Diamond Girl

Chapter 27



There are these bad old nineties movies, Escape from L.A. and Escape from New York, and they are all about how the world has come to an end but all the really bad shit has either, depending on the movie, started in either New York or L.A., the message being that even alien invaders know that those are the most important places in the country. So, if you want to get noticed, go after one of them, or maybe it’s just typical Hollywood craptastic stuff, because who would go to a movie called 'Escape from Boise'? Everyone born outside of our two major cities already spends most of their time fantasizing about escaping to them. It does kind of illustrate how even people in Boise or South Dakota, or wherever, agree that if it’s not happening in New York or L.A., it’s not happening at all.

Everyone, that is, except New Yorkers. No born-and-bred New Yorker ever dreams of escaping the city. I mean, yeah, we all periodically whine and bitch about the heat, or the cold, or the traffic, and it’s not a problem because, in a half hour helicopter ride, we can be in the Hamptons or on the Vineyard. A week away is more than long enough to make any Manhattanite ready to tear off their skin to get back into the city, trips to Amalfi and the Seychelles being an occasional exception.

My point is that there is no better city, no better life. No one lucky enough to live there ever wants to be any place else. We don’t think there is any place else. I didn’t fantasize about giving up Fifth Avenue for a day’s shopping at the malls of Beverly Hills. Ask any New Yorker and they’ll all tell you that, to us, L.A. is just a blinged-up sunnier version of New Jersey and, except for the novelty of maybe seeing the Academy Awards live once a decade, it’s a place best read about in tabloids, not lived in.

Until my family forced me from the home of my birthright, I had never considered L.A. and its surrounding environs with anything but horror. It’s not some magic factory, it’s a huge messy sprawl of giant supermarkets and Wal-Marts. There are no little corner stores where you buy prosciutto in one little place and flowers at another from some great Italian, Irish or Chinese family that has been running the place for four generations and might have even waited on your grandparents.

New York has Bergdorf’s and F.A.O. Schwartz and the Rockefeller Center, and L.A. has Beverly Center, tacky Rodeo Drive and tanning salons with their own reality shows. When I was a little girl, I used to watch the snow falling over the polar bear enclosure in Central Park and the men and women who would go up the steps of the Metropolitan at night wearing black velvet and gleaming like the white bears. You could just tell that even those sophisticated, lucky people, with their knowledge of all the places in the world you might go, knew that they were already in the best place. In Los Angeles they don’t have any real magic like that, but if you get super-nostalgic for enchantment, I guess you can always pile in the car and drive down the choked freeway to Disneyland.

New York was my home, my world, the place where my bloodline had dictated I would live out my life and make all my memories, and then I was sent away. My family decided I wasn’t right for New York; that I wasn’t good enough to stay where I had started. They exiled me, there is no other word for it and, for me, all the time I had left would be spent pacing the confines of my new cage.

In the end my parents did to me what the people who captured the polar bears for our zoo did to them. While the polar bears I had grown up watching were supposed to be happy in their pretty little park, and they even had their own swimming pool, I knew that they still dreamed of their glaciers. I could really see it in the summers. The bears would turn yellow and lie out on their rocks with these hopeless expressions. Even Manhattan couldn’t replace being taken away from their homes. I get that. People and animals need to be left where they belong. Swimming pools don’t make up for losing your natural place in the world. You’ll always end up lying on a rock somewhere, dreaming of your piece of ice and ocean or, in my case, the little patch of old city I had grown up in. I turned yellow in L.A., or orange I guess - everyone in L.A. is orange. Spray-on tans and fluorescent lighting will do that to skin; drugs and loneliness will too. I haven’t been hopeless every second out here since my exile because I always thought I might get to go home again. Now I know that will never happen, not while I’m alive anyway.

My life in New York ended on a sticky summer night in July of 2002. I didn’t do anything - I didn’t cause it to happen - but I was there in a place my family would have preferred I not be. I was a friend and employee of the perpetrator, as Carly is now called, and the press seized on me and on my family name to keep the story going, and my mother used it as an excuse and, presto-chango, I was 'on board a westbound seven forty-seven; didn’t even have time to think before deciding where to go'.

Well, in my case, maybe my family didn’t think, or maybe they did.

Why not L.A.? they must have said to themselves, L.A., land of broken dreams and broken people. Carey will fit right in. If they weren’t right then, L.A. made them right in time.



