Tom was offering personal information. If he’d let me know about Drake he might someday fill me in about my mother.
“If you’d like to tell me.”
“Drake was from California, upstate, somewhere near Big Sur. He was a good kid, a surfer, and one day he bummed a few rides and ended up in New York, at nineteen. And when I met him he was a bartender at a dive in the East Village. Where one day he fell in love, with exactly the wrong person.”
“Who?”
“She was a southern girl, a real honeybunch, rich and pretty and bored out of her mind at junior college after, as she put it, ‘Almost an entire whole semester!’ And she’d headed north for a friend’s bachelorette weekend and she was out slumming and when she came across Drake, she fell hard and so did he.”
“So what happened?”
“So Miss Carole Ann Basnight Shelburne, she extends her stay for two weeks and on her last night in town, Drake proposes and she accepts. And I met her, she wasn’t a bad person, she was just greeting-card romantic and chronically impulsive and not really spoiled, not a ninny, but a touch helpless. And Drake had no idea what he was getting into.”
“Which was …”
“Carole Ann was a senator’s daughter from South Carolina and the senator wasn’t about to have his presumably untouched debutante sweet pea shacking up with a bartender and a Yankee at that. Not when the senator had his eye on the White House.”
“And?”
“And so first the senator goes behind his daughter’s back and he offers Drake a bundle, his own bar, to bow out. And Drake says no. The senator gets angry, he forbids Carole Ann to marry Drake. She says no, she’s convinced that she and Drake will be deliriously content in a fifth-floor walk-up on St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue. And she might’ve been absolutely right. Who knows?”
“Until …”
“Well, the senator, as such men will, had contacts within organized crime. And he arranged for certain men to wait outside Drake’s bar one night until the 4:00 A.M. closing time. And they followed Drake and they dragged him into an alley and they went to work, with their fists, their feet and a baseball bat.”
“Oh my God …”
“They broke almost every bone in his body. He was unrecognizable. And he didn’t have a penny or any health insurance, so all he could do was languish in the stifling back ward of a truly repulsive petri dish of a hospital and receive only the most basic, inept care possible.”
“But what about Carole Ann? Didn’t she help him?”
“Oh, she tried, she promised she’d never leave him. But she didn’t have any money of her own and she’d always planned on a full-tilt, banjos-on-the-verandah wedding and she really wasn’t equipped for nursing a poverty case. And her daddy swore that he’d had nothing to do with Drake’s beating and the thugs were never caught and six months later, Carole Ann was engaged, again. To someone else.”
“Who?”
“A young Republican tax attorney from back home, although are Republicans ever really young? But he was a suitable choice from a suitable family and as a wedding gift, Daddy gave the lucky couple a suitably colonnaded and weeping-willowed home on three hundred and eighty acres and he offered the young man a job with his campaign. And within two years Daddy became the vice president of the United States. So I suppose, in a way, he was punished.”
“But — what happened to Drake?”
“When I heard what had happened I took him in. I paid for some top-of-the-line Brazilian cosmetic surgery and I pushed him through rehab. And I offered him a job as my driver.”
As with so much of what Tom accomplished, his actions at first appeared unselfish and then took a turn. He’d discovered my mom but I knew how her life had ended. And if I could believe him, he’d pretty much rescued Drake but now Drake was another fiercely loyal, vigilantly secretive, possibly imprisoned employee. I was Tom Kelly’s most recent acquisition: Where was I headed? If I couldn’t meet his deadline, if I didn’t marry the prince, where would I be a year from now?
“Would you like to see a sketch? Of your wedding dress?”
I knew better than to answer. Instead I waited, as Tom went to a mahogany library table and removed a large sheet of white parchment from beneath a stack of art books. He held the sketch at arm’s length, admiring it.
“A royal bride. Just imagine.”
