Ten Girls to Watch (15 page)

Glass and polished cement walls soared twenty-five feet to a polished cement ceiling checkered with vast skylights, all of it softly lit by bulbs I couldn’t seem to locate. Had I been the lighting designer who’d put this glow in place, I’d have immediately written a book called
Modern Ambience
featuring this apartment on the cover. A woman in a little black dress checked my name again and stepped aside to reveal a polished cement bridge spanning a shallow stream of water that cut across the corner of the room before disappearing behind frosted glass. Even with the music and the gabbing, the tripping of the water over the gleaming river rocks made the room sound like a spa. Pale-green-tinted lights beneath the water’s surface uplit the entire affair—the perfect back cover shot for
Modern Ambience.
So, this was someone’s house, and this was supposed to make me feel right at home? The only stream I’d ever had in my house was an unfortunate result of plumbing problems and a sloping floor.

As soon as I could tear my eyes away from the wonder of the water, I scanned the assembled Ones. Two possibilities immediately emerged: (1) All the parties were in kick-ass apartments and my poor-to-middle-class pals and I were simply basking in opulence, because why not meet your soul mate at a shindig worth talking about? (2) Rachel had wild-carded me into a slick, richy-rich assemblage to prove a point, that point being that this was going to be a disaster.

I looked around to assess my company. Just ahead of me a woman in a lilac satin camisole and a cream, summer-weight cashmere cardigan leaned against the back of a gray velvet armchair. Her skin was that flawless translucent sort of skin that has launched a thousand skin care product purchases by less blessed gals like me.

The man next to her glanced over. Lanky and sweet faced, he looked as if his inability to drag himself from the library had kept him from the barber for quite some time. Perhaps this was the right party after all. I caught the woman’s eye and moved toward the group.

“I’m Liz,” she said, scooting closer to our floppy-haired friend to create a space for me. I started to introduce myself at just the moment the hair guy opened his mouth to say his name.

“Oh, sorry,” I sputtered. “It’s the apartment’s fault. It’s sort of blowing my mind.”

He smiled sympathetically.

“I know what you mean,” Liz said, giving the room an impressed nod.

“Right? I feel like I should have worn my good jewels, only I don’t have any.” I laughed at my own little joke, per usual. Unfortunately, it was at that very moment that my eyes caught the glint of a giant yellow diamond cocktail ring on Liz’s right hand.

“Doug,” said the sweet-faced gentleman, putting out his hand. His wrist jutted out of his jacket, revealing gold cuff links. I didn’t get enough of a look as we shook to say for sure, but I could swear they were Alexander the Great gold coin cuff links. Oh boy. Robert had a collection of “great men” paraphernalia, including Alexander and Caesar cuff links. You name your conqueror, he had him emblazoned on something. The whiff of wild card was in the air. Right before my very eyes Doug’s hair seemed to flop its way on over from scholarly disarray to too-entitled-to-groom.

“So you’re saying your apartment isn’t a scene from
A River Runs Through It
?” Doug chuckled, leaning toward me. Hm. That was the sort of bad joke my dad would make. Maybe the cuff links were a gift. Having spent years developing the ability to smile at groan-worthy jokes, it seemed a shame to waste those skills. I gave Doug an amiable half grin.

“I hear this river thing is a new trend,” I began, not really having thought through the rest of the sentence. “Only in the really trendy places . . . it’s either chocolate or lava, not water.”

He gave me a half-puzzled, half-amused look.

I wrote a whole paper in college about myths and fairy tales across cultures in which words turned to toads, gold coins, or other assorted tokens (turns out there were loads of these stories), and I could just see the warty toads tumbling out of my mouth as I tried to dig myself out of the lava/chocolate line totally unsuccessfully with further yammering about Willy Wonka and Indiana Jones, and oh, why couldn’t I just stop? In normal conversation I could usually moderate my toad-speak, but the soaring cement walls and the room full of single-and-available strangers were putting me in peak form. Doug did his best to smile politely, but I clearly detected his darting glances to the left, to the right, to anywhere that would free him from the muck I was creating all around us. I finally bit my tongue and stopped the horror, and he politely excused himself.

