Mercury in Retrograde (12 page)

“Who said that?” Marge demanded.

The William Hurt look-alike raised his hand and said, “Me.”

Penelope turned toward the voice. Her heart skipped a beat.
He was hot supreme.

“ME? What kind of name is that?” Marge demanded.

“Fine, Marge, I will play your crazy game. I, Thomas Howard, had the hot bunny idea.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Four years, Marge, you know that. I've been producing the evening news for you for three years.”

“Well, where the hell have you been hiding, Thomas Howard? That is the most genius idea I have heard all week! It's sexy—sex sells, people!
And
it has bunnies in it—people absolutely
adore
animals! Especially cute fuzzy ones! Fabulous! Where's Lopez?”

“Laura's out today,” David piped up. “She's interviewing Sam Dwain for his new movie
Monster Men
at the Regency. The junket runs all day. She won't be back till late afternoon.”

“Who the hell are we going to get on such short notice?” Marge roared. “You! Blondie!” She pointed at Penelope, who promptly dropped the tray of office supplies she was holding. “Get into makeup and put on something colorful! You're doing the hot bunny story. NOW!! But clean up that mess first. God! Can't we get any good help around here?”

And that is how Penelope ended up later that day at Walt's World of Curios, a “novelty” (read: sex) store on Seventh Avenue South and Charles Street, in the only “sexy bunny” outfit they could find—a skintight fuzzy X-rated Bugs Bunny costume that smelled like someone had worn it before, with her “Smile, It's Monday!” grandma underwear peeking through the outfit's cutout crotch. The effect was more silly than sexy, but none of that mattered to Marge, who upon hearing a detailed description of the outfit barked, “Love it!” before slamming down the phone.

 

Standing in aisle four, Thomas got off the phone. “Marge wants
to make the piece a feature, so we have to do some promos,” he excitedly told Penelope, who was breaking out in a rash on her neck from the polyester suit that had a heart-shaped cutout to show bunny cleavage; large, oversized bunny paws and feet; as well as a hole for her face to stick through what would have been the costume's mouth, with two large rabbit teeth hanging menacingly just above her forehead, obstructing her view.

“Oh, God, no.”

“Sorry, Marge said we had to.”

“Are we shooting from inside the…Easter paradise?” Penelope asked, sweeping her large rabbit paw hand over a wall of shiny, pastel-colored “marital aids.”

“No, there's a bakery with a good Easter display two blocks away. We can do it there.”

“I have to go out in public like this?” Penelope moaned. “I can barely move with these feet. I had to do a weird fascist march just to get out of the changing room.”

“Hey,” Walt, the store's owner, said, “you only paid for an hour—take it wherever you want, but I want this back by five. Comic-Con is in town next week and this is one of the more popular outfits.”

“Comic-Con?” Penelope asked.

“The comic book convention,” Walt said, rolling his eyes.

Two minutes later, Penelope, in the smelly, nasty bunny suit, tripped down Seventh Avenue South with the crew to Maven's Bakery, which had Easter cakes in the window. Thanks to an unseasonable cold snap, it was freezing and the wind was tearing down the avenue, whipping up garbage and silt, making it hard for Penelope to fully open her eyes despite the bunny teeth blocking the wind.

“I feel like a camel in a freezing sandstorm,” Penelope shivered as Eric and Stew set up the cameras for the shot. “A really
hideous, promiscuous bunny-camel.”

“Get into a sexy stance!” Thomas yelled through the wind at Penelope when they reached the bakery. “Make sure the egg cakes are in the shot!”

She put her hand on her hips, grinning madly while thrusting her chest out in her best manic mascot pose. “Um, okay…how's this?” Penelope—who'd never considered herself particularly sexy—asked.

“Well, how about something…sexier,” Thomas suggested. “Lean against the glass and jut your hip out…yeah, yeah, that's it. Now put one hand up on the wall and one on your hip…yeah! Perfect!”

“I look like a bunny version of Jodie Foster in
Taxi Driver,
” Penelope said. “I could take a stand and say I'm not doing this. I used to be a respectable reporter, you know.”

