by Tia Williams
“I love inspiring my followers to eat healthy,” said Jinx, taking a pic of her salad for the ‘Gram. “Umm…Jenna, are you going to eat your cheese fries?”
“No, go ahead,” she said, signaling for the check. “I’m calling it a night. I’m obliterated from my week.”
Jinx took a fry, emitted an orgasmic moan, and then poured all of them on top of her salad.
“Speaking of your week,” started Terry, “are you and E cool?
Yesterday he called you ‘Ursula the Sea Witch.’”
“Did he say that?” Jenna fake-laughed. “Ohh, that Eric.”
Jinx smiled wistfully. “Have you ever noticed his initials are E.C.? Eye Candy?”
“You’re such a thirst-bucket,” said Terry. “Besides, we all know you have to be an eighteen-year-old gazelle to get him. God, he and his ex were hella-dazzling together. But honestly? She wasn’t too swift. The only time she spoke up was to recap Pretty Little Liars.”
“Jenna, I bet when you were eighteen you had it all together,” said Jinx.
“Ha! I was clueless. When I was eighteen, I was fourteen.” Jenna downed her tea and left cash for the check. Uncomfortable with the turn the conversation was taking, she decided it was time to go. “I should be going, ladies. But thank you so much for my shopping montage. This was a magical day.”
Jenna gave them both bear hugs, grabbed her bags and left, blowing the girls kisses.
Ursula the Sea Witch? This standoff had to end. She’d suck it up and take all the blame, so they could get to work. And it had to happen, fast.
CHAPTER 10
At eighteen, Jenna really was fourteen. As a college freshman, Jenna was far less mature than she’d been as a high school freshman. In high school, she knew what to expect. She woke up, ate bacon, and listened to her cooly glamorous, consistently disappointed mother imply that, since no one asked Jenna to parties or on dates, she was officially the social disappointment of Northern Virginia’s chapter of the fancy black teen social club, Jack and Jill. Next, she’d berate Jenna’s outfit (she went to her all-white, mullets-and-tractors-obsessed rural high school dressed like Jody Watley if she were an alien dropped inside of a Madeleine L’Engle novel). Then, Jenna drove to school, where she was predictably ignored. Afterwards, she escaped to the library—where she’d get lost in a world of Old Hollywood books, science fiction novels, Japanese anime, Harlem Renaissance photography and Grimm’s fairy tales. Alone.
She was a friendless outsider, but it was okay. There was almost a comfort in not expecting to be accepted.
She entered Georgetown inexperienced in every way. But in the first week, she found a soulmate in her suitemate—wild, wanton, self-assured Elodie, who bewitched everyone around her, thanks to her I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, Korean eyes, and black ass. She took one look at Jenna, with her costumes and weird references and bizarre diet of sides and carbs exclusively, and decided she was fantastic. If Elodie thought she was cool, then maybe she was!
She was swept into her orbit. Jenna got slaughtered on Boones Farm at two am and picked up a Parliament Lites habit. She made out with bad boys in sketchy neighborhoods with no ride home. She got abysmal grades for the first time in her life, broke her ankle dancing on a beer-slick table at a Kappa party, and even collapsed, blackout drunk in the middle of M Street. These were all things that her fourteen-year-old self would’ve known better than to do, but she wanted to feel what everyone else was feeling, no matter how dumb, or immature, or not-careful it was.
Somehow, in the middle of this freshman year messiness, Jenna managed to design a couple of heavily knocked-off-from-Club-MTV outfits for the Black Student Association Spring Talent Show. She had a feeling her biker shorts and poet shirts would win, and as she waited backstage with her mannequins, she began practicing an acceptance speech in her head. Lost in her thoughts, she barely noticed the tall white guy stop in front of her.
“What’s your talent?” The dude had on enormous, paint-splattered acid wash jeans and flip-up glasses.
“Designing.” She showed off her mannequins.
“Downtown Julie Brown knockoffs? Yeah, that’s talent.”
