the Overnight Socialite (38 page)

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Authors: Bridie Clark

BOOK: the Overnight Socialite
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"Correction." Mallory cleared her throat. "She bid on
Lucia Haverford Ellis's
gown. Who knows if she'll be equally impressed by some small-town nobody. No offense."
"Just give us one week," Lucy said, trying to push past Mallory's brutal candor. "Then you can go ahead and write about how I conned everyone into thinking I was to the manor born. But that will just be backstory. The
real
story here isn't about society scandal. It's about reaching the summit--achieving a dream--the good, old-fashioned New York way: by any means necessary."
Mallory considered this for a millisecond. "The society scandal angle will sell more copies than your prairie-girl-makes-good angle."
"Ours will elevate
Townhouse
in a way that brings in more readers over time. Remember, you'll be the first to cover the story--the whole story. It's an ASME award, Mallory. You'll be duly credited by all the other press publications that will jump on this once it breaks. You'll be the authority, the talking head, for all the news outlets, boosting
Townhouse
's visibility and your own."
"I'd agree to style the next three issues, free of charge," added Eloise, for good measure.
"You'd do that?"
"Sure. A little mutual back-scratching." Eloise smiled sweetly.
Mallory sat back in her chair, fingering the invitation, weighing the risks. "Screw me over on this, ladies, and I will make Cornelia Rockman look like a Sister of Perpetual Mercy. One week."
Wyatt squinted up at the sky, which was just growing light, and nervously took a seat on a green wooden bench. He hoped Lucy would be showing up soon, out for her typical early morning run. He felt more than a little creepy, staking her out like this, but she still refused to talk to him.
There she was! His breath tightened in his throat as he saw her running toward him, up the steps to the Central Park reservoir. She moved easily, like a veteran athlete, hair pulled off her face into a clean ponytail. Derrick would be proud. Just seeing her brought a wave of emotion--it was crazy how much Wyatt had missed her in just a few short days. He glanced at the sky.
Perfect
, he thought.
Couldn't have timed it any better.
"Lucy!" he called out. She was in her own world, and didn't look up right away. "Lucy!"
Seeing him, her eyes widened and she stopped in her tracks. He pointed vigorously up to the sky, where a plane had traced out I'M SORRY in enormous fluffy white letters. "Please, please forgive me!"
She looked up. She read the message. Then she turned, without so much as a word of response, and sprinted back toward the Met.
Hearing the familiar buzz, Lucy stopped walking down Bleecker Street and glanced down at her BlackBerry. "I just got a text from Max. He's doing a Home Depot run and wants to know how many stages we'll need," she said to Eloise.
"Six. Small ones, just big enough for each model. Assuming they all agree."
Lucy wrote back quickly with both thumbs. "Thank God he's so good with his hands." She looked up to see Eloise blush. "I mean, handy. Dottie says we can build the pieces right at her house, by the way."
"Lucy"--Eloise reached out and touched her arm--"thanks for letting me do this with you. I--it's just a godsend, to have this right now."
"Are you kidding? There's no way I could pull it off without you. You're the best thing Wyatt Hayes ever added to my life." Lucy felt just as grateful to be busy--to be the mistress of her own fate, once and for all. She didn't have time to make sense of her conflicted emotions about Wyatt, which was good, because she had no idea where to begin. "We make a fabulous team." Arms linked, they headed inside to August, a quiet West Village boite where they'd asked the other girls to meet them for lunch.
"So?" Libet asked as soon as they came into view. "What's up? Your e-mail said it was top-secret and urgent."
Lucy looked out at the clutch of young women, arrayed in their luncheon finery, some in clothing they'd commissioned from Lucy since the
Townhouse
shoot (
no wonder
, she thought,
that Doreen was able to quit her Nola job to focus solely on producing my dresses
). All the girls around the table knew her as Lucia Haverford Ellis, the Chicago heiress to a timber fortune who'd gone to the same sorts of schools they'd attended, who'd jumped onto the same committees and showed up at the same openings. The woman they knew wasn't Lucy; the woman they knew was Wyatt's creation. Rooted as they were in their Upper East Side-Hamptons-Palm Beach world, could they even
imagine
being the daughter of a manicurist from Dayville, Minnesota? Or for that matter, being the friend of that girl?
