Me, Nessa Joanne Mulholland, I’m going to help Holly Isles out of her hobo collecting. And I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. After all, this is my biggest Marilynism yet. The biggest one of my whole life.
Come on, Sugar Kane! My fingers are dancing around, ready to begin. They hover over the keyboard, waiting. Finally. I press the button to start up Word. Almost there . . .
And how could I not have seen it? I mean, this cruise, Holly hearing my Lorelei line, her always gravitating toward the wrong guys . . . it really is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes all over again. Holly is Dorothy and I’m Lorelei, and being Lorelei, it’s up to me to find her the right guy. Like Lorelei says about Dorothy in the film, “She needs someone like I to educate her”! Am I going too fast for you? Sorry. It’s simple, really.
It’s like this: Holly’s greatest attribute is that she’s smart and gorgeous; mine is that I’ve done an awful lot of research (read: watching Marilyn Monroe attract guys in film after film); so with my knowledge and Holly’s . . . everything, we really should be able to meet almost every available guy on this ship. Okay, so we might skip the single guy who’s having his one hundredth birthday tomorrow, but everyone else, as far as I’m concerned, is fair game. All that I need to do now is teach Holly everything I know about men (and thank goodness for Marilyn, or I’d know nothing). Goodbye intimidation, hello . . . hmmm . . . I can’t think of the right word. How about: “Goodbye intimidation, hello beating them off with a stick”? Hmmm, that’s not bad.
Still, I bite my lip (ouch! I forgot I’d hurt it for a second there) when I think about how this is going to look. I mean, what I’m about to put down on paper (okay, computer screen), it’s not exactly something the feminist movement would applaud. But it works. I’ve seen it work. Maybe not in person, but Marilyn certainly pulls it off time after time. And if Holly can pull it off too (and why shouldn’t she—she’s an A-List actor, just like Marilyn), I guarantee she’ll get to know every man on the ship. If she tries what I’m suggesting, no man on earth could possibly be intimidated by her. Then, when she’s done attracting them all and has worked out which ones she really likes, she can throw out the dead wood and slowly but surely introduce the stayers to the real Holly. It’ll be easy. In fact, she’ll probably have too many guys to choose from.
Yes. It’s the plan of the century. Foolproof. But to put it into action, Holly will need to study, and study hard. And thankfully, now Sugar Kane’s ready to go, I can get on with writing up Holly’s first lesson—Lesson I. (Everything looks more scholarly and important when you use Roman numerals, you know.)
NESSA’S LESSONS IN LOVE
Lesson I: Femininity is the key
At all times, be feminine. Men love a woman who pampers herself. Long baths with sweet-smelling vanilla oil are good (this will remind him of Mother’s home cooking—and you don’t have to let on that, despite your brand-new gourmet kitchen, you’ve never cooked anything more than a microwave dinner). Manicures and pedicures are good. Facials are good. Time spent on hair and make-up is good. However, when complimented, you should never, ever show that you have gone to any trouble. As for clothes, short and tight is not what you are looking for. Remember: femininity is the key. Shapely calves and ankles should definitely be displayed. A hint of bronzer-enhanced cleavage is also good, but don’t overdo anything.
Lesson II: Flirt
Play with and toss your hair, smile, look up at him through your eyelashes, take his arm, stroke his lovely suit material (the material you just complimented). Keep it light, keep it bubbly, keep it giggly. Never get serious.
Lesson III: Act helpless
Men like to be good at the “boy stuff.” Let him drive (and read the map), let him fix your TV/alarm clock/zipper. Let him order for you, open doors, pull out chairs, and help you across the road as if these things would never happen if it weren’t for him.
Lesson IV: Let him have all the answers
Never monopolize the conversation. He knows everything and you know . . . well, not nothing, but not very much. If he starts to tell you about how fascinating iguanas are, and you happen to have done your thesis on the species, don’t admit this. Simply gaze at him attentively. The iguanas won’t say anything.
