Overnight Socialite

by Bridie Clark

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Day One, 7:12 AM

  Day Two, 2:54 PM

  Day Three, 12:24 PM

  Day Four, 4:52 PM

  Day Five, 10:43 AM

  Day Six, 3:12 PM

  Day Seven, 1:54 AM

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  3:45 PM

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Dedicated to John

  1

  Mallory Keeler, Editor in Chief

  Invites you to celebrate the launch of

  Townhouse

  The Magazine

  December 2nd

  7 PM

  Doubles

  783 Fifth Avenue

  Dress to be photographed

  Wyatt, sweetie, please! I can’t breathe if you’re mad at me!” Wyatt Hayes IV lit his Dunhill, struggling to keep the expression on his face placid. The girl in front of him—stunning, lithe as an island cat, eight years his junior—looked to be in almost as much discomfort as she deserved. And true enough, as the party music throbbed and the extravagant crowd milled around them, she did appear to be moments away from hyperventilation.

  Her name was Cornelia Rockman. Dark blonde hair, green eyes fringed with dark lashes, the most adorable nose money could buy. Maybe you’ve heard of her. If you’d been dragged to the launch party for Townhouse, as Wyatt had, you couldn’t miss her photograph. She beamed smugly from the new magazine’s inaugural cover, which was on display around the posh private club—and the city, for that matter—in poster-size blow-ups, like a portrait of a Renaissance patron saint. Which goes to show how deceptive looks can be.

  “I’m sorry, Wy! I said I was sorry.” Cornelia dropped her voice to a low whisper. “I barely even know Theo. Daphne—my publicist—just told me to stand next to him for a few photos. I’ve got to boost my image a little if I want that Badgley Mischka campaign. It’s not enough to show up to parties wearing pretty dresses!”

  Boost her image? Her goddamn image was already plastered all over Manhattan, the anorexic little . . .

  Wyatt took his time exhaling. He pulled down on the lapel of his festive velvet blazer. With every passing second of silence, Cornelia’s chiseled face grew more contorted with anxiety. Wyatt studied the burning tip of his cigarette. (Only he could get away with indoor smoking, which is why he maintained the habit.)

  “Please say something!” she pleaded.

  What was there to say? He could no longer look the other way as his girlfriend devolved into a lowbrow celebutante. If Cornelia wanted to degrade herself for publicity, popping up next to other men on the red carpet like a human whack-the-weasel game, he certainly wouldn’t be waiting on the sidelines.

  “No big deal, Corn,” Wyatt finally answered, using a nickname she loathed. He was sick of watching Cornelia’s eyes flit around the room; she was so worried that other people were noticing the tension between them. Her need for approval exhausted him. “I’ve got an early start tomorrow. I’m going to call it a night.”

  “Call it a night? But you just got back from Zimbabwe, I haven’t gotten to see you yet—”

  “Tanzania,” he corrected.

  “Tanzania! I meant Tanzania! What about tomorrow?” She lowered her chin to give him her most kittenish look. “I could come over—”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. He kissed her dewy cheek in the most perfunctory way, and walked away, ignoring the throng of supercharged socialites and social wannabes who nodded or waved for his attention as he slipped by.

  If the economy was tanking, if the nation was at war, if the world was teetering on the brink of devastation, you’d never know it from the women at Doubles, Wyatt thought. The club was a teeming garden of cocktail dresses that night: red Valentinos, green Pradas, pink and gold Oscar de la Rentas, and on the more exotic flowers, a smattering of Cavallis in swirling blue and purple. Bright Young Things waiting to be plucked, so to speak, by a man like Wyatt Hayes IV. They’d arrived decked out in their great-grandmother’s jewelry, hoping their presence at the right party would be documented on Parkavenueroyalty.com the next day—or even better, in the pages of Townhouse, the much hyped new magazine. These were beautiful girls. Not just stylish—sexy, too. But tonight, Wyatt just shrugged past them.

  Striding into the gilded foyer, past the incongruous five-foot jar of jelly beans, Wyatt could still see the shocked, nearly tearful expression he’d left on Cornelia’s face. Good. At least there was that.

  Upstairs and outside, the air was thick with imminent rain. Standing under the gold awning, hunched in his raincoat against the cold, Wyatt could hear his pulse in his ears. If he were a different kind of man, a barroom brawl would be just the thing right now. He felt like shoving someone. He felt like throwing all his weight behind a punch.

  Cornelia had been contrite, but that was only because he’d gotten angry. Her remorse didn’t erase the fact that she’d slipped away from Wyatt a moment before being photographed by Patrick McMullan and the pack, only to pop up next to Theo Galt, the hotshot son of private equity billionaire Howard Galt. Not that Wyatt wanted to mug for the camera himself—he avoided it whenever possible. He just didn’t appreciate his girlfriend seizing a photo op with another man.

