LILLIAN:?What’s nuts? She’s a nice girl. Better than the big-mouthed tramp you were engaged to. I read the papers. Who’s Albert, your agent?
ME:?My publicist. She wasn’t always a big-mouthed tramp.
LILLIAN:?Not my business. Let me talk to him.
This couldn’t get any more ridiculous, so I gave her the phone.
LILLIAN:?Albert, let me bring him up to my friend Ruthie on three. She’s like our resident consigliere. She can fix anything.
It had been a long twenty-four hours and somehow, after the betrayal and all the screaming, turning my life over to the Bloomingdale’s mafiosi seemed like a reasonable course of action. Besides, I trusted them; unlike my publicist and agent, they were only making commission on the tie. Lillian, still talking to Albert on my phone, motioned for me to follow her up two escalator flights to the third floor. There she approached three other salespeople: a woman around her age who seemed to be the fixer, name tag Ruthie; a Latin-looking guy around my age, name tag Tomás; and a younger woman whose back was to me. At least she looked younger; I couldn’t totally tell from behind.
They listened to Lillian intently, the consigliere eyeing me rather obviously, the younger one taking a quick peek over her shoulder, the guy staring openly. Her quick peek in my direction revealed that the younger woman was in fact younger. And she was pretty—unconventionally pretty and kind of sexy. I watched as she turned back to the group and emphatically shook her head: No way. She was refusing a date with a movie star. This just made her seem even sexier. But then Lillian whispered something in her ear. Whatever it was sealed the deal. She turned, walked over to me, and smiled. “I’m Natalie.” (I tried not to dwell on the coincidence.) “Give me ten minutes. I assume a little black dress is appropriate?” I smiled and nodded. She smiled back and was off.
Up close she was quite beautiful. Not model beautiful, thankfully. The kind of beautiful that radiates from her smile. The kind of beautiful I remembered from high school. Back then, before I was famous, I could trust that a smile was a smile with no further agenda. Now when a girl is nice to me, I have to question her motives. I hate being so distrusting, but fame has its downsides. Lillian handed me back the phone and I told Albert I had the date and the tie and that he should tell Hank I would be there soon. I promised to hold her hand, and when the press shouted questions at me I would just sweep by with my pretty date, saying that I was late.
“Just calmly late, though, not White Rabbit late,” he warned.
I promised to act calm and Albert was happy. Natalie returned in an elegant little black dress, and quite surprisingly, for the first time in a long time, I felt happy too.
CHAPTER 3
The Red Carpet
By Natalie, the Beard
Age: 26
“That’s a beautiful dress,” he said as we stepped into the limo. It was. I wanted to tell him all about it. How it was a Max Hammer, or rather the Max Hammer, the hottest dress of the season. How the first shipment sold out in just a week and how I was so excited to be wearing it, even though the price tag was digging into my back. But I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I was only borrowing the dress and would be returning it after tonight. Not that borrowing it was such a terrible thing to do. I mean, I know it’s not an excuse, but everyone does it. “Buying” a dress, wearing it, then returning it is such a common practice that it was given a name—wardrobing. I guess once it was commonplace enough to get a name, retailers had to take measures; we got a memo just last week saying that giant tags are being created to attach to the front of all dresses, making them unwearable until the tag is removed. This little black dress that I’m borrowing may represent the end of an era.
“Thank you,” I said, like six beats later.
“Can I pay for it?” he asked sweetly. As much as I didn’t want him to know I was going to return the dress, it seemed worse to let him think I’d bought a dress that cost two weeks’ worth of my salary to go on a last-minute date with a movie star, so I came clean. “Don’t worry, I’m just borrowing it.”
He suddenly seemed embarrassed. “I could have bought it for you. You could have kept it.” He added, a bit pathetically, “You must think I’m such a loser, getting a date at Bloomingdale’s.”