Privileged (11 page)
“Um, Keith,” I told her, his last name escaping me for a moment.
“
The
Keith?” Giselle uttered the name with hushed reverence. “I’ve tried and tried to book him. How did you do it?”
“I’m staying at Les Anges—”
“With the Baker twins? We were all on the Hearts and Hopes ball committee last season. Tell them Giselle said hi, okay? I loved their
Vanity Fair
thing.”
“Sure,” I told her, filing away some mental notes. “And I’m actually here to see Will Phillips? He’s expecting me. I’m Megan.”
“Right away.” She pushed a few buttons on her phone system. As she did, a well-dressed guy with shaggy hair and the ruddy complexion of someone who spent lots of time on boats, or golf courses, or both, entered the gallery. He smiled at me in the way that I had seen so many guys smile at my sister. My first instinct was to turn to see if he was smiling at some really hot girl standing behind me. Apparently, the Cinderella effect had lasted after the ball.
Just as my golfing sailor took a couple of steps in my direction, Will materialized. “Megan? Welcome to the gallery.”
He wore a blue sport coat, an open-collar light blue shirt, khaki pants, and maroon loafers with no socks. I would soon learn that variations on this outfit were Palm Beach’s unofficial male uniform. My sailor offered me a little nod of recognition and a good-natured look of regret. Then he turned and walked out.
“Have you had a chance to look around yet?” Will asked.
“Not much. But this room is gorgeous.”
“I grew up with it. I don’t even see it anymore,” Will confessed.
I wanted Will to be comfortable enough around me to be himself—what better poster boy for an article about Palm Beach could there be?—but it was hard to squelch my desire to kick him in the shins for being so spoiled.
“Want to take the two-cent tour and then a walk on the avenue?”
“Sounds good,” I answered him.
Will mostly talked, and I mostly listened, as he showed me through the two expansive white rooms of the gallery. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Corot’s work and life, and he took me through the artist’s three distinct periods, then turned to me. “Let’s go.”
We walked out into the dazzling early-afternoon sunshine and turned right on the sidewalk, passing one designer shop after another. Ferragamo. Gucci. Hermès. Tiffany. There was nary a Gap nor a Starbucks in sight. The pedestrian traffic was light, and the day was warm. The only real action was in front of a restaurant named Ta-boo, where a team of valets was efficiently parking a substantial lineup of Bentleys, Mercedeses, and Rolls-Royces.
I noticed a speed-limit sign that was posted with a minimum as well as a maximum. Why would you possibly have a
minimum
speed requirement?
“What’s up with those signs?” I asked.
“They don’t have those in Philadelphia?” He looked puzzled. “It’s to keep the tourists from slowing down to gawk. People around here like their privacy.”
“Who said I’m from Philadelphia?”
“Sage.”
Well, okay. This could work to my advantage. For research purposes, it couldn’t hurt for Will to also think I was the other Megan.
“So I’ve never been to Philly,” Will said. “Tell me about where you grew up.”
Thanks to my Internet research that very morning, this wasn’t hard. I told him where I liked to eat (Tre Scalini), where I liked to shop (the Smak Parlour), and where I liked to go on vacation (Gstaad, for the skiing, and Brussels, for the shopping). I was having so much fun inventing myself that I barely noticed we had done the full circle of Worth Avenue and were standing in front of the gallery again.
Will looked at his watch. “I have to get back to work.”
Wait, what about the Breakers? “Thanks for the tour.” I touched his arm. “Maybe we could get together another time.”
This was my shameless way of saying:
Ask me out for cocktails, pretty boy
. Who knew what I could get out of him after two or three drinks?
“Yeah, maybe. Take care, Megan.” I couldn’t help but think he looked a little confused as he stepped backward into the gallery.
Choose the best antonym (pair of words possessing an opposite meaning) for the following set of words:
DIVIDE and CONQUER
(a) invite and party
(b) separate and destroy
(c) highlight and blowout
(d) unify and submit
(e) mani and pedi
I
was walking on the now-familiar white pebble path between the main mansion and the twins’ manse, going over the bizarre end to Will’s and my walk, when I heard shouts coming from the pool deck. The twins—I couldn’t yet tell their voices apart—and someone else.