"Ladies," Lucy said, taking off her spring jacket and sitting at the head of the table. She took a deep breath and looked at Eloise, who nodded in encouragement. "There's something I need to tell you."
Wyatt hit the speakerphone button and dialed Lucy's home number. He'd lost hope that she might answer his call herself. Instead he braced himself for her inevitable voice mail greeting, holding his manuscript over the shredder with both hands.
"I've erased all the book files from my computer," he called out after the beep. "And this is the sound of the last hard copy getting shredded!" He began feeding page after page into the machine's waiting teeth, hoping the gesture might summon her to the phone, but nobody picked up.
Libet twirled around Eloise's living room. "This is too gorgeous. You said I get to keep it, right?"
Lucy nodded, her pursed lips holding a row of pins. "C'mere," she managed to get out, and Libet stood still to be fitted. Lucy expertly pulled in the fabric around the socialite's bony bottom.
Shoot
. Libet was so greyhound-thin that getting the hips to fit caused a puckering at the waist. If she had more time, Lucy could redo the whole dress. But she had a mere four days left and two more looks to fine-tune. Doreen had been working at a turbocharged pace, too, and Lucy couldn't ask any more of her.
"It's cool you're doing this, Luce," Libet said. "I mean, you're an artist. Just like me, you know?" Lucy thought of Libet's rotting fruit and smiled politely. "I've got your back two hundred percent. I had a friend in high school who was poor, and she was, like,
so
great."
"Remember, you can't tell anyone about any of this," Lucy said, still struggling with the pins. She took a step back and looked at her model. "Libet, I'm going to ask you a favor. Please don't take it the wrong way."
"Anything, sweetie."
"Could you possibly . . . eat a few cheeseburgers this week? Some Haagen-Dazs? The thing is, the dress will fit perfectly if you gain five pounds. Otherwise, it'll cost me hours of work, and I don't have an extra minute between now and Saturday."
At first Libet looked horrified. Then, accepting the sacrifice she'd been asked to make, she nodded gravely. "
I'll do it
," she declared with great feeling. "For you, Lucy, I will gain five pounds."
"Wow, that's great. Thanks so much."
"You said I get to keep the dress, right?" Libet tilted her head, straining to hear. "Do you hear music outside?"
"Oh, that. There's a boys' choir singing outside the window."
"What?" Libet rushed over to look. "There's two dozen kids on your sidewalk!"
"Wyatt and I heard them perform last month at a benefit for a settlement house, and I told him how much I loved it--"
"So he sent them over to serenade you?
Omigod!
That is so sweet!"
Lucy just shook her head. "Over-the-top gestures don't make what he did any better. Besides, I don't have time for a concert, personal or otherwise, right now. I'm not even sleeping this week."
"You're tough, lady," Libet said with admiration. "I'd totally melt. I hear Wyatt's a wreck. Mimi said Jack said he's been moping around the Racquet Club."
"Poor guy," Lucy said, shoving in her final pin. But as much as she hated to admit it, it was getting harder each day to bar Wyatt from her thoughts. She deleted his messages without listening, afraid of the effect his voice might have on her. She had to stay strong--she couldn't let him distract her from what really mattered, and she didn't know if she'd ever be able to trust him again.
As Libet slipped back into her street clothes, Lucy rummaged through the kitchen cabinets to find her a gift: a huge tub of Nutella. Four days, two looks to go.
"Please," Wyatt begged, following Rita as she hurried down 33rd Street toward the subway stop. "I just need to talk to her for one minute. Could you convince her to give me a minute?"
Rita stopped at the top of the stairs, clearly contemptuous. "Maybe I could, but I won't. And let me tell you something else. I got your note about wanting to 'fund' Rita's Artistic Acrylics.
