Diamond Girl

Chapter 22



By the time I finally connected with my mother, Michael had already taught me how to drive, had attended two Lions games with Daddy and Sarah, and I had been working at my awesome new job for two weeks. I had left six messages for Mother with her secretary-social secretary, and dropped by eight hundred fifth twice, without finding her.

Her being unavailable to me was nothing new so, like always, I lived my life without her. What wasn’t like always is that during that time I was living it happily. Daddy had called one of his acquaintances, a very rich junk bond trader whose only daughter was a woman about ten years older than me who ran her own seriously successful PR firm in Manhattan. He had gotten me a position as assistant to Carly Goldstein.

Carly was a loaded gun of a woman, as completely opposite from me as if we came from different planets. Her own parents, not coming from a long line of people who had been bred to breed and then distance, had had their first and been weirdly, in my experience, so delighted by having a child, a girl even, that they made her the center of their lives. Following her birth in the wild days of eighties trading and takeovers, her own father made a billion or so and both her parents dedicated themselves to having fun and including their child in that fun.

Like I said, they were aliens.

Apparently, and I can only state this from observation not personal knowledge, having your parents want you around gives you a freakishly high level of self-confidence, because Carly Goldstein was the single most forceful person I have ever met. Luckily she liked me, so I was never on the receiving end of her ‘bulldoze over everybody’ tirades.

She treated me like a pet, like I treated Petal, and, speaking of Petal, Carly let me bring her to the office every day.

So I was grateful to her, and in awe of her, and that created the sort of dynamic she was comfortable with, so she in turn was kind to me. Milan was super self-confident too, but in a much different way. Her blood was as blue and icy as mine, as was her father’s, so her belief in herself is a little hard to figure out. My theory is that as a lonely little girl, like I was, she stood in front of her own mirror and, instead of asking 'Why am I alone, what’s wrong with me?', she took stock of her amazing genetic gifts and decided to love herself. That’s some powerful juju. I never got there personally.

Carly was nothing like Milan. She was short, obviously Jewish, with strong rather than pretty features, and she was notoriously continuously tanned, seemingly oblivious to the aging that came along with worshipping the sun. She had her hair bleached almost white, spoke in a gravelly voice, smoked openly while the rest of us hid it, and ordered everyone around regardless of who they were. She didn’t give a crap if people hated her or not. Mostly people did hate her but she was so focused on running the hottest PR firm in town that she either didn’t notice or didn’t care, maybe both.

She piled on the star clients: P.Diddy, Madonna, you name ‘em. She had them in her closely guarded Rolodex. My 'job' was to answer emails for her, run across town with gift baskets for clients or venues, and trail her around at media functions looking pretty and smiling at people when she wouldn’t. My experience as Milan’s bff made me a natural at this.

At night and on weekends there was Michael, my Michael, with his navy eyes and shaggy hair, his half-grin, his hands and his funny stories about his clients.

He wasn’t living with me officially but he really was. All his clothes were at my place. It’s just that he still held onto his own apartment, which I hated, but taking Milan’s advice, never told him I hated it.

He liked my new job. Carly was the PR person in town and he would ask me about everything she was doing and probably copied half of it, not that I cared. Carly was pissed that I couldn’t bring her Milan, but love is thicker than a paycheck, especially a paycheck that barely kept Petal in shoes, let alone me. And though I was positive that Michael loved me for me, and not for Milan’s patronage, or for the lifestyle I gave him, I wasn’t so positive that I was willing to test that theory.

I did bring her the Diabetes Foundation account, or Daddy did. I think that was how I was hired, and it was Carly who was inadvertently responsible for me finally connecting with my mother, and also for the bizarre new turn our relationship took.

The Friday before Memorial Day, Petal and I were in the little rose-colored alcove outside Carly’s ginormous office. Funnily, the office of Carly Goldstein PR was all done in cream and rose, a sharp contrast to her own style that tended to be black, or blacker if it was an evening event.

Anyway, her door flew open and she barked at me. “Carey, did you confirm the Met for 'Evening in Florence'?” 'Evening in Florence' was the fall fundraiser for the foundation. In typical haute New York style, three hundred tables at five thousand a head would be fêted on free range animals and their former livers – well, pâté - and Cristal - though not vintage, this being for charity, after all - and small individual cakes that each mirrored an Italian masterpiece, the last being because it was an 'Evening in Florence'. Now I realize cake is a strange thing for a Diabetes Foundation, but I didn’t worry because I knew at least none of the women would touch dessert.

