Three Girls and their Brother

This logic seems pretty irrefutable to me but, such a surprise, I seem to have no clear idea how to be the cool, rational, not-tanked person in a room full of tanked women. So instead I act like a big baby and grab the clicker from Amelia. “What are you watching?” I mumble, and I start to zip through all the channels again.

“Hey!” she says. She shoves me. “I was watching that.”

“You’re drunk,” I say, quiet, like an insult. Which is relatively stupid, as Amelia is the one who snuck me up in the elevator and got me to my room, and later to the bathroom, without anyone knowing, after the tequila episode.

“I’m not drunk,” she says, and then she starts to laugh like an idiot, like “I’m not drunk” is the most hilarious thing she’s ever said in her life. I swear, she thinks this whole situation is just hilarious.

“What did you say?” asks Mom, all fake-startled and guilty as hell.

“Philip thinks I’m drunk.“

“Don’t be ridiculous, Philip.”

“Mom,” I say back. Like there’s nothing else to say, really; sometimes, there just isn’t, and this is one of those times. Not that she’s going to give an inch.

“Today was a big day for everyone, and if you can’t be happy for your sisters, then I think you might want to think about that.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll do that, Mom,” I tell her. And that’s all I say about it. Amelia keeps giggling, and Mom goes into the study, probably to sneak another drink, because she’s got liquor stashed in there too, and Polly and Daria drift back into their bedrooms to consult with the stars, and I find a Star Trek rerun, the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with an android and then she dies at the end of the episode because she learned that feelings hurt too much to live with. I swear, that show was really brilliant, it really just was, and I’m not embarrassed to mention it. I mean, I’m not one of those idiots who goes to conventions and dresses up like Mr Spock. I’m just saying. That show was not near as stupid as everything that’s been on television since.

CHAPTER THREE

No one ever said Herb Lang was overrated, and the fact is, he isn’t overrated. He’s a very good photographer, even if he is a bit spooky in person. So the picture, when it comes out, is very hot. Daria the Ice Queen has a big smile on her face, her head is tipped back and she looks like joy, she just does. Polly looks like she’s grabbing Daria and trying to push her out of the frame, which maybe could be a little too accurate, in terms of the reality of their relationship, but it doesn’t look mean or competitive. It just looks nice, like a nice sisterly sort of thing to do. The spiky hair is great, the little green dress with the black beads, also great. She has a killer pair of heels on, also great. And then there’s old Amelia, all the way on the other side of the frame, with her blue jeans and T-shirt, and those nutty little bare feet and little green toenails. She’s sort of half in profile, head down, but looking up, right at the camera. And she just looks smart, and a little bit devilish and like someone you just want to know, who also happens to be so pretty you need to fall over. The whole thing is killer, there’s no question.

When Mom took it out of the FedEx envelope, it was pretty wild. We were all sitting around the kitchen—I don’t know why we always hang out in the kitchen, there’s never any food there—but anyway we were hanging out in the kitchen, collectively on pins and needles, while Mom took her own damn time opening that FedEx.

“Just a minute, just a minute, would you please?” she laughed, turning away from Polly and Daria, both of whom were actively trying to rip it from her hands.

“Mom, it doesn’t take normal people sixteen minutes to open a FedEx!” Polly screeched, still grabbing.

“Well, then I’m not normal,” Mom informed her, elegantly cheerful. “I just want to savor this, is that all right with you?” What an act. I thought Daria was going to brain her with the blender. Amelia was sitting next to me, trying not to care, but even she couldn’t stand the tension finally, and she practically knocked her chair over, bolting to the other side of the table so she could get a good look as soon as the thing was out of the envelope. It was kind of goofy and sweet, honestly; all of them were laughing and nervous and happy and shoving at each other to get the best look. And then they all saw it, at once, and I’m not kidding, they all just shut up. That picture shut them all up. Because it was impossible to look at it and not know that something was going to happen. You just couldn’t not know.

