Poseur #4: All That Glitters Is Not Gucci (6 page)

The Getup: Camel-colored scalloped Chloé shorts with matching jacket, beige buffalo leather Miu Miu wedges, crème and black
patent Chanel shopper

Jake and Charlotte had dinner plans Wednesday night:
platonic
dinner plans, she’d reminded him over a shared plate of shoestring fries at Kate Mantilini, earlier that day at lunch.
Whatever you say
, Jake thought, printing out a comprehensive list of froufrou French restaurants, restricting his choices to four-star Romance
ratings. French ambience, plus French wine, plus French food… French kissing had to figure in somewhere, right? Besides, Jake
knew what Charlotte liked. She
was
his ex-girlfriend, after all. He steered his ancient black Volvo 240 DL down the Beverwils’ sparkling gravel drive and parked,
happily drumming the wheel.

At the foot of the Beverwils’ 8,000-square-foot Spanish colonial estate, his pint-sized ex informed him she was “only eating
at restaurants that dealt in francs.”
Right
, thought Jake, retreating to the car to scan the “payment options” tab on the list he’d printed out. Only after a mortifying
phone call to JiRaffe did he discover
no
restaurant in the area accepted the currency. In fact, no restaurant in the world accepted that currency, not even in France,
as it had been
completely obsolete for the last decade.

Instead of going out to dinner, like they’d planned, Charlotte and Jake decided to just drive up the coast and park outside
Moon Shadows, “to talk.” They then relocated to the musty backseat of the Volvo and got to work steaming up the windows. Which
was A-OK with Jake. After all, what dude in his right mind preferred the taste of duck a l’orange to the taste of Charlotte
a l’optimal hotness?

She was wearing this weird thing that looked like a skirt but was actually shorts, and her legs were bare and smooth and very
recently shaved, he hoped, for him. Gently, he squeezed Charlotte’s smooth calf and then ran his hand all the way up to her
thigh, slipping beneath the silky hem of her shorts
. And she let him.

Until she didn’t.

“Stop!” she squeaked, loud and sudden like he’d stepped on her toe.

“What?” Jake jumped back. As somebody with very (
very
) little experience in the make-out department, he was perpetually petrified of screwing up. And now, it seemed, he had. Jake
ran though a series of options for what he could have done wrong. Maybe he was supposed to ask before he touched her under
that skirty shorts thing? Or maybe he was not supposed to touch her under that skirty shorts thing at all? Ugh… he could really
use a manual for this hook-up stuff. A
man-
ual. He smirked, briefly amused by his lame inner joke.

“I can’t do this,” Charlotte announced, a bit dramatically, in his opinion. “I need air!” She scrambled away from him, and
after a failed attempt to roll down the sticky car window, popped the door open and leaped from the car. Jake watched Charlotte
stomp away and plant her tiny butt on the hood of his Volvo. He followed her. That much he knew he was supposed to do, even
without a man-ual.

The whispering black sea stretched out before them. In the faraway distance, the Santa Monica pier sparkled against the night
sky like an old Lite-Brite toy. Jake sighed.

“What?” he asked, finally. “What’d I do now?”

“You know what you did, Jake Farrish.” Charlotte looked straight forward, refusing to meet his pleading brown eyes. “You did…
Nikki Pellegrini.”

He was in shock. So, this had nothing to do with him groping her thigh after all? She was seriously still peeved at him for
getting way too drunk at her hoity-toity fashion party and
accidentally
macking on that eighth-grader, Nikki Pepperoni? God, of all the dumb and totally not worth it mistakes he’d made in his life—and
he could count a few—the whole Nikki fiasco took the cake. Which would be one thing if the cake had been
good.
But it wasn’t! It was seriously like musty old, special-dietary-needs,
nursing
home cake.

Couldn’t she
see
that by now?

