first feature film. It wasn’t a really significant part, but it established her as a young actress, rather than a young partier. After that, she could no longer afford to be seen as some flake living on the beach with a baby. She needed to entertain in style, so she bought The Monstrosity. We moved to Bel Air when I was two and Simone was a Real-Life Movie Star. Our house is on all the star maps.
I won’t go into any Norma Desmond foolishness about how grim and melancholy it was to grow up rich in Bel Air. Other than the aforementioned normalcy fantasies, I had it pretty damn good. There were a few hiccups. My mother was gone most of the time, and she always hired irresponsible, pretty nannies. One of them left me at the movie theater when I was eight.
My mother laughed over the crackling phone line from Budapest and told me to quit crying. “In certain countries, girls are married when they’re eight! Be a big girl!” As if that were supposed to make it all better. In Simone’s world, there was always a starving eight-year-old getting married against her will. Whatever.
Then, on my eighteenth birthday, she gave me the house in Venice. I d on’t think she ever really knew what to do with me when I was a girl, but when I turned eighteen, she kind of got the hang of it.
The following week is hectic like the last. I burn the candle at both ends, as spring term ramps up at work and Alexei pulls me deeper and deeper into the everyday running of Voyanovski. To be fair, he’s no longer having to pull very hard. I start looking forward to my ten o’clock calls. I start volunteering ideas for some new projects, without his prodding. I start becoming far more interested in what’s happening in Segezha than I am in what’s happening with my whiny graduate students’ final projects.
And I’m trying to respect Landon’s justifiable wish for me to make a decision about our next step. I decide to go all out for the party on Friday night. It’s a hospital fund-raiser, and I know how much he loves to squire me around at those sorts of things. I don’t even resent it—if he wants arm candy, I’m perfectly willing to give him arm candy.
I leave work early, waving to one of my colleagues about having a doctor’s appointment. Well, it’s only a white lie. It is an appointment. At my mother’s favorite salon.
Three hours later, I’m feeling like a goddess (and looking like one, or so they tell me). My hair’s been blown out in long, sexy waves; I’m all waxed and buffed and shiny. I even go over to my mom’s house and rifle through her closet and borrow a vintage Pucci gown. It’s long and stretchy and wonderfully sexy without showing much skin, which is a bit of a sticking point with Landon when we’re out with his stodgy colleagues.
I call a cab to take me to the hotel and feel like a million bucks. Or a billion. I don’t know what the exchange rate is for fabulous anymore. Anyway, I’m cruising along really well, seriously schmoozing all the board members of and major donors to the hospital, but I sort of feel as if my face is going to crack right off after about an hour.
While we’re all standing around, having multiple conversations at the same time, I overhear Landon tell someone, “Yes, she’s also a professor at USC.”
It kind of makes me cringe, that also . If Bill Gates were hot, would anyone say, “He’s also the founder of Microsoft”? I try not to let my feminist hackles get up on Landon’s big night, but he’s bugging me. I tell myself to get over it; he’s happy and proud of me, so I try to leave it at that.
Unfortunately, in the next breath he refers to me as “the whole package.” And I kind of snap.
This is not the first time he has referred to me as “the whole package,” and I used to think it was kind of funny and endearing. Suddenly, when I hear him use that phrase at the Beverly Hilton, while he is all puffed up in his tuxedo and bragging to a bunch of likewise-tuxedoed
I won’t go into any Norma Desmond foolishness about how grim and melancholy it was to grow up rich in Bel Air. Other than the aforementioned normalcy fantasies, I had it pretty damn good. There were a few hiccups. My mother was gone most of the time, and she always hired irresponsible, pretty nannies. One of them left me at the movie theater when I was eight.
My mother laughed over the crackling phone line from Budapest and told me to quit crying. “In certain countries, girls are married when they’re eight! Be a big girl!” As if that were supposed to make it all better. In Simone’s world, there was always a starving eight-year-old getting married against her will. Whatever.
Then, on my eighteenth birthday, she gave me the house in Venice. I d on’t think she ever really knew what to do with me when I was a girl, but when I turned eighteen, she kind of got the hang of it.
The following week is hectic like the last. I burn the candle at both ends, as spring term ramps up at work and Alexei pulls me deeper and deeper into the everyday running of Voyanovski. To be fair, he’s no longer having to pull very hard. I start looking forward to my ten o’clock calls. I start volunteering ideas for some new projects, without his prodding. I start becoming far more interested in what’s happening in Segezha than I am in what’s happening with my whiny graduate students’ final projects.
And I’m trying to respect Landon’s justifiable wish for me to make a decision about our next step. I decide to go all out for the party on Friday night. It’s a hospital fund-raiser, and I know how much he loves to squire me around at those sorts of things. I don’t even resent it—if he wants arm candy, I’m perfectly willing to give him arm candy.
I leave work early, waving to one of my colleagues about having a doctor’s appointment. Well, it’s only a white lie. It is an appointment. At my mother’s favorite salon.
Three hours later, I’m feeling like a goddess (and looking like one, or so they tell me). My hair’s been blown out in long, sexy waves; I’m all waxed and buffed and shiny. I even go over to my mom’s house and rifle through her closet and borrow a vintage Pucci gown. It’s long and stretchy and wonderfully sexy without showing much skin, which is a bit of a sticking point with Landon when we’re out with his stodgy colleagues.
I call a cab to take me to the hotel and feel like a million bucks. Or a billion. I don’t know what the exchange rate is for fabulous anymore. Anyway, I’m cruising along really well, seriously schmoozing all the board members of and major donors to the hospital, but I sort of feel as if my face is going to crack right off after about an hour.
While we’re all standing around, having multiple conversations at the same time, I overhear Landon tell someone, “Yes, she’s also a professor at USC.”
It kind of makes me cringe, that also . If Bill Gates were hot, would anyone say, “He’s also the founder of Microsoft”? I try not to let my feminist hackles get up on Landon’s big night, but he’s bugging me. I tell myself to get over it; he’s happy and proud of me, so I try to leave it at that.
Unfortunately, in the next breath he refers to me as “the whole package.” And I kind of snap.
This is not the first time he has referred to me as “the whole package,” and I used to think it was kind of funny and endearing. Suddenly, when I hear him use that phrase at the Beverly Hilton, while he is all puffed up in his tuxedo and bragging to a bunch of likewise-tuxedoed
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