Green Tea Won't Help You Now! (2 page)

I grimaced to myself.

"What are you thinking about?" Latoya asked.

"Nothing..." It was a lie. I closed my eyes and thought about a number. A number I had read the same morning in a letter from a man called Jacob Weinberg. It was the running total of my bank account.

The number was 7 billion dollars.

Yes, that is a "b".

Two

My name is not Trixie. My name is Laetitia Corvera-Fabergé, but these days I call myself Trixie Beaumont, after my late grandmother. I am twenty-nine years and five quarters old and I currently reside in a one-bedroom apartment in Venice, California. I am 5'8'', I weigh 120 pounds, I have short, dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. Some people even say I look like Audrey Hepburn, but I think she was only half as tall as me. My father is a professional polo player and breeder from Argentina. My mother is an English aristocrat. To put it bluntly, I am bloody, freaking, stinking, fucking rich! I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth. I have tried
not
to be rich, believe me. In the past decade, I have attempted to get rid of the stuff in every way I could possibly imagine. I bought cars and jets and houses and drugs. Quite a lot of those, actually. But somehow, the money never went away. Whenever I had managed to burn a few millions, they would simply pop back up somewhere else. My superhuman brother, Ryan and his Wall Street wizards kept on multiplying the dough without any consideration for my desire for poverty.
 

Fortunately, three years ago, I was rescued by my old school mate Poppy Jude Jansen, who suffers the doubtful fate of being the love of my brother's life. He was completely derailed from his moneymaking tracks by their encounter and is nowadays happily hammering boats together in Hamburg, Germany, and about to become a father. Poppy Jude was the one who picked me up after a love affair gone wrong and a rehab gone even wronger (is wronger a word, do you reckon?). She had me flown to Berlin where I was taken in by the people I now consider to be my closest friends, but of whom I was terrified in the beginning. There, I was cured from my depressions and my nasty habits with lasting effect.

When I first moved in with Nicky and Lilly—he's a guru, she's some sort of medically trained voodoo witch—I thought they were what one might call complete nut cases. They only wore white clothes and seemed to be suffused by an overflowing exuberance which I had never managed to achieve, no matter what poison I had taken. They lived in a roof top apartment as large as a football field with a great view over the city. I should perhaps mention that Nicky used to be a senior partner of McKinnley's Consultants in India for over ten years before he retired to be a guru. Money is no issue for Nicky and Lilly, which is quite practical. Nothing is worse for rich people than to have poor friends. Not because the poor friends always want something from the rich friends, no, they would not be friends if they did, but because the rich ones always feel guilty for being able to do all those things the poor ones can not do and they always feel bad because, in order to participate, the poor ones need to let themselves be invited by the rich ones. (Huh? Did you understand the last phrase? I think I don't. Forget it.)

In Berlin, I was given my own bedroom with an en suite bathroom and a
nigh tropical balcony
(as my grandmother would have put it). My treatment was not really a treatment at all. Nothing was ever asked of me. Every morning I would be awakened by the faint noises of chanting. Shortly afterwards, Lilly would tiptoe into my room, carrying a tray full of breakfast, looking more or less like a fairy princess and singing merrily. When I came out of the shower, Nicky would have left for his practice and Lilly would commence a morning routine of playing drums and dancing through the apartment. She handed me another pair of bongos and continued in a frantic rhythm until I could not resist the beat any longer and joined into the music. After an hour or so of drumming we would take our bicycles to the local market and buy the ingredients for our dinner. Normally, we had lunch in a street restaurant. Later, Lilly would take me to have my feet massaged at a place owned by a Chinese friend of hers. Seriously, everybody should have their feet massaged on a regular basis. (And it needs to hurt, too. Otherwise, it is ineffective. Keep that in mind.) Finally, we would join Nicky for his ninety minute yoga class. It took place in an industrial loft and there were usually over a hundred people. From new born babes to hundred year old grandfathers, everybody was shaking, stretching, crouching, wriggling, singing, gurgling, hopping and chanting, everyone to their own abilities, with no ambitions, no obligations and no corrections. The energy was beyond anything I had ever experienced and it was the only thing I would be addicted to for the rest of my life.
 

