Privileged (2 page)
Every head craned around to look at me. I could see their reaction all over their faces: Her?
Really?
James corralled me after class. I was too shocked to be nervous, and then I was too at ease to remember why I would have been nervous. We went for coffee and agreed on everything and everyone from Jonathan Safran Foer (loved
Everything Is Illuminated
) to Donna Tartt (loathed
The Secret History
). Lily, oracle of all romantic wisdom, had cautioned me to never, ever,
ever
have sex on dates one through three. I suppose you could say that I took her advice, in that my first meeting with James wasn’t really a date. I was in his loft bed within five hours of “Want to grab a cup of coffee?”
We’d come to New York together after graduation, though not so together that we shared an apartment. His parents owned an excruciatingly chic white-on-white pied-à-terre in a Donald Trump Upper West Side development, though their three-million-dollar mansion in Tenafly, New Jersey, was actually home. Dr. and Mrs. Ladeen—he was an intensely anxious but gifted cardiologist, she was a senior editor at the
New York Review of Books
—offered James the condo rent-free while he began what would surely be his meteoric rise to literary fame. Their expectation was based not only on the fact that he was truly talented, but also on the fact that his mother had used
her
connections to snag James a junior editor job at
East Coast
.
East Coast
is kind of like
The New Yorker
, except with even more of a focus on fiction.
Alas, James’s parents had never warmed up to me. I’d tried, I really had, but there was no question they harbored hope James would get back together with his former girlfriend, Heather van der Meer, the youngest daughter of their longtime family friends. And thus the offer of lodging did not extend to me.
That was okay. There was plenty of time. James and I were happy. And tonight was his twenty-third birthday. I wanted it to be memorable, which was why I’d cut my bank account in half: first, dinner and a fabulous bottle of wine at the restaurant Prune. During dessert, I would casually break out the concert tickets, which would cause him to whoop with delight and lavish upon me the kind of public display of affection to which he was normally allergic. After the concert, we’d go back to his place for the best part of the evening. And morning.
To finalize my plan, all I had to do was trade my dad’s Woodstock T-shirt for the tickets.
“We doing this or not?” Pete tapped his coffee-colored loafer against the sidewalk.
I bit my lower lip. My parents would understand. Of course they would. Or at least that was what I told myself. We made the swap. God, James was going to be so surprised.
I stuck the tickets in my backpack and then rose to wish Pete a pleasant life. A kid with a shaved head—he couldn’t have been older than fourteen—wheeled toward us on one of those delivery-boy bicycles. He was swerving from side to side, taking pleasure in scaring the little old Polish ladies nearby.
“Thanks,” I told Pete. “Take good care of my—Hey!”
The kid on the bicycle sped past me, snatching my backpack before I could sling it over my shoulder.
“Stop! Stop that kid!” I bellowed.
I gave chase, Pete gave chase, and a lot of other people did, too. But the kid cut off the path and through the trees, pumping for all he was worth. A few seconds later, he was speeding down Avenue A with my backpack swaying from a handlebar.
It was almost as if the concert tickets and my two hundred dollars were waving goodbye.
Choose the analogy that best expresses the relationship of the words in the following example:
EAST VILLAGE WALK-UP :
SCOOP
(a) classic six on the Upper West Side :
The New Yorker
(b) condo in Panama City :
USA Today
(c) Hollywood Hills bungalow :
Daily Variety
(d) flat in Camden, London :
Blender
(e) SoHo loft :
Us Weekly
A
skinny white kid with a shaved head, combat boots, baggy green shorts, black sweatshirt, and a tattoo on the knuckles of his right hand,” I reported, forking the larger of the two filet mignons I’d just broiled in my apartment’s ancient stove onto James’s plate. “Also, one of his handlebars was dented. So I told all that to the cop.”
“Wow, that smells amazing.” James inhaled appreciatively. He tucked his dark hair behind his ears and blinked his gorgeous gray eyes at me. “So what did the cop say?”
I slid the second steak onto my plate and headed back to the counter where I’d left the side dishes. “He said it was the most detailed description of a perp he’d ever heard and that I should consider a career in law enforcement.”
“Either that or you’ve been watching too much
CSI.
