Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

“And?” He blinked both his eyes.

  “And she just bought a house in—”

  “Islington. St. Peters Street, to be precise. Bloody everyone knows that. Is that really the lot of it? You talked to her for ages and that’s all you got?” Anthony’s voice was harsh, almost angry. “That’s a bit weak, Schulman. Charlie will be absolutely livid. So much for being the lucky charm of the summer.”

  He shook his head and leaned back, balancing on the chair’s two hind legs. Then he leaned back some more and the chair toppled backward, taking Anthony down with it. He groaned as his head hit the floor and his glasses shot out of his jacket pocket.

  “Battleship down,” cackled one onlooker.

  “Looks like we’ll be needing a bin,” added another.

  Anthony didn’t look the least bit embarrassed. “Ah, my specs, lovely.” He strained forward for his glasses, which had landed a few inches away, and put them crookedly back on his face.

  “Anthony,” I whispered, crouching down. “Please, let’s get you out of here.”

  “I’m fine.” He sprang to his feet just as a waiter passed with a tray of red wine. “Oh, cheers,” he said, lurching forward for a glass. ’

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “that’s the last thing you need!” But Anthony had already downed much of the wine in one gulp. “See?” he said. “I’m fine.” He raised his hand as if making a toast, but his arm jerked and what little wine remained sloshed up and out of his glass. The red liquid cascaded in an arc through the air, as if in slow motion, before finally, horribly, spraying all over the front of Rebecca Bridgewater’s butter yellow couture gown.

  Noddy & Co.

  THOUGH THE CASSIDY HOUSE HAD FOUR BEDROOMS, it still felt cramped. The boys usually congregated downstairs, waging pillow wars or boosting their sugar levels with chocolate milk and Pirate Puffs. Colleen had established a firm rule against playing video games before I woke up, a rule her sons cleverly circumvented by first waking me up, then turning on the video games.

  “Why are you climbing over me?” I groaned early Saturday morning. I tried to sit up, but somebody’s foot was pinning my shoulder down. “Do I look like a tree?”

  “You’re a tree and we’re baby birds,” Robby chirped.

  “We can fly!” Roddy catapulted onto me, landing on my bladder. “Tweet!”

  Unwilling to miss out on the action, Hugh swooped onto the arm of the couch and then crashed down on my ankles. Once again, I found myself outnumbered, outwitted, and outsugared. At least, I reminded myself, the Cassidy boys were normal; at least they weren’t humorless mutant freaks like the Meyerson-Cullens. That said, at six in the morning, on four hours of sleep, I found it hard to make such subtle distinctions. With another groan, I pulled myself off the couch and asked Hugh if I could borrow his bed. Before I’d reached the top of the stairs, the video consoles were out of the closet and the boingy theme to Space Flight Seven was on at full blast.

  When, sometime after ten, Colleen knocked on the door of Hugh’s room, the day had turned bright and beautiful. A little family of sparrows buzzed past the window, and for several seconds I actually forgot the horrors of the previous night: Anthony’s awful behavior, Rebecca Bridgewater’s ruined dress, my unwelcome knowledge about Jacquetta Schloss.

  “You awright?” Colleen asked, sitting at the edge of the bed. She was wearing a short-sleeved sweater with appliqué turtles on it—definitely a Loose Ends original. I could hear Sylvia thumping up the stairs. Within seconds, the dog had entered the room and was slobbering all over my face.

  I smiled stoically and, determined not to burden Colleen with more problems, told her I was just tired. “That’s a shame,” she said. “We were hoping you might fancy a wee excursion this afternoon. Ian’s buggered off to the office, and the lads have their hearts set on a trip to Chessington, but it’s quite difficult to take them there on my own. Even with my mum coming along, I could use a bit of extra support.”

  Chessington, Colleen explained, was the boys’ favorite amusement park, located about an hour’s drive outside of London. “They go absolutely bonkers there.”

  Lily and I had agreed to spend the afternoon—her last chunk of spare time before her big performance the following Friday night—at the Victoria and Albert Museum, checking out the exhibition on adolescent uniforms Sam had told me he’d read about in The New Yorker. But I couldn’t refuse Colleen in her moment of need. “Sounds like fun,” I said. “Do you mind if I bring my friend Lily? Remember, you met her last weekend?”

