I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 24

  In walks Pat Field, long fire-engine-red hair ablaze. A very low-cut, sleeveless shirt, a lace push-up bra, and skinny green army pants reveal a figure that would be the envy of most twenty-somethings, let alone seventy-somethings. She has come in with Paolo Nieddu for a movie. We catch up on the latest. She’s just returned from setting up a Sex and the City exhibit in a Melbourne, Australia, mall that she wants to take on the road like Barnum & Bailey. But only where there are a lot of big malls, no museums, so no Europe. “If I am going to work, it has to be for money,” she says from behind the green sunglasses she wears even indoors. “I didn’t invent the rules, I just play by them.”

  Pat is bereft because her beloved veterinarian died recently, and when I ask about him, he turns out to be the very same vet I went to for my schnauzer Max, who has been dead for twenty years! What are the chances? Dr. John Higgins was good to me in my time of troubles; when Sonny left, I ended up with the dog and used the vet as a psychiatrist. (Eventually he had me hold Max when he administered the lethal shot so that the dog died in my arms. I walked home crying with Max’s empty leash, which is still in the hall drawer where it was kept while he was alive.)

  I am so sorry to hear about Dr. Higgins’s death, but there is work to do. Paolo and Pat are shopping for a romantic comedy in which Cameron Diaz, Kate Upton, and Leslie Mann join forces after realizing that they’re all in a relationship with the same man. Each actress is an archetype—wife, sexy power broker, ingenue—and their clothes have to tell the story. “I want original, not trendy,” Pat growled. “I don’t want them to look like they came right out of the spring collection.”

  Oh, and shooting begins in two weeks.

  “We’re in the prepping stages,” says Pat, who is beyond unflappable.

  “Rather.”

  The three of us hit the floor. The store has shrunk to me. I know most every corner (even though it’s like the musical-chairs game—every day there’s a move). Almost right outside my door, I show them a long black silk crepe oversheath with a large circular gold closure at the breastbone. You won’t see yourself coming and going in this. I have whetted Paolo’s and Pat’s appetites, but almost immediately I put on the brakes.

  “What size is Cameron?” I ask about the actress, who plays a high-powered attorney.

  “She says she’s a twenty-five or twenty-six, but never a twenty-seven,” Paolo says.

  I can’t imagine she’s that tiny.

  “These clothes run really small.”

  “She seems to know what she’s talking about. She was a model before she became an actress.”

  “So she knows how to squeeze into clothes.”

  While Paolo and I confer, Pat is diverted by a coat with a cutaway front in a patchwork design of calf leather, lambskin, and bonded snakeskin panels.

  “Don’t go near it,” I say.

  I have eyes in the back of my head.

  She veers away from the coat but heads for something just as dangerous—a yolk-yellow fringe-front T-shirt. “That’s left over from your last TV show,” I say. This could take days. We need to get the hook and rein her in.

  I pull a red dress. Bright in color, masterful in structure; it is deceptively simple-looking.

  “Gorgeous,” Pat says. “But what shoes? They’re all so obnoxious.”

  “Aren’t they awful? They’re like hooker shoes.”

  “Hookers are classic. They wear a nice leopard or patent pump. Upstairs, one pair of shoes is more ludicrous than the next. They scream, ‘Look at my feet!’ Please, someone give me a nice five-inch Manolo.”

  A cell phone hanging around her neck on a string rings, and Pat answers. Pat is always on the phone. She absentmindedly starts poking at a square scarf with an abstract print in purples, pinks, yellows, and oranges so bright it would make a sunset ashamed, then sits down at the desk in the boutique she’s entered.

  “No. This is a fine time. I can talk for a minute,” she says into the phone. “We’ve been taught that men can be bold but women should be demure.”

  Now she’s giving an interview!

  “We need to get her out of here,” Paolo says.

  “. . . having gay male writers’ words coming out of the mouths of women was liberating and revolutionary.”

  “We should pull her plug,” I say.

