Chapter 21
The night before the launch party felt to me like what I imagined most girls feel the night before their wedding: terrorizing helplessness.
There’s nothing more to do, nothing more that can be done but go to sleep knowing the very next time you lay your head down, all this crazy shit will have already happened.
So you can’t stop imagining exactly how it’ll all go, the getting from here to there, what will go wrong.
There’s also, of course, the enduring dread that this whole thing might turn out to be the biggest mistake of your life.
It was enough to give a girl dry heaves, if that girl was me.
So I decided to drink, and Emily helped.
One glass of wine, two glasses of wine, and then Emily said, “We should probably go over your speech one more time.”
It had been decided a week prior (by Ginger and Wendi) that I should be the one to give the speech at our launch party because I was supposedly “more real” than Emily was.
“Emily’s the face and Tina’s the brains,” were Ginger’s exact words.
Even I knew this was a stretch. Perhaps I did read as “real,” which was often just code people used to describe a woman who was willing to eat a hamburger in public, but I would never really pass for a brain.
If I were a character from Alvin and the Chipmunks, there’s not a chance in hell I would be Simon.
I would be Dave, the quick-tempered, insecure songwriter whose only companions were anthropomorphic rodents.
“Now?” I said to Emily. I was just about to curl up with my laptop and call it a night.
“Let’s go over it one last time for good luck.” Emily reached for the stack of frayed and food-stained index cards on my nightstand and handed them to me.
“I didn’t even study for my SATs this hard,” I said, taking the cards from Emily. Then I cleared my throat and began the speech that Wendi and Lily had helped me write—most of which we lifted verbatim from a pile of library books and a couple of Elizabeth Warren YouTube videos.
Emily reclined against my bed pillows and waited for me to begin.
“Here are the facts,” I said. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have dwindled.”
“Stand up,” Emily said.
“Are you serious? Come on.” But I stood even as I protested because I really did want to do a good job when I gave this speech.
It’s a well-known fact that public speaking is ranked up there with the death of a spouse, divorce, and Christmas when it comes to the detrimental stress it can cause, so I was willing to stand the hell up if Emily really thought it would help my performance.
“Here are the facts,” I said again. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have—”
“Project your voice!” Emily shouted. “Pretend like you’re confident!”
“Paychecks have dwindled!” I yelled back at her.
“Stop.” Emily scowled like the head cheerleader at bitch-squad practice. “Take a breath and try again, better this time.”
I started my speech yet again from the beginning, striving this time to exude a no-nonsense confidence, which somehow, coupled with the wine I’d ingested, resulted in my Bronx undertones rising to the surface.
“Here aw the facts,” I said with my hands. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at da same time paychecks have dwindled.”
Emily muffled a laugh.
“Screw this.” I chucked the index cards onto the floor and flopped back down on my bed beside Emily. “What I don’t know by now, I’ll never know.” I took my wineglass back in hand, and Emily let me, both of us understanding that all there was really left to do was nothing.
—
The front of cipriani looked like the Parthenon, with Greek-style monolithic columns and decorative sculptures missing limbs.
Inside the ballroom were glittering lights, shimmering cocktail dresses, suits and ties—all of which were to be expected.
Unexpected was the multitude of electronic cigarette tips fireflying around the room.
Why were these ridiculous things actually taking off?
The crowd was a handsome mix of new-media enthusiasts and the young philanthropists who appeared every Sunday in the Times fashion pages—the new generation of wealthy liberals who attended parties each weekend to give away their parents’ money.
These venerable future donors to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Modern Art appeared at ease in their fancy clothes and trendy haircuts, and they all seemed to already know one another.
“There he is,” Emily said, referring to Kevin, who was standing at the bar.
Emily was wearing vintage Valentino (that some ex-boyfriend must have bought her) in silvery pearl.
My dress was basic black with thin shoulder straps, nothing to come in your pants over, but Kevin opened his arms and dropped his jaw at the sight of me like I was Belle from Beauty and the Beast (the only Disney princess, mind you, who loved to read, and also the only one whose name literally meant beauty).
