“So far you haven’t done anything that you can bill for,” Vanessa said. I haven’t done anything that I could bill for? Didn’t she see me concentrating, like, totally hard, on those cases for a solid six-tenths of an hour? Jeez.
“Wouldn’t it be great, though, if you could just bill for primping?” I asked her. The next best thing to billing actual clients was talking about billing them. In fact, you should be able to bill for that, too. “Just bill the client for your hair and manicures and stuff? It should really be write-off-able, if you think about it. You have to look good for court, don’t you?” Vanessa kept reading her documents, although I could swear that I saw the sides of her mouth pull a bit as she tried to keep a straight face. “And, now that I’m thinking about it, you should be able to write off your makeup, too. I mean, could you imagine if you showed up for a meeting with a client without any makeup on? That would be, like, totally unprofessional.”
“Work, Brooke!” Vanessa said with a laugh.
Seeing as Vanessa was not in the mood to discuss the issues plaguing women in today’s modern world, I picked up my wet cases and began to blow on them. They were still drenched through and through, and just the mere act of holding them up was making some of them begin to rip in half. I considered putting them under the nail dryers, but thought better of it. I began to leaf through the cases I hadn’t dropped into the pedicure tub. I looked over to Vanessa and tried to balance my cases on my own lap the way she had done herself.
The nail technician began to massage my legs. I closed my eyes and sank into it. I mean, a girl can’t reasonably be expected to read cases and bill her client during a massage, can she?
“You know, I don’t even know if Marcus is going to be able to make it to the wedding this weekend,” Vanessa said, not even bothering to look up from her work.
“What?” I asked, turning to her. As I twisted my body to look at her, the dry cases slid off my lap and fell into the pedicure tub. The nail technician, having already run this drill, slowly began to peel each case out of the water and fan the papers out next to her stool.
“I think he’s going to have to work,” she said, head still buried in her documents, documents still balanced perfectly on her lap.
“Work?” I asked.
“Yes, work, Brooke,” she said, picking her head up. “What you’re not doing right now. Work.”
“What color?” our nail technicians sang out in unison. I knew which color Vanessa would choose. Vanessa always wore the same color on both her hands and feet — Hitchcock Blonde — a barely-there nude color with a dash of pink that was only two shades away from clear topcoat. It was the sort of thing you would imagine Grace Kelly in her Princess Grace years wearing.
I usually changed it up each week, never matching my hands to my feet, a move that Vanessa considered completely déclassé and was never too shy to tell me. I knew for a fact that she obeyed the same rule about matching with respect to her bras and panties.
“I don’t know,” I thought aloud. “What color do you think?” I asked Vanessa.
“Have you tried Hitchcock Blonde?” she asked.
“Maybe a red on my toes since my dress for the wedding is nude with a black overlay?” I asked. Vanessa rolled her eyes as if to say, “Why even bother to ask when you ignore my sage advice?” and my nail technician ran off to the wall of nail polish to pick out a few reds.
“Are you going to wear red on your hands, too?” Vanessa asked me with a look of disdain that indicated that if I answered yes, our friendship may very well be over, or, at the very least, she would be unable to be seen in public with me.
“I was thinking something beigy for my hands?” I said it like a question.
“Okay,” Vanessa approved. “Hitchcock Blonde?”
“Leather and Lace?” the nail technician called over to me.
“That sounds like something Beryl would wear,” I said and she nodded, even though she had no idea who Beryl was. Presumably.
“Fresh Strawberries?” she asked and I shook my head no. Too Pollyanna. We were going to Los Angeles, for God’s sake.
“Ah!” she said, seemingly having hit gold. “Weekend in Rio.” Weekend in Rio — how perfect! This weekend was going to shape up quite nicely. This was a sign. I could tell.
“That sounds like it would match my bikini wax perfectly!” I cried out and she nodded as if I had just said something that made sense.
“That sounds a little whore-ish,” Vanessa said. I thought she was working? Was she billing the client for coming up with little wingdingers like that?