How intriguing.
The expletives were flying as I stepped off the path and hid behind a palm tree just west of the pool deck. From there, I could see across the deck to the cabanas, where the battle royal was taking place. The girls were still in their swimsuits, and the other woman was dressed in a beige pantsuit.
“I can’t fucking believe you, Zenith!” Sage screeched. “You call yourself a fucking manager? You
suck
!”
Manager? As in the manager who was supposed to be getting the twins all that priceless film, TV, and modeling work?
Zenith took a deep breath, clearly attempting to maintain her composure. “Look, this kind of thing happens all the time—deals fall through when it comes time for people to write checks.”
“You said you were going to get us our own TV series. Our own movie. Our own chain of clubs,” Rose whined. “You said we were going to make the world forget about Paris and Nicole!”
“Look, there
is
an offer on the table. If you weren’t such spoiled brats, you’d be grabbing at it,” Zenith fumed.
“Golden Glow spray-on tan? And I’m the fucking ‘before’ picture? Sage Baker is
never
a ‘before’ picture!”
Sage Baker as a “before” picture? Priceless.
“Are you finished?” Zenith asked quietly.
“Get the hell off our property,” Sage responded.
“Nothing would make me happier. Don’t ever call me again.” Zenith started back across the pool deck, thankfully taking a path that wouldn’t cause her to run into me.
“No, you don’t ever call
us
again!” Sage took off one of her jewel-encrusted sandals and hurled it at her retreating manager. It plunged into the pool. “And you look like shit in beige!” Sage turned back to her sister. “Fuck her. We’ll find another manager. Come on, Rose, let’s go get plastered.”
“No.” Rose looked like she was on the verge of tears.
“No?”
Sage echoed, sounding incredulous. I was incredulous, too. I hadn’t known that Rose was capable of saying that word to her sister.
“Everything’s . . . ruined.” Rose dashed across the deck and down the stone steps to the beach, leaving Sage alone. For a brief moment, it seemed like Sage was going to go after her. But then she strode back toward their house, kicking her other sandal into the pool on the way.
Divide and conquer,
I told myself. The twins’ house was already divided. All I had to do was conquer.
I took the back way to the beach and tried to look casual, like I merely happened to be going for an afternoon stroll. Almost immediately, I saw Rose taking baby steps along the surf line, dancing away from each oncoming wave and then daring the ocean to soak her feet.
“Out for a walk?” I asked as I approached. Her lower lip was trembling. “Hey, are you okay?”
She shook her head. The tide was on the way in, and a wave came dangerously close to soaking our feet. I jumped back, figuring Marco’s ballet slippers were not waterproof.
“Where’s my sister?” Rose asked, looking concerned.
I shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Rose started up the beach and sat down against the stone seawall. I followed her there, realizing that if Sage looked out at the beach, she couldn’t see us together. That was the point.
“We’re totally fucked,” Rose finally muttered. “Sage and me.”
Well, then. “Fucked how?”
She kept her eyes on the water. “You remember what Sage told you the night you arrived—about our manager out in Los Angeles? All the offers and how we were going to make our own money?”
I nodded and waited for her explanation. And waited some more. Finally, she let it all spill out in a monologue that challenged every law of punctuation and syntax: “Sage said doing
Vanity Fair
would make us famous, and we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere after a while without television cameras following us, and I mean, that sounded like fun because that’s how famous people are, like, all the time and everything . . . So Sage hired this manager in Los Angeles, and there were going to be all these offers, like for a movie, and our own reality TV show, and, like, makeup companies but not like cheap ones, you know?”
I nodded again. It seemed like the thing to do.
“Well,” Rose went on, “as it turns out, none of those deals worked out, but I don’t know why and, like, there was only this spray-tan thingie? Oh, and maybe this other thing that wasn’t for sure, but it was for a chain of stores in the South that carries, like, Jessica Simpson jeans, which she doesn’t even wear.”
“Wow.”
