hair and shook it out, picked up her shirt and knotted it revealing a 29-year-old tanned abdomen shaped by two years of Title IX soccer and six years of constant professional exercise.

It was that house, the famous story of last summer. The people who bought it for 25 million had it completely redecorated so they might live in a nice beige womb for a month before tearing it down. This was what they had built, one of those houses that get photographed for a book even if the book is only there in the New York apartment to remind them of what awaits on weekends.

Jackie knew this because she would thumb through such house books while waiting for her New York clients who always appeared without makeup, looking like shit.

Ali met her at the door and Jackie knew her right away. She was one of those blondes she would see bopping along Madison Avenue at 10:30 in the morning in their neoprene blends and giant sunglasses with their Birkins flapping open. Long streaks of  hair, short streaks of temper, whippet legs anchored in sneakers like clown shoes. They would be girlishly thin with muscles like tiny lumps but then, when you caught up with them, the faces never matched, nor did the hands, nor did the upper arms when they waved and flapped unless she worked them out using Tracy Anderson and three-pound weights.

“He’s out by the pool,” said Ali standing in the great hall with white marble underfoot and blue and white porcelain in the niches, Hamptons cliché as she had learned from Beverly.

. “Don’t feel you have to take it easy, he’s strong.” No handshake. She was looking at the knotted teeshirt.

“I’ve got my swimsuit,” Jackie said quickly, glad she had brought the one piece, the “maillot” as it said on the frightening price tag.

“First, I’ll show you the gym so you know what’s here if everything works out today.”

They went down a long back hallway carpeted in navy and dog hair, and Jackie heard high hysterical barking in the distance. Following Ali, if she had to guess, she would say her body had been formed first by Lotte Berk, then Core Fusion, Soul Cycle, Tracy Anderson, one meal a day and alcohol.

The gym, the largest she had seen in a home, was replete with paired equipment: two Pre-Cor Icarians, Rom bikes, Vibro Gym Diamonds and a three-tier weight rack, the lower tier of which would never ever be used in this lifetime.

Lester, his hand cupped over the phone he was murmuring into, scarcely looked up.

A cheater, Jackie thought looking at the small belly rising above the usual voluminous Villebrequin trunks that all the older men out here wore, his with turtles. His hair was the mahogany of the Crayola crayon she used to color tree trunks and arched into thin wings over his ears. He had hard eyes the color of her soft shatoosh, tan skin too tight to be natural and indeed, as he slipped into the pool, she saw a small white vertical line by his ear. There had been no greeting.

She went through the leg lifts, ankle pumps and thigh squeezes with him. In the background the manic barking continued through the pool music. The saltwater pool was colder than most and Jackie felt her nipples beginning to swell. Then Lester was on his backside on the side of the pool for the lying kicks and heel slides and Jackie saw evidence of what she had seen in the pool as the trunks clung, as well as the scar in front of his other ear.

Ali, under a big black straw hat that went halfway down her back, turned another page of her magazine and looked up without any interest.

“Last ten.”

“I can’t.” He was awake, he was in pain, he was almost in love. The evidence of her effect was still there. He looked down amazed and saw her looking and then both of them looked away.

“I’ll walk you out,” Lester said, limping over and opening a different door on the side of the house. Two small dogs rushed out in a jumping frenzy and a blur of white and went for Jackie’s ankles.

One of them, the full breed cotton de tulear and not the rescue dog, quickly bit Jackie. The blood filled her flipflop.

“Toby! Bad bad dog!” Lester said. Ali was up looking bothered and a bit afraid for this was Toby’s third bite and if the town knew…

Jackie, hopping a bit with the blood pouring now, was trying not to cry. Ali was running to the basket of rolled towels and then hesitating.

“Give her the fucking towel!” said Lester in his old voice.

“Here, lean on me.” She had her arm around his neck and was clinging a bit more than necessary, the blood making a trail.

“Tereza! Constanza!” Ali called. One was peeling carrots, one shucking corn over the garbage hole built into the countertop and both stopped to look at the blood, now a smear on the floor, and the unfamiliar sight of the master showing human concern.

Jackie had seen many such kitchens out here where abundance was the norm, at least two of everything—always the five or six cars in the driveway, hills of farm vegetables piled artfully in multiple baskets on the counter, and the refrigerators, when he opened one for the ice, packed tight with different kinds of imported beers, stacked containers from Loaves and Fishes, and that silver wrapped Plugra butter they all used. Two dogs, two humans in service…

She smiled through her pain, now throbbing and pulsing. Toby was sniffing around her leg when one of the maids pulled him away. He bared his little fangs at her.

