Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die Read online

  Libby continued to look confused. “It looks like a child’s toy. Like a miniature, twisted-up hula hoop. How is this thing a bra?”

  “Panty hose seemed weird at first, and now we never think of using garters.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said my sister. “At Potions and Passions, we believe—”

  “Libby, I’d like you to meet Richard D’eath.”

  Until that moment, my sister’s usually superb testosterone radar had failed her. And when Libby finally became aware of Richard, she was struck dumb by his male physique, never mind the cane. Her gaze grew large and lustrous as she drank in his long-legged handsomeness. Within a heartbeat she regained herself and managed to communicate her willingness to give Richard a lap dance on the spot.

  “Hello,” Richard said, impervious to my sister’s seductive bosom. Then to me, “Is this how you aristocrats spend your free time? Going to underwear shows?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m working, too.”

  “The intrepid society columnist always chases the most important stories, I suppose.”

  Libby’s eyes had begun to narrow. “Nora’s not the columnist. That’s Kitty Keough’s job, although most of us feel the best thing Kitty could do is drop dead and let Nora take over.”

  “Libby,” I said.

  “Well, it’s absolutely true.” She faced Richard with her jaw jutting as stubbornly as her breasts. “My sister does a wonderful job at the Intelligencer, so you can climb down off your high horse, mister.”

  Richard didn’t bother to respond. “Look,” he said to me, “if you can’t get me into this thing, I’ll find somebody who can.”

  I hated that he could be so dismissive of my sister, and the fact that he looked so damn heroic made it even worse.

  “I might be able to get you into the fashion show,” I conceded. “But you’re going to have to tell me why. I won’t aid and abet some kind of fetish.”

  “Forget it. I’ll find another way in. I just thought you might want to do something right for a change.”

  “For a change?” Libby demanded. “Since when do you get off insulting my sister? Nora is here to support a charity event. Breast cancer awareness is—”

  “Charity event? This is a PR extravaganza, pure and simple. They’ll use any excuse to promote their product, even a disease.”

  I said, “Do you want to go inside with us—yes or no?”

  He wanted to say no, but obviously his nose for news was twitching. “Yes.”

  So I turned to the biker, who was still muttering into his headset. I plucked my press card from his hand and leaned close to whisper, “Keith, dear, I love the tattoos, but your mom is going to have a seizure when she sees them.”

  Keith Rudnick, a part-time actor and full-time waiter at my favorite lunching spot, broke character and winked at me. “They’re temporary, darling, and she helped pick them out,” he whispered back. “Now, look, we’ve been ordered not to allow Kitty Keough inside. Straight from Brinker—no Kitty.”

  “How weird.”

  “Yeah, he hates her guts. But you’re not on the nix list, so I’m trying to get you a seat close to the action. If we’d known you were coming, we’d have front-row center waiting. But at this late hour—”

  “I don’t need special treatment, Keith. Anywhere’s fine.”

  “But you look so divine, we want to show you off. And I presume Mr. Hunkalicious is with you?”

  “Hunkiness is only skin-deep, Keith. Can you seat all three of us? Not necessarily together.” I didn’t feel the need to see the show with Richard.

  “Only in the second row,” Keith said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s perfect. I owe you a favor of your choosing.”

  He hesitated, then began to look like a kid who’d just found one more present under the Christmas tree. “Let me borrow your Lagerfeld wrap for the Gay Pride parade? The one with the koi motif?”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Three seats coming right up!” Going butch again, he summoned one of his similarly costumed colleagues. Ten seconds later we were through the curtains and into the bedlam of the Brinker Bra fashion show.

  Chapter 2

  “This,” Richard muttered beside me, “is crazy.”

  The Brinker Bra had made headlines even before its official launch into retail stores. With no underwires, cups, straps or any of the traditional corseting elements, the bra created the now famous “push and plunge” form desired by every woman between the ages of twelve and two hundred. It was a work of genius, touted by architects, engineers and fashionistas alike. The fashion world had come to Brinker’s doorstep to see its official unveiling.

