Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel (15 page)

“Get away from me,” Petra pushed Charlotte’s shoulder and giggled, leaning back in her chair. Charlotte waved a hand in front
of her nose.

“My pleasure.”

“If you want to know why I chose Mariposa,”
Melissa boomingly interrupted, thoroughly unamused by her colleagues’
evident
ADD; as the four sets of eyes brightly refocused, she exhaled, posing with her hands on her hips. “I provided a clue in my
outfit.”

Charlotte, Petra, and Janie perused Melissa’s outfit with merry intrigue. Her white Versace stretch-silk dress, cinched into
place by a gold Prada butterfly-clasp belt, boasted a pattern of purple butterflies, her Hanae Mori Butterfly–scented earlobes
sported pink-and-gold Juicy Couture butterfly studs, and perched upon her smooth, center-parted, raven-haired head, a pair
of raspberry plastic Prada butterfly frames shone like a crown. The three older girls shared a surreptitious eye roll.

Either the clue was
butterfly
, or Melissa was in the grip of Mariah Carey mind control.
²

Tucking the toe of her hot pink patent Doc Marten behind the wooden chair leg, Janie screwed her face up in mock concentration.
“Is the clue, butter… face?”

“No, no, it’s
butterfly
,” Nikki corrected her explosively. The three older girls glanced at one another a second time, stifling their smirks. “
Mariposa
means butterfly in Spanish!”

“Fine.” Petra tucked her teal bra strap under the torn sleeve of her faded black Bikini Kill t-shirt. (
Since when was Petra into punk?
Janie wondered.) “What do butterflies have to do with Poseur?”

Melissa bitch-slapped the table with both hands, nearly divaporizing an approaching server. “Do you even
remember
,” she squawked as the waiter cringingly dropped a basket of freshly baked popovers on the table, “where you people
were
three months ago?”

“Daddy’s vineyard?” Charlotte sighed nostalgically.

“I don’t mean where were you
geographically
,” Melissa groaned as the waiter scampered away. “I mean
metaphorically
.”

Except for Nikki, who was busy taking the minutes, the Poseur collective regarded their Director of Public Relations with
confusion.

“Caterpillars,”
she sighed, answering her own question. “Except, of course,
worse
than caterpillars. We were
couture
-pillars.”

A moment of humble silence.

“
That’s
why I decided to hold a lunch here,” she explained, pouring a tall glass of Pellegrino. “To remind us of what we were. Of
what we
are
. And most importantly…”

“What we can become,” Janie finished her thought.

With a bob of rigidly gelled eyebrows, Melissa raised her slender water glass. “What we
will
become.”

Gripping their own glasses, the colleagues craned across the table. The Pellegrino sparkled and hissed, catapulting into the
air the occasional glinting droplet
—like flares on a sinking ship,
Janie mused before retracting the comparison. This was a
toast
, after all, and of all images to have in mind, “sinking ship” wasn’t ideal. Still, just before she struck the image from
her mind and replaced it with something optimistic (Sasha Obama sliding down a rainbow into a field of four-leaf clover?),
the four glasses clinked together. She winced, overcome by superstitious guilt.

She hadn’t just cursed them, had she?

As if in response to her question, an ominous shadow angled across her friends’ cheerful faces. “Exactly
what
is going on here?” honked an outraged female voice. Without lowering their glasses, all four girls glanced upward. Jocelyn
Pill Brickman—thirty-something ex-wife to studio mogul Bert Brickman, former Miss December and Playmate of the Year and author
of the almost bestselling
The Afterwife: You’re Divorced (Not Dead!)
—folded her Clarins-slathered arms across the rock formation she called breasts and glared like the world’s meanest bus driver.
Every Friday, she and her two BFF’s, Pepper and Trish, piled into Trish’s enormous glossy black Range Rover, rocked out to
Jane’s Addiction and/or the Beastie Boys, and cougared on down to Neiman Marcus where, after buying fresh sets of lingerie
for the upcoming weekend, they gathered at Mariposa to cackle loudly over white Zinfandel and truffle Parmesan French fries.
Because yes,
some
things had changed since high school—they’d since traded in cafeterias for cafés and raspberry Crystal Light for Cabernet—but
the rules remained the same.
They were
still
Pepper, Trish, and Joss, the leanest, meanest, homecoming queen-est, I-guess-we-were-just-blessed-with-superior-genes-est
bitches around. And, um,
hello
.

