Being Audrey Hepburn (34 page)

That night I tried on everything. One after the other, each dress was spectacular. It was like living a fairy tale or playing princess when we were kids. Everything was cool, feminine, and dazzling.

Jess took notes on adjustments.

We designed the order of the show with the orange chiffon the last, and I put together my first thoughts on a guest list.

A big problem to solve was where the show should be staged. Jess was still waiting to hear about the FIT auditorium. School was in its lighter summer session and she was hoping that one of her teachers would help her get it for free. But I insisted that it had to be held away from the school. Jess couldn’t seem to understand why.

“Because Designer X doesn’t go to school,” I said. “Designer X needs to appear fully formed out of nowhere and be fiercely fabulous.”

“Only there is no Designer X except on your blog,” Jess said wearily. “I’m just a freshman fashion student from New Jersey having her first independent show. I am not ‘fully formed,’ and I don’t have any fabulous connections.”

“Jess, you’re more than that. It’s not enough to design a great collection—you have to make a splash to get the right kind of attention.” I tried to think of alternatives for a moment.

“Doesn’t Sarrah work in an art gallery somewhere?” I asked.

“Please, not more Sarrah,” she said, shaking her head.

I hated bringing up Sarrah so much, but I was determined to make Jess’s debut incredible, and I knew that Sarrah was so infatuated with Jess that she would help.

“Yeah she works at Below the Line. It’s one of those storefront art spaces under the High Line. But can’t we worry about that later?” I could see that Jess’s eyes were glazing over. She seemed overwhelmed by it all.

“Sarrah has to get permission for you to have the show there,” I said. “And it has to be off calendar. Maybe on Fashion’s Night Out—that’s in five days—when everyone’s in town and the press is trying to find a good story. Something new. Can you be ready by then?”

Around the time we were freshman at Montclair High, Anna Wintour of
Vogue
started Fashion’s Night Out in New York City. It was the recession, and Anna Wintour hoped to save her industry and to help perk up sales in retail stores in Manhattan.

Almost immediately, it became a huge worldwide event and a prelude to fashion week. All the stores in the city that sell clothes stayed open until midnight, handing out free champagne. It was a great night for happenings and off-beat news stories.

“I don’t know,” she said, exhausted.

“The actual show is going to take all of a half hour. Promise me you’ll ask Sarrah?”

“That’s too much. I can’t promise anything right now. I’m too tired,” she said, collapsing onto the bed. I flopped down next to her. We were both ready to drop off to sleep.

Jess turned to look at me. We stared into each other’s eyes, as Jess admired her work on my hair.

“You’re the best friend … ever,” she said.

“No,” I began, “I’ll never be able to hold a candle to you.” But she never heard me.

Jess had fallen asleep.

My Jess. Then I dozed off, too.

The next morning I woke early. I let Jess snooze away. I tiptoed to the closet, stacked a few of Nan’s remixed dresses into a clothing bag, and then filled one of Jess’s monster bags with shoes and purses. If Tabitha and I partied every night for five days straight, I was ready.

As I was getting ready to leave, I realized that Jess had been watching me the entire time.

“Go back to sleep—you need to rest,” I said. But she got out of bed and walked over to the closet. She picked out a dress from her new designs. It was the first one I had tried on, her signature dress, soft orange chiffon with the tight blush silk skirt underneath.

“Take this,” she said, unzipping the clothing bag and placing the dress inside. Then she stretched to wake up.

“How can I?” I said.

“It’s a great dress. It will be fabulous at a party. Don’t try to tell me you’re not going to a party out there.”

“But it’s one of your originals, maybe the most important dress in your collection,” I said. “It has to be in the show.”

“Exactly why I want you to take it.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat on the stool I had sat on the night before when she was cutting my hair.

She took a long sip and peered at me over the coffee-mug rim. “Bring it back, okay?”

51

It was a clear blue Thursday morning, and I felt as if I were traveling to another world. I boarded the Hamptons Jitney at Fortieth Street with the summer hoards—urban surfer dudes, preppy boys wearing pink and green, giggling well-groomed tweens carrying Vera Bradley travel bags, and an eighties music fanatic playing “Small Town Girl” so loudly that I could hear every word through his earbuds.