“Marge said she
really
wanted it,” Thomas said. “I'll admit, it was a stupid idea, but Marge liked it and it will be both our asses if you walk out on the big shoot of the day. Besides, what else are you gonna do today—dodge Trace's clammy hands while you find more teeth whitening paste for him?”

Penelope backed down. “Okay. You have a point. Besides, nobody watches NY Access anyway, right? But you'd better tell her I deserve a raise for this.”

“Fine, fine, just pose…okay great…now look at the camera and say, ‘This Easter, come hop into bed with New York Access!'”

A guy in a black town car rolled his window down and wolf-whistled at Penelope.

“Hey, thanks!” Penelope said, waving after the car. Looking toward Thomas, she said, “That's the first time I've been whistled at since, like, junior high.”

“Let's go, Penelope,” Thomas said. “Say the line and we're out.” Several people stopped to stare at the shoot and the oddity
in front of them, creating a small crowd.

“Um,” Penelope said, feeling more than a little awkward and shy in front of an audience. “In front of all these people? Seriously?”

“Oh, come on. You look kind of cute, actually,” Thomas said. “Just say it…they probably won't even run it!”

“I look cute? Really?” Penelope blushed. Maybe the bunny outfit wasn't
so
bad.

Cars honked their horns as they drove by and a man from a nearby scaffolding screamed, “Hey bunny babe, wanna find my Easter egg?”

“Ooooh, that's a good one,” Thomas said. “We'll do that too!”

“Oh, no,” Penelope said. “Fine, I'll say the first one—but I'm not saying the bad pick-up line. A bunny has got to have standards.” She got herself back into the “sexy stance” on the bakery's glass window, positioned in between an egg cake and an Easter basket. As the wind howled in her face, she screeched, “This Easter come hop into bed with…Argh!”

Someone had tossed a half-eaten hot dog at her head from a passing car. The actual hot dog and bun had bounced off the top of the bunny face, but the condiments remained. Relish dripped down the bunny's buck teeth onto her face and Penelope suddenly contemplated going back to the
Telegraph
.

After Eric, the cameraman, helped her clean off, Penelope regained her composure, once again assumed the “sexy stance,” and howled into the wind, “This Easter come hop into bed with New York Access!”

“Perfect!” Thomas said. “Now, let's do it again.”

“Satan,” Penelope said, shivering.

 

As Penelope was being tortured in the West Village, Lipstick was uptown covering a trunk show at Portia Vanderven's East Ninetieth Street townhouse with Ashley. Portia was a former model who, immediately after her 1999 wedding to Goldman Sachs managing director Ralph Vanderven, had set about sealing the deal by providing him with two adorable children, Maxwell and Harriet. The children, who spoke fluent Spanish and called their nanny, “Madre Marta,” and Portia, “Madre Portia,” were the light of her life and “so precious, no diamond could compare to them.” But even more important, Maxwell and Harriet provided physical assurance of a heftier divorce settlement should her husband Ralph ever leave her for the Russian rhythmic gymnast he was rumored to be seeing on the side.

Not that Portia was alone in her predicament. The ladies of the Upper East Side were all atwitter. Just a year ago there were several high-profile splits: the Kramers, the Gettys, the von Furstmergs. All of which had involved women from the same “Russian Invasion,” one member of which was trying to coerce Ralph into international relations.

Portia was on red alert. News of Ralph's affair was all over town, whispered about over lunch at Fred's, the racks at Bendel's, and the bar at La Goulue. But Portia's options were limited. She wasn't going to leave him and hand over her husband, the private plane, the yacht, and the houses in the Hamptons and Palm Beach to some woman he'd happened to have met at the notorious hunting grounds of the
Bull & Bear
after work one day, and who'd been flexibly fucking him for just six months. That Russkie would have to work much harder than that. “You don't leave your husband over infidelity. That's ridiculous. Men aren't supposed to be monogamous—that's just a bourgeois lie that
Americans made up. I'm more…European. Ralph and I have a partnership, a corporation. There's more to marriage then just romance and sex,” Portia, momentarily letting her guard down, had told Lipstick over lunch a week earlier. “Besides, what would become of me if I did leave him? Or, God forbid, he left me? I'll tell you what—not much. There's not much of a market for a forty-two-year-old divorcée with two children who demands a certain lifestyle these days. He would remarry and that hooker would get the money and the name and I would be forgotten.”

