Кэндес Бушнелл - Four Blondes

"Best friends," Dianna says, kissing me on the cheek.

Raymond tugs at my arm. "Well, as her best friend, you ought to know this. This young lady is very, very smart. I'll betcha she's smarter than my grandsons, and they went to Harvard. This young lady didn't even go to college!”

"Thank you, Raymond. Isn't he a doll?" Dianna says.

"And I'll tell you a little secret," Raymond says, now that he has our attention. "Most people don't know this, but every woman who makes it on her own is smart. She's got to have it here/' he says, pointing to Dianna's chest. "But she's got to have it up here too," touching his head.

"And you can buy that," I say, indicating his chest. "Oh, men don't care if they're real or fake, as long as you got some. And if you got none, go out and buy them, or else you're a loser. But this," he says, tapping his head again, "this you can't buy. You've either got it or you don't. And this girl's got it." Suddenly, his gnarled hand shoots out and grabs Dianna's hand, which he pulls to his mouth and gives a large, ferocious kiss. "There," he says. "Now you girls go and have some fun. You don't want to be hanging around with an old man like me. Go on.”

I look at Dianna inquiringly as we move away. She shrugs. "Old men love me. Come to think of it, all men love me. Hey, I'd give that old guy a blow job if I thought it'd help. But I don't care about men, Cecelia. I only care about you.”

"And I only care about you, too," I say, which may or may not be true but doesn't really matter as we make our way, nodding and smiling, through the crowd.

"Did I ever tell you that I'm the best in bed?" she asks, taking a glass of champagne off a tray. "Yes," I say, laughing a bit uneasily because that is exactly what Amanda used to say about herself. I believe her exact words were: "I can get any man I want because I know exactly what to do to men in bed.”

And I always wanted to scream, "Yes, but you can't keep them.”

And look what happened to HER.

Dianna is probably just as crazy and fucked up as Amanda was and will probably go ape shit someday the way Amanda did and try to do something horrible to me, but for the moment, that is all in my future. And then D.W. approaches with Juliette Morganz, whose wedding dress consists of beads and lace and bows (definitely not Bentley) and Juliette gushes all over us and drags us off for photographs with her mother and about fifteen other assorted relatives.

I just smile. I don't want to make any waves.

And then I'm kind of bored, so when Sandi Sandi, the hot new singer, is playing, and everyone is dancing and drunk, I wander through the house and go into a marble bathroom on the second floor and snort some cocaine, which I remind myself is just for old time's sake, and then I go back to the party, cross the dance floor, and walk out of the tent, following a boardwalk down to the pond and onto a white dock, where I light up a cigarette.

Dianna Moon follows me.

"Hey, hey," she says. She's stumbling a bit and pretty drunk. "Let’s get out of here.”

There's a charmingly beat-up old rowboat which she gets in. I follow, and we almost tip over, but then we sit in the bottom of the boat and try to row a little. There's a current and the boat drifts away from the dock.

"Hey," Dianna says. "I have to tell you something.”

“Not about Jesus, okay?”

"Oh Cecelia. Someone told me you killed your best friend.”

"Who?" I say. "Nevil Mouse.”

"Nevil Mouse is so ... stupid," I say. "I think he hates you," Dianna says.

"He hates me because I wouldn't go out with him. Years ago.”

"He says you're not what you appear to be. I told him to go fuck himself.”

"What did he say?”

"He said you killed ... Amanda? Your best friend? You put something in her drink?”

Oh GOD. Where do people get these lies? "It was a long time ago," I say, as if it really isn't important. And it does seem long ago, almost as if it couldn't have happened, although it was actually four years ago, to be exact. At the end of that long, crazy summer right after I'd met Hubert and was seeing him secretly. Amanda and I were sharing a house. "She killed herself," I say.

"Jesus took her.”

"No." I shake my head. "She was drunk, and she took too much coke. She got into her car and drove into the duck pond and drowned.”

She had been on her way to Hubert's house. On the sly.

"Fuck. Do you think I care?" Dianna said. "People think I killed my husband.”

There are lilies in the pond. I trail my fingers in the water. We both look over at the shore, where the party is in full swing.

"What I like about you," Dianna says, "is that we're both outsiders. Neither one of us fits in with this ... society crowd.”

"Society is dead," I say, for what I think is the second or third time this year.

"My mother was a prostitute. She doesn't even know who my real father is.”

"Marriage is prostitution.”

"But my mother ... wasn't married.”

"Oh so what," I say. "My mother was a fucking drug addict.”

"I'm going swimming," Dianna says. She basically falls out of the boat, and for a moment, as she flails in the water and I realize she probably can't swim, I wonder if I'm going to have to rescue her. Luckily, the pond isn't deep, only about three feet, and she finds her footing and wades to shore.

I watch her with some degree of relief. I sit there alone.

After a while, I begin to row back to the dock in the charmingly beat-up old rowboat. I have a cigarette between my lips and I'm aware of my short blond hair, a slight pink blush on my cheeks and my bare shoulders.

And when I'm almost at the shore, Patrice shouts, "Hey Cecelia," and I look over my shoulder and he fires off as many pictures as he can in five seconds. The following week, this photograph is beamed all over the world. In it, the expression on my face is: frowning slightly, yet a little surprised; still young, and I'm wearing the nearly see-through baby-blue Bentley dress, the lines of my slim yet shapely figure clearly visible. The caption reads: RICH, BEAUTIFUL, AND FIERCELY INDEPENDENT, PRINCESS CECELIA KELLY LUXENSTEIN IS THE LEADER OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM SOCIETY.

And I realize: This is my life. SMILE.

e have a saying in New York: English girls who are considered beautiful in London are merely "pretty" in New York, while American girls who are called "attractive" in New York are beautiful in London. And this sums up one of the biggest differences between Life in New York and Life in London. In London, if you're an attractive, nice girl with some personality and a career, you can meet a man, date him, and—if you want to—marry him. On the other hand, in New York, you can be a beautiful woman with a body like Cindy Crawford's and a highpowered career and you cannot even get a date.

Maybe because Englishwomen can actually snag a man—and can do so with ratty hair, unpolished nails, and flabby thighs—they possess a certain sort of annoying smugness when it comes to relationships.

Recently, I had an encounter with one of these women in New York. As she sat there eating a smoked salmon sandwich and interviewing me about w my life (which was sounding, to my ears, more and more pitiful by the moment), my eye was inevitably drawn to her large sapphire engagement ring topped by a sapphire-studded wedding band.

It shouldn't have made me hate her, but it did. "Let’s see," she said, checking her tape recorder. "Is there any man in your life right now?”

“Noooo," I said, although I had just broken up with a man who refused to marry me after six months of dating. I believe his actual words were "I do want to get married someday, but I don't want to marry you.”