“Excuse me? What’s your talent? You do know this is a BSA show, right?
“I’m an R&B singer,” he said. He had sly, feline-shaped emerald eyes and his mussed, Cobain-esque hair was streaked with amber. He had the face of a pin-up, like he belonged on the cover of Tiger Beat—not dressed like a male Left Eye.
“You’re an R&B singer?”
“Yeah, like a one-man Jodeci. I live and breathe R&B. It doesn’t matter that I’m white. I can still flow.”
Jenna folded her arms. “Okay, David Silver. Flow.”
He held down his ear, Mariah Carey-style, and started humming to find his pitch. Jenna could barely hold back giggles.
Then he started crooning off the top of his head, in an impressive alto.
Mmm…ooooh yeah, oh yeah…
Microphone check one two one two Shorty tryna diss the funky fly
Jew Vanilla Xtract’s the moniker
You’ll fall in love, I’m warning ya I’ll make you jump around like House of Pain But first, baby girl, tell me what’s your name?
Jenna burst out laughing. “Vanilla Xtract? I’m Jenna Jones. And that was ridiculous.”
He shook her hand. “Hi JJ. My real name’s Brian Stein. And if I win, I’m taking you to The Tombs after the show.”
“If you don’t win?”
“Then you’re taking me to The Tombs.”
Brian won. What Jenna didn’t know was that he could dance, which, for a white R&B singer in the early nineties, was three-fourths of the battle. He walked away from the show with the unofficial title of Georgetown’s funkiest Econ/Accounting major—and the girl. They went to The Tombs, GU’s legendary bar that inspired St. Elmo’s Fire, sat and talked, laughed, and flirted for hours. She found out that Vanilla Xtract was also, shockingly, one of the smartest people she’d ever met. The eldest of six thugged-out brothers from North Philly—a Jewish kid in a Dominican neighborhood who went to a black school—he was an outsider, just like Jenna. But unlike Jenna, he seemed self-possessed. Sure, he grew up in sketchy circumstances, with a wacky waitress mom, in a shabby house full of aspiring career criminals (most with different dads, none of whom were around), but he deflected every hit to his confidence. He saw his background as fuel to his fire, the reason he fought, the thing that would propel him to greatness.
Jenna, who second-guessed herself at every turn, was in awe. “I was so serious in high school,” Jenna told him, over Heinekens. “A smarty. But here, I’ve been acting like the brainless cheerleaders I thought were so silly. College is overwhelming. I don’t know how to be.”
“Be silly and a smarty. I’m both. I know how dumb I looked, a white R&B singer in a black talent show. But I like black music, so I did it. And won,” he said. “Be whoever you want, just never half-ass. And always have a plan. The plan is key.”
Jenna smiled. “You’re so together.”
“I have goals, you know. For my life. I’m sure you do, too.” He grabbed two Tombs napkins from the bar, and pulled out a pen. “You know what we should do? Make a list of everything we want, and then check in with each other fifteen years from now, to make sure we did them.”
They wrote out their bullet points and then read them out loud. On Jenna’s napkin, she wrote: I want to be a famous fashion editor like Grace Coddington, live in New York, work at Darling, and have a husband and family.
On Brian’s napkin, he scrawled: I want to be a more important real estate developer than Donald Trump, a millionaire before I’m thirty, build my mom a house on Park Avenue, have a wife and family…and you. I want you.
They went back to his dorm. And in his bed, in the dark, as a March snowstorm raged outside, he slowly took her clothes off.
“I’ve never done this,” she whispered.
“I have. You’re safe. You’ll always be safe with me.”
Elodie, who loved Brian like a brother, always felt he was too bossy and controlling. Which he was. But back then, Jenna ate it up; it was what she needed. It was Brian’s strength that gave her the balls to stand up to her parents—both of whom wanted her to go to med school, like them—and move with him and Elodie to New York.
