Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  Charlie introduced him to me as Anthony Palfrey. “Anthony came down from Cambridge last month,” Charlie said. “He turned down an internship in the medieval wing of the British Museum to chase down third-rate celebrities for us, so you see, we’re quite an estimable organization.”

  “He may be clever,” Rebecca said, playfully wagging a finger at the recent arrival, “but I wouldn’t trust him as far as he can see without his specs. You can safely assume that everything he tells you is complete rubbish.”

  Anthony seemed uncomfortable with Rebecca’s banter and quickly turned to Charlie and, with a little military salute, said, “Right. Sir, I have the information you requested, which is as follows: Britain measures approximately 90,000 square miles to Texas’s 269,000 square miles. That would be a difference of, let’s see, roughly three hundred percent.”

  “Blast,” said Charlie. “I suppose I misheard, then. But what about France, what are those dimensions?”

  “Don’t know, sir,” Anthony said in the same playful pseudo-military manner. “Didn’t specify France, sir.” Then, when neither of his superiors was looking, he flashed me a secret smile, as if to convey that we were the two sane people in the room. “Shall I orientate our young recruit then?” he asked Charlie.

  “You could do, yes, that’d be most helpful indeed,” the editor said to his young employee. “Photocopy all relevant paperwork and pass it along to Rebecca when you’re done.” He turned to me. “We’ll have you sorted in no time.”

  I followed Anthony past the reception area and elevator bank, into a large, room with cubicles cramped like chicken coops. Several stringy-haired girls in garish Mardi Gras outfits stared as Anthony and I passed them on our way to the Xerox machine.

  “Don’t mind old Becky,” my new friend whispered along the way. “She’s a bit competitive, that’s all. Dislikes all females under the age of seventy-five, I reckon.”

  I looked around the office. “That would mean she doesn’t like anybody here.”

  “Indeed not. It’s not all bad. She saves a bundle on Christmas cards every year,” Anthony responded. “But don’t lose sleep over it; she’s harmless. Just a little sad.”

  “Your passport, mademoiselle?” he said when we got to the copy machine. I gave it to him, and he wasted no time in opening it to the photo page. He grinned at the stupid picture of me as an orthodontically challenged thirteen-year-old. God, I couldn’t wait for that stupid thing to expire.

  When the copy came out of the machine, he brought it close to his nose and sniffed long and hard, the way I’d seen Sam’s pretentious parents do with their wineglasses. “Lovely smell, don’t you think?” he asked, tipping the warm paper to my face.

  “Mmm, yes,” I said, suddenly lightheaded. The scent brought back happy memories of afternoons in Dad’s darkroom when I’d listen to Dusty Springfield while Quinn hung freshly developed photographs with clothespins.

  Anthony took a big step toward me and stretched forward to reach the cabinet above my head. “Sorry about this,” he said politely, rising on his tiptoes and angling a few inches nearer. He was so close I could smell him, a blend of soap and cologne and maybe liquor. “Should be right up here,” he went on, fumbling around the shelf.

  I felt slightly seasick throughout this encounter. Was he pressing up against me on purpose? But then why would he, and furthermore why did I care? Why did his proximity fill me with such a nauseating blend of delight and mortification?

  “Here we are now,” he said after what felt like an eternity, coming down with a manila folder in his hand.

  Anthony had me wait in the reception area while he delivered my papers to Rebecca. In an effort to regain my composure, I eavesdropped on the receptionist’s deft handling of phone calls. “Sorry, love, I’m afraid we don’t give out e-mail addresses.” Click. “You’re welcome to send a letter to the editor. No response guaranteed.” Click. “If you don’t know the pronunciation of her name, I don’t see much point in connecting you, love.” Click.

  What did it take, I wondered, to get a phone, call put through—a secret password, a compliment on her manicure? She brightened only when a chubby, dark-haired man in army fatigues came through the door. “Ian, I was hoping you’d be in today!” the receptionist cried, ignoring the ringing telephone. She drew a bank-note from her purse and handed it to the man. “I just popped round to the bank,” she said. “So do give that to Colleen, won’t you? Now I’m paid up on the cupid cardigan. I still owe her for the one I bought for my nephew, with the piglets. She’ll remember.”.

