Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection

by Lauren Weisberger

‘Sure. Will do. You, too, Kelly,’ I said, inching closer to the door, still not really believing that I had just promised my boss I’d continue sleeping with a guy I hadn’t slept with yet. ‘See you Monday.’

  She picked up the phone, smiled, and gave me a thumbs-up. I beelined for my area, near Elisa, but was stopped several times on the way by people grinning at me in knowing ways or calling out ‘Nice work’ or ‘Great work with Philip.’ Elisa had gone out to lunch (read: a liter of Fiji water, a Baggie of baby carrots, and a half-dozen Marlboro Lights), according to a note she left on my computer, so I picked up the phone and called Penelope.

  ‘Hey, how are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine. And you?’ I responded in my detonation voice, so quiet and uptight that it gave the impression something might blow up at any second.

  ‘Great. Thanks for inviting me to dinner last night. It was, uh, really interesting.’

  ‘So you hated it?’

  ‘No! Bette, I didn’t say anything like that. I didn’t hate it at all. It was just, uh, different from what we usually do. Hope you don’t mind that I bailed early, but I was exhausted. How was the rest of the night?’

  ‘Are you asking just to be polite or have you not seen the news today?’ I mentally crossed my fingers that she hadn’t heard.

  ‘Yeah, I’m just being nice. Avery forwarded it to me first thing this morning. It’s taken every last ounce of willpower not to call you. I want the full play-by-play. Start with “When I met him at Bungalow he was wearing a black ribbed shirt and black pants with a thirty-four-inch inseam and he bought me a Stoli Vanilla and Sprite.” Proceed at that detail level, please.’

  ‘Pen, I can’t really get into it here,’ I said tersely, looking up to notice that half of my coworkers were pretending to stare at their screens while listening to me intently.

  ‘Bette! You can’t be serious! You go and have sex with one of the hottest guys in the free world – Avery’s always talking about how every female in Manhattan worships him – and you can’t tell me about it?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him!’ I all but screamed into the phone. Skye and Leo – in addition to a few assistants – jerked their heads up and grinned at me in unison.

  ‘Whatever,’ I heard someone else whisper.

  Leo just rolled his eyes as if to say, ‘Oh, dear God, we’re not all that stupid.’

  And for a minute I was flattered. So what if it was slightly slutty to meet someone and sleep with him that very night? Better everyone considered it a possibility that Philip Weston would deign to have sex with me, I suppose, than just assume he’d taken me in for the night out of pity and a sense of obligation and spent as little time as possible actually in the bed I occupied.

  ‘Whoa,’ Penelope was saying. ‘Touchy, touchy. Okay, so you didn’t have sex with him. I believe you. The only question I have now is, why the hell not? I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you of your recent celibacy. What are you holding out for? He’s supposedly incredible!’

  I finally laughed for what I realized was the first time all morning. Seriously, what was the big deal? If I wasn’t going to get fired for my rather public indiscretion – and that certainly didn’t seem to be an option – then why not just enjoy it?

  ‘I remember very little about what actually happened last night,’ I whispered, placing my hand over the receiver, ‘but I’ll tell you whatever I can dredge up when I get home tonight.’

  ‘Can’t. Avery and I have dinner at his parents’ house and I can’t seem to talk him out of it. What about tomorrow night? Can we meet for a drink at the Black Door?’

  ‘I’d love to, but I’m meeting the book club for dinner and drinks. Little Italy, I think.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, we should probably make a plan now for the weekend after next since I’m in St Louis for work the next two weeks. Are you around?’

  It felt strange to have plans with people other than my book club, Will, or Penelope, but work had already begun to seep into my weekends, too. I checked my rapidly filling calendar. ‘Yeah, totally, I just promised Kelly that I’d go with our group from here to scout a new location for the Playboy party. It’s still four months away, but everyone’s already panicking. Want to come?’

  Penelope hesitated. I could tell she wasn’t into the idea, but she couldn’t really say no since she’d already admitted to being free. ‘Uh, sure. That sounds great. We’ll figure out the details this week. And of course, if you suddenly “remember” anything about last night, I’ll take that, too.’

