Wicked Jealous: A Love Story

by Palmer, Robin

  Inside, the place was packed. Each person was hipper and more beautiful than the last. It was like being on the Ramp at school, but with Botox.

  “What a fabulous dress!” exclaimed a very tall older woman wearing something that, in most places, would probably pass as a beach cover-up but that here in L.A. constituted high fashion. “Very Joan Holloway from Mad Men.”

  Apparently, I was going to have to start watching that show, because she was like the fourth person who had compared me to this Joan chick

  “I find it very exciting to see young women embracing their full figuredness.”

  Unfortunately, because her facial expression remained blank because of the Botox, I was just going to have to take her word about the fact that she was excited. I smiled. “Thanks,” I replied, pretty sure it was a compliment.

  “And your hair. Just fabulous.” She pulled over an equally old, equally blank-faced woman who was examining one of Zooey’s photographs with a short bald man wearing a pink-and-white-pinstriped suit and debating what the one-butt-cheek-in-shadow-one-in-light might signify on a psychological level. “Diedre, doesn’t this young woman remind you of the model we had on the cover of the March 1968 issue of the magazine?”

  Nineteen sixty-eight? My mother hadn’t even been born then. Exactly how old were these women?

  Diedre squinted. Minus any lines around her eyes or between her eyebrows. “She does. She’s like . . . Audrey Hepburn. But with breasts and an appetite.”

  As I stood there while the two of them examined me from head to toe as if I were a piece of livestock, I learned that Fiona—the beach-cover-up-wearing woman—had been the editor of Au Courant, a fashion magazine similar to Vogue way back when, and Diedre had been her second-in-command.

  “Beautiful bone structure,” Diedre went on as she took my face between her hands (even her liver spots were elegant) and moved it from side to side.

  “Oh, you’re so sweet to say that!” came a voice behind me. “I think she takes after me on that front.”

  My eyes widened at the same time as Max’s, who was walking toward me. I knew that voice . . . but why was it in this gallery at this moment? The gallery where I was meeting my date?

  A hand shot out in front of me. “Hillary Stone, senior VP, Production, LOL Films. And you ladies are?”

  Diedre and Fiona were so confused, there was actually some lineage on the foreheads.

  Max stepped up next to me. “Hillary. How’d you—”

  “—manage to get on the list after my stepson-to-be told me that he couldn’t get anyone else—not even his parents—on the list, even though this is considered the social event in town tonight?” she finished. “Easy. I told my assistant to take care of it or she’d be fired.”

  “Is my dad here?” I asked. Just what I needed—for my date to meet my entire family.

  “Yes. He’s over there in the corner being antisocial,” she replied.

  I turned to see his fingers flying along on his phone. From the way that he was breathing through his mouth, I knew that he was probably writing a script.

  Hillary took out her own BlackBerry. “I need to add that to the list of things to have this new shrink fix in him—the antisocial thing.” When she was done, she slipped it back in her purse and gazed at me. “Did you get that dress from that bedbug place?”

  I nodded.

  “It looks—”

  “Divine? Don’t you think?” Diedre asked.

  “I love the contrast of the blue against your lips. It gives them such a rich color,” Fiona said.

  Hillary whipped out her snake compact and a tube of lipstick and quickly put some on. “How about mine? I just got this at Neiman’s.”

  The women looked at her. “There’s a somewhat . . . green undertone to it,” said Fiona.

  As Hillary began to wipe it off with a tissue, Jason walked up to the group. “Hey,” he said.

  I turned to face him. His faded-just-right jeans and sapphire-blue polo shirt totally matched his eyes. Did guys think about that stuff as they were getting dressed? I made a mental note to put that on my Things-to-Ask-Blush list. Before I remembered that I had gotten all huffy during our last conversation and probably owed him an apology first. I had Blush on the brain so bad that I had almost forgotten that I had a date with Jason. Which was not cool, seeing that (a) Blush was my friend, and (b) any moment would be walking in with his date.

