A Big Storm Knocked It Over Read Free

for specials and sales ( YOUR MONOGRAM EMBROIDERED FREE WITH THE PURCHASE OF TWO BATH SHEETS !), and the Stuff was hauled away and stored at Adele’s grandmother’s house.
    All this made Jane Louise feel very tender toward Adele. She did not begrudge Adele any of it: She wanted someone to want it.
    She and Teddy had simply merged their possessions and were now thinking about buying a sideboard. Jane Louise had never bought a piece of furniture with another person in her life. It seemed to her an act of almost exotic intimacy. After all, anyone can sleep with anyone, but few people not closely connected purchase furniture in common.
    Dita Neville was Jane Louise’s next visitor. Jane Louise was dreading her. She breezed into the office trailing cigarette smoke and wearing the sort of clothes girls might have worn in French convent schools in the forties. No one could identify where she got these clothes which, as Edie pointed out, were killingly lovely. Today she was wearing a heavy white shirt, a knife-pleated black serge skirt, heavy black stockings, and flat suede shoes like balletslippers. Her stripey, tawny hair was cut asymmetrically. She was older than Jane Louise, and they had been close friends, but recently Dita had faded out of her life.
    When Dita first came to the firm she had created a minor stir: She was extremely glamorous. No one else in the office carried a burled-walnut cigarette case with a twenty-two-carat-gold clasp. No one else had lunch with people whose title was Princess. She seemed to know everyone: old film directors, movie stars, wild Southern boys who wrote dirty novels, elephant trainers who wrote poetry. At the moment she was publishing a novel entitled Dream of the Biker’s Girl, by a woman who had ridden with the Hell’s Angels and came to the office in full biker regalia. Undeterred, Dita, wearing sober gray and real pearls, took her out to lunch at the fancy women’s club of which her mother was a member.
    She was small and wiry, like a wildcat. She stalked about like a cat, too. Her stride was nervous and taut. At the moment she was married to her third husband, the reportage photographer Nick Samuelovich, an overlifesized, blond man. Handsome. Her first husband had been a charmless, appropriate stockbroker. This had pleased and then displeased her mother, who was horrified by divorce. Next she married a poet from a very old family but left him for Nick, who had carried her off to Cambodia.
    Dita had taken Jane Louise up with a vengeance, and Jane Louise had been somewhat dazzled. Together they had gone to the movies at lunchtime armed with huge sandwiches from the local delicatessen. When Nick was out of town, Dita and Jane Louise camped out at the cozy Samuelovich flat in Greenwich Village, where they talked and gossiped endlessly. Dita had given Jane Louise access to her private life: In front of Jane Louise she felt free to cry, rant, let down her public face, and display whatseemed to Jane Louise a boiling vat of emotion. In public Dita was perfect: a clubwoman who used dirty language, a freewheeling, freethinking maverick from an impeccable background, the person you could count on to get all the jokes and nuances. Their friendship prospered over the years, but around the time that Jane Louise first met Teddy, Dita began to withdraw. She no longer came into Jane Louise’s office to yak. Their midday movie dates were over. Dita was never home in the evening anymore, and Jane Louise had known in her heart of hearts that Dita would never make it to her wedding.
    And she hadn’t. It turned out that the birthday party for Nick’s old father was the same day, even though it was not his official birthday. And although a smaller party would be given for the old man on his actual birthday, Dita said it was imperative that she attend both. If it had not been Nick’s father’s birthday, Jane Louise had suspected, it would have been something