and fitting in with them felt like such a daunting task. Ergo, when the invitation to Caroline’s shower arrived, I had originally assumed there had been a mix-up at the calligraphers. I was just about to post the response card back with a little note alerting the host to the error, when John returned home from the office and assured me that the invitation really had been intended for me. Apparently one of his new colleagues at Zenith Capital had a wife who was expecting their first child and wanted to invite me to her shower.
On the day of the party, I had my hair blown out at the hair salon on the corner, and after getting caught with a stylist who was convinced they could pump more volume into my unrepentantly limp locks, ended up arriving a bit late to the Kemp’s four-story Upper East Side townhouse on a tree-lined block off of Fifth Avenue. I was only ten minutes late, but already the first gush of guests had trickled out of the entry foyer and into the first-floor living room, allowing me to make a mostly unnoticed entrance, which turned out to be a stroke of luck. When I spotted the rack of designer furs in the front hall, I realized that my bright pink puffer would have stuck out, literally, like a sore thumb among all that sable and mink; and I crossed my fingers that no one but the maid, whose sole job it was to keep an eye on the coat rack, would connect me with my pink marshmallow parka. Chicago’s anything-goes-as-long-as-it-keeps-you-from-getting-frostbitten approach to outerwear clearly didn’t apply in New York City. This was a chinchilla-or-bust kind of town, and I made a mental note to go shopping for a new winter coat as soon as possible.
Taking a deep breath I made my way through the mirror-walled marble foyer into the Louis-XIV-antiques-decorated living room, and surveyed its contents: a couch and several arm chairs upholstered in lustrous dove-gray silk; marble-topped side tables and a coffee table made of mercury glass; a huge ivory oriental rug and a pair of gargantuan Lalique vases filled with fresh-cut pale pink-and-white flowers. A large Dutch pastoral painting hung on the far wall just above the couch, and a slew of Impressionist paintings from Renoir, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, and Pissarro covered nearly every available inch on the others. I counted about twenty-five female guests milling about, each wearing at least eight carats of diamonds and shoes that cost as much as my first car.
I took another deep breath, fluffed my hair a bit, and decided to introduce myself to Caroline. Only problem: nearly everyone was pregnant. And not just a little pregnant—at least half of the women there were sporting basketball-sized bellies, making it next to impossible to know who I was supposed to be congratulating. Luckily, I didn’t have to take more than three steps toward a tray of mini croques monsieurs and Gruyère gougères before a striking blonde greeted me with a double air kiss.
‘Marcy, I’m Caroline,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming.’
Caroline Reinhardt had pin-straight blond hair that hung in an impossibly thick curtain down her back, dark blue eyes, and rubbery lips. She was wearing a wool pencil skirt and sleeveless ivory silk blouse that showed off her toned arms, perky, full breasts, and flat stomach. In other words, there was no way this woman was pregnant. It took me a second, but when it finally dawned on me that she was having the baby via surrogate I managed to eke out a passably hearty congratulations.
‘Thanks so much for inviting me,’ I said, given that the usual ‘you’re glowing!’ and ‘how do you feel?’ were obviously not applicable.
‘Of course we had to include you. There was no question,’ she smiled, revealing a row of perfectly white teeth. Veneers, no doubt, and from the look of them, the best and most expensive kind ($50,000 easily). ‘How are you finding the move?’ she asked, crossing her long arms right below her perfect breasts.
‘Decorating our new place has kept me pretty busy, but to be honest I’ve been really lonely. It’s no fun shopping alone for armchairs,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me you’re not working with an interior designer?’ she balked.
I shook my head, helping myself to one of the Gruyère puffs. Cheese was my one big weakness in life, a mild obsession that would forever necessitate the wearing of body-fat encasing (or restructuring, as I liked to call it) undergarments.
‘Not to worry. I’ll call Jasper on Monday and ask him to see you straightaway. He’s finishing up our place on Bank Street. He’s marvelous and does so many of the girls’ homes here,’ she said.
‘Did he do this place?’
‘Oh Lord no. He’s much more, shall we say, décor forward? But Thomas Kemp is such a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist,’ she said, conspiratorially. ‘Anyway, there’s a chance Jasper’s in Chicago doing a taping with Oprah but I know I’m going to see him next Tuesday. Should I tell him to give you a ring?’
‘Oh no, don’t do that,’ I said, wondering exactly how much Jasper Pell, an interior designer who makes regular pit stops on The Oprah Winfrey Show, charged for a telephone, forget in-person, consultation. ‘I’m doing it on my own. Well, really John and I are doing it, but—’
‘Ohh, you’re an interior designer. No one told me,’ she said, suddenly excited. ‘Will you come over and tell me what you think of the nursery? I can’t decide if we should go with the faded sea foam or dusty wisteria color palette. Which one do you think is more progressive yet soothing?’
I told her she’d gotten the wrong idea, that I wasn’t an interior designer and was useless when it came to such dilemmas.
‘Oh,’ she sighed, her lips furling with disappointment. Then she started scanning the room in search of someone else to introduce me to, and I knew I’d blown it—my one big shot to make a good impression, and hopefully, a friend. John wasn’t kidding when he said that if in the real world you get one chance to get in someone’s good graces, when it comes to the superrich, it’s thirty seconds.
‘Have you met the party host, Dahlia Kemp, yet?’ Caroline asked distractedly.
We walked over to the couch where two women, both thin and blonde and dressed in pastel tweed skirts, silk blouses, and gold necklaces, were bent over their BlackBerries, tapping out emails. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I recognized the one on the right from a copy of Vogue that I’d thumbed through at the hair salon that morning.
The one on the left spoke first. ‘So tell me Caroline how are you staffing up for the baby’s arrival?’
‘We’re thinking a cook, baby nurse, and a nanny should do it.’
Three people for one little baby?
‘We did the same when Carolina and Alexander were born,’ Dahlia sniffed. ‘It’s so important to have a backup nanny in case of emergencies. Of course now that our children are six and eight, we’ve had to staff up with specialists: language and culture tutors, tennis, golf, and swimming instructors, and so on. But you don’t have to worry about that just yet. And whoever handles your domestics headhunting can help vet your candidates.’
Caroline said she would have to remember to ask for more details at a later date, and then put her hand lightly on my shoulder before introducing me. ‘Dahlia Kemp, Ainsley Partridge, this is Marcy Emerson. Her husband John works with Fred at Zenith,’ she said, taking a small step away from me, almost as if I were being presented at court. For a moment I had the distinct yet surreal impression I was meant to curtsey.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ I said, offering my hand across the mercury glass coffee table. I waited for Dahlia to grasp it but she didn’t. Instead, she daintily fingered one of the multiple Van Cleef & Arpels clover Alhambra necklaces strung around her neck and looked away while Caroline hissed in my ear, ‘She doesn’t shake.’
What, like the pope? Confused and embarrassed, I withdrew my outstretched hand and stuffed it in the little front pocket on my dress, and as I fumbled with the pocket, it occurred to me that maybe I had been meant to curtsey before.
‘You have a beautiful home,’ I said finally.
Dahlia looked around the room as if she’d never really noticed how nice it was and parted her thin lips, hesitating for a second before gesturing