“It wouldn’t be a gift. It’d be my TV, but I’d keep it at your apartment.”
This time I laughed and gave him a soft peck on the lips, before saying again, “No, James.”
. . .
“No, James” was something I found myself saying a lot over the next few months.
No, I couldn’t go out to dinner with him at the hottest new restaurant in town. No, we couldn’t fly to Cabo on my Monday–Tuesday weekend. No, I couldn’t attend any event where there would be press.
The last one was the real issue, because he didn’t understand what reason I’d possibly have for not going out to at least a few of these things with him, especially since it didn’t cost us any money.
And I couldn’t exactly tell him the truth, that I was dog-scared somebody would snap a picture of us, and one of his mean-ass sisters would see it.
Both Veronica and Tammy Farrell lived in New York now. From what I could understand, Veronica did the same ambassadorship, showing-up-places thing that James did, but on the East Coast. And Tammy—who was a model and went by Tam now, was the main face of Farrell Cosmetics.
Before they had sold the company, I had gotten used to seeing large billboards of her, peeping out at the world through a straight curtain of silky black hair for their hair products line, whenever I visited Mama Jane in Inglewood. But now that Gusteau had launched a makeup line under the Farrell brand, I saw her face everywhere. In magazines and winking at me in the makeup section at convenience stores. In these ads she was often with a round-eyed Asian model and a smoky Latina. They walked down city streets, hailed taxicabs, and laughed in the back of limousines. They always looked like they were having the time of their lives.
I was a MAC girl through and through, but I understood those ads now, because I was having the time of my life with James. And I didn’t want to do anything that would endanger that. So I told him that I didn’t have the funds to buy outfits for all of his events. He said he’d take care of it. Then I had to tell him again that I wouldn’t accept gifts from him. But he insisted that it was a write-off, a business expense. Not a gift.
“I perform at parties, I don’t go to them,” I finally answered, shutting him down for real.
We had these kinds of conversations a lot. Afterward James would look hurt. And I would feel like the most unreasonable woman on the planet for basically refusing to be seen in public with the guy I was dating.
Still, I knew in my heart that no matter how it looked to him, I wasn’t being unreasonable. I had my reasons. They were psycho reasons, yes, but they were mine.
. . .
Those were the bad times. But for the most part, the summer of 2007 was good times for us.
I was thirty-one, and if I had thought my Bohemian lifestyle would turn James off, I was wrong. Against all odds, me not wanting to do expensive things actually made our relationship more interesting because we had to be creative.
We went on a lot of picnics and to free plays and black-and-white movies that were projected onto the sides of buildings.
Once we turned down the lights and turned up the music in James’s den, which had a bar, then we danced until three in the morning, as wild as we wanted, since there were no paparazzi, bloggers, society page editors, or judgmental scenesters there to see us. Afterward as we stumbled, drunk, up his winding staircase, James declared, “That’s the best nightclub I’ve ever been to.”