by Compai
“Definitely!” Venice beamed, and proudly extracted a tube of white parchment from her colorful Murakami Louis Vuitton canvas tote. “I drew up an affidavit.”
Affa-david. In-die-dead. Seriously, Nikki fretted. Is this even English?
Venice shimmied a Goodie No Snags rubber band down the length of the tube in one swift motion, and with a snap of her bangled wrist, unfurled the paper with a flourish.
“It’s in calligraphy,” she pointed out for Melissa’s approval.
“Would you mind reading it out loud?” Melissa folded her arms across her bountiful chest. Venice nodded, clearing her throat.
“ ‘I, Nikki Pellegrini, hereby confess to the deliberate sabotage of the contest organized on the thirtieth of September by the . . .’ ”
“Wait — what?” Nikki burst out without thinking.
“Please, don’t interrupt,” Melissa sternly advised. “Venice, go on.”
“ ‘I, Nikki Pellegrini,’ ” Venice repeated the first line with restored authority, “ ‘hereby confess to the deliberate sabotage of the contest organized on the thirtieth of September by the Fashion Label currently known as POSEUR.’ ”
“But I didn’t!” Nikki gasped, clasping her hands and retreating a step toward the back wall.
“Really?” Melissa asked, unfolding her toffee-toned arms. “Because Venice has been working on this all week, and she swears you did.”
Nikki noted a lilt of worry in Melissa’s voice, and for the first time realized how genuinely she wanted to know the truth.
“I swear to God!” Nikki swallowed, emphasizing her innocence by touching the modest gold cross at her neck. Melissa cocked her head toward Venice, raising a beautifully arched you-better-explain-yourself eyebrow.
“Juliet,” Venice quickly addressed Nikki’s dark-haired friend, “didn’t you say Nikki disappeared at 11:30?”
“Yes.” Juliet nodded, glancing at Nikki. “Well, you did.”
“And the crime occurred between eleven and midnight.” Melissa frowned, refocusing on Nikki. “And so far, everybody else can be accounted for. Can you explain that?”
“I . . .” Nikki bit her bottom lip, the same bottom lip that had found it’s way so easily into Jake’s mouth, the same bottom lip that he’d tasted with his tongue, sending little pulsing jolts of electricity throughout her entire body. “I was . . .”
“She was kissing Jake Farrish,” Carly impatiently snipped from her position on the floor. “Gawd.”
Melissa gaped, looking her up and down. “That was you?”
“Yeah, but . . .” The panicky Venice tugged Melissa’s bronzed arm for attention. “Juliet said she was gone for practically an hour. No way were they kissing the entire time.”
“I was not gone for an hour!” Nikki insisted, gaping down at her double-crossing friend. “Juliet, tell them.”
“All I know is you were the one who invited me to that party and then you totally left me stranded,” she sniffed.
“But I . . .” Nikki flushed as her friend lowered her pumpkin-slathered ice cream scoop to the floor and furrowed her dusky forehead. Omigod, she had abandoned Juliet, she realized with a pang of guilt. But it hadn’t been intentional.
“Juliet,” Melissa addressed her in soothing tones. “Try to put your emotions aside and think. Was Nikki really gone for an entire hour?”
“I wasn’t wearing a watch so I don’t know.” She frowned into the lobotomized pumpkin skull and slowly nodded. “All I can say is that’s what it felt like.”
“But,” Nikki beseeched her redheaded friend for support, “Carly . . .”
“Don’t look at me.” She raised a marker-stained palm and hotly huffed. “I wasn’t even invited to that party, remember?”
“But . . .” Nikki’s face crumpled. “You knew I could only invite one person.”
“And you invited Juliet, so I’m staying out of this.” Carly uncapped a blueberry-scented marker with a pop! “Sorry.”
“Listen, Nikki,” Melissa interrupted. “We all want to believe you, but you have to admit . . . your case does not look good.” She smoothed Venice’s swirling calligraphied affidavit on the wooden fold-out table, and clicked open a ballpoint pen. “Why don’t you just sign this, so we can all move on with our lives?”
“Because I didn’t do it,” she replied weakly.
