Party Girl: A Novel (30 page)

“No!” I snap. This is all going so horrifically wrong. I turn to Adam to explain things, thinking he may even laugh about how I tricked people into thinking I was doing shots, but the look on his face tells me not to bother.

“Excuse me,” he says to Jeremy, not even looking at me. “I’ll leave you two to your shots.” He glances at me as he starts to walk away, and I start following him.

“Adam! Stop! I need to explain.” I grab his arm and he turns around to face me.

“No you don’t, Amelia. Seriously. I don’t know what game you’re playing here but I really don’t want any part of it.” He shakes me off and keeps walking.

Tears sting my eyes as I start to follow him but I suddenly realize that there’s no point. As I watch him make his way over to Stephanie and Lizzie near the bar, I feel Jeremy enter my personal space yet again. Adam whispers something to Lizzie while Stephanie gives me a questioning look. I shrug as Jeremy envelops me in a hug.

“Forget about that tool,” Jeremy says, and for some reason this seems incredibly soothing. “He probably thinks he’s hot shit because he’s on some sure-to-be-canceled series about real estate agents.”

I feel suddenly grateful for Jeremy’s presence, so I turn around and smile at him. He takes my hand.

“Seriously,” he says. “I don’t know what you have going on with that guy but he sure doesn’t seem to treat you right.”

I nod as a tear falls down my face. “You’re right.”

Jeremy reaches over and wipes the tear away and the act seems incredibly gentle, especially for someone who seemed like a drunken buffoon about five minutes ago.
At least he’s being nice to me
, I think,
which is more than I can say for Adam.

“Plus, this party sucks,” Jeremy says. “It would make anyone cry.”

For some reason, this strikes me as incredibly hilarious and I start laughing like I haven’t in weeks. When Jeremy grabs my hand this time, I don’t shake him off.

“What do you say we get the hell out of Dodge?” he asks, as he gives me a spontaneous twirl. “Have an after-party at my place?”

My eyes land on Adam and Lizzie making their way to the exit, and then on Stephanie, now talking to someone near the bar. I wave to her and mouth that I’ll call her tomorrow.

“Why the hell not?” I say.

Jeremy’s house, nestled high in the Hollywood Hills, has a view not only of L.A. County and the Valley, but also of the roofs of houses belonging to Keanu Reeves and Leonardo Di Caprio. As I look at the incredible view, an altogether bizarre thought occurs to me.

Roughly translated, it’s that I’m probably not an alcoholic.

Suddenly, everything becomes incredibly clear. I never actually enjoyed drinking all that much—it always made me feel kind of achy and tired. But I allowed Tommy and everyone in rehab to convince me that being a coke fiend and an alcoholic were one and the same. But I could see now—Christ, any sane person could surely see—that they weren’t. They were entirely different. And I’d spent the past six-and-a-half months in meetings with people that, now that I thought about it, seemed incredibly insane. Justin was really the only person I felt connected to and he had distanced himself from Pledges altogether. Why had I allowed these militant sober people to influence me so much?

Of course, I’ve been listening enough in meetings to have heard people talk about how this might happen to me—how one day my “disease” would probably try to convince me I wasn’t an alcoholic. But if I didn’t actually suffer from the disease, it couldn’t be my disease convincing me of anything, could it? Besides, who the hell believes that diseases can talk?

The only person who could answer this, the only person who’d understand, is Justin. With Jeremy inside checking his messages and e-mails, I pull my BlackBerry out of my bag and speed-dial Justin.

I’m sorry. The mailbox for the person you are calling is full. Please try again later.

It’s that damn recorded voice lady, the one who always sounds so harsh and yet calm, a voice that couldn’t ever be in the midst of a crisis or important quandary because she’s not real. Suddenly, I’m having a hard time trying to figure out what is. And since Justin is one of these utterly modern creatures who uses his cell phone as his home phone, there’s nowhere else I can try him. I could call Stephanie, I think, but I know that try as she might, she won’t ultimately understand. And for some reason, I’m just not in the mood to hear Rachel’s opinions right now. “They” say that when you want to drink, you’re supposed to call someone in the program before you do. And I had tried, I tell myself. I did exactly what they told me to.