I lived with Nicky and Lilly for three months. When I left them, several things had drastically changed. I had stopped fighting who I was. I had embraced my identity. Also, I had realised, the only person responsible for my happiness was myself. I, and I alone, could make myself lead the life I actually wanted to lead. I began to appreciate the great luck I had to be able to afford this life.
 

Nicky encouraged me in my plans to become a yoga instructor and I even went to India and Nepal with him for two months in order to fast, practice yoga and live in total silence in a Himalayan monastery. He was supposed to travel there with his wife, but Lilly was in the early stages of her first pregnancy then and preferred to, "get in touch with the new soul", in their stylish beach house on the North Sea island of Sylt.
 

So, while I sat there, gazing at Mount Everest, I decided what I wanted to do. I wanted to move to Venice, which had always been my favourite place on planet Earth. There I would live under a different name. I would also instruct my property manager, Jacob Weinberg, to re-organise my finances and start a fund for the education of girls in third world countries. I would ask him to pull out of the high risk, big win gambles and set up the fund as efficiently as he could. He would know how to do it, since he was handling my money all by himself anyway and had done so for quite some time. I usually just signed and forgot all about it.
 

When I got back from Nepal I made the call and told Jacob I wanted no more money of mine to be invested in any venture capitalist affairs. Had I only known how much I would come to regret it.

Three

"Do you need help?"

I staggered and held onto the brick wall. It is not commendable to address a person standing on a ladder. Especially not one who holds a screwdriver in her hand.

I turned my head haughtily, despite my insecure foothold. I think I managed it with some elegance. Being a yoga instructor enables me to make use of movements nearly impossible to less flexible people.

The first thing I saw was a black Jaguar F-Type. A fellow Brit. I was mellowing. Then I saw the driver. Guess who it was? You know it, of course. Who else could it have been but the man I had been thinking about for the past four hours without interruption? A warm glow crept into my stomach, one I had not felt there for over three years.
 

Stop! This was also the man who had just caused the destruction of a year's work! I had manufactured that sign above my door all by myself. I had bought the wood, painted it, cut it out, repainted it, varnished it... I had created the designs for my charity cups and shirts and it had taken me an eternity to find suitable fair trade materials for their production. I had printed flyers to advertise my studio and I had walked the entire coast from Malibu to Orange County to distribute them. I had sweated, cried, screamed and despaired over it. I was very angry at this man. That is, I should have been very angry at this man, should I not?— I was. Almost.

"Oh, it's you," I said with a pointed show of disinterest.

He got out of the car and walked around it until he reached the ladder.

"You're right. It's me. I wanted to see if you were putting my demands into action." He was still wearing his phenomenally cut suit, but his killer eyes were covered by dark glasses. Praise ye the Lord!

"Why of course, I'm going to lift this ten foot long wooden sign down in the blink of an eye. How did you put it?
Ey ess ey pee
?"

"Yogis can do things other people can't. Some can even fly. Can you?" He gently slapped the ladder. It shuddered.

"Stop it!" I shrieked and grabbed the first "n" in "InspYre" to which the sign reacted with uncanny creaking.

"Sounds like it's going to come off easy."

Now I was truly enraged. "Excuse me, Mr. Silverston. I have stated in front of both our legal representatives that I would comply to your demands, even though I have no idea how this strange coincidence, or whatever it may be, came about. But I do not think I have to tolerate your mockery of my deprivation. I presume I could sue you for mental abuse, if I chose to do so. This is America, after all."

"Wow. You sound like Downton Abbey." He smiled. The ladder shook again. He had not touched it.

"If you say so..."

"Get down."

"What?"

"Get down!"
 

I did. There was something irresistible in that commanding voice of his. It was a very male voice, not too deep, but, you know, the right timbre to shout across a battle field.

"Give me the screwdriver." He pried it from my hand.

