Diamond Girl (7 page)

The preceding six months had been rough. My father had moved to his club and was letting himself be photographed publicly with his mistress, a six foot tall Italian former Miss World. My mother was losing her shit over it, understanding from his carelessness that a divorce might
soon  follow. To forestall her worst case scenario, she had thrown me under Daddy’s love bus as a speed bump. I don’t think she was out to get me personally - any one of her daughters would have worked - but I was Daddy’s favorite and I was the stupid one who landed on her radar.

I had met my two best friends for ever, the amazing looking Marin sisters, when I had started at Dwight three years before. Dwight is
another über-chic Manhattan private school for financially gifted children. It’s known in the city for the miraculous work they do. Ninety percent of Dwight’s graduates get into the college of their choice. Other kids from other schools refer to Dwight attendees as dumb white idiots getting high together but you can’t argue with success. I never really hated reading or studying, I just pretended to so I could fit in, but, sure, even if I had been in a coma during my time there, I would have received early acceptance to the Kelleher alma mater, Brown University.

Dwight had a very active endowment program. I think the office of Gifts and Alumni Pledges had more staff than we had teachers, and so Dwight parents could rest easy about their kids' futures. If that peace of mind cost a few million over the course of their child’s time there, no one was complaining. I’m not saying Dwight was so crass as to demand cash for our places there, or for our eventual guaranteed college placement either; that is not how it works.

Endowments are charitable tax write-offs and any good parent would want to jump on that bandwagon. They also want to show their support of their kid’s school by attending the twice-yearly ‘Dwight Day’s Fundraisers and Silent Auctions’.

The silent auctions are genius. Every parent is asked to contribute some unique item or service from their family, and then the other families bid on it at ten or two hundred times the market value.

For example, if your daddy owns say DreamWorks, then another family could bid on getting one of their kids a voice-over part in the next animated hit. Or if it’s one of the Lauren’s, you can bid on a shot at your wife or daughter modeling in the collections during Fashion Week. If your kid is at Vera Wang’s child’s school, then maybe a couturier one-of-a-kind dress, etc.. I am just imagining how much, say, Jay Z and Beyoncé could raise for 'services' if they had a kid.

In our family, a flight to one of the Lions' games and seats in the owner’s box would have been a natural, but Daddy is a very private person and, since my mother wasn’t an Olympic skier or a world class designer, and none of the mothers of my classmates needed social climbing lessons as they did fine on their own, our family always bought some rare thing, like Napoleon’s bed or Marie Antoinette’s hair brushes, and contributed those to the auction.

For me, Dwight was a good place. For the first time in my life I had real friends. I had met Milan and Christy Marin before - I think we might have even had play dates together or been in the same ballet classes once or twice when we were little - but our true, and at least for me, inseparable, bond started at Dwight.

The Marin girls were the gorgeous great-granddaughters of the founder of Marin Hotels, a mid-range business chain that was in nearly every city in the world that had an airport. Like in my family, the last Marin to actually have a job in the company biz was their grandfather. The girls' dad was the youngest son of the last great working Marin but, unlike in my family, old man Marin didn’t believe in passing on the family fortune along with the family name. One by one he had tried his sons out in the company and, one by one, they had either lost him a ton of money or embarrassed him by marrying and divorcing movie stars and having all of it written up in the tabloids, or, almost as bad,
they had overdosed on heroin or died driving various exotic sports cars while loaded - or all of the above.

By the time the girls' dad, Jimmy, was old enough to take a shot at the hotel
empire, the old man was done giving out chances. So when Jimmy married a former Miss California, Milan and Christy’s hot looking mom, he didn’t cut him off but he didn’t cut him in either. He gave the young couple an allowance of a million a year and sat back to see what, if anything, Jimmy would make of himself. 

Not much as it turned out. 

