Adored (27 page)
“Max!” said Hunter, fighting to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “How are you, man? When are you coming back?”
“That’s what I called to tell you,” said Max. “Oh, fuck, have I just woken you up? What time is it?”
“Two in the morning, but don’t worry, I’m up. Tiffany went home to that shit hole she lives in, and now I can’t sleep.”
Max was taken aback. He had never heard Hunter sounding so bitter about anything, especially not Tiffany.
“Oh,” he said lamely. “Well, cheer up, fella, you see the girl every day. I’d make the most of a night off if I were you. At least you can fart in bed with impunity.”
“Hmmm, I guess,” said Hunter. “So what’s up anyway. Did you change your plans?”
“Slightly,” said Max. “I’m still leaving here on the twenty-eighth, but I’m going to New York for a few days. There’s a chance I may have a meeting with Alex McFadden on the twenty-ninth.”
“Max, that’s great!” said Hunter, genuinely impressed. Alex McFadden was a big producer of Broadway musicals, and Max had been angling for a one-on-one meeting with the guy forever.
“Yeah, well, it hasn’t happened yet,” said Max, ever the pessimist. “But in any case, a couple of mates of mine from school are having a big New Year’s Eve bash at this loft in SoHo. Jerry, my mate, just got a whopping great bonus from Goldman, so he’s spending a fortune on this thing. It’ll be wall-to-wall beautiful women—and I’m talking New York beautiful, none of your plastic, L.A. silicone bullshit. I know you and Tiffany are as good as married, but there’s no law against looking. Wanna come?”
Hunter chuckled quietly to himself. Sometimes Max reminded him of nothing more than an overexcited Labrador. Listening to him chattering happily away about this party, he could almost hear his tail thumping on the ground.
“Thanks, man, but I can’t,” he said, stretching out his arms in a huge, full-bodied yawn and rubbing his head drowsily. “We’re shooting on New Year’s Eve.”
“You’re kidding?” said Max. “Doesn’t that slave driver Orchard ever give you a night off? It’s New Year’s Eve, for Christ’s sake.”
“What can I tell you?” said Hunter. “He works hard, and that means the rest of us have to keep up. Anyway, I don’t mind. Tiffany is working too, so we can maybe have dinner together or something later. To be honest with you, I’m feeling kinda low-key right now. And you know how much I hate New York.”
“Suit yourself,” said Max, who considered hating New York to be a form of mental illness. “I’ll see you back in Hell-A on the second or third, then.”
“Oh, get over yourself!” Hunter laughed. “Don’t give me that Hell-A shit. You love it here and you know it. Just wait till you’ve had three days of subzero winds and hail in Manhattan. You’ll be
begging
to come back home.”
Once Max had hung up, Hunter took his drink with him and climbed back into bed, pulling the covers up around him. The lingering smell of Tiffany’s body still clung to his sheets. With all his heart, he wished she were lying there next to him.
It had been a bitterly cold winter in New York, one of the worst on record.
Tourists still flocked there in droves, to skate around the Christmas tree at the romantic Rockefeller Center ice rink, to marvel at the snow and the lights on Park Avenue, or to visit Santa’s grotto at FAO Schwarz. Ruddy-cheeked families, with Dad in his Brooks Brothers cashmere coat, Mom in full-length mink, and the kids in scarves, woolly hats, and down jackets from the Gap, stamped their feet on every corner against the cold, wolfing down cheap hot dogs smothered in fried onions just so they could feel something warm hitting their stomachs, while passing drivers splashed them with icy spray from the puddles as they honked and swerved their way down Lexington.
The snow had turned to grimy slush on the streets, but it still kept falling, and the taxi drivers came in from Queens every morning with six inches of pure white icing on top of their marzipan-yellow cabs. Manhattan was crowded and dirty with a windchill factor that could have shamed the North Pole.
But there was nowhere quite like New York at Christmastime.