  ‘Bitch,’ I shot back.

  She just laughed.

  ‘You have fun with your future in-laws, you hear? Be sure to listen up when they tell you exactly how many grandchildren they want, broken down by gender and eye color. You do, after all, have certain obligations now. …’

  It was good to hear her laughing again.

  ‘Bettina Robinson, I’m not sure you’re in a position to offer advice on such things right now, considering your rather tawdry exploits in the last twenty-four hours. … Talk to you later.’

  ‘Bye.’ I hung up the phone and decided that such a night and morning warranted a second bacon, egg, and cheese on a buttered roll. I still had to do that invitation list for five hundred and party favors, but I decided it could wait. My hangover could not.

  9

  Three weeks later – three weeks of list-making, wardrobe-building, party-going, and general immersion in the culture of Kelly & Company – I stood waiting for Penelope to arrive. The line outside Sanctuary looked absolutely unbearable. Whole hordes of girls smoothed their Japanese-reconditioned hair with manicured hands while the boys – revitalized from various steak dinners – gripped their forearms to keep them from tottering over sideways on their heels. The early November night was chilly, but no one seemed to notice that it wasn’t July anymore. Skin – scrubbed, buffed, waxed, moisturized, tanned, and glowing – was everywhere, from huge expanses of bronzed cleavage to slightly sparkling stretches of stomach to those inches of upper thigh that are rarely spotted away from the beach or the gynecologist’s office. A few people swayed in time to loungy music emanating from behind the imposing steel door, and most seemed to twitter at the mere idea of what the night held: the sensation of that first martini hitting your bloodstream, the feeling of music pulsating through your hips, the cigarette smoke burning but delicious, the chance to press some of that perfect skin against someone else’s. There was nothing quite as heady as a Saturday night in New York when you were standing outside the newest, chicest place in the city, surrounded by all sorts of glittering, pretty things, the kind of vibe where every fantasy was just waiting to unfold … if you could only get inside.

  To my surprise, Will had been less than thrilled with the coverage of my non-one-night-stand three weeks earlier. I’d called after work to say hi, figuring he didn’t even read New York Scoop and there was a good chance he hadn’t seen it, but I was very, very wrong. Everybody, it seemed, had begun reading New York Scoop – and worse, they were reading it solely for Ellie Insider’s column.

  ‘Oh, Bette, your uncle has been champing at the bit, just waiting for your call. Hold on a second, I’ll get him,’ Simon said rather formally, not even bothering to ask how I was or when I’d next be over for dinner, as he always did.

  ‘Bette? Is that really you? The celebrity herself deigns to call her old uncle, huh?’

  ‘Celebrity? What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe just that little piece about my “mystery niece.” Apparently your new boyfriend is rather fashionable, and so his, um, conquests are often recorded for posterity within the Scoop’s highly journalistic pages. Did you not see it?’

  ‘My boyfriend? You’re referring to the illustrious Philip Weston, I’m guessing?’

  ‘Indeed I am, darling, indeed I am. Not exactly what I had in mind when I encouraged you to get out there and meet someone, but what do I know? I’m just an old man, living vicariously throu
gh his beautiful young niece. If you find that whole British trustafarian thing appealing, well, then, far be it from me to say otherwise. …’

  ‘Will! I should think you of all people would understand that you can’t necessarily believe everything you read in the papers, you know? It didn’t exactly happen like that.’

  ‘Well, darling, since you seem to be a bit late to the game, everyone’s been reading Ellie Insider lately. She’s surely a conniving little wench, but she does always seem to have the scoop. Are you telling me you didn’t go home with him? Or that it was a different new Kelly hire? Because if that’s true, then I’d recommend having that corrected as soon as possible. I’m not sure that’s the reputation you’d be looking to create for yourself.’

  ‘It’s complicated’ was all I could manage.

  ‘I see,’ he replied quietly. ‘Well, look, it’s certainly none of my business. As long as you’re enjoying yourself, that’s really all that matters. See you at brunch on Sunday. We’re in prime pre-holiday wedding season, so I imagine there’ll be some real winners in Sunday’s announcements. Wear your snarky shoes, darling.’