  Colleen glowed at the suggestion. “But of course you can, love. She was lovely, your friend, and the people mover’s always got room for one more.”

  Then came the more embarrassing question. “Colleen, would you, um, mind, calling up and asking for her yourself? I kind of don’t want to chat with whoever might be on the other end.”

  Seconds later, Colleen passed the receiver to me with a wink and Lily’s voice came onto the line. “You’ll probably hate to skip out on Saturday lunch,” I began, “but maybe you’d like to meet up earlier than planned?”

  To my surprise, Lily sounded thrilled. “Robin’s making sweetbreads,” she whispered into the phone. “Any idea what those are?”

  “Um, bread that’s sweet?”

  “Not even close. Hurry.”

  We agreed to pick her up outside the Brixton station in an hour, a slight detour on the road to Chessington. By the time Lily got into the car, Robby and Roddy were already squabbling over which ride to go on first, Sir Walter Squirtsalot or Professor Burp’s Bubbleworks. I worried that the boys’ energy might overwhelm my friend on the drive to suburban Surrey, but she seemed to enjoy herself. She certainly had way more fun that I did. I spent the whole ride blinking out the car window, mulling over the Anthony-Rebecca-Jacquetta Schloss predicament.

  Because we were all too tall for the rides, Colleen, her mother, Jackie, Lily, and I just stood around watching the boys get strapped into cars and blast through third-rate approximations of pirate coves and coral reefs. Outside the spooky house, Colleen and her mom began animatedly discussing the latest episode of The Archers, in which the vicar gambled away church funds and the fishmonger’s wife took up Jazzercise.

  “I’m correct in detecting they’re awesome, right?” Lily said, tilting her head at my hosts. I nodded fervently. “They’re not feeding you gruel or denying you shower access or anything, are they?”

  “Not even close—they’re great. When I’m out late, Colleen keeps dinner hot for me, and her mother taught me how to play Sudoku a few days ago.” I didn’t mention that, every morning, I had to fold up the sheets and duvets and stack them neatly under the coffee table while Roddy, Robby, and Hugh pogoed hyperactively around me.

  “So what’s up, then?” Lily wanted to know. “You’ve been acting kind of draggy.”

  “Hard to explain,” I said, “but it has nothing to do with the Cassidys.” I told her about my conversation with Jacquetta Schloss the night before, Anthony’s rudeness when I approached him to discuss it, and my growing doubts about the whole enterprise. “She was so nice, Lily,” I said. “I can’t explain why, but the more I think about it, the less right I feel about spilling the beans about her pregnancy—especially after the way Anthony treated me. But then, if I don’t say anything, I’ll be in even more trouble for screwing up Rebecca’s dress, you know?”

  “It’s always total apocalypse with you, isn’t it?” Lily said with a loud, open-mouthed laugh. “I wouldn’t worry about the dress—there’s no way she paid for it, and you said yourself she has millions of them. As for Jacquetta What’s-Her-Name, well, my God, Mimi, it’s just a summer internship—get a little perspective, will you? Nobody expects you to uncover all the world’s secrets. Now, I hate to change the subject,” Lily said suddenly, “but if I don’t tell you now, I’ll lose my nerve. First you have to swear not to tell anyone, OK? Not even the other girls.”

  Intrigued, I solemnly promised, and Lily went on, “So, um, you remember Har
ry, right?”

  “Harry from Baldwin or Harry from your theater class?”

  Lily blushed. “Harry from my theater class. Well, the night when you were supposed to come to Lambeth Nightingale with me, we kind of hung out a little, and then yesterday we met up for coffee after class and, well, we . . .” Lily, now the color of a pimple, trailed off.

  “Let me guess. As we say at A-ha! you snogged?”

  “Be quiet!” Lily hissed, but it was too late. Colleen and her mother had turned around to see the two of us hopping up and down excitedly.

  Luckily, at the same moment, Robby, Roddy, and Hugh tumbled out the exit of the pirate cove. Hugh was wailing in terror as his older brothers swung him back and forth between them.

  “He got scared, he did!” Robby cried exultantly when his mother demanded an explanation. “Scared of Captain Hook—how wet is that!”

  “I am not wet!” Hugh protested, then resumed wailing.