For just over a year, Siena and Ines had shared a Manhattan apartment, although each spent a good half of her time traveling, doing shows and campaigns around the world. Both the girls had left the city over the holiday, Ines to visit her family in Seville, and Siena to stay with a well-known designer and his boyfriend at their weekend retreat in Vermont. But after five days away, they had both found themselves going stir-crazy and decided to fly back to New York in time for New Year’s Eve.
Sitting in the window seat of their palatial living room overlooking Central Park, with a red-and-green tartan blanket pulled up over her knees and a big glass of cognac in her hands, Siena looked out over the snowy greenery below her.
“So was it lovely in Spain?” she asked Ines, who was busy applying a third coat of purple polish to her toenails. “You don’t look very brown.”
“Ees weenter in Espain, you eediot,” Ines laughed. “But yes, I ’ad a great time. Eet was so long since I saw all my family togethair.” She rolled her eyes to heaven. “I ate like a peeg, though.”
“Me too,” said Siena, thinking back longingly to the rum-soaked Yule log she’d eaten almost single-handedly at Fabrizio’s. “I’m on champagne and cigarettes only for the rest of the week.”
Ines raised a questioning eyebrow at her friend’s half-drunk cognac but said nothing.
“So what are your plans for tomorrow night?” asked Siena. “Are you going to Matt’s New Year’s thing?”
“No, I don’t theenk so,” said Ines, screwing the cap back on her nail polish bottle and blowing gently on her toes. “I am so tired of heem. I theenk he prefairs you, anyway.”
“Oh, baloney,” protested Siena, blushing.
In fact, Ines’s most recent boyfriend had already made his feelings toward her perfectly clear at a party a few weeks ago. Fucking slimeball. As if she would do the dirty on her best friend with a scumbag like him. She was glad that Ines was finally seeing the light about Matt.
“I haird about thees party in SoHo,” Ines continued, “you know, the Eenglish friend of Anya’s? A lot of cool people are going to be there, maybe we should stop by?”
Siena finished her drink and walked over to the fridge, extracting a cold sausage and munching on it contemplatively. She’d start the nicotine diet tomorrow. “Sure, I don’t mind,” she said.
Her own supposed boyfriend, a Brazilian model called Carlo, had been putting pressure on her to join him and his friends at some bash downtown, but Siena’s relationship claustrophobia was already starting to kick in. She’d much rather hang with Ines and the girls.
“Those Wall Street guys spend money like water,” she mused, leaning back against the cold fridge door. “I remember the last banker party I went to, the guy had this fuck-off fountain flowing with Cristal the whole night. He must have spent fifteen thousand on that fountain alone. Totally vulgar but kinda cool.”
She finished the sausage and started gnawing away on a slightly stale hunk of cheddar. They really must get around to some grocery shopping. “So who else is going?”
Ines carefully removed her white foam toe separators and stood up. She was so tall and thin, with her shock of red hair—she had cut it very short about three months ago—she reminded Siena of an extra-long safety match.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Anya, I theenk Zane and some of the other boys will be there. A lot of bankers.” She wiggled her purple toes admiringly. “But of course”—she grinned—“as soon as we arrive, every man in New York weel be banging down that door!”
Siena laughed. Sometimes Ines could be even more of an arrogant bitch than she was.
Max struggled miserably along Fifth Avenue. With his sleet-soaked raincoat clinging like shrink wrap to his huge shoulders, and his pants splattered from the knee down with filthy spray from the streets, he looked exactly like he felt—utterly dejected.
New York sucked.
His meeting with the great Broadway producer Alex McFadden yesterday had been yet another waste of time. The guy had said some complimentary things about some of Max’s English theater work, and had even admired the short film he’d had at Sundance last year. But Max had been to enough of these “love your stuff, must get together sometime” meetings to know when he was being given the brushoff, however gracefully it was done. Unlike most of the L.A. producers he dealt with, McFadden had been a gentleman, taking time out of his day to encourage a struggling young director he didn’t know from Adam. But the fact remained, Max was no nearer to hitting the big time than he had been last week in Batcombe, and he was starting to feel increasingly hopeless. He couldn’t wait for this year to be over.
