I just smile. I don't want to make any waves.
And then I'm kind of bored, so when Sandi Sandi, the hot new singer, is playing, and everyone is dancing and drunk, I wander through the house and go into a marble bathroom on the second floor and snort some cocaine, which I remind myself is just for old time's sake, and then I go back to the party, cross the dance floor, and walk out of the tent, following a boardwalk down to the pond and onto a white dock, where I light up a cigarette.
Dianna Moon follows me.
"Hey, hey," she says. She's stumbling a bit and pretty drunk. "Let’s get out of here.”
There's a charmingly beat-up old rowboat which she gets in. I follow, and we almost tip over, but then we sit in the bottom of the boat and try to row a little. There's a current and the boat drifts away from the dock.
"Hey," Dianna says. "I have to tell you something.”
“Not about Jesus, okay?”
"Oh Cecelia. Someone told me you killed your best friend.”
"Who?" I say. "Nevil Mouse.”
"Nevil Mouse is so ... stupid," I say. "I think he hates you," Dianna says.
"He hates me because I wouldn't go out with him. Years ago.”
"He says you're not what you appear to be. I told him to go fuck himself.”
"What did he say?”
"He said you killed ... Amanda? Your best friend? You put something in her drink?”
Oh GOD. Where do people get these lies? "It was a long time ago," I say, as if it really isn't important. And it does seem long ago, almost as if it couldn't have happened, although it was actually four years ago, to be exact. At the end of that long, crazy summer right after I'd met Hubert and was seeing him secretly. Amanda and I were sharing a house. "She killed herself," I say.
"Jesus took her.”
"No." I shake my head. "She was drunk, and she took too much coke. She got into her car and drove into the duck pond and drowned.”
She had been on her way to Hubert's house. On the sly.
"Fuck. Do you think I care?" Dianna said. "People think I killed my husband.”
There are lilies in the pond. I trail my fingers in the water. We both look over at the shore, where the party is in full swing.
"What I like about you," Dianna says, "is that we're both outsiders. Neither one of us fits in with this ... society crowd.”
"Society is dead," I say, for what I think is the second or third time this year.
"My mother was a prostitute. She doesn't even know who my real father is.”
"Marriage is prostitution.”
"But my mother ... wasn't married.”
"Oh so what," I say. "My mother was a fucking drug addict.”
"I'm going swimming," Dianna says. She basically falls out of the boat, and for a moment, as she flails in the water and I realize she probably can't swim, I wonder if I'm going to have to rescue her. Luckily, the pond isn't deep, only about three feet, and she finds her footing and wades to shore.
I watch her with some degree of relief. I sit there alone.
After a while, I begin to row back to the dock in the charmingly beat-up old rowboat. I have a cigarette between my lips and I'm aware of my short blond hair, a slight pink blush on my cheeks and my bare shoulders.
And when I'm almost at the shore, Patrice shouts, "Hey Cecelia," and I look over my shoulder and he fires off as many pictures as he can in five seconds. The following week, this photograph is beamed all over the world. In it, the expression on my face is: frowning slightly, yet a little surprised; still young, and I'm wearing the nearly see-through baby-blue Bentley dress, the lines of my slim yet shapely figure clearly visible. The caption reads: RICH, BEAUTIFUL, AND FIERCELY INDEPENDENT, PRINCESS CECELIA KELLY LUXENSTEIN IS THE LEADER OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM SOCIETY.
And I realize: This is my life. SMILE.
SINGLE PROCESS
I
e have a saying in New York: English girls who are considered beautiful in London are merely "pretty" in New York, while American girls who are called "attractive" in New York are beautiful in London. And this sums up one of the biggest differences between Life in New York and Life in London. In London, if you're an attractive, nice girl with some personality and a career, you can meet a man, date him, and—if you want to—marry him. On the other hand, in New York, you can be a beautiful woman with a body like Cindy Crawford's and a highpowered career and you cannot even get a date.
Maybe because Englishwomen can actually snag a man—and can do so with ratty hair, unpolished nails, and flabby thighs—they possess a certain sort of annoying smugness when it comes to relationships.
Recently, I had an encounter with one of these women in New York. As she sat there eating a smoked salmon sandwich and interviewing me about w my life (which was sounding, to my ears, more and more pitiful by the moment), my eye was inevitably drawn to her large sapphire engagement ring topped by a sapphire-studded wedding band.
It shouldn't have made me hate her, but it did. "Let’s see," she said, checking her tape recorder. "Is there any man in your life right now?”
“Noooo," I said, although I had just broken up with a man who refused to marry me after six months of dating. I believe his actual words were "I do want to get married someday, but I don't want to marry you.”
Okay, maybe I did rush him a little. But on the other hand, he used to sit at home in the evenings watching Kung Fu movies. And when I tried to talk to him, he would say, "Shhhhh. Grasshopper is about to learn an important lesson." After this happened a few times, I realized that "Grasshopper" had indeed learned a lesson: By the time you get to Grasshopper's age, there is absolutely no reason to be with a man who watches Kung Fu movies unless you are married to him.
But there was no reason to tell the English journalist this.
"How ... interesting," she said. "I've been married for six years.”
"Is that so," I said. I took a sip of my Bloody Mary and wondered if I was getting drunk. "Well, if you lived in New York," I said, "you wouldn't be. In fact, if you lived in New York, you'd probably be living in a small one-bedroom apartment, agonizing over some jerky guy you slept with three times." Ah yes. Grasshopper was just getting warmed up. "You'd think that maybe you were going to have a relationship, but then the guy would call to tell you that he didn't want any obligations. He would actually say, 'I don't want to check in . '“
I ordered another Bloody Mary. "Commitment is a mystery here," I said.
"Not in London," the English journalist said. "Men in London—Englishmen—well, they're better than American men. They're rather ..." Here her face took on a sort of disgusting look that I could only call "dreamy." Then she continued, "Steady. They're interested in relationships. They like them. Englishmen are ... cozy.”
"You mean like ... kittens?" I asked.
The English journalist gave me a superior smile. "Now, let's see. You are ... how old now?”
“Forty," I whispered.
"That's right. So you must be at that point where you've realized that you'll probably be alone for the rest of your life.”
And so it was that a month later, Grasshopper found herself on a flight to London. In the tradition of many American heroines before her, she was off to England in search of something she hadn't been able to find in New York: a husband.
That, of course, was my secret plan.
Being one of those clever American women who are so clever that they manage to trick themselves out of having relationships, I naturally needed some kind of cover-up. And I'd found it: This big English newspaper was paying me a ridiculous amount of money to find out about sex in London. If there actually was such a thing.
It was the kind of assignment that would involve copious amounts of alcohol and quite a lot of late night bar crawling, the kind of activities I specialized in. Which was probably the reason I didn't have a husband in the first place.