The Crasher Read online

“Neither can I,” said Johnny. “I’m on deadline.” He smiled at an increasingly flustered Susan, then taking Ginny’s arm, said, “Let’s pay our respects to the Rockefellers, and squeeze in for the first course.” He grinned again. “We’ll be out of your hair by the main course, Susan…”

  “But Johnny… so many people are waiting to meet you…,” Susan wailed.

  “I’ve met them, all of them,” he said firmly. “I’ve got the story.”

  As he shepherded Ginny through the crowd Johnny was hailed and stopped time after time by people of all ages, most of whom seemed to adore him.

  By the time they reached the table, Ginny’s stomach was playing somersaults. It had nothing to do with Susan Barker’s unmistakable disdain and cold fury. That was easy to put up with. No, as she’d stumbled along with this strange, sarcastic man, a lurking suspicion had begun to build.

  As introductions were made, and she heard his name loud and clear, her worst fear was confirmed.

  “Johnny Peet, pleased to meet you.”

  “Hi, Johnny, love your column. This is my wife, Sheila…”

  “Glad to meet you.”

  “Mr. Peet, a pleasure to meet the mastermind behind… what’s your magazine called?”

  “Next!, dear. Don’t mind my husband, Mr. Peet. He often forgets my name.”

  John Q. Peet!

  She’d been rescued by Dolores’s ex-husband, by John Q. Peet, who wrote the wickedly satirical column for Next! magazine.

  No wonder he wanted her to answer his questions. No wonder he’d guessed she was a crasher. He was everywhere. He must have seen her before. Her cover was blown. He would turn her into a laughingstock in his column, by exposing her as a gate-crasher. Her fashion career was over before it began.

  CHAPTER SIX

  II WEST 77TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY

  As often happened, Johnny’s alarm went off when he was already awake, although he hadn’t yet opened his eyes.

  He lay still, trying to recover from a dream, more accurately a nightmare about his father. He didn’t need a psychiatrist to explain it. He’d dreamed he’d let his father down in some terrible, tragic way. It had something to do with an envelope he’d been entrusted to deliver, but no matter how fast he ran down a never-ending street, chasing his father’s shadow, he never managed to catch him.

  It wasn’t too different from real life. He’d been running and trying to catch up with his father for years. He was almost thirty now, but his father remained as far away and as remote as ever.

  He shrugged on a robe and went into the handsome bathroom of his new apartment overlooking the Museum of Natural History. As he began to shave, his feeling of gloom and doom deepened. Again he knew why. He was lunching with his father in a few hours at the Century, the illustrious club for men of letters, and, following a feminist hullabaloo that had changed the club’s bylaws, now for women, too.

  He wasn’t a member. Until recently he’d never given it any thought, although as Quentin Peet’s son, he guessed he probably wouldn’t have a hard time getting approved by the board.

  Johnny nodded at his bleary, sleep-deprived reflection, agreeing with himself that he had never sought membership because he knew his father wouldn’t think he’d earned it.

  That was what the dream was all about. No matter that the “perceptive spin” of his ego-pricking pieces on society and people in the news in his Next! column were being talked about; that he now occasionally appeared on McNeill-Lehrer and Charlie Rose. His piece on the homeless woman, wrapped in sacking, lying on the pavement beneath a fancy costume in a Saks Fifth Avenue window, had brought that about. As far as his father was concerned he hadn’t earned anything, period.

  Yesterday a messenger had brought a clipping to his office from his father. It was a flattering item in Liz Smith’s New York Post column that he’d already seen, praising his work. “Like father, like son,” she’d written, reminding her readers that, “after all, the ‘Q’ in young Mr. Peet’s name does stand for Quentin.”

  His father had attached a note, which told Johnny what today’s lunch was going to be all about.

  “Quidnunc, if you ask me,” he’d written.

  He didn’t know the word but he’d expected the worst, and looking it up in Webster’s, he’d been right.

  “Quidnunc: what now?” he’d read, “an inquisitive, gossipy person; a busybody.”

