Bette, where have you been all night?’ he said, immediately moving toward me and offering to take my coat. In the same second Penelope bounded over, looking flushed and then relieved. She was wearing a short black cocktail dress topped with a sequined shrug and extraordinarily high-heeled silver sandals, and I knew immediately that her mother had dressed her.
‘Bette!’ she hissed, grabbing my arm and leading me away from Avery, who immediately resumed his intense conversation with the girl. ‘What took you so long? I’ve been suffering alone all night.’
I raised my eyebrows and looked around. ‘Alone? There must be two hundred people here. All these years, and I didn’t know you had two hundred friends. This is quite the party!’
‘Yeah, really impressive, right? Exactly five of the people in this room are here to see me: my mother, my brother, one of the girls from the real-estate department, my father’s secretary, and now you. Megu and Michael left, right?’ I nodded. ‘The rest are Avery’s, of course. And my mother’s friends. Where have you been?’ She took a gulp of her drink and passed the glass to me with slightly shaking hands, as though it were a pipe and not a champagne flute.
‘Honey, I’ve been here for over an hour, as promised. Had a bit of trouble at the door.’
‘You didn’t!’ She looked horrified.
‘I did. Very cute bouncer, but a total creep.’
‘Oh, Bette, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t you call me?’
‘I did, a few dozen times, but I guess you couldn’t hear your phone. Listen, don’t worry about it. Tonight’s your night, so try and, well, uh, enjoy it?’
‘Let’s get you a drink,’ she said, pulling a cosmopolitan from a circling waiter’s tray. ‘Do you believe this party?’
‘It’s crazy. How long has your mother been planning this?’
‘She read in Page Six weeks ago that Gisele and Leo were seen “canoodling” here, so I guess she called and booked it right after that. She keeps telling me that these are the kinds of places I should be patronizing because of their “exclusive clientele.” I didn’t tell her that the one time Avery dragged me here the clientele was basically having sex on the dance floor.’
‘It probably would’ve only encouraged her more.’
‘True.’ A model-tall woman wedged herself between us and began air-kissing Penelope in a manner so insincere I actually cringed, gulped my cosmo, and sneaked away. I got pulled into some inane conversation with a few people from the bank who’d just arrived and who looked a little shell-shocked to be away from their computers, and I chatted as briefly as possible with Penelope’s mother, who immediately referenced both the Chanel suit and the heels she was wearing and then pulled Penelope by the arm to another cache of people. I surveyed the designer-clad crowd and tried not to shrink in my outfit, which had been purchased online from a combination of J. Crew and Banana Republic at three in the morning a few months ago. Will had been particularly insistent lately that I needed ‘going out’ clothes, but the catalog orders were not what he had in mind. I got the feeling that any of these people could – and would – feel perfectly comfortable roaming around naked. Even better than the clothes (which were perfect) was the confidence, and that came from somewhere else entirely. Two hours and three cosmos later, certifiably tipsy, I was considering going home. Instead, I grabbed another drink and ducked outside.
The line to get in had cleared up entirely; only the bouncer who’d held me in club purgatory for so long remained. I was preparing my snide remarks should he address me in any way whatsoever, but he just grinned and returned his attention to the paperback he was reading, which looked like a matchbook in his massive hands. Shame he was so cute – but jerks always are.
‘So, what was it about me that you didn’t like?’ I couldn’t help myself. Five years in the city and I’d tried to avoid places with doormen or velvet ropes unless absolutely necessary; I’d inherited at least a bit of my parents’ egalitarian self-righteousness – or intense insecurity, depending on how you looked at it.
‘Pardon?’
‘I mean, when you wouldn’t let me in before, even though it’s my best friend’s engagement party.’
He shook his head and half-smiled to himself. ‘Look, it’s nothing personal. They hand me a list and tell me to follow it and do crowd control. If you’re not on the list or you show up when a hundred other people do, I have to keep you outside for a little while. There’s really nothing more to it.’
‘Sure.’ I’d all but missed my best friend’s big night because of his door policy. I teetered a bit and then hissed, ‘Nothing personal. Right.’
‘You think I need your attitude tonight? I’ve got plenty of people who are far more expert at giving me a really fucking hard time, so why don’t we just stop talking and I’ll put you in a cab?’
Perhaps it was the fourth cosmo – liquid courage – but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with his condescending attitude, so I turned on my too-chunky heels and yanked the door open. ‘I hardly need your charity. Thanks for nothing,’ I snapped and marched back inside the club as soberly as I could manage.
I hugged Penelope, air-kissed Avery, and then beelined to the door before anyone else could initiate any more small talk. I saw a girl crouched in a corner, sobbing quietly but with a pleased awareness that others were watching, and sidestepped a strikingly stylish foreign couple who were making out furiously, and with much hip grinding. I then made a big show of ignoring the meathead bouncer who, incidentally, was reading from a tattered paperback version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (sex fiend!) and threw my arm in the air to hail a cab. Only the street was completely empty, and a cold drizzle had just begun, practically guaranteeing that a taxi was nowhere in my immediate future.
‘Hey, you need some help?’ he asked after opening the velvet rope to admit three squealing, tottering girls. ‘This is a tough street for cabs when it rains.’
‘No thanks, I’m just fine.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Minutes were starting to feel like hours, and the warm summer sprinkles had rapidly become a cold, persistent rain. What, exactly, was I proving here? The bouncer had pressed himself against the door to get some protection from the overhang and was still reading calmly, as though unaware of the hurricane that now whipped around us. I continued to stare at him until he looked up, grinned, and said, ‘Yeah, you seem to be doing just fine on your own. You’re definitely teaching me a lesson by not taking one of these huge umbrellas and walking a couple blocks over to Eighth, where you’ll have no trouble getting a cab at all. Great call on your part.’
‘You have umbrellas?’ I asked before I could stop myself. The water had soaked entirely through my shirt and I could feel my blanket-thick hair sticking to my neck in wet, cold clumps.
‘Sure do. Keep ’em right here for situations just like this. But I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested in taking one of them, right?’
‘Right. I’m just fine.’ To think I’d almost begun warming up to him. Just then a livery cab drove by, and I had the brilliant idea to call UBS’s car service for a ride home.
‘Hi, this is Bette Robinson with account number six-three-three-eight. I need a car to pick me up at—’
‘All booked!’ barked back an angry-sounding female dispatcher.
‘No, I don’t think you understand. I have an account with your company and—’
Click.
I stood there soaking wet, anger boiling inside me.
‘No cars, huh? Tough,’ he said, clucking sympathetically without looking up from the book. I’d managed to skim Lady Chatterley’s Lover when I was twelve and had already gleaned as much about sex as possible from the combination of Forever, Wifey and What’s Happening to My Body? Book for