by Bridie Clark
When she reached the station, Lucy Jo was thwarted by a heavy current of people exiting onto the street. “Flooded,” an old man in a Mets cap told her. “Trains aren’t running. Don’t bother.”
Lucy Jo had barely noticed the pelting rain, since it seemed like such a natural extension of her mental anguish. Humiliated, unemployed, and now forced to fight for a cab. She’d never mastered the bus routes, and during a torrential downpour on the worst night of her life didn’t seem like the time to try. The street was crowded with cab competition, so Lucy Jo decided she’d have better luck heading north and over to Fifth Avenue, a straight shot home to Murray Hill. She flipped up the hood of her parka.
By the time she reached Fifth and then made her way down to 60th, she looked like she’d jumped into a swimming pool fully dressed, and she’d still had no luck. She’d almost given up hope when she saw a dim light in the distance moving down Fifth toward her. The number on the taxi’s roof glowed like a beacon signaling Home. Like an island castaway spotting a plane in the sky, Lucy Jo darted into the street, frantically waving both arms to get the cabbie’s attention. He pulled over just steps away.
But before she reached the back door, another girl dashed past her—unseen behind her umbrella—grabbed the door handle and slid into the backseat.
“Excuse me?” Lucy Jo was shocked by the stranger’s audacity. “This is my cab! I’ve been looking for a really long—”
“So you’re already wet.” The umbrella quickly collapsed to reveal its owner, a glamorous blonde with catlike green eyes. She looked expensive and vaguely familiar, and she laughed a little as she slammed the door in Lucy Jo’s face. Then she rubbed a circle on the fogged window so that Lucy Jo could see her victorious little smile as the cab pulled away.
Lucy Jo watched the taxi disappear into the rain. Maybe I’ll catch a fatal case of pneumonia, she thought, struggling to see the bright side. She glanced at the bus stop, only to see her cab thief ’s smugly beautiful face on a huge poster for Townhouse magazine.
“IT” GIRL CORNELIA ROCKMAN TAKES MANHATTAN, read the headline.
Lucy Jo ducked under a nearby awning. Who was she kidding? MANHATTAN CHEWS LUCY JO ELLIS UP AND SPITS HER OUT, that’s what her headline would read—right next to a photo of a drowned rodent in fluorescent ruffles and an old ski parka.
6
To: [email protected]
Sent: December 2, 9:22 PM
From: [email protected]
Subject: heading to your place in 20. xox
Trip’s BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket, and he held out the blue screen in front of him. “Eloise. I should get home.”
Wyatt rolled his eyes. “For the record, I don’t see what you’re holding out for. You’re more or less married already. Just give the girl a ring.”
“You’re either married or you’re not.” Trip’s speech might have been a little slurred from drinking, but his defensive edge was sharp.
“Touchy!” Wyatt laughed. But he couldn’t help feeling a little impressed. Who would’ve guessed that roly-poly Trip Peters, of all their friends, would be the one most unwilling to commit to marriage? Then again, who’d have guessed he’d be the one to bank $500 mil by his thirty-fifth birthday?
“Eloise is the best. I love her to death. All I’m saying is, marriage isn’t for everyone. It’s not for us.”
“Hear, hear,” toasted Wyatt, enjoying the last of his scotch. He waved for the check. It was reassuring to have one wingman he could still count on. Most of their buddies had been swept into the vortex of domesticity, guarded by wardens who used to dance on tables at Bungalow 8 or Moomba. Many had moved off-island to Greenwich or Locust Valley, their lives surrendering any real spontaneity. Wyatt didn’t envy them a bit. Neither, apparently, did Trip.
They stumbled out of the bar and into the downpour. “Where’s Raoul?” Wyatt asked. He glanced down the block, expecting to see the midnight blue Mercedes that trailed Trip wherever he went.
“Gave him the night off, his daughter had a ballet recital. Shit timing. We’ll never get a cab.” Trip pulled his Barbour over his head.
“We’ll walk. You’ve got four blocks; I’ve got six,” Wyatt said. Trip’s pursuit of convenience had become almost comical, he thought. His household manager now packed and shipped his luggage before every trip to spare him the chore of wheeling a roller bag onto his private plane.
They set off, weaving through the already deep puddles. “Any interest in Turks and Caicos for a few days?” Trip asked, tripping over a fire hydrant that shot out in front of him. “Wheels up tomorrow at eleven, weather permitting. We’ve got room.”
“Yeah?” Wyatt considered it for a moment, but he felt too glum to motivate himself. “Maybe next time. Now that I’m a free man, I might head to London for a visit. I keep promising friends I’ll make it there, but work’s been keeping me busy.”
He knew he was playing fast and loose with the definition of busy. The truth—that his career as a biological anthropologist had become as strenuous as his “gentleman’s workouts” (five-minute swim, followed by a fifteen-minute steam) at the Racquet Club—made him uncomfortable. Although from time to time he’d publish a small piece (on such arcane topics as male mating effort among the bonobos, or the effect of predation pressure on social systems), Wyatt hadn’t broken an intellectual sweat in a long time. Still, he kept up a good act, claiming that all the far-flung safaris he took each year were in the name of “research.”