In addition, there were gondolas, though it was not 'a Night in Venice'. The gondolas would be filled by four thousand deep golden roses and, for entertainment, a performance by Harry Connick Jr., all to be followed by dancing and a silent auction.

The greatest thing up for bid was a private week at the Pitti Palace, which actually was in Florence. Given the evening’s overhead, the expected profit for the foundation would be around a hundred thousand dollars, but that wasn’t the point. The point, as Carly assured me, was to raise awareness for the plight of juvenile diabetics and, presumably, though I didn’t say it out loud, to raise awareness of Florence’s unfortunate lack of gondolas.

I assured Carly that everything she had given me to do on her ten thousand point check list was done and in order. She rapped her hand against my little French desk, making Petal bark.

Carly rolled her eyes and snapped out. “Your mother is back and she is annoying me. She wants to know why she wasn’t in the loop on the fundraiser and what her chairperson activities are? It’s bullshit, Carey, me having to deal with this shit right now since I didn’t know she had any f*cking chairperson duties and I understood that you were hostessing this event. So, since this can’t be my problem, it must be yours. Call her up and deal with it.”

“Carly, I didn’t know my mother was gone, let alone back, and I haven’t talked to her in months, so I have no idea why she is bothering you. What are you asking me?”

She rolled her eyes. “I am asking you to do your job, Carey.”

“How is my mother my job?”

“Your job is handling things I don’t want to, so that I can handle the important things for our clients, so that I can run a P.R. business, and so that you can have a job. Now, if you can’t handle calling up your own mother and telling her that this event is a done deal, and that you, not she - the apparently soon-to-be-no-longer-Mrs. Kells Kelleher, is the hostess, I will have to do it, and I don’t want to, and I will be extremely pissed if I have to. Handling little family dramas is not what I do and I shouldn’t have to tell you to handle this, you should want to. So capisch, Carey?”

I did love my new job, I loved having to be somewhere every day, and the way it made Daddy and Michael and Milan and Christy so proud of me, and Carly wasn’t being mean to me, she was just being Carly, the same way my mother was always being my mother and, anyway, I thought she was right. If I couldn’t handle telling my mother she was persona non grata, then I wasn’t tough enough to be in PR. Besides, I had been wanting to hand my mother a rejection slip for years and now I had my chance. I had told Daddy I would do it weeks ago and I had tried. It wasn’t my fault that she didn’t tell me she was out of town or consider me important enough to call back.

The more I considered how degrading it was that she had called my boss instead of me to discuss the benefit, the angrier I got. I told Carly not to think of it again.

She responded curtly that she wouldn’t and breezed out of the office in a wave of platinum hair and black clothes, looking a little like the witch that people said she was. She could have had a bit part in 'The Devil Wears Prada' but, in her case, 'Satan wears Alexander McQueen' would have been more appropriate.

I picked up the phone and dialed my mother’s cell, preparing to leave a longer message than my previous ones.

To my surprise she answered. “Carey, there you are. Did you know I had to call your employer to reach you? Isn’t that ridiculous, my own daughter? How are you, darling? I’m so anxious to see you.”

Darling? Anxious to see me? It was pretty easy to figure out that old Mumsy had gone round the bend.

I answered cautiously. “Great, Mom, then it’s a good thing you finally tracked me down by calling Carly. I know I’m hard to get a hold of - if you don’t call my home phone or the cell, that is. I have tried calling you a few times, and I even stopped by. Your maid and secretary both told me you were out of town and unavailable. So where have you been that has no cell service - Mongolia? - doing one of your Outward Bound climbs?”

Her irritating faux-laugh, which is her only laugh, rang in my ear. “Outward Bound? Aren’t you hysterical? No, I was in Switzerland. It’s so lovely this time of year, and ...”

“Oh, some more face work, Mom? And Switzerland now? Is that because you’ve been - what do they call it? - over-served by anyone accredited by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, or do they just have laxer laws over there about being injected with unborn fetal tissue to help a girl keep that dewy soft look?”

I heard her inhale. “I see, Carolyn, that despite glowing reports from your father, you haven’t in reality matured a bit. I’m sorry to hear that. I was rather hoping …”

“Rather hoping for what, Mumsy?”