Jimmy and Lulu, his wife, didn’t see the million a year as something they were supposed to put to work for them; they saw it as money to survive on, barely. They took off and partied around the world, and when Lulu had Milan, named after the city she was conceived in, naturally, they brought her back to the States and started this weird gypsy lifestyle where they would check into cities with the most high-end Marin Hotels and call down to the front desks and demand a staff babysitter come up and take care of their daughter.

The thing is
, the Marin Hotels aren’t the kind that has staff babysitters, which didn’t seem to bother Lulu and Jimmy. They would use a room service waiter or a maid. I don’t know if this is true, but my mother told me that she heard that once they left Milan in the San Antonio Marin for three months with a Mexican valet’s wife as her nanny while they were off, who knows where. My mother and Lulu were kind of frenemies off and on over the years, and like all New York trophy wives, always talked trash about their close friends when they weren’t calling each other 'darling' to their faces. It might have been true, the story about the valet’s wife, because a few years after Christina was born, old man Marin demanded that Lulu and Jimmy settle down somewhere permanently with the children.

Since obviously they couldn’t live at the Airport Marin in New York, and he wasn’t willing to buy an estate in Connecticut, Grandpa Marin worked out some deal with the Plaza owners, and the family moved into a six bedroom suite there so the girls could attend school in the city. Once this was done, and their daughters were safely in a hotel with real babysitting services, Jimmy and Lulu took up their old traveling ways and disappeared for months at a time, leaving Milan and Christy to live totally independent lives in one of the greatest hotels in the world’s greatest city.

This made them about twenty times more sophisticated and glamorous than the rest of us. From the first days at Dwight, they were the girls the rest of us wanted to be. Milan, for all her public pretend dumb blond act, must have filed our admiration away for later consideration because, eventually, she turned her God-given beauty and self-created style into a brand, and for a while she became the girl that every teenage girl in the world wanted to be.

Back then, though, all her fame was a long way off. Back when she picked me out of all the other girls at Dwight to be her sidekick, she was just a girl, albeit the most beautiful twelve year old girl anyone had ever seen. Being Milan’s bff meant being Christy’s bff as well. They were majorly bonded, those sisters, not like me and my sisters at all,
maybe  because they had been left alone so much in hotel rooms as kids. Whatever it was, they were tight.

Milan was always the leader, but she still needed Christy as much as Christy needed her, so they remained a matched set - love one, love both. Christy was gorgeous too. Her even features were maybe more beautiful than Milan’s, but Milan had something special.

I don’t know the right word for it, but she was one of those rare people who, no matter how many other beautiful or famous people are around, outshine them. You wanted to look at her and keep looking. Christy was fine with that. It was more than good enough for her to be Milan Marin’s beautiful little sister. It was more than good enough for me to be Milan Marin’s little buddy too. Milan never mentioned my last name with awe and she didn’t act impressed by the Kelleher apartment, or the Kelleher money. She treated me like I was the privileged one to be her friend and, since I agreed totally with her, we got along perfectly.

She and Christy didn’t have credit cards like mine, so when I went shopping, if I bought a bag, I bought each of them one too, and when I found out Chanel made bicycles, I charged three of them, not one.

That was the first time Daddy ever mentioned my bills to me.

He had taken me with him to Detroit for an away game, and when
we  were eating hot dogs at half time, he gave me a little sideways look and said, “So, Carey K, last month my accountant showed me your bills. Fifty-two thousand dollars seems high, even for you, Miss Kelleher, but I’ve got to ask, what did you buy at Chanel that costs thirty-six thousand dollars? Are they making solid gold shoes there now? You’ve got me curious. Can I see them?”

I laughed up at him, dimple-to-dimple. “No way, Daddy, that’s silly.
Gold shoes would be really uncomfortable. That charge was for bikes. They make bikes now. They even have leather quilting on them, like the bags, and they are so cute. I got one for me, and one for Milan and Christy too. They’re best friend bikes.” I kissed him on the cheek. “Are you mad?”

He put his arm around me. “No, I’m not mad. I’m glad you have good friends. But do your old father a favor, will you, Carey K?”

“Anything, Daddy. Do you want me to get you one too?” I teased him.

