Everyone Worth Knowing Read Free

torrentially
    pouring, but a cab was nowhere to be found. I had been
    whistling, screaming, and jumping skywards like a lunatic for
    twenty minutes to no avail, when a lone cab finally pulled up to
    the curb. The cabbie's response when I requested to go uptown
    was "Too much traffic!" before he screeched off and disappeared.
    When a second driver actually picked me up, I ended up tipping
    him 50 percent out of relief and gratitude.
    "Hey, Bettina, you look unhappy. Is everything okay?" I'd insisted
    that people call me Bette, and most did. Only my parents
    and George, Uncle Will's doorman (who was so old and cute he
    could get away with anything), still insisted on using my full name.
    "Just the usual cab hassle, George." 1 sighed, giving him a peck
    on the cheek. "How's your day been?"
    "Oh, just dandy as always," he replied without a hint of sarcasm.
    "Saw the sun for a few minutes this morning and have been
    happy ever since." Nauseating.
    "Bette!" I heard Simon call from the lobby's discreetly hidden
    mailroom. "Is that you I hear, Bette?"
    He emerged from the mailroom in tennis whites, a racketshaped
    bag slung over his broad shoulders, and picked me up in a
    bear hug as no straight man ever had. It was sacrilege to skip a
    weekly dinner, which in addition to being a good time also provided
    by far the most male attention I received (not counting
    brunch).
    Will and Simon had developed lots of rituals in the almost
    thirty years they'd spent together. They vacationed in only three
    places: St. Barth's in late January (although lately Will had been
    complaining that it was "too French"), Palm Springs in mid-March,
    and an occasional spontaneous weekend in Key West. They drank
    gin and tonics only out of Baccarat glasses, spent every Monday
    night from seven until eleven at Elaine's, and hosted an annual holiday
    party where each would wear a cashmere turtleneck. Will was
    almost six-three, with close-cropped silver hair, and he preferred
    sweaters with suede elbow patches; Simon was barely five-nine,
    with a wiry, athletic build that he swathed entirely in linen, irrespective
    of the season. "Gay ; men," he'd say, "have carte blanche to
    flout fashion convention. We've earned the right." Even now, moments
    off the tennis court, he'd managed to don some sort of
    white linen hoodie.
    "Gorgeous girl, how are you? Come, come, Will is sure to be
    wondering where we both are, and I just know that the new girl
    has prepared something fantastic for us to eat." Always the perfect
    gentleman, he took my exploding tote bag from my shoulder, held
    the elevator door open, and pressed PH.
    "How was tennis?" I asked, wondering why this sixty-year-old
    man had a better body than every guy I knew.
    "Oh, you know how it is, a bunch of old guys running around
    the court, tracking down balls they shouldn't even try for and pretending
    they've got strokes like Roddick. A little pathetic, but always
    amusing."
    The door to their apartment was slightly ajar and I could hear
    Will talking to the TV in the study, as usual. In the old days, Will
    had scooped Liza Minnelli's relapse and RFK's affairs and Patty
    Hearst's leap from socialite to cult member. It was the "amorality"
    of the Dems that finally pushed him toward politics instead of all
    things glamorous. He called it the Clinton Clinch. Now, a few short
    decades later, Will was a news junkie with political affiliations that
    ran slightly to the right of Attila the Hun's. He was almost certainly
    the only gay right-wing entertainment-and-society columnist living
    on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who refused to comment on
    either entertainment or society. There were two televisions in his
    study, the larger of which he kept tuned to Fox News. "Finally," he
    was fond of saying, "a network that speaks to my people."
    And always Simon's retort: "Riiight. That huge audience of
    right-wing gay entertainment-and-society columnists living on the
    Upper West Side of Manhattan?"
    The smaller set