Privileged (10 page)
I’d done my homework. Most of the events during The Season were ostensibly given for charity, though in actuality, they were excuses for the ridiculously rich, shallow, and self-involved to try to outdress and out-bling one another. This particular ball was being given for the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
Sage pushed some curls that had tumbled from her updo behind her ears. “I meant, how did you get
in
?”
“Uh—”
“What difference does it make?” Precious exclaimed. “She’s here, she obviously belongs here. Ohmigod—I love your dress. Why didn’t my stylist show me that one?”
Pembroke grinned at me. “I almost didn’t recognize her with her clothes on.” He guffawed at his own cleverness.
“I could strip and remind you, but I’m sure you have a vivid imagination.” I dearly hoped this came across as playful teasing, since I felt like feeding him my fist.
He laughed. “How about that apple martini?”
“Something else,” I replied, and then I looked at Rose. “What are you all drinking?”
“Flirtinis.”
No clue what those were.
“Fine, then,” I told Pembroke. “A flirtini.”
“Flirtini it is.”
He trotted off, and his place was taken by another of the twins’ friends from the night before, the one with the eye-popping implants. What was her name again? It had something to do with
Sesame Street
. Big Bird? Cookie Monster? Oscar the Grouch? That was it. Grouch. Suzanne de Grouchy. She stared at me with unabashed admiration. “Zac Posen, right?”
She didn’t even attempt an apology for the night before. I played along like I was too cool to want one.
“Of course,” I lied. I had zero recollection of who’d made my dress.
Sage narrowed her eyes at me, and I willed myself to stay calm. “What happened to the frizzy hair and the crap clothes?”
This
one I was ready for, thanks to my former not-so-brilliant career.
“Please, Sage. All I ever wear when I’m traveling is an Evian spritz, lip gloss, and my most comfortable clothes.” I did my best imitation of her patented hair toss. A month ago at
Scoop,
I’d written the photo captions for an interview with three top models. Kate Moss had explained that she never wore makeup while traveling. “It’s not like
I
need to impress anyone.”
This moment shall be forever seared into my brain. Sage blinked. The superior sneer fell from her face, and she sniffed. “Well, you could have told us.”
I smiled sweetly. “As I said, it’s not like I need to impress anyone.”
And yet I was impressing someone. Sage and Rose. Exactly whom I had to impress. They might not like me, but there wasn’t an ounce of disdain in their eyes. By any measure, it was progress.
“Here you go!” Pembroke was back, handing me a pink drink in a martini glass. “One flirtini.”
“You’re a sweetheart.”
Sweetheart
? Who was I? I was tempted to gulp the thing down, the better to fuel my farce, but I remembered Keith cautioning me to sip, so I did, feigning great interest in the couples dancing to something by the BeeGees that no one should dance to, ever.
“Dance?” came a voice from behind me.
I turned to find myself staring into the impossibly blue eyes of the guy who’d handed me the towel the night before. Will Phillips. Now, instead of a full-body blush, I was wearing a red dress. It seemed fitting.
“How can you dance to this shit, Will?” Sage asked. The orchestra had just started “Strangers in the Night.” I hesitated as couples old enough to have lost their virginity to Sinatra—no, Edith Piaf—took to the dance floor.
“Think of it as really, really retro,” Will told Sage, then looked back at me. “So?” He held out a hand.
“Sure.” It was momentarily hard to look away from his eyes until I reminded myself exactly who this guy was friends with and precisely what those eyes had already gazed upon.
I’m working,
I told myself. I had two weeks until Laurel would return and see that the girls were no closer to getting in to Duke, and then I’d be out on my ass—two weeks to learn everything I could about the rich, wretched, and repugnant of Palm Beach. I slipped my hand into his. Every minute counted.
“Sorry about last night,” Will said as he slipped his arms around me. “That surprised me, too.”
To believe or not to believe, that was the question. I’d muse on it later.
“No biggie,” I said smoothly. “It was just a silly prank. So how do you know the twins?”
“I live next door, at Barbados.” We began to move to the alleged music.
The next-door neighbor who’d known them forever. Perfect.
“Barbados is an island in the Caribbean,” I said teasingly.
“Also the name of our property. People in Palm Beach can’t resist naming their houses. I think it’s in the water.”