  “It’s awright, love, it’s awright.” Colleen bent down to scoop up her youngest son. With Hugh slung over her shoulder, she shot a ferocious look at the twins and muttered, “You ’aven’t ’eard the end of this one, lads!” And then, to Hugh: “C’mon, love, why don’t we get a bit of nosh, wouldn’t that be nice? Come along now, darling, you can have anything you fancy . . .”

  For better or worse, the Green Goblin Food Court truly lived up to its name. Every single thing to eat there was, you guessed it, green. The boys ordered foot-high mint ice cream cones, Colleen and her mother green tea and “Shamrock pudding.” Lily abstained, while I, idiotic as ever, ordered the “Gobby Pizza,” an unholy mess of green dough, green cheese, and tomato sauce that was also green.

  “Some pizza you got there. Looks very . . . environmental.”

  Ian had sauntered up in his usual army vest, but with a few weekend touches: a Paddington Bear-type sun hat on his head and a stripe of zinc oxide on his nose.

  “What are you doing here?” I cried. “I thought you were at the office.”

  “Was. But I never miss the show on Saturdays, not if I can possibly help it.” Then, after kissing his wife and warmly greeting Lily, Ian turned to me and asked, “You up for naughty?”

  “Up for what?”

  “Naughty. With the dancing.”

  “Sorry, what?” I asked again.

  “Noddy the puppet bear!” Colleen’s mom broke in impatiently. “You don’t mean to say you don’t have Noddy back in the States?”

  And what a loss that turned out to be. Noddy the Bear, Celeste the Sea Lion, and Eugene the Eagle robots put on a show every hour at Chessington, lip-synching to taped music as they rolled across the stage. While most parents snoozed in the back, Ian dragged us right up to the second row. Little Hugh, clearly familiar with the lineup, sang and clapped along as Priscilla the Prairie Dog came out from behind a prosthetic tree for “Twisty-Wisty Rock.”

  By the time we got home that night, I was too exhausted to worry much about Jacquetta. After heating a Marks & Spencer shepherd’s pie for dinner, Colleen ordered the family to bed early. Once everyone had gone to sleep, I decided to call my dad, knowing he could help me make sense of life. I got out the Nigerian phone card I’d bought on the High Street in Peckham and dialed his number.

  “How’s our favorite cub reporter?” he asked, delighted by the sound of my voice.

  “I’m OK,” I said tersely.

  “Well, we lowly Barrow Streeters are very impressed with your exploits. Quinn’s been bragging to anybody who will listen, and Sam said he wishes there were Mimi stocks he could invest in.”

  “When did you talk to Sam?”

  “Thursday night,” Dad said. “I ran into him at a P.S. 1 opening for an Iranian photography show. He was with some nice girl from his summer program.”

  Before I could press for details, the phone beeped and a Nigerian voice announced the impending expiration of my card. I quickly said goodbye to Dad, then lay down on the couch and started thinking about Sam—a welcome relief from pondering Jacquetta Schloss and the ruined dress. Which “nice girl” had he taken to P.S. 1? Why hadn’t he mentioned it to me, and why did I care?

  Sunday morning, the Cassidys left early for a cousin’s christening in the suburbs, and I woke up to an empty house. Sophie was at the magazine and Lily had rehearsals that day, so I had no option but to start scrubbing the wine stains off Rebecca Bridgewater’s gown. I’d noticed a “Loose Ends Garment Care Tips” sheet taped to the wall in the Cassidys’ laundry room. The instructions weren’t very detailed, but toward the bottom of the page there was a line that said, “For really tough stains on your delicate fabrics, try vinegar!”

  Vinegar? Sounded weird to me, but then, I remembered the time Mom had used toothpaste to remove a cranberry sauce stain at Thanksgiving. I guess I had a lot to learn before I’d ever be crowned Miss Housekeeping. I rooted through the cupboard until I found a slender green-glass bottle of Sicilian Balsamic Vinegar, and shook out its contents along the dress’s soiled neckline. To my horror, the liquid that coursed out was tobacco-colored and loaded with sediment. Rather than removing the wine stains, the vinegar had added a whole new slew of dark brown blots, and the dress now looked like it had been worn by somebody who was eating spaghetti with her hands tied behind her back.

