I march back into Cornelia’s dressing room and try to sound authoritative and like I’m not lying. “Can you give me his new number? I only have his old one.”
“Get with the now, Angie, he changed it, like, six months ago.” Still gazing at herself in the mirror, Cornelia hands me her cell. “Tell him if Olivia is wearing the pink then I need to know, because I have it in the yellow, and tell him to tell me if Lauren is lying to me because I will fucking cut that bitch dead tonight.”
I nod and back out of the room while it’s ringing.
Finally, on the eleventh ring, it goes to voice mail.
“Hello, this is Angie James calling for Mr. Posen on behalf of Cornelia Pace. She has an urgent query about a dress for the Met Ball this evening. Can you please call me back?” I leave my number and hang up.
Who am I kidding? Zac Posen is never going to call me back. He doesn’t care what Cornelia is wearing. She’s not important enough.
Then I remember. Candie Stokes dresses all the top-tier socialites. And if she doesn’t dress them, she’ll still know what they’re wearing, that’s her job. And though she’d never answer a call from me, her third personal assistant sure as hell will.
So for the second time today, I call Edward.
“Edward!”
“Angie! Sweetface! Are the flowers okay?”
“They’re perfect! So perfect! But, um … I need your help again. Can you please, please call the assistant you always speak to at Candie Stokes’s office and find out who is wearing Zac Posen to the Met tonight? I know it sounds weird, but I’m with Cornelia Pace, and…”
“Ooh! I love a socialite emergency! Of course I will! But only if you promise not to move to L.A. I wanna be BFFs!”
Tears flood my eyes. He’s so lovely. But I have to leave. The chaos of working for Cornelia is a great distraction, but I know that the minute I’m alone, thoughts of Sam will lurch back into my head and I’ll just start crying again. It happened twice on the subway over here, and I looked like a total freak. I need a fresh start.
I can’t say anything, but Edward doesn’t notice. “I’ll call you in three minutes! Stand by the phone!”
As promised, three minutes later he calls back. And the news isn’t good.
I walk back into the dressing room, where Keith is now prepping Cornelia’s skin with a lymphatic drainage massage. She’s convinced it makes her cheekbones stand out.
“Cornelia, Olivia is wearing the pink. Natalie and Anna are wearing Zac, too. And I found out what all Candie Stokes’s other clients are wearing tonight.” I hand over the list. “Voilà.”
“Oh, Angie, you are the best!” She reads the list and looks up, a note of panic in her voice. “Those bitches have taken everything. I have nothing! Oh, my GOD!”
She gets up off the chair and makes a bloodcurdling wail, then sinks to the floor, her hand clutching at her hair. “ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGHH!”
I exchange a glance with Bibi and Keith, who are their usual mute passive selves. Someone needs to take charge of this situation.
“Cornelia, calm down. We can come up with a solution,” I say. “Okay, so all the big guns are gone. Let’s call someone newer. A designer who is up-and-coming.”
“I don’t want to wear up-and-fucking-coming!” Cornelia is lying on the floor, screaming into the carpet. “I want to wear Oscar de la fucking Renta! Or Armani fucking Privé! Or Atelier fucking Versace! Or—”
“What about that guy who used to do the cutting for Vera Wang?” I interrupt her before she can insert “fuck” into every couture brand in existence. “I read in Women’s Wear Daily that he just started out on his own.”
“Vera and I had a fight when she wouldn’t design my dress for junior prom the way I wanted it. I fucking hate that bitch and I hate everyone who works for her,” says Cornelia, her voice muffled by the carpet.
“Okay…” I rack my brains for a second. There’s someone else, I know there’s someone else. “Wait! I know! Sarah Drake! She worked for Narciso Rodriguez, you know?”
“I love him.” Cornelia flips over. “But he has those bitch actress groupies who always wear him.”
Man, I am tired of Cornelia calling every other woman in the world a bitch. “Well, she started her own label, Drake, about six months ago. I met her intern Philly Meyer in Starbucks when I was, uh, interviewing in the Fashion District! We’re Facebook friends! I can get in touch with her in ten minutes.”