  “I don’t care,” he’d told himself yesterday, tearing the note to shreds and hurling it across the room. Working for Next! may not be as significant a career step as running the Albany Bureau of the New York Times (where, his father still cuttingly reminded him, many of the men now in top jobs at the Times had first been sent), but it provided a forum for him to write about whatever he liked; injustices, perversities, anomalies, sometimes trivial (“The Art of Raising Money as a Form of Social Mountaineering”); sometimes consequential (“Who Runs This Place? A Look at the Battle Between New York’s Mayor and New York’s Governor”). So he hadn’t cracked a big one à la Woodward and Bernstein, but he was building a name for himself, not only as a shrewd commentator, but as someone who stirred things up, sometimes for the better.

  Yesterday, he’d thought bitterly how much he agreed with what a number of young reporters sneeringly called the old-time way of “access reporting.” So his father knew the secretary of state, could get to him easily with one phone call, and then give his millions of readers around the world the inside story about U.S. decisions in the world’s trouble spots, Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa, but did his father ever sit down and explain what bungling had led to the mess in the first place? Did he ever write about the suffering masses, about poor people—not only the ones thousands of miles away, but also those in New York, on his own doorstep?

  No, Johnny had thought yesterday, burning over the quidnunc crack. His father was too busy being James Bond, not accepting that there was room in the world for another kind of reporting, the kind that was now bringing him kudos. If he had to have a role model, he supposed it would be Robin Hood.

  That was yesterday.

  Today he cared, waking up, longing as much as ever to receive the look of approving camaraderie he’d seen his father give brilliant young journalists such as Tom Friedman, who’d already earned a couple of Pulitzers as a foreign correspondent.

  What was he going to do about it? There was no point telling his father that he wasn’t a lightweight, that along with his column, he’d been working with a member of the DEA on a dangerous story to expose a link between two major New York robberies and the international drug trade, tying that in with Rosa Brueckner/Rosemary Abbott’s horrific death by fire.

  Would his father have been deterred by Ben Abbott’s threat to stay off his turf?

  Of course not, so what was the point of proving to his father still more that he didn’t measure up, because he had been deterred. The Licton/Licone lead had turned into a dead end, and he’d filed the story away, not because he was trying to save his own skin, but because he did not know enough. Abbott had been right. Inadvertently he might risk the life of somebody else. Even now a chill went through him, remembering Abbott’s Joan of Arc crack. It would haunt him forever.

  He turned on the triple jets in the fancy shower he loved. How lucky he was, thanks to his mother, to be able to afford such a great pad. That was another thing. The old man had probably never forgiven him for inheriting his mother’s money, because he’d been banking on inheriting it himself.

  Although Quentin Peet was among the world’s top-earning newsmen, for as long as Johnny could remember his father had always talked about being short of money. Why? What a story it would make for Next! Few people knew—and they’d never know it from him—that Quentin Peet not only gambled with his life; he gambled on anything and everything—horses, baccarat, politics, baseball, football, even Scrabble. His father was an addict and it had made their family life, what there was of it, unadulterated hell.

  Paying some of his inheritance out
in alimony to get rid of Dolores fast hadn’t helped the situation either. His mother would have approved, he knew that. He had his freedom and a clear conscience. He could have left Dolores in the gutter, where his father thought she belonged, but he’d behaved like a gentleman.

  Johnny looked carefully through his wardrobe. That was another great thing about Next! He could wear what he liked to the office and it was often jeans, a sweater and a cord jacket. Not today though. It was a suit today, somber serge, the one he’d worn only a few times since his mother’s funeral.

  When he reached his office around ten, there was a FedEx envelope on his desk. He glanced at the sender’s name and address before opening it. He often received information he hadn’t asked for this way, from diligent or overanxious public relations companies trying to signal that this communiqué was too good to miss, hoping to ignite a story idea for his column. This “urgent” missive was from Fay Needham of Random House.