  I’d agreed, but I felt unsettled. Something had changed – or shifted, at least – and I couldn’t quite pinpoint it.

  ‘Hey, Bette, over here,’ Penelope called a bit too loudly as she settled up with the cabdriver and waved to me from the backseat.

  I waved. ‘Hi! Right on time. Elisa and crew are already here, but I didn’t want you to have to come in alone.’

  ‘Wow, you look great,’ she said, putting a hand on my hip and examining my outfit from head to toe. ‘Where’d you find clothes like that?’

  I laughed, pleased that she had noticed. I’d only been working at Kelly & Company for a month, but it was long enough for me to get sick of looking like I was always dressed for a funeral. I’d thrown my drab suits in the back of my closet, ripped a couple pages out of Lucky and Glamour, and made a beeline for Barney’s. Standing at the register, I’d mentally added up the years it was going to take to pay for all this stuff and then bravely handed over my credit card. When the salesperson gave it back, I could have sworn it was warm to the touch. In one afternoon I’d managed to kiss both dorkiness and credit health good-bye.

  While it wasn’t exactly couture, I was pretty happy with my new look: Paige Jeans that cost more than all my monthly bills combined; a silky, lace-lined lingerie top in kelly green; a tweedy, fitted blazer that didn’t match anything but which the salesman, Jean-Luc, had declared ‘ravishing’; and the classic Chanel clutch Will had bought me for my twenty-first birthday because apparently ‘it’s criminal to pass into womanhood without a single designer paving your passage. Welcome to what I hope will be a long life of shallow consumerism and brand worship.’

  I had worked at CWK for five years, slaving away for eighty hours a week. Since I’d never had any time to spend money, I’d managed to build a little nest egg without really trying. After eight weeks of unemployment and one afternoon at Barney’s, that nest egg had been seriously compromised, but my ass had never looked better in denim. Standing outside Sanctuary among the thin and beautiful people, I felt like I belonged. It had been worth it.

  ‘Hi there,’ I said, hugging Penelope’s tiny frame. ‘Do you like it? It’s my “I’ve never been remotely cool but I’m trying real hard to be so now” look. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you look hot,’ she said, forever the good friend. ‘Is someone planning on seeing a certain English deity this evening?’

  ‘Hardly. I don’t think Philip Weston calls girls who don’t immediately fall into his bed with their legs spread. Actually, I don’t think he calls girls who do, either. Whatever. He’s beautiful, but he was unbelievably arrogant and full of himself.’

  ‘And no one likes that, of course,’ Penelope said with mock seriousness.

  ‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘Come on, everyone else is inside and it’s freezing. Let’s go in.’

  ‘Have you seen this line? What’s going on here tonight? You’d think they were handing out free lap dances or something.’

  ‘I don’t know too much except that it opened last night and is supposed to be the ultimate exclusive place, sort of a VIP room on steroids. Kelly wanted us to check it out in case it actually does live up to the hype. If it becomes the new place, we’ll already have it booked for the Playboy party.’

  Kelly & Company had been commissioned by Playboy over a year ago to put on the Manhattan portion of their never-ending Fiftieth Anniversary celebration, which would start in Chicago in January and eventually end in a blowout at the mansion in Los Angeles in March, making stops in Vegas, Miami, and New York along the way. It was going to be a massive undertaking – definitely our biggest project to date, and it pretty much dominated every workday. Kelly had gathered us around the day before to change the number on the countdown board to 164 and then asked for updates. The List Girls were already running simultaneous searches on all A- and B-list celebs, preparing to construct a final winning group. Meanwhile, the rest of us spent half of each day fielding calls from every imaginable person in every sector of the city looking to wrangle invitations and request invites for themselves, or clients, or both. Combine all the anticipation with Hef’s paranoid insistence that all details (including – but not limited to – location, date, time, and attendees) be kept lockbox-quiet, and we had the recipe for total chaos.

  ‘I looked it up on Citysearch today. They quoted the manager as saying they expected the clientele to be “upscale creative,” which I sort of thought applied more to menus than people, but what do I know?’ Penelope sighed.

