Southern Charm

by Tinsley Mortimer

  When the cab pulled up to the entrance of the hotel, the first thing I noticed was the row of perfectly groomed carriage horses. Then I saw the lights, the bellmen in pressed suits and hard round caps, the plush carpet, the sparkling glass, and the shimmering carved wood. I stood in the lobby and looked around, feeling as if someone had dropped me into a genie bottle.

  “Welcome to the Plaza Hotel, Miss Davenport,” a man said as my mother and I checked in.

  He leaned over and handed me a lollipop. I almost told him I already had one in my purse, but I knew it would have been rude not to accept a present (the correct word was “present,” not “gift,” my mother always told me).

  My mother caught my eye and smiled at me sternly, as if to say, Go on and thank the man now, Minty.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  The same bellman gathered our many bags and guided us toward a set of elevators. He told us that the Plaza had twenty floors and that we would be staying on the eighteenth floor in the Royal Terrace Suite, which featured a view of Central Park. I was only half-listening, of course. I was on the lookout for Eloise. I thought she might come running down the hallway at any moment and try to steal my lollipop.

  “Is this your first time in New York City?”

  We were in the elevator, climbing the floors one by one, and the bellman was posing this question to me, but I was not listening.

  “Minty,” my mother said. “Answer the nice man.”

  I must have jumped a little, because the man laughed.

  “What are you thinking about now, little miss?”

  I looked up, eyes wide and fueled by sugar. I answered with the first thought that came to my mind, which was the truth. “Eloise,” I said.

  “I thought you might be looking for her,” the bellman said. Then he leaned down and whispered, just loud enough that my mother could hear as well. “You just missed her in the Palm Court.”

  I had just missed her? I had come all this way to New York City and just narrowly missed seeing and meeting Eloise?

  “We’ll look for her tomorrow, Minty,” my mother said, stepping off the elevator. She exchanged a wink with the bellman.

  I narrowed my eyes at both of them. The bellman directed us toward a door at the end of the hallway. It was heavy and old and had a brass plaque that read ROYAL TERRACE SUITE. He opened the door and deposited our luggage. Then he bowed slightly and let himself out.

  My mother and I held hands and looked out the windows of the suite, past the sumptuous silk faille curtains and onto Central Park. I felt both awed and frightened by what lay past our window. The park seemed dark and sprawling, almost ominous without the benefit of daylight. “Time to go to sleep now, Minty,” my mother said. “We have a full schedule ahead of us tomorrow.”

  As she tucked me in, she rattled off a to-do list for the following day: breakfast in the Edwardian Room, shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, a stroll down Fifth Avenue, a stop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, lunch at La Grenouille, more shopping at Saks. I drifted off into a deep sleep and dreamed about finding Eloise.

  Now, fourteen years later, I was back. Except this time, I’d left my mother in Charleston and my sister at Ole Miss. My parents divorced when I was in high school. My mother fought long and hard for Magnolia Gate and, in the end, won the right to stay there under the condition that the property would be left to my sister and me in her will. My father spends his days now playing golf in Palm Beach and has since gone back to his debutante days, breaking hearts. My mother often says, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and your father has always been an old dog.”

  I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in the spring, cum laude, and immediately set my sights on New York City. It was the only place I ever wanted to be. Plus, I’d broken up with my high school sweetheart Ryerson Bigelow the year before, and I was still struggling with the fact that we weren’t together. We’d fallen in love when I was a sophomore in high school and he was a senior, but we’d known each other for far longer. It just happened one day. I was walking home from school on a perfect fall day in Charleston. He came out of nowhere and tackled me into a pile of leaves. When I got my bearings again, I started hysterically laughing, and we kissed.

  Later, he told me it was my reaction that made him realize I was different from the other girls.

  “Anyone else would have been furious with me,” he said. “You were such a good sport, I couldn’t help but fall in love with you.”

  We were inseparable for six years after that.