  Striding past the typically esoteric Christmas display in the Barneys storefront, Wyatt tried chalking up the slight to Cornelia’s addiction to attention, to be expected in a woman desperate to be the reigning hen in the chicken coop that was the Upper East Side. He had no real attachment to Cornelia, he reminded himself, even though he had been seeing her regularly for many months. True, she’d won the approval of Wyatt’s mother, the queen of hauteur, and that was not a hurdle many of his ex-girlfriends had cleared. (Not that Mrs. Hayes had particularly warm feelings for Cornelia. She simply knew her parents from Palm Beach and felt comfortable that a Rockman heiress wouldn’t be after her son’s fortune.)

  True, Cornelia was a knockout—the tawny hair, the flawless skin, the pouty lips, the size-two body. In appearance and carriage, she was a thoroughbred, and Wyatt relished how good they looked together. They were the alpha couple in any room. At least, that’s how he’d always seen it. Obviously she felt otherwise.

  He’d even made a stop at Harry Winston that afternoon to pick out an early Christmas present: a classic diamond tennis bracelet, set in platinum. It would go back tomorrow.

  Wyatt Hayes IV wasn’t feeling heartbroken. What he felt was worse than heartbreak. Though he’d never stoop to admit it, even to himself in the darkest hours of the night, Wyatt felt humiliated.

  In all his thirty-seven years, he’d always been the bigger, better deal, the sleekest lion in the pride, the kind of man that any woman—whether she was a socialite, heiress, It girl, model, actress, or some hyphenate hybrid—would ditch her date for. Indeed, it had happened countless times,
some young woman locking in on him across a crowded room despite the man at her elbow. Women, for as long as he could remember, had been primed to look him in the eye, listen to him, and take him seriously.

  And why wouldn’t they? He was tall, aristocratically handsome, tops at tennis and squash, a member of the best clubs, the proud descendant of Mayflower bluebloods, cutthroat robber barons, and more than one dead president. He was also—as someone outside his own social set might put it—massively loaded.

  But most important, he was a respected scholar, a Harvard man . . . a thinker! Maybe his career had more or less stalled for the past five years, but he’d always have those three prestigious letters—Ph.D.—anchoring his good name. Hadn’t Quest referred to Wyatt as “the world-renowned biological anthropologist and New York’s most eligible bachelor”? They most certainly had—he had the clipping to prove it.

  So what if he was going a little gray at the temples? He was Wyatt Hayes; aging shouldn’t matter.

  But now he couldn’t help but worry. Since when did his girlfriend trade up for photo ops? Cornelia hadn’t even attempted to coax him into a shot. She’d been too eager to share the frame with twenty- something Theo, with his slicked-back hair and gleaming, bonded smile. It was a terrifying shift in the natural order. Wyatt knew a lot about the natural order; he’d spent his adult life studying it. The young lioness knew when to move over from the aging head of the pack to the up-and-coming male. Had Cornelia just done the same?

  The game was changing; he couldn’t deny it. Take Southampton, studded with McMansions, brand-new Bentleys, and various arrivistes waving their wealth like nautical flags—the place felt utterly transformed since his youth. Uproars in the economy had separated the bulls from the steers, and the bulls that survived were hardier, fiercer, tougher to ignore. The socialites were far worse. Unlike their predecessors—well-bred, civic-minded young ladies—the current “socials” were self-serving, calculating, press-hungry parasites. Their sense of responsibility had disappeared along with the Botoxed wrinkles on their foreheads—replaced with a hunger for fame. Vanished was any notion of contributing to the public good, of using one’s position of privilege for something loftier than buying shoes or selling handbags. The new socialite grabbed as much spotlight as she could. She took, and took, and took. And now, with her picture plastered on Townhouse, Cornelia was the poster girl for a world gone wrong.

  Wyatt stared through the window of the Hermès store, bitterness etched across his face. He wished life could be as it once was.

  Maybe his friend Trip was around. Wyatt needed a drink, or several.

  Leaving Cornelia whimpering at Doubles had left him feeling empty and alone. Something deep inside Wyatt—as well as something shallow—demanded that he make his world right again.

  2

  You’re invited to attend

  Nola Sinclair’s Holiday

  Resort Collection

  Wednesday, December 2nd

  The Armory

  643 Park Avenue

  Show begins promptly at 8 PM.

  This invitation is nontransferable.

  At exactly seven o’clock, Lucy Jo Ellis emerged slightly breathless from the East Sixty-Eighth Street subway stop. It would have been better to arrive fashionably late, but she couldn’t bear to sit home a minute longer. Not when the biggest night of her life lay ahead of her, wrapped up in shiny paper like the most fabulous gift ever.

