Eighteen Germaine
Eighteen
Germaine
2018
Germaine is back in her bedroom in New York, flipping through Rolling Stone . Her Beats headphones, connected to her phone, are blasting Bad Society’s newest release. She feels almost like a teenager again as she lies on her bed and pores over an article about a pop star who turned the experience of her divorce into a killer album.
Well—not Germaine as a teenager. She’d been running around on Kidz Klub and becoming America’s shopping icon back then. But maybe she feels like the teenager she wishes she could have been.
She needs to be back in or around music in some way. Not the old Blast Off! way—she doesn’t exactly want to perform, and if she did, it would be as a dancer. But up onstage with Bad Society, it felt like there was something there. She needs to work with bands again. Good ones this time. She needs to immerse herself in that energy, the way she felt at the party in Paris, without being the center of attention. She isn’t sure exactly how to do it, but she knows she needs to take some sort of step back in her life—it may be the only way she can move forward.
Germaine looks up, startled. The housekeeper has poked her head in and is trying to say something.
Germaine pulls off her headphones. “Sorry. What?”
“Miss St. Germaine-Chang, your parents have requested you in the library.”
Germaine frowns. The library? They go there to have only their most sensitive discussions about business or public relations, ones they can’t risk being overheard by visitors or staff. She wanders to the room and finds Terence and Céline in the fireside chairs at the center, surrounded by books that no one ever reads.
Giles and Greg are there, too, luckily without their simpering and passive-aggressive wives in tow. The four of them are murmuring intently and stop when they see Germaine approach.
“What is this?” she says suspiciously, taking a seat. “Why the secrecy?”
“We needed to call a family meeting about Eddie,” her father begins.
“ Thank you,” Germaine says. “Has it gotten through to you that he was the one who embarrassed me after Paris?”
“What, do you mean posting the pictures?” her mother asks. “Whatever. It was you in those pictures, not him.”
“He’s immature.” Giles shrugs his shoulders. “So what? He’ll grow up once he has a wife and kids. I did.”
“You did not.” Germaine glares at him.
“And that’s what we need to talk about,” Céline cuts in. She looks intently at Germaine, as though she knows she’s up against a fight. “We’ve had enough of the stalling. You and Eddie need to get engaged this spring; you’ll have the wedding exactly ten months later to avoid any unsavory rumors that you ... forced his hand.”
“Mom ...,” Germaine starts. She expected this conversation, but not so soon. She thought she still had time.
“I have a call out to Michael Cinco’s studio in Dubai. We’ll go with Michelle, and we’ll fly in your cousins Yun and Leah from Taiwan and Vietnam, and there’s a few more in Singapore I’d like to bring along—I thought it was just a good central meeting point, anyway.”
Germaine doesn’t even bother to ask about Sicily and Miranda. The cousins are varying breeds of models and fashion industry people and will serve as a suitably photogenic bridal party. It’s been clear to Germaine for a long time that, should she ever get married, Sicily and Miranda will not be welcome at her bachelorette festivities, and maybe not even at the wedding.
“We’re already considering which of our properties will make the best venue,” Terence adds. “You’re welcome to help with that. The venue, the catering, the decor and so forth. And music, within reason. I guess you like that sort of thing.”
Germaine sits very still and calm, nodding along with their plans, fingers laced together in her lap. But inside, her mind is whirling, ticking through all the different paths that might lead her away from this crash course. She has to put a stop to this immediately.
“That would all be well and good,” she says, putting her hand up when her parents pause for a breath. “And the plans sound lovely, they really do. But ... there’s a problem.”
“What?” Germaine’s mother says suspiciously. Both she and Terence had to expect Germaine to put up some sort of resistance, but she hopes her relaxed posture is throwing them off.
“I didn’t want to say anything, but—Eddie is impotent,” Germaine continues. “That’s why he does these mean things to shame me in public. Sorry to be crude, but he just can’t get it up. We won’t be able to have children.”
Greg narrows his eyes at her, but their father looks stunned to silence. Giles seems embarrassed. Céline’s mouth has fallen open a little. She glances at Terence, questioning.
Germaine has them on the hook; she can feel it. So she decides to step it up, shifting in her chair like the whole thing is very awkward. “Listen, I don’t want to humiliate him—this is a big secret. I’ve known since we were teenagers. But his family is totally in the dark.” She tucks her hair behind her ear and shrugs. “Now maybe you understand why he feels the need to overcompensate in other ways, always talking so big and trying to make me—and our family—look small. I know you want to make it work. But I’m not sure if this is a good alliance for us.”
It seems to be working; the expressions on the faces of Germaine’s parents fall somewhere between aghast and disappointed.
Terence turns back to Céline. “Michelle never mentioned anything to you about ...?”
“Of course not.” Her lip curls. “Why would she?”
Germaine’s father presses his forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Well, then, Germaine, if this is true ...”
Greg clears his throat and shifts in his seat. “Yeah, if this is true.”