My sympathy seemed to encourage Rose. She went on, “Anyway, we wouldn’t have made enough to live for, like, a year. But we already said fuck you to Grandma’s money we never should have made you swim naked because now you hate us and you’ll never want to be our tutor but even if you did what good would that even be?” She blinked twice. “Does that make sense?”
In an alternate grammatical universe, maybe. But I got the gist, because the gist seemed like the opening I’d been hoping for. Sage had sold Rose on the notion that they wouldn’t need their grandmother’s money because they were going to make so much of their own. Ergo, they could blow me off. All wrong. Rose was confiding in me because she was scared shitless of being fundless.
There’s nothing like being needed.
“So . . . can you help us?” she asked.
I could tutor her, which would buy me more time in paradise—a good thing. No. A great thing. But could I get her in to Duke? Even if I worked with her night and day for seven and a half weeks, I wasn’t sure she had the IQ of a tennis ball. Plus,
both
twins had to be accepted, and being the Palm Beach version of Heidi Fleiss was likely Sage’s preference over being tutored by me.
At least I was getting somewhere with
one
of the twins. Maybe her sister wouldn’t be so far behind.
That night, like any good investigative journalist, I worked on my notes. Between Marco, Keith, Will, and the twins, I had more than enough dirt to bury the Palm Beach privileged.
From Suzanne de Grouchy, after one two many flirtinis at the Red and White ball: A society princess who stabbed her husband with a Wüsthof-Trident classic kitchen knife, after catching him with one of Suzanne’s friends, had received two months of house arrest. The friend was shipped off to the South of France.
From Keith, during another makeup application: Last year a shelter called the Peace Place canceled their usual fund-raising ball for The Season and instead sent out invitations announcing that “guests” could stay home in comfort and send a donation in their place. Peace Place normally received more than a million dollars in donations at their event. The year they canceled, they raised five thousand. “Charity balls during The Season,” Keith decreed, “are Palm Beach’s contribution to society.”
From Rose herself, with a napkin folded in her lap: Sometimes chewing your food and then spitting it out is just as satisfying as, like, eating . . . you know?
Seriously. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
I’d thought I’d be here for only two weeks. But Rose had given me the possibility of a two-month sojourn. To make that work, I had to get Sage on board, too. So the next morning I flatironed my hair, put on one of the more casual outfits Marco had lent me—low-rise Joe’s jeans that had shrunk in the wash, plus a white Petit Bateau T-shirt—and settled myself at the fork of the corridor between our two suites.
Around eleven, Sage strode out, wearing dark skinny jeans, a white tank with angel wings on the front, and impossibly high strappy sandals. Save for the shoes, we were similarly dressed.
I took it as a sign. “Sage!”
She looked irritated before I even opened my mouth. “What do you want?”
“Well . . .” I sagged back against the wall and tried to look as forlorn as possible.
“What?”
she snapped. “You catch crabs from someone at Bath and Tennis or something?”
I stopped sagging. Evidently, Lily had the acting talent in our family, but it was too late to stop now. “Listen, Sage, I’ll level with you.”
True. In a journalist-who’ll-do-anything-to-get-the-story kind of way
. “I know you don’t care about studying, but honestly?”
Fingers crossed
. “I really, really need this job.”
She looked at me with something approaching professional interest. “Because you’re in debt?”
“Exactly.”
Totally true.
“Big debt?”
I nodded.
Sage nodded gravely. “I kind of figured. Two years ago Precious had front-row seats during Fashion Week in New York, and the clothes were to die for that year. And she ended up, like, three hundred thousand dollars in debt, and her mom
freaked
because her credit card only had a hundred-thousand-dollar limit.”
This was amazing. And priceless.
“What did Precious’s parents do?”
Sage leaned forward. “They cut off her allowance,” she whispered, as if imparting a national-security secret. “Precious was so upset, she nearly
gave birth
. When we Googled you, I sort of figured it must be something like that.”
Ah, the irony. Never in a million years would it have occurred to me that Sage would jump to the conclusion that I had run up a couture debt and not an educational one.
“So you can see why I really need this job,” I said without correcting her misimpression. “To try to whack it down.”
“Make Mommy and Daddy Smith happy, you mean,” she interpreted. “Did they push back the release of your trust? God, it’s just so
mean
!”
