She angled her million-dollar cheekbones to the light, just so. “You do say the funniest things, Vivs. What about my dress?”
I surveyed the kelly-greenness of it. “Makes your eyes look like emeralds and your curves look like honeydews. He’ll want to marry you twice.”
She sank into a nearby chair, no small feat for a chair as old and rackety as that one, and propped her flawless chin on her flawless fingers. “Oh, Vivs, I’m so happy. You don’t know what it’s like being me.”
“What, infinitely gorgeous and adorable? Having men fall at your feet, like so many mosquitoes in spraying season?”
“Having men fall at your feet, yes, and then a few weeks later . . .” Melancholy. “Drifting away.”
“Now, Gogo . . .”
“You know. They stop calling. The flowers stop arriving. No more notes, no more chocolates and dinners at 21. Every time, Vivian. Just as I was getting my hopes up, just as I was thinking, Oh, he’s the one, we’ll get married in June and have a dozen babies and a big white house in Darien with a big white oak tree out front and a swing on it . . .” She put her hands together and stared at the fingers. “I was starting to think there was something wrong with me.”
I knelt at her feet and put my hands on her knees. “Honey. There’s nothing wrong with you, okay? There’s everything right with you. You are the finest person I know, Gogo Lightfoot. You are. You are true and solid gold, and if this Mr. David Perfect gives you the runaround, why, I’ll punch his lights out.”
“Oh, don’t do that, Vivs!”
“You see what I mean?” I folded her hands between mine. “Solid gold.”
Now. We’ll pause a minute right here, because my conscience—such as it is—is stabbing me. Time to disabuse you of your notions. I can’t go on any longer without telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if you despise me for it.
Because you should despise me for it.
Sweet Margaux Lightfoot, the dearest girl in the world, that adorable little scrap of feminine virtue you see above, with the emerald eyes and the honeydew curves and the eagerly twitching womb . . . well, I became friends with her for one reason, and one reason alone: I wanted a job at the Metropolitan.
You see? Flat-out despicable, aren’t I?
I courted her like the most ardent suitor, starting in February of our junior year at Bryn Mawr. I became her best friend overnight. I held her hands and started her drinking when Suitor Number Eight faded back into the worm-eaten woodwork from whence he came; I kept her from drinking too much at the Penn mixer and losing her priceless virginity to a pockmarked fresher from a little house on the prairie. I went with her to the movies and shopping, I helped her study for her final exams. I did all this because I knew her father was S. Barnard Lightfoot III, owner and publisher of the Metropolitan, and there was no other grand journalistic institution in Manhattan—which is to say, the world—I more ardently wished to conquer than the malicious slick-sleek monthly Metropolitan, inscrutable cartoons and all.
As you can see, it worked like a charm.
But somewhere along the line, something happened I hadn’t planned for: I actually started to like her. A sort of pinprick admiration, just in passing, that expanded outward as pinpricks will do.
Yes. Yes. I know it. You wouldn’t think she’s my type. She couldn’t be less like Pepper, for example, and in her virgin modesty she bears a passing resemblance to Tiny. But she’s just so . . .
Sweet.
Honestly, unaffectedly, unabashedly sweet. And I really did want to punch out the lights of Suitor Number Eight. I thought he was passing up the deal of a lifetime. Gogo would make a beautiful, loyal wife. Plop a husband at her breakfast table and a baby on her hip, and she would bloom kazoom into a nurturing mother, a thorough homemaker, a patiently charming hostess to every deadly friend and colleague Suitor Number Eight could drag home comatose from the executive boardroom. All the things, in short, that I would not.
Well, except the loyal part. I am loyal. I’ll grant myself that.
So when Gogo had come home from a four-week graduation holiday in Los Angeles last July, bubbling over with enthusiasm for Disneyland and for Suitor Number Ten (we shall not mention Nine), I was delighted for her. He did sound like the real deal. They wrote all summer long. He came to visit her in New York. No, he was moving to New York! Actually moving here, supposedly for work, but really because he wanted to be with her, Margaux Lightfoot, which could mean only love and marriage and the baby carriage at last for the deserving Gogo. An MRS degree awarded with highest honors.