  And then, suddenly, we were over. I still wasn’t quite sure exactly where things went wrong. He’d graduated from UVA and our relationship began to suffer. In the end, he told me he wasn’t ready to settle down and get married. The last I’d heard he was traveling around Africa. I couldn’t imagine staying in the South, where everything reminded me of my former life with him.

  So I set my sights on a career in fashion—the only thing I’d ever been good at, besides tennis, of course. Luckily, New York was the center of the fashion universe. I was determined to turn my dreams into reality.

  My mother was skeptical at first.

  “New York, Minty?” she said. “What on earth are you going to do there?”

  “Get a job in fashion!” I said, annoyed. She’d heard me say this a million times by then.

  She shook her head. “Can’t you do that in Charleston? We’ve got our own Madison Avenue right here on King Street. You could open your own shop and—” She paused. “This isn’t about Ryerson, is it?”

  “Mommy.”

  She crossed her thin alabaster arms over her chest.

  “As long as you’re not running away from something,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  I scoffed. “It’s been over a year, Mother.”

  “Very well then,” she said.

  It only took a few calls to some of her clients with apartments in New York before she was able to land an apartment in a “respectable” doorman building on the Upper East Side (although, she noted, “the address is east of Park Avenue, so we will have to do something about that eventually”). And a few weeks later, there I was, an official Manhattan resident at the ripe old age of twenty-two.

  Did I have a job? Not yet. Did I have friends? Well, I was working on that. What mattered was that I was in New York City, and if I stretched out my bathroom window and turned ten degrees to the right, I could just make out the very top of the roof of the Plaza Hotel.

  And maybe even catch a glimpse of Eloise.

  Grin and Bear It

  My mother always says it takes about two weeks to get “situated” in a new place. She told me this when I was headed off to sleepaway camp for the first time, and she was wrong. She mentioned it again when she dropped me off at Chapel Hill my freshman year. Again, wrong. And she reminded me of this two-week rule as I boarded the plane to New York.

  “Give it two weeks, honey,” she said. “Two weeks and you’ll be just fine.”

  Maybe it takes her only two weeks to feel situated in a new place, but I guess I move a little slower. Two weeks after arriving in New York, my apartment felt more like a campsite than home. My bed was still technically a mattress on top of a box spring. I barely knew where the good restaurants were let alone where to go if I needed a cute outfit for a party.

  Which brings me to my social life. I have always been good at making new friends. In the eighth grade I was voted “most outgoing.” People tell me all the time that I have a way of making others feel at ease, of reaching out to the one person in the room who is feeling like an outsider and making them feel included, part of the group.

  Unfortunately, I was that outsider now.

  It’s hard to meet people in New York. It’s not like Charleston, where you walk down the street and pretty much everyone waves and smiles. In New York, if you wave and smile at someone you don’t know, you look like a crazy person.

  Sure, a few of my casual acquaintances were probably in the city, girls from camp or the daughte
rs of my mother’s clients who’d lived in New York the last time I checked, but I didn’t really know these people. Cold-calling Mr. Pierson’s second cousin or Harriet Gumble’s sister-in-law’s niece just didn’t feel right.

  I figured I’d start meeting new people when I found a job, but even that was slow going. In two weeks I’d gone on a handful of interviews, one at Oscar de la Renta, another at Macy’s and one at Glamour magazine. The people who interviewed me seemed to like me well enough, but they all ended up saying the same thing: I needed more experience. So I bit the bullet and called my mother for advice.

  “What you need, Minty,” she said, “is an in.”

  “An ‘in’?”

  “A connection. Someone to help you get your foot in the door. God knows I can’t do it from Charleston.” She paused. “Think about it. You must know someone.”

  I thought for a moment. She was right. There must be someone I could call. But all of the friends I’d graduated with were starting jobs in Atlanta or Washington, DC. What about someone older? Did I know anyone who’d moved to New York a few years back? I pulled out one of my old yearbooks and flipped to the photo of the women of Pi Beta Phi, my sorority at Chapel Hill. There were faces I hadn’t seen in years. Lots of pretty faces. And that is when it dawned on me: Emily Maplethorpe.

