Bergdorf Blondes (11 page)

A single tear crept down my cheek. My phone beeped.

“Sorry,” I whispered. It was a text from Julie:

“Julie says hi,” I croaked. My voice had virtually disappeared. I was starting to shiver, but it wasn’t cold.

“How the
fuck
does she know I’m here? No one knows what I do,” said Zach. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

I mumbled, “Mmm…I guess…I must have—”

I never finished the sentence. Zach grabbed the phone from my hands and scrolled through the messages. This was a scrape worse than the almost-discovery that I didn’t have a DVD player.

“Tiramisu? You were textin’ your fuckin’ friend while I was fuckin’ you?
Selfish
isn’t even a bad enough word for you.”

“I can get better, darling,” I pleaded. “I know I’m a terrible, selfish girl but I can improve.”

“You won’t. It’s all Me-Me-Me with you. Do you ever think of anyone else but you? Do you ever think about me?”

“All I do is think about you!” I said. “All I do is wonder how I can make you happy—”

“Is that why you fuckin’ forgot to ask about my doctor’s appointment today?”

“I didn’t know you had one—”

“You should
automatically
know stuff like that about me if you’re going to marry me.”

“But you won’t even speak to me,” I implored him. “Your assistant won’t put me through.”

“That’s because I tell her not to put your fuckin’ calls through.”

I was crying big-time now. Huge, hysterical tears
as big as a Harry Winston diamond were shooting down my cheeks.

“How am I supposed to know what you want if I’m not allowed to ask you?” I wailed.

“Stop asking me stuff!” he screamed. “I told you, you should just
know
.”

I sank off the sofa. My legs collapsed like two strands of that really thin spaghettini they do at Da Silvano. I half-knelt, half-lay on my zebra rug at Zach’s feet. Married girls must be really smart if one of the requirements of wedlock is being able to think of everything their husbands need without ever having to communicate with them. Zach headed for the armoire.

“You don’t have a fuckin’ DVD player, do you?” He started banging the doors. As I had suspected there was no DVD player to be found in there. “You have ‘social objections’ to those, don’t you? You don’t like Martin Scorsese. You’ve never even seen
Apocalypse Now
.”

“That was Francis Ford Coppola, darling,” I said.

“Why do you always have to contradict me!” he yelled. “If you love someone, you don’t disagree with them. But that’s it, isn’t it, you don’t understand how to love anyone except yourself, and you don’t even love yourself, do you? You don’t even know who you are. You wouldn’t notice an apocalypse unless it had a Gucci label on it.”

“Actually it’s Chloé I’m into,” I whispered sadly. He
didn’t know anything about me, you see, even something as big as that.

Zach stared at me blankly, then he unlocked the door and left. You could say I had learned the meaning of the words “Shame Attack.” The tears were coming faster than an avalanche in Aspen now. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the whole thing completely ruined
The Talented Mr. Ripley
for me forever.

S
omeone was whispering.

“If she didn’t make the Chanel sale, it really must be bad. I mean, maybe she actually, like, loved him.”

“I always thought his photos were beyond icky,” hissed another voice. “There is no way I could marry someone who thinks a drowned truck is cute.”

I heard a door opening.

“Sshhh! You two! You’ll wake her up. I’m going to the pharmacy to get her some more Xanax. Watch her
quietly
.” The door closed and someone disappeared.

Where was I? It was too much effort to move my legs or arms or open my eyes. My body felt like a wedge of brie that’s been left out of the refrigerator too long. Every few minutes my head felt as though it was being stabbed by a needle just above my right eyebrow.

Silence. A few sighs. Then, “God, look at her. She
looks totally ana, but not in a great supermodel way, more in a bad Karen Carpenter way. Ee-ow.”

“Apparently she showed up at five AM complaining of a Shame Attack extraordinaire, crying that her wedding was off. Julie said she was dressed in a stolen chi-chi and a thong and that was
it
.”