“Okay.” Melissa unclicked her pen and dropped it into her purse. “I’m going to give you one week. If I were you, I’d do everything in my power to locate one of the vandalized tags. If the handwriting doesn’t match yours, then you’re off the hook.”
“But what happens if I don’t find one?”
“That’s not really my problem,” Melissa breathed airily, checking her pink crocodile watch, and shoving her half-drunk latte into Venice’s waiting hands. “All right, ladies. I’m out.”
“Good luck finding those tags.” Venice smirked as Melissa’s sharp footsteps faded down the hall. “I spent every day last week looking up and down Rodeo . . . and nada, muchacha.”
“I need VitaminWater,” Carly sighed to her feet, brushing off her denim-clad knees. “Juliet,” she addressed her friend, “Focus, Endurance, or Multi-V?”
“I’ll go with.” Juliet sprung to her feet and joined her at the door.
“Can I go, too?” Venice asked. Carly and Juliet shared a quick glance.
“A’course,” they replied in unison.
As her friends disappeared down the hall, Nikki swallowed a hard lump in her throat, and — against all logic — checked her pink Nokia phone. Had he called her back? Of course he hadn’t. She stared at the blue carpet, noticing for the first time a water stain in the shape of a whale, and her friends disappeared down the hall, Venice in tow, her cornflower-blue eyes stung with tears. The whale-shaped water stain wavered at her feet, expanding and contracting. If only it would expand into the size of a real whale, she thought. A great blue whale, like the one in Pinocchio, to swallow her whole. She would live there, surviving on seaweed, krill, and plankton. She would listen to the lonely slosh of ocean waves, text-message by the light of a kerosene lamp . . .
It wouldn’t be so bad.
For their first date, Charlotte recommended dinner at Campanile, the ultra-sleek see-and-be-seen restaurant on La Brea Boulevard (a far cry from the see-and-be-shot Hard Rock Café, thank you very much). The breezy interior of the ivy-covered building boasted such historical details as terra-cotta tile floors and elegant abbey-like walls of exposed grayish brown brick. Sage green rafters supported a peaked glass roof through which one could glimpse a square bell tower with secret-looking windows, a wraparound balcony, and a glinting silver sundial. Charlotte had been seven years old the first time she’d come to Campanile; her father had taken her to celebrate her first ballet lesson. They’d ordered Russian tea with dark cherry preserves, raspberry financiers, flaky ginger scones, and while Charlotte ate, her actor father gesticulated dramatically to all corners of the room, narrating the history of the place. The building, he’d told her, was built all the way back in nineteen twenty-nine by none other than Charlie Chaplin, who planned to use it as an office. He never got to work there, however; just as the structure neared completion, he lost it in a scandalous divorce from his wife, Lita Grey, whom Chaplin had married at sixteen. Which was to say, she’d been sixteen. Chaplin, Bud Beverwil informed his daughter with a chuckle, had been thirty-five.
And now it was Charlotte who was sixteen, catwalking the Campanile restaurant floor like she owned it. She shrugged out of her high-collared butterscotch-brown Milly faux-fur coat, allowing four dozen sets of eyes, both male and female, to linger wistfully on the confident jerk of her hips, the elegant angle of her neck, and the tumble of glossy black curls between her ivory shoulder blades. As usual, Charlotte ignored her audience, pausing only once to measure the gaze of someone she recognized, or thought she recognized — a middle-aged man with amused hazel eyes, a closely cropped salt-and-pepper haircut, and a deeply lined smile. He was so fam
iliar, Charlotte turned as she passed him, rubbernecking like a motorist at the scene of a gruesome accident, and, noting her attention, the middle-aged man cocked a groomed eyebrow and smirked. She turned away, realizing at once who he was.
Never mind; there was Jules, waiting at the polished bar just half a room away. He slid off his barstool, eyeing her with rapt appreciation, and Charlotte batted her soot-black eyelashes in thanks (the only time she’d seen Jake get to his feet out of respect was during the National Anthem at Dodgers Stadium). Nice to be dating someone with manners, she thought as he hung her coat next to his.
“You look beautiful,” he whispered into her ear, sending a thrill to the base of her spine. “And you smell like a fig.”