“I did not ‘do’ her, okay?” Jake clarified, pushing himself
away from the misty-damp wooden rail. “God, I told you everything you wanted to know. Apologized… a
thousand
times. What more can I
do
? What do you
want
?”

Charlotte folded her arms, pouting, while Jake sighed, vigorously rubbing his face. “I’m sorry. I’m just sick of having the
same conversation.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you so eagerly sampled
Prostitutti pâté
in front of, like, everybody I have
ever
known.”

“I know,” Jake insisted, reaching for her arm. “
Pâté
is torture. I understand that now. So, can we please just get back together?”

“No way,” she huffed, shrugging away from his touch. “Can’t you see how disgustingly
desperate
I would look?”

“So this is about how you
look
?” Jake fumed, beginning to pace. “Wait,” he realized, stopping in his tracks. “You already
knew
there’s no restaurant that takes the French franc, right? That’s why you came up with the rule! So we wouldn’t be able to
go out. So we wouldn’t be able to, like,
be
in public!”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Charlotte tossed her hair back and set her dainty jaw.

“Oh, I’m being
ridiculous
?” He lowered his voice, pointing accusingly. “Why were you so weird on the phone today? Why’d you call me
Evan
? Huh?”

“Oh!” she tsked, dismissing him with an airy laugh. “I
just… I ran into Janie at Ted Pelligan’s, that’s all.”

“I don’t get it.” Jake shook his head. “What does Janie have to do with this?”

“Nothing! Except… the whole time we were talking on the phone, I’m pretty sure she was, like,
listening
in the fitting room next to mine
.
I just thought if I called you Evan, then she’d wouldn’t realize I wasn’t talking about, you know,
what I was talking about
.”

“But…” Jake’s face collapsed in confusion. “She already
knows
about Nikki, I mean…”

“Yeah,” Charlotte interrupted, narrowing her eyes into glittering green slits. “I
know
she knows about Nikki.
Everyone
‘knows about Nikki.’ That doesn’t mean I want everyone to know that I, like, still
care.
”

She stomped her foot, flouncing toward the car.

“It’s
humiliating
, okay?”

“Fine.” Jake followed after her. “I get it. It’s humiliating. And that’s my fault, okay? But you have
got
to decide if it’s the kind of humiliating that means we’re over? Or if it’s the kind of humiliating that means we can work
it out.”

“
I don’t know
,” she confessed, sounding truly miserable. At last, she grabbed his hand, blinking back tears. “I don’t know.”

Jake sighed, clenching and unclenching his jaw. Seriously? He couldn’t go through this alone. He needed outside assistance.
He needed a man-ual. He needed…

“Counseling.”

Charlotte’s delicate nostril flexed as though she’d wandered into the presence of something foul. “You’re not serious.”

“What?” Jake gaped, tapping his heart with two fingers. “I want to get back together, okay? And I
think
you do, too. And
yet
, instead of making out in my car, like we should be doing, we’re acting like my parents outside Moon Shadows. I mean, does
that make sense to you? Because it sure as hell doesn’t make sense to me.”

“But I don’t
believe
in counseling,” Charlotte reminded him, twiddling the glossy amber button on her tailored jacket. “Napoleon and Josephine
didn’t dissect their love on some crumbly old therapist’s couch, okay? They believed in destiny. In
fate
.”

“Char—” Jake smiled, cupping his slightly cracked ex-girlfriend’s china cup chin in his hands. “This isn’t eighteenth-century
France. There are options.” One hand abandoned her face and reached for the back pocket of his faded gray corduroys. “Check
it out,” he smiled nervously, presenting a tightly folded printout, otherwise known as his last hope, to the girl of his dreams.
“Her name’s Hortense Bonnaire,” he explained. “She combines traditional psychotherapy with French existentialist philosophy.
She’s supposed to be really cool.”

Charlotte took the page and scanned it timidly. In the
distance, a wave crashed.

“First session’s free,” he added.