* * *



My last innocent, drug-fueled, drunken Hamptons weekend started off like usual. I had asked Carly for Friday off that week so that I could get out to East Hampton early - well noon - but early is subjective. She had rolled her eyes but agreed, saying, “You can take all of next week off, if you want to, Carey. The city's dead for the summer; everybody’s gone south, or south of the border, or wherever.”

I didn’t mention that she had shut down the office for all of last summer to follow her boyfriend around Europe. I didn’t mention it because Page Six, our local gossip rag for the rarefied, had been shouting out headlines for the last two weeks that Scott, the man everybody was pretty sure was going to be Carly’s first husband, had been spotted around town with a Victoria’s Secret model, a girl of limited fortune but, unlike Carly, unlimited looks.

Carly was my friend but she was also older and my boss, and she was the kind of friend who liked to give advice and ask personal questions without allowing the favour to be reciprocated.

She was no different that Thursday.

“Are you planning to head out to East Hampton?”

I nodded, hoping it wouldn’t go any further. Of course it did, because when you are having man troubles of your own, it feels so good to criticize your friends for their own loser relationships. Carly didn’t let me down. She walked over and perched on the edge of my desk, petting Petal, pretending, like all of us do, to be saying it out of concern.

She started in. “Carey, do you really think spending another weekend out at Endpoint, hanging around, drinking too much and riding the Bolivian wave is going to make Michael suddenly realize he wants to come back to you?”

“Gawd, Carly, I’m not doing drugs, and ...” She narrowed her eyes. I sighed. “Okay, maybe I am right now, but I’m … I don’t know ... this is a weird time, the trust, my mother and Michael. I mean, he’s not, we’re not, well anyway, I know he likes how skinny I am right now,” I finished defiantly.

Carly, who could drink and cuss like a truck driver or an L.A. girl, was very judgmental about drugs. “Did he say he liked the way you looked, Carey?”

“No but last weekend he couldn’t take his eyes off me.”

“Did he take you home with him, did he talk to you or did he just look at you because, you know, Carey, you might be mistaking why he was looking at you.”

“Oh Gawd, Carly, stop it. I don’t need this. You sound like Milan.”

“Milan’s a smart girl and she knows all about over-exposure, Carey. Maybe you should listen to her.”

“Over-exposure?”

“Yeah, come on, don’t play naïve. You’ve been friends with Milan Marin for a billion years. You’ve worked with me for two, and in P.R. time that’s like a hundred years. You know that if anyone, no matter who they are, is seen at the same place, or doing the same thing, too much, they reach saturation. It stops being exciting and starts to be a joke. That’s when the press, or a guy, can turn nasty. Give Endpoint and Michael a rest, Carey. Let him miss you.”

“You’re wrong, Carly. I know he’s been hard to get a hold of these days, but if he didn’t want me at the Point on weekends, Gawd, it’s his club, he could just tell the doormen not to let me in.”

She laughed. “Oh c’mon, Carey, stop acting like the dumb blond you aren’t. You’re Carey Kelleher, and where you go, other idiots willing to drop ten large on a night at the Point follow. They follow and the paparazzi follows, and while you might end up looking like pretty sad in Monday’s Page Six, his bar just looks like the place to be.”

I winced; there was some truth in what she said. There had been a recent spate of grainy shots of me coming out of the club, dazzled by the daylight, staggering a little, looking sleazy in the night before’s clothes, shots that inevitably ended up in The Post, shots I hoped Daddy wasn’t seeing but knew he probably was.

I looked down. “I know you’re right, Carly, but if I don’t see him at the Point, I don’t see him at all, and I …”

“Don’t say it, don’t say, 'I love him, I miss him, and I don’t care if I’m making an ass out of myself'. Think it but don’t say it, Carey. Don’t validate, even to yourself, how bad you feel. I know a little bit about that myself.”

I looked up at her, surprised and more than willing to switch from loser advisee to sympathetic advice-giving friend. She gave me a warning 'don’t even try it' look. Standing, she said briskly, “Listen, I’m going to be out there myself this weekend. Why don’t you hang out with me at Daddy’s place? He’s got a bunch of people coming in but there’s still plenty of privacy at my end of the estate. We’ll do vodka shooters, lay by the pool and talk about everything but the men who are or aren’t in our lives. What do you say?”