“I think I have to get her to the Emergency Room,” Lester said as Ali, still in her black bikini, was wrapping the ice. “She’s gonna need stitches.”

“You won’t say it was Toby will you? It would be his third bite and you know what will happen. Say it was Ipo, please, he’s never…”

Jackie could hear a familiar tone of annoyance and impatience under the plea. In kitchens like this she had waited for her ladies to appear, talking to the servants as one, hearing their low voiced complaints. If they gave her so much as a glass of iced tea, the wife would frown at the glass as though she had transgressed in some unfamiliar way. Jackie did not understand until she figured out the housekeeper had used one of the Baccarat bar glasses, not a kitchen glass.

Still, now in her fourth season, she wanted it all, the salty cold ocean air, the light bleaching the chintzes on the furniture, the stacks of decorating books marked with Post-its, the soft throws on every chair– all that said to her security, which meant she would never wind up like her mother, and luxury that said to her she might take it easy and have others want just what she had.

Just because he was Lester Grant and had taken a few tables at the benefit for the Southampton Hospital, it did not mean they would take him right away in the Emergency Room. This really bothered Lester because of the girl, but also because he had recently lost a major deal. Not his money, of course, but some of his power, which to him was a different thing. The first was just assumed by now, the second was something he had stroked and cultivated and sweated over and finally enjoyed for years. He loved showing it off in what he thought of as subtle ways.

He liked the girl. He actually wanted the girl. She had a little hole in her t shirt and, as he stared at it, he felt sorry for that, too.

He knew Ali was home, already thinking that the girl might sue–that was just the way her mind worked– afraid, grasping, insecure, o-l-d. That was why she had let him drive off with the girl after putting a kitchen towel down on the floor of the Audi TT. Probably she was calling Tom, one of their lawyer, right now.

“Maybe if I walk a little it won’t hurt as much,” the girl (Jackie, that was her name, he remembered) was saying and she put her hand on his knee to rise, and it shot right through him. Jesus.

“You look like you are shivering. It must be the shock. Please take my jacket.”

So young that face in the brutal light, so soft and small in the pretty blue scarf. The tears were still on her cheeks. He swelled with lust and pity.

“She is going into shock,” he said to the woman at the desk. “We need a doctor here right away!” He was using his voice of command, and the Mexican man next to him with the blood soaked dirty bandage halfway up his arm was smiling for he knew this man was about to say “Usted sabe quien so yo”

“It’s O.K.” said Jackie in her softer voice. “Don’t get upset.”

“Do not shout at me, sir” said the woman.

Here it comes, thought the Mexican man.

“I’ve given a great deal of money to this hospital,” Lester said.

“Really, it’s O.K., I don’t mind waiting…”

“You’re shivering and it must hurt like hell. That fucking overbred Toby, that one’s her dog.”

It was then Jackie saw she had a real chance with Lester Grant, and Lester Grant thought what a good person she was, how appealing and grateful for all he was doing, all he might do in the limitless future for this little girl with the hole in her shirt…

 

“I know I shouldn’t have, but I slept with Lester Grant,” Jackie told Beverly “and it was just wonderful. I can’t explain it, we were both so tired and I was weak from that whole emergency room thing and the stitches and Ali calling every few minutes and not being able to get through, thank God. We just fit, we are perfectly sexually suited.

“He drove me back and said ‘Is this where you live?’ when we parked in front of the hardware store. He got up the stairs with his bad knee and he kept staring around like he wanted to correct everything. I had one peach in a little blue bowl and he kept looking at it like he had never seen a peach before. And the bathroom down the hall…he could not believe the way I live. I mean, it’s just for the summer and anyhow the lease is up in a week.”

Beverly had her “absolutely-enthralled-tell-me-more” television face on now and they were forgetting about the yoga/Pilates/ Xertube resistance band session which was scheduled for that day.

“Oh, and here’s your scarf, it really saved me in the hospital. He brought back my flipflops and we did it again. Twice. He’s like a young man. I know he really really likes me. He wanted me to ask Ali if I could bunk in with them.”

“That is definitely not a good idea. I mean, you’ve met Ali, no?”

Jackie listened to a lot of advice and wise counsel from the older woman as she walked her out to the driveway where Jackie’s new car was parked. Beverly, who did not know or care about cars, touched it and looked at her with that face again, the one she used when she got to the real questions with celebrities.

Jackie looked down at the pearly gravel and wondered if she should lie again as she had just lied to Lester about being on the pill and to the E.R. doctor about it being Spike who had bitten her and any drugs she might recently have taken.

The car was exciting and brand new like Lester, who had insisted and written her a check on the spot. She knew when her lease was up, she could even sleep in the Escalade and thus prolong the summer.