“So you kind of grew up with Sage and Rose?” I asked.
“Not exactly. I’m twenty-three. I graduated from Northwestern last June.”
He was my age. Which begged the question: Why was he hanging out with a group of high school kids? Which led me to an obvious conclusion: He was sleeping with one of them. Where I come from, we call that criminal. And no matter where you come from, it’s just . .
. icky
.
“How about you?” He pulled away just far enough so that he could look at me.
“Yale,” I replied diffidently.
He whistled softly. “And you’re a tutor? By choice? What’d you study?”
“Literature.” The truth seemed safe enough. “You?”
“Art history. My dad’s a dealer. I’m trying to decide whether to go into the business. His flagship gallery is on Worth Avenue, actually. I’m sure you know it—the Phillips Gallery.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at this guy’s totally self-important spiel. Did all these people assume their little world was the center of the universe? “This is actually my first time in Palm Beach,” I told him, trying to keep my research in mind. “I haven’t seen the island at all yet.”
I hoped he’d take the bait I’d just floated. What better tour guide could I possibly have than Barbados Boy?
“My dad’s showing some Corots at the gallery. Maybe you’d like to see them. I’d be happy to show you around tomorrow.”
Oh, yeah. Hook, line, and sinker.
“Love to.”
I smiled over his shoulder, imagining all the inside dish I could get from him the next day. And when an old codger in a red dinner jacket bumped me closer to Will, well . . . I didn’t even mind.
This was starting to be
fun
.
Identify which part of the following sentence is incorrect:
It’s an (a)
excellent
idea, in theory, to (b)
masquerade
as someone (c)
your
not when (d) trying
to impress
a member of the opposite sex. (e) No error
D
espite the minor progress I’d made with the twins at the party—at least I was Megan again instead of Frizzy—I’d decided not to chase after them the morning after. I figured I’d go to the main mansion to get breakfast and my predictions for my afternoon with likely-statutory-rapist-slash-Baker-twins-neighbor Will Phillips.
It turned out that I didn’t have to. The twins’ pounding on my door woke me at the almost reasonable hour of ten o’clock. They were dressed for fun in the sun. Sage had on a three-Post-it-notes-size gold bikini, while Rose wore a black tank suit cut up to the waist on the sides, making it look as if her legs were about eight feet long.
Sage spoke first. She folded her arms, eyes narrowed. “We know who you are.”
Busted. So much for Marco and Keith’s attempt to pass me off as one of them. It was fun while it lasted. All sixteen hours of it.
“Okay, fine,” I began. “So I’m not really—”
“We Googled you,” Rose interrupted me. Sage nodded. “You’re Megan Smith from Main Line Philadelphia—Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, to be exact. Your family sponsored a ball last spring to benefit the University of Pennsylvania Hospital’s transplant center. Your mother wore Chanel, and you wore Versace. We read all about it.”
Sponsoring a benefit last spring was so far from the reality of my life that it was laughable, but the puzzle pieces rearranged themselves in my head. Smith wasn’t exactly an uncommon name, and neither was Megan. That there was another girl out there with my name who came from a super-rich family shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’d Googled myself once or twice. Okay, ten or twelve times. Except for a few hits on Yale-related websites, my real self was an Internet nonentity. But there were about 93,700 other Megan Smiths mentioned. And apparently, one of them was rich.
“At least we know how you got invited to the ball,” Rose muttered.
“And where the dress came from,” Sage added. “You should have just told us, Megan.”
They flounced off. I took a chance and shouted after them, “Are you guys ready to study with me?”
It’s amazing how quickly a pair of twins can shout the word
no
over their shoulders.
I ended up ordering breakfast from the main house—two fresh-baked croissants, a plate of sliced fresh tropical fruit, and a carafe of Ethiopian coffee—and spent the morning out on my private deck, doing a little online research myself about Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, home of the other Megan Smith. Gladwyne was another one of those places that made Concord, New Hampshire, the town where I’d grown up, seem like a third-world country.
It was in the midst of my Gladwyne research that a scary thought hit me. When I went to meet Will later, he’d expect to see the girl he’d danced with the night before. Only, that girl didn’t exist. I was terrible with my hair, and I had no clothes. Short of having
the
Mr. Keith materialize in my den, I was screwed.
