ALISON MOORE hits the big time. It wasn’t that long ago that she was a total nobody he felt perfectly justified in snubbing at a nothing cocktail party. Now look at her. A gorgeous brunette with a crazy sexy haircut. Shocking green eyes. Great smile. A standard PR shot from some afterparty during the Tribeca Film Festival. Didn’t see that coming.
Seth clicked the server off and turned his attention to the fucking pile of press invites which had been dumped on his fucking desk in his fucking cubbyhole. There must have been fifty of them, and he was expected to cover them all, in twenty-two days.
The sheer physical impossibility of needing to be two or three places at one time was not actually the problem; the real problem was how utterly fucking boring it all was. He had been on the culture beat at the Times for only four months but it was seriously ruining his life. His job was, literally, going to parties and then writing about them, and then fielding phone calls from hysterical press representatives who didn’t like the way he covered the parties. BAM 50th Anniversary Gala! Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night! 1,000 Stars Fashion Benefit for Breast Cancer! Come Celebrate the New Wing at MoMA! Come Celebrate the Award Honoring Somebody Ridiculously Famous Who Really Doesn’t Need Awards! The exclamation points were plentiful, the graphics gorgeous, the paper stock superb.
Everybody who knew anything knew this was a total shit gig. Hi, Jessica! You look fantastic! Can I grab you for a few minutes to talk about your know-nothing role as a gun-toting whore in Evil Dead 12? Matthew, hey, how are the kids! Fantastic! How do you feel about being overlooked by the Tonys this year? Nicky, hi, can I grab you for a minute? Just heard about the deal you signed with Warners, congratulations! You stood in a line and got two minutes of their time as they paraded off the red carpet, on their way to the cocktail event. And then you went to the next one of these things, asked the same questions, and then you went back to the office to type this shit up, and then you went home and thought about murder.
But of course he was surrounded by idiots who thought this whole song and dance was so exciting. The would-be models and actresses he met at bars and clubs and parties all over the city couldn’t get enough of it. He had never really had any trouble getting laid, New York was a wonderland of party babes, truth be told, and half the guys in town were gay. A relatively decent-looking, moderately successful writer who had gone to Harvard was never going to have a problem here. But this beat had taken his sex life to a whole new level. The girls who fluttered around these A-list events were international beauties—Brazilian, French, Italian, Swedish—who floated back and forth between Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Cannes, Lake Como—on the arms of some of the ugliest men Seth had ever laid eyes on. They were never terribly interested in talking to him at the different events, where the photographers got much more of their attention, but they were happy to say hello at the private clubs and downtown hipster bars to which he had been suddenly granted insider status. The guy from the Times who covered “culture”—God, he couldn’t even think of the word now without putting it in quotes—was someone everyone wanted to know.
Arwen the office intern once again had clipped the collated schedule of events to the back of the packet of invites. It made him irrationally angry; he had told her repeatedly that he preferred the schedule clipped to the top of the pile, where he could glance over it without going to all the trouble of unclipping the entire packet, which made a mess. The fact that she had also left him a red velvet cupcake with a little note pissed him off even more. Dial it down, his brain warned him. She wants you to like her she wants to be a writer you are her hero she doesn’t even get paid don’t hurt her feelings. He slumped back in his Aero chair and sighed. A cupcake, a fucking cupcake. They were omnipresent these days. You came by them so easily, they had ceased to be special.
He opened the note. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!! the note announced, in capital letters. HAVE A GOOD ONE!!! For a moment his impatience with this overexcited piece of punctuation almost clouded the information that had been presented to him so unexpectedly. But there it was. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!