Without gracing me with a further remark, he climbed up the ladder and started unscrewing the sign. I wanted to protest, but somehow I was mesmerised. I marvelled in sheer fascination at his long, muscular legs and his incredibly firm, well, shall we say, lower back? Suddenly, the sign came loose but he caught it and held it in the air
with one hand
. He climbed down the ladder, still holding the bloody giant sign, I repeat,
in one hand
.

"That's how you get your screwing done." He put down the sign.

My cheeks grew hot at this remark. I find a
double entendre
in far less obvious phrases. My mind simply works that way.

He looked at me questioningly, then he pulled a face. "Ah. Sorry, I didn't mean to.. I mean, I didn't want to... don't sue me, okay?"

I shook my head and nodded at the same time. I did not know which movement to use, really. "No."

"Where do I put this?"

"Err, just, well, just lean it against the wall."

He did as he was bid, then he straightened his suit. "I'm not dressed for this. — Hey, listen, Trixie. I didn't come here to gloat at you. Honestly. The truth is, when I saw you today at Ray's office, I felt sorry for you. I know how hard it can be to build something up and then see it vanish before your eyes. You probably put every cent into this studio and now you have to pay for the lawyer, too. That must be hard. I wanted to offer you my assistance. If you can't afford to buy new stuff, I could get it for you. I would not be so pedantic normally, but my company has its IPO in a few weeks and I can't allow any controversy. My financial backers are hard to please."

I looked at him blandly, then I understood. He thought I was poor. Of course, he thought I was poor! Well, not poor probably, nobody who could afford any real estate in Venice would be poor.
 

So... what if he thought I was, "of limited means"? What if he thought I had paid my last penny to open the studio? Even if it was not actually true, it certainly felt like it. The emotional value of this place was immeasurable.
 

A smile crept up on my face. "How kind of you, but I'll be fine. My students want to make a collection. Fortunately, there are a few with some money among them who are willing to help me out."

"Like I said, I'm willing to help you out."

"You won't have to."

He took off his sunglasses and his bright blue eyes bore right into me. Holy guacamole, I can tell you, they were as sharp as two laser beams!
 

"Will you have dinner with me?"

I jumped. I still had not got used to American men and how straightforward they were. Across the pond, things are generally much more complicated (unless you are in Italy). If you spot somebody you want to be naked with, and who obviously wants to be naked with you as well, you have to go through a strategic routine of eye contact, an incidental encounter and some random conversation ("sorry, oh, hi, do you know whether they serve Katchinsky Vodka here?"), followed by an hour of small talk, where everybody exhibits their rhetorical qualities until, quite spontaneously, it appears to make sense to meet again. In Argentina, they just sleep without saying anything and go back to their wives.

"Oh..."

"I couldn't blame you if you said no."

"No."

"Too bad." He wrinkled his well shaped forehead.

I shook my head vigorously to contradict myself. "No! I meant, yes."
 

"What about tonight?"

I put on an air of studied nonchalance. "Sure, why not? I have a class in an hour, but I have nothing else planned for tonight." I did not want to seem like a sitting duck, but in all honesty, I
was
a sitting duck. This man was like cryptonite to me. But things were clear as day to me now. He was asking me to go to dinner with him and it meant only one thing: he wanted to be naked with me. I wanted to be naked with him. Why eat?

I nearly suggested we could go upstairs and be naked right away, but I had determined to mend my old ways, so I kept my mouth shut.

"Where do you live?"

I cleared my throat. "First floor. I mean second floor. Above the studio."

He looked up and smiled. "Nice. No ocean view, but nobody's perfect. I'll pick you up at eight."

"Do so."

He laughed. "Here's Downton Abbey again. Are you called Trixie for real? Is that a posh name?"

"Yes," I said in an exaggeratedly posh accent, imitating my grandmother: "My grandfather is the Duke of Heresford."
 

"Ha ha, you almost had me there. I'll see you at eight."

He strode around his car once more, climbed in and drove off with a wee bit too much engine noise. As soon as he was gone, I leaned against the wall. I felt as if I had been hit by a freak wave.