Diamond Girl

Chapter 33



There’s this old saying, 'a fool and his money are soon parted', and blah blah blah. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but I could make up a better one: this fool and her money were welcomed everywhere.

I don’t know if what I did was so wrong or if I was always supposed to end up here. I was just trying to be happy that whole crazy year, when Milan moved out here and I got and lost the opportunity of a lifetime, and it seemed like Herbert had sort of given me a blank check, which, of course, he hadn’t. It was from my own money but since my so-called trustees kept threatening to take it away, it didn’t really seem like my money, so I thought it was okay to buy things. Or maybe I did it because of the great week I had spent with Daddy, where he had treated me like his little princess again, that made me feel stupidly secure.

The money I spent the summer I turned twenty-five felt like revenge and it felt like a return to the only power I’d ever had, being Carey Kelleher, adored heiress to Kells V. Thinking about it now while I’m laying in cold urine and most likely getting rabies from rat bites, it all seems pretty crazy, but at the time it felt so good.

People are your very bestest friends when you are buying stuff from them and I guess I always knew, even from my first magic shopping spree with Aunt Georgia, that the only reason all the pretty girls and boys in the shops treated me like I was so amazing and beautiful and witty, no matter what I said, was because there was no limit either on my own excess or on Daddy’s credit.

I get that it wasn’t real, but then not much in my life is real, so I don’t think it’s strange that shopping is what I did when I needed affection and approval. Where else had I ever gotten it?

My summer of serious shopping started off with the biggest purchase I had ever gotten to make on my own, a house. Shopping for a house, I found out, gives you a whole new level of warmth and intimacy with your salesperson.

Shopping for a house in Beverly Hills makes your real estate agent, who is just another personal shopper but one who is going to get a really sweet commission, take sucking up and charming the client to a whole new level. Sotheby’s is a firm that made it to the top by finding out everything they could about we rich, and then applying it to the psychology of selling us things, whether we could afford them or not, by picking the right real estate agent/best friend - possible fiancé in my case - salesperson and setting them loose on us.

After I made the call to their Beverly Hills office, I set off a chain reaction. The sweet gushing British receptionist asked me few questions, my name and my stupid vague statement about how I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for being more than enough to set off whatever their office’s version of the ‘all hands on deck’ signal was.

Two hours later I was on the patio of the Ivy, drinking Mimosas and having my hand held by Stephen, a gut punchingly handsome Aussie who was like everyone else in this town, a wannabe actor. Normally I would have scorned this ambition but his resemblance to Russell Crowe, albeit Russell Crowe in a Zegna suit, made me nod adoringly instead of rolling my eyes as he explained that real estate was merely his pastime.

“Though, now, sitting here with a lass as beautiful as you, Carey, I think maybe real estate is my calling. I can’t tell you how much pleasure I’m deriving at the idea of helping you find your ideal home, a home that I hope will have a rather ideal en-suite bedroom that ...” here he paused to give my palm a one finger stroke which made my nearly virginal body shake with lust since it had been so long, “will be the perfect room for you to awaken in each morning.” Since after that I was fairly certain that whatever house I did buy was going to be our house where we would live happily ever after, at least until the children came and then we would get a bigger house, I decided to let Stephen guide my purchase.

Clearly he picked up on my feelings and saw a way to make a quick buck for very little effort as he sold me the second house he showed me. I didn’t notice much about the place; real estate is not my thing. I did like the pretty red-bricked pool that Stephen daringly talked me into joining him in during the showing. He was pretty quick but it was the first underwater sex of my life, and the way he looked naked in the water with the sun on him made me feel like I was starring in some great romantic comedy. Afterward, when he said that he thought the house was perfect, I agreed.

I was positive that Stephen was giving me a subliminal message that the house was where he wanted to live one day, with me. I immediately told him I thought it was perfect for me too and said to draw up the papers and send them to Herbert’s office in New York. Stephen seemed ecstatic and I don’t think that part was an act because he had just cleared six percent on a five and a half million dollar house and gotten laid, all before noon. I’m sure he still tells the story at real estate dinners. I never heard from him again. A Sotheby’s assistant brought me the closing papers a week later. I could have backed out but there was no real reason to; Herbert had approved the purchase and each time I saw the house on Cherokee Lane, I liked it more.

Milan gave me her stamp of approval and managed to put the whole Stephen thing in a positive light. “That’s why Sotheby’s is so fabulous. Their customer service is really all-encompassing. Besides, Cares, did you really want to marry some poor Russell imitation who sells houses for a living? Come on, this place is adorable, and with the right look it could be amazing.” The whole right look thing was beyond me. I never have had my own taste, really. I know what I was used to, antique French and English furniture, hand-painted silk walls and ceilings, and old master paintings, originals not reproductions, but I never thought about whether or not I liked any of it. It was just there, it’s how we had always lived.

Milan’s comment was a challenge to me. I had never had many of those and it felt novel. One thing being a Kelleher had taught me was that if I didn’t know what I wanted, I just had to say that out loud in a store and people would rush to help me find something I had always wanted, but hadn’t known I’d wanted till then. Leaning on Milan, like always, I asked her who she thought I should go to for design advice and, like always, despite having only been in L.A. for two weeks, she had it wired.

