Chapter 20
The next day, once Reggie had brought Elizabeth to the suite, Jenn’s spirits began to improve.
“Wait,” she said, thunderstruck, “are you Elizabeth Grand, the author?”
Elizabeth, after being ferried many miles by helicopter and deposited on the topmost deck of the Olympia, was neatly dressed and unruffled; even her hair remained fashionably styled and intact.
“I am,” she admitted to Jenn, “and I’m told you’re having an extremely disruptive week.”
“But…,” said Jenn, fighting back tears, “I’ve read all your books.
That’s exactly how I dreamed my life with Brayden would be, like Nora and Reynolds in Shalimar Chalet, and Abigail and Belinda in Secrets of the Prairie Wives, oh, oh, and especially Sir Wainwright and Lally McGruder in Curtseys and Cummerbunds, where when Lally finds out that Sir Wainwright is trans she still loves him because since he’s a guy he can inherit Bournemouth Manor including the working dairy, the vineyards, and the tumbledown potting shed, which she’ll convert into a studio for doing her watercolors! Your books made me believe in love!”
“Thank you, although I’m so sorry if my work has led you astray. I wish your wedding hadn’t taken a turn.”
“Me too, although I guess it was good that I found out about what a shithead Brayden is, before the vows. But you have to tell me something, because it’ll cheer me up.
I’ve read your Clementine and Clarence trilogy, where the coal miner and the dance hall girl are both trans, which is great, but they confront so many obstacles, like when the mine collapses and Clementine rallies the town to save Clarence and his coworkers, even though the church deacon keeps calling her a diseased harlot with a limited soprano, and then in the next book, where Clarence gets pregnant and has the baby in that mountaintop log cabin while Clementine loses her sheet music in the blizzard, and in the last book, where, just as the town signs a petition so Clementine and Clarence can be married in the sweet little clapboard church, even if the deacon predicts hellfire, there’s an attack by outlaws who force Clementine to clog dance, and then, just as Clarence leaves the baby with that amazing Osage nanny, the book ends! You have to tell me—what happens next?”
All the Tuxes were riveted, awaiting Elizabeth’s response.
“I’ll only tell you this,” Elizabeth said, “because you’ve been through such a terrible time, but I don’t think you should give up on love.
In the next book, Deacon Fothernast contracts tuberculosis, but on his deathbed he has a change of heart, marries Clarence and Clementine, and baptizes their baby Claybelle. ”
Jenn was caught between fictional joy and the contradiction of her recent betrayal.
I longed to ask Elizabeth for advice on my own tangled love life, but Reggie was herding everyone from the suite, “so these ladies can have some downtime. Jenn, thank you for doing this, and I promise you’re not in any personal danger.
Liz, or Lady Tresselmere, I’ll be here in an hour to go over logistics.
Everyone, we’ve got a critical day ahead, so be ready. ”
Reggie joined Brock and me in our parlor to outline our tasks: “Liz will meet with Stanton in his office at one p.m. The two of you will act as associates from her consulting firm, to back up her vouching for the emerald. I’m her bodyguard.
Once Liz can hold the emerald, you’ll both participate.
You’re in charge of a diversion, to cover Liz switching the emerald for Edwin’s duplicate, and palming the real thing off to me.
Then we’ll get her back on the chopper. If everything goes as planned, we’ll have all three gems and can get in touch with Reata for further instructions.
Once Liz is safely off the ship, we’ll look after ourselves, disembark tomorrow in the Bahamas, and head home. ”
“I’m still worried about Jenn,” I said. “She loved spending time with Elizabeth, but she’s hurting.”
“Which we’re going to do something about,” said Reggie. “Tonight. The Tuxes are throwing her a birthday party, with all the trimmings.”
“I’m not sure about that,” I said. “Jenn hates getting older. Keeping her patients looking like teenagers is what she does for a living. And Brayden accused her of being ancient.”
“Which is why it’s a twenty-fifth birthday party.”
To impersonate Lady Tresselmere’s art geeks, Brock and I slicked our hair and put on narrow, Nehru-style black suits with a surefire accessory: grotesquely ugly, thickly framed, meaninglessly oversized black eyeglasses, designed at great cost by someone Scandinavian who also sketches chairs without legs or backs.
Brock’s frames were goofball squares, while mine were owlishly round.
“These glasses make us look appraisal-ready,” Brock said.
