Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  And it was. When the dessert came, I focused all my energies on inhaling it. Mom sat back and watched me eat, without once asking to borrow my spoon.

  From: “Ppazzolini”

  To: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 25,3:12 p.m.

  Subject: Ciao, bambina

  Mimi,

  Whasssssssssup? I’m hurt that you jet over to see Lily, and you haven’t even mentioned coming to Italia. It’s hot here—not the weather, but everything else. Actually, I haven’t seen much daylight in a little while. Nona’s dad is out here for the Lake Como film festival, and she and I have been living inside movie theaters and at afterparties. Nona’s dad is staying with Tom Ramsey, who just bought a villa out here to store his Oscars and rotating cast of lady friends. Nona was hoping to stay there, too, but Tom has an 18-and-older rule, so she’s camping out on a Pazzolini bunk bed.

  I think I saw your favorite Baldwin alum, Nikola Ziff, sitting by her lonesome at the festival’s Cinema Paradiso café. I fear this means she’s pursuing an acting career instead of college—big shocker there, huh? If I run into her again, I’ll be sure to tell her you send your regards. Or . . . maybe not.

  Miss you, my bellissima,

  Xoxoxo Pia

  Home to Roost

  AFTER MY WEEKEND WITH MOM, I hoped to forget about the ICA party, but I found myself unable to erase from my mind the image of Mario tracing Pippa’s back and had some difficulty settling back into the rhythms of life in Little Venice. I felt obscurely guilty around the Foxes’—as if knowing Pippa’s secret somehow implicated me in it. For the first few days following Mom’s visit, I kept busy at events every evening, remaining at Anthony’s side until late at night. In the mornings, I lay in bed reading until Pippa and Robin left the house.

  But that Wednesday, just as I was scooting out the door, Robin Fox—who for reasons unknown had skipped his ritual of reading at the Harbour Club that day—called out after me. I doubled back to the drawing room, where he sat surrounded by the usual shreds of clipped-out newspapers. “Spot of trouble,” he said. “One of our dinner guests this evening has just split from her husband, so he’s quite understandably canceled on us, and she hasn’t yet decided if she can bear to come on her own. I’ve already asked Lily, and I’m hoping you too can help us fill out the table. Helene Lassin and Nigel Bosworth from the Royal Opera House will be here. Do tell us we can depend on you to join us?”

  I accepted the invitation with a forced smile and made a mental note to look up Helene Lassin and Nigel Bosworth when I got to work.

  “Right, cheerio!” Robin said as I backed out the door. “See you for eight, then!”

  After work Anthony and I went to a bar inside our building complex. Employees from neighboring skyscrapers were clumped together in wolflike packs of ten or more. We found a spot on the radiator, which was cool from disuse. “Come on,” Anthony said, pulling a fifty-pence coin out of his pocket. “Are you resistant even to bribes?”

  He was trying to cajole me into accompanying him to the opening of a Harley-Davidson franchise on Park Lane later that night, but I was staunch in my refusals. “You don’t know how much I wish I could come,” I said, stealing a hungry glance at his liquid brown eyes. “But the Foxes are having a dinner party and I promised I’d attend.”

  “Jacquetta will be there,” Anthony said with a suggestive lift of his right eyebrow. “Could be our big break.”

  Jacquetta Schloss was London’s pop star of the summer. It was impossible to walk through a clothing store or sit in a pub for longer than ten minutes without hearing her single “This Is a (Love) Holdup,” a catchy ditty in which Jacquetta sings about cornering the object of her affections and making him confront her feelings. Because the magazine with the dishiest story on Jacquetta Schloss was a guaranteed sellout, Charlie Lappin and his competitors were frantically scrambling to tarnish the singer’s reputation in print.

  “Jacquetta and I were at Cambridge together,” Anthony told me. “Or we were for a term, before she dropped out to become a pop idol. If I introduce you as my clueless American cousin, she’ll doubtless keep you entertained.” Scooting off the radiator, he tipped his chin at my basically untouched half-pint of Guinness (which was, I discovered too late, way too strong for me). “You’ll have another of the same, will you?” he asked me.

