Nothing Left To Want (17 page)

It’s too bad because I don’t know if I’m a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not quite as stupid as people think. I have thoughts all the time, not just now and here where all I can do is think. I’ve always had them. I spent years trying to find someone, anyone, to connect with and talk to but, of course and to be fair, look where I tried to find those connections. So, no, I’m not mentally enfeebled or anything, I’ve just been scared - now, then, pretty much always. And it was fear that drove me right back into those clubs and stupid waste-of-space parties.

That fear makes me pretty normal, actually, because there are millions of people who hate where they are and are taken aback by the face in the mirror, but they don’t change what they are doing. Unhappy or not, they stick with their routines like gerbils on a treadmill. Those little guys keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping they’ll end up somewhere different, like by magic.

What’s the definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome.

I don’t think that’s true, it’s a blanket statement, it’s a fucking treatment-shrink statement. Gerbils aren’t insane, they’re just hopeful, like I was, like everybody is.

I was trying to remember Anthro, and my thoughts slid off the tracks, but maybe it’s all a part of it; what we think we are, what people will think we are. In the study of anthropology, people learn about long-gone cultures, and individuals too, by what they leave behind. We know that the Romans had a senate and even water pipes by what’s left to look at. If an anthropologist was going to study what I left behind, I think he or she would get really confused.

The professor, whose name escapes me, was doing his usual incredibly boring, guaranteed to put an auditorium of students to sleep, discussion about the various ways we could understand the civilization and building of the Niantic Indians of Rhode Island through the tools they developed over time.

Suddenly he stopped and looked out at us. He laughed, reached into his desk and pulled out a pair of Gargoyle sunglasses, an IPOD Nano and his cell phone, and put them on his desk. Speaking earnestly, and really trying to break through our fog of clock-watching lack of interest, he recited his cell number and asked everyone of us, more than two hundred students, to text him a message right then on their cells.

It woke us up, I’ll give him that. People like novelty in class, so there was a lot of talk and laughter, and we all tried to be creative or smart-assy - which is the same thing when you’re a kid - in sending our messages. I think mine was some lame bullshit like, 'Ms. Kelleher, your Jimmy Choo’s have arrived', something that was both juvenile and show-offy.

After we were done texting, he scrolled through the messages, either nodding or shaking his head, he even read a few of the funnier ones out loud, thankfully, not mine.

When he had our complete attention, he laid down his cell alongside his glasses and the iPod, and looked out at us.

“
If an earthquake or a nuclear strike came right now and wiped out our civilization as we know it, eventually other humans, or at least something resembling humans, would reappear and re-colonize. When that happened, they would dig through the rubble and maybe one of them would find and study this little pile.” He gestured at his desk. “After a while, even if the world became like
Planet of the Apes
… ” he paused, waiting for our laugher to die down, his face glowing with the appreciation of an entertainer who knows he has his audience, “ … after a while, even they would figure out how to wear the sunglasses and play the music and, who knows, maybe they would develop a taste for Alanis Morrisette too …” another pause for laughter, then he continued, his voice gaining in confidence, “ … one of them would discover what this strange little object was and would read the text messages on it to better understand the weird creatures who had once been here.” He picked up his cell and absently scrolled down the texts. We were all quiet by then. “The creature might, for example, wonder, who was Jimmy Choo, or what 'whass up suckah' meant, and from this they would base their judgments and understandings of those who came before. And that ladies and gentleman is anthropology. Have a good weekend.”

I won’t say it was like that moment in
The Miracle Worker
when Annie Sullivan breaks through to Helen Keller’s silent world with water, but it was kind of like that.

I know I got it. It’s something I’ve thought of off and on for years, because a lot of times I have looked around me, wherever I was, and wondered if a bomb dropped on the building, what in the hell would people think when they sorted through the rubble later? He was a good teacher. I wish I’d told him that.

Anyway, so I’m obviously going to die and people who never knew me, which pretty much covers everyone, people are going to come in to this weird little guest house and worse, the bigger house where most of my stuff is, and oh my God, what will they make of it?

The graffiti I sprayed on the living room walls. Will anyone see past the obvious property destruction to the S.O.S. I was sending to whoever might bother to read it? Will they look at the garbage and the dirt and think, 'What a filthy girl', or will they think, 'Poor thing, she didn’t have clue one how to take care of anything'. Will they see the mounds and mounds of beautiful clothes in all those different sizes, most of them all dirty and rat-chewed by now, and think, 'Was this girl crazy?', or will some sensitive woman, who knows what it’s like to starve and purge to be thin, look at my clothes and see the weight vagaries I fought so hard against in order to be perfect?

And the shoes, oh my God, the shoes: hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes, all size five, all high heeled, some with broken heels from nights spent running away from various horrors. Will they look at all the shoes and think, 'Wow was she greedy, or what?', or will they see that the shoes, like the story of the princesses that danced their shoes down to the soles every night, tell a story of a magical lost princess who wore them because they made her feel tall and pretty and because each night, when she got ready to go out and put on a beautiful pair of dancing shoes, she thought this night might be the night that changes everything. Will they understand the shoes represented both another night on my own particular gerbil wheel and also meant hope to me?

I doubt it. I think the shoes are going to be one of those embarrassing epitaph deals. “She sure had a lot of shoes.”