“Thank you,” she replied, affecting a modest blush. Following the advice of her bosom friend and fashion confidant, Don John, she’d chosen to wear something in keeping with the restaurant’s Roaring Twenties history: a vintage Lanvin drop-waist emerald-green satin frock with draping sleeves that fluttered as she moved. Jules, she noted, wore fitted dark gray chinos and a black cotton V-neck — all very fine — but it wasn’t until he sat on the barstool and wedged the heel of his polished black Ferragamo on the horizontal bar below his seat, cinching his pant cuff ever-so-slightly, that she gasped with final approval.
“Your socks!” she exclaimed, and fixed her chlorine-green eyes to the article in question. Jules lifted his right foot to examine his ankle, frowning in confusion, and Charlotte’s little heart skipped a beat. Here was a definite, definite sign, she thought, mingling Jules’s amber gaze with her own. “They match my dress,” she informed him. “Like, perfectly.”
“Oh,” he laughed with relief. “I thought there was something wrong.”
Charlotte smiled. How could anything be wrong when everything was right? What were the chances of arriving in two outfits that not only didn’t clash, but coordinated perfectly? She had no head for percentages, but the chances had to be slim. Like being struck by lightning, which was, incidentally, exactly how it felt, staring into Jules’s electric amber eyes. Charlotte decided his socks and her dress knew something they didn’t, but soon would:
They belonged together.
And so, as he divulged the details of his life before Los Angeles, she listened with rapt attention. He attended L’Ecole Internationale de Genève, a French-speaking boarding school in Switzerland, where he cultivated interests in everything from skiing to birding to fine wine to Italian opera. But so wide-ranging and eclectic were his tastes, he feared he would never focus on just one thing. Yet focus, he told her, was a necessary and important step toward adulthood. Not just any adulthood, of course, but the kind of adulthood to which he aspired: a necessary and important adulthood.
So, rather than waste time fretting, he took a comprehensive aptitude test which determined a list of career choices based on his “natural strengths” and “innate talents.” And low and behold . . .
“I am a natural filmmaker.” He wrapped up his monologue with a little blasé shrug. “So I move to Los Angeles. Why not?”
“Yay!” Charlotte burst into a mini round of applause, to which Jules lifted a modest hand. Indeed, he’d conveniently forgotten “filmmaker” had been nineteenth on his results list.
“Dentist” had been his first.
“But tell me, Charlotte,” he continued, pronouncing the “ch” in her name like “children” (Charlotte imagined they’d have four, all girls; the fifth, a boy, would die tragically in childbirth). “I want to know all abowchoo.”
Charlotte unhooked her platinum Christian Dior stiletto heel from the horizontal leg of her barstool, and rested it on his. “Well . . . ,” she began with a coy, flirty smile. “I enjoy long, romantic walks on the beach . . . waking up to the sound of the rain . . . and laughing with old friends.”
Jules responded with a solemn nod of his handsome head. “I too enjoy laughing with friends,” he informed her, sounding grave. Charlotte dangled a few absentminded fingers into a dish of salted nuts, and gazed fleetingly at a nearby burbling fountain. She’d intended her clichéd response to be taken as a joke (hadn’t that been obvious?), but somehow Jules had missed it. What to say next? She found herself at a loss.
She crammed a fistful of nuts into her mouth.
“We must laugh at man,” Jules boomed with unexpected force, causing Charlotte to gag quietly on a cashew, “to avoid crying for him.” He bobbed his thick black man-brows, assessing the level of her awe while she nodded, dabbing her watering eyes with the edge of her napkin.
“Do you know who said that?” he ventured at last.
“Um . . .” She bit the corner of her petal-pink bottom lip. “You did?”
He chuckled, touching her softly on the elbow. “It is a quote,” he explained. “Napoleon. You know who he is, yes?”
Charlotte narrowed her pool-green eyes. Did she, Charlotte Sidonie Beverwil, honorary French Citizen of the Hollywood Hills, know who Napoleon was?
“Um . . . he’s dating Mischa Barton, right?”
“No,” Jules answered with a sympathetic smile. “He is . . .”
“I know,” she blurted, holding fast to the seat of her stool, “who he is. I was joking.”
