Privileged (30 page)
“Debra?” I called after her. “I just want to say . . . if I let you down, I’m sorry.”
She stopped and turned. “Did you meet anyone interesting down there?”
“Actually, I did,” I admitted, despite it being a very strange moment for her to become interested in my personal life. “But it didn’t work out. It’s all in the article.”
“That’s too bad.” She sounded oddly disappointed. The she reached for the door handle of the car. “What do you want me to do with the story when I’m done?”
“Chuck it, I guess.”
“Take care, Megan.” She ducked into the backseat of the car before the driver could get out and open the door.
I turned toward Broadway and the downtown R train, just another unemployed New Yorker trying to fight the cold and get through the day.
Choose the definition that most accurately describes the following word:
ELATION
(a) giddiness
(b) delight
(c) delirious
(d) high as a kite
(e) so thrilled that you want to throw your arms out and spin and sing like Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music
Y
ou want flirtini?” Vitaly asked as I finished filling his olive tray.
It was the Monday night after my ill-fated double-dip encounter with Gary and Debra. I’d been working and spending more time with Lily since our session of True Confessions at her gym. I was even going to let her buy me a new winter coat tomorrow, but for tonight my bed was calling.
“No drink tonight,” I told Vitaly. “I’m going home to change into my spare feet.”
He looked at me blankly, confirmation that appreciation for my sense of humor is something acquired late in the English learning curve.
My feet were throbbing, and even though Tver had been busy for my entire shift, I’d made only twenty-five bucks in tips. Every lowlife in New York had decided to sit in my section. There’d been the drunk at booth one who had grabbed my ass as I set his rice pudding in front of him, and the lesbian couple in booth four who changed their order three times without ever actually making eye contact with me. Late in my shift, ten girls from New Jersey took booths two, three, and four, ordered half the menu, wolfed it down, and then pointed to a dead roach under the lettuce leaf of one girl’s cheeseburger special. Her snicker led me to believe they’d provided said bug themselves to get out of paying. The Tver surveillance camera backed up my hunch. Vitaly and Vadim made them pay up, but there was no tip for me.
I said good night to my coworkers and stepped out into a crisp, fresh evening. The walk home featured the usual sights and sounds—sirens wailing in the distance, a junkie peeing between two trash cans at the corner of A and Tenth, a couple screaming at each other in front of my stoop. They were still going at it when I let myself into my building and made the five-flight trek up the stairs. I’d called ahead, since the last few nights I’d walked in on Charma and Gary doing the do on their side of the partition.
I undid the three locks and stepped into our Levittown kitchen. If Charma’s grandmother had been visiting us, there would have been homemade chicken soup on the stove instead of what I saw: champagne flutes and an unopened bottle of Taittinger.
Either Charma had just gotten cast in something major, or Gary had gotten a huge raise, or—
“Surprise!”
Out jumped the Baker twins. They were beaming at me. As in not mad. As in they threw their arms around me in a group hug.
“What are you doing here? When—how did you get here?” I babbled.
“Not you,
we,
” Rose corrected. “What are
we
doing here? That would be first-person plural. I should know, since I’m going to Duke next fall. I had to come tell you in person.”
“Oh my God, you did it!” I hugged the girls again. The implications were not lost on me. If Rose got in, the twins were halfway—
“I got in, too,” Sage said laconically, then assessed my waitress uniform. “Have we taught you
nothing
?”
“You got in! You’re going! You got your money!” I found myself dancing around the kitchen. “I’m so happy for you guys!” And I was, I really, truly was. “You’re rich!”
“And you know who else is happy for me?” Rose was beaming. “Thom!” she yelled before I could even ask.
Sage smiled. “They’re madly in luh-luh-love,” she informed me. “And I’m not even being bitchy about it. At least not to their faces. Joking.”
Rose stuck her tongue out at her sister before turning back to me. “Hey, don’t you want to know how we found you?” she asked eagerly.
“Fuck that. Tell her later. Let’s open the champagne,” Sage ordered. She popped the cork and filled four glasses. “To our tutor, Megan Smith, who did the impossible: got us in to Duke and got a fashion sense, even though she seems to have lost it.”
We clinked glasses and drank. The champagne was heady, but even more heady was the knowledge that it seemed I’d been forgiven. The question was, how?
