Diamond Girl (18 page)

Chapter 19

In retrospect, which is the only 'spect' I’ve got right now, I maybe could have seen the writing on the wall as far as the future of my relationship. But when you are in love, really in love, you only see the world in two colors, black and blue: navy blue for the color of Michael’s eyes, paler blue for the sky that always seems clear - and azure on the good days - blue for the ocean of hope and promise that your world holds; black for the days he didn’t call and black for the pit of fear of the very idea that he didn’t love me as much as I loved him.

And how could he have? He was eighteen too, and not my kind of eighteen, not a needy, insecure, self-hating mess who was ready to cling so hard to the first person who let me love them that I might drag us both down into more black … the black murky waters of obsession.

The morning after our first night together, he was sweet and cute, and a little shy, and I was happy. Saying I was happy maybe doesn’t get it. A different girl would say she was in heaven, walking on air, blah blah blah. I was walking the hard pavement of New York in a wrinkled white lace Chanel dress and heels, but unlike some other mornings, it didn’t feel like the walk of shame. I didn’t feel giddy but I didn’t feel hungover and ashamed either. It might have been the first morning in my whole life that I noticed how truly blue the Manhattan sky was. Just looking upward, looking ahead was a huge deal for me.

I did feel happy and, if you have never really been happy, that word is plenty huge enough without laying on a bunch of excess sap for effect.

The first thing I did when I got home, after apologizing to Petal and leaving a note for my maid to call in the carpet cleaners, was to sit down at the computer and Google the song he had said I reminded him of - Elvis Costello, 'Alison'.

The lines 'Alison, I know this world is killing you' and 'Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say' fired straight back at me.
That is what I meant by signs and portents, but a girl in love will tell herself all kinds of things. In my case I told myself that he didn’t really know the words and that, even if he had, he couldn’t have seen that much truth about me so quick. But I never did tell Christy, after all, what love song he had said I reminded him of. I told her I had forgotten, as if I could have.

I also told myself that, even for a guy who wasn’t a needy emotional mess, eighteen was plenty old enough to recognize the girl of your dreams and want to settle down.

All I had to do, I told myself, was find out exactly what Michael’s idea of the perfect girl was, and be her. If there is a single girl or woman in the world who says she hasn’t done the same thing, all I can say to that is, oh my God, wake up and get real.

The whole ‘how to be perfect’ thing is a slippery slope with guys, though, because you can’t ask them what they want you to be; that will send them running away at hyper-speed. You are supposed to know these things, but I didn’t, I still don’t. I knew who did though, so I went to the source to which all male admiration flowed.

Milan was living in her own apartment by then. She had gotten Christy a different place. After all, she didn’t want her little sister stalked by her own twenty-four seven paparazzi entourage.

Their parents had finally settled down in some oversized palace out in Beverly Hills. I don’t know if Grandpa Marin paid for it, to get Sonny Boy to settle down, or if Milan had helped finance it. She never talked about money or sex, so I never knew if she had a lot or a little of either of them.

Her apartment in the Trump Towers was small, and nice by most standards. Mine weren’t most standards and I thought at best it looked like a decent small hotel suite. The place was always a mess because she had, at any given time, fifty dresses lying out, mostly ones designers sent over, hoping she would showcase them. Add that to two or three hundred shoes lying around, none of them matching, a Chihuahua, two kittens and a white lop-eared bunny, which she had dyed pink, and it was a crazy apartment. She was only an eighteen year old girl too, not that anyone besides Christy and me ever remembered that.

I hadn’t even showered before running over there because I didn’t want to wash the smell of Michael off of me.

I just threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, put Petal into her carrier and called for a car to take me over to her. It was only ten in the morning, so I knew she would be home. When the doorman buzzed me up, she was waiting at the door, wearing panties and nothing else, and naturally looking like she was ready for the cover of Esquire.

