The Whiteness of Bones by Susanna Moore Page B

him for Father’s Day.”
    “Was he Courtney and Brooke’s father?”
    “Oh, no,” Alysse said. “That was my second husband, Harry Shannon, the handsomest Irishman you ever saw. They were the children from his second marriage. Not mine. Oh, you would have adored Harry Shannon.”
    “I liked his daughters. I hoped to see them—”
    “I met him in the South of France at a party. His wife was having an affair with Betsy Tyndal, the Marchioness of Drummle, and he shoved his foot between my legs at dinner. I slipped my hand down and somehow managed to remove his shoe. I put it in my sewing bag, we all carried big tapestry bags then because it was a fad to do needlework after dinner, you know, like Queen Victoria or someone, and I wouldn’t give the shoe back to him. When we got up from the table, he, wearing one patent leather shoe like in that nursery rhyme, followed me from room to room, hopping. It was very funny, because he was considered quite a dandy. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure. He was the one who first wore his wristwatch right on his shirtsleeve cuff, so fabulous, and all the young men at theparty thought Harry was setting a new fashion by wearing only one shoe. Several of them turned up at dinner the very next night wearing one black evening shoe. He followed me back to the Eden Roc and stayed three weeks.”
    Because most of her stories were about sex, Mamie thought at first that Alysse liked men very much, but as time went by, she began to suspect that Alysse wasn’t really interested in men, and that she was not interested in sex at all. She had no understanding of pleasure, certainly not anything so unselfish as shared pleasure, and even had she been interested, she would have seen her own pleasure as something that might, to her disadvantage, get in her way. This practical view of romance was a new and not altogether likable one to Mamie. She often felt uncomfortable when Alysse laughed about her husbands or boyfriends, as if she, Mamie, should be defending them, and it wasn’t until years later that Mamie discovered by accident that Alysse had left out entirely a certain Mr. Vic “Big Cat” Cattani, her first husband, who drowned mysteriously off Staten Island.
    “Of course, after Jack Fitzjames had that umbrella duel at the Opera with the man sitting in front of us, I couldn’t possibly see him again,” Alysse said in her slight, careless way. She said about another admirer, “He fought in that war in Spain in the thirties, I forget what it was about, and ever after he insisted on wearing this ludicrous Basque beret. I did everything to get him to change, took him to Lock in London, everything, but he was unnaturally attached to that goddamn hat.”
    “Perhaps someone gave it to him,” Mamie said, sympathetic to the man in the beret. She would have liked to have given it to him.
    “I doubt it.” Alysse said, snorting. “His wee-wee was the size of a thimble. I found
that
out.”
    Mamie went one night in a snowstorm to have drinks with Alysse’s second-best-friend, Bones Washburn. Whether Mrs. Washburn’s nickname came from her celebrated figure or her ability to stop, with a single shot, a charging rhinoceros at a hundred feet, Alysse did not know. She had never thought about it, she told Mamie on their way up to the hotel suite that Bones had kept for twenty years. Bones was what used to be called a dame, and she was smart enough to be proud of it. She was one of those tolerant women with a raucous laugh and heavy gold charm bracelets who could hunt and ski and fish and drink all night with her man. She was a good sport. As Alysse put it to Mamie, “She could ‘fuck, fight or hold the light.’ ” It was not an expression familiar to Mamie.
    Bones had met Alysse and Buddy Klost in the bar of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. She took Alysse in hand after that first drunken night in Africa, and showed her how to dress and how to order food and hire servants, and Alysse always