He carefully put it in the little envelope and wrote Felicia neatly, in script.
And on the other…
The prettiest dress in town for the prettiest girl in town. Meet me at the Four Seasons, Tuesday at eight, to celebrate the big day!
Tomás couldn’t help but ask. “What are you celebrating?”
“Oh, our four-month anniversary. My girlfriend says in the first year of a relationship you celebrate each month. I’m kind of new at this,” he whispered. “I’m a widower.”
I returned from my cigarette break right as the hussy hit the register with an armful of clothing.
“I’ll just take these…I am devastated about that dress!” Devastated? About a dress? Really? There are people wearing recycled I Rocked Becca’s Bat-mitzvah T-shirts in Africa!
Arthur smiled knowingly at Tomás, who smiled back as he rang up the staggering cost of “just these.” As they left, the hussy thanked Arthur with a ridiculously wet kiss and a whiny “Thank you, my handsome Artie.”
Within minutes of their departure Natalie arrived with the dress. Tomás’s eyes lit up.
CHAPTER 5
Eye of the Tiger
By Jeremy Madison, Movie Star
I woke up late, with a smile on my face, thinking about my night with Natalie. Since my good mood was unlikely to survive any form of social media or interactions of any kind, I decided to remain unplugged. Except for the delivery man from Three Guys, who brought me my usual Sunday morning double stack of banana–chocolate chip pancakes, I spoke to no one all day. There was a Rocky marathon on and I fell asleep somewhere after Adrian traded in her glasses for contacts. I woke up once to see Mickey die, at which I shed a perfunctory tear, and fell back asleep until the buzzer woke me. By this time Rocky and Apollo Creed were doing their ultra-eighties frolic through the waves. No one called them gay.
I hit the intercom and my doorman announced, “A Hank and an Albert are here to see you.” I almost tossed my pancakes. Hank and Albert. Together. They never went anywhere together. I reluctantly told him to send them up and ran to my computer to Google myself to see what had sparked such a rare occurrence. By the time my doorbell rang I had pieced together the whole story.
They stormed in like gangbusters. Hank was on fire, as if he were on his ninth espresso, and Albert, poor Albert, looked like he had spent the entire day nibbling the tips off Xanax just to keep calm. I had seen him do that before. It’s like he thinks it doesn’t count if he just takes a little bite off the top, but eventually those little bites add up to god only knows how many pills. They handed me a printout of a TMZ.com story, as if they thought I didn’t own a computer, and acted like my turning off my phone was a criminal offense. They were quite the combination, my agent and my publicist. When it came to me and my life, they usually had the instinct of a lioness protecting her cubs. Today they were like tigers on the hunt. Hank would shout out a solution and Albert would point out all that could go wrong with it. In the end, they agreed that the TMZ headline “Gay or Straight? Who’s Jeremy Madison’s Mystery Girl?” was better for my career than just “Gay!”
This bothered me for a few reasons: one, the paparazzi will now have even more reason to follow me to try and find out who the mystery girl is; two, I feel bad about my brother, I really do. He has been out and proud since we were kids and probably could care less about all this, but I feel as a good brother I should speak out against this kind of public outing of celebrities. And there was also a third reason: now it would be assumed that I was just a cheating louse who broke everyone’s favorite Victoria’s Secret model’s heart. Truth? I really didn’t want to be that guy.
But my advisers, whom, as I told you, I’m scared I would be nothing without, thought differently. Hank especially wanted no part of my gay-advocacy campaign.
He was adamant: “Pick another cause, like the rain forest or puppy mills. And whatever you do, don’t get caught kissing any dudes.”
They decided our best bet would be to answer the question “Who’s the mystery girl?” with a few staged red-carpet photos of Natalie and me, thus answering the gay-or-straight question as well. Of course this meant finding the girl again.
They were so anxious I thought they might explode—how would they convince her to go along with it, would they have to give her some kind of hush money, how would they make sure that never came out in the press, and on and on. The only thing worse than the two of them pacing back and forth across my living room would be the two of them detonated into little pieces and splattered all over my walls, so I gave in, agreed to their plan, and told them I thought the mystery girl would be more than willing to go along with the whole thing. They were so relieved they both hugged and kissed me.