  Like, say, that moment.

  With her long black hair rippling down to her butt, and the pink gardenia that was tucked behind her ear, and the purple sundress that wrapped around her curves just right, it was hard not to notice Aleka. Especially with someone as tall and, frankly, cute as Blush next to her. I waited for her to do something annoying, like flip her hair back and giggle, but she didn’t. Instead, the two of them looked a little uncomfortable with the way that everyone stopped what they were doing to look at them.

  “Simone?” I heard Jason say.

  I turned to him and smiled. Focus, Simone, I said to myself. You’re on a date with a Testosterone Twit. Tons of girls would kill to be in your position. So what if Blush is with a totally hot girl who will probably win the Nobel Prize one day. It’s not like you could ever like him. Plus, you need to pay attention to make sure Hillary doesn’t embarrass you. “Yeah?”

  “You look way hot,” he said.

  Way hot. I knew it was a compliment, but somehow, when I had allowed myself to fantasize about what my hypothetical boyfriend would say to me, “way hot” was not part of the equation. “Way hot” was way not romantic.

  “I’m so glad you appreciate my handiwork,” Hillary said.

  I turned to her. “Your handiwork?”

  “Well, yes. Remember how I took you shopping that day?” She looked at Jason and smiled. “Hillary Stone, senior VP, Production, LOL Films. We met briefly in the parking lot that day. By the way, I’m a big fan of your father’s work. Huge.”

  “That’s cool. You’ll be able to tell him in person, actually.” He turned to me. “I didn’t know when we talked, but it turns out my parents already had plans to come here.” He smiled and lowered his voice. “I told my mom if they embarrass me, I’d kill them.”

  As Hillary began to yak away to Jason about Italy, I kept stealing glances at Blush and Aleka. Luckily, there was no PDA going on, but the way that she kept putting her hand on his arm so that he’d lean his head down to hear her seemed awfully familiar. Once when he caught me looking at him, he smiled, and I gave him a (fake) smile back before I put my hand on Jason’s arm. Or meant to put it on his arm.

  “Uh, Simone?” I heard him say.

  “Yeah?” I said, fake smiling at Blush.

  “You, uh . . . I’m not sure . . .”

  I turned and saw that I had overshot his arm and my hand was clutching his chest.

  “Whoops. Sorry about that,” I said, quickly removing it.

  “Hello! Hello!” sang Cheryl as she made her way through the crowd, dressed in a bedazzled Indian shirt over black leggings (“You think with all the Zumba-ing, I’m not going to show off these things?” she said, when Marcia commented one day at coffee that Cheryl never wore anything else). I guess because he had won so many Academy Awards I had thought that Jason’s dad would be, I don’t know, dressed head to toe in black or something equally . . . Academy Award–like, but the guy who was trailing behind Cheryl looked more like a balding chemistry teacher.

  I squinted. “Your dad has a pocket protector?” I asked.

  Jason sighed. “I told him to leave that at home tonight.”

  “Honey, look at how gorgeous you are all dressed up!” Cheryl cried as she smothered me in a hug. She let me go. “G-o-r-g-o-u-s!”

  “Cheryl, you forget the ‘e,’” said Stan. “There’s an ‘e’ before the ‘o.’”

 
; As an excellent speller myself, I already liked Jason’s dad a lot.

  “Stan, sweetie, this is the girl I’ve been telling you about—my Zumba friend.”

  Hillary laughed. “I just think it’s so cute how Simone is so into irony.”

  Because she was so tiny, Cheryl made up for her lack of height with a very loud voice. That, even though the gallery was packed, was loud enough to make a few people turn. Including Diedre and Fiona.

  “Oh, we Zumba, too,” said Diedre.

  “I find it to be just divine!” said Fiona.

  Diedre turned to her. “You know the magazine has an entire feature devoted to it this month. Apparently, it’s become quite the rage. Rumor has it Nicole Kidman was spotted doing it in Nashville.”

