Free People Like Us by Dominick Dunne

hardly be ordering new slipcovers if she were getting a divorce. I mean, would she?”
    “Take my word for it, honey,” said Ezzie, full of himself as he always was when he was the first one with the latest news. “Have I ever been wrong?”
    “Who told you?” asked Cora, who knew that Ezzie, even if he was an old gossip, usually had his facts straight.
    Ezzie drew himself up archly and announced, “I’m not telling.”
    “But why? After twenty-one years?”
    “Twenty-two years,” Ezzie corrected her.
    “Twenty-two,” Cora conceded. “Don’t you think couples should just put up with each other after all that time?”
    Ezzie Fenwick, whose restless eyes roamed everywhere, even during the most intimate conversation, followed with undisguised interest the entrance into the restaurant of Constantine de Rham and Yvonne Lupescu and then barely acknowledged de Rham’s courtly bowand looked right through Mrs. Lupescu as the couple passed his table on the way to their own. At times, with lesser mortals or upstarts, a favorite word of his, Ezzie’s face assumed attitudes of aristocratic hauteur, although they were attitudes studied and memorized but not inherited. Cora liked Ezzie. His snobbery amused her. She could remember many years ago when Ezzie had been considered an upstart himself in New York and people claimed that his father, who bought up all the foreign-car franchises that Ezzie’s considerable income was derived from, had anglicized his more exotic name to the Episcopal-sounding Fenwick.
    “The things I could tell you about that one,” said Ezzie to Cora about Mrs. Lupescu, but Cora had no interest whatever in either Constantine de Rham or Yvonne Lupescu, or any of the other “trash Europeans,” as she called them, who were overcrowding New York and driving up the price of real estate.
    “Pretty cuff links,” she replied, tapping a long red fingernail against one of the tiny green enamel frogs with ruby eyes that Ezzie wore on each wrist.
    “Blanche Abdy gave me these when Hector died,” said Ezzie, glancing down to admire how perfectly they went with his green-and-white striped shirt and green paisley tie.
    Ezzie Fenwick had never had to make a living, and never had, nor had he ever gone in for any of the artistic pursuits of rich men with time on their hands, like founding magazines, or producing plays, or running art galleries or antique shops, offering, as credentials, their perfect taste, as well as their bankrolls. Ezzie was always considered close, meaning, as Laurance Van Degan often put it, that he was tight with a buck, although he was known to be extremely generous, in gifts of flowers and restaurant dinners, to certain hostesses and fashionable ladies of the city whom he particularly admired.
    Early on he was known as a good seat, meaning that he was amusing to sit next to at dinner, and ladiesvied for his attention, although he was quite capable of wounding any one of those same ladies who were kindest to him if he didn’t care for her choice of dress for the evening (“That color yellow is
all wrong
for you!” he once said to Loelia Manchester), or if he thought she had seated a table badly (“Imagine, wasting
me
next to Maude Hoare!” he had complained to Lil Altemus), or if he felt she had redecorated her library incorrectly (“Never, ever, quilt chintz! So tacky!” he once said to Baba Timson).
    Although Ezzie was now a stalwart figure in the most fashionable groups in society, it had not always been so. Cora Mandell could remember forty years ago when Ezzie was often asked to leave parties he hadn’t been invited to, not only because he was a crasher, but because he dared to criticize the flower arrangements as puny, as he had at Sibila Monroe’s coming-out dance, or complain that the chicken hash was all cream and no chicken, as he had at Blanche Abdy’s supper party. But that was all long ago and no one else remembered.
    “Back to the Manchesters,” Cora redirected