In a panic, I showered, washed my hair, and put on a combination of hideous Century 21 outfits numbers one and two. Then I dashed over to the main mansion—deliberately skirting the pool deck, where the twins might be—to find my fairy gaymother.
With few preliminaries, I explained my crisis. Not the whole story, of course—Marco couldn’t know that I was actually going undercover as a journalist—but I did work in how the twins had mistaken me for another, much richer Megan Smith. He thought this was hysterical and seemed to understand the importance of not doing anything to dissuade them from the notion. For purely, um, academic reasons.
“Not to worry, dear heart,” Marco cooed, setting cinnamon buns on a cooling rack. “It’s a stroke of good fortune. I believe I can come to your rescue. Have a bun.”
I wolfed one down, both relieved that he thought he could help and newly guilt-ridden. Marco had been nothing but nice to me from the first moment we’d met, and I was being less than honest about my intentions in Palm Beach.
This is what journalists do,
I reminded myself.
As Marco led me to his pink bungalow at the north end of the property, my remorse abated. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who had a secret. When Marco wasn’t Chef Marco, he was Zsa Zsa Lahore, the most glamorous drag queen this side of the intercoastal. And he just happened to be my size.
We walked though his red and black living room with a lizard-print couch—he was currently in a western phase—and into his bedroom. Unlike his general demeanor, it was aggressively masculine, all silver and chrome, with a painting over his bed of two cowboys eying each other with lust. How
Brokeback
.
“My closets are your closets,” he announced, opening double doors to a walk-in nearly as large as his bedroom.
How generous could one fairy gaymother possibly be? The walk-in was filled with rack upon rack upon rack of gorgeous designer clothes. He began pulling out possibilities. “For the gallery with Will, I’m thinking Bottega Veneta high-waisted black crepe trousers and the Fendi ivory chiffon blouse. Now let us find you more.”
I tried to protest, but by the time he was done, he’d filled one large suitcase and a king-size garment bag, saying that I’d need these clothes for the future.
“My advice for what you’re wearing, darling?” he offered. “Burn it.”
Next came hair and makeup. Marco didn’t share Keith’s genius for hair, but he did teach me to use a flatiron. Next was makeup, which he had more than perfected, and then I changed into the outfit he’d suggested. It fit. I looked down at my black loafers and bit my lip in concern. Even I knew they were a
nonono
.
“Oh, dear.” Marco nibbled on a perfectly manicured fingernail.
I wore a women’s eight. He wore a women’s ten. Then he snapped his fingers. “Stretch Chanel ballet slippers, darling. Just the thing.”
I tried them—still too big, but they stayed on because of the elastic. He promised to call Keith and have him bring over some other options. I protested one more time, but Marco was hearing none of it.
“Dahling,” he drolled in a near-perfect Zsa Zsa Gabor accent as he coated my lashes with mascara, “you look stunning. Which car will you take?”
I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought, which was what I told Marco. In exactly fifty minutes, I was supposed to be downtown on Worth Avenue, where Will would give me the grand tour of his father’s gallery and then take me to the Breakers for tea.
“Take the Ferrari,” Marco advised. “The red Ferrari. It’s the most fun to drive. You can handle a stick?” He smirked at the sexual innuendo.
“I sure can.” I laughed. My father’s pickup truck had a manual transmission.
Marco smiled. “My advice, my dear? When given the opportunity to handle a stick, handle it.”
The Phillips Gallery was located at the north end of Worth Avenue, and it had but a single painting in its picture window: a stone bridge in the French countryside. An even more discreet sign announced PHILLIPS GALLERY: PALM BEACH. JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT, WORKS. NOVEMBER 13 TO DECEMBER 23.
I left my car at the valet stand directly in front of the gallery and then stepped inside. So this was it. The gallery that Will’s father wanted him to run. The front room was stark white with a polished wood floor. The air-conditioning offered relief from the sun and humidity.
I was greeted by a young woman in a very fitted black suit, with a de rigueur Palm Beach tan and blunt-cut shoulder-length blond hair. “Welcome to the Phillips Gallery. I’m Giselle Keenan,” she said to me. Then she turned her head and regarded me again. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but . . . who did your color? The streaks are
wonderful.”