  “No doubt she will at that,” replied the man, zipping the cash inside one of his many vest pockets.

  I was hoping for more clues into this mysterious transaction when Charlie Lappin flung open his office door to admit the man.

  A few minutes later Anthony returned, heaving a big stack of magazines, which he proceeded to drop onto my lap. The topmost issue—with a neon orange headline demanding “What Happened to Joz’s Curves?”—slid onto the floor, and I picked it up with a trembling hand. I guess it was settled: there would be no political journal in my future.

  “Steady now,” Anthony said, laughing. “Don’t worry—it’s easy-peasy. I’m sure all of this twaddle is the same as yours, tomato tom-ah-to and the like. Just cast your eyes over a few issues and familiarize yourself with stars’ tragic childhoods, find out who’s shagging who. We’ll liaise tomorrow morning at half eleven.”

  I stared. Did half eleven mean eleven-thirty or ten-thirty, and how could I ask without sounding stupid?

  “On second thought,” Anthony said, “let’s make it noon. The Henley Awards are tonight, and I might be on the tiles till quite late.”

  I smiled at my new friend and told him noon. It was a time I understood, and now I had one fewer question for Lily.

  Baby Greens and Grown-Up Snogs

  OUTSIDE THE A-HA! OFFICES, THE SUN FELL soft on my bare arms. I called Dad collect from a pay phone for an update and he told me that while Mom was still furious, she no longer expected me to turn up. “You two have some real repairing to do,” Dad told me. “And it’s your responsibility to patch things up. I can only apply so many Band-Aids; I’m backing off.”

  “I completely understand,” I said quietly. I knew he was right—she was my mom—but for the moment, I was just happy to be free of the Meyerson-Cullen terrors.

  After promising Dad that I’d phone Mom once a week from London, I went strolling aimlessly around the maze of skyscrapers, past several characterless Italian cafés similar to those in Manhattan’s financial district. A kebab shop reminded me of Sam, and I wished I could conjure him—make that the old him—for a lunch date. When, after a few minutes, I spotted the familiar Starbucks logo, I couldn’t resist and went right inside. Yes, that’s right—the very first eating establishment I patronized in the United Kingdom was a Starbucks. Familiar old Starbucks, with its plush velveteen chairs and four-sided shelves of thermoses and Billie Holiday CDs. Pathetic, but still. It appealed to me right then, not least because this branch looked so much like the one my dad and I sometimes visited on Sixth Avenue.

  Once at the front of the line—possibly to go out on a cultural limb, or possibly because the name reminded me of Dad’s and my Tuesday-night pancake dinners on Barrow Street—I ordered the one unfamiliar item on the menu, a flapjack, which turned out to be a cold mound of oats and butter, like a wet, dense granola bar. I’d polished off the unexpectedly delicious treat before even taking my seat at a table next to an older man whose shirt was buttoned wrong. He slurped down a coffee drink as he read, to my horror, a pornographic newspaper. Unapologetically, and in the bright light of day, he examined a huge color photograph of two topless girls in suspenders. Then, without a glimmer of embarrassment, the man—who was wearing a wedding band and a tag that identified him as Fergus, an employee of Waitrose supermarket—idly flipped a few pages to an article on rugby.

  Confused, I squinted to read the title at the top of the page: Londo
n Morning News. So that was it, then—a newspaper with nudity. No doubt about it, this country was weird, and by no means as uniformly high-class as a lifetime of PBS miniseries had conditioned me to expect.

  With this in mind, I turned to the stacks of the magazine that now employed me. The headline splashed in hot pink across the cover of the February 9 edition promised an exclusive peek at JULES AND FRANKIE’S SECRET SNOGFEST and featured a blurry image of two silhouettes smooshed together in the back seat of a black cab. In the upper corner of the page was a headshot of a perky blonde in a low-cut equestrian costume and the quotation “How I Escaped from Rehab—Again!”

  Subsequent issues of A-ha! contained much the same type of stories: people “snogging” who weren’t supposed to be; broken wedding engagements; eating disorder denials by stars of both genders; and “Ten Steps to a Hot Bod” as relayed by a number of “Britain’s hottest sex symbols.” A few headlines recurred in issue after issue:

  COULD JEMINA BE PREGGERS?

