Being Audrey Hepburn

by Mitchell Kriegman

  There is no name for the luscious deep-green of the grass courts in the yellow afternoon sun at the Maidstone Club. A cooling breeze drifted through the trees as ZK diligently tried to teach me how to hit a basic groundstroke. To me the ultraexclusive golf and tennis club seemed like the ideal setting for a glass of wine. Tennis not so much.

  On the court farthest away from the clubhouse, at the edge of the hill above the pond, ZK fed me ball after ball. I hit the fuzzy yellow thing everywhere but in the court, several times forcing profuse apologies to those unfortunate people trying to play doubles nearby.

  It was more fun when we were the last ones left and the sun was setting. ZK finally abandoned any pretense of actually teaching me the game of tennis, and I just hit the ball whatever goofy way I could. I even hit a few in the court. I concocted a story about how I never learned tennis as a child because of some infantile illness. The story was so elaborate it was pointless.

  We ended up in his car, where he kissed me again. It felt so nice to be held by someone who wanted to hold me. Unbelievable, really, that it was none other than ZK Northcott, practically the most eligible bachelor in America. Was I the only one who knew the wayward boy he sheltered inside? He was a good kisser, that boy. I felt bad that I was taking him for granted.

  Back at the house, Tabitha was still sleeping so I didn’t disturb her. I decided to eek out a day or two more with ZK. I’d still have time to get back to the city for Jess’s show. I hoped that I could reach Isak and push my Tumblr and blog following and that we’d put on a pop-up show that could make a splash. I would have invited Tabitha, but there seemed to be a tacit understanding that no one should bother her. I figured I’d save her invite for the last minute before I left.

  Flo found me as I headed to my room.

  “Lisbeth, I have something for you,” she said, reaching into a giant pink straw bag. “It’s symbolic really.” She pulled out a long blue check. “You’ll probably just want to frame it.” I think my mouth was open as I read my name across the top line and the amount in the box to the side: $2,987.00. “It’s coming together much faster than I expected.” She had a mischievous, self-satisfied smile. “This advance is one of our company checks and is simply based on the tracking data. More checks will come later, but I wanted you to have some idea of what we might expect initially. A little pocket change can’t hurt, right?”

  She happily demurred to my profuse thanks, and we gossiped a bit about Tabitha. In a conspiratorial tone, she told me they had given her something to calm her down and that, as a result, she hadn’t come out of her room in days. I told her I was off for an evening with ZK. The mention of his name brought an amused smile to her lips.

  “He’s such a good boy,” she said tactfully. “It’s his family I’d be cautious of. I hear the entire Northcott family is unwinding, and that can make one do things one wouldn’t do normally. But I’m sure you can handle him.”

  Her words were still resonating in my ears later that night as ZK and I entered Nick and Toni’s for dinner. After our first glass of wine, I noticed people staring at us.

  “Is it my imagination, or are we under observation?” I asked. ZK didn’t glance up as he cut his steak, but he must have noticed.

  “I told you, being a Northcott comes with a fair amount of unwanted attention,” he said.

  Although it persisted throughout dinner, I didn’t mention it again. There was something on ZK’s mind, or so it seemed, as he was not as lighthearted as he had been earlier in the day.

  The table next to us was occupied by two couples, middle aged, very well dressed, a bit stuffy, and noticeably well-off. I couldn’t help observing the wives smirking and whispering. ZK seemed to grow more tense as the night went on, no matter what kind of small talk I made. He asked for the check at last, and I figured that would be the end of it.

  As we were leaving, one of the men at the table began talking in a voice that all the tables around us could hear. “His father should pay for the rest of his life—it’s despicable,” the man said, undeniably making a point.

  ZK pivoted, thrust the chairs out of his way, reached across the table, and picked the man up by his collar, shoving him against the wall. Silverware and plates fell to the floor.

  “Don’t you ever say a word about my father again,” ZK said, his teeth clenched. The panic-stricken man’s face was turning blue. I thought ZK would choke him or he’d have a heart attack. The maître d’ and bartender stepped in, separating them, and I hustled ZK out. It wasn’t until we got in the car and drove away that I dared ask him what was going on.