“So, baby, what do you say—I’ve got a 1995 Chateau Margaux that I could crack if you’re game,” Jeremy says as he joins me out on the balcony. I detect the distinct scent of Drakkar Noir that wasn’t there before.

“Jeremy, I have to tell you something and it’s going to sound a bit crazy,” I say, looking down at the infinity pool.

“I like crazy.” If a voice could leer, his now is.

“I don’t actually drink. I’m sober.” He looks at me confusedly, so I add, “I went to rehab.”

“But—”

“I faked doing the shot that night at the Roosevelt,” I say, and he crinkles his forehead as he clearly tries to go over that night in his mind. “Water looks exactly like vodka when it’s in a shot glass.”

“No way,” he says, looking bizarrely intrigued. “But why?”

“Well, I used to be really wild and crazy,” I say. “Holed-up-by-myself-at-home-not-able-to-stop-doing-coke crazy. I was completely out of control and I lost my job and was generally a real asshole. Then, just as I got my shit together, I was given the chance to write a column documenting my wild and crazy life, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. So I do the column, culling all my information from my old life, and—”

“Act the part when you have to,” he says, nodding approvingly. “That
is
crazy, baby. I like it.”

I smile, relief over having gotten this off my chest flooding through me. “You don’t think I’m completely out of my mind?”

Now it’s Jeremy’s turn to smile. “Oh, I do,” he says. “In a great way, though.” He turns to walk back inside. “So, what can I get you? I have cranberry juice and Perrier so I could make you a—”

“That’s the thing,” I interrupt. “I haven’t had a drink in six and a half months, and I’d like to now.”

“But I thought you just said—”

“I said that I was a coke fiend. It’s the people at my rehab who have been telling me that means I’m an alcoholic, too.”

He looks at me carefully. “I’ve always heard that those people like to go around calling everyone alcoholic,” he says.

I nod. “They do. All of which is meant to say, yes, I’m game for splitting that bottle of wine.”

Jeremy looks me over, then nods. “Great,” he smiles. “Let me go get it.”

The first thought I have when I sip from the crystal goblet and feel the bitter and familiar-tasting liquid coasting down my throat is,
Is this what all the fuss has been about? The rehab and the slogans and the meetings and the incessant talk about feelings has all been about this—this liquid?
And, feeling even more empowered, I take another sip. It tastes…fine. Nice, even. Not like the first drop of water after having been stranded in the desert for six and a half months—not even close.
Clearly
, I say to myself,
if I were really an alcoholic, this moment would feel monumental.
But to me, right now, it just feels like I’m drinking something.

“This is nice,” I say, smiling at Jeremy. I’ve never been able to tell the difference between Trader Joe’s $9.99 wine and the kind that people save for eons because it’s such a great vintage or whatever and this has always made me slightly self-conscious.
If I were an alcoholic, surely I would have studied wines and gone to tastings and whatnot
, I tell myself as Jeremy blathers on about why the wine’s particular year is so crucial.

We move to the living room, where Jeremy gets out a photo album and starts pointing out pictures of him with Al Pacino, his mom, his brother, and what looks like all the current and former Lakers Girls. And it all feels very sophisticated—the wine drinking, the multimillion-dollar mansion, the photos all gathered in green leather binders. If I were at Adam’s, I think, we’d probably be drinking out of cans and sitting on his futon couch.

“My God,” Jeremy says, as I sip from my wine and examine a photo album page dedicated to a film festival, complete with pictures of Jeremy with indie darlings like Aaron Eckhart and Catherine Keener. “I can’t believe you thought you were an alcoholic—I mean, you’re barely sipping your wine.”

“I know,” I say, glowing with this latest revelation to add to my arsenal of information about what a good decision it was to drink. I take another small, delicate sip to emphasize the point.

I walk outside to smoke and Jeremy joins me a minute later, bringing a freshly opened bottle of wine which seems weird, seeing as there’s no way we could have possibly finished the first, but he’s telling me some story about how when he was an assistant at ICM, he had to take his boss’s dog’s stool sample to the vet, and I’m so riveted by the concept of such a demeaning job that I forget to even ask about the bottle.

We continue to drink the wine and I blow smoke rings and talk—about my life, my column, my feelings on various and sundry topics—and Jeremy mostly listens, piping in occasionally or laughing. It’s starting to feel a little like a performance I’m giving and he’s watching but neither of us seems to mind.
I forgot how theatrical I can get when I drink
, I think, as I spontaneously decide to recite dialogue from
Grease
, which I saw about 199 times during my formative years and thus can recite verbatim, complete with Australian accent for Sandy and New York accent for Danny.