  I’d recently begun to understand that the concept of exclusivity was an organizing principle of life in Manhattan. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the sheer concentration of people on such a tiny island. New Yorkers instinctively compete for everything from taxis at rush hour to seats on the subway to Hermès Birkin bags to Knicks season tickets. Impenetrable co-op boards take years to navigate. Icy hostesses at the city’s most desirable restaurants haughtily demand reservations six months in advance. ‘If they let you in without a hassle,’ people say, ‘it’s probably not worth going.’ Since the days of Studio 54, and probably long before (if there even were nightclubs before then), club-goers have made getting into trendy nightclubs a competitive sport. And at the chicest places, like tonight, there are levels of access. Getting in the front door is just the beginning – any NYU sophomore in a tube top can manage that. ‘The main bar?’ I’d heard someone say in reference to Sanctuary. ‘I’d rather be at TGI Friday’s in Hoboken.’ Elisa had provided explicit instructions to make our way directly to the VIP lounge, apparently the only place to find some ‘real action.’ Jagger and Bowie partied in Studio 54’s legendary private rooms. Today Leo, Colin, and Lindsay hold court, unmolested by prying eyes. And everyone else clamors to get in.

  I’d grown accustomed to being a non-VIP quite some time ago – it hadn’t occurred to me that VIP was even a possibility for me. It had taken the opening of a VIP room outside of the confines of the nightclub arena to really stir my righteous indignation. In what I could only interpret as the first sign of the apocalypse, my dentist, Dr Quinn, had opened a VIP waiting room in his office. ‘So the doctor’s high-profile, important clients will have a place where they feel comfortable,’ the assistant had explained. ‘You can have a seat in our regular lounge.’ I sat in Dr Powell’s very uncool and very public waiting room, thumbing through a two-year-old issue of Redbook and silently willing the overweight gentleman next to me to cease cracking his gum. I gazed longingly at the door marked VIP and fantasized about the plush dental wonderland that surely lay beyond. I resigned myself to the fact that I would always be one of those people on the outside looking in. But there I was, a mere few months later, standing outside Sanctuary in my cool new clothes with a gaggle of fabulous friends waiting inside. It felt like my luck was changing.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl who looked exactl
y like Abby kiss the bouncer and make her way into the lounge, but I couldn’t positively identify her from where I stood. ‘Hey, you’ll never guess who I saw the other night. I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! Abby was at Bungalow that night you left after dinner.’

  Penelope’s head snapped toward mine. She hated Abby more than I did, if that was possible. She’d refused to acknowledge her presence since Abby had cornered her in an empty classroom sophomore year and told her not to take it personally that Penelope’s father was sleeping with his secretary, that it was certainly no reflection on his love for her. Penelope had been so shocked she’d merely asked, ‘How do you know?’ and Abby had smirked in return. ‘Are you serious?’ she’d asked. ‘Who doesn’t know?’

  ‘You saw that midget and didn’t tell me? What’d she have to say for herself?’

  ‘Her usual. She’s now at the vortex of the media world, you’ll be happy to know. Goes by Abigail now, not Abby, so of course I said “Abby” as many times as I possibly could. Had her boobs done and half her face rearranged, but she’s still exactly the same.’

  ‘Girl would walk over her own mother in spike heels if it helped her get ahead,’ Penelope mumbled.

  ‘Sure would,’ I confirmed cheerfully. ‘And you just might have the pleasure of seeing her here tonight. I think she just walked in.’

  ‘Great. That’s just great. Lucky us.’

  I linked arms with Penelope and boldly walked to the front of the line, hopefully projecting some level of confidence. A highly manorexic black guy sporting a giant, fake Afro wig and a long-sleeved mesh T-shirt over hot pink Lycra tights peered at us through sparkle-encrusted eyelashes.

  ‘Are you on the list?’ he asked in a voice that was surprisingly gruff for someone who cross-dressed so expertly.

  ‘Yep, sure are,’ I said casually. Silence. ‘Um, yes, we are on the list. We’re here with Kelly & Company.’

  No response. He held the clipboard but didn’t consult it, and I decided he hadn’t heard me.