“Totally whore-ish or just a little whore-ish?” I asked. Vanessa stopped to think for a second. Grabbing the bottle from my nail technician, she studied it carefully.
“A little whore-ish,” was her final determination.
“But would it look good with nude with black overlay?” I asked. “And don’t call my dress whore-ish,” I quickly added.
“Not even whore-ish,” she qualified. “Just a bit slutty.”
“I’ll take it,” I said to my nail technician and she began to paint. “Are you upset?” I asked Vanessa.
“You can pick any color you want,” she said.
“Not about my toenails, Vanessa,” I said. “I meant about your husband.”
“You’ve been living with us for two weeks, Brooke. Haven’t you noticed that Marcus works a lot?”
“You’re right, Vanessa, I know,” I said. “I’ve only seen him once in the entire two weeks.”
“I told you to use the guest bathroom off the kitchen if you were going to go in the middle of the night,” she said.
“That was rather embarrassing, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Only for you,” she sang with a smile.
“Well, I hope that it all works out,” I said, looking at her.
“So do I, Brooke,” she said, turning to look out the window. “So do I.”
11
“What does it all mean?” a young guy with dreadlocks flowing down his back asked me in a thick English accent. He was wearing a chocolate-brown bandanna in his hair, the way I did when I went to the gym, to keep it out of his face. On him, it somehow looked elegant.
“I have no idea,” I said, trailing off and looking out the huge picture window, as I puzzled over my life, what had become of it and what I was about to do. “I honestly have no idea.”
“I meant the painting,” he said, pointing at it. He dug his other hand deep into his black leather jeans. The jeans were complemented by a denim shirt that I could have sworn I’d seen at Barneys New York the week before.
Vanessa and I had taken our newly painted fingers and toes down to Tribeca for “Texarkana 1985” — the new exhibit opening at Vanessa’s mother’s gallery. Millie’s gallery was in a huge penthouse loft in Tribeca, with fourteen-foot ceilings and views looking out to the water that made you feel as if you were in a movie. All exposed brick and original wood, it was framed perfectly by its many picture windows on each of the four walls. Rather than sacrifice the natural beauty of the space, Millie hadn’t touched an inch of the original architecture and instead had the gallery set up with eight-foot white walls, arranged like Stonehenge, on which the art was displayed. Elvis was playing faintly in the background.
“Oh, yeah, I knew that,” I quickly covered. “What does it all mean? Hmmm. What does it mean? I think that it is a statement about peace in the Middle East.”
“Peace,” he repeated solemnly. “Yes. Peace. To me,” he said as he continued pointing to the painting like a professor, or at the very least, a very, very good tour guide, “it’s saying something about the genocide taking place in the Sudan.” I nodded in agreement as he pointed to the speakers — Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel” offering the support he needed for his argument. We were looking at a painting of a small child holding a green apple.
“Ah, yes, I got that, too,” I said. His dark eyes bore into me as he listened intently. “I mean, I knew that it was a statement against
something really, really bad.”
What? I had to say something. I didn’t want him to think I was stupid. I read the New York Times every day just like every other New Yorker. Okay, well, the Styles section at the very least. Okay, okay, so maybe I don’t always read the Times, but I always read the New York Post from cover to cover. Well, maybe not cover to cover, but every last word of Page Six, to be sure.
“Well, I think that it means that we need a drink,” Vanessa said, coming up from behind us and grabbing me. We walked over to the bar. “I hate it when people ask me about the art at these things.”
“Tell me about it,” I said as I grabbed two champagne cocktails off the bar for us.
“Are you holding up okay?” Vanessa asked me as she licked the powdered sugar off the rim of her champagne glass.
“Fine,” I replied. “Absolutely fine.” A waiter walked by with a plate of tiny pieces of filet mignon on toast. They had fancy mustard painted on top in a swirl design that looked like a question mark. We each took one. “Why on earth wouldn’t I be fine?”