Cornelia looks up at me, her pale blue eyes shining with hope.
“Do it.”
And it works. By 6:30 P.M., Philly Meyer is couriering three dresses straight from Sarah Drake’s atelier on Thirty-seventh Street to Cornelia’s apartment. The dresses are on loan, for free: it’s good PR for Sarah Drake. Cornelia isn’t exactly A-list or even B-list, but anyone going to the Met Ball has fashion cachet today.
Thank God Cornelia is sample size. I guess all that coke is good for something.
She tries each dress, one by one, and parades out in front of Bibi, Keith, and me.
The first dress is called, according to the Sarah Drake–branded name tag that came with the delivery, The Bettina. It’s pale pink and strapless, making her look like an upside-down tulip, and not in a good way. It would be perfect on someone edgier, but not Cornelia. She’s too white-bread.
“Amay-zing!” sing Bibi and Keith. Jeez. So not true.
“No. A bit garden-y,” I say. Cornelia nods obediently and takes the dress off. She trusts my opinion? That’s a surprise.
The second dress is called The Shadow. It’s black, sleeveless, and divinely dramatic with a high neck, but her shoulders aren’t broad enough to carry it off, so it just sort of hangs down from her face, making her look like a bat-nun hybrid.
“Ohmygod!” chorus Bibi and Keith.
“No good for photos,” I say. “Drowns your body.”
Again, Cornelia nods and obeys.
The third dress is called The Angel. And it’s just right. It’s an ivory column dress, extremely fitted with angular, slightly futuristic details, and elongates Cornelia’s figure perfectly, giving her an elegance and class that, between you and me, she sure as hell doesn’t possess in real life. She looks like Grace Kelly, if Grace Kelly was in Blade Runner.
“Wow! Like, wow!” Bibi and Keith are orgasmic with joy.
“That’s stunning,” I say. “Shoes?”
“I want to wear the Louboutins,” Cornie says, looking at me slightly pleadingly, like I have to give her permission. I glance down: they’re burnished gold and absolutely beautiful.
“Fine. Bag?”
Cornelia promptly opens drawers containing over fifty evening bags. But none of them work. They’re all the wrong color, too big, too last season, too shiny, too tacky …
“I can run to Christian Louboutin,” I say. “Give me ten minutes—”
“Your clutch!” Cornelia interrupts. “The gold clutch I saw you with in the Minetta Tavern. Where is that?”
“Next to my coat…” I say, confused. “You want to borrow my clutch?”
“Yes. It’s perfect! It’s a talking point! It’s all soft and bunchy; it’ll be perfect next to the angularity of the dress! And because it’s not a big label, I’ll look effortlessly eclectic and unassuming, like those bitches who always end up on the best-dressed lists … not like I’ve just thrown money at the whole thing, because that’s so tacky, you know?” Cornelia does her best imploring face. “Please, Angie? Please?”
“Um, okay, sure.” I grab my clutch and empty the contents into my coat pockets. “It’s yours for the night. Now, we have thirty minutes until the car gets here. Keith, work your magic. Bibi, fix the hair. Cornelia, can I get you a Red Bull?”
“You’re acting weird,” Cornelia says a few minutes later, as she’s having foundation painstakingly brushed into her pores.
“I am?” I say. I’m crouched on the floor next to her, rearranging the two rejected dresses in tissue paper so they can be returned crease-free. “How?”<
br />
“Maybe not weird. But you’re … I don’t know. Different. Confident. Kind of take-charge. I mean, you were confident before, but not like this.… Before, I was never sure if you’d do something I asked you to do, or just walk away.”
“Ha,” I say. Without any mirth whatsoever.
“I guess you should never underestimate the life-altering power of a little scandal, huh?” Cornelia raises an eyebrow at me knowingly, then glances at her phone as she gets a text. “Oh, for fuck’s sake … It’s Roger. Some family crisis. He’s going to have to meet me there.”
“Family problem?”
“His son.” My heart stops for a second. Sam? “He’s going for some big job at a bank. Roger wants to have a drink with the chairman, to try to win him the job.”