  Her big break had come that afternoon, when one of Nola’s assistants—Clarissa, the red-haired one never seen without a Starbucks double espresso clutched in her white-knuckled fist—had come sprinting into the workroom, waving the extra invitation. Lucy Jo dove on it before anyone else could. “Take it easy,” Clarissa had muttered. “Just get there on time, okay?”

  Nola Sinclair—technically her boss, although Lucy Jo was such a peon that the designer never bothered to offer eye contact—had decided to create a show around the collection she’d unveiled to buyers and press the previous spring, adding a few new pieces, in order to take advantage of the way the city was done up for the holidays and to drive some more press. The collection was just arriving at the hippest, hautest boutiques, and the designer wanted to give it some extra buzz. No expense had been spared in transforming the inside of the Park Avenue Armory into the world’s largest igloo, with a clear plastic runway customized to look like ice. Nola had wanted the real thing, and pouted for weeks when her father—the sole investor in her company since its inception—deemed it too dangerous for the models. Silvery cocktail tables had been set out for the glitterati, with a mink muff (theirs to keep, of course) waiting on each tufted white leather seat.

  All this Lucy Jo had garnered from trade rags, gossip columns, and at the watercooler. Now she’d be seeing the spectacle in person.

  Too bad she hadn’t gotten the nod just a day earlier—then she could’ve whipped up a one-of-a-kind creation that really showed her design chops. As it was, she’d barely had time to slice-and-dice a flamingo pink chiffon gown (Loehmann’s, $19.99) into a kicky little minidress, using some of the extra fabric to add a flounce at the hem. The color was a little brighter than she remembered from the store—but the whole point was to make an impression, not to blend into the sea of little black dresses.

  She squared her shoulders and marched toward the huge brick Armory on Sixty-Seventh. Tall, with a tendency to stoop, Lucy Jo had often been called big-boned. She’d never once been called beautiful, which had more to do with the people she knew than her looks.

  You can do this, she coached herself. She took a breath so deep she could feel the chiffon strain against her rib cage.

  How could she not feel nervous? Madonna was being flown in for the night. Margaux Irving, the fiercely chic editrix famous for her withering stare and influence throughout fashion’s highest echelons, had RSVP’d yes and was bringing along Roger Federer. The glossy posse, comprised of the chicest girls from the chicest magazines, would be present and accounted for, along with everyone from Uma to the Olsens. And now Lucy Jo Ellis—the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a manicurist from Dayville, Minnesota; assistant patternmaker in a packed Garment District workshop that always reeked of BO and Funyuns; and aspiring designer—would be there, too. Fêteing with the best of ’em. And with any luck, landing that coveted job doing creative design work . . . the job that narrow-minded Nola Sinclair refused to consider her for.

  How did it happen, Ms. Ellis? Lucy Jo could imagine some deferential fashion reporter asking her years from now. How did you go from being an anonymous worker bee to one of the most influential designers in the history of the industry?

  And Lucy Jo would sit back in her chair, tickled by the memory of her humble start. She would recall her early days spent huddled over a crowded worktable, barely looking up until she sensed that her fellow workers had gone home. Only then could she pull out her design portfolio, diving into the sketches that would one day thrust her to the center runway of American fashion. She would tell the reporter how some nights she could feel the folds of lustrous silk run through her fingers, so real was the illustration she’d painstakingly created.

  Then, of course, she would fondly recount the night she was about to experience, the turning point in her career. “I always knew,” she’d tell the admiring reporter, “that it was just a matter of time before my life caught up with my dreams.”

  And she had, truly, always known. Growing up in a small town two hours outside Minneapolis, Lucy Jo Ellis had harbored a secret belief that life would deliver on its big promises. Fashion had been her passion ever since she could remember; at age four, she’d pointed her little index finger at a gown in one of her mother’s celebrity magazines and declared, “Too much ruffle.” She’d started making her own clothes when she was only twelve, mimicking the trends she could never afford to buy. As a teenager, she’d memorized tattered copies of Vogue, absorbing how iconic ’90s designers such as Gianni Versace and Azzedine Alaïa glorified the female form, delightin
g in the gritty glamour of Herb Ritts’s photography. On the walls around her bed, she pinned fashion ads from the old W, and they hovered like sophisticated, angular angels over her sleep.

  After high school, with no cash for college, she’d tried working for Annie Druitt, the local seamstress. Annie was a sweet woman and enjoyed having company in her shop—but hemming pants and taking in hand-me-down prom dresses barely paid one salary, let alone two, and Lucy Jo’s big things remained at large.