As he began to flip the sketch so I could share his design and grab a glimpse of my possible future, the sketch burst into flames and became smoke. This was a lounge act gimmick, a pick-a-card-any-card, first-day-of-Junior-Houdini-school fizzle, until the ashes from the parchment began to rise and multiply and coalesce and become a life-sized replica of a truly stunning wedding gown, comprised entirely of floating ash, like the most well-drilled army of fluttering moths. As I reached out to touch the hovering, ghostly gown, the ashes fell to the floor.
“Earn it,” Tom advised.
I arranged to meet Rocher at the airport and I waited just outside a secluded VIP lounge requisitioned through the movie studio. I stood at one end of a long hallway as Rocher stomped toward me. She had slung a sports equipment–sized duffel bag over her shoulder, packed with her entire wardrobe, and clutched in her fists and spilling from her pockets were a sleep mask, felt slippers, an in-flight magazine and a thankfully unused air-sickness bag. As she drew nearer, Rocher griped, “It takes too fucking long to get here, why can’t people just get beamed places, like on Star Trek; I smell like airplane air, and they took back my headset, what’re they gonna do, sterilize it and pass it along?”
She was now close enough to see, for the first time ever, full-on and in person, not me, but Rebecca.
“Oh my God, oh my Jesus holy fucking pee-on-me God.”
“Roche, it’s so good to see you….”
“No. No. Don’t touch me, not yet. Just stay right there. Oh my God, oh my sweet Jesus in the motherfucking manger, no. No. Fuck me. NO.”
“I know it’s going to take some time for you to get used to —”
“NO! NO! I mean, I’ve seen you, on TV and online and in the magazines but WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU?”
Rocher looked as if she’d seen the ghost of someone she’d killed in cold blood. Then sheer curiosity got the best of her and she inched forward, still with hesitation, as if I were foaming at the mouth or might spew fireballs from my eyes.
“Becky?” she finally asked, as she tiptoed within a foot of me and peered into my face, seeking anything familiar, some trace of Becky, as if she were incredibly nearsighted and was trying to read the fine print on my forehead.
“Becky? Is that really you? Are you in there?”
“It’s me. Ask me something. I’ll prove it.”
“What’s my favorite ice cream flavor?”
“Butter pecan with little frozen marshmallows, chopped-up graham crackers and stale cashews.”
“What does my stepdad do for a living?”
“Irritates your mom. Except lately he’s been pretending to be laid off from never having worked at the post office, which was an idea he got when he once had to mail a letter.”
“What do I have tattooed and where?”
“You have a picture of Jate Mallow right under your left butt cheek because his love for you is a special private thing just between the two of you and because it’s your lucky butt cheek.”
“Becky! It is you!” she yelped and then she flung herself into my arms where, after a meaningfully suffocating hug, we both, still holding each other, jumped up and down on an invisible trampoline.
“Roche! I can’t believe you’re here!”
“Princess Becky!”
And from both of us: “YAYYYY!!!!”
Back in my hotel suite Rocher sat cross-legged on my bed, amid the crumbs and the smeared plates of the room-service desserts which she’d mainlined and a few that she was still considering: “I’m gonna hold on to the weird little pancakes, what do you call ’em, the crepes, for later, because they look kinda light or m
aybe I’ll just roll ’em up and smoke ’em like joints. And you gotta tell me, is this all part of the package, I mean, can you eat like this, all of this amazing crap, and still look like that? And answer carefully because if you say yes, then on behalf of women everywhere, I’m gonna come at you with this butter knife and do as much damage as I can.”
“Well, at first I scarfed down everything I could, just to test it out and I have to tell you, I didn’t gain an ounce. I can eat, like, fifteen bags of real potato chips, not the baked or the reduced fat, or the Olestra….”
“Ewww!!!” we both said, acknowledging that the label on the fat-free, fried-in-Olestra variety warned about stomach cramps and anal leakage.
“And I can eat ten boxes of Mallomars and drink a gallon jug of Coke, real Coke….”
“Real Coke?”
“And I still look exactly like this.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you. Just fuck you.”
“Except for one thing — when I’m alone, and I look in the mirror, it all shows up on Becky.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. That’s just wrong. That’s just evil. That’s like if when the Prince finally met Cinderella and she tried on the glass slipper, she had bunions.”
