Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel (23 page)

Vivien squeezed his hand and turned, disappearing into the scintillating crowd.

“Hey!” He beckoned to a passing server, flashing a winning smile. The server, a jowly older dude with a jutting lower lip,
hairy-ass forearms, and big ol’ baby head, sauntered over with his tray.
Huh,
Seedy thought.
So much for L.A. waiters all being hot-to-trot actor types.
“Let me at that champagne, brother,” he laughed, reaching for a glass.

Baby Head did not laugh back.

“Not really into this shizz,” the rapper explained to the server’s evident boredom (were his eyebrows that permanently raised
type, or what?), “but I gotta make this toast, so, you know, got to clink my fork on something.…” He finally trailed off,
surrendering to the server’s religiously unamused stone-face. What was
with
this dude? “Man,” he ventured, scratching his shaved head. “You all right?”

The server shrugged. “Is there anythin’ ailse I can ch’elp?”

“Nah.” Seedy took a swig of champagne and shook his head slowly. “I’m cool.”

The server nodded; he and the champagne flutes continued on their way. Sliding a polished fork off a nearby table, Seedy watched
after him.

He’d have to look into this catering company.

Clattering his fork to the side of his glass, he greeted the glittering crowd, walking backward. “Spuh-
eech
!” Tiombé, the backup vocalist on Lil’ Miss Chang, cried out, raising her fist. Within seconds, every guest was his, hooting
and hollering and calling his name.

“See-dy! See-dy! See-dy!”

“Ah, ha-ha!” He beamed his appreciation, mounted the polished marble stairs that led to the next room, and scanned the hundreds
of gleeful, shining faces.
“Vee,”
he bellowed in a mock-authoritative baritone, eliciting an inevitable high-pitched
whooooo!!!
followed by a cackling round of applause. By the wall of rose curtains, Vivien hid her face in her hands, shaking her elaborately
coiffed head. “Get up here, baby!” Seedy warned, and she lowered her hands to her mouth, gazed at her friends with bright,
embarrassed eyes, and then surrendered, lifting up her pink chiffon mermaid skirt and trotting gaily through the crowd. In
seconds, she was at Seedy’s side, bowing with laughter and clapping her hands.

“As y’all know by now!” Seedy began, and then smiled, waiting for his audience to simmer down. “As you all
know
!” He began again, and this time the volume took a dip. “I am a songwriter.”

A smattering of laughter convulsed through the room.
Of course they knew. He was Seedy Moon!
The hip-hop giant took a deep breath and cleared his throat. The crowd was pretty quiet now—just a sea of expectant faces.
A sea, you know. Like where seaweed was from. No, wait. That wasn’t right.

“We rhymers be
trippin’
!” he continued, soliciting another round of laughter—a little quieter this time. He rubbed his chin and frowned. Had he forgotten
a line, or…? Looking up, he noticed his daughter—she was standing by the piano, her forehead furrowed with worry. Beside her,
Lena squeezed her shoulder and, suddenly aware of his attention, nodded once, encouraging him to go on.

“As y’all know…”

“Baby!” With an embarrassed smile to her audience, Vivien linked his arm and leaned in close, hissing through her teeth.
“What do we all know?”

Lightly twisting free from her arm, Seedy stepped back, searching her familiar face. “Did you…,” he began in a low voice.
“Did you do it?”

“Do what?” she whispered, nervously aware of the crowd, now burbling with curiosity and concern.

“Melissa’s contest,” he replied, still searching her face.

“What are you talking about?” she frowned, dropping his arm. “Are you messin’ with me?”

“LIAR!” A voice boomed, and sent seismic swells of wrath across the room. The multitude of guests turned to the back of the
room. Miss Paletsky gasped in horror.

“Yuri!”
she cried, gaping at a squat, barrel-shaped cater-waiter stationed at the other end of the piano. “What are you doing ch’ere?”

“You think I don’t find out? You think I am
byeaz oom yets
? YOU!” He whirled on his heel, pointed a trembling, hairy-knuckled finger up at Seedy, and glared across the room. “You think
you can ch’ave double life, eh?” He spat on the floor. “Why don’t you face me like
man
?”

“
Gloo
pei slepits!” Lena erupted, flushed with mortification. “What do you think?” she warned, and inexplicably clutched her pink
nano. “I don’t call police?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Seedy interrupted loudly but clearly, and then, with his hardest gangsta glare, stepped down the
stairs. One by one, his people moved aside, parting for him like the Red Sea, and Yuri hacked a noisy cough, pressing a napkin
to his moistened, unimpressed lips. Beads of sweat glistened on his skull and dampened the buttoned white shirt that strained,
against all odds, to contain his pendulous gut. In contrast, Seedy was compact, svelte—a muscle-bound machine. The Russian
crumpled his pink napkin into his fist, dropped it on the floor, and faced him with a down-turned mouth. Seedy had to give
him some respect. For a dude in his shape, he was balls-to-walls
crazy.

“
Say
chaas
!” he barked, snapping his fingers. A few unlucky guests yelped as Yuri’s
Bratva
, disguised this whole time as servers and valets, emerged from within the crowd and roughly shouldered them aside, among
them Nikolai Mogilevich, Melissa’s steely-eyed stool bearer, and Boris “Bobo” Balagula, otherwise known as Baby Head. The
men revered Yuri; in Moscow, he belonged to the
Vory v zakone
, an elite band of criminals existing in Russia since the days of the Tsar from whom Yuri was
also
(he’d emphatically declared over lunch at Canter’s Deli, a shred of sauerkraut quivering on his lip)
directly descended
. Now, since 1991, he continued his shady dealings at the Copy & Print store on Fairfax, selling black market plasma screens,
cell phones, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and purebred baby dogs out of a storage basement. All his men were in on it, except, of
course, for Nikolai, whom he’d hired to work the copy machine.