There had obviously been a wedding disaster. The heavenly thing about anti-anxiety pills like Xanax is that you can be at the epicenter of your own personal romantic tragedy and you don’t even notice.

“She would have looked awesome in a wedding dress. Ooooh, so sa-a-a-d. Vera Wang is going to
freak
. Apparently she went to India three times to supervise the beading of the veil personally. It was going to be the most exclusive veil Vera had ever created. It was going to take a whole year to embroider. What’s she going to do with it now?”

“Why don’t you help? Take the veil yourself for your wedding. That would be kind. Then you’d be the one with the Vera veil.”

“Oh, y-e-ssss! I could take the veil as an uncalled-for act of kindness.”

“Everyone at 660 Park would think you were the most generous friend she has. God, can you imagine the
humil-i-ation
of a disengagement? Imagine being the girl-who-almost-got–married. How will she ever be able to be seen drinking a Bellini at Cipriani again? Eew, god, the shame.”

Hopefully these kindhearted people had brought
me to a lovely lunatic asylum like the Broken Engagement Ward at Mount Sinai.

“You know I don’t gossip, and I trust you not to say a thing to anyone, but I heard it ended because he caught her texting Jules while he was, you know…”

“What?”

Whisper whisper. A lot of
pssht, shhhpsst, pssshst
.

“No-ooo!”

“Yes-s-s-s!”

“Oh my god. That is brilliant. Do you think she’d teach me how to do that?”

I cracked open my eyes. The room was almost dark and I could just make out two blonde manes frantically flicking back and forth. I said weakly, “Daphne can teach you.”

Two heads shot up, and Jolene and Lara stared back at me.

“Oh thank
god
,” said Jolene. “She’s alive.”

“Where am I?” I mumbled.

“You’re in the guest bedroom at Julie’s apartment. She just had it done up by Tracey Clarkson, you know, who does absolutely everyone in Hollywood. It’s so chic in here you can hardly imagine.”

“Why am I here?”

“Your fiancé callously dropped you after having sex with you and—”

“Eew!” yelled Lara. “You don’t have to give her all the intimate sexual details.”

Even Xanax doesn’t erase details like that. Every
ghastly moment was branded on my brain. I was sick with shock and horror. Now I know exactly what that poor girl in
The Exorcist
must have felt like.

“Darling, you need to eat,” said Lara. “We’ll order from room service. What do you want?”

“Just a silver fruit knife,” I said.

“What?” said Jolene.

“A silver fruit knife,” I repeated. “So I can slit my wrists with style.”

“She’s totally clinical,” whispered Jolene to Lara.

Oh good, I thought, it would only be a matter of time before I was shipped off to We Care Spa, this lovely therapy center in California. Publicists in New York are regularly clinical because it means they can take vacations there almost once a month and catch up on their A-list networking. Apparently you can get the latest Japanese hot stone massages there.

The tragic thing about Xanax is that eventually someone like Julie says you can’t have any more of it. When it wore off a few hours later, fear sidled through the French windows and snuck under Julie’s 473-thread-count sheets. Loneliness snaked around my body like the fumes from one of her Diptyque candles. I started to sweat, my face damp, my body boiling as I came to the icky realization that a broken heart is a broken heart no matter who designed the guest bedroom you are having it in. I must warn Julie that unfortunately Frette linens are absolutely no
safeguard against personal romantic tragedy. I called for Julie and she came tiptoeing in.

“Please let me call Zach,” I croaked. “I need to sort everything out.”

Julie hadn’t let me near a phone since I’d arrived the night before.

“Engagements and divorces are the only things that really make people happy,” she said. “You’re lucky to be out of it. Don’t call him and make things worse.”

“But I love him,” I whispered weakly.

“You’re not in love with him. You’re in longing for him. How could you love someone you hardly saw? My analyst says you are infatuated with a romantic ideal. It’s the idea of him not the reality that you want. The reality is that he’s a total monster.”

