Professional Beauty

Sasha was one of those celebrated beauties--women for whom the drape of a garment and the shape of the eyebrow were subjects of advanced study, who submitted themselves not only to trainers, hairdressers and stylists but even unto surgeons' scalpels in pursuit of a feminine ideal that they, in turn, took their modest part in shaping after their pictures appeared in the party pages of Town & Country and W. She was, in one sense, a professional beauty. In fact Luke was still proud of her on that purely superficial level, of making an entrance with Sasha on his arm.

Tonight the couple had made their entrance at the Central Park Zoo amid dark waves of paparazzi surging and yearning on either side of them. It was a benefit. Ten thousand dollars a table--one table for him and his wife and friends and another for his teenage daughter Ashley and her friends. After they were past the gauntlet and had emerged into the courtyard of the zoo, Sasha asked for the drink Luke, out of habit, was already on his way to retrieve.

At the bar Luke stood behind a redheaded socialite known for her wit. "I was married to Tom for six months," she said to her girlfriend. "It was a case of mistaken identity basically. Someone said he was the biggest prick at Time Warner and I misheard the verb."

She'd said the same thing to Luke at a previous benefit, when she was still married to the man in question, who had subsequently moved into the Carlyle when the couple split. Word was that he'd left her after catching her with her head between the legs of his partner's wife. To which one listener replied, "Yeah, but why did he leave?"

Carrying the two drinks, he looked around for Sasha and caught sight of her huddled with Bernard Melman. He watched from a distance as Sasha whispered in Melman's ear while the deputy mayor waited respectfully for his moment. Melman was perhaps not quite as small as Luke liked to imagine him, although the hulking bodyguards who accompanied him everywhere--which some saw as an affectation to underline his importance--did nothing to make him seem taller. Bernie was one of the few corporate raiders of the 1980s to have flourished in the subsequent decade. During his early years in New York, he had been caricatured as a barbarian and a parvenu. His current eminence and good press stemmed as much from genuine admiration for his vast fortune as from fear of his power and influence, which now included certain branches of the media. The rumors of his impending divorce seemed conceivable--Melman and his wife hadn't been photographed together in months. There was also, Luke knew, a certain buzz surrounding his friendship with Sasha. They had been spotted lunching together recently, not at the Four Seasons of Aureole, but at a dowdy Italian spot on Third Avenue in the 50s. Sasha explained the rendezvous plausibly enough--she was hitting him up for a big donation on behalf of the ballet, on whose board she served. As it turned out, some helpful soul called in the sighting to the Post's Page Six, which reported it the next day with the comment that the restaurant in question hadn't seen such glamorous diners since Kennedy was president.

•

He had been sitting at the table with his and Sasha's drinks untouched for 20 minutes when Sasha finally appeared with Casey Reynes, their eyes all glittery and bright. Casey was one of Sasha's druggie friends. Luke had somehow been under the impression that coke had largely disappeared from their circle a decade before and was uncertain whether his wife's indulgence was a recent revival of an old party habit or if he simply had failed to notice it all these years, as he apparently had failed to notice so many other things while he was so single-mindedly pursuing his career, bringing home the prosciutto.

Sasha took a chair at the other end of the table between Casey's husband, a partner at Goldman Sachs, and an actor invited to punch up the mix. Luke found himself seated next to Sloane Cafferty, a fierce young trader a few years out of Radcliffe, who was morbidly fascinated by his ronin status.

"What do you do all day?" she asked as the waiters served the salad course.

"I read," he said. "Today, I went to the Whitney and looked at the Hoppers. And then I went to a class at the New School. Socratic Humanism."

"Don't you miss, you know, being in the game?"

"Not really. To tell you the truth, by the end, I really hated my job."

"Word is you would've been running the firm in two years if you'd stayed."

"Luke's writing a book," said Casey, jumping into the conversation. "You know, I really should introduce you to my friend; he's an editor at one of the big houses...."

Yet again Luke wished he'd never announced his intention to write. The secret ambition that had animated him in his 20s, the one he had not announced--to write a novel--seemed even more implausible. He was discovering that it was difficult to adjust to the solo formlessness and fluidity of his days after spending half a lifetime enslaved to the rhythms of the financial markets, engaged in the rigidly structured rituals of corporate enterprise. Sometimes he was surprised how easy it was to fill a day, and sometimes he was horrified.

"What are your goals?" he asked Sloane, turning the question back on her.

"I don't know. I guess I'd like to run my own fund."

Looking into her eager eyes, Luke tried to remember when all of this had stopped making sense to him.

The conversation was blessedly truncated by the speeches and awards portion of the evening. Who has done so much for this city. Needs no introduction. Cause dear to our hearts. Luke looked across the table at Sasha just as she exchanged a glance with Bernard Melman, who was seated at the table behind her.

•

Over the course of dinner Sasha repeatedly beckoned the waiter to fill her wineglass and pressed close to the actor. At one point she noticed Luke watching her and stuck out her tongue, then held out her glass for more chardonnay. Her laughter carried across the table as if she were determined to be the life of the party. He caught snatches of her conversation, her voice metallic and shrill. Isn't it to die? When the band started playing, she rose from her seat. "I'm in the mood to dance," she said, looking at Luke. "But my husband is looking at me censoriously. And he's not much of a dancer anyway. Perhaps you'd take me for a spin," she said to the actor, who replied that he would be delighted. Luke watched as they walked out to the open area of the pavilion.

After listening to Sloane discourse about the euro, he looked up to see Melman cutting in on the actor with the air of a suitor supremely assured of his welcome. Although he looked slightly ludicrous, Melman was, if anything, a little more confident than most of the other paunchy middle-aged men who'd been coaxed out onto the dance floor.