Before I could even ask, Rose explained. “We read your article,” she said softly.
“What art—”
Then I understood. The one I’d written for
Rockit.
That I’d given to Debra Wurtzel. Debra knew Laurel. Debra must have read it and then sent it to Laurel. The kindness of that overwhelmed me.
“We came off great, I might add,” Sage said.
“So . . . you forgive me?” I asked tentatively.
Rather than answer, Rose reached into her jeans pocket and took out an envelope. “For you.”
Heart hammering, I tore it open. It was from the Sage and Rose Baker Trust, payable to Megan Smith. For one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
“We asked Grandma how much you were supposed to get. Then we doubled it. We figured we were each worth seventy-five thou, easy,” Sage explained.
It’s not often that I am at a loss for words, but at that moment I was rendered speechless.
“It’s because you were so generous with us,” Rose said simply.
Holy shit. A hundred and fifty grand. I could pay off my Yale loans. I could quit the restaurant, write freelance, and hold out for a job at a great magazine.
“I’m not poor, and the Baker twins are going to college,” I marveled.
Sage looked horrified. “College?” She shuddered. “God, no. How boring would
that
be?”
“But the money? How do you get the—”
“Megan, Megan, Megan,” Sage intoned with a long-suffering sigh. “I would have thought a Yale grad would pay attention to the fine print. The deal was, Rose and I got the money if we both got
into
Duke. Not if we both
attended
Duke.”
It was hilarious. She was right. “You mean you outsmarted your grandmother?”
“It’s a thing of beauty,” she agreed, and lifted her champagne glass. “Another toast. Here’s to us. And especially to
Sage Baker’s Season.
”
“What’s that?” I asked.
She spread her hands wide. “It’s winter in Palm Beach, and the island’s It Girl has been doing The Season since she was in sixth grade—galas, balls, ten-thou-a-plate charity dinners. But this year she has to put on one of her own.” She placed her hands on my shoulders. “I’m calling it the Sage Stage.” Sage mimed a headline with her hands. “It’s to benefit women who are out of work, just finished drug rehab, whatever.”
“Like a halfway house?” I asked skeptically.
“More like the ultimate makeover,” Sage decreed. “It’ll be on E! next winter.”
Rose set her champagne glass on the table. “So are you going to show us your apartment?”
“What there is of it,” I said, motioning for them to follow me around the apartment. “Addison Mizner designed the tasteful eight-by-ten living room, and the partition that makes up the cell-like bedrooms is Mizner’s homage to Riker’s Island, where—”
I stopped. On my bed were the suitcase and garment bag Marco had given me that first day he’d helped me with my wardrobe. They were bulging. Clearly, the girls had already given themselves the tour.
“Marco read what you wrote, too,” Sage explained. “And he said you left him a note. He wants to play himself in the movie.”
“He also said he couldn’t bear to think of these on anyone but you. So go ahead,” Rose urged. “Open one.”
I unzipped the garment bag. It was full of Chloé and Zac Posen, Vera Wang and Pucci, Gucci and Alaia. Some I recognized, but some I didn’t.
“One of Marco’s friends opened a store called When Good Clothes Go Drag,” Rose explained. “He cherry-picked these for you.”
I was stunned.
“Don’t gush yet,” Sage cautioned. She tugged on my left shoulder so I’d pivot toward the wall, a wall that had been bare ever since I’d sold my parents’ framed Woodstock T-shirt. Now an exquisite painting hung there.
It was Will and me in Hanan’s garden, done in Hanan’s inimitable style. She must have painted it from one of the photographs she’d taken of the two of us.
“Will wanted you to have that,” Rose said quietly.
Something twisted in my heart.
“Did he . . . read the article, too?” I asked.
“That’s why he sent this up here with us,” Sage reported. She took a look at her Hermès Medor watch. “It’s one-thirty. If we don’t leave now, we’ll miss the last set.”
“Then we gotta go,” Rose agreed.
“Whose last set?” I asked as they headed back to the kitchen and took their coats off the hook on the back of the door.
“Brain Freeze,” Rose explained. “Thom knows the bass player from high school. They’re at the Pyramid Club tonight.”