Lesson V: Be unavailable
It’s never good to look like no-one wants you, so pretend you’ve got a boyfriend even if you don’t have one. Even better, pretend you’ve got quite a few. This means a) plenty of guys want you; and b) that you flit lightly in and out of situations and he’ll think that he’ll be able to flit lightly in and out of your life too. Remember at all times that you need to attract as many men as possible. (Think of moths to a lit candle, flies to a bug zapper . . .) This means they’ll have to compete for your attention, and they will—it’s always good to be the alpha male.
Right. I think that’s it.
I sit back in my chair and puff my cheeks out, only feeling the cold again because I’ve stopped concentrating so hard. At least my fingers are warm. I bring my hand up to my face to warm my cheeks, checking my watch as I go. Three a.m.?! I snap Sugar Kane shut and jump up. I’ve really got to get some sleep. After all, today’s going to be a big day. I’ve got to convince Holly that a little bit of love study is in order. And something tells me that’s not going to be easy.
“You’re kidding, right?” Holly looks up from the piece of paper I’ve given her and laughs. Laughs long and hard. And yes, it’s the “Nessa’s Lessons in Love” piece of paper I’m talking about here. And hang on, let me go back and rephrase that . . . Holly looks up from her sumptuous cream silk-padded bay window seat, silhouetted against her stunning, endless sea view. Oh, and that’s in her private lounge room. (Marc has one of his own, which is a good thing because I’m not sure he’d exactly approve of the Nessa’s Lessons in Love message if he was here.)
“Tell me this is where the cameras come out. Nessa, sweetheart, you can’t actually believe this.” She holds the paper out in front of her, pinched between two fingers as if it’s got some kind of disease.
I go over from my spot in the middle of the (cream plush-pile-carpeted) room. I retreated there after I gave her the missive so I could see her reaction, and I guessed it would be something like this. Now for the convincing. “I knew you’d say that,” are the words that come out of my mouth with a sigh.
“Are you really surprised? This is advice from the dark ages!” She brings the paper in again to read aloud from it. “Keep it giggly. Never get serious. Gaze at him attentively. Shapely calves and ankles should definitely be displayed . . . Nessa, I’m ashamed of you!”
Wow. I guess this really is going to take some convincing. Maybe even more than I thought. I walk over to sit down beside Holly in the bay window seat (adopt me, please).
She shakes her head as she reads over the lessons once more. “How could I follow any of this? I’d look like a complete bimbo.”
“Aha!” I’m quick to jump in here with a waggle of one finger. “But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s all about the bimbo. The bimbo always gets the guy!”
Holly looks up.
“Well, she does, doesn’t she?” I say.
“I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
“Aha!” I jump in again. “That’s true. But only from our point of view. It suits the bimbo just fine though, doesn’t it? The thing is, we’ve learned that being a bimbo is bad. But is it really? Maybe it’s fun. Who knows if you never try it?”
Holly keeps on looking at me.
“It’s not like bimbos ever hurt anyone, do they? So they look a little dumb, but so what? It’s just flirting, and all flirting really is is making other people feel good about themselves. It’s about being interested in them. In really listening to them and what they’re saying, rather than thinking about what you’re going to say next.”
Silence. And then, across from me, Holly’s brow crinkles thoughtfully. In a “Huh, that’s funny, I never thought about it that way before” kind of way.
Excellent. I’m making progress. But, um, er, now what? Maybe I should try to explain it another way. Really hit the message home. In the continuing silence, I gather my thoughts until I come up with something. “Look. I don’t mean to be rude, but whatever you’ve been doing for the past number of years, it’s not working for you, is it?”
Sitting across from me, Holly’s eyebrows raise a tad.
“So maybe you should try something else for a change and see how it fits?”
Silence. Again.
“But . . .” Holly looks confused when she finally speaks.
“But what?”
“Well, even if I thought this was a good idea—which I don’t—it’s not me, is it? I know I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid. I’m not a bimbo. What if I act like a complete bimbo and then I meet someone I really like? What do I do then? I’ve pretended to be something I’m not.”