“Oh.” Jules blinked, looking stunned. And then, without warning, he burst into a fit of giggles. Seriously. Giggles. Charlotte flushed to the roots of her hair and glanced around, queasy with embarrassment. “You are funny!” Jules informed her in an exhilarated voice, while a blonde at the end of the bar smirkingly pretended to examine her fingernails.
“I’m really not.” Charlotte cringed, bugged her eyes at the bartender, and mouthed the word “martini.” The bartender, a white-haired man with a nose like a turnip, raised his gray caterpillar eyebrows, judging her age with classic bartenderly suspicion.
“Yes.” Jules pounded his Rolexed fist into his open palm. “Of all human qualities, humor is the most important. More important than strength, than money, than beauty, than strength . . .”
“More important than repeating yourself?” Charlotte couldn’t help herself.
“Perhaps,” Jules went on, blissfully unaware of her gentle jab. “Even more important than food. Because food only nourishes this.” He pressed his wide hand to his firm abdomen, and for one delicious moment Charlotte’s appreciation for rock-hard man-driff overwhelmed her urge to die. But then he said:
“The tummy.”
Charlotte blanched with numb horror. The tummy? Was he a guy, or an unusually overdeveloped Teletubbie? She sent the bartender another imploring look. Please, her eyes pleaded, and she actually clasped her hands. Please, take pity. The bartender sighed, and with a casual whaddowhycare shrug of his black suspender-clad shoulders, twisted open a bottle of gin.
“So!” Charlotte blurted, desperate to change the subject. “What’s your favorite movie?”
“Oh.” Jules frowned, baffled as to why they changed topics of conversation. (The laughter thing had been going so well!) “Well, that one is easy for me. Garden State. Have you seen this film?”
Charlotte bit the inside of her cheek, hard, hoping to distract herself from an unwelcome memory. She and Jake had rented Garden State on their first official second date; Charlotte had thought it was okay, actually, but Jake had hated it. He’d staggered around the rest of the day with this glazed, wide-eyed expression on his face. “Look at me,” he’d say. “I’m Zach Braff. I just go around, like, feeling stuff.” And when she’d hit him with her pillow, he’d whine. “Sto-o-op! Don’t you realize I’m Zach Braff and I’m sensitive?!” And when she’d pressed her lips against his to shut him up, he’d clutch his stomach and say: “Ugh . . . I’m gonna braff. Oh God, I just braffed myself.”
She’d never laughed so hard in her life.
“You see that guy over there?” she blurted, desperate to change the subject once again. Jules stared at her for a prolonged beat, and Charlotte realized he was beginning to think she was schizo. “By the fountain,” she instructed, inexplicab
ly lowering her voice.
“Yes.” Jules frowned, observing the small, candlelit table in question.
“You know that girl Petra?” Charlotte evenly continued. “That’s her father.”
“Oh.” Jules nodded with another blasé shrug. “He is a handsome man, no?”
“Yeah, well . . . see that woman he’s with? Definitely not her mother. And they’re still married, so . . . you put it together.”
Jules furrowed his black eyebrows, joining Charlotte in observing the scene. The man who was Petra’s father stabbed a toothpick into a small ceramic dish, offering his mysterious brunette companion a dripping green olive. Smiling, she tilted across the table, sunk her teeth in, and slowly slid the olive from the tiny wood skewer. Her oversized, thin oatmeal cashmere sweater slipped down her shoulder as she leaned back into her seat, rolled her prize inside her still-smiling mouth, spat the pit into her cupped palm, pinched her tapered fingers, tilted across the table a second time, and dropped it — like a coin — into the right breast pocket of his expensive-looking denim cowboy shirt.
“Isn’t that just so . . . ew?” Charlotte delicately inquired.
Jules swiveled in his seat, exhaled an expressive burst of air between his pouting French lips, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Nothing disgusts me more than this,” he intoned. “To do such a thing to your wife . . . it is despicable.”
“Really?” Charlotte winked her left eye with suspicion.
“Of course!” Jules pinched his fingers to his temples, springing them apart. “People who go around like loyalty is nothing? It makes me sick. When I am with a woman, I am with her.”
“So, you mean” — Charlotte swallowed — “you’ve never cheated?”