Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont

‘So what’s your point? You think I’d actually marry Simon, even if I could? Those same-sex, San Francisco city hall weddings aren’t exactly my scene. Not on your life.’

‘You’ve been living with him since before I was born. You do realize that you are, essentially, married.’

‘Negative, darling. Either one of us is free to leave at any point, without any messy legal or emotional ramifications. And that’s why it works. But enough of that; I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Tell me about the ring.’ I filled him in on the details he really cared about while munching the remaining Twizzlers, and didn’t even realize I had fallen asleep on the couch until close to 3 A.M., when Millington woofed her desire to sleep in a real bed. I dragged us both to my room and buried my head under the pillow, reminding myself over and over that this was not a disaster. Not a disaster. Not a disaster.

2 (#ulink_ca70e030-06dd-5f80-9830-b6153930d698)

Just my luck that Penelope’s engagement party fell on a Thursday night – the night of my standing dinner date with Uncle Will and Simon. Neither appointment could be denied. I stood in front of my ugly, postwar, high-rise Murray Hill apartment building, desperately trying to escape to my uncle’s huge duplex on Central Park West. It wasn’t rush hour, Christmas, shift change, or torrentially pouring, but a cab was nowhere to be found. I had been whistling, screaming, and jumping skywards like a lunatic for twenty minutes to no avail, when a lone cab finally pulled up to the curb. The cabbie’s response when I requested to go uptown was ‘Too much traffic!’ before he screeched off and disappeared. When a second driver actually picked me up, I ended up tipping him 50 percent out of relief and gratitude.

‘Hey, Bettina, you look unhappy. Is everything okay?’ I’d insisted that people call me Bette, and most did. Only my parents and George, Uncle Will’s doorman (who was so old and cute he could get away with anything), still insisted on using my full name.

‘Just the usual cab hassle, George.’ I sighed, giving him a peck on the cheek. ‘How’s your day been?’

‘Oh, just dandy as always,’ he replied without a hint of sarcasm. ‘Saw the sun for a few minutes this morning and have been happy ever since.’ Nauseating.

‘Bette!’ I heard Simon call from the lobby’s discreetly hidden mailroom. ‘Is that you I hear, Bette?’

He emerged from the mailroom in tennis whites, a racket-shaped bag slung over his broad shoulders, and picked me up in a bear hug as no straight man ever had. It was sacrilege to skip a weekly dinner, which in addition to being a good time also provided by far the most male attention I received (not counting brunch).

Will and Simon had developed lots of rituals in the almost thirty years they’d spent together. They vacationed in only three places: St Barth’s in late January (although lately Will had been complaining that it was ‘too French’), Palm Springs in mid-March, and an occasional spontaneous weekend in Key West. They drank gin and tonics only out of Baccarat glasses, spent every Monday night from seven until eleven at Elaine’s, and hosted an annual holiday party where each would wear a cashmere turtleneck. Will was almost six-three, with close-cropped silver hair, and he preferred sweaters with suede elbow patches; Simon was barely five-nine, with a wiry, athletic build that he swathed entirely in linen, irrespective of the season. ‘Gay men,’ he’d say, ‘have carte blanche to flout fashion convention. We’ve earned the right.’ Even now, moments off the tennis court, he’d managed to don some sort of white linen hoodie.

‘Gorgeous girl, how are you? Come, come, Will is sure to be wondering where we both are, and I just know that the new girl has prepared something fantastic for us to eat.’ Always the perfect gentleman, he took my exploding tote bag from my shoulder, held the elevator door open, and pressed PH.

‘How was tennis?’ I asked, wondering why this sixty-year-old man had a better body than every guy I knew.

‘Oh, you know how it is, a bunch of old guys running around the court, tracking down balls they shouldn’t even try for and pretending they’ve got strokes like Roddick. A little pathetic, but always amusing.’

The door to their apartment was slightly ajar and I could hear Will talking to the TV in the study, as usual. In the old days, Will had scooped Liza Minnelli’s relapse and RFK’s affairs and Patty Hearst’s leap from socialite to cult member. It was the ‘amorality’ of the Dems that finally pushed him toward politics instead of all things glamorous. He called it the Clinton Clinch. Now, a few short decades later, Will was a news junkie with political affiliations that ran slightly to the right of Attila the Hun’s. He was almost certainly the only gay right-wing entertainment-and-society columnist living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who refused to comment on either entertainment or society. There were two televisions in his study, the larger of which he kept tuned to Fox News. ‘Finally,’ he was fond of saying, ‘a network that speaks to my people.’

And always Simon’s retort: ‘Riiight. That huge audience of right-wing gay entertainment-and-society columnists living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?’