Only it didn’t happen that way.

 

It was one of those rainy days when the Hamptons seem like a great big waste of money. The food did not taste the same in the rain, Ali thought.

She wanted some donut holes from Dreesen’s even though Constanza was unavailable and she had not eaten anything like a donut in about fifteen years.

She thought she would get some for Jackie, too, who was coming later. She had not been very nice to the girl. She had saved Toby’s life after all and was being so friendly to Ali before and after the sessions with Lester.

Ali got two big sacks full of Dreesen’s donuts and donut holes and ate some of the powdered ones while stalled on the wet roads home, locked in traffic. Without Lester in the car she could play her music, oldies and all the country stuff he could not stand, as loud as she liked. By the time she got to the house, Ali was in a really good mood and thought she would bring Lester and the girl some donuts.

She went in the back entrance carrying the bags and dripping all along the long hall carpet. The lights were off in the gym. Ali heard sounds she did not like. She shifted the bags to her left hand and with her right she reached for the light switch. Even with her rain hat down over half her face she could see them rolling around, panting on the carpeted floor.

With her raincoat still on, she walked over to one of the Rom bikes and started pedaling, the donuts getting wet against her chest.

Back against the wall she heard him say, “Jackie you’re killing me.”

She, very disarranged, was holding the green exercise ball to her chest and then they were doing squats against the wall.

“Are you all through?’Ali said.

“I’ll just walk her out” Lester said.

Ali bent over her donut bags and cried right into them and when he returned, already screaming, “How dare you spy on me!”, she threw them both and the bags burst and a shower of confectioner’s sugar rose up into the air and descended like sweet snow on both of them.

They might have laughed then and considered it just another low point in their marriage in which unforgivable things were said and done pretty much every day.

“That whore is never allowed in this house again,” Ali said.

What else could she say and what else could he do but agree, and she used the house phone for Tereza to come with the dustbuster. The dogs were following her and they ate every sodden, tear-laden crumb Tereza could not get to in time.

 

Lester would raise her up. He would give Jackie everything, or, at least, half or forty percent of everything.

When Lester was a small boy, more than once, his mother had read him a poem called “Pity” about two little girls going to town, each with a penny to spend. They met a boy, “all rags and tatters,” on the road: “here little boy without a hat/ take this penny, also that” for “clothes and victuals too/ We do not want though others do.” How those words stuck in Lester’s head…

“With smiling face the lad drew near/The girls could scarce refrain a tear /When the poor lad was heard to say/God bless you both by night and day.”

His mother would look at him significantly then as though to say, “Did that register, Lester?” It must have, because he remembered every word fifty years later and he remembered his mother’s expression too, severe and also fully “onto” him. As was Ali, who had known him before the big money and the people saying yes and thank you, sir when he ran their lives—thousands of lives– and picked up the checks—hundreds of checks except when someone was even richer. He always knew which one of them was richer, as did they.

Jackie was to be his new project, rescued from above the hardware store with that disgusting communal toilet in the hall. She was the poor little boy on the road, only he kept on wanting her.

He would think of that one lonesome peach in the bowl and then of the artfully spilling baskets on his kitchen counters, and then he would get to Ali’s jewels, so many that he had copies made for traveling, and then Jackie’s one gold chain around her neck that hung with its pathetic four leaf clover to almost between her breasts which were a 32-C and young.

He had bought her just about all the European underwear at Barney’s, the saleswoman following as he threw the bustiers and thongs into bag after bag—she would sort out the sizes later. “We’ll have this and this in all the colors—do you like this?” he’d say, and he and Jackie would disappear into the fitting room together. He told her to throw out her sport bras and her tights. He would take care of her, for she was going to be the mother of his next child.

He stood over her as she tried on shoes, pair after pair, and then boots, and then evening shoes. Lester had always liked women’s shoes, low cut ones showing a bit of toe and arch. Ali had taken to wearing crocodile flats, which she thought were elegant and he thought made her look short. Now, Jackie walked around and around, half limping until the shoe’s mate could be found, swishing her backside, having other women look as the boxes of thousand-dollar shoes piled up.

“Take them all,” Lester said.

Then came the credit cards and the charge accounts made over to her while she was still in the corporate apartment in midtown. She drifted from designer to designer in the stores in a trance of pleasure, carrying the garment bags over her arm with shiny bags hanging from her hand, the left one with a big ring on it that she would raise and study every once in a while, twisting her finger to catch the light.

