Tell-All

tonight’s dinner. A telephone number, handwritten, a prefix in Murray Hill .
    On the television, Joan Crawford enters the gates of Madrid , wearing some gauzy harem getup, both her hands carrying a wicker basket in front of her, the basket spilling over with potatoes and Cuban cigars, her bare limbs and face painted black to suggest she’s a captured Mayan slave. The subtext being either Crawford’s carrying syphilis or she’s supposed to be a secret cannibal. Tainted spoils of the New World. A concubine. Perhaps she’s an Aztec.
    That slight lift of one naked shoulder, Crawford’s shrug of disdain, here is another signature gesture stolen from me.
    Above the mantel hangs a portrait of Miss Katherine painted by Salvador Dalí; it rises from a thicket of engraved invitations and the silver-framed photographs of men whom Walter Winchell would call “was-bands.” Former husbands. The painting of my Miss Kathie, her eyebrows arch in surprise, but her heavy eyelashes droop, the eyelids almost closed with boredom. Her hands spread on either side of her face, her fingers fanning from her famous cheekbones to disappear into her movie star updo of auburn hair. Her mouth something between a laugh and a yawn. Valium and Dexedrine . Between Lillian Gish and Tallulah Bankhead . The portrait rises from the invitations and photographs, future parties and past marriages, the flickering candles andhalf-dead cigarettes stubbed out in crystal ashtrays threading white smoke upward in looping incense trails. This altar to my Katherine Kenton .
    Me, forever guarding this shrine. Not so much a servant as a high priestess.
    In what Winchell would call a “New York minute” I carry the place card to the fireplace. Dangle it within a candle flame until it catches fire. With one hand, I reach into the fireplace, deep into the open cavity of carved pink onyx and rose quartz, grasping in the dark until my fingers find the damper and wrench it open. Holding the white card, Webster Carlton Westward III , twisting him in the chimney draft, I watch a flame eat the name and telephone number. The scent of vanilla. The ash falls to the cold hearth.
    On the television, Preston Sturges and Harpo Marx enter as Tycho Brahe and Copernicus . The first arguing that the earth goes around the sun, the latter insisting the world actually orbits Rita Hayworth . The picture is called
Armada of Love
, and David O. Selznick shot it on the Universal back lot the year when every other song on the radio was Helen O’Connell singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” backed by the Jimmy Dorsey band.
    The bathroom door swings open, Miss Kathie’s voice saying:
bark, yip, cluck-cluck
… Maxwell Anderson . Her Katherine Kenton hair turbaned in a white bath towel. Her face layered with a mask of pulped avocado and royal jelly. Pulling the belt of her robe tight around her waist, my Miss Kathie looks at the lipstick dumped on her bed. The scattered cigarette lighter and keys and charge cards. The empty evening bag. Her gaze wafts to me standing before the fireplace, the tongues of candle flame licking below herportrait, her lineup of “was-bands,” the invitations, all those future obligations to enjoy herself, and—of course—the flowers.
    Perched on the mantel, that altar, always enough flowers for a honeymoon suite or a funeral. Tonight features a tall arrangement of white spider chrysanthemums, white lilies and sprays of yellow orchids, bright and frilly as a cloud of butterflies.
    With one hand, Miss Kathie sweeps aside the lipstick and keys, the cigarette pack, and she settles herself on the satin bed, amid the candy wrappers, saying, “Did you burn something just now?”
    Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands, or one of those new miracle pills.
    As if human beings—men in particular—need yet another way to lie.
    I ask, Did she misplace something?
    Her violet eyes waft to my hands. Petting her Pekingese, Loverboy , dragging one hand through the dog’s long fur, Miss Kathie says, “I do get so tired of buying my own flowers.…”
    My hands, smeared black and filthy from the handle of the fireplace damper. Smudged with soot from the burned place card. I wipe them in the folds of my tweed skirt. I tell her I