It was a shame, really. Back in his Ph.D. days at Harvard, Wyatt had been lauded as a star on the rise. His professors and mentors expected an august career to follow his dissertation (subordinate behavior in chimpanzees, in keeping with his childhood crush on Jane Goodall). But it hadn’t.
What happened instead: after working himself into the ground to finish his doctorate, Wyatt figured he deserved some time off. He felt blissfully liberated from academia, freed from the dusty stacks of Widener Library, where he’d spent countless sun-deprived hours. To make up for lost time, he spent that first winter stationed in St. John, importing friends and models to keep him company, windsurfing off Cinnamon Bay Beach and napping in catamarans off Trunk Bay. Then he took up residence in his mother’s guest cottage in Southampton, where he could count on three lavish meals prepared daily by her Cordon Bleu-trained chef and served by her staff of twelve, along with more invitations than one man could possibly accept. But accept Wyatt did. It was a charmed existence, dotted with boondoggles and jet-setting long weekends that stretched into weeks if such was his pleasure. Wyatt hit the international social circuit with a vengeance, flitting about the glittering überworld of the rich and beautiful. The months stretched on, quickly becoming a year and then two.
Not having to earn a living can be an insurmountable challenge to a person’s career. The path to tenure at Harvard was too steep; it required years of unappealingly hard labor. Nor did Wyatt dream of teaching at Podunk University (which was every school but Harvard, as far as he was concerned), living in a town where you couldn’t find a decent scotch and where sushi was considered as exotic as space travel. Besides, it wasn’t like he needed the spending money a teaching job could provide.
So he’d more or less given up—a fact that he refused to fully admit, even to himself.
“Busy, huh? Working on anything interesting these days?” Trip asked.
“I’m thinking about writing a book.” It was a bluff with a tiny seed of truth: Dr. Alfred Kipling, the publisher of Harvard University Press, had been after Wyatt to write a book for years. Kipling—a stubborn old gentleman whom Wyatt had met through his Ph.D. adviser—refused to give up hope that the younger scholar could produce something original, provocative, and valuable (or at least worth more than Lehman stock). Wyatt had written a scholarly dissertation, Kipling reasoned—why not a book? So far, Wyatt had only proved these hopes to be misplaced.
“A book about what?” Trip asked. Then something caught his eye, and he pau
sed for a split second in front of a bus stop. Wyatt stopped alongside him, forgetting the rain. There was Cornelia, staring out from an oversize advertisement for Townhouse, larger than life. Flawlessly beautiful in a mint-colored cocktail dress, Cornelia modeled a plunging neckline accentuated by a rope of diamonds. Her character flaws aside, Wyatt had to admit that she was a 12 out of 10. He couldn’t avoid reading the enormous headline: “IT” GIRL CORNELIA ROCKMAN TAKES MANHATTAN.
It could just make you sick.
“Hey,” Trip said, giving Wyatt a light punch on the arm. “It’s a good photo, and she’s a hot girl, but you made the right call. She drove you insane, right?”
“Right,” Wyatt repeated, still staring. She looked so smug. So sure of herself. So obnoxiously . . . superior. Why hadn’t he noticed how much he hated her while they were dating? “I need a smoke,” he said, gesturing toward a deep storefront awning.
“C’mon, man, we’ve barely made it a block,” protested Trip. But he too jumped under the awning. “Are you okay?”
Wyatt’s head was spinning. It wasn’t just the amount of alcohol he’d consumed. And it wasn’t just Cornelia, either—it was everything she represented. Then, in cinematic style, a thought struck him just as a vein of lightning crashed above their heads. “I have an idea,” he said slowly. The four little words felt dangerous and exciting as they left his mouth.
“Yeah?” Trip pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets and shifted from side to side. He didn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of the moment. “What’s that?”
“An idea that I could develop into a book!” Wyatt could feel his passion escalate. It was the first time in a long time that anything connected to his career had done that. “And if it worked—if I could pull it off—it would knock Cornelia down a few notches. It would reveal the farce of society as it now stands!”
That got Trip’s attention. He looked at his friend, illuminated in the yellow glow of the streetlamp. “Okay, let me hear it.”
“It might sound a little strange—”
“That’s a given.”
Wyatt ignored him. “Socialites in Manhattan have wealth, privilege, beauty, and youth working for them. Designers curry their favor and send them free clothes; magazines run fluff pieces about their so-called ‘businesses’; every PR flack in town begs them to make an appearance at parties. Like it or not, they’re alphas—the top of the pecking order.”
“Okay,” Trip said. “So what’s your idea?”
“I’d conduct a social experiment answering the question: Could anyone become an alpha socialite if she wanted to? Or is there something inherent in these girls’ backgrounds, personalities, or genetics that predetermines their social status? My theory is that there isn’t.”
“Uncharacteristically democratic of you,” Trip remarked.