As soon as Seedy became aware of Yuri’s encroaching entourage, he jerked back his chin, exhaling sharply through his nostrils.
Within seconds, the rapper was flanked by his main Moon men: Harlem, G-Nugz, Reginald, and
the Man from K-Town
who, with a heavy sigh, reluctantly put down his half-eaten Peeps.

Now, they were locked into a face-off: thug against thug, posse against posse.

“You wanna do this thing?” Seedy flared, folding his extremely cut arms across his broad chest. Young Nikolai turned to Yuri
with beseeching ice blue eyes.

“What kind of night shift is this?” he complained in Russian. “I want to work Xerox, not get my ass kicked by a bunch of gang
members.”

“The boy has a point, Yuri,” Baby Head grumbled, also in Russian. “Maybe twenty years ago… but now?” He shook his head. “I
am too old.”

“Cowards,” Yuri muttered, but you could see it in his face: he too had given up. Turning to Seedy, he pushed out his lower
lip.

“We will not fight.”

“Good,” Seedy stonily replied, still folding his arms. “My man Reg’ll escort y’all outside.”

“Right thith way,” gap-toothed Reginald lisped, ushering them to the door. Again the crowd parted (Miss Paletsky turned to
the wall, closed her eyes, and pressed her knuckles to her mouth) and the four men shuffled by, staring at the floor, enduring
their Walk of Shame. As they passed a table, Yuri noticed for the first time a platter of Richart truffles. In the shadow
of the platter, lying on the table, another truffle, half eaten, tilted on its side. The sight of it lying there mutilated,
rejected, filled him with something like compassion. Gently, he picked it up.

“You better put that back,” Reginald cautioned—and it was all the Russian could take. His steely eyes flashed.

“Oigah!”

Seedy’s henchman flinched, flew a hand to his stung forehead, and wiped off a smear of chocolate. “Fool,” he looked up from
his chocolate-stained fingers in disbelief. “You juthst
bean
me?” The Russian licked his lips, readying his response, and Reginald frowned, reaching for a heavy crystal bowl. Yuri roared
as an arsenal of hard pink candy hearts hailed down on his hard pink head, clattering hysterically to the hard marble floor.
Reddening with rage, Baby Head palmed an enormous double-layered pink-frosted coconut cake, grunted a small step forward,
and smashed it into Reginald’s unsuspecting face.

Needless to say, all chaos broke loose.

A jaw-clenched Seedy Moon raced through the crowd and, at the last possible moment, lunged, thudding his full weight into
Lena’s portly tormentor; the crowd collectively gasped as together they careened across the overdressed table. Seedy hapkido-pinned
his struggling opponent into place, grinding fistfuls of strawberry shortcake into his sputtering, ruddy face. With a flap
of his burly arms, Yuri scooped frosting into his thick hands, clapping it explosively to his rival’s ears. The table tipped
over with a crash, tumbling the two men to the floor, burying them both in an avalanche of crushed cakes, finger sandwiches,
silverware, and plates. All around them, people pushed and shrieked, desperate to evade a fatal dry-cleaning bill. At another
table, Baby Face and G-Nugz went at it, wrestling in an oozing swamp of pink caviar, stuffing icy shrimp down their shirts,
shrieking like two girls at a pool. Young Nikolai ducked for cover, cowering behind a potted indoor tree, firing sour cherry
meringues like grenades. A slimy slice of smoked salmon slapped Vivien across the face and she screamed, clawing for the ballroom
door. At the relatively pristine piano, Melissa consoled a sobbing Tila Tequila (who’d just been Carrie’d in chilled strawberry
gazpacho), surreptitiously wiping her salmony fingers on the MySpace diva’s convulsing back. As Miss Paletsky grabbed her
hand, pulling her toward the poolside exit with everyone else, pink parakeets panicked, screeching inside their cages, watching
in horror as their Peeps brethren scattered across the floor, crushed in moments by the stampede of heels.

And all the while, as the situation spiraled out of control, Jules watched curiously from a relatively quiet corner of the
expansive room.
I do not think this would happen in Switzerland,
he frowned as the now decapitated Cupid lurched through the air and crashed through the rose-draped window, chased by a flock
of shrimp projectiles. Something hard skidded across the floor, thwacking to a stop at his shiny dress shoe. He bent to his
knees, picking it up. A tiny pink candy heart. He looked up, observing again this impossible American pandemonium. He abhorred
food fights; they were worse than boorish; they flew in the face of basic humanity.
Hundreds of thousands of people going hungry in the world,
he thought, flicking from his cheek a gob of pale pink frosting.
How do they justify it?
And yet, there with the miniature heart’s weight in his palm, he couldn’t deny the tiniest urge to throw it. He sighed, disturbed
by this new development—it was so
unlike
him. But maybe that was precisely the point. His heart was broken, and, well, he wanted to do something as unlike him as
possible, to get away from himself—if only for a moment. He scanned the horde for Charlotte, and finding her nowhere, sighed.
Closing his eyes, he pressed the hard, sweet heart to his lips.

With all his might, he threw it.