Oh! You Pretty Things (28 page)

I
'm a detail person, and there are a million to arrange for New York: flights and shops and restaurants and hotel rooms for Eva's makeup team, which is really just a chubby girl named Minka and her husband, Todd, who does nothing but hold her brushes and make off-color jokes.

Eva never does her own makeup when she's going out in public, despite always having me buy the stuff that makeup artists use on her in photo shoots. Thousands of dollars' worth of products from lines they only carry at Barneys or Fred Segal or once in a while Bergdorf Goodman, which is a pain in the ass because you need an unintelligible and vaguely European accent to work at a Bergdorf's makeup counter, and their website only has half their shit, so I always have to call.

If my life were a movie, I'd need a montage sequence here: eleventy billion trips to Opening Ceremony and American Rag and Maxfield's and Decades; garment bags piled in the back of my car; me struggling under their weight as I climb the two flights of stairs from the driveway to her bedroom; sitting on the hardwood floor in Eva's bedroom surrounded by a pile of discarded clothes and empty shopping bags; the slow layering of the Louis Vuitton luggage—the checkerboard kind, not the logo kind. I mean, what are we, Russians?

I'd love to complain about all the work, but the truth is that I'm jittery with excitement.

I'm taking a mini vacation to New York.

E
va calls at nine on the morning we're leaving. I'm throwing a few last-minute things into my one carry-on bag—underpacking feels like the polite thing to do so Eva doesn't have to pay overage charges for her five bags—and getting ready to head to her house. She's not due to wake up until ten, but I'm scheduled early, to make sure she's protein-shaked and cardioed before the studio car picks us up.

Okay, I have another confession to make. I told Eva the flight was at 1:00 instead of 2:15. They'll hold a flight if your airplane has a private tail number, but let's be honest, Richard Branson isn't going to keep a plane to New York waiting for anyone but Angie and Brad, not that they ever fly commercial. It's a survival tactic. We are not missing that plane.

“Hey,” I say. “You're up early.”

“Oh my God,” Eva says, all giddy and awake. “I have the best news ever.”

“You won the lottery,” I say, which is kind of comical, because let's face it, she already has.

“Better. Are you ready? Scout's coming with us to New York! Could you die? It's gonna be epic.”

I'm happy. I really am. But I also get an oogy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don't want to light the feminist world on fire, but the truth is that girls aren't good at threesomes. Someone always ends up feeling left out, and if there's a left-out position in the room, I will move into it, redecorate, and stay awhile.

“Awesome,” I say. “What do I need to do?”

“Here's the thing. She doesn't have any money, so I figure she can stay with us. She'll just sleep with me, or whatever. Hopefully they'll give us a great suite.”

“Cool,” I say.

“I think it'd be weird to have her fly in coach while we're up front, so why don't you see if you can get her on the next flight out? Just tell her ours is full. That way it won't be awkward.”

Frankly, lying about our flight kind of makes it awkward already. But okay. Unfortunately, though, the cheapest flight I can find Scout is almost fifteen hundred bucks, and I'm talking coach, not even premium economy. There's room on our flight, but it's over thirteen hundred dollars for a middle seat in the main cabin. Not that Eva can't afford it, but it seems like a shitty thing to do, especially when I'm flying for free, or, at least, free to Eva.

When I call Eva back, I can hear the sound of her fancy Life Fitness elliptical clunking away in the background.

“What's up?” she asks, panting slightly.

“It's ugly, dude. The cheapest ticket is over thirteen hundred bucks, either on our flight or on the redeye. Coach, I mean.”

“Jesus,” she says, and I hear her grind to a halt and give me her full attention.

“I know,” I say. “It's brutal.”

There's a moment of silence, in which I contemplate what I'm about to do. “Here's what I'm thinking. Why don't I let Janine swap my ticket for two coach tickets?”

“Ew, no,” Eva says. “There's no way I'm flying in first while my friends are in coach. That's gross.”

“Well, we could come tomorrow morning. Although you'd be on your own for the
Today
show.”

“Not an option,” she says, and I hear the bleeping of her elliptical as she slowly starts moving again.

“That's the best solution. I'll have Janine swap my ticket.”

“You'd really do that?” Eva says, and there's such a sincere note of gratitude in her voice that I feel like an asshole for not suggesting it sooner.