This was like two days before the magazine hit the stands, that’s when they finally sent us a so-called “advance” copy. I thought for sure they’d give us more preparation than that, but that old Collette apparently really had to pull strings just to get that much special treatment. Anyway, things had gotten pretty hot by then. In those six weeks while we were waiting for the magazine to come out, Collette set up a whole mess of meetings all over town with different ad agencies and magazines and stylists and publicists, TV execs, talk-show producers, it went on and on. Amelia spent the entire time kicking and screaming and saying “fuck you,” and then getting dragged to all the meetings anyway. Which meant that she missed quite a bit of school, which meant that several of her teachers started calling to give Mom a hard time about it. No one particularly cared about Polly virtually dropping out; that was sort of understood as the sort of thing that was just going to happen, and Polly was always a little bit of a hell-raiser anyway, so truth be told I think the school was finally glad that she was taking off of her own accord. But Amelia was a freshman and known to be a fairly responsible little student, so the school got bent out of shape about her not showing up for algebra tests, and Amelia was bent out of shape, and Mom was bent out of shape. And then Ben the piano teacher got way bent out of shape, probably because, as I think I’ve mentioned, he had a completely illicit and illegal crush on her, which he had to pretend was, like, a more legal kind of concern about her development as an artist. So Ben called Amelia at home about six times, about missed lessons, and then he called Mom, who told him off, and then Amelia called Dad, who was back from Brazil, and he called Mom and expressed his supreme disapproval, and he reamed her out for yanking Amelia out of school, and Mom reamed him back, which just bent Polly completely out of shape, and sent Daria into a complete shrieking rage. So that’s what life was like, up until the day we got that picture in the mail and realized that, as weird as it all was getting? It was about to get worse.

The next day, it did. The phone rang. Mom picked it up, listened for no more than fifteen seconds, hung it up, turned around and informed everyone that they were going into Union Square to have drinks with a movie star whose name I cannot mention because he’d definitely sue me. This is a true story. One of the things that happen in New York, that people don’t always put together is, there are plenty of famous people out there who would like to meet pretty girls who are about to become famous themselves. PR people and agents do this sort of thing all the time; it’s their job to arrange these meetings between the famous and the nearly famous at a time when photographers might be around to snap some so-called candid shots of these exceptional encounters. So our friend Collette is somewhat on the ball, it seems, because Mom suddenly announced that Amelia, Daria and Polly had to go doll themselves up fast, because this major movie star was going to be holding court at W in an hour, and he wanted to meet them.

Which frankly floored all of us, even Amelia. She said, “Who?” And Mom said the name of this movie star again, we’ll just call him “Rex Wentworth” for now, although we could just as easily call him Bruce or Arnold or George. So Mom said, “Rex Wentworth,” and everybody just sat there. If that’s the sort of thing that impresses you, you had to be impressed.

Although I have to admit that even now I’m not a hundred percent clear even on why movie stars actually are such hot shit. I have spent a good deal of time thinking about this and it continues to perplex me. As far as I can tell, they don’t really do anything except parade around with machine guns or pistols shouting things like “Get in the truck!” Plus, when you check out their shenanigans when they’re not on screen, you really start to wonder. You read Rush & Molloy, or Page Six, about movie stars shoplifting and trashing hotel rooms and smacking around their girlfriends or getting blow jobs from transvestite hookers, I mean, it’s not like I’m saying there’s anything wrong with things like that, but it’s also not particularly something you have to admire. And then in the same issue you can read about how some studio handed over thirty million dollars or something, to one of these lunatics, so they can make some crazy movie that is just going to be so bad that your brain just starts to fry while you’re watching it. And these are the people we’re supposed to get all excited about, in America. I realize that I’m not saying anything particularly fresh here. But you have to wonder, over time, what the continued fascination is, you really just do.

Except that on the evening in question, all three of my sisters and my mother thought that meeting one of these guys was about the most mind-numbingly fantastic thing that had ever happened to them. They ran around like gorgeous birds, half-plumed, tossing shoes everywhere; even Amelia, who I would have sworn couldn’t give a shit about shoes. But there she was, hungrily swiping a pair of strappy taupe heels off the floor of Polly’s closet, and then acting all guilty when Polly walked in on her, having just ripped off a gold-sequined halter top from some reject pile in Daria’s room.