  Emily was two years older and had acted as my “big sister” when I pledged PBP. She had light brown hair and a bright, warm smile. She also happened to be a bona fide New Yorker—the only one I’d ever met. She had grown up on Park Avenue; attended Chapin, one of the most exclusive girls’ schools; and had moved back to New York after graduating from Chapel Hill. The last I’d heard, she was working as a publicist for Saks Fifth Avenue, which sounded very grown-up and fancy to me.

  I remembered that she’d sent me an e-mail sometime in the late winter, something about a PBP reunion in New York. After searching through some old e-mails, I found it: Emily Maplethorpe, Public Relations Manager, Saks Fifth Avenue. I dialed her direct line.

  She picked up on the second ring.

  “Minty!” she said. She sounded out of breath. “How are you? Oh my God, it’s been so long! What are you doing? Where are you?” I could hear her fingers typing away and phones ringing in the background. “Minty,” she said, “I’m kind of busy, actually, but I’d love to catch up. Can I call you back later this week?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I was actually calling to talk about jobs. I just moved here and I’ve been interviewing and—”

  “Wait. You’re in New York?”

  More typing.

  “Yes,” I said. “I got an apartment on Sixty-first and Lexington and I’ve been trying to find something entry-level in—”

  “Hold on,” she said.

  It sounded like a tornado was coming through her office, there was so much noise, buzzing, and shouting. About thirty seconds later she came back, even more out of breath than before. “Minty, actually, are you busy today?”

  I almost laughed out loud.

  “Not really.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “How quickly can you be dressed and out the door?”

  Emily explained she was in desperate need of a “seat filler” for a Saks charity luncheon. One of the VIP guests had dropped out at the last minute, leaving her with an empty seat, and she was panicking. She told me all I had to do was put on a cute dress, sit there, and look pretty, maybe have a glass of champagne and make conversation.

  “This is right up your alley, Minty,” Emily said. “You’re a natural. It’s that Southern charm.” She hung up.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over my dresser drawers, bed head and footie pajamas and all. I looked more like a five-year-old at a slumber party than someone who might be invited to attend a charity luncheon at Saks Fifth Avenue. Call me naïve—and I was at the time—but I had never been to anything with VIPs and free champagne and “seat fillers.”

  Okay, so I could certainly put down a glass of champagne, but what in God’s name was I going to wear? I immediately called Emily back.

  She did not seem as happy to hear from me this time around.

  “Minty! You’ve been to a million parties. Just wear a dress.”

  “But what kind of dress? Short? Long? Dressy or more casual?”

  I had already pulled out the majority of the contents of my closet—everything from BCBG to Céline—and had started a pile on my bed, a vortex of ruffles, bows, and various shades of pink.

  “Minty, I have to get back to work,” Emily said. I heard the tap, tap, tap of her fingers on the keyboard. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “But, Emily, I don’t even know where to begin!”

  “Just wear what you feel most comfortable in!”

  Click.

  I had less than two hours to be washed, primped, and ready to attend my very first New York event.

  When I walked into Saks, I felt like a kid in a candy store. That is, if candy came in patent leather, ostrich, and sumptuous suede. Ladies in sleek black suits offered me a sample of the latest designer perfume. Women popped in from work to fawn over the latest handbags: Burberry, Dior, Marc Jacobs, Prada. Even the elevators were glamorous—gilded and polished, lined up at the back of the store like gateways to heaven.

  “Wow,” I said out loud.

  There’s a Saks in Charleston, but compared to the Manhattan flagship it might as well have been a Piggly Wiggly. It didn’t buzz like this. It didn’t sparkle like this. For a moment I was so dazzled that I almost forgot I had somewhere to go. I rushed for the elevator just as the doors began to close and pressed “8.”