  “Sorry, but I should be heading out pretty soon.”

  “Oh, pray don’t be boring, Schulman. One more, that’s all I ask of you.”

  “You know I can’t drink very much before a dinner party at the Foxes’,” I told him. “I’ve hardly seen them all week, and I need to stay on their good side. I don’t exactly have too many other places to live for that price.”

  “Oh, bollocks. You can always stay in my flat and cook and clean for your keep. You’d look smashing in a French maid’s uniform.”

  Smiling, I stood up to leave, but Anthony was insistent. “Right, Schulman, here’s my final offer. I order myself one more drink and a pack of crisps for you. You keep me company while I kill my liver, then we leave when I finish my drink or in ten minutes, whichever comes first.”

  Without waiting for a response, Anthony shot over to the bar. When he returned, he was humming “This Is a (Love) Holdup” and sipping a Scotch. True to his word, he finished his drink in eight minutes and walked with me to the Canary Wharf station.

  Back at Bridge House ten minutes before eight, I found Pippa and Lily in the kitchen, furiously scooping store-bought containers of tiramasalata and olives into ceramic bowls. “If you ever tell your mother this is how we do things round here,” Pippa told Lily, “I’ll be devastated.”

  “Oh, please,” Lily said to Pippa. “This is a hundred times more home-cooked than anything Mom has ever made. Off camera, that is. Besides, you save your fire for Saturday lunch—everyone knows that.”

  “Looks amazing—especially those.” I said, indicating a plate of minitoasts topped with smoked salmon and crème fraiche.

  Minutes later the doorbell sounded, announcing the arrival of Helene Lassin, the first-chair flautist in the Royal Opera House, and her very, very elderly husband, Nigel, the company’s former conductor. He was so elderly, in fact, that for the hors d’oeuvres part of the evening, which we spent munching on proscuitto-wrapped asparagus and sipping champagne in the upstairs parlor, I mistook him for her father or even grandfather. He was completely bald, stooped over, and had a clear plastic tube running from his nose to the inside of his shirt.

  “Can you imagine marrying such a hideous old git?” Imogen whispered to Lily and me. Across the coffee table from us, Helene was delicately wiping spittle from Nigel’s chin. “Even if he is a world-famous conductor—or was twelve centuries ago—I can’t get my head around it. It’s enough to put one off marriage altogether.”

  Coming from Imogen, Bridge House’s resident matrimony fanatic, this was a pretty intense criticism, and Lily covered her mouth to muffle her laughter.

  While waiting for the final guest, Pippa’s maritally troubled childhood friend, we made polite conversation for what felt like hours but was probably more like fifteen minutes. After Robin reported that Adrian was enjoying himself on the Indian Ocean, we discussed Helene’s latest gig. She’d recently returned from Berlin, where the Royal Opera had performed Mozart’s Cost fan tutti. “It’s always Berlin, isn’t it?” Helene reflected in a bored voice.

  “Do you know what, Mimi was just there,” Robin said.

  “Were you?” Helene asked without interest. “And how did you find it?”

  “Um . . . exciting, I guess,” I said, knowing Helene wouldn’t be interested in my induction into the white slave trade.

  “Exciting, you say?” Helene frowned. “I always find it a bit melancholy—rather depressing actually. Nigel can never stay awake there for more than ten minutes at a stretch.”

  At the sound of his name, Nigel let off a king snore and his body convulsed spasmodically. His eyes popping open, he said, “Yes, yes, there we are
now. Moving on to supper, are we?”

  Pippa rose and, after glancing out the window, nodded. “Yes, I suppose we might as well do. When I spoke to Linda this afternoon, she seemed quite keen on coming, but then she’s in such a state I imagine it slipped her mind altogether, poor dear.”

  Slowly, for Nigel, we headed downstairs into the Foxes’ spectacular dining room, with its deep burgundy walls and the disconcerting Stanley Spencer nude positioned just above the serving sideboard.

  Pippa was serving the carrot and coriander soup when the doorbell rang. “Oh, that’ll be Linda, lovely,” she said, dropping the ladle. “Imogen, will you finish with the soup while I get the door?”