Germaine regards him coolly. “Do you have something for the class, Greg?”
“Well ...” Greg opens his hands, palms up, in a shrug. “If you’ve known since you were teenagers, then how do you explain the sex tape?”
Germaine’s fingernails curl hard enough into a fist to make welts in her palm.
“The what ?” Céline asks.
“Yep.” Greg raises his eyebrows. “Sweet, spoiled little Germaine made a sex tape. With Eddie.”
“What are you saying?” Germaine says through gritted teeth.
“Yes, Gregoire, explain yourself,” their father demands.
Greg leans back in his chair, happy to be the center of attention again. “Eddie showed it to me last year—he wanted me to set him up with Germaine, but I gave him the brush-off at first, so he brought up the video. Turned my stomach. I said fine, he could tag along to Bali with the rest of you as long as he never showed me that again.”
Germaine could burst into tears. She could spit. She could rip off all her fingernails with her teeth.
“I didn’t know he was filming us that night,” she says, her voice still calm. But she’s shaking. “It was done without my consent. He held it over my head.”
Greg rolls his eyes. “Don’t get all #MeToo on me. That’s just how Eddie is. If you didn’t want to be part of his weird kinky hijinks, you shouldn’t have had sex with him.”
“He blackmailed me with it, and blackmailed you, too!” Germaine’s voice is steadily growing in volume. “He used you, Greg, as a stepping stone to me, to marry into a richer family. Are you completely blind?”
Greg makes a face like he smells something bad. “No—I don’t think that’s how it was. It’s guy stuff, you don’t get it.”
“Did he say he’d release the footage if you didn’t set us up?” Germaine presses.
“Yeah, he joked about it, but—”
“He played you, Greg!” It nearly comes out as a wail, and Germaine struggles to control herself. She needs to be very careful about the next moves she makes. “Do we want someone to have power like that over our family?”
“ You gave him that power, Germaine,” Greg shoots back, red in the face. “That’s what happens when you slut around. And now you have to make things right and marry him.”
Germaine looks to the others for help, expecting them to be as horrified as she is. But her father is staring vacantly into the middle distance. Giles has the balls to laugh.
“God, that is so like Eddie.” He chuckles. “That’s one dirty tape you probably didn’t want to rewind, huh, Greg?”
Greg seems to relax at his brother’s words and shakes his head as if that will get the memory out. “Never again. Anyway. Eddie may be a dickhead, but he’s certainly not impotent. Or at least, he wasn’t when that footage was taken.”
“And if he is, oh well,” says Giles. “You two can adopt kids.”
“We can get beautiful ones in Vietnam,” Céline says, her voice crisp and very level. Then she turns to Germaine, and the look in her eyes is frightening. “Gregoire is right, Germaine. You brought this on yourself. A sex tape! How tawdry. That’s something I would expect from your trailer-trash friends, not you.”
Germaine feels, simultaneously, like she could combust on the spot and like she could take two swift steps from where she sits and snap Greg’s neck with her bare hands. None of them will take her side. None of them will even have the grace to show her sympathy. Her own brother saw her naked.
“And what if I refuse to marry Eddie?” she asks very quietly.
Greg shrugs. “Then he’ll publish it online, I guess. And all your disgusting moaning and writhing will be on a million websites in the span of one minute.”
“Don’t be like this, Germaine,” Giles whines, still not taking it seriously. “Our kids will see it, and I don’t want to have to explain that to them.”
“And if he does publish it.” Germaine looks from her father to her mother. She will at least give them the chance. “Will you stand by me? Say it was from fifteen years ago and I was just a kid who thought she was in love? That he’s in the wrong for filming me without my knowledge?”
Her father looks at her as though she just asked him to make it snow in July.
“Of course not,” her mother snaps. “You’ll bring shame to us. We’ll have to cut you off.”
In all her life, being criticized and cut down and denigrated by her family—being cut off from her credit cards and shamed and punished—Germaine has never felt this bad. She feels completely empty, as though each of them has taken turns scooping her insides out and throwing them on the library floor. Perhaps she has always known this moment would come, or perhaps an outside force is taking control of her; but whatever it is, Germaine cannot believe the words that come out of her mouth next.
“Consider me cut off, then.”
There is no reaction. They look at her, unblinking, not understanding.
Germaine stands and leaves the room. She doesn’t pack. She doesn’t kiss her dogs goodbye—her nephews will take good care of them, Germaine knows. They’ve been begging for a puppy.
The only one she’ll miss is Marie.
Germaine walks calmly to the foyer and picks up her purse and coat, putting them on. After Paris, she researched how to put some money in an account of her own and open her own line of credit. She’s been saving for a while; she’ll check into a hotel for the next few nights and has enough to spend on toiletries, underwear, and a little food, at least. Her parents can cut her off and she won’t be destitute.
She’ll just have to start over, without the giant safety net of her family’s money that comes with so many strings attached. Germaine has been caught in that net for far, far too long.
It’s time to cut herself free—no matter the consequences.