was like, Yeah, mama. I love the feeling of sun on my breasts.”
“You are like literal bosom buddies,” her costar/boyfriend chimed in.
“Don’t let the paparazzi stop you from finding your light. It’s so healing, right?” the actress said as cater-waiters descended on the room with trays of miniature American foods and chilled Miller High Life in crystal Champagne flutes. I looked at one with longing as the actress continued. “Sometimes I go outside naked and do a handstand. Every flower needs sun. Every garden needs nutrients. It’s like I can feel the earth impregnating me with its power.” She released me. “Also, your tits looked bomb. I didn’t know British people had boobs like that.”
“Literally no one did,” her boyfriend said, pulling his phone out of his pocket and tapping away at it. “Babe, I’m hungry, let’s chase some passed apps.”
She squeezed my hand. “In case you get a chance,” she added, “my people are trying to option The Bexicon and if you could put in a good word for me, that would be amazing. I will totally do you justice.”
With a wave, she and her boyfriend were off. Nick was across the room in conversation with the singer who hated Kanye, which I hoped was about Kanye so that I could get some dirt later. I surveyed the room from beside a potted plant taller than I was and watched everyone pretend they weren’t looking at me. Even the staff seemed to have been told to treat me like wallpaper; food whizzed past me without anyone offering me a miniature grilled cheese. Over by the crudités, I spied two women pretending to take a photo of themselves that was, I was sure, framed to fit me “accidentally” in the background. The Vogue editor swept past them and snatched the offending iPhone out of the blonde’s hand with one smooth movement on her way over to me. It was such an Eleanor move that I caught myself chuckling.
“I made it clear that there were to be no unauthorized photos at this party,” she said tartly. “If she thinks she’ll be at Fashion Week again anytime soon, she’ll discover she is very much mistaken. Good luck with your little blog now, Monica.”
She exhaled hard and then smoothed her not-at-all-ruffled bangs. “How sweet,” she said, lightly touching my flag pin, which I’d affixed to my floral dress. It had been Nick’s idea. “How are you finding New York?”
“So far, hugely different than when I was a college student,” I said. “If you smashed together all the places my sister and I stayed in, they’d still be smaller than our suite here.”
“Undoubtedly,” the editor said. “You, in particular, cannot go home again. But at least now you have heated floors. I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me. I need to tell Tommy that under no circumstances is he to bring back the cargo short. I shall circulate diverting people your way. Please give my best to Richard. We dated for three weeks in the very early eighties. He had fine calves.”
She left me with this disturbing mental image as she swept off to save us from the tyranny of many-pocketed shorts. But she did not fail me: I was approached by a variety of people over the next hour and a half, each of whom chatted at me for fifteen minutes until someone new drifted in to change the subject. I got the impression that I was being handled, while the real muckety-mucks circled to Nick. But plenty of the guests wanted something from me, too: Tommy showed me a trench coat and floated the idea of naming it after me, if I wore it first; the actor gave me business cards for three restaurants he owned in Tribeca and told me they had open tables that night; the very blond, very tan wife of the mayor boasted that she’d designed all the tablescapes at this event, despite the fact that there were no tables present. Amid the barrage, I caught my gaze drifting out the window and down to the bustling New York sidewalks. I had walked those streets while most of these folks lived in the clouds. And even now, I was not, as a person, interesting to them; I was, as a duchess, interesting to their Instagrams, or their pocketbooks. It had been silly to think that the New York I would be showing Nick would be the New York I had experienced. We would not sprint to