  It’s funny how you rarely have any idea when disaster is about to strike. I was just sitting at the table, slightly bored but content, waiting for some random upper-class English lady to join us and spend the night sniffling or drinking too much wine. But after briefly murmuring in the hallway, Pippa walked into the dining room followed by none other than Linda Ross, the dandelion-haired woman who had relayed her marital sleeping arrangements in the Soul Cathedral ladies’ room—the woman whose private confession I’d exposed to the entire United Kingdom.

  I almost gasped. Oh, God, I thought, heart thumping loudly against my chest—this was the friend whose husband had just moved out? The one Pippa had spent the better part of a Saturday talking off the cliff?

  I felt terrible. Dizzy, ashamed, and most of all terrified that Linda would recognize me, the agent of her undoing. The accusations and curses were already unspooling in my mind like a scene from daytime television. I wanted to get up and run.

  But when Pippa made the introductions, Linda—her hair wilted, her face pinched with fatigue—only gave me an impassive smile. Even so, the night was young and my future still in jeopardy. I shifted lower into my seat and stared at my endive salad to avoid meeting her eyes.

  While Linda, paying no attention to the other guests, updated Pippa on her miserable existence, Helene once again steered the general conversation to classical music, a subject I know embarrassingly little about. I made no contributions until Nigel, who turned out to have an incredible memory for dialogue that took place while he slept, asked me how I’d found the concert halls in Berlin.

  When I admitted that I hadn’t actually entered any Berlin concert halls, Nigel looked a bit confused. “Right, yes, I see, how very fascinating indeed,” he murmured, watery red eyes narrowing. Then, almost accusingly, he asked me, “So what do you do, then, to pass the time?”

  With a furtive glance at Linda Ross, I answered quietly, almost in a whisper: “I’m working for a magazine—or really just interning there, for the summer only.”

  But low volume was not the best tactic with Nigel, who like many ninety-year-olds had only half a working ear. “WHAT’S THAT YOU SAY? A MAGAZINE?” he bellowed so loudly that even Linda Ross looked up, startled.

  Perhaps because I’d turned bright red, the former pop singer squinted at me with new interest. “I say, have we met before?” she asked. “You look oddly familiar to me.”

  Here we go, I thought, praying, Powers That Be: Please help me. Please, please, do not let Linda Ross connect the dots and realize that the person across from her brought about the collapse of her marriage. Everyone sat there, gazing at me expectantly, and with absolutely no cool whatsoever I clenched the tablecloth.

  And then, to my surprise, Lily spoke. “Everyone thinks Mimi looks familiar,” she said. “This actress who’s the spitting image of Mimi has had bit parts in practically every film in the last decade, and people are always confusing them.”

  This was completely untrue, and though I couldn’t guess why Lily had chosen this opportunity to practice techniques from her improvisation class, I didn’t care. I wanted to jump up and hug her.

  Linda was still looking at me, only half convinced. “How odd. I’m certain it’s you I’ve seen, but perhaps my excellent memory has gone to seed along with the rest of my life.”

  Before she could pursue this line of thought, the kitchen timer buzzed and Pippa jumped up. Linda, rising to help her friend, forgot me. By the time the two women returned to serve the main course of pheasant and roast potatoes, Robin and Helene were comparing notes op an exhibition they’d both seen at the National Portrait Gallery, and the crisis seemed to have passed.

  Miraculously, I got through the never-ending meal intact, but I was way too skittish and jumpy to enjoy myself. In my room afterward, I lay in bed, exhausted from the effort of avoiding eye contact with Linda Ross all evening. For distraction, I’d brought up the latest Tatler, already mangled by Robin, who’d clipped photographs from a story entitled “The New Power Yachts” and another on eighteen-year-olds who get Botox. The real meat of the publication, however, was intact: the dozen-some pages of party pictures in the back of the magazine, in which all the featured women were labeled like “Lady Kenneth Kilburn” or “Mrs. Wendell Ulster.” (The Judys would not approve, and neither did I.) I was skimming the pictures, thinking maybe I’d pick out some faces from an A-ha! event, when I saw the “White Nights Gala” collage, commemorating the Saint Petersburg Ballet’s performance on London’s South Bank.