Insulting
, Mister. As if I would sell out my own daughter for a bribe like that!"
Wyatt groaned. He'd known that offer was a bad idea, but was running out of good ones. "I'm sorry, Rita, I'm just--
desperate
." Wyatt couldn't believe he was saying that about himself, but it was true.
"Why are you so worked up? I figure a guy like you could get any girl he wants."
"Lucy's irreplaceable."
Rita seemed to soften a little, perhaps sensing his agony. "Well, give her time. Lucy just might come around, you never know." Wyatt, clinging to the sliver of hope she'd just offered, watched as Rita headed down the stairs and out of sight.
"Where the hell is everybody?" Cornelia scowled into the phone when Anna Santiago's voice mail picked up again. Bad enough that she was persona non grata at Dafinco, which had immediately yanked her perfume off the shelves and suppressed news about the rash of rashes as if it were another Chernobyl. Bad enough that Daphne couldn't get the MTV producers to return calls about her reality show.
But what made it all worse was that even Fernanda wouldn't talk to her.
Despite Fernanda's blatant disloyalty at the ball, Cornelia had decided to be the bigger person when she heard about her friend's surprise engagement. (She'd gotten the news from one of her maids, who knew one of the Fairchilds' maids, and she never received so much as an e-mail from Fernanda herself. She was willing to overlook that, too.) If Fernanda could get over Parker's distressingly six-figure annual income, then Cornelia would, too. But how could she be supportive if the girl refused to speak to her? Fernanda picked up the phone each time she called, only to immediately hang up in her ear.
Cornelia headed into her white marble kitchen, carefully avoiding eye contact with mirrors. She hadn't left her apartment since the ball--the perfume debacle and subsequent whispered bad-mouthing had essentially put her under house arrest, and it was shocking how quickly her carefully maintained looks had run wild with nobody there to see them.
Her hair was now kinked and curly, her nails were a ragged mess, and she hadn't showered for at least two days. It felt strangely good to let herself go.
I've had to be perfect for twenty-seven years
, she realized, pouring some more vodka into her coffee mug, which she used before noon for propriety's sake.
Townhouse
would be out in just a few more days, ending the Lucy dynasty and restoring Cornelia to the top of Manhattan's social order. Then her little vacation would be over.
Returning from their pilgrimage to Costco in Queens, Rita and Margaret appeared in the doorway of Dottie Hayes's library, each holding a megabox. "Got the Twinkies, got the Bagel Bites!" Rita announced.
"You are the best!" Lucy jumped up from her sewing machine to help them with their loads. "And the wine spritzers?"
"But of course!" Margaret smiled. "We'll load up Mrs. Hayes's refrigerator. Keep working."
"You sent more flowers?" Wyatt was seated across from Trip at their usual table at Bar & Books, a half-empty pack of Dunhills on the table between them. They'd been camped out for an hour, swilling scotch and trying to make sense of the situation. Lucy still wasn't returning his calls. It had been five days. He had tried everything: repeatedly leaving voice mails with apologies so profuse they startled him; continuing with avowals that his manuscript had been shredded, then burned, then buried; begging a tightlipped Eloise and even more tightlipped Dottie Hayes to intervene. His own mother had stiffly told him to "leave my Lucy alone." All had failed. He felt like an exile from his own life. During the past three months, Lucy Ellis had become the first person he spoke to in the morning and the last person he spoke to at night, but even still, Wyatt was surprised at how bereft he felt. Without her, and with the burden of his own guilt and hubris, he was a man deprived of oxygen.
"Of course," said Trip, who had his own problems. "Eight dozen red roses. A dozen for each of the years I've been blessed to have Eloise in my life. I've been sending 'em every day, I don't care what that doorman told you."
Wyatt groaned. "Jesus, you really wanted to remind her of how
long
it's been?"
Trip scratched his head. "Maybe that's why she hasn't responded."
"Or maybe she's buried in roses and can't see the telephone."

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