“He says you’re not what you appear to be. I told him to go fuck himself.”
“What did he say?”
“He said you killed . . . Amanda? Your best friend? You put something in her drink?”
Oh GOD. Where do people get these lies? “It was a long time ago,” I say, as if it really isn’t important. And it does seem long ago, almost as if it couldn’t have happened, although it was actually four years ago, to be exact. At the end of that long, crazy summer right after I’d met Hubert and was seeing him secretly. Amanda and I were sharing a house.
“She killed herself,” I say.
“Jesus took her.”
“No.” I shake my head. “She was drunk, and she took too much coke. She got into her car and drove into the duck pond and drowned.”
She had been on her way to Hubert’s house. On the sly.
“Fuck. Do you think I care?” Dianna said. “People think I killed my husband.”
There are lilies in the pond. I trail my fingers in the water. We both look over at the shore, where the party is in full swing.
“What I like about you,” Dianna says, “is that we’re both outsiders. Neither one of us fits in with this . . . society crowd.”
“Society is dead,” I say, for what I think is the second or third time this year.
“My mother was a prostitute. She doesn’t even know who my real father is.”
“Marriage is prostitution.”
“But my mother . . . wasn’t married.”
“Oh so what,” I say. “My mother was a fucking drug addict.”
“I’m going swimming,” Dianna says. She basically falls out of the boat, and for a moment, as she flails in the water and I realize she probably can’t swim, I wonder if I’m going to have to rescue her. Luckily, the pond isn’t deep, only about three feet, and she finds her footing and wades to shore.
I watch her with some degree of relief.
I sit there alone.
After a while, I begin to row back to the dock in the charmingly beat-up old rowboat. I have a cigarette between my lips and I’m aware of my short blond hair, a slight pink blush on my cheeks and my bare shoulders.
And when I’m almost at the shore, Patrice shouts, “Hey Cecelia,” and I look over my shoulder and he fires off as many pictures as he can in five seconds.
The following week, this photograph is beamed all over the world. In it, the expression on my face is: frowning slightly, yet a little surprised; still young, and I’m wearing the nearly see-through baby-blue Bentley dress, the lines of my slim yet shapely figure clearly visible. The caption reads: RICH, BEAUTIFUL, AND FIERCELY INDEPENDENT, PRINCESS CECELIA KELLY LUXENSTEIN IS THE LEADER OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM SOCIETY.
And I realize: This is my life.
SMILE.
SINGLE PROCESS
I
We have a saying in New York: English girls who are considered beautiful in London are merely “pretty” in New York, while American girls who are called “attractive” in New York are beautiful in London. And this sums up one of the biggest differences between Life in New York and Life in London. In London, if you’re an attractive, nice girl with some personality and a career, you can meet a man, date him, and—if you want to—marry him. On the other hand, in New York, you can be a beautiful woman with a body like Cindy Crawford’s and a high-powered career and you cannot even get a date.
Maybe because Englishwomen can actually snag a man—and can do so with ratty hair, unpolished nails, and flabby thighs—they possess a certain sort of annoying smugness when it comes to relationships. Recently, I had an encounter with one of these women in New York. As she sat there eating a smoked salmon sandwich and interviewing me about my life (which was sounding, to my ears, more and more pitiful by the moment), my eye was inevitably drawn to her large sapphire engagement ring topped by a sapphire-studded wedding band.
It shouldn’t have made me hate her, but it did.
“Let’s see,” she said, checking her tape recorder. “Is there any man in your life right now?”