Because I'm Worth it (18 page)
Dan sipped his drink. He wasn’t sure what she meant by premature death. Was there ever a right time to die? He wondered if he should write a poem about it, but then again, he didn’t want to steal Mystery’s material. “I’m supposed to be the next Keats.”
Mystery dunked her thumb into her drink again and then licked it off. “What’s your favorite verb?”
Dan took another drag off his cigarette and blew smoke into the crowded, noisy room. He wasn’t sure if it was the club, or the music, or the caffeine, or the taurine, but he felt so alive and
so good
at that very moment, talking about words with this girl named Mystery whose life he had saved. He was seriously digging it.
“
Dying
, I guess,” he answered, finishing his drink and setting the empty glass down on the floor. “The verb
to die
.” He knew it must have sounded like he was trying to impress her. After all, she was writing a book about premature death and cremation. But it was the truth. Almost all of his poems really were about dying. Dying of love, dying of anger, dying of boredom, of anxiety; falling asleep and never waking up.
Mystery smiled. “Me too.” Her gray eyes and long, thin face were starkly beautiful, but her front teeth were crooked and yellow, like she’d never been to the dentist in her entire life. She snagged another Red Bull cocktail from a waiter’s tray and handed it to Dan. “Rusty says poets are the next movie stars. One day we’ll both be riding around in limos with our bodyguards.” She sighed heavily. “As if that will make life any easier.” She raised her glass and clinked it against his. “To poetry,” she announced grimly. Then she grabbed the back of Dan’s head and pulled him toward her, crushing his lips in a deep, Campari-soaked kiss.
Dan knew he should have thrown Mystery off, protesting that he had a girlfriend, that he was in love. He shouldn’t have enjoyed being hit on by a strange, practically naked girl with yellow teeth. But Mystery’s lips tasted sweet and sour at the same time and he wanted to understand why she was so sad and so tired. He wanted to
discover
her, the way he sometimes discovered the perfect metaphor when he was in the middle of writing a poem, and to do that he had to keep kissing her.
“What’s your favorite noun?” he breathed into her ear when he came up for air.
“
Sex
,” she answered, diving for his lips again.
Dan grinned as he kissed her back.
It might have been the taurine, but sometimes it just feels good to be bad.
“So you’re the one.” A beautiful, tanned, blond dude dressed in baggy orange surf shorts, white leather Birkenstock clogs, and a brown-and-white pony fur vest with nothing on underneath smiled at Vanessa with glistening white teeth. His name was Dork or Duke or something and he claimed to be a producer. “The genius filmmaker.”
“She’s the next Bertolucci,” Ken Mogul corrected Duke, or whatever his name was. “Give me a year and she’s going to be a household name.” Ken was dressed like an urban cowboy in a silver Culture of Humanity down vest over a black Western-style shirt with pearly white snaps instead of buttons. His curly red hair was tucked into a black Stetson hat, and he was even wearing black cowboy boots with his Culture of Humanity boot-cut jeans. He’d flown into New York that night from Utah, where his most recent film had just been introduced at the Sundance Film Festival. It was an ambitious piece about a deaf and mute man who worked in a cannery in Alaska and lived in a trailer with thirty-six cats. The man didn’t talk and spent a lot of time at his computer e-mailing girls on singles Web sites, so Ken had had to be extremely creative with the camera to keep the action going. It was his finest work yet.
“Dude, watching your film was like being born again,” Dork told Vanessa. “It made my day.”
The corners of Vanessa’s mouth turned up in a half-bored, half-amused Mona Lisa smile. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being called “dude,” but she was glad she’d made Dork’s day.
The Culture of Humanity by Jedediah Angel after-party was an even bigger deal than the fashion show itself. Highway 1 had been decorated like a Hindu wedding tent, and bikini-clad models who hadn’t even been in the show were lounging on leather sofas, drinking saffron martinis. or dancing to the live bhangra music. Vanessa tugged on her tight red top. It was kind of hard not to feel like a porker around so many bony, seven-foot-tall models.
“Okay. Here’s the guy from
Entertainment Weekly
,” Ken Mogul said, wrapping his arm around her waist. “Smile, it’s a photo op!”
Duke stood on the other side of Vanessa and pressed his tanned, angular cheek against her soft, pale one. He smelled like Coppertone. “Say salami!”