  Hillary whipped out her phone and pressed a button. “The minute you get into the office tomorrow, I want you to sign me up for a Zumba class,” she whispered into the receiver. “Do a Google search for ‘best Zumba class to run into celebs’ and get me into that one. Actually, don’t wait until tomorrow. Do it now,” she demanded before clicking off. She smiled. “Just leaving a little friendly reminder for my assistant.”

  The smile that seemed to be permanently etched on Cheryl’s face, because she was one of those freaky people, like my brother, who was happy pretty much all the time (“And no antidepressants involved, thankyouverymuch,” she said proudly when Gwen commented on it once at the Bean), disappeared. “You weren’t kidding,” she murmured.

  Why did everyone keep saying that? It made it sound like I was a total exaggerator or something.

  Cheryl stepped back and looked at Jason and me, and the smile came back. “Oh, you don’t know how happy it makes me to see the two of you together!”

  “They do make a cute couple, don’t they?” agreed Hillary. “You know, Jason, my first boyfriend looked a lot like you.” She gave him a flirty smile. “Of course, unlike Simone, I was only ten when I started dating.”

  I rolled my eyes. That was wrong on multiple levels. This was getting more and more uncomfortable by the minute. A waitress walking by with a tray of hors d’oeuvres stopped. For a second I was tempted to hijack the entire tray and lock myself in the bathroom with them. But that would have been really really wrong.

  I reached for one. “What are these?” I asked her.

  “Apple fritters with a smidge of crème fraiche and a dusting of cinnamon and a pinch of cardamom.”

  I pulled my hand back and sighed. Just my luck. “Oh. Thanks anyway.”

  Cheryl turned to the group. “Simone’s allergic to apples.”

  Hillary looked up from her snake compact. “Oh, yeah. I always forget that.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” Cheryl said, giving me a look.

  Hillary turned to Jason’s dad, who was busy trying to stop himself from yawning. “Actually, you know what that reminds me of? That scene in the movie you did set in—where was it? India? China?—I can’t remember where, but it looked like one of those places that’s very overpopulated and smells just awful. The one where the man starts to believe that he may be the reincarnation of Jesus?”

  “It was Nepal, and it was Buddha,” Mr. Frank said icily.

  “Exactly. That’s what I meant,” Hillary said, reaching for his arm and batting her eyelashes.

  I looked over at my dad, who was typing away on his iPhone in the corner.

  “And explain to me, if you can, what that has to do with an allergy to apples?” Jason’s dad asked.

  “It was more like a segue,” Hillary said, “to start talking about your movies and your incredible talent and the fact that I’d just love to have you come direct something for me.”

  I spent a lot of time dreaming up worst-case scenarios, in my life. But this took the cake. I don’t think I could even have come anywhere near the nightmare this evening was turning into if I’d really tried. It was one thing for Hillary to embarrass me in front of a guy, but in front of the guy’s father? Who happened to be an award-winning director?! “I’m, uh, going to go look at some of the photographs,” I announced as I drifted away. The farther away I was from the scene of the crime, the better. Plus, it would give me a chance to spy on Blush and Aleka.

  “What do you think that is?” a voice asked a few minutes later as I stared at one of the photographs. Or, rather, pretended to stare at it while what I was really doing was watching Aleka laugh at something Blush had just said. Since when had he become funny? I mean, in public. That was one of the things I liked about him. That, unlike most people, he didn’t spend all his time making jokes in order to cover up feeling uncomfortable. Like, say, I did.

  I turned to see Stan squinting. Oh God. Really? Now this? “I think it’s . . .” What was the best way to say this to the father of the-boy-whom-I-was-technically-on-a-date-with-but-was-currently-ignoring? ”. . . a pair of . . . buttocks,” I replied. That sounded more parent-appropriate than “butt.”

  He nodded. “Ah. I think you’re right.”

  He pointed to another bloblike photo. “And this one?”

