Day In The Life

Conrad was gone when she woke, and in his place, propped against the coffee pot on the breakfast tray, were his card and a note in fountain pen: Gone to see men about a marina. Spend some of it angry at me. — C.

Belfie read it twice, smiling, and put the card in her handbag, where it rode like a small passport.

The suite had been put back together while she slept. No ice on the floor, no cork, no champagne ghost on the carpet; even the lamp they'd knocked over stood at attention with its shade straight. The hotel had tidied the whole night out of existence, which, Belfie supposed, was what the rates were for. She sat at the vanity in the white morning light and glued a fresh nail onto the second finger of her right hand, pressed it, held the hand out at arm's length. Ten again. Good as a lie.

She gave the morning what it deserved: a summer dress that moved when she did, a silk scarf for her hair, lipstick, sunglasses big enough to be discreet and glamorous at once, which was the whole trick of the Riviera. In the lobby, the boy from last night wished her good morning with a face wiped perfectly clean of everything he knew. She tipped him too much for it. That was the local economy, and Belfie believed in tipping the economy.

* * *

The town was still carting off hay bales from the Grand Prix, and the harbor was hard at its blue glitter, and at a café under a vermouth-colored awning Nicolette Vaughn was already at a table, blonde and cool in powder blue, gloves folded beside her plate like a second pair of hands. They kissed cheeks. They admired each other professionally. The waiter brought Belfie an Americano, Campari-red and sweating in the sun, and a kir for Nicolette, and the two of them settled in to take New York apart from a polite distance.

Gloria Hess had married her department-store man. A judge did it in his chambers, very quiet, very fast.

"Quiet," Belfie said. "After six years of loud."

"And a settlement on her before the ring, in writing." Nicolette pronounced in writing as other women pronounced in Paris. "Her lawyer sent her flowers."

"What about Annette?"

"Acapulco. The polo player." Nicolette turned her glass by its stem. "She came back in March. She's taking introductions again."

Belfie let that sit where it landed. Annette had once made an ambassador miss the opera by standing near him in a doorway. Introductions, again, at her age. The sun stayed exactly as warm.

"And nobody's heard a word out of Dot since Easter," Nicolette said.

Neither of them touched that one. Nicolette signaled the waiter for olives, and the table moved itself along to safer wreckage: Liz had married her Welshman in Montreal, finally, scandalously, magnificently.

"Good for her," Belfie said, and meant it from the floor of herself. "Let them print that."

"You would side with the scandal."

"The scandal has better dresses."

Nicolette laughed her measured laugh, two notes, both of them lovely. "How's the work, Belfie?"

"I'm between pictures."

"Which pictures?"

"The ones I haven't made yet."

Nicolette, who was too good a friend to laugh wrong, raised her kir instead. "To the pictures."

They drank to the pictures. A motor launch went by below the seawall, towing its own parade of gulls, and Belfie felt the afternoon arranging itself around her like a set: the awning, the harbor, the cold red drink, a beautiful friend, somebody else's money warm in her handbag. There were women at three other tables performing the same scene. She could tell the kept ones by the quality of their boredom.

"How long is it now," Nicolette said, "with Conrad? I've lost count."

Belfie counted on her fresh nails, which was theater; she knew it to the season. "Four years. On and off."

"Which is it this week?"

"On." She tipped her sunglasses down and gave Nicolette the harbor, the awning, all of it, like a hostess. "Obviously."

"Mm." Nicolette had a sip of kir and came at it sideways, the only way she came at anything. "He leaves his card with you."

"He leaves his card with me."

"That's not casual, honey. A man's card." She set her glass down and looked pleased and acquisitive and fond, all in the same quarter inch of smile. "You're more than a kept woman, you know. I'm over here trying to make it like you."

"Aim higher." Belfie said it lightly, and then, because it was Nicolette, less lightly: "It's a lot more complicated than it looks."

"Complicated how?"

"Last week he got mad at me because I got mad at him for embarrassing me in front of his friends."

Nicolette blinked once, filing the sentence away in its correct drawer. "Embarrassing you how?"

"We're at a party, somebody's library, all his banker friends. One of them asks me what I do." Belfie put her drink down so her hands could have the scene. "And before I can open my mouth, Conrad says, She's decorative. And they laughed. All of them, the whole leather room, ha ha ha, decorative."

"What did you do?"

"I laughed too." She said it without apology; Nicolette nodded, because that part needed no explaining at this table. "Then in the car I told him I'm not wallpaper, and he told me I was making a scene over nothing, and we made the scene over nothing until two in the morning, and then he started throwing my things off the terrace."

"He did not."

