For months, Janey tried to avoid mentioning Patty's name, as though if she didn't talk about her maybe she would go away. But she didn't. Janey spilled it all out to Harold.
"I can't figure out how it ... happened," Janey said, in a tone of voice that was much lighter than what she really felt. "I don't want to be mean, Harold," she said, intending to be just that, "but no one paid any attention to Patty after she was sixteen. It was like she was just another adolescent lump.”
“Maybe she didn't want to compete with you," Harold said. They were at the gala dinner for the opening of the ballet. The theme was Midwinter Night's Dream and the floor was awash in sparkle and fake snow.
"She couldn't compete with me/' Janey said. She reached out and lightly touched the centerpiece, a miniature pine tree spray-painted white and studded with pink roses. "And besides," she said. "Why would she want to?”
"I think you're suffering from a case of good old garden-variety jealousy," Harold said. "You feel like she's doing something with her life and you're not. If you would just do something ... “
"But I have, Harold," Janey said. "I've done a lot ...”
"Real estate," Harold said. "Become a realtor. That’s the ticket.”
Janey rolled her eyes. In the last six months, she and Harold had become great friends, which was wonderful because he took her to black-tie dinners, gave her money to pay her rent, and didn't ask for anything in return. Unfortunately, after Janey told him about Zack and Redmon and Bill, he became determined to help Janey find a new career. This might have been tolerable, but his ideas about what Janey should do for a living were so painfully mundane that she could hardly bear to discuss it.
Two weeks ago, he'd been convinced she should become a paralegal ("You've got a good mind, Janey, you should use it."), and the week before that, a tutor for underprivileged kids ("If 11 take your mind off your own problems.”
“Yes, but then J couldn't afford to eat."). This week, it was real estate.
"Can we please discuss Patty?" Janey asked. "I feel like she's secretly trying to be me.”
"Patty isn't your problem," Harold said. "You need to find something rewarding to do. Patty will take care of herself.”
"I'm sure she will," Janey said softly. "But I couldn't be a real estate agent either." She sipped her champagne and looked around the room. They were seated at one of the best tables. A real estate agent! She knew girls who had done that. It was pathetic. It was one thing to be Janey Wilcox, the model, and quite another to be Janey Wilcox, the real estate agent.
"Why not? Ifs the perfect profession for you," Harold said, picking up his fork. "Who wouldn't buy a house from you? You could do it in the Hamptons. You know every house out there worth knowing anyway.”
"I've certainly stayed in them ...”
"All you'd have to do is apply yourself a bit and well, I'd pay for the course. My treat.”
The room swirled around them. Someone stopped and said hello; there were pictures taken.
"Oh Harold, how could I be a real estate agent?" she said impatiently, throwing down her napkin. She was wearing her hair in ringlets that she'd swept back from her face; her breasts spilled out of a beaded ivory bustier. Her skin was dazzlingly white, and she knew the whole effect was what she had come to think of as an "Elizabethan fairy princess." She was certainly one of the most beautiful women in the room, if not the most beautiful.
"Janey," Harold said patiently. "Look at the facts.
You live in a lousy one-bedroom apartment on the East Side. You don't even have a doorman. You're broke. You're not interested in dating anyone who's remotely sensible for you ...”
"By sensible, you mean boring," Janey said. "I mean a regular guy who stays home and watches football on Sunday. A guy who really loves you.”
"But I could never love a guy like that," Janey said. "Don't you understand?”
"Have you ever loved anyone, Janey?" he asked. "As a matter of fact, I have.”
"Who?" Harold demanded.
"Just some guy," Janey said. "When I was younger. Twenty-three.”
"You see," Harold said. "Just some guy. You said it yourself.”
Janey pushed her salad around her plate and said nothing. It was ridiculous to call Charlie "just some guy" because he was anything but, but there was no point in explaining to Harold. She'd met Charlie at a fashion shoot when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-one (he was modeling as a joke, to piss off his father), and they had instantly fallen in love. Charlie was the scion of a wealthy oil family from Denver; it was rumored that he'd inherited sixty million dollars when he turned eighteen. But it wasn't his money that made him attractive. There was the time he bought Rollerblades and skated down Fifth Avenue in a tux. The Valentine's Day that he drove her around in the back of a flower van filled with roses. And the birthday when he gave her a pug named Popeye that they dressed up like a baby and snuck into their friends' apartment buildings. He called her Willie (short for Wilcox, he said) and was the only man who ever thought she was funny. They lived together for a year and a half, and then he bought a five-thousand-acre ranch in Montana. He wanted to get married and live there and raise cattle. He wanted to be a cowboy. Janey thought it was another joke. She told him he was the only twenty three year-old in the world who was dying to get married and have kids. But he was serious.
"I can't move to Montana and live on a ranch," she screamed. Her career was starting to take off. She'd just gotten the part in that movie.
She was convinced if she moved to Montana, her life would be over. Everything she had would be wasted.
At first, he used to call her on the set. "I got up at four a.m. I had my lunch at nine!" he would shout excitedly. "We rounded up four hundred head of cattle." But by the time she'd finished shooting the movie and it was a hit and she thought she was going to have a career as an actress and then realized she wasn't, he had married his old girlfriend from high school.
"Janey! Smile!" a photographer said. Janey complied, leaning her head on Harold's shoulder. Harold patted her hand. "Why don't you get married?" she said.
Harold shook his head. "You know I don't want to get married until I'm at least sixty.”
"You'll be nearly dead by then.”
"My father didn't marry my mother until he was sixty. And she was twenty-five. They were very happy together.”
Janey nodded. She'd heard this story before, and what Harold didn't point out was that his father had died at seventy, and Harold had grown up a frightened little boy raised by his mother and two aunts in a crabbed Fifth Avenue apartment: the result being that Harold was an anal retentive who spent an hour a day on the crapper and still saw his old mother every Sunday. It was so stupid. If only men like Harold would do their part and behave sensibly—i.e., get married and have children—then women like Janey wouldn't have to worry about how they were supposed to support themselves and—ugh—make a living. Didn't Harold realize that there really wasn't any profession in which she could make as much money as he did, short of becoming a famous movie star, no matter how hard she tried?
"We could be married and have children by now," Janey said. "Do you ever think about that?”
“Children!" Harold said. "I'm still a child myself. But think about what I've said, won't you?”
Janey nodded.
"I won't be able to lend you money forever," he said quietly.
"No. Of course not," Janey said. She picked up her fork and concentrated on her lobster quadrilles. Rich people were always like that, weren't they? They'd help you out a couple of times and then, no matter how much money they had and how meaningless the amount would have meant to them, they cut you off. They didn't want to be used.