I thought about it. Carly’s daddy, Harry Goldstein’s place in the Hamptons was legendary in our circle, not because any of our families couldn’t have afforded to build our own sixty thousand square foot fantasy palaces (I'm thinking Dubai), but because none of them would have. Harry didn’t care if everybody thought his house was way over the top or that we laughed about the three salt water pools he had installed at the edge of God’s salt water pool, the Atlantic. He had made his money in a hurry and I guess, when you do that, you need pink marble floors, and gold hardware, and a chandelier from a palazzo in Rome that is forty feet long and weighs nearly a ton. In his defense, unlike the rest of us with our weekend estates, he actually spent a lot of time out at Gold House, as he had named the place.

Gold House had everything that a person could want and a lot of stuff they didn’t know they wanted until they spent some time there, things like down-filled climate-controlled chaises longues, and having the sheets changed three times a day. The place also came equipped with its own summer-long environmental protest group who camped out at the gates because Harry had apparently drained the only pond where the speckled Lyon fish, or something like that, could survive. That he had done so because it was where he wanted his helipad located only added to their outrage. Our set thought the protesters were hilarious and, after a little bit, Harry began to enjoy the cachet of having his own crew of outraged greenies at the gate and often supplied them with sandwiches and beer on hot days.

Carly’s 'little cottage' on the property was a ten thousand square foot Tudor mini-mansion. Like I said before, her parents' strange adoration of her, and their desire to spend time with their child, continued to puzzle me, but despite the lure of a weekend in the Hamptons' version of the Sultan’s Palace, I declined Carly’s offer.

She took my no gracefully - for her - saying only, “Okay, fine. I guess your plan is the usual: take a suite but spend all night at Endpoint and hope that Michael will take you home with him in the morning light, huh?”

I didn’t bite back. I smiled and told her that if she didn’t find what she was looking for over the weekend, to stop by Endpoint and I’d buy her a drink. Unsaid as she waved goodbye to me on her way out, was that we both knew Scott was going to be out in the Hamptons that weekend too, staying at his parents' estate, a nice old place, one millionth the size of Gold House but sharing the same stretch of beach.

I went home and packed a small bag for the long weekend and called Milan on my way out to the heliport, asking her if she was coming out.

She answered, sounding frazzled. “Oh no, Cares, not this weekend.”

“Why not?” I asked her plaintively. When Milan was at Endpoint, we were the party, and also when she was there, Michael was forced to spend time with me as she was his most valued client. Without her, I just ended up drifting around, drinking too much, using too much, and looking lost and pathetic.

Her voice was cautious when she answered. “I just don’t feel like it, Cares. Endpoint's not like my first destination choice. I think I might fly out and see Mother and Daddy or, who knows, maybe I’ll just stay in and try to pay off a little of my sleep debt.”

“No, come on, Mills. Hey, I know, we can stay at Carly’s place. You haven’t seen it and ...”

“Oh Gawd, Carly’s going out this weekend? Why, to try and hook up with Scott? How sad can you be?”

Eager to agree with her I jumped in. “Oh, I know. I mean, like can’t she tell he’s done with her?”

Milan’s voice sounded sad when she answered me. “Yeah, I guess not, huh? Sometimes a girl needs to just go away but she doesn’t know how to.”

I wanted off the phone then. “Okay, well I guess I’ll see you next week. You have a good long sleep, Mills, or, you know, whatever you’re doing.”

“Cares, listen, don’t go. Stay in the city with me. We’ll have a slumber party like we used to. We’ll go on an all-chocolate diet and watch eighties hook-up movies.”

“Whoa, sounds good, Mills - not. No, I’m going. It’s going to be a hot weekend in every sense of the word. You should come.”

“No, I don’t think so, Careybeary. It sounds to me more like a long drama trauma weekend with a bunch of girls, who should know better, out in the Hamptons chasing things they should forget about. The weekend of the train wrecks. Are you sure you think you have to go?”

“Gawd, nice shot, Mills, double ouch. And I don’t have to go, I want to go. I am going. Oops, listen, we’re taking off. The 'copter's too loud.”

She said something I couldn’t hear, probably asking me not to go again.

I made kissing noises into the phone. “Okay, well, I’ll miss you. I love you and I’ll call you Monday and tell you everything you missed.”

Of course, I didn’t have to call her Monday. By then, along with everyone else on the Eastern seaboard, she had read or watched on TV all about what she missed.