Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  I introduced myself as a reporter from A-ha! which I’d assumed would please him as much as it had the Lonsdale stars I’d canvassed about their favorite prepared Marks & Spencer dinners, but Thom assessed me warily before shifting away.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, smiling gently, as I do when speaking to Boris’s little brother, Constantine. “I’m just trying to collect quotes from all the famous people here.”

  “So sorry,” Thom said curtly, “but I’m afraid I’m not really in the mood.”

  “Any old comment will do,” I pressed on. “Like, how about telling me about your worst haircut ever? We could run the quote along with a pict—”

  “Maybe next time?”

  And with that, Thom Thorpe ditched me.

  At least there was still plenty of food to console me—always a balm in moments of humiliation. After reuniting with my plate, I stood in the corner watching Thom fix himself a meal of cheese curls and licorice at the buffet table. And then a crazy thing happened. In a single, balletically smooth movement, Thom set the plate on the table and swiped three pomade jars from a display case. His eyes darting around the room, he quickly transferred the loot to his jacket pocket.

  He picked up his plate and started shoveling in the food. Why, I wondered, would a gainfully employed grownup, and a practically bald one at that, steal hairstyling products? Then again, Pia—whose parents would give her anything—had taught me that shoplifting isn’t a need-based activity.

  “Nicely done, Mimi,” Anthony said, sidling up beside me and gesturing at my empty plate. “Very postwar—waste not, want not—isn’t it though? I thought American birds were meant to eat like birds.”

  “I didn’t have lunch,” I lied. Then, to change the subject, I asked, “So, did you pick up any juicy tidbits?”

  “It hasn’t been half bad, actually,” Anthony said. He glanced at his notepad to read some of his scribblings aloud. “Ron Rampling just got back from holiday in Croatia, where he got engaged not once but twice. My God, but he’s completely mental! And oh, this one’s amusing. Sasha Entbert, the sexpot from the band Singerton, explained why she’s lucky to have such small breasts—although, if I might be so indelicate as to point out, she has nothing of the sort. And the bloke from the Subatomic Machines praised Scissors Thompson’s technique with the electric razor, likening him to Picasso.” Anthony slipped the notepad into his pocket and then asked me, “And how are you getting on? Gathering witticisms from the pasta, are you?”

  “Basically,” I said, “I’ve just been standing here watching Thom Thorpe swipe some exclusive Scissors Thompson hair-care products.”

  Anthony snorted. “Baldy Thom Thorpe nicking hair products. Wouldn’t that be fantastic!”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Check out the left pocket of his jacket. You see the blue thing sticking out? It’s ajar of pomade, and there are several more where that came from.”

  “You don’t—why, you mean to say you’re not taking the piss?” When I shook my head, he cried, “But Mimi, you’re bloody brilliant! Charlie will be absolutely over the moon. We must find Ian.”

  As Anthony pushed through the crowd to locate the A-ha! photographer, I stood there buzzing with pleasure. So what if the Thom Thorpe pomade theft didn’t exactly rank up there with my Serge Ziff scoop? I enjoyed even the minor triumphs. Thirty seconds earlier, I had been useless and conspicuous, and now, just like that, I was “bloody brilliant.”

  Ian loved it, too. As he refitted his camera with a ginormous telephoto lens, he was shaking with laughter. Meanwhile, poor Thom Thorpe, who had no idea he was under surveillance, continued to inhale pasta even as Ian zoomed in on the pilfered pomade.

  “She’s a sharp one,” Ian advised Anthony, tipping his chin my way as he screwed off the mountainous lens and returned it to one of the zippered pockets on his vest. “Watch out for her.”

  Slap and Tickle

  WHEN WE LEFT THE SALON, the sky had faded to a pale pink. “The car is this way—follow me,” Ian said, walking ahead of us at a fast clip.

  “You’ve clearly made quite the impression,” Anthony confided to me. “Ian never gives lifts to us lowly hacks. He’s left me stranded in the middle of the motorway at all hours of the night. It’s a miracle I’m still intact.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” Ian called back cheerfully. “I’m hired as a photographer, not a chauffeur.”