There is nothing I hate more than a professional opinion I haven’t asked for. Julie’s shrink had no idea about my One and Only.

“Why did he send me all those gifts, and tell me I was the wittiest girl in Manhattan, and ask me to marry him? It doesn’t make sense,” I pleaded.

“You know what? It does. For a guy like Zach with a bit of money and style, sweeping a girl off her feet is easy. It’s much harder to really
be
with someone and make them part of your life. He prefers the chase,” said Julie, as if she were Oprah or something.

“Please let me call—”

“Just rest,” she said sweetly.

She left the room. She also left her cell phone on the bed. I dialed Zach. After the usual set of negotiations with the assistant, he finally came on the line.

“Yeah,” he said, just like normal. Maybe nothing had happened.

“Should we meet, and you know…discuss—”

“I’m too busy,” Zach interrupted.

“But this is serious. We should talk about it,” I said.

“I’m leaving town. I’ll call you.” He hung up.

I felt desperate. Even though I knew Zach had behaved appallingly, I guess I still loved him. There is nothing as painful as being madly in love with someone who isn’t madly in love with you anymore. How did we get from
it’s so cute you can’t cook
to this, I wondered as I lay in Julie’s guest bedroom. I felt like I was in one of those majorly depressing Meryl Streep movies where everyone lives in the suburbs and wears bad clothes and can’t understand what happened to their relationship.

“I’ll never get him back now,” I wailed to Julie when she put her head around the bedroom door later that day. “I feel so sad. I called him and he said he’s leaving town.”

“I don’t understand why you keep going back for more,” said Julie, exasperated. “I told you, he’s a monster and now he’s proven it.”

I knew Julie was right, but that didn’t make it any easier. There’s an irrational behavioral pattern shared
by many New York girls where the worse a man is to them, the more they want him back. If they do get him back, he’s viler than ever. Then they end it because he’s being vile, like he was all along, and they look sane and rational and together. The main point of the exercise is to become the reject-
or
instead of the reject-
ee
. I would have thought Julie would really understand, bearing in mind that she’s probably the most irrational girl in town.

She tried everything to cheer me up. But mostly anything she or anyone else said made me feel worse. Like when she said to me, “He doesn’t deserve someone as great and pretty as you anyway,” I felt beyond depressed. After all, that’s exactly the kind of thing I say to girls who aren’t particularly great or pretty to try and make them feel better after boyfriends have dumped them.

I didn’t leave Julie’s guest bedroom for three days. Zach never called. I developed a severe case of breakuprexia, which is this illness all girls in NY and LA get after a breakup where you get beyond ana and can fit into a size two. I couldn’t eat a thing—even my favorite vanilla cupcakes that Julie specially ordered in for me from Magnolia Bakery downtown. My flesh turned to bone. Lara kept trying to cheer me up about my appearance by saying she wished she had breakuprexia too then she wouldn’t have to spend so much on nutritionists and personal trainers. The truth was, I looked like a chopstick and felt as
raw as a piece of Nobu’s yellowtail. Only, it would have been better being the yellowtail because at least everyone wants yellowtail, and no one wanted me. You know you’ve checked into Heartbreak Hotel for real when you feel less desirable than uncooked fish.

There were other signs that something was very, very wrong with me. Like the only music I could bear to listen to was Mariah Carey, which, when I look back on it, was almost more worrying than the breakuprexia. When Julie offered to get in Xenia, the Polish manicurist who goes on all the
W
magazine shoots and buffs absolutely anyone who is anyone’s nails, I whimpered, “No thanks.” I must have been beyond clinical to turn down Xenia, I mean, I am such a New York grooming addict that my nails actually
hurt
if they don’t have NARS Candy Darling pink varnish on them. But you know what? Aching nails were nothing compared to the pain I was in now.