I turned to Liz, figuring I’d try to croak out something at least halfway normal after the Doug Disaster.

“So, Liz, are you from New York?” As a nonnative New Yorker, I have found it is often flattering just to be asked the question, as if it were possible that little-town-me could be mistaken for a metropolitan type.

“I am, actually,” she said. “West Village, born and raised.”

“Wow, same apartment the whole time?”

“Well, sort of. My parents ended up buying the building next to ours, and we renovated, so I technically moved next door when I was eight. And then I went away for high school.”

Ah, the crisp clarity of it all. Liz “went away for high school” the exact same way I “went to college in Boston,” except I was going to be paying for “college in Boston” until I was fifty, and it was pretty clear that Liz’s time at Exeter or St. Paul’s or Groton or wherever wasn’t keeping her up late tallying lawn care word counts. Was Liz here a wild card? Just a sweet New York prep-stress all grown up and looking for crazy adventure in the form of a working boy from west of the Mississippi? As she shifted her drink I noticed the bag hanging from her arm—the nondiamond arm, that is. Small, sweet, and black, the bag was clearly the real version of a five-dollar bag I’d purchased in Chinatown solely for the amusement of its large “Prado” label. Liz’s bag didn’t say “Prado.”

She took a sip of her drink, which gave me the chance to get another eyeful of the geological marvel on her finger.

“That looks like a good idea.” I tipped my head toward her champagne glass. Sweet, sweet conversational escape.

She graciously nodded her good-bye, and I moved through the crowd, noting approximately three Indian women, no Indian men, a handful of Asian women, again, no Asian men, two black women, two black men, and an awful lot of white people in various states of highly cultivated dishevelment.

The bar was at the back, in front of one of the glass walls with a view of the Financial District. I gazed at these same buildings from Brooklyn, but from this new angle, I had to search the skyline until I recognized my favorites. There was one I especially loved, the American International Building, which had a sort of Gothic–meets–Art Deco spire that looked like the perfect spot for King Kong to hang out. I scanned and scanned, and ah, there it was. Architectural orientation complete, I got in line for crackers and cheese, piling a few baby carrots and olives onto the small plate while waiting. I smiled and said hi to the woman across the table and then did a double take at what I saw over her shoulder. At the door, the LBD with the clipboard waved her pen in front of a familiar face, the face of Secret Agent Romance, Elliot too-old-for-me Kaslowski.

I immediately spun around and pretended I hadn’t seen him, sending carrots and olives flying in the process. I stared intently out the window as the long seconds ticked by—gosh, that one building, who doesn’t love the lights of that one building, or . . . that other one. How long before I could slowly swivel back toward the party and hope that Elliot had moved on without seeing me? Just as I steeled my nerves to turn around, there was a tap on my shoulder. I startled and jumped, which finished off the flight of the crackers from my plate.

“Whoa, sorry,” Elliot said, bending down to help me clean up the mess.

“Oh, hi.” I smoothed my hair (my confidence talisman for the evening) and tried to smile like, hey, airborne crackers, no big deal. “Elliot, right?” I said, as if I hadn’t been reading his columns and as if I didn’t regularly walk through the aisles of the archives shelves with outstanding posture, just in case he should reappear.

Bent over in his jeans, light gray dress shirt, and almost black blazer, he looked like a professor who’d just dropped the notes to his lecture on “Modernists’ Search for Meaning” and was shuffling through them on the floor. If he were lecturing, I’d sit in the front row every day.

When he stood back up and awkwardly handed me back my plate of floor crackers, we both laughed a little. “So, what brings you here?” I said, ever the charmer.

“I’m doing a column on setups. The theory that other people know you better than you know yourself . . . or do they? This is the commercial angle. Last night I went out with my mom’s aerobics instructor’s daughter. That was the personal angle. And you?” he said. “Won’t John be surprised you’re here?” He smiled slyly as he pronounced the final sentence.

There was only one thing Elliot could have been referring to.

“You Google-stalked me!” I said, clasping my hands together in front of my heart. “I’m so flattered.”

