Southern Charm

by Tinsley Mortimer

  “Well, I really should be going,” Mother said.

  What?!

  “That armoire is being delivered at six P.M. and if I’m not there to sign for it we’ll have one ticked-off doorman on our hands.”

  “M-mommy, I,” I stuttered, “I should probably help you?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. She looked at me, then Tripp. “The night is young and you two obviously have some talking to do. Why don’t y’all grab a drink around the corner and iron things out?”

  Iron things out? I was starting to feel faint.

  “Tripp, dear, don’t make yourself a stranger, now, you hear? I don’t want another seven years going by before our next chance meeting on a New York City street.” She winked at him. She actually had the nerve to wink at him. And then she swiveled around and scurried away as though if she just walked quickly enough, I would forget she had ever been standing there in the first place.

  “I forgot how amusing your mother can be,” Tripp said.

  “Amusing?”

  “She’s a pistol.”

  “Oh, Tripp.”

  “Anyway”—he looped his arm in mine—“she reminds me of someone I know.” He smiled. “One drink, Minty Davenport,” he said. “You owe me that much.”

  It’s All in the Details

  I believe in fate and just knowing within a short period of time that something is meant to be. In fact, my mother always swore she loved my father the moment she saw him, even though she also kind of hated him and definitely threw a drink in his face. She said that she was really just trying to get his attention at the end of the day, and she knew a man like Gharland Davenport wasn’t exactly an easy target.

  “Anyway,” she explained, “sometimes love and hate are the same thing.”

  I understood what she was trying to say, but I never truly believed it until it happened to me.

  Tripp took me to Nectar Coffee Shop on Madison Avenue. We ordered hot chocolate and apple pie. I was so in shock that it took me a good seven minutes to start talking, but there was nothing awkward about those first seven minutes of silence.

  “I had to get your attention somehow,” he finally said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I would call this ‘getting my attention,’” I said. “It’s more like, I don’t know, cornering?”

  He smiled. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

  I stared back at him. That connection, however small, however undeveloped, remained. We both knew it. But was I really ready to rewind seven years and admit how much he’d hurt me? It seemed silly now in the grand scheme of things, but the scars were still there.

  “I have to say, Tripp,” I began, “I’m totally surprised by this.”

  He looked taken aback.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m not sure what you want me to say. I’m happy we ran into each other. I mean, I’ve been wondering about you for years. Probably since the last time I saw you. When was it? The Christmas party at the club?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was the Christmas party at the club. And my memories of that night aren’t exactly . . . fond.”

  “I see.” He bristled. “I’m—I’m sorry about that.”

  “I know we were really young,” I said. “And yes—it was such a short period of time. But I liked you so much—I even thought I might be falling in love with you—and you lied to me.”

  “I know,” he said. He stared at his cup of coffee. “What else can I say? I liked you a lot too. If it helps at all I broke up with my girlfriend that spring. It had been winding down for a while. And I wanted to contact you, but then I heard you were dating Ryerson Bigelow.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You know Ryerson?”

  “I guess you could say that.” Tripp smirked. “We’ve been playing lacrosse against each other since camp in the seventh grade.” He rolled his eyes. “He was also UVA’s top defenseman.”

  “I see,” I said. Tripp was the top defenseman at Princeton.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “my point is, I learned my lesson—I should have been honest with you from the get-go.”

  Okay, I thought.

  “Listen.” He paused for a moment. “You’re too good for me, Minty Davenport.” He looked directly at me and smiled. “We both know that. And I screwed it up the first time around. But I want you to understand, I have no intentions of doing that again. I’m a different guy this time around. And all I ask is that you give me a chance.”

  My heart raced. The Tripp I knew at fifteen would never have said something so forthright. He would have played it cool.

  I thought for a minute.

  “Okay,” I said, smiling softly.

  Tripp exhaled. “Thank you.”

  “Not to say you’re off the hook just yet,” I continued, raising an eyebrow. “Tabitha Lipton. What exactly is going on there?”

  It didn’t take him long to unload the whole story. He admitted that he had been dating Tabitha Lipton, albeit casually, but when I came back into his life he couldn’t pretend with her any longer.

  “Listen, Minty,” he said. “I just have a feeling about you, about us, and I think it’s worth exploring. I don’t know what else to say.”

  I didn’t disagree with him.

  That night, he dropped me off at my apartment and we kissed for the first time in seven years. Of course I’d kissed a few boys since Tripp, but what can I say? Every once in a while a person comes into your life and it’s just . . . different. Years before, I was head over heels for Tripp. It was like I’d always pictured him in my mind and one day he appeared in front of me, an actual person. Now he’d come back into my life, new and improved. I wasn’t going to question it anymore.

  The next morning, he followed up with a text message, then a call the next day, and finally a delivery of a dozen white roses with a card that said: “Oh, hey.”

  In the meantime, my mother took up residence at the Plaza Hotel. As I slaved away at RVPR, trying to balance the demands of being Ruth’s assistant with the excitement of being wooed by Tripp du Pont, Mother was spending more time in my apartment than I was, orchestrating a most ambitious interior design project. One evening, I arrived home at midnight to find her in the kitchen on her hands and knees, inspecting the newly grouted tile.