  Pat discusses the seminal nature of Sex and the City with the journalist on the phone as Paolo and I scour the racks and keep her from getting lost in the sweater section. We take oversize cashmere sweaters, upscale chinos, flirty dresses, and clingy silks. While contemplating whether a pair of pants is bell-bottomed or boot-cut, I see it. The missing piece to a now beautifully complete puzzle. A dark red ribbed sweater set. Where on earth has that been hiding? It’s the perfect thing to go with my client’s palazzo pants! I can tell without a doubt that its scoop neck will flatter her décolletage and the length of her hips. I pluck it from the rack and place it atop the heap of clothing I carry over my left arm. I will organize it all when I return to the office.

  Suddenly Pat, a chain smoker, takes a cigarette out of her pack—in front of Prada!

  “Oh, dear God! She’s going to light up right here and get me fired,” I say. Just then the doors open to one of the elevators filled with tony shoppers, and in goes Pat with a slight push from yours truly.

  Back in the office, I neatly sort the clothes for the movie, hanging the items for each character in separate fitting rooms as if the characters themselves will be by any minute to try them on. Then I hang the sweater set on the clothing rack next to my desk and label it for my client, not with satisfaction—I’m not and never will be satisfied—but instead with gratification.

  Clothes aren’t the be-all and end-all. They can be fun; they can be beautiful; you can put them on your head or wear them backward if you want to; they’re feel-good. I expedite all that for others. I’m a saleslady. It’s everything my mother said don’t be. There is, however, much gratification to what I do. Like when people come back and tell me, which they do a lot, “You know that dress you sold me five years ago? I still wear it all the time.” Or, “I love that jacket from two seasons ago. You can’t kill it.” Or, “Do you know how many compliments I get about that blouse I bought last time I came here?” I hope to make an experience called shopping a bit more than just trying on clothes. When I’ve helped a person like what she sees in the mirror, I’m fulfilled.

  “Sheila Wolfe, Tom Wolfe’s wife, called,” Emily says as I sit down at my desk.

  The phone rings, and I pick up; it’s Mindy, my ex-assistant.

  “Hi, dear, I just saw your mother,” I say. “She wants a suit. . . . Why? Because she wants a suit.”

  Mindy is going to London with her husband and two children next week and wants to know if she needs to make reservations for restaurants before she leaves.

  “I would,” I say. “The shoes you crave are in.” (Mindy is a 51/2, and we will get maybe two pairs, so I know I have to watch the shoe department for her tiny feet!)

  The irony of my travel advice on London restaurant reservations isn’t lost on me; the last time I was there, Jim and I dined in cozy pubs and in our charming flat, not at five-star eateries.

  But in the last several years, I have become, despite my better instincts, something of a woman about town. I never contemplated beginning another life after my dear Jim died. How many restarts does one woman get? It simply appeared.

  There are so many people who have picked me up when I saw no hope whatsoever. Charlotte, my first friend in New York, died from breast cancer long ago, but her son Jimmy (the one who was evacuated as a baby from the Atlantic Beach vacation house after I contracted polio), and his wife, Nancy, call me all the time for dates, always to a great, new, and trendy restaurant. God knows the maître d’s and waitstaff must think they are dragging around their grandmother, but they’ve become dear friends as have thei
r wonderful children, Charlotte and John.

  Thirty years later I’m still enjoying Susie’s impeccable taste and force of imagination that astonished me when she worked at the store. Now it is at the most glorious house that she and her husband Stuart bought in the Berkshires, where they invite me for weekends with their amazing daughter, Emmelyn. There all her talents are trained on a garden the like of which only occurs when a person loves and tends to it herself, the kitchen with food that is as delicious as it is lovely and plentiful, and decorating that is never finished—nor should it be.

  I still have my oldest friend in Chicago, who was captain of my team at our all-girls summer camp. Dorie, who drinks a martini with an olive, is still captain. My second-oldest friend, Claire, whom I met sixty years ago, is another force of nature. She’s been known to drive herself to Greenbrier in West Virginia for her medical examination. The last time she did this, the amazed doctors wrote on her chart, “88-year-old woman drives from N.Y. for physical and she made it in eight hours!” In addition to her driving abilities, Claire makes extraordinary sculptures in alabaster—that’s when she’s not running to the Union Square farmers’ market or down to some late-night comedy club in the Bowery. She is always up for an adventure, no matter what part of town it’s in. One evening after coming out of a movie when it was still too early to go home, we landed at the Le Cirque bar. All of a sudden, while talking bar nonsense to the patrons around us, the woman next to me turned and asked, “Are you two a couple?” We almost fell off our barstools, but we didn’t respond yes or no. The two of us have certainly grown into our own. Whenever I’m out with Claire, the doorman always gives me that peculiar nod when I arrive home after midnight.