  “My dad’s a photographer, too, you know,” I said, though I don’t think Ian heard. We’d just turned onto a busy commercial street, and I gave a little gasp at the sight of my first Marks & Spencer. I saw none of the store’s famous Ready Meals in the window display, but one of the mannequins was wearing the underwear that, according to Rebecca Bridgewater, one-third of all women in the United Kingdom favored.

  “I prefer the sportier styles myself,” Anthony said, catching me studying the mannequin’s lacy undergarments, “but to each his own, I suppose.”

  “Ah, here she is,” Ian said, coming to a stop beside his parked vehicle, which was the transportation equivalent of his outfit: a mammoth olive green four-door pickup truck with customized tread wheels that were higher than my waist. I hadn’t seen such a large car in all of Europe, or even New York. No, Ian’s car belonged in a rap video, or on a South Texas highway.

  After he and Anthony got in the front seat, Ian reached over to open the back door for me. “This is amazing,” I said as I climbed in. “No wonder you don’t let anybody inside it.” I looked at the photograph hanging from the rearview mirror. It showed three young boys, a black poodle with red ribbons on her ears, and a woman in an elaborately decorated sweater.

  Before we took off, Anthony and Ian phoned the office to report on our unexpected success at Scissors. “He was trying to nab off with the pomade—you’ll jolly well piss yourself when you see the snaps I got,” Ian bragged to someone, while Anthony gave Rebecca Bridgewater a dressed-up account of our afternoon. “Absolutely riveting stuff,” he gushed, “better even than his tryst at the Tate Modern!”

  The ride back was short, “much better than the way out—it was chock-a-bloc on the M25, a car park, if you want the truth,” said Ian. When we entered central London, Anthony and Ian, still jubilant, seemed reluctant to bring our rollicking adventure to an end. “No victory too small for a pint,” Ian declared. “Who fancies a celebratory drink?”

  “It would be uncivilized to refuse,” Anthony said, while I just bobbed my head in agreement, pleased to have the opportunity to hang around him a little longer.

  Because we all lived in different parts of town (Ian in Peckham and Anthony in West Hampstead), Ian chose Waterloo, my transfer station just south of the Thames, as a convenient midway point. “Smashing place I know just round the corner here,” he said as he parked his massive vehicle in a tour bus lot a few blocks behind the station.

  After last night’s outing to the gastropub with Imogen, Tunisia, and Lily, I was looking forward to finally seeing a British pub of the old school, but once again I was out of luck. The Firehouse was industrial and bare, with shelves of model fire engines and large red poles every few feet. Even so, the décor turned out not to matter, for at Anthony’s suggestion, we took our beers outside and drank standing up on the sidewalk. The pavement was narrow, and sometimes we had to make room for a cluster of pedestrians or a baby carriage. In New York, drinking outside was a major no-no; here no one thought twice about it, and I enjoyed the illicit thrill of drinking on the street. Or, for that matter, drinking in public at all.

  Before I’d taken two sips of my beer, my companions had polished off theirs, and Ian volunteered to fetch refills. No sooner had he left than Anthony removed a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and began dabbing the beer dribble off his chin. “I’m frequently abused for this affectation,” he said, “but I have a sound defense: it’s passed down by my grandfather.”

  “Did you also pick up your primary-colored-socks affectation from him?” I asked playfully. Maybe because Anthony was so v
erbal, he was easier to flirt with than most guys.

  “No, that’s my own innovation. I have him to thank for the hankies and the antique map collection—little else, I’m afraid.”

  “What about the rest of your family?” I asked. “What are they like?”

