Wolves in Chic Clothing

by Carrie Karasyov

  “This is not the time, dear. Thank goodness my niece is in one of her thin phases. I was quite worried she would be rolling down the aisle on a dolly.”

  “Honey, everything’s perfect. Everything will be picture perfect.”

  Emily looked around. She saw the girl from the store standing off to the side at the end, and she motioned for her to come at once.

  “You—” Emily gestured desperately to Julia, who had been carrying Lell’s train with one of the four stylists. “Come here.”

  Julia obediently went to Emily’s side. “Yes, Mrs. Pelham.”

  “Listen, I need you in the wings to stand by in case Lell needs her train adjusted at the altar. It keeps getting tangled when she walks.”

  “Um . . . okay.” Shit. She didn’t know how to adjust a gown! Okay, she could just follow her instincts. She always knew what looked good.

  “I don’t want any wrinkles along these back pleats. So if you see any folds after her walk, just quietly come around and smooth out the creases. You look more put together than the girl who did it in rehearsal.”

  “Oh, okay. Sure.” Surreal, surreal, surreal.

  The wedding planner came up and tapped Emily on the shoulder, and she immediately tucked her small hands onto her sons’ arms and put on a small, tight smile.

  “Iron Maiden has left the launchpad with the junior Eagles,” crackled the voice over the headset, as Lell’s mother was escorted down the aisle by her sons.

  Lell was led to her father’s arm in preparation.

  “Diamond Horseshoe moving! Repeat: Diamond Horseshoe in motion. Places, everyone. Repeat: places!”

  Lell and her father stepped around the corner into the holding pen where her bridesmaids and ten headset people were gathered. Now Lell had her veil down, the ethereal wash of tulle making her stunning face appear even more delicate and radiant.

  “And we have a ‘go’ for the maids. Repeat: that is a green light for the maids. Eagle and Diamond Horsehoe are in position.”

  The girls obediently lined up, hearts pounding, and as directed, one by one, began their metered walk into the light.

  Julia, meanwhile, slipped up the side of the church to hide in the shadows of the apse, on the lookout for errant folds.

  The music of Pachelbel’s Canon rang out from the strings and winds of the New York Philharmonic, which was there to perform music for their shining benefactor. Le Tout New York had turned out in their couture finery. And as befit social ass-kissers, everyone was wearing their best Pelham’s jewels.

  Willoughby Banks took a deep breath and smiled at his groomsmen lined behind him in their white ties and tails. Those guys, he thought, what a friggin’ riot—the toasts last night were hi-fucking-larious. Except Skip Milstead making that crack that Will would never have to go to an ATM again, that was crass. The guy was wasted though.

  But hey, there was some truth to Skip’s remarks—Will, though of Mayflower ancestry, didn’t have any real dough. The Banks family was so properly Brahmin you could slash their wrists and the proverbially cobalt blood would ooze out. But their once-great fortune had been frittered away over time, and now the refined, gorgeous Willoughby was the definition of Counts Without Accounts—fancy descent without a cent.

  But not anymore. He bagged his equity sales job when he got engaged, and Gene Pelham funneled fifty mill to his soon-to-be son-in-law so he could manage Lell’s money. And now Will was free. Well, sort of. Financially free. In a way.

  He remembered the advice his late grandfather had bestowed on him after a few scotches one summer night in Newport. “Willo, take it from me! You marry a rich girl, ya kiss one ass. Marry a poor girl, ya kiss a million.”

  Marriage seemed so far away back then, the crazy nights of getting baked on the beach and hooking up with different girls every night by the bonfire. Now he was standing in front of a thousand fucking people making it official with Lell. Here we go, he thought. The Plunge.

  The New York Philharmonic paused after the parade of bridesmaids, each poised and graceful, but quivering ever so slightly beneath the heated gaze of the boldfaced-named guests. The music commenced again, this time Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, as Gene Pelham, smile shining, stood at the back with his daughter, the new Ambassador of Pelham’s and the toast of Junior society, on his arm. The crowd rose and strained to see Lell as if in their sea of velvets and satins and pearls they were desperately thirsting to drink in drops of her angelic radiance.