  He opened the envelope with a sense of guilt. He knew what this was about and he’d definitely been negligent. More than a month must have passed since he’d received the first letter from Needham, a senior editor at the publishing house, asking if he’d be interested in writing a book for them, “a serious sociological look at a year spent ‘inside’ New York society.”

  “We want the ultimate insider’s look; available to someone like yourself,” her letter had begun. “Single, attractive, invited everywhere because of your eligibility, your humor, your family background, connections and, yes, of course, your column inches. From reading your column, we feel you would bring to this study an unusually penetrating, unjaded and, we hope, witty perspective.

  “Would you be interested in discussing this idea with us? Perhaps comparing ‘now’ with ‘back then,’ as well as comparing today’s society in New York with that of other American cities, Washington, of course, Los Angeles, and any other city or cities you might suggest”

  He’d been intrigued and called to say he’d give the idea some thought, but with Rosemary’s death, it had completely slipped from his mind.

  Obviously his silence hadn’t hurt. Now they were suggesting an advance of two hundred thousand dollars for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-word book, subject to agreement on his outline. It sounded pretty good to him. Did he have the discipline to add that load to his regular weekly thousand-word column?

  He thought he did, and if he wrote a successful, good book, a soul-searching, truthful John O’Hara meets Tom Wolfe sort of book, wouldn’t that be one way to redeem himself in his father’s eyes?

  Should he bring it up at lunch? He already knew the answer. No way, not until he’d written every one of the one hundred and fifty thousand words and the book was approved and at the printer’s.

  He pushed Needham’s letter aside. He would meet with her group this week and then make a decision. He picked up the phone to retrieve his voice mail. There were eight messages, two of them, both agitated, from a Ginny Walker, asking him to call.

  Ginny Walker? Oh, yes, the gate-crasher.

  He’d stayed at the Guggenheim longer than he’d intended to, enjoying some fast repartee with a modern-art-loving young Rockefeller, and even taking to the floor for a brief body encounter with Ms. Walker (who, in his arms, surprisingly turned out to be nothing like as bony as he’d expected from her skinny silhouette).

  As midnight struck, she had done a disappearing act. He’d been relieved. He’d acted too impetuously and once she knew exactly who he was, he’d wondered how he was going to cope with her jitters, which had shown up on the dance floor, when she’d started pleading with him not to write anything about her. He hadn’t bothered to reply. If she thought she was about to be exposed as a gate-crasher, perhaps she’d think twice about doing it again. Then again, the reason behind her gatecrashing did interest him, but not that much.

  Because he’d woken up so aware of his father’s continuing depressing effect on his moods, Johnny decided to be magnanimous. He would put the young woman out of her misery and tell her she was not about to be skewered in Next! He dialed the number she’d left.

  “Welcome to the world of Ginny Walker Fashion. We are either away from our drawing board or on the telephone, but your call is important to us. Please leave your name, date, time of call and a brief message if you wish and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Wait for the—”

  The beep went off before she was able to get the word out. With all that blather no wonder her voice sounded so breathless and who, Johnny wondered idly, made up the “we” of Ginny Walker Fashion?

  “This is John Peet returning your calls. I would like to talk to you. Leave word when you’re actually going to be present, creating at your drawing board, so we don’t play endless telephone tag.”

  When Ginny received the message around six, she panicked.

  “I would like to talk to you” could only mean one thing; Peet intended to write about her in Next! He wanted to interrogate her about her crashing habits.

  Why on earth had she called him and left her number after running away from the museum so successfully? Because she might be able to appeal to a sympathetic side she sensed John Q. Peet possessed.

  Now she castigated herself for her stupidity. How did she know he had an iota of sympathy in him? So many successful people appeared sympathetic, even when they were aiming straight at the jugular.

  She’d just spent seven straight hours on her feet, working like a maniac in the December rush at Bloomingdale’s. Climbing the stairs to the loft, she’d more or less decided she didn’t have the energy to go to a holiday party after a movie screening that night, even though, for once, Poppy had actually invited her.

  Peet’s message changed all that. There was no way she could stay home, biting her nails from anxiety, wondering what to do next.