That’s pretty obnoxious. And she definitely can’t mean Sam. So maybe he does have a brother.
“How old is his son?”
“Twenty-five, twenty-six, I don’t know. His name is Pete,” she says, then lowers her voice. “Rog actually has two sons, but the other isn’t talking to him.”
Sam! My Sam! I mean, not my Sam, but, oh never mind.
“No kidding. Why?”
“I don’t know. Something to do with the ex-wife. She was a fucking hippie, apparently. Always taking the boys to South America or Africa or whatever to do volunteer work. So pretentious. Just throw a fund-raiser, you know?”
“Right on…” I say, staring into space. So Sam is the product of a genuinely philanthropic mother and an overachieving, overbearing father. Huh. “Is, uh, the other kid a banker, too?”
“Nah. He’s traveling the world, finding himself, or something ridiculous like that. I think he wanted to be a doctor, but Rog wanted him to go into finance or law, something normal, you know? So they had some big fight.”
Who the fuck wouldn’t want their kid to be a doctor?
Suddenly, I remember something Cornelia said before she started talking about Sam’s father. Something that didn’t make sense.
“What did you mean before? When you said ‘the life-altering power of a little scandal’?”
“I just mean … you know, Angie.” Cornelia lowers her voice, as though Keith weren’t standing four inches away from her applying individual eyelashes to her eyelids. “The bar. The tape.”
I look up at her, totally confused. “What bar? What tape? What are you talking about?”
“The tiny secret bar in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s called Angie’s Secret. They play the sex tape in the bathroom the whole time. I heard about it from that little sleazebag, what’s his name, that guy you hang around with? Steven, or Stef—”
But I’m not listening anymore. Instead, I’ve grabbed my coat and am heading straight for the door, every part of my brain and body and soul blazing with fury.
The Soho Grand night.
Now I know what happened.
CHAPTER 40
“That evil little fuckwit. We’ll destroy it, okay? And cut his balls off. I’ll be in Manhattan in half an hour. Don’t kill anyone until I get there.” Pia hangs up without waiting for a response.
Which is lucky, since I’m not sure I could say anything more right now. I just told Pia the truth about the Soho Grand night, about not remembering anything and waking up with three thousand dollars in an envelope. Pia, being Pia, didn’t seem shocked at all. She just loaded her metaphorical shotgun and is coming with me to the bar to reclaim the tape.
I’m striding up Hudson, my face burning, my pulse racing, my stomach churning with an almost overwhelming need to vomit, or pass out, or scream.
There’s a sex tape of me, taken when I was too out of it to know what the fuck I was doing.
Which means I had sex with—well, with someone—in the Soho Grand that night, and he taped me.
It’s playing in that secret bar under the café in Hell’s Kitchen.
They called the bar Angie’s Secret in the end. After me.
Just like I asked them to.
I wonder who it was. Maybe it was one of the guys I met that night, one of the bar owners … Busey. Or Emmett.
Suddenly, I have a flashback to being in the back of a cab with Emmett. He gave me a keybump of coke. And then he kissed me. I remember tongue. Lots of tongue.
Yes. It was him.
Oh God. I am overcome with a sickening shame. I feel like I’ve lost something I can never get back. I wonder what I did on the tape, how bad it was … I mean, it shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Everyone has sex! The existence of the human race is testament to the fact that everyone has sex. And every low-level celebrity and reality TV star has a sex tape. Hell, I’m pretty sure most of them make a sex tape to try to boost their fame quotient. They would probably just shrug this off. Or be proud of it, even.
But I’m not like that. I don’t want fame. I don’t want notoriety. I never did. I just want a job that will be the start of a real career and a life of which I can be proud. I’m fed up with people taking advantage of me, and yeah, maybe it’s partly my fault for being immature and thoughtless and making so many stupid decisions.
But enough is enough.