  “It’s in the details, Minty,” she said, looking up at me. All I could do was stare down at her, speechless. “Details, details, details.”

  It turned out this maxim could be applied to many areas of my life, especially my job. Ever since my disastrous performance at the Hermès party, I was determined to prove myself to Ruth. I arrived at work an hour earlier than the other assistants (sometime between seven thirty and eight A.M. each morning). I smiled even when smiling was the last thing I felt like doing, which was usually the case. If I had to cry, I went into the handicap bathroom stall and did it very, very softly. I always carried Clé de Peau concealer and Visine so that when I emerged from the bathroom, I actually looked fresher and more alert than I did going in.

  One morning, Ruth asked me to pick up some ballpoint pens for an event. I forgot which type was her favorite and had to ask before I ran out to buy some.

  When I popped my head in her office to check, she turned very red, stopped breathing for a moment, and then buried her head in her hands. All I could do was stand there helpless, wondering if I should grab her a brown paper bag.

  “Jesus Christ, Minty,” she bellowed. “Do you think I have time for this crap? Fucking ballpoint pens? Get a fucking clue!”

  Back at my desk, I wasn’t sure whether to just make an educated guess or wait for Ruth to miraculously have a charitable moment and remind me on her own. I racked my brain for a memory of Ruth holding a pen and came up with nothing. So I made my way to the bathroom, where I spent approximately four minutes in the handicap stall trying not to cry.

  When I returned to my desk, Spencer was there.

  “Ruthless just left for lunch,” he said, referencing a nickname Ruth had rightly ea
rned in the industry. He used the nickname liberally, while the rest of us were too scared to use it even in the privacy of our own homes. “The coast is clear.”

  Spencer was a rare find in the fashion world, not because he was charming, clever, and good-looking, but because he was all of those things in addition to being straight (as he once swore in front of the entire office with his right hand on a copy of the Bible).

  He had a boyish, prep-school look: dirty blond, sunburned hair and a ruddy complexion. He spent his junior year at Dartmouth abroad in Paris, during which he discovered Flaubert and the merits of the clove cigarette. When he returned to Hanover for his senior year, he decided he would become “a writer.” He would move to New York after graduation and pursue a career at Vanity Fair.

  Even if Spencer were years away from the Vanity Fair contributors’ page as an RVPR intern, he was determined to schmooze his way up the ladder until his dream became a reality. Which couldn’t help but make me think about my own goals. It seemed so far beyond my reach, but I dreamed of having my own fashion label one day. Hopefully the connections I was making at RVPR would bring me closer to that goal. Although sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder, was I reaching too high?

  “Minty.” Spencer rolled his eyes as I sat down with a defeated look on my face. “You’ve got to stop taking things so personally.”

  “Forgive me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but it’s hard not to take it personally when someone tells you to get a—excuse my French—fucking clue.”

  “I grew up in New Jersey, where people in SUVs the size of a third-world country run you off the road if you’re not going over eighty miles an hour.” He paused and looked me straight in the eye. “It’s not personal.”

  When Ruth returned from lunch, she was holding a small gift bag. I knew the blue shade of the bag well: Smythson. She walked into her office and summoned me via speakerphone. She always waited until she got back into her office to address me, as if she was following some sort of boss/assistant protocol.

  Typically, I would have run to her office, but this time around, I couldn’t help but walk slowly, like a prisoner walking the gangplank.

  When I got to her office, there was something eerie about how calm she was. All I could think was, How am I going to explain being fired to my mother?

  Before I could sit down, she rested her hand on the Smythson bag, which was in front of her on her desk, and slid it toward me. “Now, I’m only going to say this once,” she said, staring at me intently. “And if there is even a reason for me to want to say it a second time, well, let’s just say I won’t even have the chance to say it because you won’t be here anymore.”

  “Okay,” I gulped.

  “Write. Everything. Down.”

  I picked up the bag and looked inside. There was a pink notebook. I found it curious, seeing as pink was not exactly Ruth’s favorite color and, in spite of the fact that it was mine, I had never once worn pink in the office.

  “Thank you, Ruth,” I said. “I love it. I absolutely love it. I promise to write everything down.”

  “It had your name written all over it,” she said, shooing me away.

  When I got back to my desk, Spencer eyed my present suspiciously.

  “Oh boy, she got you a Smythson?” Spencer grumbled. “That means you’re in deep.”

  “In deep?”

  “Well . . .” Spencer paused for a moment. “It’s both good and bad. It means Ruth has a soft spot for you. It also means she’s investing in you. Which—how shall we put this?—never ends well.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  One morning, about a week before Christmas, I arrived in the office extra early in order to get a head start on my growing to-do list.

  I was praying to get out of the office at a reasonable hour. Tripp had invited me to a dinner at the home of one of his childhood friends, Baron Guggenheim, that evening. We had only been dating for about two months and I was a bit nervous about spending an evening with a group of native New Yorkers who had known one another their entire lives. I wanted some time to get ready.