  In hot pursuit of our usher, Libby called over her shoulder, “C’mon! The show’s going to start any minute!”

  We were bombarded by the combined music and noise of several hundred people jammed into the space. To reach the center of the tightly packed second row, we first climbed over the laps of three bejeweled women who looked seriously displeased about getting stuck in the dreaded second row. Next came a lineup of young aristocrats who all clutched their programs and chattered like kids at the circus. Richard struggled to climb over their perfect knees. I dared not ask if I could help him. I doubt I could have made myself heard over the music anyway.

  We squashed into our seats—second row, but dead center—and found ourselves surrounded by exotically dressed bodies in rows of gilt folding chairs, all facing the runway in a theater-in-the-round configuration. Milling behind us like lions ready to devour the Christians was a pride of roaring photographers.

  As Richard sat down, his cane thunked the back of the head of the man sitting in front of him.

  The man leaped up, clutching his head, and spun around. “What the hell are—Why, Nora!” His voice was too musical. “It’s Nora Blackbird!”

  It was all I could do not to call him by his teenage nickname.

  “Hemmings,” I said, although Hemorrhoid danced on the tip of my tongue.

  Hemmings Pierce, immaculately groomed, wore the current uniform of the urban male narcissist—tight pants riding low on his hips, Prada shirt unbuttoned enough to reveal a hint of waxed, moisturized chest, narrow shoes with stainless-steel buckles. His hair was carefully mussed and his manicure was perfection. I knew him as my college roommate’s pain-in-the-butt kid brother who had a horror of germs. Although he was all grown up now, he still had a sly, darting look in his eyes, as if plotting to catch a glimpse of me in the shower.

  “How long has it been, Nora? You look beautiful.”

  I held my coat tightly closed and leaned down for him to give me two air kisses. “Hello, Hemmings,” I said. “It’s been ages.”

  “Since my sister’s wedding, I think. Oh, dear, you have a thread!”

  “A what?”

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny pocketknife, which he flipped open to a scissors attachment. “Allow me,” he said, and pounced on one of the oversize buttons. Between thumb and forefinger, he nipped a tiny thread that had been hanging from the button, then snipped it off with a single cut with the miniscissors. “There! Perfect. Don’t you look amazing now? Where did you get this fabulous coat?”

  “I . . . It was my grandmother’s.”

  “I remember her. She kept a diary of her clothing so she’d never be seen twice in exactly the same ensemble. I use the same method myself. What a gal!”

  For being called a “gal,” my grandmother would have whapped him upside the head with a Burberry umbrella and left him in the exhaust of her departing silver Bentley.

  “I didn’t realize you knew my grandmother, Hem.”

  “Of course I did!” Even over the roar of music, he sounded false.

  My job required a wardrobe of party-suitable clothing, which, unfortunately, I could no longer afford to buy for myself. So I mixed my old clothes with pieces raided from the closet of Grandmama Blackbird, who had in her lifetime amassed one of the world’s finest collections of couture
and matching accessories. She had gone to Paris and Milan twice annually for fifty years, so I possessed an astonishing selection of beautiful things to wear as long as I didn’t move too strenuously and took care to reinforce the seams. In haste tonight, I had dug out Grandmama’s chinchilla swing coat, dyed Schiaparelli pink and sporting three large black Bakelite buttons down the front. It covered my nightie quite modestly, thank heavens. I only hoped the antifur advocates weren’t on the prowl tonight.

  Hemorrhoid folded up his pocketknife with military precision and tucked it back into his pocket. “Have you met my nephew, Orlando?”

  If he hadn’t spoken the child’s name, I never would have recognized the boy sitting beside him. Hemorrhoid goosed him to stand and face me, and the child complied sullenly. He’d gained forty pounds and grown several inches since I’d seen him last—perhaps two years ago, before his mother died.

  “Why, yes. Hello, Orlando. Last I saw you, it was your birthday.”

  The boy stopped glaring at his handheld computer game only long enough to send a surly glance up at me. “Who are you?”

  “Nora Blackbird. I was your mother’s friend.”

  “I don’t have birthday parties anymore. They’re for kids.”