  At the very center of the spread was a familiar captain of industry: Boris’s dad—tall, athletic, and psychotic Alexei Potasnik. He stood surrounded by beautiful ballerinas with tight glossy buns and flying-saucer eyes. How strange, I thought, that his dad had come to London and Boris hadn’t mentioned it to me. Not that Alexei and I were such close buddies, but even so, surely Boris could’ve accompanied his father on the trip? Or, worse, what if Boris had come to London and not told me? But why would he do that? As I studied the pictures, searching for Boris’s shock of white hair, I reasoned that I was probably still in Berlin, or even in New York, when this photograph was taken. I was just being paranoid and illogical, that was all. The Linda Ross near-miss had taken a real toll on me, so, tossing the magazine aside, I flicked off the light and inched under the protective warmth of the duvet.

  To: “Unclesam9”

  From: “Mimicita86”

  Date: July 28, 10:54 p.m.

  Subject: something wrong in the atmosphere?

  Good morning, Vermont! I got that CD you burned me of your radio show. Thank you very much, very much indeed (imagine the last bit said quickly, almost inaudibly, and you’ll practically be in England). You picked some great songs, esp. the Chinese version of “Heart of Glass.” Impressive taste as always! Seems like you’re having a pretty good time up there. . . . As for me, well, London continues to treat me right, I guess. Going to all these decadent parties—I’m getting spoiled and don’t know if I’ll be able to handle another Baldwin dance. No complaints about the rooftop book parties or soul food restaurant openings, but life on the home front is getting sort of complicated. I swear, my host family is beginning to make the Mom-Maurice-Dad triangle seem almost functional. I’m beginning to miss the good old days, back when you and I would spend the day finger painting. Ah, sweet oblivion. Do they sell it on the Internet?

  More soon,

  Mimi

  P.S. Any chance you’ve heard from your Russian friend, or is he lost in space for good?

  The Other Side of Father Christmas

  IT’S ALWAYS CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND. Even in the middle of July, Britons discuss the holiday as if it’s just days off. Red and green tinsel clings like ivy to pub walls and television advertisements bill everything from new air fresheners to puddings as “Christmassy.” A month into my stay in London, I’d lost count of the number of times people tried to revive flagging conversations by asking, “So, made any plans for Christmas?”

  It didn’t seem all that bizarre, then, that my coworkers at A-ha! were so thrilled about the magazine’s annual Christmas in July party; they needed little encouragement to get into that jingle-bell spirit. A single office-wide e-mail announcing a celebration for the “friends of A-ha!” transformed a staff of hard-working gossip reporters into giddy kindergartne
rs. Sophie was in charge of the office advent calender; the twins were baking mince pies; and Zoe had special-ordered an elf costume.

  I alone failed to catch the holiday bug, and I don’t think it was because I’m half-Jewish and unaccustomed to splashy Christmas celebrations. Since the night Linda Ross had come to the Foxes’ dinner party, I saw the darker side of my job more clearly, and I didn’t like it. At first I’d considered A-ha! a harmless, amusing gossip rag with little or no connection to the real world. I’d never suspected a misleading scoop could derail a marriage, but Linda’s undereye circles had suggested otherwise.

  I found it hard, then, to get too enthusiastic about Thursday night’s “pseudoholiday do” (as Anthony called it) at the Porthole, a slick hotel bar in St. Martin’s Lane, only a few blocks from Lily’s school in Covent Garden. She, alas, would be in rehearsals that night and unable to be my date.

  The A-ha! staff would make up only a small portion of the attendees; the magazine’s marketing team had spent two months securing RSVPs from celebrities of every stripe. “It’ll be completely over the top,” Ian said when he popped by my desk. “Wilder than the BAMYs. Oh, and hold up a minute,” he said as if suddenly remembering something. He searched his vest pockets at length before pulling out a sparkly snowman brooch. “Remember you said you had nothing festive to wear? There you are now, courtesy of the missus.” He watched with satisfaction as I fastened the brooch to my shirt, then said, “Now you’re Christmassy. Lovely-jubbly.”