‘I’m already crazy,’ Angie said. She pulled two mismatched mittens out of her Marc Jacobs purse to prove her point. ‘I’m working on a Saturday and I can no longer dress myself.’
‘Honey.’ I patted her on the shoulder with love. ‘There are some people who would suggest you’ve never been great at the latter. And the former is the price of success. I’ve got to work today too, remember?’
‘You’re going to the launch of a new handbag,’ Angie retaliated. ‘And it’s not even your launch.’
‘Competitor research. I have to check out what the other PR companies are up to.’
‘And get a free handbag?’
‘I gave up my freaking Saturday afternoon for this shit,’ I replied. ‘If they aren’t tossing purses around like confetti, I’m going to kick someone’s ass.’
Even though I’d spent almost all my adult life in Manhattan, nothing readied me for the bitter sting of the winter wind. I scrunched up my face, as best as the neurotoxins in my forehead would allow, and winced. My Latin blood was not meant for this shitty weather.
‘So, Thursday, what’s the plan?’
‘Come over whenever?’ Angela shrugged and wrapped a black scarf shot through with glitter round her face. ‘I’ll get food in.’
‘Angela Clark,’ I said, stamping my foot and punching her maybe a little too hard in the arm. ‘We are not talking about getting sushi and bitching out the girls on America’s Next Top Model. It’s Christmas Day. It’s me and you. It’s champagne for breakfast and dinner with our nearest and dearest and gifts that we can’t really afford because our rents are crazy, and you getting wasted and singing that dumb carol from Sleepless in Seattle over and over and over until I get just as wasted and start crying. There are traditions to uphold.’
‘And you did a fantastic job of selling them,’ she said, rubbing her arm. Huh. Maybe those Soulcycle classes were starting to pay off after all. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just mad that I’ve got to go into work and that Alex is away and all the rest of it.’
‘Your folks couldn’t come this year?’ I asked, mustering up as much sympathy as I could in sub-zero temperatures.
‘I told them not to because I thought I was going out to Japan to meet Alex,’ she said, swiping her already runny nose. It was ball-shrinkingly cold. ‘And now they’ve booked to go to The Crown.’
‘The Crown?’
‘Local pub.’
‘They can’t cancel?’
‘Clearly not.’
I knew Angie found her parents frustrating, but I would still trade hers for mine. Mine were only upstate − hardly another country − but they might as well have been on the other side of the planet for how often we spoke. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to see what they were doing for the holidays; Christmas had never been a big deal for our family. I figured they’d be off on vacation. Vacation had been their default setting since my dad had retired.
‘Okay, since you’re clearly determined to play the Grinch this year, I’m taking over,’ I announced. ‘So you leave your holly jollies with me, and I will figure out the best damn Christmas you ever did see.’
Angela raised an entirely mobile eyebrow.
‘Or, I don’t know, I’ll buy as many bottles of champagne as I can carry and we’ll have a True Blood marathon?’ I suggested, quietly smug in the knowledge that I’d already secured the best Christmas present she would ever get in her entire adorable little life.
Angela smiled.
‘Trust me,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek and squeezing her sad little shoulders in a bear hug. ‘It’s gonna be the best Christmas yet, I promise.’
*
As much of a consumer whore as I was, it was hard to get excited about a handbag launch in the week before Christmas on a Saturday afternoon. If it weren’t for the fact that my flatmate, Sadie Nixon, was being paid an obscene amount of money to walk around the room waving said handbag under people’s noses, I totally wouldn’t have been there. But she had promised me boozing and schmoozing, and (I hadn’t wanted to rub Angie’s nose in it too much) a new designer handbag of my very own if I showed up, oohed and ahhed and waited around for her afterwards.
For a relatively famous model, Sadie had huge self-esteem problems. When we’d first met, she was one of the most in-demand models in America − in the world, really − but the last year or so she’d been way more interested in taking vacations with her super-rich boyfriend. Until he unceremoniously dumped her ass three months ago for a younger model. Literally, in this case. I’d seen photos of him tramping all over town with some 22-year-old tramp from a Pharrell video, and there was no one on earth who could spin that into a positive story, not even me. Now she was taking every job she could get and hanging onto me like a limpet. Oh, the joy.
No one could have called the room at the St Regis crowded, but given the weather and the time of year, I was pretty impressed that anyone had shown up. Unless they’d all been lured in by the promise of a free purse. Shimmying out of my fur-trimmed parka (I hadn’t bothered to ask whether it was real or faux in the store, and now I loved it so much I was scared to know the answer), I peeled off my blood-red leather gloves as the coat-check girl handed me a ticket. According to the quick glance in my powder compact in the cab, my eyeliner was still in place, my nude lipstick hadn’t smudged all over my face and my olive complexion glowed from the wind-whipping it had taken. On the whole, I was a pass. Smiling graciously, I tossed the coat-check coupon into my bag, never to be seen again, and surveyed the room.
‘Jenny, darling!’
Death and taxes may be the only certainties in life, but in PR we add the absolute certainty of running into the last person you ever want to see as soon as you walk into a launch. And you can kinda bet your house on them calling you ‘darling’. It’s PR speak for ‘I fucking hate you’.
‘Carrie Anne!’ I broadened my beam, narrowed my eyes and returned her two air kisses. ‘Darling.’
Carrie Anne Roitfeld was one of the luckiest women in New York City. Born tall and skinny, but not nearly as blonde as she appeared to be today, the story went that she was modelling in Paris when she met Michel Roitfeld and fell madly in love at just nineteen. Five years later, she divorced her husband and returned to New York with an impressive last name, a veneer of French sophistication and a sense of entitlement like you wouldn’t believe. While it would never have worked on me, she spent ten years dropping her name and forgetting to pick it up at pretty much every PR company in the city until she stacked up a big enough roster to bust out on her own. If Sadie had told me this was a CAR PR event, I wouldn’t have got my ass out of my snuggie this morning.
She could squeak out as many ‘Je ne sais pas’ as often as she liked − I’d done my research, I knew the truth. Modelling equalled waiting tables, and sure she married a guy called Michel Roitfeld, but the real reason she didn’t like to talk about her former in-laws wasn’t out of tactfulness, it was because anyone who knew how to enter a name into Google would figure out he wasn’t in any way, shape or form related to Carine Roitfeld from French Vogue. Not that she ever said he was, but she never said he wasn’t. An asshole, maybe, but she was pretty smart. And that’s what made her so dangerous.
‘I didn’t see your name on the list,’ she said, pulling away and leaving me choking in a cloud of Viktor & Rolf perfume. ‘I’m so happy you could be with us.’
‘Yeah, you know I live with Sadie, right?’ I replied, eyeing her up and down as surreptitiously as possible. Know thy enemy. ‘Nixon? The model?’
‘Oh,