On the fourth day Julie announced she was taking me out. The Vandonbilt twins were throwing a lunch in aid of their charity, a Guatemalan girls’ school. The twins made Julie feel
très
awkward about being Julie because even though they were far richer than Julie, they acted totally broke-slash-cool all the time and were always helping other people. “And, you know, they tilt their heads to one side as though they are really listening to you and speak real quiet as though they are perfect. But then, you know, in a moment of
weakness they go to Barneys and spend a gajillion dollars on makeup and think no one’s got any idea,” said Julie.

“I don’t want to go. I’m too ashamed to ever leave the house ever again,” I said.

“Listen, I don’t wanna go either, sweetie, but those Vandy girls are my cousins and I need to show them I can be just as benevolent as them. Why they live in that
medium
apartment and wear those
medium
clothes when they could have the best that Dolce & Gabbana has to offer I will never understand.” Then she added softly, “You can’t stay here forever. You’ve gotta go out at some point.”

I struggled out of bed and somehow got dressed. I was freaked out when I looked in the mirror: my hair was stringy, my face blotchy. My pants hung depressingly from my frame and my T-shirt sagged forlornly from my chest. I looked like one of those really sad Marc Jacobs groupies who hang around the Marc stores on Bleecker Street on Saturdays. The only difference was they spent a fortune trying to look this undernourished. Julie, who was in an upbeat pink sundress, loved my despondent appearance.

“You look totally heroin chic,” she said. “The Vandys are gonna kill themselves when they see you.” Well, at least something positive may come from the visit, I thought.

Julie wanted to stop at Pastis, down in the meat
packing district, for a bowl of decaf latte before we hit the Vandy lunch. “I gotta get in the downtown mood,” she said. I was terrified: Pastis is like the trendiest place in New York. What if there were people there who could detect that I was recently disengaged?

“Don’t worry,” said Julie, seeing my troubled expression. “We won’t bump into anyone we know down there. No one gets up in the West Village before twelve.”

As we were chauffeured downtown I started to feel better. It felt good to be out of bed at last, and it was fun being in Julie’s new car, an SUV luxuriously upholstered in caramel leather. I wasn’t crying hysterically anymore. I could actually chat as we headed down Fifth Avenue.

“You wanna come to the beach this weekend? You can have the guest house all to yourself. Daddy would love to see you,” said Julie.

“Sure!” I said brightly.

“Hey, good girl!” said Julie. “You’re going to be good again so soon you don’t even know it.”

But here’s the thing about a broken heart: just when you feel a teensy bit less hysterical about it, it bites you in the heel and you’re more hysterical than you ever were the first time you got hysterical. As we sped across Fifty-seventh Street I glimpsed a huge billboard with a giant picture of a ring set with three diamonds.
Underneath the photograph were the words
THREE WAYS TO TELL HER YOU LOVE HER
. My first crying attack of the day started immediately. Why were the people at De Beers trying to make me feel so bad about myself? Didn’t they know that advertising engagement rings was extremely traumatic for the disengaged population?

“Oh my god!” said Julie. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s that ad for an engagement ring, it’s reminding me.”

“But sweetie, you never had an engagement ring, so it’s not really relevant.”

“I kno-ooo-w!” I sniveled. “Imagine if I had h-h-had an engag-g-g-gement ring h-
hiccup
h-how much more upset I’d be. Oh god, I can’t bear it.”

“Here, darling, have a Versace tissue, they always make me feel so much better.”

I wiped my nose and tried to concentrate on something bland like the inside of the car. I pulled
New York
magazine from the pouch in front of me. MANHATTAN’s 25 MOST ROMANTIC PROPOSALS read the headline in pastel pink text. Whoever the editor of
New York
magazine was, they were totally sick to do this. It reminded me of work: I’d totally forgotten to reschedule the Palm Beach story. I couldn’t deal. I snapped my eyes shut and kept them like that until we arrived at Pastis.