“As if we’ve written monographs on mid-century stereo cabinets, and if someone rearranges the three white lilies in the crystal vases on our hall tables, we’ll get so upset we won’t be able to form words.
I’ve met these guys and next to them we’re lumberjacks. ”
I was already standing straighter and becoming delicately erudite, as we fetched Liz from Jenn’s suite. “Look at you two,” said Jenn. “You’re ghouls from a Tim Burton movie.”
“How are you?” I asked, which is probably the least helpful question for anyone whose life has just been upended, but I meant it.
“I’m… somewhere between homicidal and suicidal, you know? Part of me is relieved but mostly I’m still in shock, because I don’t have any idea what I’m going to say to people.”
“Except I keep telling her,” said Elizabeth, “she doesn’t owe the world an explanation.”
“Just like with Gwendolyn Ashby in Love with the Proper Corpse,” said Jenn, citing another of Elizabeth’s novels. “After her first three husbands are poisoned, everyone in London society stops thinking of her as marriageable. So I’m going to say what Gwendolyn says.”
“ ‘These things happen,’ ” said Elizabeth.
“And you’re okay with being our guest of honor tonight?” I asked.
“Why not? Like Liz says, it’s important to have fun without that shitwad, and believe me, I’m charging everything to his Mastercard.”
“Ready?” Brock asked Elizabeth, whose green silk dress not only complemented her red hair but would help with the emerald substitution.
Within a few minutes, Brock and I were standing behind Elizabeth, as she sat in an ostentatiously carved chair in a cavernous office that was part of Jack Stanton’s shipboard retreat, far from his passengers’ clamor.
The three of us, along with Reggie, who wore the uniform of an invented private security firm, with a pistol at his hip, had been vetted at two checkpoints by their own hulking personnel.
I’d waited for us to be recognized from the Olympics, but as gay functionaries we weren’t a threat or even a consideration.
The office was mahogany-paneled and thickly carpeted, decorated in Mogul Excess.
There was a framed Picasso, a Braque, and two smaller Magrittes.
These paintings were real, but the overly dramatic “museum-quality” lighting made them seem like amateur reproductions, as if the eyes in the angular portraits had been sliced out so someone could peep at us from the next room.
Brock had told me that “Jack Stanton owns half of Vegas, most of Atlantic City, and a Mercedes-Maybach, which cost eight million dollars and get ordered a year in advance—everything has to be the biggest and the glitziest. He’s on his fourth, decades-younger wife, and I bet he can’t remember his kids’ names.
He takes over the Ralph Lauren store and makes everyone on staff fetch him things, not just the top-of-the-line Purple Label blazers and those linen sweaters hand-knitted with American flags, but jugs of caviar from a specialty place on 57th Street and bologna sandwiches from his favorite deli.
He spends a fortune, but you can tell he’s already thinking about the signed letter from Churchill he’s going to buy, to hang next to the photo of him partying at a Super Bowl with O. J. Simpson and Mel Gibson.”
An inner door, not the one we’d entered through, swung open, and a man who I instantly sensed was wearing lifts in his shoes strode into the room, announcing, “Howdy, y’all! Damn good to see ya!”
His accent combined tones of the generic South and his birthplace of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, for a down-home bray.
He was like the full-sized, full-color cardboard cutouts of himself that greeted customers at his venues.
At a rough seventy-eight, it was clear he’d been ill; he wasn’t frail but thin, and his face was lined from age and numerous medical treatments.
His custom suit was tailored to offset any weakness, with shoulder pads that could knock the paintings off the walls, and a shirt collar raised to conceal a scrawny neck.
His hands and wrists were galleries of door knocker?scale rings (hammered from silver, with turquoise ovals) and a wristwatch so heavy and enormous it seemed more like an appliance, some restaurant-grade stove or side-by-side refrigerator/freezer clamped to his wrist.
“We’re gonna have us some fun, ain’t we?” he said, opening his arms with a slight arthritic flinch.
“So good to meet you, Mr. Stanton,” said Elizabeth, without standing, to assert her you-need-me-more-than-I-need-you equilibrium.
“These are my associates, Gustav Brandt and Helmut Nesslerod.” On our way to the office, Brock and I had turned forbiddingly German, and we nodded in Teutonic unison, deferring to Elizabeth.
“Lady Marlene goddamn Tresselmere!” crowed Stanton, “right here on my little ol’ ship!”