  Would Peet be at the party? What of it? This time she had a genuine invitation. Poppy had promised “a gala night, to celebrate the holidays at the Rainbow Room.” There was a string attached, but Ginny hadn’t cared, in fact had welcomed it. Poppy wanted Ginny to give her a fitting for a new dress there, on the spot

  It wasn’t so unrealistic. Poppy had loved the concept—basically being wrapped as tight as a mummy in high-twist heavy georgette; had ordered the dress, and then played her usual hide-and-seek game when it came to being fitted.

  Now Poppy wanted the dress pronto, in time for Christmas, and Ginny had figured she could transport the georgette to the dinner in a matching georgette bag and fit Poppy quickly in the nearest ladies’ room.

  Ginny listened to Peet’s message again. He had a great voice, with the suggestion of a laugh buried in it. Perhaps she was right after all and he really was a sympathetic soul. Perhaps he didn’t only view her as column fodder? Perhaps he fancied her? Perhaps he still liked brunettes.

  She laughed at her own absurdity. After being married to Ms. Gorgeous, who was he going out with now? Somehow from somewhere she knew John Q. Peet hadn’t taken long to recover from his “amicable divorce,” that despite what Tony had told her about Johnny having “sworn off women for good,” he was already earning a reputation as a “ladies’ man.”

  If only Alex were back from Europe, he would tell her how to deal with the Peet situation.

  She went over to the tall, narrow, art deco wardrobe she’d found for practically nothing in the flea market, where she now kept her “best” clothes. What should she wear to the Rainbow Room to cheer herself up? She sighed. Everything hanging there she knew too well. The red tuxedo top with sarong skirt, the silver suit with the birdcage jacket with inside-out seams, the lilac chiffon and the two Gosmans in expensive fabric that she’d renovated, the back-to-front “Dior” pumpkin-colored sateen (once described, she’d been told, in Peet’s column as “the two-faced dress”) and the “Yves St. Laurent” she’d covered in paillettes.

  For all the clippings in her portfolio, not one of them had brought her any success. Each stood for an unhappy memory, a disappointment, a letdown, the
story of her life so far. She longed to burn the lot, but it wasn’t so easy to replenish her wardrobe now that she was no longer at Gosman’s. There, forgotten, leftover fabric and unsuccessful numbers gathering dust in drawers and cupboards had turned 554 Seventh Avenue into her personal Aladdin’s Cave.

  She decided sometime during the week ahead, in time for Christmas, she would turn the sparkling “YSL” into a shorter flapper-style dress, replacing the paillettes with fringes she’d found in her own dusty cupboard.

  She only wished she’d thought of it before, because what could be more suitable for movie-going than uncrushable fringes? What was the movie anyway? Perhaps she should go there first? Women didn’t wear long dresses to watch a movie, did they? Was the dinner dance listed as black-tie? She rushed to find Poppy’s agenda. The movie wasn’t mentioned, only the post-screening party, which didn’t mention black tie or any tie.

  Holiday party or not, she decided to dress down, not up, in something that didn’t crush. She went to her everyday closet and took out her oilskin bodysuit just back from the cleaner’s. Uncrushed and fresh, she’d go straight to the party.

  She didn’t like the anxious look she saw in the mirror. She practiced her Eliza Doolittle expressions to relax her facial features. “How n-ice of you to l-et me c-ome…” She added a few strokes of kohl around the eyes, vivid coral lipstick, and Alex’s “entailed” gold petal bracelet around her wrist, which did the best job of cheering her up.

  Her heart beat fast as she approached Rockefeller Center. To think, only a few nights ago she’d been sitting and chatting so confidently with members of the family. In one way she hoped Peet might be at the Rainbow Room, so she could show him she knew a few people, too.

  Her ears popped as the elevator rushed her and a dozen others up to the sixty-fifth floor. Emerging was like leaving reality behind, each step down the glass hallway taking her farther into fantasy. Through floor-to-ceiling windows New York City’s lit-up skyline sparkled like a trillion diamonds.