The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy by David Handler Page A

the sky. Most of it had blown over by the time I left the Jag in the garage around the corner from our seven rooms on Central Park West. Just the sticky heat was left. It felt like summer all over again.
    It’s always jarring to be back in the city after a while away. The people seem to move so furiously, with such grim intent and so little purpose. Briefly, I stand apart from them, wondering what invisible current propels them forward. But within moments the current lifts my own feet from the pavement and sweeps me along and I am one of them.
    Pamela, our British housekeeper, was delighted to see me. Pamela’s plump and silver-haired and possesses the most unflappable disposition I’ve ever come across. Lulu adores her. But then Lulu adores anyone who will make her kippers and eggs. I ditched the turtleneck for a lavender broadcloth shirt and cream-colored bow tie, and the cheviot wool for a lighter-weight silk and wool hounds-tooth. Then I sat down and picked up the phone and found out Clethra had just been Gilloolyed.
    This was the day the home video broke, that infamous X-rated video of little Clethra performing her little striptease for Thor in some hotel room. One of the tabloid shows, Hard Copy, had gotten ahold of it and planned to show it in all its sleazy glory that evening. Already, there had been no small amount of horn-blowing on their part. Every television news outlet in the country had been rushed a tasty five-second snippet in time for the noon news. Plus, the tabloid’s giddy producers had held a raucous morning press conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on Forty-second Street, where they flatly refused to say how they’d landed the tape—just that it came from a source close to the family. The tape went for between three and six hundred thousand dollars, depending on who you heard about it from. Me, I heard about it from Ruth, who claimed she’d known nothing about it until the producers called her that morning for her comment. She sounded worn down by this latest dirty installment. She told me I was welcome to come downtown for a talk, provided I was alone. She wasn’t referring to Lulu.
    Baby Ruth Feingold lived in the bottom two floors of a brownstone down on Greenwich Street, the same apartment she’d lived in back when she represented Greenwich Village in the U.S. Congress. Greenwich is all the way over on the west side in the middle of the old meatpacking district. There was still a meatpacking house right next door to hers. Loud, burly men were busy loading and unloading sides of beef at the curb, a battalion of tabloid cameramen and reporters competing with them for precious sidewalk space—and losing. You don’t mess with meatpackers. Not in New York. Not anywhere. These are men who know what goes inside of hot dogs. And eat them anyway.
    A cop in uniform was watching it all with glum resignation. I elbowed my way through the crowd to him, my Borsalino down low over my face, and told him I was expected. The cop went into the vestibule and buzzed Ruth. She let me in.
    “It’s been a long time, Ruth,” I said, bending down to kiss her cheek. The last time was when I had interviewed her for Esquire, back in both of our heydays. “How are you doing?”
    “It stinks out loud is how I’m doing,” Ruth fumed, her voice a raspy, defiant snarl. “It’s humiliating, it’s painful and it’s so typical. He does whatever he goddamned wants and I have to swallow it to the last drop and pretend I like it, just like women have been pretending they like it for centuries.”
    At our feet Lulu let out a moan. Any allusion to oral sex has always horrified her.
    “It’s still a man’s world, Hoagy,” Ruth raged on. “Nothing has changed. Not one thing. Did you know that the average amount a divorced man pays in child support has fallen by twenty-five percent in the past fifteen years? That the number of women in domestic violence shelters has doubled? That the largest percentage of working