But nothing could disturb the tranquility and excitement of escaping the city to visit the unexplored Eden of the Hamptons. Unexplored by me, anyway.

The Jitney was just a bus, honestly, but it felt like transportation for the privileged classes with attendants serving your needs and offering a choice of muffins or granola bars as well as orange juice, water, and Wi-Fi, the lifeblood of any blogger.

As we reached exit 70, the landscape and air changed. We passed through the towns of Southampton, Water Mill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Wainscott, and East Hampton. Gazing out the Jitney windows, each town seemed more beachy than the one before. Hydrangeas were everywhere. The big blue flowers made me think of little old ladies and churches.

“ON WAY 2 HAMPTONS WILL U B THERE THIS WKEND?” I texted Isak. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I needed to lock him into Jess’s show. I waited for his reply.

“HELLOW DFC, IM OFF TO ITALIE BACK IN NY FOR FW,” he replied. Not until Fashion Week? That was unfortunate. But since we didn’t know yet exactly when Jess’s show would be, there wasn’t much I could do.

“HOPE YOU’LL B IN TIME FOR DESIGNER X,” I teased back.

“WHEN? WHEN!”

“LAST MINUTE WILL LET YOU KNOW.”

The Jitney pulled into Amagansett. As I stepped off the bus, the difference between the scented air-freshened Jitney and the beach air was so revitalizing it practically made me giddy.

As the taxi pulled up to the enormous mansion by the dunes, the balmy ocean atmosphere embraced me: clean, salty, with hints of lilac and privet. The clouds in the sterling-blue sky above were full but not threatening.

A stocky woman in a classic black-and-white maid’s uniform opened the door holding a barking, squirming Pomeranian—Galileo.

“We are so happy seeing you,” she said loudly in a thick Russian accent over Galileo’s yapping. “Miss Eden has been anxiously waiting. My name is Zoya. I welcome you.” She seemed very excited, but when she glanced down and saw my lonely roller and garment bag, she stopped, alarmed.

“Did they lose bags? You want I call them?” she asked. She seemed upset that I had so few.

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said, smiling. “These are my bags.”

“Really? But what will you wear?” she asked as we walked inside. I laughed. “Ah, maybe you go shopping spree?”

Galileo sniffed and remembered me as I walked into a lively, boisterous houseful of people. Even though Tabitha wasn’t there, she had plenty of houseguests. Balty was back, and I had to admit I enjoyed talking to him though he still ogled me. This time it was his sister, Flo, who kept him in line.

“Tabitha told me you’d be here this weekend,” Flo said, excitedly. She was wearing a lovely black one-piece swimsuit and huge red floppy straw hat that almost enveloped her entire body in shadow. I could see she had the kind of skin that would sunburn badly.

“I think you’ll be very pleased with what I’ve cooked up for you,” she said. “We can talk now if you have a moment.” There was a devious sparkle in her eye. I couldn’t wait to hear. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I was counting on her.

Balty soon drifted away, utterly bored, as his sister and I sat by the pool droning on and on about click-through, e-book links, RSS aggregators, AdSense, AdWords, lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Bottom line: it would take time, but if we worked together click by click, entry by entry, we could develop an income stream and potentially a worthwhile and profitable “brand” from my little blog. Flo Birkenhead’s excitement was utterly infectious.

“This is what I love to do!” she exclaimed, her eyes glowing with excitement beneath her voluminous hat that spread like a flaming mushroom top over her. I could tell it was true. The idea of initially earning three or four thousand dollars a month, which Flo dismissed as negligible, was huge for me. It was at least double what I would have made working at the Hole if I had worked forty hours a week.

We talked for hours while dozens of houseguests milled about the house. They were swimming in the pool, sleeping sunburned on the sectional in the living room, watching the US Open on the flat-screen, and driving quads across the lawn, ripping up the massive manicured grounds for the gardeners to repair. Tabitha had all the toys—a ten-seat theater, skateboard half-pipe, sunken tennis court, and a complete spa facility. I’d heard there was even a two-lane bowling alley somewhere.

Soon my head was swimming and I needed a rest. Zoya showed me to the guest cottage, which would have been a complete house for some people. After she insisted on hanging up my clothes in the massive walk-in closet, I flopped down on the bed and crashed.