So to combat the anger, boredom, and frustration of having fulfilled all societal and connubial promises—and still be stuck in a semiloveless marriage that may or may not be torn asunder by a lithe and limber gymnast—Portia decided to do what several others in her situation had done: start a handbag/jewelry line, and then have a big party to celebrate it.

“It's shimple really,” Portia, who was on her fifth Grey Goose gimlet by then, said to Lipstick. “I love handbagsh, I have about a
million
of them—and I obvioushly know fashion. I'm front row at Parish couture every year. Sho why not shtart my own very upshcale acceshories line?”

Lipstick noted the framed picture on one of the mantels of Portia with her good friend, socialite-turned-designer Tory Burch, whose eponymous line not only sold out at Saks Fifth Avenue but, thanks to several
Oprah
appearances, had sold out everywhere else as well. “Tory and her husband shplit—and she shtill got to keep her shocial shtanding,” Portia slurred, picking up the picture and looking at it closely. “She's more entrenched than ever becaushe of that line. It
made
her. Shocially. Financially. I mean, she's
famous
now. She's got more money than her ex
and
she got to date Lanshe Armshtrong. That clothing line let her
be
the man and
get
the man.”

“Okaaay, Portia,” Lipstick said, taking the picture out of Portia's hands and breaking her trance. “Let's take a break from
the drinks, just for a little bit, 'kay? Oh, look, Bethie and Birdie just arrived….”

“Darling,” Portia, looking Lipstick up and down with her gimlet-soaked eye, said in a loud, drunken voice before Lipstick could make a clean getaway, “
who
are you wearing?”

Just as Portia demanded to know about Lipstick's sartorial surprise, there was a lull in the room. All eyes turned toward Lipstick and on her latest creation: a crimson-red silk cocktail dress made from a Miu Miu dress and matching jacket she'd deconstructed and ripped apart at the seams a week earlier. It had a high collar that swept around the back of Lipstick's neck, draping on her shoulders and coming together in a low V. It was perfectly shaped, thanks to Lipstick's workmanship and the corset in the old Miu Miu dress that flared out to just above her knee—making it look like a Dior dress from the 1960s. Neal's old
Vogue
s had come in handy after all.

The eyes belonged to Ashley, Lipstick's coworker; the women who made up Bitsy Farmdale's posse, also known as The Bitsies: Peaches Swarovski, the crystal heiress; Gwendolyn “Gwynnie” Bacardi, the rum heiress; Mary MacDaniels (her father was a Scottish lord); Fernela Branca, who'd married into the family that created the liquor Fernet Branca; and Lulu Ward-Nass, of the textile monopoly. Thankfully, Bitsy herself had yet to show up. Also milling around was SueAnne Cavendish from Dolce & Gabbana, Ivanka Baer from
Vogue,
Marybelle Whitehead from
Glamour,
Susan Naim from
Harper's Bazaar,
Bethany Applewood, the head buyer for
Bergdorf,
and a host of other fashionistas. All looking at Lipstick's dress.

“It's beautiful,” Susan gushed. “Where did you get it?”

“I didn't see that at any of the viewings last fashion week,” Ivanka said. “Is it Prada?”

“No,” Lipstick said evasively. “Just a dress I picked up in my travels.”

“Figures,” said Peaches. “Every time I see someone with a gorgeous creation, they never want to share the designer. Come on, Lena, it's not like we're all going to run out and buy the same dress. We just want to know where we can get it.”

“Seriously, I'm not being a bitch,” Lipstick said, “I got it in Paris last summer—”

“Oh, the French! They are just divine,” Susan from
Harper's
sighed.

“You've been wearing a lot of this mysterious designer lately,” Fernela said. “There was that blue gown you wore to the Alzheimer's benefit, the pantsuit at the Bahrain ball, the dress at the Tourrette's luncheon…you seem to have an awful lot of these clothes. Yet you won't share?”

“The designer is very…shy,” Lipstick explained. “Although I'm sure she will be thrilled that you've been keeping tabs on all the clothes she's made for me.”