‘Unretouched. Don’t ask how much we paid to expedite them.’
Daniel, whom Andy had hired last year after interviewing no fewer than ten potential candidates, slipped a memory card directly into Andy’s iMac. Aperture popped open and asked if she wanted to import the photos and Daniel hit yes. ‘Here, check these out.’ Daniel clicked around and a photo of her and Max filled her twenty-seven-inch screen. She gazed directly at the camera, her eyes intensely blue and her skin flawless. Max had his lips pressed to her cheek; his jaw was defined, his profile perfect. The leaves behind them almost burst out of the background, their oranges and yellows and reds serving as an intense contrast to his black tuxedo and her white dress. It looked like a picture right out of a magazine, one of the most beautiful she’d ever seen.
‘Spectacular, isn’t it? Here, look at this one.’ A couple more clicks and a black-and-white image of the reception filled the screen. Dozens of their guests gathered around the perimeter of the dance floor, smiling and clapping, while Max embraced her for their first dance, to ‘Warm Love.’ The angle showed Max leaning down to kiss Andy’s forehead, his arms wrapped around her middle, her chestnut hair cascading down her back. The button detail they’d decided to add to the train after the last fitting looked fantastic, Andy thought. And she was pleased she’d decided on the shorter kitten heels; it gave them a more clearly defined height difference that looked more elegant in photos.
‘Here, check out your solo shots. They’re stunning.’ Daniel moved his cursor to a folder labeled ‘portraits’ and opened it to thumbnails. He scrolled for a minute and then clicked on one. The screen came alive with Andy’s face and shoulders, dusted just so with a subtle shimmer powder that made her glow. In most of them she’d kept her smile deliberately restrained (according to the photographer, fine lines and wrinkles were harder to mask with a ‘full face’ smile), but there was a single image of her grinning unabashedly, and although it made her crow’s-feet and laugh lines more noticeable, it was by far the most authentic of the photos. Clearly it was taken before she’d visited Max’s suite.
Everyone had told her St Germain would be an impossible get, but she couldn’t resist trying. It had taken over a month and no fewer than a dozen calls for St Germain’s agent even to take a message from Andy, repeatedly telling her that The Plunge was much too puny a publication for his world-famous client to consider, but he’d pass along her info if she would agree to stop calling. When Andy hadn’t heard back after another week, she wrote St Germain a handwritten letter and messengered it to his Chinatown studio. In it she promised him two future cover shots of his choosing, all expenses paid to any far-flung location, and volunteered The Plunge to cosponsor his next fund-raising benefit for the Haiti earthquake victims, his favorite charity. That had elicited a phone call from a woman who identified herself only as St Germain’s ‘friend,’ and when Andy agreed to the woman’s request for The Plunge to do a cover story on St Germain’s much-adored niece, who was engaged to be married next fall, the impossible-to-book photographer signed on the dotted line. It had been one of her biggest coups at work, and she smiled thinking about it.
Andy had been terrified to be photographed by such a famous photographer – and one who specialized in nudes – but St Germain had immediately put her at ease. She could see right away what made him so good.
‘What a relief!’ he had crowed the moment he stepped into Andy’s bridal suite with two assistants in tow. When they arrived at the estate, Andy remembered feeling inexplicably grateful they’d even shown up. Despite wearing only a strapless bra and knee-to-chest Spanx, Andy felt nothing but joy and appreciation at the sight of the photographer.
‘What? That you only have to shoot one average bride rather than an entire brigade of swimsuit models? Hi, I’m Andy. It’s so nice to finally meet you in person.’
St Germain couldn’t have been an inch over five-six, with a slight build and a lily-white complexion, but his voice sounded like it belonged to a linebacker. Not even his indeterminate accent (French? British? A hint of Aussie?) seemed to fit. ‘Hah hah! Yes, exactly. Those girls were crazy, completely aberrant! But seriously, ma chérie, I am so happy we do not need full-body makeup. It is so tiresome.’
‘No full-body makeup, I promise. If all goes as planned, you will not be able to tell whether I’m up to date on my bikini wax, either.’ Andy laughed. All the drama his booking required had prepared Andy to hate him, but St Germain was irresistibly charming. She knew from his ‘friend’ that he’d flown in directly from Rio, where he’d been shooting the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Five days, two dozen models, hundreds if not thousands of inches of tanned and toned legs.