  The bride walked in measured steps, a small, delicate half smile formed by her pink glossed lips (the one she had practiced in front of the mirror for weeks). Will looked on as Lell and her dad walked closer and closer until she was so close he could touch her. Gene lifted her veil, kissed her cheek, and presented his daughter to her groom, who suavely kissed her hand, put his fingers at the small of her back, and gently guided her to the altar. As she stepped up and turned to him, the train of her gown folded a tiny bit, and Julia, dreamy-eyed in the wings, caught sight of Emily Pelham shooting her a vitriolic look of death.

  Shocked into action after her peony and violin–laced reveries, Julia snapped back to the moment, knowing the haughty eye-squint was a summons into train-smoothing action. She gently tiptoed into view, though at knee-level, while every eye was on the stunning Lell. Julia knelt down and quickly smoothed out the pleats and lace, then crept back into the wings to watch the astonishingly exquisite ceremony and inhale the intoxicating fragrance of a hundred thousand flowers. She exhaled in relief as she stepped back into the safety of the shadows to drink it all in.

  Except something was different. The darkness of Julia’s little corner perch didn’t have the same anonymity as it had before. Of the two thousand eyes that had just beheld her quick mouselike dart to tend to the bride, two were still lingering upon her. And Willoughby Banks could not look away.

  chapter 6

  “A dollop of heaven.”

  “The best party of the year.”

  Joan Coddington and Wendy Marshall, two of society’s biggest gossips, were nestled quite snugly into their corner booth at Orsay sipping piping hot lattes while the snow fell softly outside. A week had passed, but they were still so overcome with the grandiose, Mount Olympus scale of Lell Pelham’s wedding, that its dissection was now entering week two. Plus, it was February, so there wasn’t much else going on.

  “The individual wedding cakes!” said Joan dramatically.

  “Nine hundred of them! Three tiers! Interlocking white chocolate L’s and W’s! Can you even imagine the cost?” asked Wendy, who had already tried to tally it up on three separate occasions.

  “The sterling silver picture frames with that darling Patrick Demarchelier portrait of Lell and Willoughby—”

  “At every place setting. Not to mention the gift bags—”

  “I wore the Hermès scarf yesterday. So thoughtful.”

  “It was the wedding of the year,” nodded Wendy.

  “It was better than the Goodyears’,” pronounced Joan. And with that, she silenced her dining companion. There could be no greater compliment than to have outdone the lavish extravaganza that Nigel and Sandra Goodyear had recently hosted in Antigua for their beauty-challenged daughter Kitty.

  “You’re right,” concurred Wendy. “It kicked that tropical paradise crap in spades. Sunshine can be so tacky sometimes.”

  “The worst! Mmmm. New York. Winter white. To die for.”

  Across the room, Polly Mecox was lunching with Hope Matthews when Franny Corcoran stopped by their table to say hello.

  “Was that fantastic or what?” boomed Franny, the rotund paper clip heiress who was also the leader of the thirty-five–ish social clique, just above Polly’s gang.

  “It’s just such a letdown that it’s over!” moaned Polly. “It was like, the only thing I was looking forward to for a year, and now it’s finished!”

  “You did also have a child this year,” said Hope, smiling.

  “You know what I mean,” said Polly.

/>   “Will Banks was the most handsome groom! And he’s such a flirt, that Lell better watch out for him,” said Franny with a mischievous glimmer.

  “I think she can handle him,” said Polly. As if a fatso like you has a chance, she wanted to add. In her dreams.

  “Welllll, I’m off to the Carlyle. Are you going to Nina’s trunk show? She has the cutest monogrammed linens, totally hand-stitched and imported. Dreamy. Perfect wedding or birthday presents,” said Franny.

  “We’ll be there later,” said Polly.

  “Bye-bye, then.”

  After Franny had moved on to another table (and then another, each time talking loudly enough that the entire restaurant knew where she was going next and what she thought about Nina’s linens), Hope motioned to the waiter to ask for the check.

  “Already?” whined Polly.

  “I can’t go to the trunk show, I have to take Chip to Diller-Quayle.”

  “Can’t you let the nanny?”

  “No I can’t let the nanny! He loves it! It’s our thing.”