We went back to her closet of a bedroom and lay down on the bed. Petal and her Chihuahua Wendy were bffs too, and started right in on the kittens, so we had to shout at each other to hear ourselves. I
cuddled Captain Hook, the pink rabbit, and told her I was in love, he was the one, the only one I had been waiting for my whole life. I would die if I couldn’t get him to feel the same way, and I would die if we didn’t get married, and I really didn’t want to die at all anymore. Since last night I thought I might want to live forever and didn’t she think he was the most gorgeous, intense looking guy she had ever seen, and did she think he felt the same way about me, and what did I have to do to make him feel the same?

Then I started to cry. 

Milan had been facing me on her side while I babbled and, when I finished, she rolled over onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

I waited. After what felt like forever, she asked me to order us lattes. At Trump that means call the concierge and have him go to Starbucks. I said fine and then, “Does that mean you’re not going to tell me what you think till the coffee gets here, because I really can’t take your silent act this morning. This is my life, Mills, this is important to me. You have to help me, you have to.” 

She yawned and smiled. Rolling gracefully, she stepped out of bed. “Oh I will, Care Bear, but if we’re going to plot your whole life out, I need a shower and a latte. Actually, tell him to bring me two. This is going to be a looong day. I have to fix your life, meet with my new assistant and a promoter, be at a shoot across town, and show up to like thirty places tonight, so …” she leaned down and kissed my forehead, “… you still come first, but you’re going to have to wait till I have my shower and my coffees. Go ahead. Call, call.”

She strode off to her bathroom and I obediently called the
concierge and then impulsively called Gucci and ordered two of their new pet carriers to be delivered to Milan’s apartment. I knew she would love them and I knew I was going to owe her a present. It’s not that she expected presents - the love and iron support she gave me was real - it was just that I didn’t see what, if anything, being friends with me offered her in return, so I bought her things. 

When she'd had her shower and her coffee, she climbed back onto the bed, grabbed Captain Hook out of my arms and held him up in the air.

She cocked her head. “Captain Hook, my fuzzle bun, what are we going to do with Carey Carey most contrary?” Captain Hook was the strong silent type of pink bunny, so he gave an ear twitch as an answer and Milan nodded like she understood. She set him down on her lap and stared into my eyes. “Okay, if you want him, then I want him for you, but there’s problems, Cares.” She ticked them off on her long fingers. “He’s totally hot, you’re right about that. Of course, so are you, but it’s a sad fact of life that there are a million of us hot girls and just a few hot boys. That gives them a … what’s that word?”

“A monopoly,” I supplied helpfully. Kellehers understand monopolies. Then sulkily I said, “And you don’t even believe what you just said. You’re never one of a
million, you’re one in a million. God, he probably only came near me to get closer to you.”

I had worked myself up again and started to cry. Milan is no more emotional than most of us, me being the sole humiliating exception to our class, so she waited me out. When I was calm, she went on like I had never interrupted her.
“Two, he’s super-ambitious. I asked around last night. He isn’t going to school, he’s trying to get started in P.R..” She shrugged.

“
I don’t mind ambition, I mean …”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, obviously, and so let’s not go there, and say he wanted to meet me, maybe he does, but if he does, it’s for work, and that’s okay. Stop selling yourself short. You’re perfect. If he wants an in for promotion and if he makes you happy, whatever, maybe I’ll even let him rep me. Would that make you happy?”

I nodded, my heart too full of love and gratitude to answer her coolly, the way I knew she would be comfortable with.

She nodded. “Okay, that’s fine, but the biggest thing here, Care, is one I can’t help you with. He’s eighteen and guys age in dog years, so in the real world that makes him like seven. Seven year old little boys are totally ahhdorable but they are barely doing more than starting to think we don’t have cooties. In real boy-girl terms, what I mean is you can come on hard in bed and out of bed, you need to lighten up and I worry, Cares, that you can’t do that. You’re such a baby yourself. You show everything you’re feeling and you have to stop
now.
If you want him, you have to stop. You can’t ever call him, text him, ask when he is going to call you or, worse, why he hasn’t. You have to say no at least once out of every three times he wants to see you and, no matter what, no matter how stupid he will act, and he will, 'cause that’s what boys do, the only thing you can ever show him is that dimple, okay?” 

