Free Gossip by Beth Gutcheon Page A

and expensive teeth. “How nice of you.”
    Then came a tap on my shoulder from the row behind me. I turned, and Avis said, “Lovie French? I thought that was your profile . . .”
    As the house lights went down and the chandelier rose I was suddenly part of the fabric of the great city, not an odd pea alone in a pod, but the sort of woman who runs into pals from boarding school at the opera. The sort of woman who is remembered by the glamorous older girls. Though I knew, of course, that her remembering reflected well on Avis, not on me. She is a woman who notices the quiet soul in the corner.
    Avis was wearing a cushion-cut diamond on her wedding ring finger, but her companion that night was Teddy Tomalin, a dapper young bachelor who later became a great friend of mine. She insisted I join them in the Belmont Room at intermission. No standing in line at the lobby bar with the hoi polloi for us.
    â€œSo you’re in New York now,” said Avis while Teddy went to get us champagne. “Tell me everything, what are you doing?”
    I gave her my card, dreading her reaction. Surely she supposed, given my fancy orchestra seats, that I was some rich man’s wife, spending my days lunching at Le Cirque. But she read the card and cried, “How wonderful! Does that mean you get to run barefoot through the collections and buy everything on discount? I will come straight to you for my clothes from now on.” And she did.
    She dresses very well, Avis. She is a realist in the fitting room. Her figure is slim, with no bottom to speak of. Even now, she never wears trousers in town. She wears skirts just below the knee, and beautiful shoes that show off her narrow calves and feet. She knew to avoid the big-shoulder styles of the 1980s, when so many women looked as if their jackets still had the hangers in them. Armani is too masculine for her, but Chanel is very good, and now she mostly wears a German designer I’ve found, who does feminine clothes with clean lines but beautiful details.
    She made a professional appointment with me soon after the opera night, and we spent several hours trying clothes for day and for evening. She’d say, “Oh, isn’t that pretty, I’ve always wanted to wear that color,” and try on whatever I’d brought her. Everything that season was a gray-green color called Wintermint and it was a disaster on her; it made her skin sallow and her eyes dull, as she had known it would. Gradually I learned. She is marvelous in strong warm colors or black. Black more and more, now that her hair is white. Now, black probably forever.
    Next, she invited me to a Sunday luncheon party. Her apartment was on Fifth Avenue. The dining room windows are just above treetop level with a charming view of the Children’s Zoo in Central Park. The living room was done in glowing brocades with real Empire French furniture and everywhere vitrines full of objets d’art. I met two new clients that day who have stayed very faithful over the years. Marylin gets the high rollers from South America, but I’ve built up a steady base of the ladies who live between Carnegie Hill and East Fifty-seventh Street, and Avis helped a lot.
    The lunch was not just for ladies. It was much more like a dinner party, with ten at table, a cocktail beforehand, four courses, and three kinds of wine. As I remember, Teddy Tomalin the opera buff was there, as well as Avis’s business partner, the art dealer Gordon Hall, the zillionaire collector Victor Greenwood with a vavavoom lady friend, and an aging literary lion who had once shot one of his wives and had just published a memoir. I was seated on the right hand of Avis’s husband, Harrison Metcalf. He was twenty years older than Avis, in a bespoke tweed jacket and Lobb shoes, with a beautiful head of reddish blond hair. We talked about his pre-Columbian art collection, which was all around us, and about which he was fascinating, at