  “Whatever. It’s like, you and all of Trinidad.”

  Hope pretended not to hear this. “Why don’t you bring Quint over later and we can have a playdate with Chip?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so. It’s snowing and he has his schedule.” Polly didn’t quite know what her son’s schedule was, but since her nanny took care of it, she didn’t really pay much attention.

  “So, Lelly and Will are back a week from Friday. I can’t wait to hear the deets on the honeymoon,” said Hope.

  “Yes. But why Bali? I have zero desire to go to Asia, it seems so . . . dirty. The heat and the pollution, imagine the stench? Like New York in August. And aren’t there, like, bombs going off hourly?”

  “I think it seems exotic. I’d love to go someday.”

  “Well, I’m just psyched for Willoughby’s birthday party. Everything is so boring lately, it will be fun to have something to do.”

  “I can’t believe that Lell’s throwing such a huge party right after her wedding. The poor thing must be exhausted.”

  “There’s nothing else to do. Plus, let’s face it, you know she’s inviting W and Vogue’s photographers to cover it, she’s fully vying for that ‘Girl of the Moment’ page.”

  Hope was sometimes scared of Polly. Polly was supposed to be Lell’s best friend on earth, but she always slashed her Lady Macbeth–style, and was extremely hard on her at every opportunity. Hope hated to play these games. She knew that Polly was insecure, that if Freud were to analyze her he’d blame everything on her missing father who basically split early in Polly’s life, and her mother, who couldn’t’ve cared less about her. It was really sad, and probably the reason that Polly was unable to bond with her own child. But regardless, she did wonder from time to time if she was Polly’s personal voodoo doll when she wasn’t around to share salads. Why would she be spared when so many others were eviscerated so swiftly? Hope’s only solution was to never respond to Polly’s comments. Instead, she just signed the credit card bill, swallowing hard and wondering how two Cobbs and two glasses of wine somehow got to $94.

  Polly looked out at the downy falling flakes and sighed. “I swear, Hope, I need a new project. I totally have those mid-winter blahs.”

  “Why don’t you get a job?”

  “Yeah, right.” As if. Well, she could pull a Susie Kincaid and start a jewelry line or handbag company. Or not. Why be hawking your own shit when you can buy other people’s? Plus staging some trunk show in a hotel suite was not for her—she knew she was not suited to any kind of service business. Then she remembered the project she’d toyed with at the wedding.

  Polly smiled at Hope. “Well, I do have some idea of what I want to do. I think I’ll do something dramatic this time.”

  “Okay, Miss Cryptic.”

  “You’ll see. It’s time to shake things up a bit.”

  “Drama, huh? Taking acting lessons?”

  Polly shook her head slyly. No, she wouldn’t be fretting her hour upon the stage, full of sound and fury. She preferred to be quietly holding the marionette strings high above, the one who watched overhead, enjoying a lofty view of those toiling below. And little did her dear posse know, they were about to be players in her perfect mid-winter game.

  chapter 7

  “I swear, girl, that Arab sheik will be whacking it to your chic ass tonight.”

  “Douglas!” Julia squealed while turning a shade of hot pink. “Ew, you are so gross.”

  “What? The guy like stripped you down with his eyes!”

  “Nasty.”

  He started singing. “Julia and Sheik Abdul Mohammed Al-Tariq, sittin’ in a tree—”

  “Stop!”

  “B-o-f-f-i-n-g.”

  “I need to go loofah my whole body after that grodissimo image. You are dirrrrty. Like Christina Aguilera.”

  “Haguilera’s more like it.”

  Julia was both disgusted and amused. She had just racked up a $9,000 commission, thanks to a horde of robed Middle Easterners with Amex cards as black as their bulletproof Mercedes caravan outside. The leader of the pack was flirting heavily, and she had to make nice. Such was life in the service biz.

  “You are so Goldie Hawn in Protocol!” Douglas teased. “Blondie under the burka with the blue eyes coming through the slit! Genius.”

  “Enough!”

  Julia realized she had responded too loudly. Heather, the manager, shot her a dirty look from across the rows of glass cases, and Julia lowered her head guiltily. Julia and Douglas had often been reprimanded for their cacophonous banter.