  “I apologize for my behavior,” he said. I wasn’t sure how to ask him about his family, how far to go, and what I should know. But it came spilling out of him anyway.

  “My father is in more trouble than we ever thought,” ZK said, visibly stiffening, reverting to some schooled behavior. “There are issues now for the whole family.” He said he was reluctant to go into the details, but gradually it came pouring out.

  Years ago his father had invested with Bernie Madoff and lost most of the family fortune, which was bad enough. But as time passed and many of the investigations took years to complete, it surfaced that Northcott Sr. had not only invested with the Ponzi con man but fronted the fund to many families in his social set for preferred fees in the last days of the scam. He narrowly avoided a prison term by ratting out other people he knew who had done the same thing, ruining their families as a result. The revelations were coming to light after years and years of investigations. As a result, at sixty-eight he earned the animosity of his oldest friends in New York’s Social Register.

  ZK’s mother filed for divorce to protect herself and the other children from further repercussions, and his father had withdrawn to their mansion on Gin Lane, one of the last original houses near Georgica Beach, not far from the famous Grey Gardens.

  His father had squandered the remaining family funds to pay his hefty legal fees to avoid jail, failing to pay the bank mortgage. Now the Bank of America—a bank the Northcotts helped found in 1904—had sold the land and begun the process of auctioning the actual house out from under him plank by plank. It was the house in which ZK had spent every summer of his childhood.

  56

  It was remarkable how dull Tabitha’s house had become since she remained sequestered in her room. The houseguests dwindled, including Flo and Balty. Zoya was especially happy I had decided to stay a few days. She told Tabitha, hoping that would motivate her to leave her room, but it didn’t.

  Occasional reporters would appear outside and try to gain entry, but it seemed that Robert Francis or a PR agent or someone had successfully kept a lid on the incident at the Talkhouse. It made me think that for every LiLo event we heard about on TMZ, there were at least two or three more.

  Jess was haggling with the gallery about the date, and, though she was confident they would come through, she was afraid to let me send out my eBlast. Keeping track of days passing was a challenge. Waking up at noon and staying up until four in the morning made it hard to determine where one day ended and another began.

  The next night I shared my fanciful pursuit of Donna Karan with ZK. He laughed.

  “Lisbeth Dulac has the hottest indie fashion blog and you’re not sure you’re worthy to meet Donna Karan?” he said. “These are the things that make me wonder whether you arrived here from outer space. Would it help to meet Donna’s daughter, Gabby?” he asked. I nodded eagerly.

  “So let’s go to Tutto,” he said. Tutto Il Giorno was this ultracool Italian restaurant in Sag Harbor owned by Donna Karan’s daughter, Gabby. True to form, ZK was an old buddy of Gabby’s husband, Gianpaolo, who shared ZK’s passion for racing Ducati motorcycles. I decided to take my first check and celebrate and, at the same time, make a potential connection for Designer X.

  ZK picked me up at Tabitha’s on his Ducati 1100 S, and before long we were eating and drinking the night away with Gianpaolo, Gabby, and Maurizio, the restaurant’s other owner
and chef. Espresso martinis were the drink of choice. Gabby was more than generous in accepting my invitation to the forthcoming Designer X fashion show. She said she would be heading back to the city the next day and would love to attend.

  As we closed the restaurant down, the men began to argue about the relative merits of their motorcycles. This turned into a bet, and they decided to race to Sagaponack.

  I held on to ZK for my life as we zipped down the back roads of Sag Harbor to Sagaponack. ZK was winning, but I think he pulled back when he noticed my nails digging into his leather jacket. I was holding on in sheer terror. We smoothly pulled into the driveway of an empty ultramodern mansion owned by a Bosnian multimillionaire friend of Maurizio’s. After a few touches of the security pad, we were all inside.

