honestly, I’m in awe,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin.’
She seemed to appreciate my accolades greatly. ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m putting you and John at the table with Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio. John would like that, right?’
Forget John. I was so excited I thought I might pee in my pants, but I smiled and said that yes, indeed, John would be thrilled since he was very passionate about environmental preservation.
‘Oh, good,’ Caroline hiccupped, ‘because Fred just sent the jet this morning to pick up Leo and his girlfriend.’
The Reinhardts’ New Year’s party was, according to local gossip, not quite as fabulous as the previous year’s. But you could have fooled me. Everywhere I turned there were famous faces and bold-faced names, trays of champagne flutes, and six-foot floral arrangements. I felt, as usual, underdressed in my simple jewel-toned column, especially when I saw Jill in a partially see-through dress that was made of silk and tulle, with a front panel of close-cropped gray mink. Her shoes, open-toed sandals, were constructed entirely of peacock feathers. Caroline, meanwhile opted for an asymmetrical fire-engine-red gown with a crystal-encrusted bodice and short hemline, while Dahlia chose a discreet ecru satin party frock and matching fox-trimmed bolero, that was pinned with a large diamond and pearl orchid brooch.
After a sumptuous five-course dinner with our new friends Al and Tipper Gore (Leo was a no-show) and a performance by Maroon Five (the Rihanna rumors were wrong), I went to the ladies’ room to powder my nose and get away from Al, who, to be honest, didn’t know when to stop talking. On my way out my heel caught on a duct-taped ridge covering one of the power cords leading toward the stage, and I knocked into Dahlia, who nearly had a heart attack when I instinctively grabbed her forearm to steady myself.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I tripped. I know you don’t liked to be touched.’
‘You should watch where you are going, Marcy,’ she said flatly. ‘And I mean that in more ways than one. Clumsy is not cute, and neither is playing the naïve little wife. I’ve seen a dozen women like you come and go, and as sure as I know my children’s names, I know that you will not last long. Your kind never does. Either your husband will not bear out to be the whiz kid that all the other men seem to think he is, or he will dump you for someone else. And whichever one of these comes to pass, believe me, Marcy, no one here will care.’
‘And a joyous and prosperous New Year to you, too, Dahlia,’ I said.
She regarded me contemptuously before continuing on her path through the throng of well-dressed guests.
I was stunned, but not hurt. Dahlia lived in a bubble; she was totally lacking in social grace, not to mention delusional and completely removed from reality, and I wondered what it would take for her to come back to her senses and realize that she was no better than me, or the dozens of assistants and shop girls, nannies and waitresses she probably verbally assaulted every day.
It was close to midnight, and Justin Timberlake, along with Caroline and Fred, took to the stage to lead the crowd through a countdown to the next year. John found me in the swarm of bodies near the shockingly true-to-life ice sculpture of Caroline’s naked body and pulled me to him and kissed me warmly on the mouth as the gold and silver confetti fell from the ceiling and onto the crowd.
‘I love you, Marcy,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘This is going to be our year. Look around at all these people. By this time next year, we’ll be just as rich as them. You watch and see,’ he said, lifting his glass to me.
I took a long swallow of the champagne and smiled, but inside I was wondering if my husband truly meant to sound like a greedy asshole or if it was just the cocaine talking. By then I was almost sure that he was using. All the trips to the bathroom, dilated pupils and dry mouth, not to mention the sniffing that he kept on blaming on the frigid temperatures and high altitude? Give me a break. As if I wasn’t supposed to put two and two together. It incensed me that John wouldn’t volunteer that he was snorting lines, and I didn’t know what made me more upset, that he was trying to keep it a secret from me, or that he was using a drug that up until recently he considered something only trust-fund-addled playboys blew their money on. I tried to confront him about it a few times, but we were so rarely alone—there was always another houseguest or staff member around—that I decided to leave it until we returned to New York.
As the festivities continued late into the night, I tried to remind myself that I was lucky to have a husband with big and clear goals, even if it would have been nice, that is to say I would have respected him more, if he had been motivated by something other than the deepening of his own already deep pockets. I thought of the heavy, secondhand autobiography of Lee Iacocca my father toted around with him to some of the football games that Annalise cheered in high school. My father was a Liberal Democrat, like most of the people in our middle-class Midwestern neighborhood, but he looked up to Iacocca because he had resuscitated Chrysler and had saved and created jobs in the process. This, according to my father, was capitalism at its best. Iacocca deserved every bit of his success
John did not.
In fact, most of the people around us did not. They made money for the pure sport of it, and didn’t manufacture a product or create jobs. Sure, there were the dozens upon dozens of people they employed to take care of their offspring and belongings, and I supposed that in this regard their good fortune had trickled down to the nannies and busboys, cleaning ladies and garage mechanics, but was that enough to buoy an economy forever? I did not think so, but most of the people making merry in the crowd did. And they partied despite the darkening economic clouds, despite the millions of foreclosure signs popping up across the country like little red flags. A storm was coming, but no one wanted to see it, least of all, of course, the wives.
Jillian Lovern Tischman lived in Gramercy Park, a neighborhood named for the private park to which only the residents of the buildings abutting the manicured green square were given access. Her apartment was actually two apartments that had been combined into one a few years prior to my visit. It was on the same square as the Gramercy Park Hotel, aka the scene of my latest humiliation, which I could just make out if I hung my head out of Jill’s kitchen window and squinted through the trees of the park. It was in this position that Gigi found me when she swept into the room in a cloud of her vanilla and rosewood perfume.
‘Girl, you better get your head out of that window. I can’t afford to lose one more person tonight,’ she clucked. ‘The bartender’s not returning my calls and one of my servers called to say she’s come down with the flu, which knowing this one means she’s been asked out on a date. Probably by some jerk who’s gonna take her to a fancy restaurant, have his way with her, and never call her again. I keep telling her not to put out on the first date, but Lord have mercy does she ever listen to me?’
‘We’ve been wasting our breath,’ said Gigi’s chef, Bear, an older German man who was large and huggable enough to make his name seem appropriate rather than silly. He was vigorously stirring a chocolate sauce over a double broiler and paused midstir to add, ‘I’m starting to think she is the kind that never will learn.’
Gigi sighed, and turned to look at me. I was wearing a black Ralph Lauren cashmere turtleneck sweater and skirt, and the pearl necklace John had bought me a few months ago for my thirty-fifth birthday. ‘Thank you so much for doing this,’ she said as she walked over to the butcher’s block-topped kitchen island and pushed aside four stacks of industrial-sized, plastic-wrapped baking sheets to make room for her plastic binder. Flipping through the notebook, she found the page she was looking for and started explaining to me the timeline of the evening, starting with prep work, followed by the cocktail hour, and finally dinner service. Around ten we would clear the tables and rinse the dishes before restacking them into their plastic crates. Then they would be sent to a facility to be scrubbed clean inside industrial-sized dishwashers.
‘House & Home cut