  HONEYMOON IN CORSICA: DEVON AND DAVINA HEAT UP THE ISLES

  JOOLS’S BATTLE OF THE BULGE—WILL SHE EVER LOSE THAT CRUCIAL HALF A STONE?

  PRESTON + SPARKS = FINAL SPLIT?

  As I read, I mentally sketched rough portraits of what seemed to be the most famous celebrities, stuff like Belinda Lloyd (girl band? model?) holidays with ex-hubby Damian (recovering smack addict, entrepreneur) + son Diamond. Reunion imminent? History of depression, shoe-shopping addiction? Possibly heading up organization for orphans in Laos. Then there was Thom Thorpe (TV presenter?). Bald, many earrings & girlfriends. Poss gay sex scandal?? Loves chocolate-orange biscuits.

  After two hours of studying the magazine, I still had no idea what any of these celebrities did, or why they were famous. I had, at best, identified several characteristics common to all the so called A-listers whose photographs filled issue after issue of A-ha!: (1) They tended to be less attractive than U.S. celebrities, with personal trainers, Botox, smoothie diets, and so forth much less in effect; (2) None of them was even slightly famous in America; (3) None of them seemed to mind.

  By the time I returned to Bloomfield Road, around five, my head ached with all the trivia I’d crammed into it. Bridge House was empty when I got there; only the Foxes’ one-eyed cat, a gray longhair named Lulu, greeted me at the door. She rubbed against my ankles and circled my legs twice before allowing me to pass into the front room. Ever since their next-door neighbors’ psychotic pit bull had mauled Lulu a few years earlier—the cause of her missing eye—the Foxes had obsessively patrolled their beloved cat’s movements. I’d already been told twelve times never, ever to allow Lulu to escape outdoors. At the bottom of the stairs, I reached down to rub Lulu between her ears, thinking as I did so how perfect this summer would be if Simon, my cat in Houston, were chilling at the Foxes’ with me. Lulu was a nice girl and all, but she was too skittish for my taste—and far, far less handsome than my orange Texas tomcat.

  After rinsing Pippa’s stockings in the sink of the fourth-floor bathroom that Lily and I shared, I headed down to the TV room and parked myself in front of a marathon of Only Fools and Horses, a dated BBC sitcom about old English guys who sit around the same pub all day and discuss nothing in particular—sort of like Cheers with lower production values. All and all, a relaxing antidote to my stressful day in Docklands.

  When I opened my eyes I don’t know how many minutes later, Lily was standing above me. “There you are,” she said. “I should’ve known you’d be sleeping through a fascinating documentary on Palestinian athletes.”

  I blinked at the television screen, which showed a man pole-vaulting over an orange tree. “Oh, Lils,” I said, suppressing a yawn, “I’ve had such a tiring day.”

  “Well, guess what—it ain’t over yet! You have exactly three minutes to get ready for dinner if we’re going to take the Tube. We’re meeting Imogen and her friends at a pub in Queen’s Park.”

  “Tonight? Can’t we just stay in and order Indian food again?”

  “C’mon, Mimi, you’re going to regret not taking advantage of your visit. There’ll be plenty of time next year to play hermit. I’ll be sure to assign you lots of articles if that’s what you want.”

  I offered various objections—I was wiped out, I hadn’t changed from my interview dress yet—but Lily soon convinced me to slide back into my flats sans pantyhose. I hadn’t consumed anything but that flapjack since breakfast, and I was also curious about the Foxes’ eighteen-year-old daughter, Imogen.

  Queen’s Park was just three stations up the Bakerloo line from Little Venice, and I was surprised by how quickly we reached the appointed meeting place. Fifteen minutes after rising off the couch, I was sitting next to Lily on an improbably high barstool inside The Dove on Salusbury Road. “But I thought we were going to a pub,” I said to Lily.

  “And so we did,” she replied. “But this, Mimi, is a gastropub—meaning most of the waiters have had at least minimal dental work, and you probably won’t get food poisoning from the chips.”

  “That sounds encouraging, I guess,” I said, although I was a tad disappointed not to be at an authentically down-and-out pub like the one I’d seen on television that afternoon. Instead of having peeling grandmotherly wallpaper, plaid carpeting, and hunchbacked regulars, The Dove was sleek and spare, with communal tables and blackboards on the wall posting that night’s dinner specials, dishes like “farm-fed chicken” and “salad of baby greens.”