“Sure,” I say. “It's for the greater good, right?”

“We're going to have a fucking awesome time.”

I smile. “Can't wait.”

“But, Jess? I really need you there in the morning. Can you just take the red-eye? For me?”

Well, now I've done it. I've put myself on an overnight flight across the country, which, if you ask me, is like volunteering to take tickets for the ferry across the River Styx.

“Sure,” I say.

“You're the best. I'm almost done here. I'm going to hop in the shower. Can you bring me my shake and get my stuff ready for the car?”

“On my way,” I say, which suddenly strikes me as a good idea for a tattoo.

“On my way” in looping cursive, somewhere between the edge of my collarbone and the swell of my tits. Not ruling it out.

I
don't understand people who can sleep in coach on airplanes. I mean, the whole thing is like that feeder tube that Temple Grandin devised for the slaughterhouse. It's terminal, even on Virgin America. There's only so much you can accomplish with a white leather trimmed seat and the ability to order a cocktail from the touch pad in front of you.

And I'm not the kind of person who can skip a night's sleep and remain even moderately even-keeled. By the time Scout and I are waiting at baggage claim in New York, at six in the morning, I'm ready to lose my shit.

First of all, Scout packed two giant duffel bags, only one of which has managed to make it across the country, even though there were no connections. She heaves it off the baggage belt and wrangles it onto the metal cart she's rented and we watch the empty, twirling baggage carousel.

“Dude, seriously,” I say. “What could you possibly need that isn't already in here?”

“I dunno,” she says, defensively. “My journal. Candles. A yoga mat.”

She's not kidding. She's brought her whole life to Manhattan for three days.

I check the time on my phone. Eva has an 8:20 call time for the
Today
show—she's in the netherworld of the fourth hour with Kathie Lee and Hoda—and her hair and makeup people are due in her suite in just over an hour. She is the kind of girl who shows up camera-ready, so there's no leaving her carefully cultivated face to the vagaries of the local talent.

“Okay,” I say. “You can stay here and wait for your bag, and I'll see you at the hotel later, or you can come with me and we'll get them to deliver it once they figure it out.”

“You'd leave me here?” Scout asks, an undercurrent of abandonment in her voice.

“Eva's going to wake up in an hour. I'm at least that far from the hotel, even if I luck out with a cab. I'm already screwed.”

“You suck,” she says.

There was a long moment a couple years ago when Scout was Eva's assistant, so I can't fathom what she's not getting about the severity of this situation.

“Go ahead and go,” she says grudgingly, and then, like a scene from a movie, the baggage carousel grinds to life and spits out her ridiculously huge bag.

If I'd been smarter, I would have booked a car to take us into the city. But in the last-minute melee of changing my ticket, going back and forth from LAX to make sure that Eva got off without a hitch, and swinging back to pick up Scout and bring her to Eva's, where Janine reluctantly dispatched a second studio car, I just forgot. Fortunately, the taxi line is manageable and we're cruising into midtown Manhattan before I have time to get obsessive about it.

We pull up to Le Parker Meridien at a perfectly serviceable 7:25
A.M.
, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

And then everything promptly falls apart.

First of all, shift change at the Parker is clearly imminent, because we're greeted by a lone bedraggled clerk who looks like he hasn't slept for a week.

“Can I help you?” he says, eyeing the mountain of green canvas that suggests Scout's about to deploy to Iraq and not check into a marginally five-star hotel in midtown Manhattan.

“Hi,” I say. “I'm checking in with Eva Carlton.”

“Photo ID and credit card.”

I slide my driver's license and Eva's Amex across the marble counter.

He taps on his computer, then slides my cards back across the counter. “Sorry, you're not on my list. And Ms. Carlton has a do-not-disturb on her phone.

“I'm her assistant,” I tell him. “There's a car coming to pick her up for the
Today
show in an hour.”

“Unless you're on my guest roster, there's not much I can do for you.”

“Manager, please,” I say, my tone edging on rude.

“Excuse me?”

“Did I stutter? Get me your manager if you can't solve my problem.” Yep, over the falls into pure, entitled rudeness.

He whirls and disappears through a paneled door that I didn't even realize was there.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Scout hisses. “He's just doing his job.”

“So am I,” I say. “Not well, at the moment, because I'm sure that Minka and Todd are already in the building.”