“But today is a special occasion so we can both eat whatever we want.”
“Damn right,” said Rocher, plowing another chocolate-dipped strawberry into her mouth.
“Okay, Project Princess.”
“Okay,” said Rocher, wadding up her napkin and wiping her lips. “I know what you told me on the phone, about the burn unit and everything, which was a good beginning, because there you were, looking like Rebecca and then you were a mess and he helped you. But here’s my question: Since then, have you heard from him?”
I pointed to a three-foot-tall cut-crystal urn packed with fifty red roses in full bloom and I read the attached card aloud, “To Rebecca, who must be so tired of roses. Your Prince.”
As I was reading Rocher had begun emitting high-pitched squeaking noises, like one of those ceiling smoke alarms. I thought she was reacting to the prince’s note but when I looked up I knew that she hadn’t heard a word I’d said, because she was staring past me, with her eyes wide and a thread of drool spilling from her lower lip. I turned to find the object of Rocher’s stupefied ecstasy: Jate had let himself into the room via the door to his adjoining suite.
“Hey,” said Jate, moving carefully. Jate knew that whenever he was within a few yards of any female, age seven through senility, he had to permit her time and space to catch her breath, to sob softly and to acknowledge or at least pretend to acknowledge, that the two of them were both human beings. For a girl like Rocher — okay, for almost any girl — catching first sight of Jate was like becoming a French peasant child, hurrying home across a barren, rocky field and slamming right into the Virgin Mary floating atop a golden cloud. Even if your family and the towns people and the local nuns never believed you, your life would still be changed forever.
“I’m Jate. And you’re, it’s Rocher, right?”
“He … he … you … you … you said my name. With your mouth. With your Jate mouth.” Rocher held up a hand, warning Jate to remain a few feet away, so she could settle her internal organs and prevent herself from vaulting right onto him, knocking him flat and then kissing him until she’d swallowed at least one of his lips.
“I told Jate about Prince Gregory,” I said to Rocher, ignoring the fact that she’d now stuffed a hefty chunk of the bedspread into her mouth, inadvertently sending the room-service platters clattering to the floor.
“Going for the prince is cool,” said Jate. “It’s the right move.”
Aside from my newfound desire to help others on a global scale, I’d also explained to Jate that I wasn’t really an actress. He’d been disappointed, but then he’d agreed that a crown and a kingdom could be “a sort of Euro-version of an Academy Award, like for Best Princess in a Country That Could Really Use One.”
“I’ve been thinking about the whole situation,” said Jate. “And the first step is, Rebecca, you and me, we have to break up. It can go two ways. First, we can go messy, like you catch me with some other girl, like my makeup artist or some babe from a TV show who could use the coverage, or even better, some hot girl who doesn’t speak English, so she can’t answer any questions. And then you and me, we have a vicious fight in a restaurant parking lot, close enough to the cameras so that we can make big arm gestures to show how upset we are but far enough away so that they can’t hear us. Then you go off to a spa in Arizona and I do a charity golf tournament in Vegas and we both have our people issue statements about how we’d like the media to respect our privacy at a time of great personal loss. And we both refuse to talk about each other until right before the Renn Hightower movie comes out and then you can tell Vogue that our breakup has left you feeling hurt and betrayed but that it helped you to grow as a person, and if People puts me on the cover, I can tell them that we’re both so young and we just grew apart but that we’ll always love each other.”
Rocher was on the floor, crawling on her stomach toward Jate’s feet. “I love you …,” she kept repeating, in a demonic whisper. “I have to show you … my butt.”
“Or,” Jate continued, since Rocher was still a few yards off, “we can do the ultra-classy, romantically mysterious, only-the-two-of-us-can-ever-know-what-we-meant-to-each-other deal, which is probably the better route, and we can ask the press why a man and a woman can’t just be friends. Because if the whole story gets too trashy then you turn into this trampy little supermodel/actress/ho and I turn into a bastard with no feelings. But if the three of us, you and me and Prince Gregory, if we all hang out at the children’s hospital or if we cohost something in Monaco for famine relief, then we’re all best buddies and we’re mature and smiling for a worthy cause and everybody wins.”
