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And sure enough, I broke into sobs.
“I know a famous art dealer who’s looking for an assistant for his new SoHo gallery,” the man said.
“Will he treat me like a PROSTITUTE?” I said.
“Prostitutes are very in right now. Everyone wants to be one. No woman wants to pay for her own Christian Lacroix and shouldn’t have to.”
Naturally, the man turned out to be D.W.
And now he’s sitting at an outside table at La Goulue, trying to work his cell phone. I slip onto the rickety white metal chair and say, “You’re wearing . . . seersucker?”
He says, “It’s Valentino. Italian WASP.”
“Ooooh. The newest thing, I suppose.”
“As a matter of fact, it is. What’s your problem? Aren’t you leaving tomorrow?”
“Can you get Bentley to lend Dianna a dress for the film festival?”
“Dianna,” D.W. says, “is from Florida.”
“You go to Florida.”
“I go to Palm Beach. Palm Beach is not Florida.” D.W. pauses while the waiter pours fizzy water. “I’ve heard she’s from somewhere like . . . Tallahassee? I mean, who is from Tallahassee? That we know.”
“No one,” I say.
“Why does Dianna Moon want to wear Bentley, anyway? She could wear something from Fredricks of Hollywood and it would look the same.”
“That’s right,” I say.
“I don’t like this friendship with Dianna Moon. You understand, don’t you, that she’s just like Amanda. A more successful version of Amanda, if you can call what girls like Dianna Moon do ‘successful.’”
“She’s a famous actress . . .”
“Her career is, most likely, going nowhere. For some bizarre reason, possibly due to magazines like Vogue, this little upstart wants to come to New York and become the Leader of Society. And she’s going to use you to get there. She wants to be you. Just like Amanda.”
“D.W.,” I sigh. “Society is dead.”
He just looks at me.
“She doesn’t want to be me. Maybe I want to be her,” I say.
“Oh please,” D.W. says.
“She’s enormously rich. And she doesn’t have . . . a husband.”
“Because she killed him.”
“He was killed by . . . evil forces. And parts of his body were carried off by aliens.”
“Why are you hanging out with a Jesus freak?” D.W. asks calmly, signaling to the waiter.
Good question. Because my mother is . . . strange?
“It’s a very bad look for you. Very bad,” D.W. says.
My mother came from a normal, upper-middle-class family, and her dad was a lawyer in Boston, but even today, years after she left the commune, she still refuses to dye her hair and wears Birkenstock sandals.