  Here was an entire nine-bedroom villa fully lit up without a soul in sight. In the Hamptons the locals call these “zombie houses”—kept absolutely dustless, the refrigerator fully stocked, the wine cellar with three hundred bottles chilled exactly at fifty-five degrees, the air-conditioning full blast throughout the house, with not a leaf in the swimming pool in the middle of the summer. It was just one of the thousands of mansions expensively maintained throughout the Hamptons, with landscape lighting illuminating every tree on the property throughout the night as if it were Christmas.

  ZK grabbed a twenty-year-old bottle of wine and some glasses as we all drifted through the rooms of the house.

  “Here’s to being in the Limelight,” ZK said to me as we toasted. After a little while, Maurizio and Gianpaolo wandered off and ZK gave me a tour of the trove of modern art displayed throughout the house—artists that ZK knew well and sometimes personally. Artists I didn’t have a clue about. I nodded as if I had some awareness of art history, which I did not. Nervously spinning my bracelet about my wrist, I worried once again that I was over my head with ZK. But he was so comfortably inebriated and we were so relaxed in each other’s company, I felt reassured.

  “We’re really just two drifters, you know,” ZK said to me. “We should escape! I could start over in L.A. We don’t have to stay here. We’d be better off leaving. It would be good for you, too, a new fashion world to conquer.” I wondered if he intended to leave everyone he knew and grew up with. More than that, I wondered if he really meant to take me to L.A. with him. The fantasy made my head spin.

  We kissed by the pool and kissed in the living room. We kissed again in the kitchen and kissed in bedroom after bedroom after bedroom until we were more than kissing. We stripped off our clothes, letting them fall into puddles on the lacquered oak floors, and fell into the nearest bed.

  Before, ZK’s kisses would sweep me away, seizing me, engulfing me. But that night we were unhurried and slow, deliberately drowning in each other’s arms, soothing each other and losing who we were.

  “I’m not Holly. I’m not Lula Mae, either,” Audrey said in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “I don’t know who I am. I’m like Cat here, a no-name slob.” Like Audrey pretending to be Lula Mae pretending to be Holly Golightly, I pretended to be somebody I wasn’t and ZK was my Fred. His inner life was so secret; who knew who he was pretending to be?

  We cuddled in the master bedroom beneath the weight of luxurious comforters overlooking an arbor that glowed in the dark sky. That night the lost lonely little boy inside ZK, not the flawless dashing Kennedyesque fashion darling, made me shiver and melt. It was the man who seemed apart; more so after sharing with me his family’s fall from fortune. Resting in his arms, I pulled myself tight against his body.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up with a start and realized ZK was watching me. We kissed again and I curled up into him, trying to hold every part of him close. Comparing this moment to any other moment in my life, I couldn’t recall being more content; words didn’t come close to truly describing how I felt.

  “It’s a shame that you fell for someone like me,” he said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

  I put my finger to his lips.

  “Be quiet. Don’t say that,” I said and snuggled closer. Someday I would tell him the truth about where I came from, and he would realize how little his father’s stature and money mattered to me.

  Our naked bodies fit in a tangle of arms and legs like complementary halves, like pieces of a puzzle. It felt so good to feel the texture of his skin and to have him right up against me. I wanted to stay that way forever, holding him until his worries faded and were forgotten.

  The next morning I awoke and he was gone. Only a note was left.

  My father called. Have business to finish. Meet me at Robert’s tonight.—ZK

  57

  I tore apart the bedsheets.

  On my hands and knees, I crawled over every square inch of the bedroom floor. Methodically, I retraced the location of every kiss and embrace, rewinding the entire evening back to the wine cellar, scouring every corner of the villa over and over. Pacing the driveway where the motorcycles were parked, I was dumbfounded and heartbroken as I realized it was gone. Nan’s bracelet had disappeared.

  ZK had left so mysteriously that it made my stomach churn. I was alone in this strange, empty house, trying to come up with rational reasons that made it okay. Everything about his sudden departure was wrong. I cast about for excuses and picked apart my own behavior. Was I too willing? Had my Jersey pedigree come through and put him off? Did his blue-blood instincts sniff me out? Or was this the reason he was a player and never stayed with anyone for long?