He went in for a kiss that I swore made even the chandelier overhead blush.
Kevin had been the model supportive boyfriend since the announcement of the site.
Partly, no doubt, because he still felt a little guilty for being the reason we had to prematurely announce it, but also because what Kevin had so Freudianly declared on our first date at Nougatine proved to be true: he was used to having a strong woman around telling him what to do.
And I, against all odds, in the course of a few months, had become a strong woman who was telling a lot of people what to do.
Kevin loved it. So the guy had mommy issues.
Big deal. At least he’d finally stopped asking so many questions.
An hour of mingling passed, most of which involved Ginger leering over me, with her breasts about to break free from their low-cut scoop neck, and removing alcoholic beverages from my hands. “Pace yourself,” she’d say. “You have a speech to give.” And then she’d down the drink herself.
By the time Emily appeared onstage to thank the crowd for coming, for their generous donations and their encouraging support, I’d managed to sneak just enough sips of booze to keep myself from throwing up in my mouth.
Emily was a presence onstage, confident, attractive, poised. All those years of acting training were finally paying off. She called my name with perfect elocution.
Kevin squeezed my hand once, twice, three times, and everyone else was clapping, so I knew it was time to drag my trembling ass to the stage.
I tried to breathe, but my heart was a bird that had just swallowed an Alka-Seltzer. I tried to remain calm, but the ruffled feathers of said bird had clogged all my airways. There were so many heads trained on me, each with a set of hopeful, expectant eyes.
The Titan assistants I’d gotten to know from our nights in the back room at Bar Nine stood out from the rest of the crowd.
They were the ones whose dresses hung a little more cheaply, who hadn’t just sat for professional blowouts, who weren’t dripping with Harry Winston diamonds.
They were the ones who’d volunteered to help out with the party planning in return for attendance.
I still didn’t know most of their names, but they all knew mine.
The group of them stood together at the center of the floor: the Latina woman with hair that was brown on top and blond at the bottom; the women wearing too-big and bigger glasses; the blond and brunette Zara girls.
The one I referred to as Accent Accessory was holding her cell phone up in the air like a lighter at a Coldplay concert, videotaping me. “Yeah, Tina!” she called out, which I understood meant I was taking too long to begin.
“Thank you,” I said, and forced a smile. I decided to focus on the chandelier hanging serenely above us, without falling down. How I wished to be that chandelier, or any inanimate object, really.
“Here are the facts,” I said, and then paused. “Money buys less than it did a generation ago, while at the same time paychecks have dwindled.”
These words, when I’d practiced them, had made me uneasy. (Who was I to be saying them, really? What did I know about any of this?) But hearing them now, amplified across this beautiful ballroom into the ears of all these flawless people, it felt like . . . well, honestly, it felt like singing.
“Add student-loan debt to the mix . . .” Pause. Eye contact with the audience. “The cost of a college degree in the United States has increased twelvefold in the past thirty years. That’s one thousand, one hundred twenty percent.”
Pause. Take a breath.
“Forty million Americans currently have outstanding student loans. Seven in ten college seniors will graduate with student debt. And forget about the six-figure graduate-school or law-school tuition debt so many of us take on in addition to our undergrad loans, as we race to super-educate ourselves, collecting more and more diplomas . . .” Pause.
“For what?” Look up. “It’s honorable that today’s students think they’ll be able to rise above all this, that they accept the skyrocketing cost of a college education without question.
That they refuse to give up on their dreams in spite of these debilitating obstacles.
But as the years pass, they struggle to pay down their loans, while striving to find decent work at a fair wage, while fantasizing about one day buying a home or starting a family .
. . and they are just buried. And do you know who they blame?
Themselves. They wonder: Why can’t I get it together? ”
The audience began to applaud. A few people whooped and hollered. This hadn’t happened when I’d rehearsed alone in my bedroom.