The smaller set constantly rotated between CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, and MSNBC, perpetrators of what Will referred to as ‘The Liberal Conspiracy.’ A handwritten sign sat atop the second TV. It read: KNOW YOUR ENEMY.

On CNN, Aaron Brown was interviewing Frank Rich about the media coverage surrounding the last election. ‘Aaron Brown is a lily-livered milquetoast pantywaist!’ Will snarled as he put down his crystal tumbler and hurled one of his Belgian shoes at the TV.

‘Hi, Will,’ I said, helping myself to a handful of the chocolate-covered raisins he always kept in an Orrefors bowl on his desk.

‘Of all the people qualified to discuss politics in this country, to offer some insight or an intelligent opinion on how media coverage did or did not affect these elections, and these idiots have to interview someone from The New York Times? The whole place is more bleeding than a rare steak, and I need to sit here and listen to their opinion on this?’

‘Well, not really, Will. You could turn it off, you know.’ I suppressed a smile as his eyes stayed riveted ahead. I silently debated with myself how long it would take for him to refer to The New York Times as Izvestia, or to bring up the Jayson Blair debacle as further proof that the paper’s trash at best and a conspiracy against honest, hardworking Americans at worst.

‘What, and miss Mr Aaron Brown’s blatantly opinionated coverage of Mr Frank Rich’s blatantly opinionated coverage of whatever the hell they’re talking about? Seriously, Bette, let us not forget that this is the very same paper whose reporters simply create stories when deadline looms.’ He took a swig and jabbed at the remote to silence both televisions simultaneously. Only fifteen seconds tonight – a record.

‘Enough for now,’ he said, hugging me and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. ‘You look great, honey, as always, but would it kill you to wear a dress once in a while?’

He’d not so deftly moved to discussing his second-favorite topic, my life. Uncle Will was nine years older than my mom and both swore they’d been born to the very same set of parents, but it seemed impossible to comprehend. My mother was horrified I’d taken a corporate job that required me to wear something other than caftans and espadrilles, and my uncle thought the travesty was the suit as uniform instead of some killer Valentino gown or a fabulous pair of strappy Louboutins.

‘Will, it’s just what they do at investment banks, you know?’

‘So I’ve gathered. I just didn’t think you’d end up in banking.’ That again.

‘Your people, like, love capitalism, don’t they?’ I teased. ‘The Republicans, I mean – not so much the gays.’

He raised his bushy gray eyebrows and peered at me from across the couch. ‘Cute. Very cute. It’s nothing against banking, darling, I think you know that. It’s a fine, respectable career – I’d rather see you doing that than any of those hippie-dippy-save-the-world jobs your parents would recommend – but you just seem so young to lock yourself into something so boring. You should be out there meeting people, going to parties, enjoying being young and single in New York, not tied down to a desk in a bank. What do you want to do?’

As many times as he’d asked me this, I’d never come around to a great – or even decent – answer. It was certainly a fair question. In high school I’d always thought I’d join the Peace Corps. My parents had taught me that that was the natural step following a college degree. But then I went to Emory and met Penelope. She liked that I couldn’t name every private school in Manhattan and knew nothing about Martha’s Vineyard, and I, of course, loved that she could and did. We were inseparable by Christmas break, and by the end of freshman year, I had discarded my favorite Dead T-shirts. Jerry was long dead, anyway. And it was fun going to basketball games and keg parties and joining the coed touch-football league with a whole group of people who didn’t regularly dread their hair, or recycle their bathwater, or wear patchouli oil. I didn’t stand out as the eccentric girl who always smelled a little bit off and knew way too much about the redwoods. I wore the same jeans and T-shirts as everyone else (without even checking to see if they originated in a sweatshop) and ate the same burgers and drank the same beer, and it felt fantastic. For four years I had a group of similar-minded friends and the occasional boyfriend, none of whom were Peace Corps–bound. So when all the big companies showed up on campus waving giant salaries and signing bonuses and offering to fly candidates to New York for interviews, I did it. Nearly every one of my friends from school took a similar job, because when you get right down to it, how else is a twenty-two-year-old going to be able to pay rent in Manhattan? What was incredible about the whole thing was how quickly five years had gone by. Five years had just vanished into a black hole of training programs and quarterly reports and year-end bonuses, leaving barely enough time for me to consider that I loathed what I did all day long. It didn’t help matters that I was actually good at it – it somehow seemed to signify that I was doing the right thing. Will knew it was wrong, though, could obviously sense it, but so far I’d been too complacent to make the leap into something else.

‘What do I want to do? How on earth can I answer something like that?’ I asked.