Even now, a few months later, she would get so excited as though she had never imagined owning a Cartier tank watch before. She had slipped off her parkas, thrown out her sneakers and risen as though she had been tethered before and he had freed her. She had never had a fur or a diamond or been to Europe. She pronounced Proust as “Prowst.” It only happened once.

While Lester fought with Ali, he had moved out the paintings, leaving her with the copies, for he had copied his art so it might hang in each of his homes. Perfect copies and, how truly brilliant he had been, to mix them up and not tell Ali which was which.

He thought of his children now as his previous children, beings too old to have anything to do with his new young titanium–kneed self. He sat at tables downtown with thirty-year-olds who made the reservations and walked ahead of him so he would get a good table, if there was such a thing at these places.

To old friends who asked, and there were only two who dared, he would say “She gives me what I want and I give her what she wants.”

Ali, surrounded by a cloud of lawyers, approached her divorce as a full-time profession. It was as though she had been born to fight him to the death. Lester was not a bit surprised that, with his money, she gave it her all and kept the divorce going on and on, and, deep inside his hatred,  grew a bud of respect.

His children moved to his side and did not seem to object when he began to duplicate with Jackie all the homes and possessions he had owned with Ali. In came Johnny Mondrian, the decorator who had created the beige womb he and Ali had lived in for a month before they built the new house. He would fill the new apartment on Fifth Avenue and the house in Watermill with vast expanses of reassuringly expensive hard and barren things to stumble over and stub his toes on in the middle of the night.

Little Jackie, that was how he thought of her, sat in their lavender bedroom, pregnant, ever affectionate and afraid. Unfortunately, one night she had seen the movie Rebecca on TCM and felt herself haunted.

“Only I have the beautiful underwear! And no Mrs. Danvers,” she said, with the evening smile she kept only for Lester.

She wanted protection from the avenging Ali, and so in came the body guards and the new dogs and the rotating nannies once the child, now to be the primary heir, was born.

She saw her old clients on Madison Avenue and in the stores and they could scarcely believe it when they saw her trailed by the big men in suits–with earpieces yet!– or saw her SUV running at the curb with the driver in the mirrored shades standing alongside ready to crack the door.

Was he actually wearing a gun? Did she actually not see them when they nodded hello? Was she that far gone in another realm?

Once, she even rushed past Beverly, who could not believe what she was seeing and, in a terrible way, what she had wrought.

And then one day there was Ali, prettier than ever, Jackie saw her first and told Brian, the guard she like the best, and they phalanxed her and moved her to the car in a quick scrum and the car screeched as it left the curb as it does in movies and Ali stood breathless, leaning against the limestone of the old Parke Bernet building which housed the Gagosian Gallery and Exhale and Kappo Masa (the perfect combination of mind and body). The friend who was with Ali saw a tear escape from inside her sunglasses and was not surprised. From the way she talked about him all the time, she knew that Ali, from deep within her dying fury and her cloud of lawyers, still loved Lester Grant.

 

Jackie knew no history, none of the social stories and scandals of late Twentieth Century New York. She knew who Donald Trump was in his current incarnation as a television person married to a European woman with a son and a television daughter, Ivanka. She had no knowledge whatsoever of Marla Maples Trump and her bodyguard and what happened when a cop found them both hiding under a lifeguard’s chair at 4 am on a beach in Florida when Donald Trump was out of town. She did not know the two tabloid words that lingered in everyone’s mind thereafter were “disheveled” and “hiding” or the lingering New York pleasure that was taken in the denials and the divorce that followed after a respectable interlude.

In many ways, Jackie was a woman like Marla, from another place and another generation, full of cravings for what she saw around her. Close around her was Brian with his arm out keeping others away.

They were both athletes. Competition was very natural to her and winning her preferred state. Brian respected the way Mrs. Grant (well, she wasn’t that yet, but they called her that) trained and how she had tried and succeeded in getting back her fantastic body after the baby. When Mr. Grant left the house she would go down to the gym in her new workout clothes and row and run and lift and sweat and dance around in front of the mirrors. She was her own trainer.

Then she and the other men would drive out for coffee though they had a chef and fancy espresso machines right there in the house, and she would buy the men coffee and they would drive through Central Park. The warm cardboard cup in her hand was a reminder of her past and a further bit of security for her.

 

Beverly blamed herself when she opened her New York Post one morning and read on Page Six about the breakup of Lester Grant’s new household. He was still in the middle of his divorce from Ali and through with Jackie. Brian Kinney, an ex Marine, was named. All was denied. The houses were being dismantled. She doubted the girl, no Ali, had protected herself or the child financially.

What do you want? she had asked Jackie two years ago, when she wrapped her in the blue shawl and sent her off.

“This,” she had said.

Even then, both of them knew that this was never enough.