  Hemorrhoid put his hands on Orlando’s shoulders and tried to straighten his posture. “Be polite to Miss Blackbird, now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she can write good things about you in the paper.”

  Hem tried to grab the game from the child’s hand, but Orlando evaded him with a practiced maneuver.

  During our junior year in college, my dear friend and Philadelphia heiress Oriana Pierce had married Randall Lamb, an aptly named sheep farmer whose family owned a textile conglomerate and half of New Zealand. Theirs was the most spectacular wedding I’d ever attended. The very young bride and her starry-eyed groom stood on a glorious promontory overlooking the Pacific and spoke poetry to each other as if the rest of us were hundreds of miles away. We all drank a champagne toast and threw our glasses into the rocky sea. Afterward the happy couple took off in a helicopter that flew them to the Lamb yacht for a three-week honeymoon cruise.

  I’d never seen anyone so ecstatic to share the news of her pregnancy when I met her in New York a few months later. To celebrate, I’d taken Oriana to Le Cirque for lunch—very chic for a couple of young women. Oriana dropped a buttered roll on Henry Kissinger’s shoe, but he graciously accepted her giggling apologies and sent a bottle of wine to our table.

  But on a scuba diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef several years later, both Oriana and Randall disappeared, presumably drowned. They were never found, and now here was Orlando, a pale lump of an angry ten-year-old stuck with his anal-retentive uncle.

  Orlando’s hair had been cut to look just like Hemorrhoid’s, and his clothing was clearly chosen by a stylist trying to give the kid a persona that didn’t fit. Wool pants looked far too adult on his doughy frame, and the silk shirt, worn Mick Jagger style over a T-shirt, read GIVE BLOOD. PLAY RUGBY.

  But I couldn’t imagine Hemorrhoid allowing the boy to play any game more strenuous than checkers—and that only if the game pieces were disinfected first.

  Hemorrhoid straightened Orlando’s rumpled shirt collar. Orlando held still for the fussing, but his face was shuttered.

  Unable to decipher how he was feeling, I said cheerily, “How have you been, Orlando? I understand you go to school in New Zealand now.”

  “We’re on break,” he snapped.

  “Of course. I didn’t mean—”

  “This is Orlando’s first fashion show,” Hemorrhoid intervened. “I thought he ought to start learning something about the family trade before he takes over the company in a few years, don’t you agree?”

  “I thought Lamb Limited was textiles.”

  “At the moment, yes.” Hem twinkled with a secret. “But who can guess about the future in this age of diversification?”

  “I see.”

  “I hear you’re scribbling great things for the Intelligencer now.”

  “Why, thank you—”

  “Why don’t you mention my name in your next piece? I’ve changed it, you know. I’m calling myself Hemmings Lamb now, just to make things easier to raise my wonderful nephew. I think my sister would approve, don’t you?”

  I thought I could hear Oriana screaming from her grave.

  Hemorrhoid was too busy scanning the crowd for more useful networking contacts to notice my reaction. “Well, enjoy the show. Catch you afterward!”

  He sat down, and I saw him sharpen the crease in his trousers with his fingers.

  I sat down, too, wedging myself into the seat between Richard, who had overheard every word, and Libby, who was still busily foraging through her gift bag.

  More to himself than to me, Richard said, “This is worse than Pamplona.”

  I resisted the urge to remark about running with bullshit. “Your first fashion show?” I asked instead, conscious that we were hip-to-hip and entwining elbows for lack of space.

  Richard bumped my chin with his cane, then stowed it between his knees without apology. “I suppose you feel at home here.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “Don’t bother denying it. You even knew the secret handshake to get in. These people are your kind.”

  “These people?” I repeated. “My kind?”

  “You know what I mean. Hoity-toity.” He indicated Hemorrhoid with a nod. “The ones who care about Rolexes and fancy labels on their clothes.”

  “And nothing approaching brains or social conscience, Mr. Gandhi?”

  “Come on. You don’t believe that breast cancer smoke screen, do you? You weren’t born yesterday.”

  “Thanks,” I said tartly.