‘How can you not? If you don’t get out soon, you’re going to wake up one day when you’re forty and a managing director and jump off a bridge. There’s nothing wrong with banking, darling, it’s just not for you. You should be around people. You should laugh a little. You should write. And you should be wearing much better clothes.’

I didn’t tell him I was considering looking for work at a nonprofit. He’d start ranting about how his campaign to unbrainwash me from my parents had failed, and he’d sit dejectedly at the table for the rest of the evening. I’d tried it once, just merely mentioned that I was thinking of interviewing at Planned Parenthood, and he’d informed me that while that was a most noble idea, it would lead me straight back down the path to rejoining, in his words, the World of the Great Unshowered. So we proceeded to cover the usual topics. First came my nonexistent love life (‘Darling, you’re simply too young and too pretty for your job to be your only lover’), followed by a bit of ranting about Will’s latest column (‘Is it my fault that Manhattan has become so uneducated that people no longer wish to hear the truth about their elected officials?’). We cycled back to my high school days of political activism (‘The Incense Era is blessedly over’), and then once again returned to everyone’s all-time favorite topic, the abject state of my wardrobe (‘Ill-fitting, masculine trousers do not a date outfit make’).

Just as he was beginning a small soliloquy on the far-reaching benefits of owning a Chanel suit, the maid knocked on the study door to inform us that dinner was on the table. We collected our drinks and made our way to the formal dining room.

‘Productive day?’ Simon asked Will, kissing him on the cheek in greeting. He had showered and changed into a pair of Hefesque linen pajamas and was holding a glass of champagne.

‘Of course not,’ Will responded, setting aside his dirty martini and pouring two more glasses of champagne. He handed one to me. ‘Deadline’s not until midnight; why would I do a damn thing until ten o’clock tonight? What are we celebrating?’

I dug into my Gorgonzola salad, grateful to be eating something that hadn’t originated in a street cart, and took a gulp of champagne. If I could have somehow finagled eating there every night without appearing to be the biggest loser on earth, I would’ve done it in a second. But even I had enough dignity to know that being available for the same people – even if they were your uncle and his partner – more than once a week for dinner and once for brunch was truly pathetic.

‘What, we need to be celebrating something to drink a little champagne?’ Simon asked, helping himself to a few pieces of the sliced steak their housekeeper had made for the main course. ‘Just thought it would be a nice change. Bette, what are your plans for the rest of the evening?’

‘Penelope’s engagement party. I’m going to have to head there soon, actually. The mothers put the whole thing together before either Avery or Penelope could veto it. At least it’s at some club in Chelsea, though, rather than somewhere on the Upper East Side – I think that was their one concession to their children actually enjoying themselves.’

‘What’s the name of the club?’ Will asked, although there was little chance he knew anything about it if it wasn’t dark, wood-paneled, and filled with cigar smoke.

‘She mentioned it, but I can’t remember. Begins with a B, I think. Here,’ I said, pulling a torn slip of paper from my bag. ‘It’s on Twenty-seventh between Tenth and Eleventh. It’s called –’

‘Bungalow 8,’ they replied in unison.

‘How did you both know that?’

‘Honey, it’s mentioned so often in Page Six that you’d think Richard Johnson owned the damn place,’ Will said.

‘I read somewhere that it was originally modeled after the bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that the service is just as good. It’s just a nightclub, but this article described a concierge who will cater to any whim, from ordering in a special kind of rare sushi to arranging for helicopters. There are places that are hot for a few months and then vanish, but everyone agrees that Bungalow 8 has staying power,’ Simon said.

‘I guess sitting at the Black Door on my nights out isn’t really helping my social life,’ I said and pushed my plate away. ‘Do you guys mind if I bail early tonight? Penelope wanted me there before the hordes of Avery’s friends and her family arrive.’

‘Run, Bette, run. Stop only to reapply your lipstick and then run! And it wouldn’t hurt a damn if you found yourself a dashing young gentleman to date,’ Simon declared, as though there would be roomfuls of gorgeous, eligible guys who were just waiting for me to walk into their lives.

‘Or even better, a dashing young bastard to play with for one evening.’ Will winked, only half-kidding.

‘You guys are the best,’ I said, kissing each one’s cheek before gathering my bag and cardigan. ‘You have no compunction whoring out your only niece, do you?’

‘Absolutely none,’ Will announced while Simon shook his head gravely. ‘Go be a good tart and have some fun, for Christ’s sake, will you?’

There was a crowd – three deep and a block long – when the cab pulled up in front of the club, and if it hadn’t been Penelope’s party, I would’ve had the cabbie keep driving. Instead, I plastered on a smile and strolled to the front of the forty-person line, where a giant guy wearing a Secret Service earpiece stood, holding a clipboard.