People Like Us Read Free

or had their social secretaries call him up “Mrs. Harcourt wondered if you could dine onWednesday the twenty-first, black tie,” they would say, in voices every bit as grand as those of the people for whom they telephoned. Mostly he listened to what his dinner partners had to say, for he was an excellent listener, giving them his full attention, whether they were witty or dull, intriguing or boring. It seemed to make no difference to him.
    “What do you see in all those people you’re always having dinner with?” asked Nestor.
    “I like to listen to them talk,” answered Gus.
    “When does that guy get out of prison?” asked Nestor, changing the subject and lowering his voice.
    Gus didn’t have to say, “What guy?”
    “Two years from now,” he answered, quietly, wanting to withdraw from the direction the conversation was taking. There was a part of Gus’s life that he did not discuss with the people with whom he spent his time, even a friend like Nestor Calder, who spanned both his old life and his new life.
    Nestor whistled. “So soon, huh?”
    “So soon.”
    “What was his name?”
    Gus hesitated, as he always hesitated when the name came up. “Lefty Flint,” he answered.
    “Does it worry you?” asked Nestor.
    “Yes,” said Gus. “It worries Peach too.”
    “The
nerve
of that Edwina Calder,” Maisie Verdurin said indignantly in the taxi on the way home. “She said she didn’t like her seat at my last party, for the Vice President and his wife. Can you imagine?”
    Gus, who liked Edwina Calder, didn’t reply, but Maisie didn’t expect a reply.
    “She said that I never seat her at what she called one of the
good
tables, but that I always seated Nestor at one of the good tables. So I said to her, ‘After all, Edwina, Nestor is a first-rate writer, and people want to talk to him.’ ”
    “But Edwina is so beautiful,” said Gus.
    “Beautiful girls are not what my dinners are about,” Maisie answered haughtily. “My dinners are about conversation. I think it’s a waste of time at one of my dinners when a man flirts with a pretty girl, like Bernie Slatkin does for instance, when there are such marvelous things being said at every table. It’s called missing the point of the evening.”
    Maisie always spoke possessively about her dinner parties, as creative output, in the way that a poet might speak about “my poems,” or an author might speak about “my novels,” and woe to anyone who displeased Maisie, for banishment from her list was the consequence. After each of her evenings, she dissected her guest list: who had pulled his weight in conversation, who hadn’t, whom she had given too good a seat to, whom she had not given a good enough seat to, and who would never be invited back, no matter what.
    One of the things about escorting Maisie Verdurin anywhere, Gus discovered, was that the end of the evening came at exactly the point where she was delivered back to the canopy in front of her apartment building and into the safekeeping of her doorman. There were no invitations upstairs for a nightcap, and all the things that implied. It was not even necessary to follow her out of the taxi to her doorstep. With her sables wrapped tightly around her, she dashed for her own door with only an over-the-shoulder reminder of her next dinner.
    “You’re coming to me on the twenty-fourth, remember.”
    “Okay.”
    “You didn’t write a thank-you note after my last dinner,” she added.
    “I sent you flowers instead,” said Gus. “I felt I was beginning to repeat myself with my notes.”
    “Don’t send me flowers,” said Maisie. “I never go into my living room except on the nights I have parties. Just send me a note. I save them all and put them in a scrapbook.”
    * * *
    Since Gus Bailey had moved to New York from Los Angeles and begun writing articles about famous people for a fashionable magazine, Maisie Verdurin, who had an eye for new people, had begun inviting him to her dinners