“This is our table,” aqua-eyed Jocelyn informed them with a toss of her Locklear locks.

“Really?” Petra eyed their intruder’s puffed-up piehole in disgust. Nothing grossed her out more than plastic surgery, mostly
because it provided scumbag Doctor Daddy with a living. She leaned an elbow on the table, tilting her face at a sarcastically
innocent angle. “I thought your kind belonged in caves.”

Melissa, Janie, and Charlotte exchanged a look of pure shock. So now Petra not only
dressed
punk rock, but she was also dishing out the snaps? What kind of alternate universe
was
this? From either end of the restaurant, the lunching ladies appeared to share the sentiment, albeit for a different reason:
no one had
ever
stood up to Jocelyn Pill, the former Mrs. Brickman.

This was going to be good.

“Excuse me?” piped up Pepper, an aspiring Christian pop singer whose self-proclaimed feisty personality lived up to her name
(of course, she kept her
original
name, Mavis, strictly under wraps). “What did you say, you insignificant little
diaper
stain?”

“Forgive my colleague,” Charlotte breathed, rescuing Petra from a catfight she was in no way equipped to handle. But before
she could follow up with “normally she respects her elders
,
” Trish—a redheaded gym rat with a thing for dating X-Gamers—butted in.

“Colleague?”
she guffawed, and hip-bumped Jocelyn. Assuming a singsong baby voice, she asked. “Did we inter-wupt a
meeting
?”

“Wait…,” Jocelyn gasped, widening her aqua eyes in awe. “Are you guys
the Baby-sitters Club
?”

As the three women brayed with laughter and gave each other high fives (
High fives?
thought Janie.
Who does that? And what in God’s name was the Baby-sitters Club?
thought Nikki), Melissa calmly unzipped her pink Marc Jacobs satchel, extracted a multicoloredon-white Louis Vuitton Murakami
card case, and snapped it open.

“Here,” she said, pinching out a newly minted pink, black, and gold business card. “I want y’all to keep this. ’Cause you
see, next season when our label be blowin’ up? And the lines outside Ted Pelligan—”

“
Avec
whom we have an
exclusive
handbag deal,” interjected Charlotte.

“Are
around
the
block
?” Melissa resumed. “Y’all can contact me,” she advised, slapping the card on the table with the authority of a Las Vegas
blackjack dealer, “
to apologize
.”

Before Jocelyn could respond, James, Mariposa’s manager, who had been alerted by his sensitive staff to the cub-on-cougar
tension, burst from the swinging kitchen doors. “Is everything all right?” he inquired, plunking a hot plate of bacon (extra
crispy) in front of Melissa and turning to Jocelyn with a placating smile.

“Actually,” murmured the buxom blonde, sliding Melissa’s card to the table’s edge, “everything’s fine.”

“But…!”

“Shut
up
, Pepper,” Jocelyn silenced her friend through clenched teeth. Tucking the card into her back pocket, she flashed the manager
and girls a bright smile. “So sorry to disturb you!”

The five girls watched Jocelyn and her fake-baked besties retreat from the table, unified by the same thought.
All it took was the name
. At the mere
mention
of Ted Pelligan those women had surrendered
—
tails between their designer-denim-clad legs. Someday, they incredulously pondered, Poseur could have that same kind of power.
As if by magic, tables would open and lines would part, fees would be waived and parking tickets ignored. Someday they wouldn’t
need Ted Pelligan to make things happen.

They would just
happen
.

“Did I even
order
this?” Melissa suddenly asked, bolting her bacon with a puzzled frown.

Nikki eyed the small plate with a knowing titter.

From the opposite side of the restaurant, Jocelyn began to scowl.
Get your giggles while they’re hot, girls,
she seethed, pressing a BlackBerry Touch to her aquamarine-studded ear and fanning herself with Melissa’s business card.
“Ted Pelligan, please,” she breathed, switching her phone to a fresh ear and turning to her friends with a wink. They faced
one another and high-fived, barely stifling their squeals. Seemed some fresh meat was about to be fried. And this time?

It wasn’t bacon.