”
James was sitting on a folding chair at the wooden table in my apartment’s pathetic excuse for a kitchen. Charma had salvaged it from the street, found furniture being one of New York City’s greatest shopping perks for the salary-challenged. It had various profanities carved into its surface—EAT SHIT AND DIE was my favorite. I liked to think the former owner had Tourette’s and a fetish for sharp objects.
The rest of the kitchen was similarly déclassé: warped black and white linoleum, appliances from the middle of a former century, a sink permanently stained by antibiotic-resistant life forms. It was a long, long way from Prune.
Still, when I brought the mashed potatoes and braised asparagus to the table, James gave me a huge smile. I had remembered his all-time favorite meal. It was still a piss-poor excuse for a surprise, but what choice did I have? After the cop had complimented me on my powers of observation, he’d cheerfully added that the odds of finding the kid who had ripped me off weren’t great, and even if they did find him, my backpack and its contents would be long gone. Meanwhile, Craigslist Pete insisted that a deal was a deal, refused to return my T-shirt, and took off before I gave the cop my statement.
I’d decided not to tell James that I’d lost both the money for dinner at Prune and the front-row tickets to the Strokes. Why make him feel guilty? Instead, I withdrew forty more bucks from my calamitously low bank account and bought the makings of a great dinner. As birthday surprises went, it pretty much sucked, but I figured I could liven things up with dessert.
“Oh, man, that’s perfect.” James closed his eyes in rapture as he chewed the medium-rare steak. “You canceled your credit cards, all that?” he asked.
“Credit card, singular,” I reminded him. Not that the kid could have used it anyway—my Visa had a two-thousand-dollar limit that I was already over. I tasted my steak. Delish. It was one of the few things I could cook well. “What did your parents give you?”
The night before, his parents had taken him to Bouley. I hadn’t been invited, despite the fact that last year Heather the Perfect had joined them at Five Hundred Blake Street, arguably the best restaurant in New Haven.
Truthfully, I didn’t know Heather very well, but I had of course looked her up on Facebook. She was the youngest daughter of a rich Rhode Island family that traced its roots back to Roger Williams, and she was currently a first-year law student at Harvard. Not only did Heather have a brain, she had straight blond hair, a swanlike neck, and the kind of pouty lips I longed to have. A mere mortal who writes photo captions for a living and is a size larger on the bottom than on the top could not possibly compete.
“My present?” James’s voice pulled me out of my musings. “My mom got John Updike to sign first editions of all the Rabbit novels for me.”
I took a bite of steak and tried to smile. The only collectible I
used
to have was the Woodstock T-shirt.
For the next few minutes, I ate while James regaled me with tales from
East Coast.
He’d been assigned to edit the short stories of a half-dozen well-known young singer-songwriters. According to James, they all sucked, and he’d had to rewrite every word while they got the credit.
“I
hate
it when that happens,” I teased, refilling our glasses with an Australian Shiraz that I’d found in the bargain bin. “Like, why don’t
I
get credit for what I rewrote about Jessica and Ashley’s dueling lip injections?”
He reached across the table for my hand. “You won’t be stuck there for long.”
Easy for a guy working at
East Coast
to say. I made little circles with my fork in what was left of my mashed potatoes. “If I could just pitch one really great idea that Debra would like . . .”
Debra Wurtzel was my editor in chief. She knew pop culture the way James knew Salinger. Editorial meetings were Monday mornings, and assistants like me attended only at the mercurial behest of an immediate boss—in my case, Latoya Lincoln, who’d invited me exactly twice. The first time Debra hadn’t even glanced in my direction. But the second time she’d fixed her gaze on me and asked, “Megan? Your ideas?”
When Debra looked at me, everyone else did, too. I think I’ve already established that the center of attention is not my favorite place to be. For one thing, I blush. Seriously. The conference room fell silent as my face turned the color of an overripe tomato. Finally, I pitched a piece about a new study correlating celebrities’ weights with dips and spikes in the average weight of sixteen-to-twenty-year-old women.