  I stared at it. “Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s another pair. It’s kind of what the photographer’s known for. You can read about it in her artist’s statement up front, if you want.”

  He sighed. “My wife is always on me about spending all my time in movie theaters, but I’ll take a bucket of popcorn and some subtitles over this stuff any day. Even with fake butter.”

  I nodded. “I know what you mean. L’Homme qui aimait les femmes is playing at the Nuart tonight. One night only.” I would have suggested it to Jason, but considering how he’d reacted to Freaks and Geeks, I didn’t think it would have been a good idea.

  He looked surprised. “You know who François Truffaut is?”

  I nodded. “Well, sure. He’s like the most important thing to come out of France other than . . . I don’t know . . . croissants. He’s my favorite, actually.”

  He smiled. “And you refer to the titles by the French instead of in English.”

  I shrugged. “It just seems wrong not to.”

  He shook his head. “Amazing.” His face fell. “You do realize that this kind of thing is lost on my son?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I know.”

  “The other day I walked into his room and he was listening to that Jackson Brewster boy.”

  “Justin Bieber,” I corrected. “Yeah, he mentioned that he liked him.”

  “But he’s a good boy. Despite the fact that he doesn’t have an ounce of taste when it comes to music.” He smiled.

  I smiled back. Before I could ask him what it had been like to work with Catherine Deneuve, one of the greatest French actresses of all time, Zooey Woodson began this spoken-word thing about the beauty of butts while some tattoo-sleeved guy banged a gong at the end of every sentence. (Thor would later tell me he thought it was genius.) As Stan and I both stifled yawns, Hillary came click-clacking over.

  “I just had a fantastic idea. Why don’t we all go to dinner? The six of us!” she exclaimed. “That way we can get to know each other, seeing that, you know, our children are dating. And Stan, I can go over our development slate with you, and we’ll see if there’re any movies that you might be interested in directing!”

  “I don’t direct movies,” he said. “Only films.”

  Hillary gave one of her tinklier laughs. “Movies, films—same thing.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Not in my book they’re not.”

  Hers brightened. “Ooh—you write books as well? How did I not know this! Are any of them available to be optioned? Are they plot-driven, or more character-based? Because the character-based ones end up being so slow as movies—”

  “No, I do not write books,” Stan said. “And even if I did, you can be assured that not only would I not option one to you, but I would sincerely hope that you wouldn’t even buy
one of them to read, because the idea that my readership was made up of people like you would cause me so much distress I’d have to flee the country and only be published by small independent presses that don’t have distribution in chain bookstores—”

  “Well. Someone takes his work quite seriously,” Hillary said.

  He glared at her.

  “Which is a wonderful, wonderful thing!” she cried.

  “Number one, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt me because I’m not finished yet,” he snapped, “and, number two, yes, I do take my work seriously. Which is perhaps something you should consider doing at some point, as well. In fact, if you were able to put aside your narcissistic self-obsession for a few minutes, instead of allowing your pathological envy of Simone to manifest itself in a multitude of passive-aggressive gestures toward her that are severely uncomfortable for others to behold, maybe you could learn something from her. Because despite her young age, it’s obvious that she has more character in her . . . femur . . . than you do in your entire personally-trained-to-the-hilt body!”

  My legs had gotten super strong from the Zumba-ing. Stan wasn’t nearly as loud as his wife, but by this time we had drawn quite the crowd. Even Zooey had stopped her spoken-word rant and drifted over to see what was going on.

  For a moment, Hillary remained quiet. “So . . . I guess that means I should hold off on messengering over all the scripts we have in active development for you to read?” she finally asked.

  “Actually, what it means is that I think you’re everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today,” he replied. “And that maybe you should follow Simone’s lead—both in the kind of films you watch and in the way you treat people.” He looked at Cheryl. “I think I’d like to leave now.” He turned to Jason. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you too much.”

  Jason’s neck had shrunk so much the collar of his shirt was touching his ears, which made it so that when he shrugged, it looked like he was about to hurl.