“And to test this theory,” Wyatt continued, “I’d take a random girl off the street and turn her into the most sought-after socialite in New York City. Convince everyone that she was the real deal—the number one It girl, the cover of Townhouse—in just a few months. I’d turn her into the next Cornelia Rockman, so to speak, only better. Show how hollow the system has become, and what a joke today’s ‘socials’ are. Show that any girl—no matter who her people are, no matter where she comes from, no matter how little she has in her trust fund—can be passed off as the reigning socialite.”
“Are you serious? I can’t tell if you’re kidding, man.”
“Completely serious! I’m a keen observer of human nature, Peters, and I’ve been playing the game in New York for twenty years. Then there’s my academic expertise. The animal kingdom is full of tricks to gain social dominance. All I’d need to do is apply a few of those to the socialite game. Kipling keeps telling me to work with what I know. It’s the perfect merger of two worlds I know well.” Wyatt sensed an inner stirring that he hadn’t felt in years. He could write this book—and without doing time in the stacks of a university library or in the bush of the Serengeti. “And just think of Cornelia’s reaction—”
It took the two men this long to realize they weren’t alone under the awning. If the poor girl hadn’t issued a rather wet sneeze from her corner, they might not have noticed her at all. She was drenched to the bone, teeth chattering. She tried pulling herself together when Trip looked over, but it was no use.
“Bless you,” Trip said. He offered his handkerchief.
“Thanks,” she said, accepting it. “That’s real nice of you.”
Wyatt lowered his voice. “If I could teach a common, average wallflower . . . a girl you’d never look twice at if you passed her on the street—” The girl sneezed more loudly, and Wyatt instinctively stepped away from her. She sneezed again. And again. On the sixth sneeze, he finally looked back at her.
Her dark hair hung lifelessly on either side of an open, friendly face. From the Midwest, he judged, and she hasn’t lived here longer than a year. She was tall, maybe five-nine, and not thin. Even though she was buried under a Michelin-man-size winter parka, Wyatt could tell there was meat on her bones. But her features—particularly her dark, expansive eyes—weren’t bad. All in all, she struck him as a fixer-upper; a block of clay ready for Pygmalion’s chisel. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“My name?”
“That’s right, your name.” Wyatt handed her his business card, hand-engraved on card stock that was thick enough to cut butter.
“It’s . . . um, Lucy Jo Ellis,” she said reluctantly, taking the proffered card.
Wyatt scratched his chin. “Not much of a name, but we could work on that.”
“Excuse me?”
He studied her carefully. She was the walking definition of average. Except for her outfit, a soggy rag of a neon pink cocktail dress, there wasn’t anything memorable about her appearance.
“Wyatt! You’re scaring the poor girl.” Trip admonished under his breath.
“That’s ridiculous.” He guessed she lived in Murray Hill, or maybe in the nineties near the FDR, possibly with a roommate. No wedding ring—he guessed she was single. There was just something about her that said alone in the world. “Please, Peters, I’m offering to expand the girl’s entire social status, her entire life.”
“Improve my social status?” Lucy Jo repeated, her voice rising about an octave.
“Give me a few months,” Wyatt continued deafly, still addressing Trip, “and I could turn her into a social luminary. She’d make the rest of the pack look like dim little tea lights.”
“Are you insane?” the woman spat at him. “You don’t even know me!”
“I’m really sorry,” Trip said. “My friend’s been drinking.” She just shook her head. Her lips were pursed into a tight line, and a blotchy red circle had formed on each of her full cheeks. “Please just ignore him. Wyatt, let’s go.”
But Wyatt felt more certain than ever. Meeting this girl tonight—it felt like fate. And her selection would be truly random, making a perfect start to his book. “I could turn her into the toast of Manhattan. She’d make those silver-spooned heiresses green with envy. I’d put her up in a nice apartment. With the right clothes, education, social grooming—”
Whaaaaaaaap! The girl’s right hand laid twenty pounds of slap against his cold cheek. “What the hell was that for?” Wyatt bellowed, rubbing his face to erase the pink impression of Lucy Jo’s palm. “You idiotic—”
“Do I look like the Happy Hooker? Or a charity case? I don’t know what your issue is, buddy, but I’m not that kind of girl!” Lucy Jo yelled. She stepped indignantly out into the rain, which beat down so hard on her that she could barely open her eyes.
“Calm down.” Wyatt grabbed her arm to pull her out of the waterfall. In one motion she wrenched it free, and he quickly stepped back, surprised by her strength. “You think I’m trying to pick you up or something? You’re missing the entire point!”
“Well, you’re—you’re missing some marbles!” Lucy Jo shouted over a peal of thunder. But she stepped back un
der the awning. There were no taxis in sight.
Wyatt, still pressing his injured cheek, felt his temper rise. “Imagine flying off the handle because someone offered you the opportunity of a lifetime!”
“Imagine having your head so far up your ass that you feel entitled to insult a perfect stranger!” Lucy Jo snapped back.
The two of them stood silently under the awning, huffy as an old married couple having the same fight for the umpteenth time. Then, as though remembering she was free to go, she stepped back toward the street. “Your handkerchief—” Lucy Jo glanced down at the wet linen square that Trip had given her.
“All yours. And here, please take my umbrella.”
“Nah, that’s okay—”