“Okay,” she conceded finally, with a shrug of her ballet-toned shoulders. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

“Great,” Jake exhaled, endlessly relieved. Charlotte smiled.

Was it just her or was he totally maturing?

Jake smiled back.

Who wouldn’t entrust his relationship to a chick whose last name sounded like “boner”?

The Getup: Vintage floral halter dress, scuffed white lace-up Keds, dreamcatcher earrings from Venice Boardwalk, crocheted
hemp hobo bag

That same crisp December night, just across town, Petra Greene and Paul Elliot Miller were strolling through the wide, tree-lined
streets of Beverly Hills enjoying each other, along with some seriously chronic weed.

Since they’d first met on either side of the fence of their adjoining backyards, Petra and Paul had been virtually inseparable.
Sharing joints through the ivy-entangled fence had soon given way to moonlit swims in Paul’s grandparents’ kidney-shaped pool,
which before long turned into surreptitious whiskey sipping in Petra’s little sisters’ backyard playhouse, which soon enough
morphed into surreptitious whiskey-fueled makeout sessions in Petra’s little sisters’ backyard playhouse, which soon enough
turned into, well, more….

They looked a little random and mismatched, but that’s what Petra loved about their coupling.
The punk rocker and the flower child
. Of course, when Christina Boyd mentioned they “kinda had a Joel Madden–Nicole Richie thing going on,” she’d had to put down
her fried shiitake dumpling and quietly gag.

The unlikely twosome embarked on their first public outing at Seedy Moon’s now infamous Pink Party. No more hiding their love
in the looming black shadows of their adjacent Beverly Hills estates: they were finally
real.
“You’re
real
?” Joaquin Whitman frowned over his guitar and tightened a string, barely disguising his jealousy. “You mean you’re, like,
official?” But no. Petra loathed that word (could anything sound more
corporate
?).
Real
was better.
Truer.
The last time she and Paul kissed—on her balcony, with moonlight sifting through the giant pine in her yard—she chanted it
to herself like a blessing:
This is real, this is real, this is real, this is real….

But then
this
got weird.

Maybe it was the pot. Even seasoned stoners like Petra endured the occasional bout of marijuana-induced paranoia. Then again,
maybe it
wasn’t
the pot. Four days after that magical balcony night, as they strolled down one of the pristine, hedge-bordered blocks of
their Beverly Hills neighborhood, taking what they jokingly referred to as “one of their nature walks,” Paul noticed a dead
sparrow in the gutter, his little eyes all squinched, his tiny wings wet with dew, and promptly began to
freak out.
And, not to say she wasn’t pro
sensitivity
(the more people show their feelings the better), but there was something about Paul’s
particular
display: it seemed a little put on. As soon as the thought nudged into her mind, however, she pushed it
out, her heart skittering in panic. Had she really just suspected Paul Elliot Miller, her first love,
her partner in the real
, of being phony? She had to be wrong! And yet, as he stretched out and panted on the pavement, tears squeezing from the corners
of his eyeliner-free eyes, she couldn’t help but notice.

Things had changed.

Gone were the bicycle chains that had once slung seductively from his narrow hips; in their place, a macramé belt with swirly
blue Fimo beads had appeared. He’d removed every last piercing—the silver hoop on his left brow, the pretty spike in his full
lower lip—and had stopped dyeing his hair, the electric blue she’d fallen in love with slowly washing out, leaving his hair
a murky grayish-brown that was really no color at all; a color like dishwater.

But no, Petra refused to dwell on the negative, and so she
changed her mental channel
, a trick she’d made up as a kid to keep her from obsessing over her screwed-up family. When her mom got so zonked on pills
the nanny had to take over car pool; when her father bailed after dinner to “pick up a magazine,” only to return hours later,
rumpled and empty-handed (if he returned at all, that is); when someone kept calling the house, hanging up when Petra answered,
she fluttered her tea green eyes shut, took a deep breath, and
changed the channel.
Ten years later, it still worked.