They would be correct, I have always had a lot of shoes, but if anyone takes the time to sort through them like a good anthropologist should, they will see that some of the shoes look like they have only been worn once and, if they are smart, they will know that isn’t just because I liked to buy shoes, which is also true, but some of those shoes hold magic in them.

It won’t take anyone looking very deep to figure out what one tiny white shoe means, the one they will find clutched in my cold dead hand, like Clint Eastwood would say. But there are other stories in the shoes too.

If the right woman student of history were to pick up and really look at the pair of Valentino black lace sculpture pumps that I have always kept in a special place, she would know right away the reason those so beautiful shoes had only been worn once. She would know just by looking at them that I was wearing them the night I met my first true love.

Chapter 18

His name was … oops, my bad. See, that’s what happens when your life turns to crap, you start thinking the whole world is going to hell, but really it’s just you. If you are, for example, dying in pretty disgusting circumstances, like me, then you might assume everybody else is too. They’re not. Everybody else is just fine. It’s all going to go right along without me and I think, given the way that makes me feel right now, it’s probably a really good thing that people can’t play God.

His name is Michael Annador. He is at present living in the city of my birth, running a successful P.R. firm, doubtless partying every night and, from the last I heard, deep into a relationship with some Russian supermodel who might, if she is very lucky, become his first trophy wife. If he had married me, as I prayed he would want to do for three straight years, I wouldn’t have been considered a trophy wife; he would have been the one people called a trophy.

One of the many wonderful things about him is that he makes a joke out of everything, and by the time he had finished calling himself Trophy Boy, everyone would have laughed and the sting would have been taken out of it, and we would have lived happily ever after, the way I was supposed to.

* * *

I met him like I usually met every other new person and experience in my life, because of Milan.

By the time we were eighteen, she had not only become a fixture on the club scene; she was one of the people who could
make
the club scene.

American Express will tell people that membership has its privileges. Well, Milan was the first one to teach the owners of nightclubs and restaurants, and later boutiques, designers - you pretty much name it - that being associated with Gen X’s hottest blond had its privileges too.

As everyone knows, privilege isn’t free.

They had all started offering her first perks, then money, to appear at their establishments or to wear their clothes and, since she was a formidable businesswoman nearly from the cradle, she quickly cued into the fact that she could maximize profits by, say, getting paid an appearance fee to eat at Nobu 57, cash in others by continuing the night being photographed dancing at Butter, and do all of it wearing clothes by Donatella. Milan called it her 'trifecta'. Nowadays there are other girls who are paid for appearances and label flashing, but she was the first, and she still commands the most.

On that particular night, the Michael night, Milan was expected to appear at Bungalow 8. Bungalow 8 was new, hot and becoming terribly vogue. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist in New York to find a place where to order a bottle of Keitel Vodka will cost you five hundred dollars, or where a glass of Cristal, non-vintage will run fifty dollars a glass. New York is a tourist town and any rube from nowhere U.S.A. can find a bar that will make you pay for the privilege of drinking in our city. But if you want to watch the rich and famous people you read about in magazines, you have only a few places to choose from, and good luck getting past the doorman.

Bungalow has a famously rude doorman, and because it’s so tiny and crowded, and despite its overall air of fabulousness it still has to obey city fire codes, the rare available space is reserved for the few, the stunning, the truly rich, and the famous.

If you do get in, all you have usually managed is the right to try and hold your inch of floor space while getting shoved to the side by snobbish, busy waiters who are self importantly rushing by to wait on the celebrities seated in the black and white striped booths.

They are the reason Bungalow is what it is and they are the reason that regular people who make it in consider it a privilege to stand, pressed up against the men’s room door, desperately trying to keep their thirty dollar house drink from being spilled.

Milan always has a booth, no matter where she goes, and whether I was with her or by myself, so did I. But when I was with her, the whole place revolved around us and that was heady air, even for me, a girl like me who had never breathed any other kind.

Back then I thought that it was kind of sad that Milan got paid to eat / dance / wear / exist in those places. Back then I didn’t exactly think money grew on trees; I didn’t think about money at all.

I’ll give her this, she worked for it. To the people who watched her, and that was everyone, she just looked like an almost ridiculously beautiful stretch model of a girl, eating - well, pretending to eat - in restaurants, dancing or laughing in her V.I.P. sections at clubs, and making anything she wore look stunning, which it is if you are five foot eleven, weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds and are drop dead gorgeous. If Milan was bored out of her skull, or tired, or if her feet hurt, she never let it show. This was work, and if her work is to do nothing more than be at a certain place and make being there seem like the only place to be, well nobody does it better.

That night at Bungalow, she had dressed to coordinate with the club's interior, and when she and her driver stopped by to pick me up, and I saw her, I kind of wanted to set myself, or her, on fire.

She was wearing a vintage couturier Zandra Rhodes mostly see-through black and white sari, cut up to her thigh, and a pair of black gladiator sandals. She dazzled me. She made me feel short and puffy and horrible. I had put on one of those ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ dresses, but sitting next to Milan in the back of the limo was, I realized, a fashion disaster of epic proportions.

In the salon, my now hated white lace Chanel dress had seemed ironic and edgy. I had let my new PS talk me into wearing it with white lace tights and that season’s lace-up mini boots. Sitting next to her long chic body, I knew I looked like a slightly oversized five year old in my puffy skirt.