It was Vanessa’s policy
not
to smile when she was being forced to have her picture taken, but why not? There really wasn’t any danger that she’d get swept up in the glow, marry Duke in the Temple of Surf and Sand, and live cheesily ever after in a surf shack–cum–film studio on the beach in Malibu. She was too hard-core New York for that, and besides, she hated the beach. No, tonight would be her one night of cheese and then tomorrow she’d go back to being normal again.
“Salami!” all three of them cried, flashing their cheesiest smiles for the camera.
Duke stayed close to Vanessa’s side after the photographer left. “What hotel are you staying at?” he asked, assuming she was from LA, just like everyone else he knew.
Vanessa unscrewed the cap on her bottle of Evian and took a swig. “Actually, I live here in New York, in Williamsburg, with my sister. I’m still in high school. She plays in a band.”
Dork looked excited. “Dude!” he cried. “You’re like one of those people screenwriters make up, you know?” He lifted his fingers to make quotations in the air, “An ‘urban hipster.’ Except you’re
real
. You’re realer than real. You’re dyno-mite!”
For a guy called Dork, he was actually pretty insightful.
“Thanks,” Vanessa said, unsure whether that was the correct response or not. She’d never had a conversation with someone so stupid before. She felt a hand on her elbow and she turned around.
A frail older man wearing a purple velvet smoking jacket and round black glasses smiled up at her. “You’re the film-maker, right?” he asked.
Vanessa nodded. “I guess.”
The old man waggled a bony finger at her. “Don’t take your gift too seriously,” he said before wandering away.
Duke bent down and spoke urgently into her ear. “I’m staying at the Hudson. Wanna go back to my room for a drink or something?”
Vanessa knew she should have told him to fuck off, but she’d never been hit on by a gorgeous, dumb surfer dude who could have hit on any one of the models in the room but had chosen to hit on her instead. It was really kind of flattering. And hadn’t that old guy just told her not to take things too seriously? Thank God she’d gone to all the trouble to remove the hair on her legs. “Maybe later,” she replied, not wanting to shut Dork down completely. “It’s kind of snowy out right now.”
“Right, duh.” Duke slapped himself on the head with a goofy laugh. “Want to dance instead?” He held out his hand, his arm muscles rippling invitingly. He looked like he never missed a workout and survived on a diet of protein drinks and wheatgrass.
Vanessa tugged on her red shirt again and took Duke’s hand, following him out onto the throbbing, crowded dance floor. She couldn’t believe herself—she
hated
to dance! At least no one she knew would be watching.
Oh yeah?
Because the snow had become completely unnavigable and they were trapped downtown, Blair decided that the most attractive option was to get a suite in the hotel upstairs.
“We can watch TV and order room service,” she whispered enticingly in Owen’s ear. “It’ll be fun.”
The room was luxurious, with a king-sized bed, a sunken Jacuzzi tub, a flat-screen plasma TV hanging on the wall, and an impressive view of the partially frozen, white-washed Hudson River. Owen called room service and ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, filet mignon, pommes frites, and chocolate mousse cake, and when it came they lay on the bed, feeding each other cake and watching
Top Gun
on TNT.
“How come you and your wife split up?” Blair asked, forking a piece of cake into Owen’s open mouth. Chocolatey crumbs fell onto the white 450-thread-count Egyptian cotton pillowcases.
Owen dipped a teaspoon into the cake’s frosting and offered the spoon to Blair to lick off. “We haven’t. . . .” He hesitated, his gorgeous, shapely eyebrows furrowing as he considered his answer. “I’d really rather not talk about it.”
Blair smiled sympathetically as she let the frosting melt on her tongue. She liked playing the role of the other woman. It made her feel so . . .
powerful
. Across the room on the huge flat-screen TV Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis were making out on his motorcycle. “Did she go to Yale, too?”
Owen picked up the remote and pointed it at the television. Then he put it down again without changing the channel. “I don’t know,” he replied, sounding exactly like Blair’s little brother, Tyler, when he was watching TV and their mom asked if he’d done his homework yet.
Blair grabbed the remote and began flipping through the channels. A
Friends
rerun. Wrestling. MTV
Cribs
. She wasn’t sure if she liked the boyish side of Owen. She much preferred the
man
. “She didn’t go to Yale or she did?”
