Read Online Gossip by Beth Gutcheon - Free Book Online

when he went to lunch. I happened to look into it.”
    She lit another cigarette from the butt of her first. “He had a number of files with no names on them, but one of them was Serena’s. There were what looked like verbatim quotes from a woman named Luisa who had clearly known Serena very very well. Names, dates, everything. Simon’s memory for dialogue is scary accurate, I’ve learned the hard way. Him and Truman Capote. Let’s hope he’s not planning a nonfiction novel.”
    â€œWhat kind of dialogue was it? A woman scorned?”
    â€œI doubt it. I think she was just enjoying the reaction she was getting and didn’t realize who she was talking to. Simon is very charming, you know.”
    â€œAnd Serena wasn’t the only one?”
    Dinah shook her head.
    â€œBald-faced blackmail?”
    â€œWell, he wasn’t putting it like that. He was inviting them to ‘invest’ in a new magazine he was starting.”
    â€œI take it you confronted him.”
    â€œThis morning.” She put her face in her hands, pressing her eyelids with her fingertips. “It was horrible.” Her nail polish was chipped. “He called me vicious names. He said everyone in our business does it. I said they don’t, and pointed out he could go to jail. He said I just wanted his job. I said I didn’t. He said ‘Prove it.’ ”
    My Dinah. I could see the scene.
    â€œHe said that if anyone ever, ever heard about this, Serena’s name would be all over Liz Smith in a New York minute. I said I didn’t want to ruin him, I just want him to stop.”
    â€œDid he believe you?”
    She shook her head. “People who do things like that believe that everyone else is just like them. The only way to prove there was a principle at stake was to quit. So I did.”
    â€œEven though you do want his job.”
    She nodded.
    â€œDidn’t the suits want to know why you were going?”
    â€œNot really. They will tomorrow. Today they just wished me well and assumed I want to stay home with my children.”
    â€œAnd what are you going to do?”
    â€œStay home with my children. Another Women’s Libber bites the dust.”
    The next morning, in Simon Snyder’s last column for “The Fishwrap,” he announced he was moving west to a new field of endeavor, then sang an aria to old friends, good times, and how much he had loved New York. Simon at his best.
    There are five people other than Simon and Dinah and me who knew for sure what had happened. Dinah went to them one by one and gave them their files back. One man actually wept. And to this day, Dinah misses that job, and that friendship. You never really get over someone you’ve laughed with like that.
    S till, at the time, one felt that when one door closes, many more open. Dinah’s quitting looked like a temporary hitch in an inevitable upward trajectory. Dinah was a star. She could write, she could talk, she could cook, she knew everyone. She was happily married to a good man. Why shouldn’t it all just get better and better? We rarely recognize these turning pylons in life when we round them, though they’re easy enough to spot in retrospect.
    Nicholas was born on a morning in late September 1975. New York was golden, with the fresh snap of new beginnings in the air, of back to school, of clean slates. The trees were beginning to turn, but flowers still bloomed in the sidewalk beds along the side streets. I used my lunch hour to run up to Lenox Hill to greet the new arrival, and took Dinah a blue satin bed jacket. She asked me to be Nicky’s godmother, and I cried.
    He was a beautiful baby. He had a mad shock of dark hair, like Dinah’s, and his skin had none of the scaly stuff or red blotches newborns often have. Of course I was prejudiced from the first; I felt a rush of something I’d never felt before when I held him. Mother Nature working her little