To cheer himself up, he had run into FAO Schwarz to pick up some presents for the kids. It was Madeleine’s birthday on New Year’s Day, and he’d promised to track down a Rollerblading Barbie. Max had spent enough time in New York to know that one’s fellow shoppers could be a bit on the pushy side, but he had never seen anything quite like the women in that fucking toy store. They were like drug-crazed prop forwards: grabbing and shoving and wrestling over these Barbie dolls as if they were the last water bottle on a desert island. By the time he’d beaten a crowd of them back to secure Madeleine’s prize, then gone through the whole ordeal again trying to find something suitable for the two boys, he’d emerged onto the street feeling like a gristly piece of meat that had just been chewed up and spat out by some giant, man-eating monster.
“Taxi!” he yelled as an apparently empty cab sped straight past him, stopping for a leggy blonde half a block down. “Fucker,” he mumbled, although he couldn’t really blame the driver. He’d have pulled over for the blonde as well. Abandoning hope of finding a cab in such foul weather, and suddenly in desperate need of a restorative drink, he doubled back on himself and nipped into the O’Mahoney’s pub on the corner. The dingy dark-wood-paneled bar was almost empty. Thank Christ. He was in no mood to have to wait around for service.
“What can I get you, sir?”
Max looked up from his piles of shopping into the green eyes of a truly stunning girl. She was wearing a tight white T-shirt with the O’Mahoney’s logo emblazoned across her magnificently ample chest, and her long auburn hair tumbled down around her shoulders, making her look not unlike the storybook pictures of Helen of Troy.
“Fuck me, you’re beautiful,” said Max, before realizing to his horror that he’d actually spoken the words aloud.
The siren laughed, a deep, mellow sound that Max found quite enchanting. The nightmare of the Barbie department was already fading into the dim recesses of his memory.
“And you’re not looking too bad yerself,” she said.
Ah, that Irish accent. It killed him every time.
Max noticed the mischievous way her eyes flickered when she spoke to him and her brazen holding of his gaze. Things were definitely starting to look up.
“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly, unable to wipe the smile off his face. “That just slipped out. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m Max, by the way. Max De Seville.”
He offered her his hand and she shook it.
“What, you mean like Bond, James Bond?” she teased him. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Max. I’m Angela.”
For a few delicious seconds they held each other’s hands, neither of them saying a word.
“So, Max,” said Angela eventually, still looking deep into his eyes. “What can I get for you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Max drawled, looking her body up and down as though he were appraising a master painting. “But I expect I can think of something.”
He woke up the next morning with a hangover that could have felled an elephant.
“Oh shit,” he whispered, opening one eye and trying to reorient himself to his spinning hotel room. “I’ve died and gone to hell.”
“Well that’s just charming, thanks very much.”
Angela was lying above him, propped up on her forearms, her big, smooth, rounded breasts spilling onto his chest, and the tips of her titian hair softly brushing against his face. Opening his eyes a little further, Max saw her smudged black eye makeup, and her lips and chin slightly reddened from kissing, and the previous night’s events gradually started coming back to him.
“Not you, angel,” he said, stroking her hair tenderly, but not wanting to risk a kiss, with his mouth tasting like a four-day-old ashtray. “You’re heavenly.” She was, too. How the hell had he managed to land a girl like that? “But unfortunately, I think someone may have broken in here last night and smashed me over the head with an anvil. Oh God,” he groaned, pushing her gently off him. “Did I miss something, or did you not sink about seven pints last night? How come I’m the only one who feels like a rat’s arse this morning?”
She laughed and, whipping the duvet off both of them, straddled him again, this time taking his arms and pulling them up so his hands were on her breasts.
