A Kept Woman Read Online Free PDF

glories awaiting her just a stone’s throw from Saks, Diana seemed so perfectly happy that Milla allowed her worrying inner voice to be quieted.
    She can handle Ernie, Milla told herself. Diana can. handle anything.

Chapter 4
    I could like it here, Diana thought to herself. She lifted the crystal flute of freshly pressed raspberry juice her maid had brought her, and took another exploratory stroll round their apartment. Huge windows almost as high as the ceilings looked out over Central Park, and the blue lake sparkled in the sun. Beyond that, even Harlem looked peaceful from this distance. On the horizon, when the sky was clear, like it was today, you could even make out the blaze of colour that was Westchester County. Ernie wanted her to go out to Westchester and find them a little holiday cottage. All the Wall Street boys and Park Avenue surgeons had places outside the city, and Mar tha’s Vineyard, Diana thought, was just too much of a clich6. Ditto the Hamptons. Plus, there was the small matter of Ernie’s finances. He was rich - such a hit at Blakely’s already - but he didn’t have real American dollars, the kind that Calvin and Kelly Klein, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw possessed. Diana didn’t want something in the Hamptons if hers would be the smallest place for miles around. She preferred to head out to Scarsdale or Bronxville, and find some rustic little gem for the weekends. Westchester was full of city refugees her new best friend, Felicity Metson, had told her it was the second-richest county in America, after Beverly Hills.
    It hadn’t been too hard, settling in. Paul Gammon, the chairman of the board at Blakely’s, a crust.y old social register stalwart who idolised the Brits, had thrown a party for their second night in town. All very select, no
     
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    celebrities, just the money crowd. Diana had worn a classically simple gown of pewter silk and the drop diamond and citrine earrings Ernie had bought her the day, she closed on their apartment; her make-up nothing more than a slick of foundation and a whisper of bronzer. She knew how to invoke the look of the old money she had never really had, and it worked like a charm. As Ernie boasted to the stock-market whizz-kids about his overhead cuts back home, Diana worked the wives. Business was so boring. It was much more fun knowing how to spend money. And it was the wives sometimes the mistresses, too - who held the key to social acceptance here.
    London had been a cakewalk, Diana thought, sipping her juice. A few photo shoots here, some blue-blooded relatives there, beauty and a rich husband. You could shop divinely for three weeks around Bond Street and never hit the same store twice. But grown-up exclusivity was about more than velvet ropes and your name on a guest list guarded by a gorilla in a tux. Americans had their own way of doing things, and Diana intended to fit in. The new girl in town needed all the perks of the Manhattan elite: the secret phone numbers the top restaurants gave out so that important customers always got a table; the names of the best manicurists, masseuses, dog-walkers and private shoppers; invitations to the right galleries a.nd parties. Diana had a determined look in her eye as she moved from group to group, in Mrs Gammon’s mahogany-panelled drawing room high above Park Avenue. She offered little cards, collected names, and promised a lunch here, a tea there. Ernie was a publisher, and publishing still carried prestige in New York. And, after all, women are curious creatures. Diana knew they would want to check her out.
    She planned her first two weeks like a general. Helen Gammon had provided her guest list - of course Diana
     
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    would do nothing so crass as to scrawl down phone numbers at the party - and she worked her way through it. A flurry of lunches, trips to the beauty parlour and expeditions to Prada and DKNY followed. Some of the ladies were fun, most were bitchy, all were rich, skinny and