Lauren Weisberger 3-Book Collection: Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger
the last time we had a party here that went this smoothly.’
‘Really?’ Part of me knew that this whole conversation was utterly ridiculous – we were, after all, talking about event-planning – but it was still really nice to hear.
‘Sure. The question is, do you like it?’
‘Well, like is a strong word for just about anything, don’t you think?’ He laughed and I had to physically bury my hands in my coat pockets to keep from grabbing his face. ‘It’s a far cry from the Peace Corps, for sure, but it’s okay for now.’
His face clouded over almost immediately. ‘Yeah’ was about all he could manage.
‘So, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?’ I blurted out, not realizing that it might sound like I was asking him out when all I really wanted to do was change the subject. ‘Going anywhere with your girlfriend?’ I added casually to show him I knew the situation.
He gave me another uncomfortable look, followed by some obvious squirming, sending the message loud and clear: I had overstepped my bounds.
‘I, uh, I didn’t mean anything by—’
‘No, no worries,’ he cut in, leaning backward against the door as though he felt dizzy. ‘It’s just that, well, it’s kind of complicated. Long story. Anyway, I’m actually going home this weekend. My old man’s not doing so well, and it’s been a couple months since I made it up there.’
‘Where’s home?’
He looked at me curiously, as though he were trying to read my face, and then said quietly, ‘Poughkeepsie.’
Had he said that he was born and raised in Laos, he could not have shocked me more. Was he toying with me? Kidding? Had he found out that I was from Poughkeepsie and going home this weekend and thought this was funny somehow? A quick check of his face – smiling sweetly as he watched me process this – indicated no.
‘Poughkeepsie, New York?’ was about all I could manage.
‘The one and only.’
‘That’s crazy. I’m from there—’
‘Yeah, I know. I just didn’t ever know if you knew. I remember you,’ he said softly, looking out across Twenty-seventh Street at, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing.
And, of course, it all came back then. Not that there were so many clues, but there had always been the sense that he was familiar. The time we’d stood right here and he’d joked that one of the girls who’d just gone inside needed a lesson in hippie chic since her flowing caftan was all wrong, and that she should head upstate to be schooled by the pros. That day in Starbucks when he’d brushed his hand up the back of his head and I’d sworn I’d seen that before. The very first night at Penelope’s engagement party, when he wouldn’t let me in and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was staring at me, almost waiting for me to say something. It was all so obvious now. Samuel Stevens, the guy in high school who was too gorgeous for his own good. The guy everyone assumed was gay because he was big and beautiful and didn’t play a sport, but who instead kept mostly to himself while working at a few well-known local restaurants. The guy who came across as conceited and arrogant when we were teenagers and too young to realize that he was intensely shy, a loner, someone who didn’t feel quite right with any one group of kids. The guy who’d sat at the table diagonally across from me in shop class, always focused on the wooden serving trays or gumball machines we were learning to make, never flirting or spacing or sleeping or whispering with his tablemates. The guy every girl should have loved but actually hated because he was somehow beyond her, already looking ahead, past the idiocy of high school and social hierarchies and seemingly unaware that anyone else existed. I did a quick calculation and realized that I hadn’t seen him in nearly twelve years. I was a freshman and he a senior when we had that one shop class together before he graduated and vanished altogether.
‘Mr Mertz’s shop class, 1991, right?’
He nodded.
‘Ohmigod, why didn’t you say anything before now?’ I asked, pulling out another cigarette. I offered him one and he took it, lighting first mine and then his own.
‘I don’t know, I probably should’ve. I just figured you had no idea. I felt kind of weird not saying something at first and then too much time went by. But I remember, when everyone else was sanding and chiseling, you’d always be writing – letters, it looked like – line after line, page after page, and I always wondered how anyone could have so much to say. Who was the lucky guy?’
I’d mostly forgotten about the letter-writing; I hadn’t written one of those in years. It was easier now that I no longer heard my parents asking me what I had done for the world that day. They’d taught me how to write letters when I was old enough to put sentences on paper, and I’d instantly loved it. I wrote to congressmen, senators, CEOs, lobbyists, environmental organizations, and, occasionally, the president. Each night at dinner we’d discuss some great injustice and the following day I’d write my letter, letting someone know my outrage about capital punishment or deforestation or foreign-oil dependence or contraception for teenagers or prohibitive immigration laws. They were always chock-full of self-importance and read like the obnoxious, self-righteous missives they were, but my parents were so lavish with their approval that I couldn’t stop. They tapered off at the end of high school, but it wasn’t until some guy I was hooking up with freshman year in college picked one off my desk and made some offhand comment about how adorable it was that I was trying to save the world that I stopped entirely. It wasn’t what he said so much as the timing. My parents’ lifestyle was already less appealing. I had traded the alternative, peace-on-earth persona for a significantly more mainstream college social life pretty damn fast. Sometimes I wondered if I’d been just a little too thorough in my rejection. There was probably a happy medium somewhere, but banking and – let’s be honest – party-planning hadn’t exactly put me back on the track to selflessness.
I realized that Sammy was watching me intently as I recalled that time and said, ‘Guy? Oh, they weren’t to a boyfriend or anything like that. Guys didn’t exactly dig the dreadlock/espadrille thing I had going back then. They were just, you know, letters to … I don’t know, nothing special.’
‘Well, I always thought you were pretty cute.’
I immediately felt myself blush.
For some reason, this made me happier than if he’d announced his undying love for me, but there was no time to savor it because my cell phone bleated with a 911 text message: Doll, where R U? Need Cristal ASAP.
Why Philip couldn’t just ask one of the three dozen male model/waiters wandering around for that very reason was beyond me, but I knew I should check on things.
‘Listen, I’ve got to get back in there and make sure everyone is drunk enough to have fun but not so trashed that they’ll do anything stupid, but I was wondering: do you need a ride home tomorrow?’
‘Home? To Poughkeepsie? You’re going?’
‘I couldn’t possibly miss the annual Harvest Festival.’
‘Harvest Festival?’ He once again paused to open the velvet rope, this time to let in a couple who weren’t coordinated enough to walk but still seemed in possession of enough faculties to grope each other.
‘Don’t ask. It’s something my parents do every year on Thanksgiving Day, and my presence is required. I’m pretty positive my uncle will bail – he always comes up with some pressing obligation at the last minute – but he’ll lend me his car. I’d be happy to give you a ride,’ I said, fervently praying that he’d accept and not want to invite his aging significant other.
‘Uh, sure. I mean, if you don’t mind, that’d be great. I was just planning on taking the bus up Thursday morning.’
‘Well, I was planning to go tomorrow after work, so if you could go Wednesday instead of Thursday, I’d love to have the company. I always want to drive the car off the road