“That’s just around the corner,” I told them. “Let me change out of this hideous uniform first.” I was already on my way when Rose stopped me.
“Megan . . . I’m sorry, but it’s kind of a double-date thing. I’m fixing Sage up with Thom’s friend.”
“I decided that having a musician as a boyfriend makes a statement,” Sage explained.
Oh. Okay. I felt a little let down, but I shook that feeling off.
“We’re staying at the Gansevoort,” Rose told me. “I take it you’re not waitressing tomorrow?”
We decided to meet for a very late lunch at Fatty Crab, the Malaysian place in the West Village. I hugged the girls goodbye and sat back down at the green Formica table. Then I took a chug straight from the bottle of Cristal. Hey, I deserved it. What an impossible, fantastic turn of events.
Feeling giddy from good fortune and champagne, I padded into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and was about to shed that uniform for the very last time, when I heard the fire alarm clang in the hallway.
The fire alarm. Again. I’m totally serious. Dammit
.
I was moving out of this fucking East Village firetrap tenement as soon as I cashed that check.
Being no fool, I ran to get the check, then pulled open my front door and bolted for the stairs. But my Serbian landlord was on the fourth-floor landing, calling up to me. “Stairs are blocked! Go to roof, quickly, Megan! Cross to next building!”
Fuck!
I changed direction, ran up the steep steps two at a time, and rammed my upper arm into the heavy metal door to shove it open. It took three strong pushes, and then I was out, stepping onto the—
Sand.
Not concrete.
Sand
.
There was a
beach
covering my roof. It was dotted with beach umbrellas and chaise longues and a half-dozen of those portable gas heating units that can keep outdoor cafés toasty in the coldest weather.
On one of the chaises, clad in surfer jams and sunglasses, tall drink in hand, was Will.
“Flirtini?” He offered me the drink. “Since you couldn’t come to Palm Beach, I decided that Palm Beach should come to you.”
I stepped toward him, trying to find words. “Umm . . . no fire?” was the best I could do.
“It was pathetically easy to bribe your landlord into assisting us, I’m afraid. He didn’t blink about letting us into your apartment, or about the team of burly guys we hired to haul up the sand. I’d think about moving if I were you.”
I leaned over and pinched him.
“Ow!” He pulled his arm away.
“Just wanted to make sure this was real.”
He rubbed his arm. “Was my manly yelp enough confirmation?”
I grinned, sitting down on the chaise in front of him. “I love Hanan’s painting.”
“It’s great, huh?” he agreed, placing the flirtini in my hand. “That was the day I fell for you, you know.”
I looked at Will, at his freckled arms and tapered fingers. He was so handsome. I still couldn’t quite believe he’d like someone like . . . me. “Why?” I heard myself ask.
He took off his sunglasses. “Because you were so much yourself. Frizzy hair, dirt on your face, kind of goofy.”
“Goofy?”
I laughed. “Fair enough. Well, that was when it changed for me, too, you know. The way you talked about Hanan’s paintings, even though your father would never show them. I still hope you will. Someday.”
“Step one is moving here,” he said.
Wait, had he just said . . . “Could you repeat that?”
“Here,” he repeated. “To New York. Where I’m going to open my gallery. Hanan will be the first artist I show.”
I must have looked as thrilled as I felt, because he held up a hand of caution.
“It won’t be easy. My father is less than delighted. He’s putting his money where his mouth is, meaning he’s not investing in me. The twins are, though. And I’ve already talked with some of my frat brothers from Northwestern.”
“And here I thought being in a fraternity was a waste of time,” I teased. I took a sip of my flirtini. It was as good as in Palm Beach. Maybe better. “This . . .” I gestured wide. “All of this. It’s amazing.”
“Funny, that’s the word I used about what you wrote.” He looked down at the sand-colored roof. “Everything you did made sense in a bizarre sort of way.”
“I’m so glad the twins gave you the article.”
He looked up at me. “Oh, I read it before they did. My mom FedExed it to me, actually.”
“Your . . . what?”
“Not a what, a who. Debra Wurtzel is my mother.” He smiled wide at what was surely my very shocked-looking face. “Believe me, I had no idea she’d sent you to Palm Beach until I read what you wrote. It was all her doing.”