“Okay, but none of that sounds real. What are the things I can do?”

She shrugged. “You can look beautiful all the time, be great in bed, cool out of it, happy whether you are with him or not, or at least act happy, and you can wait.” 

“Wait for what because, Mills, this sounds kind of bogus.”

“I guess it is maybe, but it’s the way it is, and if you do it, you’ll gain time to wait.”

“Wait for what?” 

She slid her arms around me, squashing Captain Hook between us. “Time with him, to wait for him to grow up, to wait for him to grow up enough to see my diamond girl, my one-of-a-kind, huge-hearted little buddy, to see that all any guy should want is you, to understand that you wearing your little heart out there for anyone to take isn’t something to make fun of or to use, but to value and to be happy about. That’s what you’ll be waiting for.”

Chapter 20

Michael and I became a couple - a couple! I’d never been one half of one of those before, and being coupled with Michael was the single greatest experience of my life.

For our second date, as he insisted on calling it, which I didn’t like since in my mind we’d already moved past dating, even though I’d only met him the day before, he took me to this horrible, grungy club in outer hell, aka New Jersey, a place the native New Yorker tends to avoid like toxic waste dumps. I think they also have a lot of them in New Jersey and that is why the grass is an almost luminescent green, hence the name the ‘Garden State.’

Not all of New Jersey is a pit by any means. Princeton is pretty and there are a lot of other decent parts. That’s why so many people with money, both old and new, live there. Heck, my crazy great-uncle, former husband of the Dominican maid, had once tried to buy New Jersey. Apparently his neighbors had objected to him covering the forty-eight thousand square foot love palace he had built - his version of the Jersey Taj Mahal - all in barbed wire. My uncle said it was to discourage intruders. His very rich but not-as-rich neighbors said it was a worse eyesore than a giant roadside ball of twine and lobbied to have the barbed wire removed. My uncle reacted as reasonably as he did to all requests and responded by trying to buy New Jersey. It wasn’t for sale and years of bitterness ensued.

I used to be embarrassed by that story when I was a little girl, but  Daddy told me that old families are not as interesting without at least one real ‘cuckoo in the nest‘ and told me the story of one of the Du Pont family members trying to become an eagle. The old wacko even moved an eagle’s nest into his home and lived in it for a year. Now there is a really awesome nature preserve in his name and my own crazy uncle’s barbed wire palace is presently a golfing facility, so everything turned out fine for the people of New Jersey.

That part of New Jersey is not where Michael took me. He took me to Bergenfield and to a bar/club called Death You.

To make the evening more of an adventure, Michael didn't drive us to Bergenfield and Death You; we took the train.

When he picked me up at my apartment, he laughed when he saw my clothes. Wanting to show him a more sophisticated side than the disastrous dress I’d met him in, I was wearing a red pleated Bottega Veneta strapless and a really beautiful pair of forties style suede pumps from their line. I don’t know what I thought our night was going to entail, maybe dinner at some ironic retro place like 107 West where you could eat fried chicken for a hundred and ten a serving. After all, he had said he liked old school. I had planned my look with an eye to that kind of night.

He cracked up on the phone when I offered to arrange a car for us and said we’d be walking, so I had thought, oh, something along the lines of a nearby restaurant and a romantic stroll home. Maybe I would be able to find a grate and do a little Marilyn Monroe pirouette for him, which is why I had chosen that particular fifties style full-skirted look. I loved Marilyn Monroe and had always planned to have New York nights like the ones in the 'Seven Year Itch' as soon as I met the right guy, which he was, he totally was.