“Uh-huh,” Owen answered, spooning a huge bit of cake into his mouth. “Astronomy major.”
Blair raised her eyebrows as she watched Sean “P. Diddy” Combs give a tour of his Upper East Side manse. Owen’s wife sounded like a genius. What kind of person became an astronomy major anyway? Someone who wanted to be an astronaut? She wished Owen had said his wife hadn’t gone to college at all, but that she just sat around watching dog shows on TV and eating Krispy Kreme donuts. That in the end she’d weighed five hundred pounds and he’d been forced to sleep in the guest bedroom until eventually moving out altogether. There just hadn’t been room for him anymore.
Blair flipped over to AMC, her favorite classic movie channel.
Casablanca
, starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, was almost halfway through. The Germans had just invaded Paris and Ingrid was frightened.
She settled back on the pillows, missing the way her long hair used to fan out around her face in a way she imagined must have been irresistible. “Sometimes I pretend I’m living in those times,” she told Owen dreamily. “It just seems so much more sophisticated, you know? No one wears jeans, everyone is so polite, and all the women have the best hair-styles.”
“Yeah, but there was a war. A big one,” Owen reminded her. He wiped his mouth on a white linen napkin and settled back against the pillows beside her.
“So?” Blair insisted. “It was still better.”
Owen reached for her hand and Blair shifted her gaze away from the TV to study his profile. “You know you look exactly like Cary Grant?” she whispered.
“You think?” Owen turned his head to look at her, his blue eyes smoldering sexily.
“I cut my hair to look like Audrey Hepburn,” Blair admitted. She turned on her side and rested her head against his manly chest in its crisp white shirt. “We could be Audrey and Cary.”
Owen kissed her hair and squeezed her hand gently. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” he murmured. With his free hand he began to rub her back and Blair could feel his gold wedding band knock against the bumps in her spine.
Outside the snow was falling harder than ever. Blair watched it fall, unable to relax. It was sort of impossible not to think about Owen’s genius astronaut wife, sitting home alone as she wrote out impossible astronomical equations on a blackboard, all the while wondering about her husband. Even if Blair and Owen did look exactly like Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, Blair was pretty sure the nice girls Audrey played didn’t lose their virginities in hotel rooms with married older men, no matter how deep the snow got. Why not end the film here, while it was still good?
Owen was breathing deeply now and had stopped rubbing her back. As soon as Blair was sure he was asleep, she’d slip out the door and ask the concierge downstairs to call her a car home. After all, she had a reputation to maintain. And it wasn’t like she was ditching him.
The best way to keep a guy intrigued is to disappear.
“Snowball fight!” Serena cried at the top of her lungs to no one in particular. She’d been dancing with a pack of tipsy, half-naked Les Best models and her blond mane was matted to the back of her neck, creating a sort of unidreadlock, beach hair effect. She’d been relieved of her I L
OVE
A
ARON
T-shirt for a cool four thousand bucks by her old friend Guy Reed from the Les Best boutique and was now wearing only a hot pink La Perla demibra that looked like a bikini top.
“Snow volleyball!” a guy shouted back even louder. He was dressed in a black ski suit from the Les Best ski line, black fur boots, and a pair of black fur earmuffs clung to his ears. He pointed out the huge bar windows to where a volleyball net had been set up outside on the snowy sidewalk.
In a matter of seconds the entire roomful of writhing, sweaty bodies attacked the coat closet, pulling on the nearest Fendi sheepskin or goose-down Gucci parka to protect their skinny bodies from the cold before they dashed outside to frolic in the snow.
Serena giggled as she slipped into a beige fleece-lined down parka with a beaver fur–trimmed hood that would have fit a giant Eskimo. In the last two hours she’d drunk more champagne than she had on New Year’s Eve and she felt giddy and warm all over. Before she could even zip up her coat, someone grabbed her hand and pulled her out the door with him.
Outside the snow had enveloped everything and the streetlights glowed gold on the downy white blanket. Without the constant honk and roar of traffic, there was a pleasant calm about the city, as if it had finally gone to sleep. Shrieking in merriment, the gang of models, stylists, and photographers plowed through the thigh-deep drifts and began spiking balls over the volleyball net with total disregard for the peaceful scene.