  I was still scoping my unexpectedly swish surroundings when a pair of girls strutted through the frosted-glass front door. Pink-cheeked and pudgy, they carried themselves with supreme confidence. I recognized the darker-haired of the girls from the photographs plastered all over the kitchen at 54 Bloomfield Road as Imogen Fox, my pseudosister for the summer. Her skin was splattered with small red dots, but her features were flawless.

  “Hello, darling!” she said when she came up to Lily. “So sorry if we’re a bit late. I was on the phone with Mum and you know how she tends to rabbit on and on.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Lily replied. “We just got here a second ago.”

  Imogen hadn’t skimped on the foundation or eyeliner, but the excess agreed with her outrageous outfit: a ruffled halter top with a bustle-like contraption and a waist separated several inches from skintight black pants possibly of suede. Her companion had dyed blond hair but was wearing a simpler ensemble of white jeans and a lime green sequined tank top.

  “Imogen tells me you only just arrived here,” Imogen’s friend said to me as the waiter showed us to our table. “How are you finding it?”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said eagerly—too eagerly. “I love it! By the way,” I said, extending my hand, “I’m Mimi. Thanks so much for coming out with us tonight—this place is awesome!” I could hear how shrill and American I sounded.

  “Lovely to meet you,” the girl said, without giving me her name in response. She took her seat at the picnic table and smiled at me pleasantly.

  “And you’re . . . ?” I had to prod. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Oh, sorry. Tunisia. Tooney for short.”

  In normal circumstances, I might’ve laughed out loud at this name. In fact, Boris and I used to make fun of his nouveau riche uncle for naming his twin sons Paris and London. In his presence, we called each other by ridiculous geographical pet names, like Zagreb and, my personal favorite, Tigris-Euphrates. But Boris seemed very far away from The Dove that evening, and as I shook Tooney’s tiny manicured hand, I found myself saying, with complete sincerity, “Wow—what a beautiful name.”

  “Bollocks,” she said brightly. “I wish my mum could’ve chosen something normal, like China or India, but she’s completely bonkers. She’s called Mary Clarke, and when she met my dad, she absolutely couldn’t wait to change her surname to Varnoozis.”

  “Yes,” said Imogen, who like Tunisia felt no need to introduce herself, “and now her two children are called Tunisia and Mirabeau Varnoozis—isn’t that mad?”


  “That’s really—” I started to say, but the two newcomers were entirely wrapped up in their own conversation.

  “Now it’s come full circle,” Tunisia said. “Beau—that’s what we call my brother—married a Sue Smith, and my boyfriend is Bob Watkins.”

  Imogen clutched her temples. “Bloody hell, can we not talk about Bob for a change? He’s dead boring. Obsessed by rugby, of all things! Absolutely not marriage material, IMHO.”

  IMHO? Imogen Must Have Olives? I shot Lily a confused look.

  “Well, in my humble opinion,” she said, translating for me, “nobody is marriage material before age fifty.”

  But Tunisia was too busy glaring at Imogen to catch Lily’s insight. “Oh, do stop banging on about it, won’t you?” she cried. “I don’t give a toss about marriage material. At least Bob doesn’t spend his weekends butchering foxes in the countryside!”

  “Alistair never makes any of the shots—he does it for the exercise and you know it!” Imogen huffed. “Incidentally, since when did you care so much about animals? Last time I checked, I was the vegetarian and you were the veal fanatic,”

  “You can stop trying to wind me up; you won’t succeed. I’d never touch veal! It’s barbaric.”

  “Rubbish—what about last week at the Wellington Rooms, after Claire’s leaving do?”

  “Yes, well, I split it with Bryony,” Tunisia admitted. “And she’d ordered it before I got there.”

  At this point in the argument, our waiter came up to take our order. With a sharp look at her friend, Imogen ordered the organic portobello sandwich and mashed potatoes. “Oh, and a half-pint of lager, if you don’t mind,” she added.

  “By the way, what’s the drinking age here?” I asked Lily under my breath. The Foxes’ laid-back attitude toward drinks with dinner seemed to extend beyond the boundaries of Bridge House.