  “You know you’d be like royalty over there as that dude’s wife,” whispered Douglas.

  “Please. What privileges are accorded to wife number forty-seven?”

  “Hey, speaking of royalty, when is her majesty Lell Pelham coming back?”

  “I don’t know. Jeez, that really was some wedding. Such a wacko dream, I’m still not over it—”

  “It’s so fucking crazoo that we were there. Like, not as bartenders but as guests! I totally thought we were going to be shoved in as coat check whores at any second. The whole night was wild,” Douglas recalled, almost in a trance. “I almost shat when you came home and told me to suit up. Lewis was so obsessed. He literally made me tell him every detail! He was all, ‘Xerox the room with your eyes!’ ”

  “It was amazing. Lell actually was so nice, too. I had heard she was kind of . . .” Julia looked both ways on the grand floor of the store to make sure no one was listening. “I heard she was very aloof and kind of . . . not the warmest.”

  “Uh, you mean, like her bi-atch ice queen madre? That woman makes Wollman Rink look like a bubbling lava pit.”

  The enormous Roman numeral pewter clock struck six, to Douglas’s relief.

  “Okay, sugar, looks like we’re good to go—let’s make like a prom dress and take the fuck off.”

  As the subway rattled downtown Julia, smushed between a heaving construction worker who kept clearing his throat and an elderly lady with more shopping bags than a homeless person, thought about the strange turn of events that had occurred of late. It was really so amazing that she was living in Manhattan and working at Pelham’s, let alone that she’d gone to Lell Pelham’s wedding! When she called her friends back home and told them, they couldn’t believe how glamorous her life had become. They already thought that she was well on her way to accomplishing her dream of designing glam jewelry—she had been making jewelry for her family and friends her whole life with macaroni, then beads, then handmade chain links. Somehow Julia didn’t feel too close to her dream’s realization. She wasn’t sure that her sales position could catapult her into the creative side. She knew she had to be patient—and look for opportunities. In the meantime, her Pelham’s experience had been pretty fabulous. She felt she had Douglas to thank for everything—certainly for the place to live and hooking her up at Pelham’s.

  Douglas was her mother’s best friend Marianne’s second c
ousin. Marianne had only ever met him when he was seven years old at a family reunion, but she had no problem contacting him on Julia’s behalf when Julia announced she was moving to New York, after putting in three years in the public relations department of a winery. She knew no one in New York, and although her parents were out of their minds with worry about her moving to the Big Apple, they fully supported her quest to design jewelry. They knew that she had to give it a shot.

  Douglas’s roommate had just happened to have moved out, and as hesitant as he was to take on a young girl from Northern California as his bunkmate, it was a quick fix for his rent problem. Their chemistry was instant. Douglas and his boyfriend, Lewis, took Julia under their wing. And aside from Julia’s volunteering at Girls, Inc., teaching jewelry making and art twice a week (evenings or Saturdays, schedule permitting), the three had been inseparable ever since.

  Although it was minuscule, Douglas and Julia had managed to insert a certain amount of glamor into the decor of their apartment through constant trips to the Chelsea Flea Market and smart choices of fabrics and paint. The coffee table was a Louis Vuitton trunk, found in a small store in Upstate New York. It was a little battered, but it had its charm. Douglas covered the floors with rugs from a trip to Morocco that he and Lewis had gone on the previous spring, and one wall was coated with his Majolica dish collection. Julia had splurged on two Ralph Lauren hurricane lamps, which rested on IKEA nesting tables, and every surface was covered in red lacquer trays meant to disguise all the clutter. It was small, but it was homey.

  After exiting the subway, Julia and Douglas walked home to Seventh Street and entered their pad. Julia happily chucked her bag down on Douglas’s chaise and flopped lazily on the couch.

  “Aaaaagh!” shrieked Douglas. “Oh my God, it’s a fucking Buick! Oh my fucking God!”

  Julia jumped up when she saw the turbo-charged roach running across the floor. With a swift move, she took the heavy March W magazine off the coffee table and chucked it onto the megabug, stopping its sprint across the floor. Then, for safe measure, she gracefully stepped onto the magazine to seal its doom.