“Do you need these?” says Amelia, as if it’s actually possible to “need” strappy shoes with three-inch heels.

“Well, no, but you might try asking,” Polly snips. “I am asking,” snips back Amelia, to which Polly replies with the age-old witticism, “Whatever.” So Amelia shrugs, pissed about something, but who knows what, since she was the one who actually got caught stealing red-handed, and she trips away haughtily, carrying off those noteworthy spikes. On the way back to her room she passes me, as I’m sitting on the floor of the hallway and have witnessed the whole ridiculous exchange.

“What are you looking at?” she asks, in the same snippy tone. Which I’m not sure why, if you’re off to meet a movie star, and you’re stealing shoes on top of it, you have to snap at people.

“Nothing,” I said. I suppose I could have waxed poetic about how dumb it all seemed, but suddenly I just got real depressed. Not that I wanted to go with them, but not that I particularly wanted to spend another night alone channel surfing either. I was also wondering if I was going to be able to find anything to eat, as an actual dinner for me didn’t seem to be on my so-called mother’s agenda. The possibility that I might spend the evening doing schoolwork vaguely crossed my mind, as being too pathetic to be believed, while the rest of my family was off carousing with movie stars in Union Square. And that was pretty much what was going on in my head.

“So what’s your problem?” Amelia suddenly yells. I mean it. She just started to yell at me. “I mean what, really … what … you really are, you know—forget it! Just forget it!” That’s what she said, more or less. It was quite dramatic. I just stared at her, and then she turned red, threw the shoes on the floor, and went to tell Mom she wasn’t going because Philip was being an asshole about everything.

I just want to make this clear. She’s the one who was yelling. I didn’t say anything. That is exactly how it happened. You can’t make this crap up.

In any case, as per usual, Mom wasn’t too interested in Amelia’s protests. By then it was pretty clear that, for some reason, all three of them were the deal. You don’t get just two sisters at any given moment, even though Polly and Daria together are not unimpressive. What people wanted was all three. Movie stars included.

So I ended up sitting in front of the television again, totally deserted by the whole female menagerie, eating the tail end of three bags of soy chips, two cans of Diet Pepsi Twist, and an orange and a banana. And then I got bored. I mean, of course I got bored. Everybody kept deserting me and I hadn’t had a decent meal for three weeks, why shouldn’t I be bored? And then I finally got tired of channel surfing, and so then I hacked around with the PlayStation 2 for about an hour, and I murdered about seven hundred aliens, and then I got mad, all of a sudden, and I picked up a six-thousand-dollar crystal sort of thing off the coffee table and threw it at the wall, where it made a dent but didn’t actually break. Which may have been prompted by an hour’s worth of murdering aliens on the PlayStation 2, but in all honesty, I think it was more of a someone-has-to-think-about-feeding-me sort of situation.

In any case, after this impressive display of impotent teen rage, I got bored again, put on my jacket, and decided to go out and stalk my own sisters.

It’s ridiculously easy to get to Union Square from where I live. I’m a two-minute walk from the Seventh Avenue Station on Flatbush, and I picked up a Q Train right away. Then there’s only five stops between Seventh Avenue and Union Square and the W bar is right there, just off the square, half a block up from the subway station. The point being that, I got there so quickly, the whole idea that maybe stalking my own sisters wasn’t the brightest choice I could make never even occurred to me. I just spotted the bar, and walked right in.

It was hot in there. Not “hot” hot, just plain hot, like eighty degrees, the air recirculated so many times it just couldn’t recreate itself into something breathable anymore. I didn’t at first make it past the foyer, where there were like seven bachelors and bachelorettes, all of them squeezed into tight little business suits and looking like they were auditioning for one of those reality shows, where average people dress up like television stars and then pretend to be real in the most unreal circumstances some idiot at the network could cook up. So they were all squashed in there, in their great-looking suits, looking kind of uncomfortable and anxious, while this totally skinny girl in a tight black dress at a kind of mini-podium kept looking down at what might be a seating chart. Then she’d look up, and look over her shoulder at the crowded room, and then she’d sigh, and then she’d whisper to some passing person in another great suit, and then she’d laugh, carelessly, not worried at all about the sweaty crowd waiting in front of her, and then she’d look down at her seating chart again. All the bachelors and bachelorettes shifting on their tight shoes, and trying to act huffy, and it seemed to have occurred to none of them that this was, after all, a bar, not a restaurant; there is no seating, you can just shove your way into the room, push to the bar and get your own drink, can’t you? It’s a goddamned bar.