St Germain nodded as though she’d just said something very serious. ‘This is good. Ach, I am so tired of looking at skinny girls in bright bikinis. Of course, this is a dream of most men, but you know what they say … show me a beautiful woman, and I will show you a man who is tired of … well, you probably have heard the rest.’ He smiled devilishly.
‘It really doesn’t sound like you had such a terrible time,’ Andy said with a smile.
‘Yes, perhaps not.’ He reached forward and turned Andy’s chin toward the light. ‘Don’t move.’
Before she knew what was happening, an assistant handed him a camera with a lens the size of a fire log, and St Germain clicked twenty or thirty times.
Andy’s hand flew to her face. ‘Stop! They haven’t done my eyes yet. I’m not even wearing the dress!’
‘No, no, you’re beautiful just like that. Gorgeous! Does your fiancé tell you you look marvelous when you’re mad?’
‘He does not.’
St Germain thrust the camera to his left. A black-clad assistant immediately reached for it and exchanged it for another. ‘Mmm, well he should. Yes, just like that. Twinkle for me, darling.’
Andy let her shoulders drop and turned to face him. ‘What?’
‘Go on, twinkle!’
‘I’m not sure I know how to twinkle.’
‘Raj!’ he barked.
One of the assistants leaped up from behind the couch, where he was holding a reflector. He jutted out a hip, pursed his lips, cocked his head slightly to the side, and lowered his eyes in an approximation of a sexy, come-hither look.
St Germain nodded. ‘See? Like I tell all the swim babies. Twinkle.’
Andy laughed again now, remembering it. She pointed to one of the thumbnails Daniel was scrolling past. Her eyes were heavy lidded to the point of looking drugged and her mouth was puckered like a duck’s. ‘See? I twinkled there.’
‘You what?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Here,’ Daniel said, enlarging a photo of Andy and Max, midkiss during the ceremony. ‘Look how beautiful.’
Andy could only remember the out-of-body anxious sensation that had started the moment the doors swung open. Hearing the first notes to Pachelbel’s Canon had confirmed that her window for fleeing was closed. Clutching her father’s arm, she spotted her brother-in-law’s parents, a pair of her mother’s distant cousins, and Max’s Caribbean nanny, the woman Max thought was his mother until he was four. Her father led her ever so gently, both pulling her along and, perhaps, keeping her upright. A group of girlfriends from college and their husbands smiled at her from the right. In front of them, Max’s gaggle of boarding school friends, nearly a dozen in total, each one irritatingly handsome with an equally attractive women beside him, all turned and watched her. She briefly wondered why they hadn’t divided themselves into the bride’s side and the groom’s side. Didn’t people do that anymore? Shouldn’t she, the resident wedding expert, know the answer? But she didn’t.
A flash of chartreuse from her right side caught her eye: Agatha, the fashion-forward assistant she and Emily shared, who’d apparently gotten a memo from the great hipster in the sky that neons, in addition to beards and fedoras, were a go. The office staff, nearly twenty in all, flanked Agatha on all sides. Some, like her photography dire
ctor and her managing director, managed to feign delight at spending Columbus Day weekend at their boss’s wedding. The assistants, associate editors, and ad sales girls didn’t do as good a job faking it. Andy thought it cruel to invite them all, to obligate them to spend time at a work function when they already clocked in so many hours, but Emily had insisted. She argued it was good for morale to get the whole office together, drinking and dancing. And so, like she had about the florist and the caterer and the size of the wedding, Andy had conceded.