Debra’s assistant, Jemma Lithgow, a recent Oxford grad in size-nothing Seven jeans, reminded the room that we had recently done a cover story on diet secrets of the stars, so we couldn’t very well turn around and rip that which we had just lauded. She didn’t need to add “you size-ten asshole” because, really, her look said it all.
Ever since that meeting, I’d been relegated to
Scoop
purgatory. Ambitious peers no longer sat with me for lunch in the fourth-floor commissary, clearly afraid of being tainted by my loser status. At least the risk of being asked back to the Monday editorial meeting was slim. I was okay avoiding further public humiliation for a while, thanks very much.
When James and I had finished eating, I piled the dishes in the sink, put in the stopper, and added water and dish soap. My prewar—meaning, pre–World War I—building had not come with plumbing fixtures suitable for a dishwasher. James came up behind me and lifted my hair to kiss the back of my neck.
“Hey,” he murmured as he nuzzled. “I was just thinking about the holidays.”
This was an interesting development. Thanksgiving and Christmas were practically upon us, and we’d spoken about them only in passing. “Yeah?”
He kissed me again, then his hands snaked around my waist. “My parents want us to go to Florida, to our place in Gulf Stream.”
Us?
“So I thought . . . maybe you’d like to come?” James asked. “For Thanksgiving?”
Thanksgiving was only ten days away. It wasn’t what you would call a lot of notice. Still, I felt like pumping my fist in the air.
I cocked my head back far enough so that I could see his eyes. “Your parents invited me?”
“Well, not yet,” he hedged. “I wanted to check with you first.”
Not good. Wasn’t this kind of invitation supposed to work the other way around?
“What do you think?” James prodded, sneaking a forefinger under the bottom of my T-shirt. He kissed me again, then pulled my T-shirt up over my head.
“I think . . .” I said, trying to concentrate on what it would be like to miss Thanksgiving with my own family. But then James slid his hand into my jeans, and all I could say was “Oh” and then “Okay” and then “
Yes
.”
I reached for James’s pants, unbuttoning them with one hand and tugging them to his knees with the other. I should mention here that in addition to writing, I do have one other talent—at least that’s what I’ve been told. Let’s just say growing up on the dark side of my sister’s celestial glow made me try harder.
I whispered to James that he should go wait for me in bed, I had a birthday surprise for him. He was only too eager to oblige.
I opened the fridge and pulled out a chocolate cake with mocha frosting from the Edelweiss pastry shop on Second Avenue. Maybe I didn’t have front-row Strokes tickets anymore, but I was hoping that frosting some of his favorites of my body parts would make up for it.
“Hey, where’s your Woodstock T-shirt?” he called from the living room/bedroom.
Shit. “I decided to store it at my parents’ house,” I called back, anointing myself with mocha frosting.
You might ask yourself at this point if I felt even slightly ridiculous. The answer is yes. Frankly, I had never frosted my nipples before. Nor any other body parts. But I was determined, in spite of everything, to make this a birthday that James would remember.
I was just putting the finishing touches on the lower portion of my anatomy and kind of wishing that his favorite flavor were vanilla or strawberry, because mocha brown is not really the most becoming color for a nude and edible seduction, when I smelled smoke.
I checked the broiler, but I’d turned it off. Yet the smell was getting stronger. I cautiously padded to the front door and peered through the peephole. The hallway was black. A split second later, the old-fashioned fire alarm above my head began to clang loudly.
“Fire!” I ran into the bedroom, completely forgetting my nudity and the frosting. “Fire! There’s a fire! The hallway is full of smoke!”
James sprang from the bed, his enthusiasm deflating, his eyes wide with fright. He grabbed his boxers.
“The fire escape!” I commanded, knowing we couldn’t get through the smoke to the stairs.
I grabbed the first thing I saw—a bed sheet—and wrapped it around myself. As it turned out, frosting serves as a reasonable adhesive. Who knew? It took precious seconds for James to manhandle the window that opened to the fire escape. When he was finally able to shove it upward, he pushed me through, then followed. I could already hear fire engines in the distance.
Did I mention that physical education was never my strong suit? Well, it turns out that if I’m highly motivated, I can really haul ass. Down and down and down we went. By the time we reached the base of the escape at the second floor, a huge crowd had gathered, staring straight up at us.