  Over the past day, Anthony had taught me plenty about A-ha! and the “D-lister” set, but almost nothing about himself. I expected him, being British and all, to divert the topic, but he answered my forward question at length. He came, he told me, from a “perfectly proper” home in Richmond, a well-to-do suburb in southwest London. Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him (and probably a few more “greats”—I lost track at some point), Anthony had gone from some fancy all-boys prep school to Cambridge, where he belonged to the debate club and some eons-old secret society. “We had such larks,” he said of the latter. “Every year, we had Mrs. Mulligan’s Birthday and did everything in reverse order, with digestifs and cigars first thing in the morning and tea and toast at night.”

  But though he’d attended the same schools as his forebears, Anthony had pursued a different course of study. “My father’s a barrister,” he said, “and so are both of my brothers, and so was my grandfather, and so on through the generations. I was expected to do the same bloody boring thing myself.”

  “But you’d always dreamed of papping D-lister celebs?” I asked, proud at how almost local I sounded.

  “Hardly! I read medieval history.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Quite.” Anthony took a big breath. “I spent an unhealthy portion of my boyhood fantasizing about King Arthur’s Court. But when I came down to London, I couldn’t bear the thought of working at the british Museum with all those dusty dowagers. Not in the least like Queen Guinevere—now there’s a fit lass.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I see her doing bench presses at the gym all the time.”

  Stifling a laugh, Anthony explained that “fit” meant “attractive.” “Not solely a byproduct of bodybuilding, though I quite understand your confusion. There was disappointingly little skin in medieval history, actually. We focused more on the plague, and papal usury, and famine, and torture mechanisms, and all that sort of thing.”

  “And you must’ve learned something about chivalry, too,” I said, then immediately regretted my words. Was I that inexperienced a drinker that I became so obvious after half a pint of lager? Or was Anthony somehow, subtly and Britishly, egging me on?

  Ian trundled out of the pub clutching three pint glasses. Though I hadn’t finished my first beer yet, I accepted the frothing refill from him.

  “Need a bit of help there?” Anthony reached for the pint I’d been holding and drained it in one gulp. “So you see,” he said, proffering the empty glass, “I do know a bit about chivalry.”

  “Watch you don’t get too sozzled, big Ant,” Ian said sternly, just as a digitalized version of the Beverly Hills Cop theme erupted inside his military regalia. “Oh, blimey,” he said, pulling his cell phone from one of the many Velcro straps connected to his belt. “It’s me old wife. Again.”

  He stepped closer to the curb to take the call, leaving Anthony and me alone together again.

  “So wait, you never told me if you like A-ha!” I said to him. “Do you prefer it to working at the British Museum or being a lawyer?”

  “Need you ask?” Anthony asked lightly. “My father continues to insist I return to school and read law, but I greatly prefer bumbling about with Britain’s finest washouts.

  He broke off, ai dreamy expression filling his face as he stared past my shoulder. I turned around to follow his eyes, and there, a few feet past Ian, a petite, high-breasted blonde was striding down the street in a tulip-printed sundress and vertiginously tall platform sandals.

  Anthony was still staring when Ian snapped shut his phone and lumbered back over to us. “She’s hearing none of it,” he complained. “I took the dog out this morning and she didn’t relieve herself, yeah? So then the missus comes home to find loads of piss all over the new sofa, and who’s she blame? Not the bloody poodle, but yours truly, that’s it. She’s fit to be tied, she is. What’d she expect me to do this morning, wring out the poor sod’s bladder on the greens?” Ian busied himself zipping up various compartments on his vest, shaking his head as he said, “I must apologize, but it’s off to Peckham straightaway, before the missus changes the locks.”

  As we watched Ian dejectedly slink toward his car, I told Anthony that I should get going as well. “Oh, come on, then, we’ll have one last pint for the road,” he cajoled.

  Though my beer was still full, Anthony dashed inside for refills. Waiting on the curb, I couldn’t stop thinking about the china-doll girl he’d just ogled. Anthony couldn’t possibly be interested in her and me. Guys transfixed on five-foot-two, ninety-pound blondes didn’t tend to be all that attracted to my ungainly self.

