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The room swirled around them. Someone stopped and said hello; there were pictures taken.
“Oh Harold, how could I be a real estate agent?” she said impatiently, throwing down her napkin. She was wearing her hair in ringlets that she’d swept back from her face; her breasts spilled out of a beaded ivory bustier. Her skin was dazzlingly white, and she knew the whole effect was what she had come to think of as an “Elizabethan fairy princess.” She was certainly one of the most beautiful women in the room, if not the most beautiful.
“Janey,” Harold said patiently. “Look at the facts. You live in a lousy one-bedroom apartment on the East Side. You don’t even have a doorman. You’re broke. You’re not interested in dating anyone who’s remotely sensible for you . . .”
“By sensible, you mean boring,” Janey said.
“I mean a regular guy who stays home and watches football on Sunday. A guy who really loves you.”
“But I could never love a guy like that,” Janey said. “Don’t you understand?”
“Have you ever loved anyone, Janey?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, I have.”
“Who?” Harold demanded.
“Just some guy,” Janey said. “When I was younger. Twenty-three.”
“You see,” Harold said. “Just some guy. You said it yourself.”
Janey pushed her salad around her plate and said nothing. It was ridiculous to call Charlie “just some guy” because he was anything but, but there was no point in explaining to Harold. She’d met Charlie at a fashion shoot when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-one (he was modeling as a joke, to piss off his father), and they had instantly fallen in love. Charlie was the scion of a wealthy oil family from Denver; it was rumored that he’d inherited sixty million dollars when he turned eighteen. But it wasn’t his money that made him attractive. There was the time he bought Rollerblades and skated down Fifth Avenue in a tux. The Valentine’s Day that he drove her around in the back of a flower van filled with roses. And the birthday when he gave her a pug named Popeye that they dressed up like a baby and snuck into their friends’ apartment buildings. He called her Willie (short for Wilcox, he said) and was the only man who ever thought she was funny.
They lived together for a year and a half, and then he bought a five-thousand-acre ranch in Montana. He wanted to get married and live there and raise cattle. He wanted to be a cowboy. Janey thought it was another joke. She told him he was the only twenty-three-year-old in the world who was dying to get married and have kids. But he was serious.
“I can’t move to Montana and live on a ranch,” she screamed. Her career was starting to take off. She’d just gotten the part in that movie.
She was convinced if she moved to Montana, her life would be over. Everything she had would be wasted.
At first, he used to call her on the set. “I got up at four A.M. I had my lunch at nine!” he would shout excitedly. “We rounded up four hundred head of cattle.” But by the time she’d finished shooting the movie and it was a hit and she thought she was going to have a career as an actress and then realized she wasn’t, he had married his old girlfriend from high school.
“Janey! Smile!” a photographer said. Janey complied, leaning her head on Harold’s shoulder. Harold patted her hand. “Why don’t you get married?” she said.
Harold shook his head. “You know I don’t want to get married until I’m at least sixty.”
“You’ll be nearly dead by then.”
“My father didn’t marry my mother until he was sixty. And she was twenty-five. They were very happy together.”
Janey nodded. She’d heard this story before, and what Harold didn’t point out was that his father had died at seventy, and Harold had grown up a frightened little boy raised by his mother and two aunts in a crabbed Fifth Avenue apartment: the result being that Harold was an anal retentive who spent an hour a day on the crapper and still saw his old mother every Sunday. It was so stupid. If only men like Harold would do their part and behave sensibly—i.e., get married and have children—then women like Janey wouldn’t have to worry about how they were supposed to support themselves and—ugh—make a living. Didn’t Harold realize that there really wasn’t any profession in which she could make as much money as he did, short of becoming a famous movie star, no matter how hard she tried?
“We could be married and have children by now,” Janey said. “Do you ever think about that?”
“Children!” Harold said. “I’m still a child myself. But think about what I’ve said, won’t you?”
Janey nodded.
“I won’t be able to lend you money forever,” he said quietly.
“No. Of course not,” Janey said. She picked up her fork and concentrated on her lobster quadrilles. Rich people were always like that, weren’t they? They’d help you out a couple of times and then, no matter how much money they had and how meaningless the amount would have meant to them, they cut you off. They didn’t want to be used.
And then there was the Swish Daily incident.
Janey was in the designer showroom, getting fitted for his runway show, when suddenly he came in, looked at her, and screamed, “Oh my dear! Those hips!”
The fitter, a nondescript woman of about fifty, looked at Janey and shrugged. Janey tried to laugh, but the fact was that she had gained about ten pounds in the last year and hadn’t been able to lose it.
“What are you talking about?” Janey said, turning sideways in the mirror to hide her discomfort, but it was no use. Swish came rushing up, knelt down, and put his hands on either side of her thighs.
