Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [80]
“Me?” I ask, dying to hear more.
“Yes, you. Spending time with you the other day just sort of sparked something obsessive in me, I guess.”
I allow the pleasure of hearing these words bathe me in happiness for a second. Then I say, “I’m thinking about you a lot, too.” Fuck the “rules” and playing hard to get. “And guess what, Adam? I’m in New York.”
“What? Are you serious? For how long?”
“Just till tomorrow.”
“This sucks,” he says. “They have me on this insane interview schedule the rest of the day and night.”
I glance at the clock and realize I only have forty-five minutes to get uptown to meet the Chat editors for dinner. “And I have to go to dinner and this club and—”
“Wait, have you even told me why you’re here?” he asks. “Oh, shit. They’re motioning for me to go back into the room. Why don’t we just stick with our plan to see each other in L.A.? I’ll call you in a week or two when I’m back.”
After we hang up, I marvel over the fact that this phone call has made me feel about a thousand times better than the entire collection of enthusiasm on my voicemail. I’m sitting on my bed thinking about that while I rock back and forth and grin like some special ed student when I hear Nadine knocking on my door and telling me she has the car downstairs to take us to dinner.
At dinner, where a few of the editors split a bottle of wine and the rest of us drink sparkling water, I listen to basically every single one of them call me a genius, and act like this is something I’m actually used to or feel I deserve. Afterward, we go to Butter, where a steady stream of well-wishers come up and congratulate me on my column or tell me how funny I was on the Today show. A Nicole Miller publicist hands me her card and tells me she’d like to send me some outfits that she hopes I’ll consider wearing “out on the town.” A Playboy senior editor asks me if I’d be willing to write something for him and then hits on me when I explain that my Chat contract is exclusive. An actor who’s on CSI drunkenly confesses his love for me and tries sticking his hand down my pants. Eventually, I return to the Royalton to sleep, and before I know it, I’m back on a plane home.
Just after the plane boards, I get a call from Mom, who’s a bit underwhelmed by the process of explaining to people how she feels about her daughter writing about a ménage à trois experience at a wedding she hosted. The details I’d given Mom about the column had been deliberately sparse, both because I hadn’t known quite how to broach the content topic and because I thought my chances were decent that Mom would be too submerged in her poetry world to be more than even tangentially aware of her daughter’s “highly fictionalized” column. But appearing on the Today show was clearly like taking a banner and waving it in front of her face.
“I just don’t understand why you can’t write about something that’s meaningful to you now,” she says.
“Mom, no one in the world at large wants to read about the adventures of a girl who goes to meetings at Pledges and hangs out with her gay best friend.”
“Nonsense—you just think that because you haven’t tried to write it yet.”
“Jesus,” I find myself screeching, causing a model I just saw on the cover of Elle who’s sliding into a seat a few feet away from me to glance over with some concern. I lower my voice. “Why can’t you just be happy for me?”
“Oh, I am happy for you, honey,” she says, sounding anything but. I’ve never met someone less able to hide how she truly feels than my mother—or maybe it’s that I’ve never been quite so skilled at interpreting someone’s subtext. “And Dad is, too.”
The mere concept of my dad reading my column is horrifying and a thought I’m planning to repress as soon as humanly possible, but luckily, I won’t have to hear about this from him since Mom is the family’s unofficial gossip columnist and spokesperson when it comes to dramatic events.
“Look, Mom, they’re asking me to turn my phone off,” I say, even though passengers are still coming onto the plane and all anyone has done to me since I’ve gotten on board is