Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [98]
Sometime later—it could be twenty minutes, it could be two hours—I wake up to the sound of someone banging on my front door. I stumble to it, groggy to the point that I almost feel hungover. Stephanie stands there, a bag of Trader Joe’s Sweet, Savory & Tart Trek Mix in her hand, and a plump Mexican woman behind her.
“Don’t say a word,” she says, gesturing for the woman to go inside. “I told Rosa I had an emergency for her.” Handing me the bag of trail mix she adds, “I wanted to bring you something healthy to eat but knew I’d have to start you on something you wouldn’t reject outright.”
“Thank you,” I croak gratefully, as she opens my living room window and starts dumping overflowing ashtrays.
“You’re welcome,” she says. “Now, will you please let Rosa clean your apartment and stop Plath-ing it over this guy?”
28
“Here you go,” Stephanie says, reaching through a throng of wannabe starlets to hand me a Diet Coke. I accept it gratefully and motion my head toward the side of the room, where I then go stand.
It’s been almost a week since she showed up with Rosa and basically single-handedly delivered me back to the world at large and I have to admit that I’m feeling significantly better. Of course, I’m still miserable over being blown off by Adam, but Stephanie has convinced me to treat it like a nagging toothache or headache—horrible, in other words, but something I can live with. The launch party for a new Condé Nast magazine, Stephanie convinced me, was just what I needed. But standing here, waiting for her to retrieve her drink from the bar, I remember that depression, like a grating Britney Spears song stuck in your head, has a way of coming back even when it seems like it’s gone away forever.
Parties like this used to fuel me—I always had that feeling that something exciting could happen—but being sober didn’t so much highlight how fun drinking was as much as it made me realize how intensely boring parties like this are. We’re all talking and no one is saying anything, I think as I tell a publicist who used to snub me when I worked at Absolutely Fabulous that it’s good to see her, too, and accept her “You go, girl” congratulations for the column. When I was drinking, if I had a boring night, I’d blame myself—for not being fabulous enough or not talking to the right people. But now I can see that I didn’t drink to make myself more interesting; it was to convince myself that other people were.
Stephanie joins me, sipping from her icy Amstel Light, and we watch a slew of club kids filter in, so perfectly outfitted in their Vans and True Religion jeans and tattoos that they may as well have come from Central Casting.
“You okay?” Stephanie asks, and I nod. She’d asked me the first time we went out together once I was sober if I’d prefer if she didn’t drink, and I told her that she shouldn’t feel like she had to deprive herself because of me. Tommy used to say that anyone out with a sober person shouldn’t drink, and if they did, they may well have a drinking problem themselves. But Tommy worked in a rehab and didn’t really understand the world of plus-ones and doormen who had articles written about them in magazines and open bars and gift bags. Drinking is as normal as putting on shoes to most people at parties like this, I think. Besides, it’s not my job to go around diagnosing people as alcoholic when it’s a self-diagnosed disease.
And then, just when Stephanie and I see Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan pitch their skeletal frames against each other on the dance floor, a thought occurs to me, a thought infinitely more depressing than any others I’ve been having during this recent bout of depression: Wherever I go, there I am. It floats through my head as I stare at the anorexic starlets, until I feel Stephanie poking me in the shoulder.
“Holy shit!” she exclaims. “Three o’clock. With a bimbo.”
Stephanie’s not known for her histrionics so I instantly know what her exclamation