"My coat went first. The swing coat." Belfie watched it go again, briefly, eleven floors of it. "A shoe landed on the doctor's awning next door. He throws like a rich boy, thank God, half of it came down on his own balcony."

"And you?"

"I broke his plaque. The big one, from the real-estate men. Man of the Year, nineteen fifty-one." She picked an olive. "I broke it over the radiator and laughed the whole elevator ride down."

Nicolette sat back with her drink and regarded her in amazement, entertained, weather happening to someone else's picnic. "That was last week?"

"Tuesday."

"And now you're in Monaco."

"He always comes crawling back." Belfie shrugged with one shoulder, a small economical glamour. "It's a headache. He's a headache with his own airplane."

The laugh thinned out of the air naturally, the harbor light moving on the water, and Nicolette asked it with her glass halfway up, gently, the question underneath all the other questions.

"Do you love him?"

"Pish posh." Belfie had an olive pit to deal with, and dealt with it. "Of course I do."

Nicolette held her there a half second longer than the answer deserved, and then, having the best manners of any girl working, let it go and signaled for the check. Max was taking the boat down to Saint-Tropez on Thursday, she said, two weeks at least, possibly the whole month if his cousins materialized; and when they were all back in the city, she and Belfie were going to do something, really do something, the new supper club everyone was on about. Belfie said she'd wear the good diamonds. Belfie paid the lunch with Conrad's card, just to feel the waiter's eyebrows behave themselves.

* * *

They went shopping on the avenue after, in and out of cold little boutiques that smelled of new silk and other women's gardenias, and the card did its quiet work at every counter. Salesgirls handled it like a relic of an early saint. Belfie bought a scarf she didn't need and sunglasses while wearing sunglasses, and Nicolette tried on gloves with the slow seriousness of a woman rehearsing a different life.

They came out into the sun with their little parcels, and Belfie saw Conrad across the street.

He was outside the bank with another man, younger, taller, in a suit cut sharp enough to slice bread, and whatever Conrad was saying he was saying it with his hands, the size of some deal growing between them. He caught sight of her mid-sentence. His whole face did what it always did, which was open like a window.

"There she is," he announced, to the street at large, and crossed it without consulting traffic.

Daylight was honest about his forehead. Over the left eyebrow the cork had left a mark gone ripe overnight, plum-colored, official, impossible to miss. He arrived and kissed her in front of God, the harbor, and the lunch crowd, one hand at her back, unhurried, a man signing his name where everyone could read it. The sharp suit arrived a polite beat behind him, and she felt its eyes tick up to the bruise and slide away from it, smooth as a waiter. Nobody mentioned it. Everyone had been trained somewhere.

"Howard Charles," Conrad said. "Belfie Amalfi. And Miss Nicolette Vaughn."

"Enchanté," Howard said, in American. He was dashing like a new building, glass-fronted, professionally maintained, and he took Belfie's hand a half breath longer than banking required. "So you're the reason he canceled golf."

"I'm the reason he does everything," Belfie said.

"Howard's in real estate," Conrad said. "New York. He's down here learning how the grown-ups do a harbor."

"I hope he's showing you a good time, at least," Howard said. "Monaco in season. There's nothing like it."

"Oh, Monaco's all right." Belfie tipped her sunglasses down and gave him the eyes over the top of them, because it was free and because Conrad enjoyed watching it land. "But I'm showing him a better time than this town ever could."

They all laughed, the right laugh, the street-corner kind. Conrad laughed loudest, with the bruise riding his eyebrow like a medal, and his arm went around her waist, proprietary and pleased, and Howard's smile stayed on her a half second past the end of the joke, doing arithmetic.

"Eight o'clock," Conrad said to her, kissing her temple. "Wear something that ruins my concentration."

"I only own those."

The men recrossed the street to the bank and their marina. The women turned up the avenue with their parcels, heels in step on the warm pavement, and Nicolette tucked her arm through Belfie's and leaned in, conspiratorial, smelling of kir and cold store air.

"Now that," she whispered, "is a dashing man."

"Which one?"

"Belfie."

"I'm asking sincerely. Mine has an airplane."

Nicolette laughed properly this time, both notes and a third she saved for emergencies, and they went on up the street, and at the corner Belfie glanced back, the once that women allow themselves.

Conrad and Howard stood in the bank's doorway, two silhouettes in good cloth. Howard had two fingers raised to his own forehead, just over the eyebrow, asking something. And Conrad's hands were already lifting, already wide, the story growing between them into something the size of a fish nobody catches.

She faced front and decided to find it flattering.

The bruise was a story now. By dinner it would have a saber in it.