“You know what the best cure for a hangover is?” She gave him that mischievous look again.
“Oh please, no, for God’s sake, woman. Have some compassion for a dying man,” Max whimpered.
Licking her palm, Angela reached down and wrapped her right hand firmly around his dick.
“Just close your eyes,” she whispered. “I’m about to give you the last rites.”
By the time he arrived at Jerry’s loft later that evening for the party, Max’s stomach had stabilized, but he still looked like a man in the final stages of acute liver failure.
“What the fuck happened to you?” asked Jerry, ushering him in from the lobby and relieving him of a bottle of vintage Chablis.
“I had a rough night last night,” said Max, pushing his way through a roomful of glamorous New Yorkers and following his old friend into the kitchen, which was crammed with flustered uniformed serving staff preparing yet more trays of complicated-looking hors d’oeuvres.
“Was she worth it?” asked Jerry, snaking expertly past two waitresses and handing Max a flute of champagne.
“Fuck, yeah,” said Max, shuddering. The faint lemony smell of the fizzing alcohol was making him feel nauseated. He pushed away the glass. “But I’m never drinking again. Have you got any Coke?”
“Liquid or powder?” Jerry smiled.
“Liquid,” said Max firmly. “And not Diet. I need the sugar.” He put his hand to his temple. “That music’s fucking loud, mate.”
Jerry produced a Coke from the fridge and passed it over. “That’s the hottest DJ in the city, Max my friend,” he said. “He doesn’t do quiet. Besides, this is a party, and a shit-hot one at that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Right on cue, a six-foot brunette with legs up to her armpits sauntered past the kitchen doorway in a skintight orange minidress and thigh-high boots.
“Hey, Katya.” Jerry nodded at her, acknowledging her smile as she walked past. She blew him a kiss in return and disappeared into the throng.
“So I don’t want to hear another word about your bloody hangover, all right?” continued Jerry, slapping Max painfully across the back of the shoulders. “It’s New Year’s Eve, mate. Have some hair of the dog, get out there, and stop moaning.” He raised his bottle of Beck’s to Max’s glass of Coke in a toast. “Good to see you.”
Max downed his glass in one almighty gulp. “Good to see you too, Jerry.”
Wandering back into the main party room, an immense, warehouse-sized living space with panoramic views across the city, Max wished he had made a bit more of an effort. He was not naturally lacking in confidence, but a depressing feeling of inadequacy gripped him as he caught sight of his own reflection in one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors: pallid, unshaven, wearing a dirty old pair of Diesel jeans and a gray fisherman’s sweater of Henry’s. He wasn’t exactly the epitome of New York chic.
As he approached a low table groaning with more of the hors d’oeuvres he’d admired earlier in the kitchen, and began to swoop in on a caviar-and-cream-cheese blini, he noticed a sea of people parting around him and moving toward the door. He was starting to wonder if he still smelled of last night’s hangover and had somehow imagined his earlier shower, when he realized that they were not moving away from him, but toward a new arrival.
“She’s here,” he heard a fellow next to him whispering to his companion. “I
told
you she was coming.”
“Who’s here?” asked Max through a mouthful of caviar. He felt ravenous all of a sudden.
“Didn’t you see her?” said the man, a trendy advertising type wearing orange lenses in his Buddy Holly glasses, and waving in the general direction of the crowd by the door. “It’s Siena McMahon.”
Max almost choked on his blini.
“And that fit Spanish bird’s with her,” piped up the man’s English sidekick. Max pushed past them and made his way to a sofa at the back of the room, where two models were deep in conversation. He was very curious to see Siena, but some instinct made him recoil from the idea of battling his way toward her like a besotted fan.
“Mind if I perch here?” he asked the two girls as he eased himself down onto the arm of the sofa.
“Not at all,” said the prettier one, looking at his long legs and muscled torso with approval. “You’re a big boy, though. I’m not sure if that armrest can take your weight.”