  He shrugged. “People talk in newsrooms. You’re not brainless.”

  “Here,” I said, thrusting a program at Richard in hopes of shutting him up. “Read about Brinker Holt.”

  He took the program and looked at the cover photo. The designer of the Brinker Bra sat astride a motorcycle with his trademark camera in hand. Three startlingly endowed models swooned around him. “You know this Brinker guy?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “You mean his latest incarnation?”

  “He has incarnations?”

  I wanted to shut myself up, but I couldn’t. “Brinker is always reinventing himself in an effort to be famous. For a while, he owned a comedy club. Upchuckles.”

  “How Noël Coward.”

  “His comedy act was just as sophisticated. He showed videos of people while he ridiculed them. Like Candid Camera, only less highbrow. About a year ago the club burned down. I like to think it was a random act of human kindness by an arsonist with good taste. Anyway, now he’s a lingerie designer.”

  Richard pointed at the photo. “He hardly looks like the fashion type.”

  “Fashion isn’t pretty girls in lace anymore. A successful designer needs a shtick, a concept, an identity. Brinker has always thought of himself in marketing concepts, so maybe he has a shot.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  I hesitated. “Our families associated.”

  Richard turned a wry look on me. “Associated where? The polo grounds?”

  “A bathing club,” I said coldly.

  “So you sipped mint juleps in a hot tub with this guy?”

  “It was a swim club, a private pool. And lemonade, actually. I could use some now. It’s hot in here.” I fanned myself with my program.

  “So take your coat off.”

  I refrained from stripping down to my nightgown and found myself thinking of the Holt family instead. Their money came from a gear needed in all movie cameras, and they lived the high life thanks to an old patent. Brinker’s father wore bow ties and could get drunk by sniffing a cork. Mrs. Holt smoked Virginia Slims, loved ballroom dancing and spent so much time on cruise ships that they eventually sold t
heir Main Line estate and bought a suite of rooms on a condominium ship that sailed around the world with an orchestra that never quit and a cocktail bar that never closed. Before they set sail, they kicked Brinker off the estate and out of their lives for assorted transgressions. In retaliation, he set fire to his Porsche and became a comedian, starting with home movies of his parents.

  Richard tapped the picture again. “Looks like Brinker is trying to forget his aristocratic roots. The motorcycle, the scruffy beard. He’s gone blue-collar on you.”

  “On me? We’re barely acquainted.”

  “He likes bikes, though?”

  “I have no idea. Why?”

  Richard shrugged. “I like to know things about people. It may be a way to get close later.”

  At that moment, the two of us were as close as two people could get without discussing condoms. And I suddenly became aware that Richard D’eath smelled good. The heat of his leg against mine felt alarmingly intimate, too.

  I pulled away quickly, and he pretended not to notice. Thank heaven the roar of motorcycles exploded in the air. The crowd around us shouted and applauded as the lights went down. Then a Harley burst out from behind the black curtains and thundered onto the runway, controlled by a young woman almost entirely naked. Immediately behind her came a steady stream of equally stunning girls, all precariously balanced on high-heeled biker boots, wearing thong underwear and sporting the plastic harness that was the Brinker Bra.

  The crowd leaped to its feet and screamed orgasmically.

  Beside me, Richard D’eath cursed.

  The runway filled with strutting models, each one a perfect Amazon. A pair of long-legged twins paused in front of us, both with pouty faces and poker-straight white-blond hair down to their elbows. Their space age-y Brinker Bras looked like they might pop off at any moment.

  Behind us, the photographers shouted for the crowd to sit down so they could shoot their photos.

  In my ear, Libby shrieked, “I’m going straight home to book a bikini wax!”

  I barely heard her. Although the action on the stage was riveting, a different drama was taking place in the row in front of us. Orlando Lamb had been glued to his seat until the model on the motorcycle suddenly ripped off her traditional bra and exposed the Brinker Bra beneath. She threw the old bra into the air . . . and it landed directly in Orlando’s lap. The boy leaped up, beet red and crying with embarrassment as he threw the bra away from himself.