“Are you about to cry?” she asked me.
“Cry?” I asked. “Me?” Why on earth would she be asking me that? It may have been because she’d caught me in my office earlier that day crying to one of the guys from the mail room about my breakup with Douglas. Or perhaps because the day before I’d started to cry when I saw that Douglas’s deodorant was on sale at CVS.
What? Don’t you love a bargain, too?
“Oh, please don’t do this at my mother’s thing,” she said, grabbing a tuna tartare on potato crisp as a waiter flew by.
“Do what?” I asked. I hoped that she noticed that her accusation had made me — unlike her — too flummoxed to even grab a piece of tuna for myself.
“Embarrass me,” she whispered, eyes darting around the room as she put the whole crisp into her mouth. “You know how high stress these things can be for me.”
“I’m not going to embarrass you!” I said, laughing. Please! Me, embarrass her? How could I possibly embarrass Vanessa? I was just about to ask her that very thing when her mother walked over to greet us.
“Where’s your husband?” Millie asked, in place of hello. She kissed each of us on both of our cheeks as if she were French. Her hair was pulled back in a very severe chignon and she wore little to no makeup. As she always did, she looked more like the former model she used to be than the art gallery owner she currently was.
“Marcus is working,” Vanessa said, already looking around to see who else was there. Millie’s art gallery openings usually attracted an eclectic and altogether fabulous crowd. I stood around and tried to look fabulous myself, as if I’d actually been invited because of my said fabulousness, or fabulousity (or whatever the word would be that would mean that I was totally, completely fabulous) instead of the fact that I was merely there because I was friends with Vanessa.
“Working?” Millie said in a tone that I was pretty sure wasn’t meant to pretend that she wasn’t judging her daughter. “Just like your father.”
“Yes, Mother,” Vanessa said. She always called Millie Mother when she was upset. “Working. What men our age have to do.”
“Jack managed to make it,” Millie said, looking over our shoulders. We turned to see Jack walking in. He checked his briefcase and two huge Redwelds full of documents at the coat check set up by the front door. Clearly, he had chosen to bring his work home with him and do it later so that he could leave work early and make it to the show. “I see you met Christian Locke.”
“We did?” I asked.
“The young man with the dreadlocks,” Millie said, pointing in his direction. He was still intently studying the painting of the child with an apple.
“He’s single,” Millie said in Vanessa’s general direction as she waved him over.
“Hi, I’m Christian,” he said, shaking both of our hands. “And apparently, I’m single,” he said with a laugh.
“Too bad she’s not,” Jack said as he swept in and gave Millie the requisite kiss on each cheek.
“Millie, are you misbehaving again?” a voice from nowhere asked. A man in a navy pinstriped suit joined our group and gave Millie a hug.
“Always, sweetheart,” she said, returning the stranger’s embrace.
“This is Sidney Locke,” Millie said, introducing him to us. He made eye contact with each of us as he shook each of our hands, the way I’d seen Bill Bradley do once at a political fund-raiser. When Sidney reached out to shake my hand, I couldn’t help but notice his monogrammed gold cufflinks.
“Hi, Dad,” Christian said, giving his father a hug.
“Sidney is a diplomat,” Millie said, as Sidney feigned embarrassment over the introduction. “The work he does is truly amazing.”
“I’m sure these kids don’t want to hear about the work I do,” Sidney said, smiling broadly at us. “It’s after hours.”
“I’m sure they do!” Millie said. “These are lawyers at one of Manhattan’s top firms.” Vanessa groaned. “What? I can brag about my daughter, can’t I?”
“Then they definitely don’t want to hear about my work!” Sidney said.
“They do! Actually, Brooke’s boyfriend is from Scotland, so I’m sure that she would be particularly interested in what’s going on across the pond.”