“Are you going to sleep all night?” Tabitha asked and shook my arm as if I were dead.

“Night?” I said groggily, trying to sit up. “Really? I thought it was afternoon.”

“It was about four hours ago,” she said and took a sip of some chilled mixed alcohol concoction she was holding. “Now it’s night. That’s the way it always happens. First the afternoon and then the night,” she said. “Now it’s time to play.” She handed me a drink, something with tequila in it.

52

I’m sure there’s a difference between an “event,” “a benefit,” and a flat-out party but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it is. We drove up to an enormous Bridgehampton beachfront house made of wood and glass, parked Tabitha’s limo with the valet, and stumbled in with our entourage. Everyone in our group was already hammered.

The entire ocean side of the house was made from oversize mahogany framed glass sliding walls, which were fully opened to the outdoors. We witnessed the last orange and purple rays of sunshine setting over the nearby bay. A glass bridge crossed the infinity-edged pool reflecting the sunset. Tabitha seemed to know everyone, and it didn’t take long for her to be scary drunk. Every direction you turned, there was sushi or a grill or a bar and always lots of people.

The strange thing was that I couldn’t tell who was giving the party and whether just anyone could come. There was no hostess or activity that seemed to be the focus, and I suspected Tabitha didn’t really know these people as much as they knew her in that celebrity way.

I found myself waving, air kissing, and making empty-headed conversation with a long procession of people I didn’t know and who had no idea who I was or wasn’t, which didn’t seem to bother anyone but was exhausting. I wondered, was this how the other half parties? Eating fabulous food at enormous mansions with people they don’t know?

Tabitha couldn’t even tell me whose party it was. I developed my own pet theory that the owner was a plastic surgeon, because this particular group seemed to be filled with so many women who had enhanced surgical recontouring. Even the young women had bodies that were anatomically impossible. I felt positively flat, not for the first time, but this was extreme. At least I wouldn’t have to contend with random injectables in my body for the rest of my life.

I commented to Tabitha about the over-the-top bodies, and she laughed. She proposed a drinking game where we’d each have to throw back a shot every time we saw a woman with a breast augmentation and two for a Brazilian butt lift. But that was a bad idea because there were too many. She told me about a package deal one cosmetic surgeon she knew in the city offered with unlimited plastic surgical procedures (“within reason,” his offer stated), including a Hamptons luxury home rental and a full-time nurse for your recovery, as well as a chauffeur, invites to VIP and celebrity parties (more parties, I assumed, with people you didn’t know), and a budget for a new wardrobe (because your new body would need new, slimmer clothes, I assumed). I just hoped that whoever bought the package didn’t worry about looking puffy.

We left Bridgehampton for another party in Amagansett not far from Tabitha’s. It was a birthday bash for a sixteen-year-old girl who was the daughter of a friend of hers. But you’d never know it was a party for kids.

The adults easily outnumbered the kids and the teenagers were scary. They ran around with a total sense of entitlement and confidence that I assumed only Daddy’s trust fund could provide. Watching them intimidated me. The girls, many of them a mere thirteen or fourteen years old, wore tons of makeup, the tightest skin-tight Lycra tube dresses, and high heels just to look older.

It didn’t take Tabitha long to nab a teenage boy, Maxwell, and that was the beginning of our problems.

As the evening grew later and later, Tabitha decided to take him along. I wondered whether his mother would be panicked, searching for him. Walking the parking lot, we glided through car porn—Lambos, Masers, Ferraris, Bentleys, Aston Martins—until we reached Tabitha’s stretch.

“Where to now?” Maxwell asked, almost giddy arm in arm with Tabitha. You could tell he figured he had lucked out. Drunk pop star, stretch limo, and adults who didn’t care about the drinking age or corrupting a minor. How old was he really? Like fifteen?

“Let’s stop by the Talkhouse,” Tabitha slurred. “It should be picking up about now.”

Mocha pulled up in front of a bar and live music joint in Amagansett, Stephen Talkhouse, which resembled somebody’s rundown summer cottage. Even though it was almost two in the morning, people were pouring in and out of the club and it seemed like another hot new band was about to go on.