New York in the mid-Nineties was a whirlwind. The economy was booming, and two of Manhattan’s greatest moneymaking industries were publishing and real estate. Magazines had budgets to fly editors to Ibiza and Marrakech for wildly decadent shoots, venture capitalists were pouring billions into new structures—and Brian and Jenna found themselves in the forefront. They were indestructible—except for the five months they took a break while Brian oversaw a new property development on the West Coast (he decided they should give themselves “healthy space” to grow in each other’s absence, but Jenna interpreted this to mean that Brian just wanted space from her, so, disastrously, she ended up in Darcy’s fiancé’s arms). Within six years, they’d checked everything off of their list but the family part. Who had time to think about marriage and babies? They were late to Donatella’s birthday dinner at Moomba!
Jenna was building a name in fashion, and Brian was…building. By twenty-seven, he’d garnered breathless industry praise for building a massive residential development in commuter Nyack, which soon became the go-to luxury houses for Upper West Side families desperate for backyards. By thirty-three, he’d built seventeen buildings from Harlem to Battery Park, and was one of the few developers credited with turning Dumbo, the bleak industrial section of waterfront Brooklyn, into a destination. But he wasn’t just the hotshot young developer—he also had astounding financial prowess. He was a savvy, daredevil investor, and had long been a multi-millionaire by his thirtieth birthday. That was the year he built their much-photographed West Village townhouse.
The first night they spent there, Brian, high on power, love, and himself, made Jenna come six times—one in each of the bedrooms. Soon, they had homes in East Hampton and Mustique. Four years later, there was a jet. Their lives were complicated, glamorous, demanding. She’d be in Paris for the couture shows, he’d be in L.A. for a meeting with contractors, but then they’d meet somewhere in the middle for a charity dinner or costume ball. They were one of Manhattan’s most invited couples. A biracial Barbie and Ken. In public, they were peerless.
But “in public” began to be the only place they shone. At home, the silences were loud and long. She couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, but they stopped being BriandJenna. The spark in his eye that was once for her, was now reserved exclusively for money. The pursuit of it, growing what he already had, building grander, flashier properties. Flossing. Unless she was playing her “power wife” role at a black tie, Jenna couldn’t get his attention. Nothing she said or did seemed to interest him—and it only got worse after the economy crashed.
The more anxious Brian became about the bleak state of real estate, the more distant he was—and the more desperate she got. She only talked about things she knew he found interesting. Jenna, who wasn’t clear on how her 401K worked, quoted the Financial Times in casual conversation. She abandoned her style in favor of little outfits she thought he’d find sexy. She even stopped watching her favorite show, 24, because Kiefer Sutherland’s tense, holy-shit-I-have-five-minutes-to-save-the-world performance only exacerbated Brian’s stress level. Brian and Jenna used to be each other’s greatest passion. Their top priority. Overnight, he was their top priority.
It was in this precarious place that, at 36, Jenna woke up one morning and decided she was ready for the final goal on their checklist from so long ago. She wanted to be Brian’s wife. She wanted a baby. No, she ached for one. Like most ambitious New York women, the thought hadn’t even occurred to her, until it did—and when it did, the babylust was so strong, it decimated every other thought. When she brought it up to Brian, he distractedly agreed that it was time for them to officially become the Jones-Steins. He proposed to her in public at the 2008 Met Gala. Andre Leon Talley and Zac Posen stood on their chairs and drunkenly warbled CeCe Peniston’s “Finally.” It was more spectacle than sentiment, but Jenna didn’t care. She was thrilled.
It soon became clear that Brian was deeply disinterested in discussing a wedding. He never committed to a date and, a year later, they had no plan. In denial, Jenna threw herself into planning for her fantasy nuptials. She knew she was driving him insane with details and pushing him further away—but she thought she could want it enough for the both of them.
In private, she also started planning for the baby they’d have after the wedding. She met with fertility doctors to make sure her eggs were still viable (they were). She amassed a collection of fertility diet books, maternity clothes, and lists of baby names. She subscribed to parenting magazines, making sure they went to Darling instead of their home. She smiled and cooed when Billie had May—who she loved instantly and beyond words—but her stomach was in knots over it. Billie and Jenna had planned to get pregnant together. Now, it was looking like it would never happen for her, at all.