Later, we’re in the living room and it occurs to me that I might be buzzed because Jeremy seems to be holding my hand while I’m talking, and I don’t seem to be snatching it back. When he leans in to kiss me, I get the distinct whiff of bacteria breath, and this—not the fact that he’s about to kiss me—is what makes me wake up and push him slightly to the side while I straighten my skirt.

I think it’s around the time when I light my first indoor cigarette—he’s given me free rein to smoke wherever I want to now—that I see Jeremy reach into his pocket and pull his hand out with his fingers folded over as they clasp something.

“I don’t feel bad about giving you the wine,” he says, and I think that this seems like an oddly serious comment to be making at this point, seeing as we’ve mutually decided I’m not and have never been an alcoholic. “But I do feel a little bad about the Ecstasy.”

I look at him, confused, thinking for one brief, horrifically wonderful second that he’s dosed the wine with Ex and I’ve thus just done drugs without it having been my fault, when I glance into his previously clasped hand and spy a slew of small white pills gathered there. Is that Ecstasy? I’ve done it a bunch of times, but I’ve usually been so drunk or wired by that point that I don’t really remember what it looks like.

“Well, my problem was with drugs,” I say, regretfully. “I mean, I was addicted to coke, and that’s a drug. So doing a drug is out of the question, right?”

I’m not sure if I’m asking a rhetorical question but it doesn’t really matter because by the time the sentence is out of my mouth, I’ve already grabbed a pill and gulped it down with the wine. I look at him as he swallows one himself, and want to feel guilty for having just taken a step down the proverbial rabbit hole, but that age-old I-just-took-drugs feeling kicks in and I feel only excited, like I’m about to take a trip where my head will leave me alone for a little while. And then I think,
Well, since I’ve already taken one and clearly blown this whole sobriety thing, I may as well take another one. If I’m going to go out, why not go
all
out?

So I swallow another pill and light another cigarette and wait for that feeling of deliriousness to start rushing over me. “I don’t feel anything,” I say to Jeremy as he puts U2 on the CD player.

He looks at me. “You’re sweating bullets,” he says. “Trust me, you’re feeling something.”

I feel my forehead and notice that it is uncharacteristically moist but I don’t do drugs to sweat, I do them to feel good, and since when does sweating mean I must be feeling good? At my senior prom in high school, my boyfriend and I took Ecstasy and didn’t tell the other couples sharing the limo because we thought they would judge it. But trying to hide the high I was feeling over dinner took its toll on me, and my trip turned decidedly negative. When we got to the after-party and the two other couples found out what we’d done, they spontaneously decided they wanted to do Ecstasy, too—and they all had an amazing time. I remember sitting on a couch trying to figure out why exactly I couldn’t seem to communicate with anyone while watching one of the girls, who’d never touched drugs before, jumping up and down and shrieking, “I feel like I’m dancing on a cloud! This is the best I’ve ever felt in my life!”

I watch Jeremy open another bottle of wine, feeling convinced that his Ecstasy sucks. “Can I see those pills again?” I ask.

Jeremy smiles and pulls another one from his pocket. “Open up,” he says, and even though the act seems overly intimate, almost invasive, I want the pill too much to care. My jaw falls down, he pops a pill in my mouth, and I take another swig of wine.

Pretty soon after that I feel extremely animated so I start scrounging around his CD cabinet looking for music that I can dance to. But when Jeremy mentions that he has a sauna, that seems so thoroughly interesting that I immediately insist on seeing it.
This house is like an amusement park
, I think as I bound up the stairs after him, realizing that the thought doesn’t make much sense and wondering why I’m so excited about a sauna when I grew up with one.

Turns out I don’t so much want to take a sauna as just see it, and once I’ve seen it, my mind has moved on to something else. A cigarette! Another glass of wine! Maybe a drink-drink? Maybe we should go out? My brain leaps from one possibility to another, attempting to land on the perfect plan of action that will keep my high alive. And then I think of Adam and what a crazy liar he must think I am and the thought feels so sad and overwhelming that it seems like it might take over my entire body and mind.