The Girl: Miss Paletsky

The Getup: Olive wrinkle-resistant pleated slacks, navy blue pleather pumps, dusty rose stretch-lace turtleneck, and classic
navy blazer, all from Loehmann’s

At Winston, school ends at three, with the notable exception of Fridays, which end at two. Excluding, perhaps, a
Gossip Girl
episode featuring Nate and Chuck’s first kiss (will they get it
over
with, already?), Winstonians could imagine no hour better spent. Which was to say,
what
they did hardly mattered (some gossiped, others shopped, some took their cars to get washed, others flipped through magazines,
drawing devil horns on Miley Cyrus);
that they did it at all
—
that
was the point. They could have been in school right now, and yet
…
they weren’t!

Even
flossing
felt like a second lease on life.

Of course, no one—student or faculty—greeted end-of-week early dismissals with deeper gratitude than Miss Paletsky. Her bus
commute took about an hour, leaving her just enough time to get home, sigh her Sigh of Unfathomable Woe, and put down her
purse before Yuri roared into the apartment, shattering her solitude. Light fixtures quaked, picture frames shifted, tchotchkes
jittered: the very
walls
trembled in his presence. No space could contain him. With Yuri inside it, the room creaked like a baby carriage hijacked
by a silverback gorilla.

Of course, one might wonder why she rushed home at all. Why not hole up in her office for a while, or get off the bus one
stop early and window-shop on Melrose? Why not kill an hour or two at Sweet Lady Jane, where she could sit with a dog-eared
copy of
War and Peace
and a cup of peppermint tea, and where Leon, if he was working, gave her chocolate rugelach for free? As Yuri himself often
inquired (albeit when she was running in the opposite direction),
What is ch’urry?

The answer was simple: she must get home to her piano. Ever since Christopher “Seedy” Moon hired her to play for his pink
engagement party, she’d been racked with anxiety. Of course, nerves were not unusual, and under normal circumstances she knew
exactly how to cope. Practice, practice, practice. As Ms. Transky had instructed her as a young student: “You must play your
pieces until your fingers acquire minds of their own—until your fingers are like your heart. You may command your heart,
stop beating
. Does it stop? So it must be with your fingers. You
must
trust them to play
no matter what
. Only
then
will you relax and play with confidence.”

And so, after arranging eight of Christopher’s greatest hits into a thirty-minute program for piano, she practiced. “Kimchi
Killah,” “Death in Venice,” “Gimme All Your Love (Gimme All Your Money),” “Little Miss Chang,” “Glock to Remember”: by the
end of three weeks, she knew those pieces like her great-great-great grandmother knew Rasputin (a little
too
well). And yet, despite her preparation, her nerves hadn’t gotten better.

They’d gotten worse.

Of course, it
was
possible her anxiety had nothing to do with music. Tomorrow night, after weeks of not seeing him… she would see him. And
there was nothing she could do—nothing she could
practice
—to prepare. Not that she hadn’t tried. She had, according to the age-old tradition of the pathetically crushed out, rehearsed
to the bathroom mirror. There wasn’t a form of “ch’ello,” she hadn’t tried: the straightforward, adult
ch’ello
; the surprised and laughing I-didn’t-see-you-there
ch’ello
; the wry and ironic
ch’ello
; the subtly flirtatious
ch’ello
; the you’re-getting-married-and-I-don’t-care-because-my-heart-is-dead
ch’ello…

No,
she commanded herself, plunking down at the wooden piano bench with a self-reproving frown. That her nerves had to do with
a man she barely knew—an
engaged
man she barely knew—was too mortifying, too
ridiculous
, to consider. She was a grown woman! Not a silly young girl.
Practice
. Her trembling fingers (painted in her signature Krème de la Kremlin) hovered above the keys.
Practice.
The ethereal first notes of “Good Year Pimpin’ ” filled the air.

And then the front door exploded.

“You make noise like dying bear!”
he boomed, rumbling into the room like a Soviet tank. The young teacher dropped her pale hands to her lap and cringed, reluctantly
following her barrel-shaped fiancé with her bespectacled eyes. Thudding the short yet well-trampled path from the door to
the overstuffed black leather sofa, Yuri reached for the TiVo remote, flopped into his seat, and kicked off his black-and-white
Adidas sandals. As the leather fartingly surrendered to his dense weight, the plasma screen flicked to life, imbuing his already
toadlike face with an amphibian green hue.