Then Brian stopped sleeping with her.
For someone who had been subject to the mercurial sexuality of her man—always the one seduced, pursued, dominated—this left her totally defanged. That had been their dynamic. Professionally, she was a powerful force, but in bed, she was happily submissive. She understood it was her job to be whatever he needed—if he wanted to take his time, she was Slow Mo Flo. If he wanted it fast, she was Quickie Chickie. He fucked her how and when he wanted to. Brian’s hold on Jenna was so overwhelming that when he took it away, she felt buried. Pointless.
And then there was that last, terrible dinner, one sweltering night in June. They were both home on the same night, and Jenna, in a desperate attempt to pretend they weren’t miserable, had dinner catered.
“Let’s stay in the city this weekend. Prospect Park is starting a series where they screen an old movie every Saturday night, like a drive in. I think this one is Rebel Without a Cause. We could take a picnic.” She pasted on a smile. “My perfect dream date.”
“That’s your dream date? We rode camels to a midnight dinner party in Brunei. I’m confused.”
She remembered that dinner. It had been a breathtaking night.
But Brian forgot that she was allergic to all animal fur. She spent the entire dinner tittering with ambassadors’ wives, trying to pretend that her thighs hadn’t turned to Hubba Bubba. She never mentioned it to Brian, and the photos that appeared on Town & Country’s international party pages were stunning. Which was what mattered.
“Brian, I’m trying. I’m wearing this dress because you saw it on a billboard and mentioned liking it. I don’t complain—not even about you not coming home for three days. All I want is one night, doing something small and special.”
“I’m so tired of hearing about what you want,” said Brian.
“I assume you’re talking about the wedding,” she said. “You said you wanted to marry me. And have a family. You said it the night we met.”
“The night I was dressed like every member of Color Me Badd?”
“You’ve always said it.”
“A lot has changed. People change.”
“They do, don’t they?” Jenna picked up a forkful of risotto, and then put it down. “Am I even real to you? Or just another thing you own?”
“I could a
sk you the same question. When did I stop mattering to you? All you care about is getting married. And a baby that doesn’t exist. I overheard you asking the handyman to switch paints because Benjamin Moore doesn’t have a non-toxic option for babies. What fucking babies?” He slammed his fist down on the table. “Honestly, I don’t know what you have to complain about. You have a cleaning lady, a chef, a driver. What else do you want?”
“I’ve dated you almost half of my life. I don’t want to just be your girlfriend.”
He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled. “I love you. But you want too much.”
Jenna nodded. She knew how he felt, she just wanted to hear him say it. “The houses, the money, the cars? I’d give it up just to matter to you again.”
He laughed. “Cute line, but it’s such a lie. You’d never give this up. No woman would.”
Calmly, she stood up. And with every ounce of strength she could muster, punched him in the mouth. Her knuckles were bruised for a week.
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I loved you when you couldn’t scrape together five dollars for Taco Bell. I loved you when I financed our lives in college, working at Contempo fucking Casuals. I never cared about the money. You did. Watch me give it up, you smug bastard.”
Jenna abandoned almost twenty years of intertwined histories, family and friends. She walked away from the money, the houses, the invitations. She separated herself from his mom, Anna, who she’d lain in a hospital bed with for three days during her mastectomy, and loved just a smidge more than her own mother.
She left Brian because she still loved him, and she could feel herself dying from it, like a disease.
CHAPTER 11
Darcy had her assistant pick the coolest place she knew for Terry’s birthday drinks, which ended up being Carolina, a rustic, tavern-esque “drinkery” on Avenue B. Thanks to the amber lighting (which made everyone look like a supermodel), the well-hidden, canoodle-friendly enclaves carved into the exposed brick walls, and the most inspired cocktails in the East Village, Carolina was known for being one of the downtown’s most reliable first date spots.