As Andy neared the front of the room, her legs feeling as though she’d trudged through two feet of snow, one face in particular caught her eye. His blond hair had darkened a bit, but the dimples were unmissable. His suit was fitted, crisp, black – not a tuxedo, of course, because he’d never have been caught dead in so pedestrian a costume. He always said dress codes were for styleless people. He always said a lot of things, and Andy remembered hanging on his pontifications as though god himself had decreed them. The post-Alex, pre-Max mistake: Christian Collinsworth. He looked every bit as gorgeous and pompous and confident as the last time she’d woken up beside him in his room at the Villa d’Este five years earlier, still naked and tangled in his sheets, mere moments before he’d casually announced that his girlfriend would be joining him in Lake Como the following day, and would Andy like to meet her? When Emily had asked Andy to invite him as a personal favor to her, Andy vehemently refused, but when Mrs Harrison placed him at the top of her guest list, right alongside Christian’s parents, who were very dear friends of the Harrisons, there was nothing she could say. Oh, Barbara? So sorry, but perhaps it’s inappropriate to invite someone with whom I had a fabulous affair to our wedding? Don’t get me wrong, he was fantastic in bed, but I’m worried it might make cocktail hour uncomfortable … You understand, don’t you? So there he stood, a hand on his mother’s back, turned toward Andy and giving her that look. The one that hadn’t changed one bit in five years and said, You know and I know that we have a delicious secret. It was the look Christian gave exactly half the women in Manhattan.
‘I’m going to be walking down the aisle and seeing someone I used to have sex with,’ Andy had complained to Emily when she first saw Mrs Harrison’s guest list. Never mind that Katherine had been lopped off the list at Max’s behest. Andy had wanted to cheer when he told his mom over a wedding-planning brunch, ‘No Katherine. No exes,’ despite her status as ‘close family friend.’ When Andy had confessed to Max afterward that Christian Collinsworth was also on his mother’s list, he looked her in the eye and said, ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass about Christian if you don’t.’ Andy had nodded and agreed: it was probably best to leave well enough alone and not further upset Barbara.
Emily had rolled her eyes. ‘That makes you like exactly ninety-nine percent of brides, excluding your odd religious fanatic and the occasional freaks who met in elementary school and never slept with anyone else. Get over it. I guarantee you Christian has.’
‘I know,’ Andy said. ‘I was probably number one hundred something for Christian. But I still think it was weird to have him at our wedding.’
‘You’re a thirty-year-old woman who has lived in New York City for the last eight years. I’d be worried if you didn’t have someone at your wedding you’d slept with besides your husband.’
Andy had stopped marking up the layout in front of her and looked at Emily. ‘Which begs the question …’
‘Four.’
‘You did not! Who? I can only think of Jude and Grant.’
‘Remember Austin? With the cats?’
‘You never told me you slept with him!’
‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t anything to brag about.’ Emily sipped her coffee.
‘That’s only three. Who else?’
‘Felix. From Runway. He worked in the’
Andy almost fell out of her desk chair. ‘Felix is gay! He married his boyfriend last year. When did you have sex with him?’
‘You’re so label-conscious, Andy. It was a one-time thing, after the Fashion Rocks event one year. At one point Miranda made us take drink orders in the VIP room backstage. We both had way too many martinis. It was fun. We ended up at each other’s weddings, and who really cares? You’ve got to relax a little.’
Andy remembered agreeing at the time, but that was before she was zipped into a wedding gown and sent strolling down the aisle to marry someone who’d potentially just cheated on her, while the guy she’d always been a little obsessed with grinned at her (naughtily, she could swear!) from the sidelines.
The rest of the ceremony was a blur. It took the sound of the glass shattering under Max’s foot to bring her back to reality. Crash! They’d done it. From here on in, she would never again be just plain old Andy Sachs, herself, whatever that meant. After that split second she would forever carry one of two titles, and neither was particularly appealing at that very moment: married or divorced. How had it happened?
Andy’s office line began to ring. She glanced at the clock: ten thirty. Agatha’s voice came through the intercom: ‘Morning, Andy. Max, line one.’
Agatha came in later and later every day, and still Andy couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She reached over to depress her own intercom button, to tell Agatha she couldn’t take Max’s call, but she simultaneously knocked over her coffee cup and pressed line one.
‘Andy? You okay? I’m worried about you, sweetheart. How are you feeling?’
The coffee, now cold enough to feel worse than if it had been hot, slowly streamed off the desk and directly onto Andy’s pants. ‘I’m fine,’ she said hurriedly. She looked around for a tissue or even a piece of scrap paper to mop up the spill. Finding nothing, Andy watched as the coffee slowly soaked through her desk blotter calendar and into her lap, and she began to cry. Again. For someone who rarely cried, she sure was crying a lot lately.
‘Are you crying? Andy, what’s wrong?’ Max asked, and the concern in his voice only made her tears stream faster.