“No, no, no. That’s not how it works. It’s only for the initial attraction. The point is to attract as many guys as possible, filter out the ones you’re not interested in, pluck out the A-grade ones, and then slowly but surely start showing the real you.”
Even more silence.
“Holly?” I try eventually.
“Um, I don’t know. It seems kind of silly . . .”
I go for the clincher. “How many times have you been engaged?”
Holly looks down at the lessons again. “Three,” she mumbles. She reads over the entire sheet of paper once more before she looks up at me. “You know what this reminds me of?”
I shake my head.
“Something one of my girlfriends did a few years back. It was called “The Relationship Game.” She gave me the book when she was done with it. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever read. All about how you shouldn’t call him back for a certain amount of time after a date, so you don’t look too desperate. Things like that. I think I threw it across the room in the end.”
“Oh.” I’m not quite sure what to say to this. But then I think of something. “What happened to your friend?”
Holly’s eyes look straight into mine. “She got married six months later. She’s just had a baby. And she’s blissfully happy.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” There’s a pause. A long pause. “You really think this will work?” Holly finally speaks, shaking the piece of paper.
I think of Marilyn and I nod. Hard.
She takes a deep breath. “Maybe I should humor you, even if it’s just for a few hours. If it worked for my friend, it could work for me, too, right?”
Holly’s eyes look as if she doesn’t truly believe this statement, but I nod again, harder this time, encouraging her.
Holly watches me. “You know, you put up a pretty good argument for someone so young.”
I scoot over closer to her, animated now. “Well, I don’t read all my dad’s essays for nothing.”
Holly frowns.
“What’s up?”
“I’m sorry I dumped all my problems on you yesterday, Nessa. It wasn’t fair. I guess I’m just a bit . . .”
“Lonely?” I finish the sentence for her.
Holly pauses for a second and then shrugs.
“Don’t worry about it. Now, listen up, because I’ve got a few ideas . . .”
As I sit there and fill her in, my excitement rises. I can’t believe I’m thirteen (almost fourteen!) and I’m on board a cruise ship. Sitting beside Holly Isles. Giving her advice about love. It’s not like real life at all. It’s like something that would happen in a movie. Just as I’m thinking this, strangely, I catch sight of our reflections in the mirror opposite us.
And for just a fraction of a second, I don’t see Nessa and Holly. I see Lorelei and Dorothy. Marilyn and Jane.
***
Okay. So, over the next few days, I feel like I’m more Skipper to Holly’s Barbie, than Lorelei to Holly’s Dorothy, but that’s all right. I’m sure people feel like that around Holly all the time. You see, I find out very quickly that the terrible thing about Holly is that she’s just so awfully, awfully pretty. Not 7.30 p.m. “I’ve had the whole day to get myself together, so now we can go out on the town” pretty, but “I can wake up in the middle of the night with a raging dose of the flu, vomit, wind up with chunks of carrot left over from dinner in my hair and still be pretty” kind of pretty. And the even more terrible thing is, you can’t hate her for it. You can’t hate her for it because she’s one of those people who doesn’t get it at all. Holly has no idea she’s this stunningly gorgeous person who’s just lovely to be around twenty-four hours a day.
That’s the best thing about her—she’s simply Holly. Not Holly the film star on the red carpet, not Holly dating all the most scrumptious guys in Hollywood, not Holly on the front of every magazine. Just Holly. A chick whose favorite food in the world is nachos (with extra sour cream), who cries like a fool when watching Pretty Woman, and who has to paint this icky stuff on her nails so she won’t bite them all the time. When you get to know her she’s surprisingly . . . well, real.