Their day rate is $3,500, plus-plus. Travel is double. Come to think of it, why am I worried about their whereabouts? For what they're getting paid, they can wait in the lobby for a while.

A manager-type person glides in from a room behind a smooth, burled door. “How can I help?” he says, all unctuous smile and eye contact.

I go with the honey option, although vinegar is boiling in my throat. “Hi, I just got off a red-eye and Eva Carlton is expecting me in her suite, and I'm expecting her hair and makeup people—and the driver who's going to take us to the
Today
show. So my first step is to get to her room.”

“I understand,” he says. “But the privacy of our guests is of the utmost priority, and I don't have you on my reservation list.”

From behind me, Scout says, “No problem, we'll get some breakfast and figure it out.”

“Can you please let me handle this?” I hiss over my shoulder.

Scout bristles and takes a step away from me, holding her hands up in a gesture of mock supplication. “Sure, because you're doing such a bang-up job of it.”

I turn back to the desk, dredging up a smile from the bottom of my frayed resource bag. “I'm going to be here three more days. I'll need cars, restaurant reservations, and directions to a twenty-four-hour juice bar or something equally improbable. Please,
please
, I am begging you, let's not get off on the wrong foot.”

He sighs and his smile grows marginally less fake. “A twenty-four-hour juice bar?” he says, with just a twitch of an amused smirk.

“And a thick vein of bentonite clay.”

He scribbles a number on a piece of Parker Meridien notepaper, folds it in half and passes it across the counter like I'm buying a gram of cocaine. “Diego will show you up,” he says.

Diego is a skinny kid wearing a name tag that says Alejandro. He just stands there, openly watching Scout's copious tits strain against her flimsy white tank top as she finishes rebraiding a red pigtail.

“Eyes front, Diego,” I say. “Let's do this.”

Scout heaves herself from the sofa. “You know, you're kind of a bitch when you're working,” she says, tugging her bra into place with both hands. It's like a ten-car pileup on the interstate. Diego is transfixed. I can't really blame the guy.

When we get to the twenty-ninth floor, I can hear old-school Eminem blaring as soon as we turn the corner into the hallway. We have to wait for the end of “My Name Is” before there's any chance our pounding will be heard.

Todd opens the door, with a white towel draped over one shoulder and a handful of makeup brushes. The room is maybe five hundred square feet. Huge by New York standards, but not exactly a suite. Eva's Louis Vuitton luggage is strewn throughout the area I'm sure they call the living room, which contains a half-size sofa and a tiny built-in settee under the window, with a spectacular view through a couple gargoyle-bedecked marble buildings and into Central Park.

Minka has set herself up at the work desk adjacent to the settee, draping it in a white linen cloth I'm sure she snagged from room service and spreading her vast array of palettes and pots and jars in neat rows. The coffee table is the staging area for hair, with a couple sets of hot rollers, a few curling irons with various barrel sizes, a straightening iron, and two yellow Solano blow dryers all plugged into the heavy-duty orange extension cords that snake around the back of the sofa.

Sidebar
: If I owned a hotel, I would design a few rooms specifically for B-list celebrities doing press. Electrical outlets that aren't hidden behind furniture, extra counter space, a half-bath in the main room so your people have somewhere to pee. You know, the little things.

However, the single thing that takes up the most space in the room is Eva's shitty mood. I feel the chill before a word is spoken.

“Rough flight?” she asks me without looking up from her
OK!
magazine.

“It was fine.” I dump my bag in the corner. “You okay?”

“I didn't sleep last night. Room service sent up some kind of lemon tea that kept me up all night.”

Eva's body is her temple. I mean, she takes prescription pills by the handful and barely eats enough to keep an eight-year-old boy alive, but she'd never defile herself with caffeine. Getting a dose of caffeinated tea at midnight when she's expecting chamomile is like a hot shot.

“Dude, that's brutal,” I say.

She shrugs and tosses the tabloid onto the carpet, then the front door slams and Scout lumbers in under the weight of her giant green duffel bags.

“Scoutilla!” Eva cries, leaping from her perch to wrap herself around Scout's girth, as if Scout is a eucalyptus tree and she's a koala bear in pink lace boyshorts. “I thought you'd never get here.”

Kind of an inauspicious beginning for the girls' weekend, but maybe I'm just un-slept. That's it. I'm tired. Everything will get better from here.