It’s my birthday? He thought about it for a moment. Is it really?
He clocked the date on his computer screen. September 9, that was it all right. How Arwen had found it out was more of a mystery than the fact that everyone else had forgotten it. Birthdays were passé, and generally the source of slightly too-aggressive ribbing in his so-called band of brothers. How old are you? Thirty-three? Where’s the Pulitzer? The names of those who had won Pulitzers in their twenties were not something you wanted to think about on your thirty-third birthday, when you were on your way to the red carpet at Fashion Week, so you could write a snappy three-paragraph column for the internet edition of the fucking New York Times. Birthdays were a pain in the ass. Red velvet. What the hell is that, anyway? There was some news item floating around about how they were using ground-up insects as red food coloring because the other stuff had chemicals in it. Ground-up bugs equals organic food coloring. Another Pulitzer-worthy bit of information. He picked up the cupcake and tossed it in the garbage can at the side of this desk.
The tents in Bryant Park looked like they had floated down from some other universe. The air was fresh and cool, as an early autumn breeze had swept through Manhattan and contributed to the festive spirit. Elegant men in black suits opened limo doors and held their hands out to the mysterious figures in the backseat, in a gesture of benign invitation. Come out come out. Before barreling across the street to plunge himself into this mess, Seth stopped, suddenly taken by the timelessness of the city’s rituals, on a night that was touched with stardust. He would not have been surprised to see twelve dancing princesses hurry by him at the streetlight, eagerly throwing themselves into the celebration.
No such luck. The red carpet tent was packed and while the evening was cool, there was a sheen of humidity which had gathered, a literal wet blanket, right on top of the crowd of photographers and reporters. Someone should have turned on the air conditioning—he felt sure somehow they knew how to air-condition those fucking tents—but apparently the freshness of the late summer night had fooled the event organizer and her three assistants, who were walking around smiling serenely even though tiny beads of perspiration were popping up all over their faces. As usual, there was a problem, squishing that many bodies into a space that had no circulation. And for all the humid claustrophobia, this didn’t look like much after all. The pretty girls in the photo line were obvious nobodies, certainly nobodies that he was not going to be able to write about for the Times. Not even for the online edition.
“Hey, Fraden.” A voice called to him from the crowd of reporters, a hand with a Bic pen lifted itself above their heads.
Most of his fellow culture beat scribes were serious-minded girl reporters with digital recorders, who asked the same questions over and over and nodded professionally as they did so. Lou Schaeffer, on the other hand, was two hundred and forty pounds of sweating romance. Schaeffer thumbed his glasses back up his nose and squinted past Seth, as if something, anything worth writing about, might be hovering. The guy always looked completely out of place at these things. A beached whale with stringy hair, Schaeffer always had three or four pens clipped to the pocket of his bargain-basement cotton shirts; he would have fit in better at a sci-fi convention. But his prose was impeccable. If they actually did give out Pulitzers to losers who wrote about culture on the internet, Schaeffer would have six or seven.
“Who are these chicks?” Seth muttered, squeezing past the tiny girls to take his place next to the beached whale. “Is this the B-list? Are there two press tents?”
“You missed Clooney and the wife, Aniston, SJP, Damon was here, Susan Sarandon, David Geffen showed up—”
“Come on.”
“You’re asleep at the wheel, my little friend. We started an hour ago.”
Was that possible? Seth checked his watch and ran the times through his head. Seven p.m., the invite said seven and the screening over at the Ziegfield starts at eight. Is tonight the Ziegfield or is it the fund-raiser for PEN? He felt a pebble of sweat creeping down the side of his face. You missed Clooney. That was a mistake, someone over at the Times was going to make note of it. Clooney always stopped to chat with the clowns in the press line, everybody in town would have a decent quote. Except for him.
“Hey, Marissa! How you doing, you look incredible.” Schaeffer waved at a pretty teenager in a peach mini dress. Brown hair curled down her back and a wide belt with the biggest silver buckle he’d ever seen cinched the dress at the waist. Her eyes were bright but honestly, the kid looked like an anorexic ten-year-old. “She’s only got a few minutes, guys,” her publicist announced. He hovered sternly, to make sure they didn’t take advantage.