“Excuse me,” I said to the first bachelorette, and I pushed right by her. She looked pretty annoyed at this, but that’s kind of where she was even before I showed up. Anyway, I just slammed right through all of them, and went right to the podium, and said to Miss Little Black Dress, “I’m here with Rex Went-worth.”

Well. Talk about the magic words. Little BD looks at me, startled, but then she stops, and thinks for a second. But I gave her pause. I mean, I did, after all, know that Rex was there, somewhere. That meant that I was potentially somebody who she really better not throw out.

So she looked at me, suspicious but cool, you know, not too rude but not friendly either, and once again she ran her eyes up and down me fast, clearly considering what I was wearing—a pair of jeans and sneakers, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt over that, completely normal for a teenager who could give a shit, but not exactly the kind of thing you would expect for a member of a movie star’s entourage.

Just then, behind me, someone murmurs, “What’d that kid say? Rex Wentworth is here?”

Little BD gets a kind of look of panic in her eyes. She’s in a bind now. She’s got a weird cool loser in front of her, who’s just loudly running around, asking for Rex, and the word is about to get out that Rex is somewhere in some back room in her crummy overrated bar.

“He’s kind of waiting for me,” I said. “Is there a problem?”

“What’s the name?” she asks me, eyes narrowing.

“Philip Wentworth,” I tell her.

It did the job. Little BD blinked, tipped her head to one side, briefly, trying out her memory about what Rex’s family situation actually was, how many children he had out there, actually: Was it a possibility that I was Rex’s son? Was that a possibility? Maybe I’m a nephew. She is looking down at another list, totally professional, seeing if the name “Philip Wentworth” has been written down anywhere so that she doesn’t have to make a decision about anything, she can just let me in if this totally fraudulent name is anywhere at all; her brain is moving fast because she only has mere seconds to contemplate all of this before Rex will get wind that she kept his nephew/son/career-ruinous adolescent boyfriend waiting at the front door for no reason at all.

“There a problem?” I ask. “You want me to call his cell?” I reach into my pocket, pretending to have a cell. She looks up at me, very friendly, smiles. “No, of course not. Why don’t you just follow me?” And with that she swivels and strides straight back into the promised land.

Okay, this all happened in about five seconds, and while it may sound like I vaguely knew what I was doing, I was actually pulling major shit out of completely thin air. I mean, I did follow this insane woman back into the bar, and I did my best instinctively to slouch and shrug and look around, bored as shit, but frankly the whole performance was a complete joke, because I was in truth utterly clueless. Little BD had hauled out of a pocket somewhere—where, I will never know, because that dress was too small to hide so much as a BIC pen—one of those giant walkie-talkie things that military personnel use when they’re in the middle of the desert trying to coordinate some sort of crack offensive. And then she started murmuring with a kind of discreet determination into the speaker, “Hi, it’s Shelly. I have someone here who claims to …” I was sort of slouching along behind her, acting like this was totally protocol, I was used to babes in black dresses talking in walkie-talkies and checking me out with the security team that constantly surrounds my putative father the movie star. Meanwhile of course I was more or less in a total state of interior panic. I mean, it did suddenly occur to me that I was now not actually stalking my sisters; in actuality, what I was now doing was stalking a movie star. And that’s the kind of peculiar behavior in actuality which gets people tossed in prison.