He rolled his eyes. “No, no thanks. I’m too lazy for bicycles. No, I want you to go back and order two more for your sisters. They’ll hear about the bikes at school and it will hurt their feelings that you left them out.”

I thought about telling him that I hardly knew my sisters, and that Lily was too little for a bike anyway, but I didn’t say anything. I just shrugged and said okay, with this big sigh, like he was asking a lot of me. 

He laughed at me then, and he laughed even harder the next month when he called me downstairs to show me that month’s bill from Chanel which was over a hundred thousand. He handed it to me and waited. I pretended to look it over and sat down across from his desk. I acted all exasperated when I said, “I know it’s bad, but it’s your fault, Daddy.”

He grinned, playing along. “Oh, and how is that, Miss Kelleher?”

“Well, I did what you told me to. I went back to Chanel to order the bicycles like you asked me to, right?”

He nodded trying to keep his face straight.

“Okay, so I go in and I asked Mr. Villiers, my PS, to get two more of the bicycles, and he said no problem and then, Daddy, you will not believe this, he showed me that they had skis and snowboards now too!” 

He shook his head in amazement. “Skis and snowboards too - what will they think of next, Chanel helicopters?”

“Oh yeah, well that would be really cool, but I don’t think they make those. Anyway, Milan’s fourteenth birthday is this week, so I thought, oh my
God, she would totally love the skis, right? But then she likes to snowboard too, so I got her one of them, just in case. But, Daddy, Christy and I always match her, so I had to get us the same thing. And that’s how it came to so much money, you know, with Kelly and Lily’s bikes too, right?”

He rubbed his face. “Well, my fault for asking, I guess, but Carey, there is a limit to what you can spend, and I don’t think you always understand that. For example
...”

I cut him off by reaching behind me and putting a wrapped box on the desk. “I got you something too, Daddy.”

He grinned and grabbed for it. “A present for me? What for? It’s not my birthday, it’s not even my sister’s birthday, which reminds me ...”

“Daddy!
Open it.” 

“Okay, I will, since you asked so nicely.”

We both laughed and he tore the double wrapping paper off and lifted up the black Chanel football with his initials monogrammed into it.” He held out his arms to me and I ran around the desk to hug him.

“A Chanel football.
It’s perfect, little girl.”

“I know, right, 'cause you have the team and I thought, see, I had your initials put on it and
...”

He squeezed me tighter. “I see them. I love it. I love you, Carey K. So, does the football mean you’re not mad at me for
…? ” I didn’t want him to say it. I knew he meant because of his new girlfriend who he had introduced me to at lunch a week earlier – Amerinda – or, as my mother called her, 'Amaretto'.

I didn’t care if he had a girlfriend. She made him happy and that made me happy. I just didn’t want to have to talk about it because it made my stomach hurt, so I put my hand over his mouth and nodded.

“I’m not mad. It’s okay, Daddy.”

I wasn’t mad, I didn’t mind. I didn’t. I didn’t even mind when he moved out of the apartment to his club two weeks later. Daddy’s girlfriend was not why I got drunk on crème de menthe with Milan and Christy at the mini bar in their parents' room. It was just a dumb kid experiment, everyone does it, and it wasn’t my fault that the sickly sweet drink rocked my blood sugar and made me faint. And it wasn’t Daddy’s fault either; it was just three teenage girls trying to get a little high, that’s all it was.

Sylvia heard about it from the Marin’s maid when she came to pick me up, and she told my mother, and my mother didn’t give a damn. It was only later that night that she must have seen a way to work it to her advantage.

All I knew was that the next morning I didn’t go to Dwight. Instead, George drove my mother and me to Teeterboro where the company jet
was, and we flew to Topeka, Kansas, and my mother signed me into Menninger’s Adolescent Substance Abuse Clinic. Then she flew home to New York and called Daddy and told him I had gone on a drinking binge out of despair at his being gone  and what did he plan to do about his out-of-control daughter and her shattered home life?