‘’Bye!’ I trilled, a giant fake smile plastered on my face. The driver made a move to get out of the car and open the door for me, but I told him I was fine to let myself into the backseat. ‘The Plaza, please.’
James had been waiting for me on the stairs outside even though it couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees. He’d gone home to change and looked very, very skinny in black suede pants and a white ribbed tank top, which showed off his expertly applied midwinter bottle tan. I still looked appropriately amateurish in my Gap miniskirt.
‘Hey, Andy, how’d the Book dropping-off go?’ We waited in line to check our coats and I had immediately spotted Brad Pitt.
‘Ohmigod, you’re joking. Brad Pitt’s here?’
‘Yeah, well, Marshall does Jennifer’s hair, natch. So she must be here also. Really, Andy, maybe next time you’ll believe me when I tell you to stick with me. Let’s get a drink.’
The Reese and Johnny spottings had come back to back, and by the time one A.M. rolled around, I’d had four drinks and was happily gabbing away with a fashion assistant from Vogue. We were discussing bikini waxes. Passionately. And it didn’t even bother me. Christ, I thought, as I weaved through the crowd looking for James, flashing a giant kiss-ass smile in the general direction of Jennifer Aniston when I passed by – this isn’t a half-bad party. But I was tipsy, I had to be at work again in less than six hours, and I hadn’t been home in nearly twenty-four, so when I spotted James making out with one of the colorists from Marshall’s salon, I was just about to duck out when I felt a hand in the small of my back.
‘Hey,’ said the gorgeous guy I’d spotted earlier lurking in the corner. I waited for him to realize that he’d approached the wrong girl, that I must’ve looked the same as his girlfriend from behind, but he just smiled even wider. ‘Not so talkative, are you?’
‘Oh, and saying “hey” makes you articulate, I guess?’ Andy! Shut your mouth! I berated silently. Some absolutely beautiful man approaches you out of the blue at a party full of celebrities and you tell him off right away? But he didn’t seem offended, and even though it didn’t seem possible, his smile increased in size to an all-out grin.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered while examining my nearly empty drink. ‘My name’s Andrea. There. I think that’s a much better way of beginning.’ I stuck out my hand and wondered what he wanted.
‘Actually, I liked your way just fine. Name’s Christian. A pleasure to meet you, Andy.’ He pushed a brown curl out of his left eye and took a swig from a bottle of Budweiser. He looked vaguely familiar, I decided, but I couldn’t place him.
‘Bud, huh?’ I asked, pointing to his hand. ‘I didn’t think they served something so lowbrow at a party like this.’
He laughed, a deep, hearty laugh instead of the chuckle I’d expected. ‘You sure do say what you think, don’t you?’ I must’ve looked mortified, because he smiled again and said, ‘No, no, that’s a good thing. And a rare thing, especially in this industry. I couldn’t bring myself to drink champagne from a straw out of a minibottle, you know? Something fairly emasculating about that. So the bartender dug one of these out of the kitchen somewhere.’ Another curl push, but it fell back in his eye the moment he took his hand away. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his black sport coat and offered it to me. I took one and proceeded to drop it immediately, seizing the opportunity to examine him while I reached down to retrieve it.
It landed a few inches from his shiny, square-toed loafers that sported the irrefutable Gucci tassel, and on the way up I noticed that his Diesel jeans were the perfect parts faded, long, and wide enough at the bottom that they dragged a little behind the shiny loafers, the ends frayed from repeated interaction with the soles. A black belt, probably Gucci but thankfully not recognizable, kept the jeans riding in the perfect low spot below his waist, where he had tucked in a plain white cotton T-shirt – one that even though it easily could have been a Hanes was definitely an Armani or a Hugo Boss and was put in place only to offset his beautiful complexion. His black blazer looked just as expensive and well cut, perhaps even custom-made to fit his average-size but inexplicably sexy frame, and it was his green eyes that commanded the most attention. Seafoam, I thought, remembering the old J. Crew colors we’d loved so much in high school, or perhaps just a straightforward teal. The height, the build, the whole package looked vaguely like Alex, just with a whole lot more Euro style and a whole lot less Abercrombie. Slightly cooler, slightly better looking. Definitely older, right around thirty. And probably much too slick.
He immediately produced a flame and leaned in close to make sure my cigarette had caught. ‘So what brings you to a party like this, Andrea? Are you one of the lucky few who can call Marshall Madden her own?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. At least not yet, although he wasn’t all that subtle in telling me that I probably should be.’ I laughed, noticing for a brief moment that I was desperate to impress this stranger. ‘I work at Runway. One of the beauty guys dragged me here.’
‘Ah, Runway magazine, huh? Cool place to work, if you’re into S&M and that sort of thing. How do you like it?’
I wasn’t sure if he meant S&M or the job itself, but I considered the possibility that he got it, that he was enough of an insider to know that it wasn’t exactly how it appeared to those on the outside. Perhaps I should charm him with the nightmare involved in dropping off the Book earlier that night? No, no, I had no idea who this guy was … for all I knew he also worked at Runway in some far-flung department I hadn’t even seen yet, or maybe for another Elias-Clark magazine. Or maybe, just maybe, he was one of those sneaky Page Six reporters that Emily had so carefully warned me against. ‘They just appear,’ she’d said ominously. ‘They just appear and try to trick you into saying something juicy about Miranda or Runway. Just be aware.’ Between that and the tracking ID cards, I was quite sure that Runway’s surveillance put the mob to shame. The Runway Paranoid Turnaround was back.
‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to sound casual and noncommittal. ‘It’s a strange place. I’m not so into fashion – I’d actually rather be writing, but I guess it’s not a bad start. What do you do?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Oh, you are? That must be nice.’ I hoped I didn’t sound quite as condescending as I felt, but it got to be really annoying when anyone and everyone in New York anointed himself or herself a writer or actor or poet or artist. I used to write for the paper in college, I thought to myself, and hell, I even had an essay published in a monthly magazine once in high school. Did that make me a writer? ‘What do you write?’
‘Mostly literary fiction so far, but I’m actually working on my first historical novel.’ He took another swig and swatted yet again at that pesky but adorable curl.
‘First historical’ implied that there other were nonhistorical novels. Interesting. ‘What’s it about?’
He thought for a moment and then said, ‘It’s a story told from the perspective of a young woman, about what it was like to live in this country during World War Two. I’m still finishing my research, transcribing interviews and things like that, but the little writing I’ve done so far has come along. I think …’
He continued talking, but I’d already tuned him out. Holy shit. I recognized the book description immediately from a New Yorker article I’d just read. It seemed the entire book world was eagerly anticipating his next contribution and couldn’t shut up about the realism with which he depicts his female heroine. I was standing at a party, casually chatting with Christian Collinsworth, the boy genius who’d first been published at the ripe old age of twenty from a Yale library cubicle. The critics had gone crazy over his first book, hailing it as one of the most significant literary achievements of the twentieth century, and he’d followed it up with