  I often wonder what Jim would make of this new me, so different from the one cloistered in his quiet country apartment. I’m out so much these days that I’ve become like a streetwalker. I don’t know where the courage came from, but another person emerged yet again after he died.

  I was a child for the longest time, but I have finally grown into a proper person. Learning how to be alone, truly alone, was the last step. My being an only child, this should have been easy for me, but it wasn’t. My mother and father fussed over me too much and then left me alone too much. When I first came to New York, I was so frightened of being alone that I didn’t want to leave the little apartment I loathed. It’s funny, but on the street in a city of millions, at a cocktail party full of friends, or surrounded by family in a country house, one can still feel lonely.

  Sophistication has nothing to do with the ability to go to the movies, eat in a restaurant, pass the weekend without drowning it in busywork, or face going home alone. The terrible fear of loneliness kept me from knowing myself, but now I am happy, because I do know myself. I know I have an unpredictable stomach. I like vodka. I’m overly neat. I know I dress well and with ease. I can finally talk to me, although, like my clients, sometimes I listen and sometimes I don’t.

  I’m not a religious person, but as I grow older, I’m more appreciative of the very fact that I’m able to rise from my bed, dress—appropriately—and appear at work five days a week. I dislike, however, when I’m called a legend. That overused word, which means absolutely nothing to me, should be retired or at least reserved for people who have built skyscrapers—not an eighty-six-year-old broad who is still standing. I’m a working grandmother, which I will admit is unusual. (My grandmother lay in bed putting on violet perfume when she was my age!) But I need to work: I would absolutely collapse if I didn’t. When people stop me in the store having read about me in the paper or seen me on TV, I laugh at the recognition. I’m still the same nutcase. They all should see the real me, on my hands and knees doing a floor or standing over my sink scouring a pot; my hands tell the whole story. Where do you go when you’re up? Down and out. What is fame? A fleeting moment. Who remembers Bella Abzug?

  Sometimes, however, being recognized is a chance for a true human encounter, and those I relish. Last weekend I went to Coney Island because an old friend had a huge desire to taste a hot dog from Nathan’s. It reminded her of her wonderful husband, Charlie, who three weeks before he passed away had also wanted to visit Nathan’s.

  “But you’re not dying,” I said.

  Nonetheless, off we went on a very hot summer Sunday afternoon to the beach. We were on the boardwalk amid throngs of people when I heard someone from the crowd say, “Are you Betty?” I thought I must have misheard. My hearing is not what it once was. Who could I possibly know in the very nether regions of Brooklyn? But there was a young girl, scantily clad, covered in tattoos, and accompanied by a boyfriend wearing dark purple nail polish, who told me, “You are my idol.” How she knew me, I have no clue.

  In the last few years, I seem to have become the Most Wanted Woman. I get many requests from the media for interviews, which I do easily and happily—because after they’re done, I still go home and wash out my stockings in the bathroom sink. (I also never read or watch my own press.) A lot of people come to the store just to look at me, and I welcome them, same as I do the piles of e-mails and letters I receive from correspondents as wide-ranging as monks from an abbey in upstate New York who wrote to say keep up the good work, to owners of a deli in Denver who sent me a delicious coffee cake, to a young girl from Phoenix whose mother told her she isn’t worth anything. I answer them all.

  Yet I was completely taken aback by the fact that these two very young people on the boardwalk knew who I was. I’ve always liked accolades from people in the street. Is there any greater honor than being acknowledged—in Coney Island, of all places? The young woman went on to say that she hoped she could come to the store one day to be dressed by me. I quickly told her she did not have to wait. There was a door open to her anytime; I would be so flattered if she visited.

  And that is absolutely true, because for me dressing someone well is as divine as helping someone to walk, to see, to smile, or to bake a tall, light angel food cake.

  I’ll drink to that.

  1 E.B. and R.A.

  2 To Emily’s expert transcribing skills and being an ear to the world; and Rebecca, the writer-listener par excellence, who really got it.