To my surprise, Will had been less than thrilled with the coverage of my non-one-night-stand three weeks earlier. I’d called after work to say hi, figuring he didn’t even read New York Scoop and there was a good chance he hadn’t seen it, but I was very, very wrong. Everybody, it seemed, had begun reading New York Scoop – and worse, they were reading it solely for Ellie Insider’s column.
‘Oh, Bette, your uncle has been champing at the bit, just waiting for your call. Hold on a second, I’ll get him,’ Simon said rather formally, not even bothering to ask how I was or when I’d next be over for dinner, as he always did.
‘Bette? Is that really you? The celebrity herself deigns to call her old uncle, huh?’
‘Celebrity? What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe just that little piece about my “mystery niece.” Apparently your new boyfriend is rather fashionable, and so his, um, conquests are often recorded for posterity within the Scoop’s highly journalistic pages. Did you not see it?’
‘My boyfriend? You’re referring to the illustrious Philip Weston, I’m guessing?’
‘Indeed I am, darling, indeed I am. Not exactly what I had in mind when I encouraged you to get out there and meet someone, but what do I know? I’m just an old man, living vicariously through his beautiful young niece. If you find that whole British trustafarian thing appealing, well, then, far be it from me to say otherwise. …’
‘Will! I should think you of all people would understand that you can’t necessarily believe everything you read in the papers, you know? It didn’t exactly happen like that.’
‘Well, darling, since you seem to be a bit late to the game, everyone’s been reading Ellie Insider lately. She’s surely a conniving little wench, but she does always seem to have the scoop. Are you telling me you didn’t go home with him? Or that it was a different new Kelly hire? Because if that’s true, then I’d recommend having that corrected as soon as possible. I’m not sure that’s the reputation you’d be looking to create for yourself.’
‘It’s complicated’ was all I could manage.
‘I see,’ he replied quietly. ‘Well, look, it’s certainly none of my business. As long as you’re enjoying yourself, that’s really all that matters. See you at brunch on Sunday. We’re in prime pre-holiday wedding season, so I imagine there’ll be some real winners in Sunday’s announcements. Wear your snarky shoes, darling.’
I’d agreed, but I felt unsettled. Something had changed – or shifted, at least – and I couldn’t quite pinpoint it.
‘Hey, Bette, over here,’ Penelope called a bit too loudly as she settled up with the cabdriver and waved to me from the backseat.
I waved. ‘Hi! Right on time. Elisa and crew are already here, but I didn’t want you to have to come in alone.’
‘Wow, you look great,’ she said, putting a hand on my hip and examining my outfit from head to toe. ‘Where’d you find clothes like that?’
I laughed, pleased that she had noticed. I’d only been working at Kelly & Company for a month, but it was long enough for me to get sick of looking like I was always dressed for a funeral. I’d thrown my drab suits in the back of my closet, ripped a couple pages out of Lucky and Glamour, and made a beeline for Barney’s. Standing at the register, I’d mentally added up the years it was going to take to pay for all this stuff and then bravely handed over my credit card. When the salesperson gave it back, I could have sworn it was warm to the touch. In one afternoon I’d managed to kiss both dorkiness and credit health good-bye.
While it wasn’t exactly couture, I was pretty happy with my new look: Paige Jeans that cost more than all my monthly bills combined; a silky, lace-lined lingerie top in kelly green; a tweedy, fitted blazer that didn’t match anything but which the salesman, Jean-Luc, had declared ‘ravishing’; and the classic Chanel clutch Will had bought me for my twenty-first birthday because apparently ‘it’s criminal to pass into womanhood without a single designer paving your passage. Welcome to what I hope will be a long life of shallow consumerism and brand worship.’
I had worked at CWK for five years, slaving away for eighty hours a week. Since I’d never had any time to spend money, I’d managed to build a little nest egg without really trying. After eight weeks of unemployment and one afternoon at Barney’s, that nest egg had been seriously compromised, but my ass had never looked better in denim. Standing outside Sanctuary among the thin and beautiful people, I felt like I belonged. It had been worth it.
‘Hi there,’ I said, hugging Penelope’s tiny frame. ‘Do you like it? It’s my “I’ve never been remotely cool but I’m trying real hard to be so now” look. What do you think?’
‘I think you look hot,’ she said, forever the good friend. ‘Is someone planning on seeing a certain English deity this evening?’
‘Hardly. I don’t think Philip Weston calls girls who don’t immediately fall into his bed with their legs spread. Actually, I don’t think he calls girls who do, either. Whatever. He’s beautiful, but he was unbelievably arrogant and full of himself.’
‘And no one likes that, of course,’ Penelope said with mock seriousness.
‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘Come on, everyone else is inside and it’s freezing. Let’s go in.’
‘Have you seen this line? What’s going on here tonight? You’d think they were handing out free lap dances or something.’
‘I don’t know too much except that it opened last night and is supposed to be the ultimate exclusive place, sort of a VIP room on steroids. Kelly wanted us to check it out in case it actually does live up to the hype. If it becomes the new place, we’ll already have it booked for the Playboy party.’
Kelly & Company had been commissioned by Playboy over a year ago to put on the Manhattan portion of their never-ending Fiftieth Anniversary celebration, which would start in Chicago in January and eventually end in a blowout at the mansion in Los Angeles in March, making stops in Vegas, Miami, and New York along the way. It was going to be a massive undertaking – definitely our biggest project to date, and it pretty much dominated every workday. Kelly had gathered us around the day before to change the number on the countdown board to 164 and then asked for updates. The List Girls were already running simultaneous searches on all A- and B-list celebs, preparing to construct a final winning group. Meanwhile, the rest of us spent half of each day fielding calls from every imaginable person in every sector of the city looking to wrangle invitations and request invites for themselves, or clients, or both. Combine all the anticipation with Hef’s paranoid insistence that all details (including – but not limited to – location, date, time, and attendees) be kept lockbox-quiet, and we had the recipe for total chaos.
‘I looked it up on Citysearch today. They quoted the manager as saying they expected the clientele to be “upscale creative,” which I sort of thought applied more to menus than people, but what do I know?’ Penelope sighed.
I’d recently begun to understand that the concept of exclusivity was an organizing principle of life in Manhattan. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the sheer concentration of people on such a tiny island. New Yorkers instinctively compete for everything from taxis at rush hour to seats on the subway to Hermès Birkin bags to Knicks season tickets. Impenetrable co-op boards take years to navigate. Icy hostesses at the city’s most desirable restaurants haughtily demand reservations six months in advance. ‘If they let you in without a hassle,’ people say, ‘it’s probably not worth going.’ Since the days of Studio 54, and probably long before (if there even were nightclubs before then), club-goers have made getting into trendy nightclubs a competitive sport. And at the chicest