“Mother,” Vanessa began. “Stop.” How could it be that she hadn’t told her mother? I tell my mother what I have for breakfast each morning. I certainly would have mentioned it if my best friend had been callously thrown out of the apartment in which she had been living in sin with her boyfriend and was bunking with my handsome doctor husband and me. I must be such a wonderful houseguest that she never even needed to complain to her about me!
“Is Douglas coming, sweetheart?” Millie asked me, completely ignoring Vanessa. For the record, Douglas had never once made it to one of Millie’s art openings.
“No,” I said, trying to smile and act normal. “He’s not.”
“These young men!” she said, facing the group. “They all work way too hard, if you ask me! Brooke, sweetheart, what is he working on that he couldn’t be here?”
“He’s not working,” I said. I smiled my fake smile and everyone else smiled their fake smiles back at me, like deer caught in headlights.
“Oh, okay,” Millie said, breaking the silence with a nervous smile creeping onto her lips.
No one moved. Christian and his father were smiling so hard I thought that one of them might actually hurt themselves, and Millie and Vanessa were staring hard at each other, seemingly trying to communicate to the other through their clenched teeth. Jack looked as if he was about to say something to me.
“Douglas broke up with me,” I said. Okay, granted, maybe it wasn’t the sort of thing you just blurt out in polite company, but everyone knows that when confronted with a deer caught in your headlights, you are supposed to speed up and hit the deer really fast. It’s a fact.
“Oh, Brooke,” Millie said as she inched toward me for a hug.
“It’s okay,” I said, tearing up slightly as Sidney tried to put a diplomatic arm around me. “I’m okay.”
“Of course it’s okay,” Sidney said, and as soon as the words left his diplomatic mouth, the waterworks began. Full force. Running down my face uncontrollably. Hoover Dam breaking style. I couldn’t hold back. The tears just came and came and came and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. I began simultaneously gasping for breath and wiping my running nose with my already used cocktail napkin. I tried wiping the tears away with the back of my hand to no avail — the tears just kept on coming and they wouldn’t stop. Sidney offered me his handkerchief and I blew my nose into it. I thanked him and tried to blow my nose delicately and all ladylike, but it instead came out sounding more like a foghorn.
“I’m fine. I’m totally fine. I mean, all men cheat, don’t they? So, it’s really not that big of a deal.”
“He cheated on you?” Christian asked, clearly incredulous that a man had che
ated on a goddess like myself. He handed me his own handkerchief and I blew my nose into it. Loud.
“Yes, he cheated. But, who doesn’t, right? Didn’t Halle Berry’s husband cheat on her?” I asked the group. Sidney nodded his head yes sympathetically as only a diplomat could. “And, she’s the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. You can’t compete with Halle Berry. And didn’t Marc Anthony leave his wife for J. Lo? That guy was married to Miss Universe! You can’t get better than Miss Universe! And look at me! I’m just a mere mortal!”
“But she’s J. Lo,” Vanessa said.
“I know,” I agreed. “But this is just a minor setback in our relationship. You see, it’s no big deal. Because I’m okay and it’s okay. I’m going to get Douglas back. Yes, sir-ee-Bob. I’ll get him back. You don’t have to worry about me. Not one bit. We are going to get back together. Possibly not until after my ex-boyfriend’s wedding, but what does that matter? Right?”
“You’re going to your ex-boyfriend’s wedding?” Christian asked. I blew my nose into his handkerchief again as I nodded my head yes.
“Yes,” I said, louder and more forcefully, as if I were about to announce something like, “With God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again,” or “Tomorrow is another day,” or something of similar import. “I am going to my ex-boyfriend’s wedding. And then I’m going to get Douglas back.”
“Of course you are,” Millie said.
I tried to give Sidney and Christian their handkerchiefs back, only to have Vanessa intercept my reach, saying, “Why don’t we have these cleaned before we return them to you?”
“I’m so sorry I made a scene,” I said, turning to Millie.
“Not a problem, everyone here will think that it was performance art,” she replied with a wink as she walked to the middle of the room to introduce the artist.
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