  Frantic, I slammed open drawers and doors in the kitchen until, under the sink, I found a squirt bottle labeled MR. WINKLE’S ALL-PURPOSE STAIN REMOVER. I immediately aimed the pump at the dress’s neckline and pulled the trigger three times. A gray chemical halo rose over the dress like a mushroom cloud. A harsh smell filled my nostrils as I waited for the vinegar stains to disappear. At last the vigorous fizzing sound gave way to silence, and I saw for the first time that the dress’s rich fabric had dissolved to the density of a Kleenex and was now bedizened with little brown pills.

  “No!” I screamed, loud enough for Sylvia to start barking violently.

  I arrived to work early the next day, with huge knots in my stomach. I could hardly breathe as I sneaked into Rebecca’s empty office and placed the bag containing the object formerly known as the world’s most beautiful dress on her chair. I left a letter of apology on her keyboard and walked quickly to Penny’s cubicle, where I spent the morning doodling pictures of Noddy the bear and praying that Rebecca Bridgewater and Charlie Lappin wouldn’t come looking for me. I had no desire to discuss either the dress or Jacquetta Schloss or, for that matter, anything.

  But Charlie called me in at three, or rather, his receptionist did. When I got to the editor in chief’s office, Anthony was sitting on Charlie’s couch between Hamish and Tessa, two feature writers. It was the first time I’d seen Anthony since the BAMYs, and he looked sober and composed in his mold green sportscoat, with his glasses back in the center of his face. “Oh, and this one’s a laugh,” he was saying to Rebecca. “Pam Osbeth set her ring tone to the Welcome to the Doncasters theme—you know, dee, dee, do, do, dee. Such a slap in the face to her ex—”

  Charlie interrupted: “Very well, very well, but I’m not yet satisfied with the Linda Ross caption.” He held up a picture of Pippa’s fallen friend leaning toward a young man in a tuxedo with two empty glasses of champagne in his hand. “Look at this chap—he’s barely twenty. What about ‘On the Hunt for a New Toy Boy’—how does that strike you?”

  “Yes, but we’ve loads of other pictures from the same pre-BAMYs party,” Rebecca pointed out. “I’m afraid our readers will be able to tell that he’s just a member of the catering staff. They’ve all got those penguin suits on and there seems to be at least one in every picture.”

  “Shhh, Becky love,” Charlie said, “we both know that our readers believe precisely what we tell them.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Rebecca conceded, and thus the evil caption was born.

  I couldn’t quite believe how these people operated. When I was working on my Serge Ziff profile, I dug and dug until I’d patched my limited clues together. But here in A-ha! land, people went about the busines
s of reporting in an entirely different manner. They’d seize on whatever particles of information had come to them—an overheard snippet of dialogue, a meaningless photograph—and simply make up the rest. Listening to them, seeing how casually they distorted the truth, I felt short of breath.

  “Mimi, thanks so much for stopping by,” Charlie said, noticing me at last. “Just wanted an update.”

  “An update?” I swallowed.

  “On Jacquetta,” Rebecca said impatiently. “We need to write all the headlines before the end of the workday.”

  The assembled staffers looked at me expectantly—or, everyone except Anthony, who sneezed into his linen handkerchief, then resumed flipping through his spiral-bound notebook. As I stood there, something strange happened. A sense of resolve formed inside me, shooting up like a magic beanstalk. As I looked at the editors’ hungry eyes, I knew I would not turn Jacquetta Schloss into another Linda Ross: the consequences were too great, and for what—the approval of these people?

  “Well, actually,” I said after an excruciatingly long silence, “I didn’t get much. She was extremely careful and didn’t offer anything provocative at all.”

  “Oh, get out with you,” Charlie said. “Surely she mentioned some concern. Sex addiction? Prozac? A fling with a backup dancer? Anything?”

  “Nope,” I said. “She just told me about the colors she wants to paint the dining room in her new house. That’s pretty much it.”

  “You cannot be serious,” said Tessa.

  “But Anthony,” Rebecca Bridgewater all but whimpered, “didn’t you help her?”

  “I tried,” Anthony said, “I really did do. But I’m afraid I was absolutely hopeless at it. What else is new?”

  The editors all laughed, and for the first time, Anthony Palfrey’s self-deprecating charm infuriated me. He still hadn’t made eye contact with me when Charlie icily thanked me for my efforts and excused me with a curt “Oh, never mind, then.”

  I stood outside his office for a few seconds afterward to hear what everyone was saying about me. “Seems like I wasted a perfectly good ball gown on that one,” Rebecca complained.