My pretty new house had been built in 1952 and was a semi-traditional white pseudo-colonial that you reached after driving up a long private gated drive. It had been updated, of course, but it still had cool earlier times features and big airy glass rooms with vaulted beamed ceilings and wood burning fireplaces in most of the rooms, including the master suite. It also had a newly remodeled gourmet kitchen that was a little intimidating, but Milan reminded me it would be nice for my help as soon as I found some.

The house sat on a big lot with this great manicured garden and lots of old trees. To a New York girl it felt a little like I had just bought myself a small park. The two-car garage had an apartment over it which made me happy because I had already decided not to move in unless I had other people living there. Houses and the whole isolation, dead silence at night, thing that comes with them are something I have never gotten used to. The little apartment meant that I could have my housekeeper or gardener live right on the property with me. Milan’s mom, who had become one of the nicest people in the world in her forties and who finally was acting like a real mom, took on the job of finding me someone and hired this wonderful Japanese couple, Mieko and Harin, to take care of me, the house and my new little park garden.

As soon as they moved in, I was ready to head to, at Milan’s directive, the amazing design store she had found for me, Ian Patrick Interiors. Stanley, my salesman, also became my new bff while we were doing the house, and he introduced me to a world of shopping I had not known existed. Buying furniture is a much bigger rush than purchasing, say, a Balmain distressed army t-shirt from Net-à- Porter. And, as Stanley helped me to see, unlike throwing away money on clothes, purchasing items of furniture for your home is an investment.

I had entered a new world of fascinating, must-have objects. It was wonderful and, as Stanley pointed out when we flew to the pretty showrooms in North Carolina, I did after all have my own taste in interiors.

For example, when I saw the aged Eglomise Glass Dresser, I knew I wanted it, and that wasn’t so bad; it was on sale for ten thousand. The gorgeous, one-of-a-kind tangerine velvet chaise, that I would make infamous in Vanity Fair a year later, was only eighty-five hundred dollars. And I think I would have been all right but I became fascinated with things for my house and began researching them, much as I had Chanel bags back in my starter shopping days. When I found Limestone Gallery in London, I insisted that Stanley and I fly out there, and I couldn’t resist ordering their solid Ivory Stone bathtub, the most magnificent bathtub I had ever seen, a one-of-a-kind scooped ivory sled made from a single piece of stone. It was eighty-five thousand dollars.

Saying that “Since we are in London anyway, we might as well drop in”, Stanley introduced me to the “most amusing” store. “You have to see this, Carey darling. They’re outrageous. So bad. Their designs are stunning but the audacity!”

He had my number, I did have to see it, and that began my affair with Europe by Net, where every item of furniture is a flat one hundred thousand dollars, shipping not included.

When I hesitated briefly over the carved iron canopy bed, or the stone and distressed wooden daybeds for the pool, Stanley reminded me, truthfully enough, that for a girl who had grown up with thirty million dollar Fragonards in the library, it wasn’t all that much. In the end my new little place was really beautiful and each room made me sigh with pleasure. The house was very me, the very me I hadn’t even known I was, and my burst of self-expression had cost nearly five million dollars.

Shopping on the grand scale is a high, and I liked being high again, so when my twenty-fifth birthday came, I threw a combination house warming/birthday party and invited one hundred of Milan’s newest friends. It was a great evening and I made the newspaper the next day. Looking beautiful and wanting to stave off my post shopping and party binge let down, I called for a car service and had them take me to the Mercedes dealership. If I was going to be an independent L.A. girl, I had to drive, and buying the largest S.U.V. model they had made me feel safe.

While I was finally starting to drive myself around, I didn’t do it very well. Stopping off at Harry Winston on Rodeo Dr., and sauntering in announcing that I wanted to buy myself a birthday present from my father since he had forgotten to do it, assured me of a warm welcome. After two glasses of Veuve, deciding on the three carat ascher cut canary diamond studs didn’t seem unreasonable at the time. Later I wondered if Daddy would have spent quite that much on me and I felt the first tremors of buyer’s remorse. That night at home, lying on my pretty pale green Epoca couch, I finally started to worry.

I didn’t understand my trust and I don’t think I ever understood that an arbitrary amount like twenty-five million was all there was. Vaguely I guess I always thought I must have at least a hundred million sitting in some bank somewhere. I did know about interest accumulating on money after all, and if I was twenty-five and the money had been set up for me twenty-five years before, then it wasn’t all that crazy to think it must have grown a great deal.

When I thought about it at all, I kind of assumed that the amount Herbert had mentioned was the amount available to actually spend and that, after that, I would need to start living on a monthly amount, that amount being amorphous to me. But the night following my birthday spree, I guessed that when Herbert saw the bills, especially the one for my new earrings, I would be getting a call.

I didn’t want any more calls from Herbert. I didn’t feel like I could stand being made to feel like some defective loser who was the family failure again. I would have rather called up all the stores and slept on a mattress on my newly installed marble floors before that happened, though obviously that seemed like a pretty drastic idea too.

Then I had what I considered an epiphany. I could pay cash to all of my vendors and tell them to stop the bills. I didn’t have access to cash, of course, but I knew someone who did, my darling Aunt Georgia.

I picked up the phone and dialed her cell.