  “Why the face like a wet weekend?” Anthony asked when he returned holding our final drinks. “Don’t tell me you’re pining for some strapping American lad—that would be altogether too depressing.”

  “N-no,” I said, too quickly. “Of course not.”

  “C’mon then, out with it,” he pursued. “You must have a boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend?” I repeated, taken aback by Anthony’s directness. Would it put him off to learn about Boris? Or would he think I was a loser if I claimed to be single? And was I single, anyway? Officially, at least, Boris and I were still going out, even if we had very different ideas of what “going out” meant. Boris had yet to reply to my momentous last e-mail, about moving to London and missing him.

  In the end, I told Anthony the truth: that the long-distance element had seriously complicated my relationship back home. Then, before he could think of any follow-up questions, I asked, “And you? Any Guineveres in your life?”

  Did I really just say that? God, I was such a loser.

  “Oh, here and there,” Anthony said, blinking at what was left of his drink. “No, honestly, there’s just one girl, Lucy. We were at Cambridge together, and have been on and off for years—you know how it goes.”

  “Totally,” I said, bobbing my head and faking familiarity with such a setup.

  “We’re off at the moment,” he said, “which suddenly strikes me as quite convenient.”

  Despite his evasive wording, Anthony’s expression left little room for interpretation. He was staring straight at me as I chortled with nervous laughter, and my cheeks turned redder than the antique fire truck inside the bar.

  To: “Ppazzolini”, “Vrock2000”, “Jessieg”

  From: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 3, 9:54 p.m.

  Subject: Change of Address/Altitude/Attitude

  Howdy! What’s new? Last I heard, Pia was caught taking her neighbor’s motorboat for a joyride and Jess finished her interborough Romeo and Juliet story. (Bravo, btw.) And Viv—how’s Oregon?

  As I think Lily already told you, I escaped Germany and am living with her in London now, though already we don’t see each other often enough. But besides that, and some guilt about my abandoned mother, life is lovely, perfectly lovely. I have a new job, new slang, and even a new crush—on my colleague Anthony (pronounced the English way: “Ant-ony”). He’s twenty and superformal in dress and vocabulary but also wicked and hilarious and CUTE. I wish you could see Lily here. Gone is the tomboyish newspaper editor we all knew—she’s very worldly all of a sudden. Tres fab. Ta-ta! Or whatever.

  xxxxxxxxxxMimi

  To: “HWYates”

  From: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 3, 11:13 p.m.

  Subject: cheers!

  Dear Harriet,

  How are you? Remember what you said when I was leaving your beautiful party? I hope you were serious about my coming out to the Hamptons. It’d be nice to hang out after my frenetic European summer. Speaking of which, I keep meaning to fill you in on my own change of travel plans. Berlin wasn’t as much fun as the New York Times T
ravel section would have you believe, so thanks to Lily, I ended up coming to London, which is confusing but wonderful. I’m learning tons—about, for example, “smoked prawn”-flavored potato “crisps” and the wonders of baked beans and fried mushrooms for breakfast. And did you know that the queen is actually only the twenty-third richest person in the country, and “Hattie” is short for Harriet? Given your name, probably. As for me, I’m working at this gossip magazine that’s, well, bizarre. Will send you a few issues from the office so you can show Ed, but don’t read them in public—topless celebs show up on many a beach spread. Some things I’ll never get used to!

  xo Mimi

  Not Quite Bagels

  WE ALL HAVE OUR TRADITIONS, even the most unpredictable and free-spirited among us. The Foxes’ ritual was Saturday lunch, although “Saturday breakfast” seemed more accurate, since it got started long before I did. My first Saturday in London, I straggled down to the kitchen wearing only boxer shorts and one of Viv’s ancient CBGB T-shirts.

  I was groggy and thirsty and ill prepared for the scene awaiting me. The entire Fox clan, Imogen included, had assembled around the kitchen table amid a jumble of newspapers and saucers and vases. “Mimi!” Pippa cried when she saw me. “We didn’t hear you come down!”