Unless Elliot had stalked me for real, he must have come across a short story I’d published in the college lit mag. In the story a girl, who perhaps bore a more than slight resemblance to me, finds herself overwhelmed by the family of a boy, named John, who perhaps bore a more than slight resemblance to Robert, when she goes home with him for Thanksgiving. The story ends with her accidentally burning down his family’s boathouse, watching in horror, yet with a vague sense of satisfaction. I was mildly ashamed he’d found it—anything from college now seemed touched with a juvenile taint—but I was also proud. I still thought the story was good, and I was glad, juvenile taint aside, that it came up as one of the top Dawn West Google hits, which wasn’t a small feat given the far-reaching Internet presence of the Dawn West who lived in Ohio and headed cafeteria services for the Pawtucket school district. That story and various other bits of flattering Internet marginalia (awards, listings in various teams and organizations, a cute picture of me climbing over a snowbank from the campus newspaper) were the real reason I’d invented Kelly Burns. Not to preserve the image of a suburban man for the readers of Lawn Talk. No, to preserve my good Google.

“Stalked is such a strong word,” Elliot said.

“Don’t be offended. Google-stalking is an art,” I said. “In fact, if I could be a superhero, I would be the Googler. ‘No search is beyond her ability,’” I said in my best radio theater voice. “‘She is . . . the
Googler
.’”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t be messing with you in this department.”

“Actually, that’s very true. Case in point, this week I tracked down a Jane Smith who won Ten Girls to Watch in 1959. I had her name, Baylor University, and that’s it. I couldn’t resist trying to find her because her caption in the magazine said she grew up on a rabbit farm and they had her all decked out in a rabbit fur muff and something about it was just so ridiculous. Anyway, what do you know, I had her on the phone in fifty minutes flat. She lives in San Antonio. She has three kids. She owns a chain of scrapbook stores called Memory Magic. Her husband wants to buy a race car, but she thinks it’s a bad idea.”

“Well well,” he said, giving me his most impressed look.

“Thank you, thank you,” I said, blowing fake kisses.

“But you still didn’t answer my question about John.”

“Fiction!”

“I see.” Elliot smiled, easily, adorably. Here was a man with teeth nice enough that, if he were my husband, I would have to insist that he too avoid contact sports.

“So then, Dawn, who’s responsible for your presence here this evening?”

“Actually, an old boyfriend . . . and his new girlfriend.”

Rachel was right, being able to say that someone else had signed me up was a huge relief. I felt myself basking in the I’m-not-overeager glow of it all. Maybe that’s what made the people in TheOne ads glow—not impending romance but simple freedom from shame, or at least from the one little corner of shame associated with wanting but not having companionship.

“Does that mean that you’re not just a Google stalker, you’re a real stalker, and he needed to get you off his back?”

“Ha-ha. No.” I glared. “Actually, turns out Rachel Link, the CEO of this fine operation, was one of
Charm
’s Ten Girls to Watch back in 1996.” I explained the Robert–Lily–sister’s roommate connection.

“I see,” he said.

“So did you sign yourself up or did you make your mom do it?” I asked.

“Actually, is this bad? I made
Charm
’s intern do it.”

“You didn’t! That’s like those TV shows where the horrible guy makes his secretary call up women and ask them on dates for him.”

“Well . . .”

I rolled my eyes. “So did you give her any info about yourself and your preferences, or did you just tell her to make her best guess?”

“Are you going to report me to the
Charm
ethics board if I tell you ‘best guess’?”

“She must not have checked the box that banned redheads,” I said, then blushed. I quickly added, “I’m actually relieved to hear someone else answered the questions to get you here.” I leaned in to whisper. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to anyone at this party yet, but I had a chat or two on my way in, and I gave the crowd a little look-see, and I don’t know quite how to say this, but I think we might be at the snotty rich-kid party.”

“Dawn, I’m shocked to hear such harsh language from you.”

“Appalling, I know.”

“If this is the snotty rich-kid party, what are you doing here?”

“I think it’s a Rachel Link social experiment gone awry.”

“I see, I see. So if what you’re telling me is correct, I think the answer may be to blow this joint.”

“Are you suggesting we leave?” I fake gasped. “What about your article?”

“I’ll tell the intern to try again.” He tossed a look toward the bridge and the stream. “Come on, let’s go. You and me, crossing the Rubicon.”