  I called Zoya, Tabitha’s maid, and she sent Mocha, who arrived in no time. It was good to see his familiar face. As the villa faded from view in the rear window, I thought of Nan, wishing I could call her about the bracelet, but I feared she’d be too worried. My phone buzzed.

  “Haven’t heard from u. Everything ok ??”

  It was Jess.

  “Good,” I thumbed halfheartedly.

  “THEN GET YOUR ASS TO NYC !! WE HAVE A DATE !! FASH NITE OUT LIKE U SAID !! THERE STILL ENUF TIME ?!?”

  I couldn’t deal with it.

  I reread ZK’s note instead.

  Meet me at Robert’s tonight.

  The last place I wanted to go, although everyone else seemed perfectly comfortable hanging around him. Speaking to ZK was the only thing I could think about. I couldn’t leave for the city without seeing him first.

  My thoughts spun like a dreadful merry-go-round, returning to last night, the rowdy dinner with so many fascinating people, the crazy motorcycle race, ZK’s museum tour of the art on the villa walls, our endless kisses, our pile of clothes, the fit of our naked bodies.

  Then, falling into confusion, I thought of Nan’s lost bracelet, the way ZK was awake watching me, his self-deprecating, almost self-pitying comment. I tried to put myself in his place—his family broken by his father’s recklessness. People whispering. The grand name that once opened doors dragged through the mud.

  My father called. Have business to finish.

  Why a sudden call from his father? When had that occurred?

  It was still early morning and Tabitha’s house was asleep when I returned. The balmy sea breeze rippled through the lush trees, swaying the branches and exposing the underside of their leaves. It was soothingly quiet by the pool.

  I kept checking my phone messages, my texts, hoping for something from ZK. I started to text ZK and stopped. I felt like there was a hole where my heart used to be and it was sucking everything inside.

  As more time passed, it was becoming difficult not to feel hurt and stupid that I was worried about him. But then I’d feel guilty, fretting that something terrible might have happened to his father and that I was being insensitive.

  Unfinished business … what did that mean?

  I rose and returned to my room to take a bath and rest and prepare myself for the inevitable visit to Robert’s.

  58

  As soon as the white limo drove up in front of Tabitha’s mansion, Zoya and Mocha and the entire house staff were in an upheaval. From the balcony window
I saw the flurry of activity in the driveway. A tall, gorgeous man with long black hair stepped out first. His shoulders were so broad, his jaw so chiseled, he looked like Superman.

  A rail-thin woman followed and required the aid of the Superman to steady her. She had strawlike bleach-blond hair and wore a floral-print, rose-colored dress that seemed inappropriately short for her advanced age. At the same time, the Peter Pan collar made her appear like a prematurely aged child. Her large, gaudy jewelry, no doubt very expensive, made her bony wrists seem even skinnier.

  I heard someone on the staff whisper that this was Tabitha’s mother, Eva Eden. Tabitha said she was forty-eight years old. She looked like she was in her sixties.

  Downstairs, I found Tabitha outside her bedroom for the first time in days. Already swept up in her mother’s sudden arrival, she seemed both terrified and excited.

  “Did you hear? Mommy is here! She’ll be thrilled to meet you!” Tabitha said, sounding like she was fifteen. “We’re having afternoon tea by the pool. You have to join us! Mommy’s so British these days. She said she’s going to stay long enough to clear up the whole guardian situation. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I was speechless, wondering how to react. Not a mention from Tabitha of the fact that she had stayed in her room for two full days or the incident that had caused her confinement. Not a word about Robert and the police.

  “You’re going to Robert’s this evening, aren’t you?” she asked excitedly. “You’ll come with us in Mommy’s tacky white stretch, right?”

  “Of course,” I said reassuringly. I hadn’t seen Tabitha like this for a while, agitated, childlike with an undercurrent of desperation. I wondered if she was afraid that her mother would disappoint her. I wondered how she felt about Robert in the aftermath of her run-in with the East Hampton police.

  “Come, Mommy’s waiting,” Tabitha said. We headed for the pool, where I could see that Zoya had set up a full tea service for the four of us, including Eva’s hunk.