Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [75]
We’re getting ready to do our last set for the day—I’m in an insanely flattering purple, pink, and black-striped Missoni gown and tottering around in high-heeled purple Jimmy Choo’s—when Tim and John show up.
“You look stunning,” Tim says, as he leans in to kiss each of my cheeks. John trails behind him and gives me an awkward salute. Then Tim turns to Jean-Paul. “Have you done the champagne-drinking shot yet?”
I sort of inadvertently flinch at the word “champagne” as Jean-Paul hits his head. “Mon Dieu, I almost forgot,” he says.
Jean-Paul says something to two of his lackeys and they leave the room, then come back holding these plastic contraptions that they piece together to make an enormous, six-foot-tall champagne Plexiglas. Tim shows Jean-Paul how he’d like me to sit in it as John lets in a room service waiter delivering bottles of Dom Perignon. And even though I may well be in the middle of the single most validating day of my life so far, I grow concerned enough by what’s happening to wander over to Tim and ask him if I can speak to him for a moment.
“Of course, go ahead,” he says, continuing to stand there next to Jean-Paul and his minions. Couldn’t he see that what I wanted to say was private?
Completely uncomfortable, I force myself to ask, “Is it absolutely imperative that we do this champagne thing?”
Tim looks slightly flummoxed. “Oh, do you not like it?” For the first time since we’ve met, I get a glimpse of the fact that Tim may not be perfect. He looks, in fact, slightly irritated by my intrusion.
“Well, I just was wondering, do I have to be holding champagne in the shot?”
Tim, now making no effort to hide his annoyance, sighs. “Amelia. You’re the Party Girl. We have to convince readers of that not only through your column, but also visually—through pictures.” He’s suddenly talking to me like I’m seven and don’t understand what the word “visually” means.
I nod. Ridiculously, I feel tears start to well up, but I close my eyes for a second and force them to go away. It seems like it should be simple enough to explain my situation to Tim, but I just can’t seem to. Tell him you’re sober, my head says. And then I think, Hell, no. He’ll startasking questions and figure out that you’re really not this wild-and-crazy girl anymore. Instead, I try channeling the confident, egoless diva-in-the-making that I’d been acting like all day.
“Is there going to be a problem?” Tim asks, quite sternly, just as John wanders over to see what’s going on.
I take a breath and push all my negative thoughts to the back of my brain. “No. Not at all.”
Jean-Paul asks, “So you are ready, ma cherie?” I nod, allow two of the assistants to hoist me into the mammoth champagne glass, get as comfortable as I can in an enormous piece of plastic, and accept the bottle and glass of champagne that the set designer hands me. Tim and John move to the back of the room while Jean-Paul starts clicking and muttering his French compliments.
But the magic seems to be gone. Before, I’d been feeling natural and happy and pretty just by smiling or laughing or gazing into the camera and thinking of funny or intense moments. But now, lounging in this life-size champagne glass, I feel forced. I keep thinking, This is what a girl who’s playing the part of a “Party Girl” should look like.
Jean-Paul apparently doesn’t notice because he keeps shooting and cooing at me and calling me belle and tres belle. I try not to concentrate on the fact that my lips and nose are less than a foot from a glass of champagne.
When I got into rehab, I was perfectly willing to admit that I had a problem with coke and sleeping pills, but I still never really bought into this whole idea of being “alcoholic.” I’d told Tommy on one of my first days at Pledges that I was willing to consider the fact that alcoholism and drug addiction might be the same thing, but I still wasn’t convinced. In fact, in those meetings, when people introduced themselves by saying their name and the word “alcoholic,” I