So now I’m glancing around with casual desperation, wondering what bright idea is out there for me to just glom my brainless self onto, to get myself out of this, now that I’m in it, and Little BD is watching me carefully, as she snakes through the restaurant, and it is kind of occurring to me that in fact she never bought one bit of any of it, she’s heading for some sort of back hallway, at the end of which there seems to be a kind of sinister back office, where three massive security-looking guys are clustered around a door, staring at the kid who is about to spend the next six months in juvie. I mean, these guys were not amused, and they were not kidding, either. The true insanity of what I was doing sank in. I stopped. Shelly kept going. The security gorillas all took a step forward, seeing quite clearly that I had decided to bolt in the opposite direction and make a terrible scene crashing back through the overdressed bachelors and bachelorettes, all clustered together in their misery. I mean, things were about to get way worse, when behind me someone yells, “Philip! Hey, Philip!”

The teeny little black dress in front of me stiffens as Shelly hears this, but, as she’s swiveling, Amelia’s already got her hands on my arm, and she’s yanking me back into the bar. “Where are you going? There’s nothing back there but offices,” she tells me. Shelly, suddenly confused again, steps forward. “I’m sorry, do you know this person?”

“Yes, he’s with us, with Rex, I mean,” Amelia says, matter of factly. “Come on, come on, I’m so glad you’re here, this is such a huge bore, it’s hilarious that you came, what are you wearing, Mom is going to throw a fit …” Shelly and the giant security guys all relaxed and kind of grinned at each other; it’s amazing what a pretty girl can achieve, without even trying.

So next thing I know Amelia has me by the arm, and she’s dragging me back into the throngs of bachelors and bachelorettes, hopping a little every now and then, because she’s so short, and she seems to be looking for somebody. “Come on, I’ll get you a drink. Do you see a waiter with like kind of blue stuff in his hair? He’s our waiter, you just tell him what you want and he brings it. Like anything. You just say, I’ll have like a mango margarita and they bring it to you. I had one but I drank it too fast and I got one of those headaches in your nose. Can you believe that? Like is it not even noticeable to anybody that I’m, like, fourteen years old? And they’re serving me margaritas? This is so stupid. Maybe now that you’re here, Mom’ll let me go home, I have so much homework to do. Hi, can we get another mango margarita?” She found the waiter with the blue hair, who was at the bar receiving thousands of drinks from about four bartenders. “Sure, absolutely, not a problem,” says blue hair, and he turns back, calling suavely, “I need another Em Em.”

Amelia grabs me by the arm and pulls me in the opposite direction now, still yakking. “Can you believe that?” she says, without even looking back. “So now they’re giving out total alcoholic beverages to total teenagers, it’s pathetic, someone should report these people. Rex is a complete drip, it’s hilarious, you have to come meet him, what a jerk. How old do you think he is, forty or something? He’s like got his hand down Polly’s pants, I’m not kidding. What a sleezeball.” And she shoves me into another room.

And there, sitting straight across the room, lit by moody little tubes of something approximating light, is Rex. Even in the dark you can tell that he has a tan, and he’s leaning back on this big slick banquette, with six or seven people lounging around him, looking like Henry the Eighth, with one arm stretched out along the back of the banquette, and the other arm around Polly, his hand discreetly stuck down the back of her pants. It was spooky, really; he looked just like he looks in the movies, where he’s always waving a giant weapon around and screaming, “Get in the truck!” But he had no weapon, and he looked real little. That’s something I never considered when I thought about meeting movie stars … usually, when you see them? They’re like four stories tall, on some giant movie screen somewhere. But when you meet them, in person? They’re actually just sort of people-sized. Which makes the whole experience kind of surreal, if you haven’t thought about things like that ahead of time. Plus, if the guy has his hand down your sister’s pants, he looks significantly less like a movie star, and more like your average piece of shit asshole.

Not that Polly seemed to mind. She was leaning in and telling him some sort of secret, it looked like, and he grinned at whatever it was she said, not like it was earth-shattering, but like it was a good minor joke, and he was enough of a mensch to give a small smile to this pretty girl less than half his age, while he meanwhile had his hand down her pants. He didn’t actually look at her, but he was conscious enough of the social protocols that it was a definite smile. Mom, sitting across from the banquette, was deep in consultation with an enormous woman who was wearing something that looked like a giant green sack. She also had this major bead thing going on, strings and strings of them, big stone-like things, and crystals hanging off silver chains. She was seriously the only person in the room dressed worse than me, but Mom was hanging on her every word.