Luke excused himself from the table and went off to look for Ashley, exchanging greetings with friends and acquaintances before finally spotting her at the so-called children's table, taken aback to see his 14-year-old daughter deep in conference with Anton Hohenlohe. All of the young men at the table were at least a decade older than Ashley and her friends, and Hohenlohe, a friend of Sasha's, was closer in age to the mother than the daughter. To his admirers he was a stylish boulevardier, a living link to a lost continental world of Ferraris, Côte d'Azur casinos and polo. He was ubiquitous in Paris and Palm Beach as well as New York, and rumors of sexual malfeasance seemed only to enhance his mystique.

He'd turned up here after a sojourn in Hollywood, where he'd first come into his inheritance and set himself up as a producer. The motion-picture business had a tradition of hospitality toward rich young men who wished to share their wealth in exchange for sex with aspiring actresses. If the girl whose night with him ended in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai with nearly toxic levels of Rohypnol and cocaine in her bloodstream and some very nasty bruises had been without connections, or if Hohenlohe himself had been more established in the community, the incident probably would have been hushed up or allowed to fade away, but under the circumstances, he decided that Los Angeles wasn't truly glamorous. Luke was appalled that this was Sasha's idea of suitable company for their daughter and her friends--she, after all, had set up the table, which Luke had paid for.

Luke watched as Ashley threw back her head and laughed at some remark of Hohenlohe's, her manner and gestures reminding him all too much of her mother--a resemblance that was sealed when she lifted a champagne flute and tilted it upright between her lips--afraid that if he went over to the table, he might lose control of his temper. It occurred to him he could solve two problems at a single stroke, interrupting Sasha's dance with Melman in the name of urgent parental business. He would tell her that he was taking Ashley home immediately and, if possible, send her over to make this announcement to their daughter herself. He was counting on his righteous indignation and Sasha's vestigial sense of guilt to work in his favor, but when he spotted her among the dancers, he began to wonder if guilt was a concept with which she was familiar.

To the tune of "Bootylicious," one of the season's hits, Sasha was grinding her pelvis into Melman's, her hands on his shoulders. Even more than her posture and the burlesque motions of her hips, it was the expression on her face, a kind of liquid abandon combined with an intense focus on the eyes of her partner, that made the scene so lurid to Luke and, he realized, looking around, to a great many of the assembled guests. Any other couple might have engaged in a similar display without attracting quite so much notice, but the eminence of both parties guaranteed them an audience; it was as if a spotlight followed them, casting giant shadows that magnified the pantomime of their desire.

Without a context the dance might have been innocent enough. But clearly this was richly contextualized. It was in the eyes of the riveted tribe, the pity with which they regarded him, unable to keep from looking even as they wished at all costs to avoid his gaze, and in the way he saw women whispering to their neighbors. The community knew how to interpret this performance because they had been prepared for something like it--a confirmation of the buzz and rumors. This, if nothing else, was what Luke learned tonight--that his suspicions, far from being paranoid, were pretty general throughout the 10021 zip code, where even the clueless husbands seemed to know.

Luke could either put an end to this by cutting in on the dance or he could walk away and postpone the reckoning. But he couldn't continue to stand here watching and being watched, so he retreated to the back of the tented area to compose himself. Leaning against the railing of the snow monkeys' enclosure, he regarded the sign attached to the fence.

Separate Lifestyles

Male snow monkeys have larger canine teeth, a fuller mane of hair and weigh 20 percent more than females. Females remain with the group in which they were born for life. Males leave when they reach sexual maturity and may join several different groups during their lifetime.

There was no trace of these anthropomorphs, male or female, and Luke turned away with an urgent sense of finding his daughter, of saving her somehow.

(concluded on page 169)

Professional Beauty(continued from page 122)

She was laughing at something Hohenlohe was whispering in her ear, and from a certain liquidity in her posture, Luke could tell she was drunk. He approached unobserved and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up, the blurred giddiness of her expression coming into a wary focus at the sight of his face.

"We're going home," he said.

The expression she directed at him over her creamy shoulder was like some terrible composite of a petulant seven-year-old's with her mother's worldliest smirk. For all of his own indignation, he was shocked by the look of loathing--the glower of a drunken 14-year-old--deforming her beautiful face.

"Let's go," he said, steeling himself and glaring at Hohenlohe.

She turned away, took a swig from the champagne glass and rose slowly to her feet, attempting to convey a sense of ourtraged dignity as she struggled to establish her balance. Honhenlohe, observing proper form, rose beside her, napkin in hand, while her friends averted their eyes and bowed their heads.

"I assure you I was--"

"We were just having a conversation," Ashley said.

"You can finish it when you're 18," Luke said.

"It's not like this is the first time I've had, like, a glash of sampagne."

"Aren't we sophisticate? How many glashes have we had tonight?"

Her friends giggled nervously.

"Just because you're having a lousy time," she said.

"We'll finish this conversation at home," Luke said, taking her hand and leading her away from the table.

"I hate you," she muttered once they'd passed out of earshot.

At that moment a seal rocketed out of the zoo's pool, glistening in the artificial light against the backdrop of the trees and, above them, the cream-colored pueblos of Fifth Avenue, splashing down sideways and sending a luminescent wave over the edge of the wall. The night air was perfectly balanced between the heat of summer and the cool of the approaching autumn as they walked out, alone together, among the partygoers. The women were beautiful in their gowns, or at least glamorous in their beautiful gowns; their escorts rich in this richest of all cities, and Luke had never felt less like one of them, reminded now of the figures he'd seen this summer in Pompeii and Herculaneum, forzen in their postures of feasing and revelry.

Rumors of Sexual Malfeasance seemed only to enhance his mystique.

From Jay McInerney's new novel, The Good Life, published by Knopf this month.