  The one saving grace was that Emily would be in attendance. It turned out that she and Tripp had several friends in common. While she seemed genuinely happy that I would be there, I could also make out a bit of hesitancy in her voice.

  “I’m just warning you,” she said. “It’s a tough crowd.”

  Fine, but there was no way in hell I was going to play the role of helpless girlfriend swallowed up by a sea of piranhas. I wanted Tripp to see that I could not only hold my own with his friends but also win them over in spite of my lack of a preppy Northeast pedigree and Upper East Side connections. Emily might serve as a buffer, but as I learned at the luncheon back in September, she was no babysitter. Knowing Emily and her own unique version of tough love, she would probably give me several minutes of her time at the beginning of the party and then leave me to fend for myself, for better or for worse.

  All I knew is that I wanted to feel prepared. I wanted to look my best, and there was no way that was going to happen if I was stuck at the office late and had to rush over to the party in my pencil skirt and pumps. I had never once asked Ruth for permission to leave the office in the three months I’d been working there. I figured if I promised to get all of my work done and asked her very nicely first thing, she would understand.

  When I arrived at work that morning, it was no more than two seconds before my phone rang.

  “I need you in my office,” Ruth said.

  “Okay.” I hung up and grabbed my notebook.

  When I walked into Ruth’s office, I could tell something was amiss.

  “Have you seen this?”

  Ruth was holding a copy of the New York Post. The headline on the front page said something about a scandal with the NYPD. I wasn’t sure. She held it up so fast, I could barely see the picture.

  I tried to remember if I was supposed to read the Post first thing every day. I wondered if I had something written in my notebook about it and reflexively started leafing through the pages.

  “Well.” Ruth put the paper down and riffled through a few pages. “You might want to.” She folded the paper over and handed me “Page Six,” New York’s most notorious, ruthless, and widely read gossip column.

  PLAYBOY DU PONT DUMPS TANTALIZING TABITHA FOR SASSY SOUTHERN DEB.

  My mouth dropped open. “Oh . . . my . . . God.”

  Ruth stared at me. “Mmm-hmm.”

  The first paragraph read: “Move over, Tabitha the Tea Heiress, Minty Davenport is the new Belle of the Ball and she’s not as sweet and innocent as she seems. Friends of Ms. Lipton say the socialite was ‘shocked’ and ‘blindsided’ by her breakup with Tripp du Pont, one of New York’s most eligible bachelors. Sources cite Minty as the ‘one and only’ cause.”

  “Oh my God, Ruth,” I said. “What is this?” I held the paper up to my face. “Why on earth would they . . . ? What?!” I skimmed the rest of the article, which could be summed up in one word: LIES! They made some reference to my “down-home” Charleston roots and mentioned that my mother “claimed” to be an “FFV,” a descendant of one of the “First Families of Virginia.” (This was true, actually.) Then they went on to describe my father as a “rug salesman.”

  “My father is not a rug salesman!” I yelped.

  My paternal grandfather had once owned a well-known carpet company, but my father was a successful businessman in his own right! I didn’t even know how they got that information, let alone managed to screw it up! Not to mention, they were making me out to be some sort of seductress, like I’d stolen Tripp away from Tabitha! I was mortified.

  Either way, Ruth didn’t seem to care.

  “I’m not sure I signed up for this, Minty,” she said.

  I gulped. Neither had I!

  “It’s one thing for RVPR clients to show up on ‘Page Six,’” she said. “It’s another thing for RVPR employees.”

  “R-Ruth,” I stammered, trying to wrap my head around
what was happening, “you have to believe I had nothing to do with this.”

  “So you’re telling me you didn’t use one of my connections to get your name in bold print?”

  “Oh God, absolutely not,” I said, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t even know the first thing about something like that.”

  A lump began to form in my throat. On one hand, I was dealing with the shock of public humiliation. Had Tripp read it yet? Was he freaking out? On the other hand, I was dealing with a boss who had me on probationary terms at best. And to top it off, she thought I’d set the whole thing up on purpose.

  Ruth sighed. It seemed like she might, miraculously, believe me.

  “All right, then,” she said, staring at me. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. But I definitely have a phone call to make.”

  “Are you going to call—”

  “Absolutely, I’m calling Farah,” she said, referring to Farah Hammer, the notorious editor of “Page Six.” “She fucks with one of my clients, she’s going to hear about it. She fucks with one of my employees, well, that’s a whole other level of retribution.”

  I grimaced.

  “In the meantime, Davenport,” she continued, “I want you to focus. As far as I’m concerned this is over and done with. Is that clear?”

  I nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  By nine that morning, word of the item had already spread. I ignored several calls from my mother, two e-mails from Emily, and a text message from Spencer, who was en route to work and had just picked up his copy of the Post. But when Tripp’s number came up on my caller ID, I had to answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Minty.”

  I could hear car horns honking and various voices passing by. He was definitely on the street somewhere, navigating through a crowd and probably clutching a copy of the Post.

  “Hey, sweetie,” I said.

  “Listen,” he continued. “I’m assuming you’ve seen this ‘Page Six’ thing?”