She sighed. “Well, I suppose that I was hoping for a chance to get to know my daughter now that she is a young woman and not a difficult, disturbed child, but clearly I will need to wait a few more years.”

My little office spun around me, the pink walls becoming red. How, how did she do it? No matter what, it was always me who was the f*ck-up, the one in the wrong, never her. I couldn’t win with her. I couldn’t best her and I should have stopped trying years ago. Daddy was right; she still had teeth, big sharp ones. When I didn’t say anything, she spoke again, her voice the purr it always was when she knew she had drawn blood. That I didn’t hang up shows how mentally incompetent I am, I guess.

“Darling Carey, let’s not fight. I wish you weren’t always so hypersensitive. At any rate, I do want to see you and, of course, I’m dying to hear what I can do to help at the benefit. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you let me take you to lunch tomorrow? We can go anywhere you want. Well, of course I hope you’ll pick somewhere with a healthy diet, a mother worries. I have the most terrible visions of you eating all sorts of things that are bad for your condition, but never mind, you get to pick, name the place.”

Hating myself, I mumbled that anywhere was fine. She briskly told me to meet her at La Goulue at one the following day.

I rolled my eyes on hearing her pick. La Goulue was one of the many replacement restaurants for Mortimer’s. Mortimer’s had been the go-to restaurant for women like my mother for decades with bad food - not that they ate it - fawning service, a high turnaway rate for regular people and, most important, the ability to be seen by the same fifty women you had exchanged air kisses with the night before and would be doing so again that evening. Since the owner of Mort's had dropped dead suddenly, the East Side trophies and their mother-in-laws had been desperately scrambling, trying to decide on a new luncheon venue.

They would try different East Side eateries, their already tightened faces more tight than usual with suspicion. Would the new restaurant try to overcharge them? Would the waiters understand who they were? Worst of all, was the possibility that the maître d’ might just let in anyone. It was a difficult transitional time for them.

Finally, a great many of the women settled down at La Goulue, feeling that, though it could never be Mortimer’s, it would do. I don’t know why I said yes. I mean I had Carly’s orders to pass on a message but I could have done it by phone. I guess I said yes because she had finished her order to meet by saying, “Good, darling. I can’t wait to show off my beautiful daughter.”

Pathetic as always, and with much less dignity than my Petal who was much fussier about whom she let stroke her, I left a note for Carly and, grabbing Petal, set off for Bergdorf’s to find the perfect outfit for our mother-daughter lunch.

Pippa’s replacement was the gorgeous Denise, my new PS, and when I told her what I needed, she was a whirl of efficiency. Even I felt a little bad walking home later, dropping five figures on a luncheon outfit was over the top, even for me. Michael laughed when he saw it and made me put it on for him, and then he made me take it off for him, giving a running commentary.

“Miss Kelleher, ladies and gentleman, is now removing the jacket of her ... what is it, baby?”

I laughed trying to be sexy in a non-sexy outfit. “You peasant. Miss Kelleher is now removing the jacket of her Dolce and Gabbana floral matealasse jacket. She is trying to do so very quickly so that her horny boyfriend can remove the matching dress underneath.”

“Ahh yes, of course, the floral matealasse. How could I forget? Please continue, Miss Kelleher - remove, remove.”

I did and stood before him in the sleeveless pink and cream dress. He walked over, turned me around, lowered the zipper, and let the dress fall to my ankles. I stepped over the pile, wearing only a garter, black silk stockings and the new black Loubotin heels Denise had insisted I buy despite my protest that I had thirty identical pairs at home.

Michael was breathing shallowly. I dimpled at him.

“Now Miss Kelleher is wearing a garter and stockings by Agent Provocateur, and heels by Loubotin. Should she remove them, Mr. Annador?”

He crowded me back towards the bed. “She should not remove them.”

I didn’t.



* * *



The next day when I walked into La Goulue, several of the women sitting near my mother’s table eyed me with admiration.

Mother tilted her face for a kiss and smiled at me. “Darling, wonderful to see you and I do love that suit. I nearly ordered it for myself at the collections this year, but one mustn’t be too extravagant. Of course, I suppose your father is still paying your bills, so it’s not a concern.” I remained standing, planning to turn right around and leave, but she put her hand on my arm. “Please, Carey, sit down, it really is so good to see you and you look beautiful, darling. I couldn’t be prouder of you. Please, can’t we have a nice lunch together?”

I stayed and I was lost.