‘No, nothing, I’m fine,’ she lied, watching the coffee spread into a circular stain over her left thigh. She cleared her throat. ‘Listen, I’m going to have to stop by and change tonight before Yacht Party, so I can walk Stanley. Will you cancel the walker? Are you coming home first or would you rather meet there? What pier does it leave from again?’
They went over details for the evening and Andy managed to hang up without any more talk of her crying jag. She fixed her face in a little desk mirror, popped two Tylenols, chased them with a Diet Coke, and jammed through the rest of her day with barely a breather and, thankfully, no more tears. She even found a half hour to get a blowout at Dream Dry, which in addition to a quick change at home and an ice-cold glass of Pinot Grigio made her feel somewhat human. Max swooped over to her the moment she stepped off the red-carpeted gangplank and into the yacht’s open-air living room; his soft kiss and minty, spicy smell made her dizzy with pleasure. And then she remembered everything else.
‘You look great,’ he said, kissing her neck. ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better.’
A wave of queasiness hit Andy like a shovel, and her hand flew to her mouth.
Max’s forehead kneaded. ‘The wind is making the water rough and the boat roll. Don’t worry, it’s supposed to calm down any minute. Come on, I want to show you off.’
The party was in full swing, and together she and Max must have fielded a hundred congratulations on their wedding. Could it only have been four days earlier that she’d walked down that aisle? A chilly breeze blew and Andy moved one hand to her hair; with her other hand she tightened the cashmere wrap around her shoulders. More than anything, she was grateful her mother-in-law had some prior social engagement on the Upper East Side and wouldn’t be joining them that evening.
‘This may be the most gorgeous one yet,’ Andy said, looking around the boat’s Moroccan-inspired living room. She nodded toward an intricately woven tapestry and ran her fingers across the hand-carved bar. ‘So tasteful.’
The w
ife of Yacht Life’s editor, a woman whose name Andy could never remember, leaned in and said, ‘I heard they gave him a blank check to decorate. Literally, blank. As in, unlimited.’
‘Gave who?’
The woman peered at her. ‘Who? Why, Valentino! The owner commissioned him to decorate the entire yacht. Can you imagine? How much must it cost to hire one of the world’s preeminent fashion designers to pick fabrics for your couch?’
‘I can’t even fathom,’ Andy murmured, although of course she could. Little shocked her after her year at Runway, and what still did was certainly not the extent to which crazy rich people would spend their money.
Once again Andy watched as the woman (Molly? Sadie? Zoe?) scarfed a miniature tartare-topped tortilla and gazed, munching, past Andy.
The woman’s eyes grew wide. ‘Ohmigod, he’s here. I can’t believe he’s actually here,’ she mumbled through her half-chewed food, the hand in front of her mouth doing little to hide it.
‘Who’s here?’ her husband asked with seemingly zero interest.
‘Valentino! He just arrived! Look!’ The woman managed to swallow her chip and reapply lipstick in one almost-graceful motion.
Max and Andy swiveled toward the red carpet and sure enough, a tanned, taut, and pulled-tight Valentino gingerly removed his loafers and stepped aboard. A lackey standing just off to the side handed him a snorting, wet-faced pug, which he accepted without comment and began to stroke. He brazenly scanned the party and, appearing neither pleased nor displeased, turned to offer his one free hand to his date. Longtime partner Giancarlo was nowhere to be found; instead, Andy watched in horror as five long fingers with red-lacquered nails reached up from the belowdecks stairwell and wrapped themselves, talonlike, over Valentino’s forearm.
Noooooo!
Andy glanced at Max. Had she screamed that aloud or just thought it?
As if in slow motion, the woman materialized inch by dreaded inch: the top of her bob, followed by her bangs, and then her face, twisted into an all-too-familiar expression of extreme displeasure. Her tailored white pants, silk tunic, and cobalt high-heeled pumps were all Prada, and her military-inspired jacket and classic quilted bag were Chanel. The lone jewelry she wore was a thick, enameled Hermès cuff in a perfectly coordinating shade of blue. Andy had read years earlier that the cuffs had replaced the scarves as her Hermès security blankets – apparently she had collected nearly five hundred in every imaginable color and size – and Andy sent up a silent thanks that she was no longer responsible for sourcing them. Watching in a sort of fascinated terror as Miranda refused to remove her shoes, Andy didn’t even notice when Max squeezed her hand.