  Emily greeted me straightaway. She looked different than she had in college. Slimmer. Sleeker. She wore black from head to toe and a little headset like you sometimes see PR girls wearing in the movies.

  “Minty, honey,” she said. “You look so . . . colorful.”

  “Thanks, sweetie,” I said, smiling.

  The outfit I’d eventually decided on was a bright pink Alice and Olivia baby doll dress with an empire waist, with black patent leather Mary Jane Manolo heels. I’d had only half an hour to do my hair, but I made sure every curl was perfect. I’d recently taught myself how to apply false eyelashes, the ones that come in long strips and make your eyes pop like a movie star’s, and that morning I’d applied them liberally.

  My outfit was colorful. But what’s the point of getting dressed up to go out if you look like you’d rather be at a funeral?

  Emily guided me toward the back of the floor. “How are you?” she asked. “I can’t believe you’re in New York!” She paused. “Wait, is Ryerson here?”

  I looked at her, then down at the floor.

  “Oh,” she said. “I see. We’ll get to that later.” She narrowed her eyes and looped her arm through mine. “Come on, we have a charity lunch to attend.”

  The luncheon was being held in the midst of the designer collection section. About ten round tables were set up in a figure-eight formation, topped with cool silvery gray tablecloths and flower arrangements, bursting with some of the largest white peonies I have ever seen. The sparkle of the tables complemented the surrounding clothing. There were beaded gowns from Elie Saab hanging gracefully in one corner and structured cashmere trousers from Ralph Lauren in another. I had never seen so much amazing fashion in one place.

  The guests ranged from an elderly woman in a colorful caftan and large, round, black-rimmed glasses to a twentysomething man in high-water pants and shiny brown oxfords. The guests stood in little clusters in front of the tables, holding delicate champagne glasses by the stems and staring over one another’s shoulders. No one was making conversation. It was as if there was an unspoken agreement: they were there to observe and judge, not to interact.

  I leaned in and whispered to Emily. “What exactly am I supposed to do?”

  She gave me an exasperated look, then grabbed my arm and ushered me to the side of a photographer who was furiously snapping away. I watched him, mesmerized
. He had longish hair and a weathered Irish face. He moved sporadically, instantaneously, like he had the power to disappear and reappear.

  As I was standing next to Emily, waiting for some direction, he turned toward me.

  “Oh, wow,” he said. His eyes traveled up and down and zeroed in on mine. “Look at you! You’re like a little doll—all prim and proper.” He stepped back and held the camera up. “You’re like something from a bygone era. I’ve got to get your picture. Do you mind?”

  I just stared.

  Did I mind?

  Gosh, I wasn’t sure. No stranger had ever asked to take my picture before. For one, who was this man? And why would he want to take my picture? What was he using these photos for? Where the hell did Emily go?

  “Richard Fitzsimmons,” he said, holding out his hand. “You’re new to this stuff, aren’t you, honey?”

  I shook his hand and looked around again. No sign of Emily.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling. I always smile when I’m nervous. “Yes, Mr. Fitzsimmons. Richard? Sorry, so nice to meet you. I’m just—I’m a friend of Emily’s and . . . Oh gosh, I’m rambling.”

  Richard just smiled. “I like the accent!” he said. “Sort of Scarlett O’Hara meets Delta Burke. Charming, just charming.”

  I was about to curtsy as a joke, but just then a waiter came out of nowhere with a tray full of little chicken skewers. He ran right into me. The peanut sauce landed squarely on my arm and began dripping toward my dress. I held my dripping arm out in front of me, mortified, watching the peanut oil run down my fingers and swan-dive toward the pristine silvery carpet.

  Oh, shit! I thought.

  Only I didn’t just think it—I said it aloud as well. The moment I realized that I’d cursed aloud, I cupped my hand over my mouth, mortified. I gaped at Richard, shaking my head as if to say, “That did not just happen!”