Not to mention really, really unhappy. I feel so sorry for her (me, feeling sorry for Holly Isles—a week ago I would have had a good laugh at this one), having to call off her wedding and everything. How awful would that be? To make matters worse, she truly thought she’d found the right guy this time. She says she knew they were having problems, but kept pushing those thoughts to the back of her mind because she wanted everything to be perfect. She wanted, with all her heart, to have found the perfect man. “PM”, she calls him. Perfect Man. And they’d have the perfect wedding and buy the perfect house and have the most perfect babies. But as it turned out, she didn’t have the perfect man. He wasn’t even close. Obviously, she didn’t have the perfect pool cleaner either. (Strangely enough, she seemed more than a little upset about the pool cleaner. Apparently it’s hard to find a good one in LA.)
I listen to Holly’s tale of woe over and over again. Sometimes she cries about it, sometimes she throws pillows and magazines at the wall about it, sometimes she tries to reason it all out. And as I listen, it only cements further in my mind what I already know: I’ve been put on this ship for a reason. It’s no coincidence that I know everything there is to know about Marilyn Monroe and that Holly belted out her Dorothy line in reply to my Lorelei line as we were boarding the ship. We were meant to meet because Holly needs me. So I’ve got a job to do here. I have to help Holly out. I have got to help her find the right guy. There won’t be any more broken engagements. No more heartbreak. Holly deserves to find PM this time around, and I’m going to find him for her.
Here’s hoping he’s on this ship.
But no. Of course he is. Why else would fate bring us together and then not plant the perfect guy on the ship? Yes. He’s definitely here, no doubt about it. Now, all we’ve got to do is meet every guy on board in order to flush him out. Right. So how are we going to do that?
From: “NJM”
To: “Alexa Milton”
Subject: Brain on holiday
Help! My brain’s seen the quoits deck and swim-up bar and thinks it’s on vacation! I’m supposed to be trying to figure out ways for Holly to meet every eligible guy on the ship, so she can finally meet PM (Perfect Man), fall in perfect love, have the perfect wedding, and pop out perfect babies, but I’m coming up with . . . nothing. Any ideas?
Nessaxxx
I finish typing my email, press send, then log off and snap Sugar Kane shut with a click. That done, I continue lying on my stomach on my bed for a good half-hour, coming up with . . . again, nothing. In the end, I decide give up and drag myself off the bed. I brush my hair, put on a bit of lip gloss and head up and out onto the top deck of the ship for a stroll. Maybe the sea air will help me think a bit better. (Nothing could help me think worse, that’s for sure.)
Up on the top deck, it’s quite windy, and because of this, not many people are around. The hard core are still out in force—power-walking around the track, their little hand weights
helping to work off that third helping of French toast they had at breakfast. (Meanwhile, their stomachs are thinking about what time morning tea ends and lunch starts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. My stomach’s discovered untapped sources of greed this trip as well.) There are a few other people braving the weather along with the power-walkers, escaping from one thing or another, and a few couples scattered near the bow, enjoying the peace and quiet, looking out to sea.
I go to take a turn around the deck myself when I see him peeking around from a pile of deckchairs, not too far in front of me. The ship’s photographer. The tall skinny guy who’d taken the photo of Holly and me on our respective sun lounges the other day, which I totally forgot to go and check out. Thinking I’ve missed out, I race up to him and practically bowl him over.
“Hey!” I say, from behind. And I guess he’s not expecting anyone, because he’s startled and hits his head on a metal railing behind him. “Oh, sorry! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” He’s looking at me warily, as if I was the one who hurt him and not the railing. He rubs his head with one hand and clutches his camera to him with the other, as if I may reach out and grab it at any moment, then run off, never to be seen again.
Calm down! I think to myself. I don’t want your camera. Better tell him why I’m here. “Um, those photos you took of Holly and me the other day. I meant to come and have a look at them.”
In front of me, his shaggy eyebrows raise, making him look kind of startled again. Silence. He takes a step back.
“Um . . . hey, don’t hit your head again,” I say, pointing above him.
He winces and ducks a little. Weird.
“Um . . .” I start again, but don’t really know what to say. What is it with this guy? “So, did they turn out? Where are they? I mean, on what deck? And how much do they cost?”