“Look …,” Rocher was pleading on her hands and knees, facing away from Jate as she demurely lowered her jeans and her underwear to reveal her tattoo of Jate’s face.
“That is unbelievably and totally mad sweet,” said Jate to Rocher. Jate, over the years, had been called upon to admire and autograph similar, even more detailed tributes, inked across women’s breasts, on their shoulders and across their backs.
“And there were these three sisters,” Jate had once told me, “and one had me as a baby, tattooed on her shin, the second sister had me as a teen idol, on her neck, and on the third sister’s stomach I was being sworn in as a Supreme Court justice.”
Rocher pulled up her clothing and faced Jate as she rose to her knees. “I’m glad you’re gay,” she said solemnly, “because that way, if I can’t have you, no one can.”
“Um, Rocher,” I mentioned, “like, a dude could have him.”
This had never occurred to Rocher because she’d thought that Jate being gay translated as, “I love Rocher Bargemueller so much but I don’t deserve her so I’ll never have sex again.” The concept of Jate with a guy was fresh turf and Rocher regarded him with an especially deranged sparkle in her eyes.
“I could be a dude,” she said.
As a favor to me, Jate took Rocher into his adjoining suite and gave her a signed Cloudborne poster, a vintage Jackie + Jate lunch box and thermos and a rare bottle of the discontinued Mallowrinse Shampoo and Conditioner in One, while convincing her that “even though we’re never going to be, like, together, I really respect you and please don’t force me to put you on any of those no-fly lists.”
By the time Rocher returned, definitely more centered, Prince Gregory’s secretary had called and invited me to accompany His Royal Highness to the British Museum the next night, for the opening of an exhibit entitled The Female Ideal.
“Okay, this is a really good sign,” Rocher said. “But there’s something I have to say, if we want this whole thing to work. I know that Prince Gregory is so cute and smart and nice, he’s the total package, but you cannot, under any circumstances, no matter what he says, even if he promises you, like, a castle
or a golden fleece or Ireland, you cannot fuck him.”
“What?”
“Just listen to me, because it’s a rule, it’s like the biggest princess rule of all. It’s like, what if Cinderella is at the ball and she’s waltzing with Prince Charming but she’s keeping one eye on the clock because it’s 11:15, and she knows that, if she’s still there at midnight, boom, everything vanishes, the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, the footmen are all mice and the Prince finds out that she’s just some skank from the suburbs.
“But because the Prince is so hot,” she continued, “and because Cinderella, she’s been cooped up with her stepsisters for so long, and her dress is so amazing, so what if she drags the Prince into the royal cloakroom and gives him a blow job. You know, just as a way of saying, ‘I really like you and it’s such a great night and I just want to prove that you’re special.’”
“I am not going to do that!”
“I know, because it would ruin everything, because the next day no decent prince is going to knock on every door in town going, ‘I’m looking for the beautiful young lady who fits this glass slipper and who also gives the most righteous head in the kingdom.’”
“So you mean if I want to marry the prince I should do what, play hard to get?”
“No, I’m not saying you need to be an A-plus, number one, slap-her-silly cocktease like Shanice Morain. Even though that is how she got Cal Malstrup to ask her to prom, she just kept giving him these hand jobs in the equipment shed next to the football field and she kept telling him that she’d love to do more but that she was a good Christian girl and that it says in the Bible that good Christians can only have joyful intercourse in the back of a white stretch limo.”
“She did not say that!”
“Uh-huh, I heard it, ’cause I was up on the roof, grabbin’ a smoke. And he bought it. But, Becky?”
“Yeah?”
“I have no right to say this but I have to ask you something.”
“Of course, anything. What?”
“Could I, just for a second, and I just washed my hands, and I promise that I’ll be extra-super-unbelievably careful, but could I — try on your coat?”
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