As I argue with myself in my head, I’m marching through the West Village. The sky is getting dark, and this is postcard New York in April: beautiful buildings with yellowy lighting in the windows cut out against the dusk sky, trees kissing overhead, the twilight making everything magical. Everyone is walking home from work, thinking about their careers and love and sex and food and family and money and fashion and fun and all the things that New Yorkers are obsessed with.… God, I love it. I don’t want to leave.
So what do I want? I keep walking until I reach the cobblestoned Meatpacking District, which reminds me of being in New York when I was about nineteen and dancing on chairs in those Sunday brunch places. I would so not do that now. I don’t want that life. That’s just not who I am anymore.
So who am I?
I feel like I’m still trying to find out.
My phone rings again. It’s Pia.
“Where are you?”
I look up. “Thirteenth and Ninth?”
“Stay there.”
A couple of minutes later, Pia comes zooming around the corner in Toto, her pale pink SkinnyWheels food truck, and screeches to a halt on the cobblestones in front of me.
Julia is next to her in the front seat. She opens the door and quickly climbs out of the truck.
Our eyes meet, and I feel, if it’s possible, even sicker with apprehension. “Hi, Julia…”
“Angie, thank you for the flowers,” Julia says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I think it’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
I start laughing despite myself, feeling momentarily filled with relief. “Oh, Jules. I am so sorry I hurt you. I swear it wasn’t deliberate.”
“You didn’t, not really,” she says, leaning in for a hug. “Angie, the date with Sam was a total washout. There was no, I don’t know, connection, no sexual tension; I knew it was a failure … but I wanted him to like me anyway. I wanted it so badly. I’m just tired of being single.”
“I understand,” I say. “I’m just tired of being me.”
Julia smiles. “Let’s go nail these assholes, shall we?”
“Yes,” I say. “God, yes.”
I climb into the truck, next to Pia, and Julia climbs in after me. Pia reaches back and knocks twice on the hatch behind her head. A double knock comes right back. I frown quizzically at her.
“Maddy and Coco,” she says. “They’re hiding back there. It’s kind of illegal, but you know, they really wanted to help.”
“Oh, my God, you guys are the best. I don’t deserve this,” I say. “Did Pia tell you? About the Soho Grand night? About the money?”
“I did,” says Pia. “I hope that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay,” I say. “I don’t want any more secrets from you guys. You must think—”
“We think you’re our friend, and bad shit happens, and we�
��re going to fix it,” says Julia. “We’re all in this together.”
We smile at each other for a second, then she reaches down and turns on the radio. After a few seconds of loud static, it starts playing Blondie’s “One Way or Another.”
“Toto has such great taste in theme songs,” says Pia, patting the steering wheel approvingly.
By the time we get to Westies, at the corner of Tenth and Forty-sixth, screaming along to the radio the whole way, I’m feeling better. I can do this. With the girls by my side, I can do anything.
We get out of Toto and stand in a group on the sidewalk for a moment.
“I can never thank you enough for this,” I say. “You must think I’m an idiot.”
“I promise we don’t,” says Madeleine. “And personally, I think you should question whether this was sex with consent.”
“I don’t think we’ll know without watching the video,” I say. “And I don’t want to.”
“We’ve all been drunk, and we’ve all had sex, we’ve all made mistakes,” says Julia. “Could have been any one of us.”
“It could easily have been you since you have, in fact, made a sex tape, and you weren’t even drunk,” points out Pia.
Everyone gasps, and Julia shrugs. “That was a long time ago, P-Dawg. My experimental phase. And I destroyed the evidence, anyway. It won’t, like, pop up when I run for president.”
Madeleine cracks up. “You had an experimental phase?”
“Enough!” says Pia. “Let’s focus on the problem at hand.”
“I’m focused.” Coco makes a snarling sound. “Let’s get these fuckers.”
The five of us stalk into the café, all trying to look as angry and mean as we can, past the greasy counters and ancient cupcakes. I open the door at the back of the room and we march down the old cabbage-y stairwell, past the velvet curtain, and into the bar.
It’s been weeks since I was last here, the night that started with a bad mood and a bad friend and ended in … blackout. But it feels like a lifetime ago.
Love and Chaos: A Brooklyn Girls Novel Page 25