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The Socialite’s Oath

  AND THEN IT IS FRIDAY, 18:59 hours. Showtime.

  I peer down from the second-story window and prepare to soak in the full impact of having a car and driver pick me up. Alternating surges of humiliation and prom-date thrills course through me when the longest, whitest stretch limo I have ever laid eyes on rounds the corner and halts in front of Seneca House. I wonder whether I should hide and disclaim any knowledge of the embarrassingly ostentatious vehicle or if I should ask to be borne down to the car by the house’s six most muscular residents?

  In the end, I wait in the room until everyone in the house is fully aware that the Moby Dick of all stretch limos has beached outside. One by one, all the forms of music that have been streaming into my room for the past weeks fall silent as everyone rushes downstairs to find out who the car is for.

  A second later, there is pounding on my door. “Blythe! Blythe! Open up.”

  I crack the door to find Lute and Jerome hyperventilating. “The driver says Danny Escovedo sent the limo to pick you up!”

  Jerome’s excitement takes the form of belligerent heartiness. “I can’t believe you know Danny Fucking Escovedo. Why didn’t you tell us you know Danny Fucking Escovedo?”

  “Did you say Danny Fucking Escovedo? No, no. There’s been a mistake. Danny Copulating Escovedo is the one I know. Distant cousin. Whole other wing of the family.”

  “Hah fucking hah. Blythe, listen, you have got to, got to, got to, nonnegotiable, you absolutely have to get Danny E. over here to listen to us. By the way, you look hot.”

  “Mos def,” Lute agrees enthusiastically, making his ringlets sproing up and down.

  “I’m not kidding,” Jerome growls. “Get him over here. Period. End of discussion.”

  When I meet Jerome’s hostile glare with one of my own, Lute pushes him aside. “Ignore this wanker. He graduated from the Dick Cheney School of Charm. What he’s trying to say is that we would esteem it a great personal favor if you would be so kind as to put us in touch with Mr. Escovedo. It has long been our dream to record with Archive Records.”

  “Yeah,” Jerome interjects. “This in spite of the label’s well-known abuses including, but not limited to, charging artists hundreds of dollars against royalties for chicken sandwiches from their cafeteria.”

  “Oh, yes. Appalling outrages,” Lute agrees. “Any one of which I would kill to be subjected to.”

  “I’ll mention it,” I say. “I don’t know how far it will go. Danny just works for this company.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘works for’ as much as ‘is,’” Lute corrects me.

  “Really?” This is interesting information.

  Jerome gasps with exasperation. “The guy is sending a limo for you and you don’t know that?”

  “Not my world, blowhole. Fill me in.”

  Jerome delivers a minicolloquium as we head downstairs. “Your Mr. Escovedo made a fortune exploiting the indie scene. Then Archive hired him to produce. Everything he produced went platinum. He put Archive on the map. He could have ended up owning the company, but he wanted to stay in the field. So he’s the highest-profile A-and-R man in the business.”

  “And that would be…?”

  “Artists and repetoire,” Lute supplies.

  “God!” Jerome explodes. “People always say ‘repetoire.’ Firstly, the word is ‘re-PER-toire.’ PER. Secondly, it’s artiste et répertoire. From the French.”

  “Bite me,” Lute advises him. “From the Latin.”

  Downstairs, the entire house has congregated. Everyone pretends to have reasons for being there that have nothing to do with gawking at me. Millie and Sanjeev make a show of reviewing the house’s books. Millie glances up as I descend—the silvery gray-blue outfit floating about me like wisps of fog—and her face melts into the fond expression of a mother seeing her daughter off to prom.

  “Be home by eleven, young lady,” Lute calls out as I leave.

  “With your panties on, you little trollop,” Jerome snarls.

  Outside, the driver opens the back door, and the first thing I learn about stretch limos is how ridiculously uncomfortable they are. The seats are so low it is like riding in a canoe. All the smoked glass makes it impossible to see out so that it is more like a submarine than a canoe. As Moby Dick glides silently through the night, I hike up to the front seat and ask the driver where we are headed.

  “The Four Seasons.”

  This is good. The Four Seasons Hotel is the coolest place in Austin since the people who are too cool to be Austinites stay there. Brad and Jennifer and Ethan and Uma are regulars. I take the endorsement of these solid celebrity couples to be a very good omen.

  The limo docks in front of the hotel and a doorman leaps forward to help me out. “Mr. Escovedo is waiting for you in the bar,” he informs me in a way that is smooth and sophisticated even if he is a college kid in khaki shorts.

  The lobby bar sports low tables and plush settees. Just the spot for checking out either a million Mexican bats leaving their home beneath the Congress Avenue bridge to stream in a dark ribbon above the river or who Benicio del Toro is meeting for drinks.

  I attempt a slow, devastating entrance. My plan is to slink slowly over to Danny’s table, giving him ample time to absorb the full impact of the shoplifted skankwear. This doesn’t come off quite as hoped because Danny is not amid the robber barons populating the small tables.

  I finally spy Danny in an exclusive corner, hidden by an admiring throng of music hipsters, a sultan accepting the tributes of subjects from the far-flung corners of his empire. I almost don’t recognize him. I expect the lanky lad of years ago. Instead, Danny appears to have spent the past few years at Krispy Kreme. In short, he has gone down Alec Baldwin Lane. Which only means that Danny has put on weight while remaining criminally handsome.

  Every eye in the place is riveted on him. Except for the three pairs that flicker away and settle on me when I enter. Tragically, those eyes belong to Kippie Lee Teeter, Bamsie Beiver, and Cookie Mehan. The ladies occupy a darkened corner, slugging down mojitos, checking out whose husband is out with whose secretary, and, no doubt, bonding further over their hatred of Blythe Young. Bamsie spots me and immediately reaches into the Birkin bag at her side, whips out her cell phone, and begins stabbing in numbers. I assume that those numbers belong to either IRS agents or police officers and am backing slowly away when Danny spots me and booms out, “Younghole! Get the hell over here!”

  Bamsie’s hand freezes as she watches the sultan stand, throw his arms open wide, wrap me in a Godfather hug, then push me away to take in the hoochwear.

  “Jesus, God, look at you. Shit, Elly Mae, you’s all growed up.”

  The crowd around him laughs with the hebephrenic giddiness of sycophants currying favor. I know the laugh well. In my prime, no one curried better than me. I glance back at the triumvirate. Their finely tuned social synapses are visibly snarling. The desire to drop an anvil on my head collides with the socialite’s oath: First, do no harm—to anyone higher up on the seating chart, that is.

  Safe for the moment, I turn my attention to Danny. He no longer seems younger than me the way he did when we were copying briefs at Kinko’s. He has a heft to him that goes far beyond weight; he has the tonnage that comes only with success. It is clear from the mob of young women fawning on him that Danny has executed a jujitsu on time and performed the move that allows a man to subtract a year of age for every million or so he’s got in liquid assets, until a top CEO can run away with his grandchildren’s nanny and no one thinks much of it. So, once again, I figure, I am too old for Danny.

  “Hey!” Danny claps his hand, and the chattering crew falls silent. “Disperse. Office hours are officially over as of”—he studies his watch, holds up a finger, drops it like he is starting a race—“now!”

  With a rustle of leather from their identical jackets, the four young men in the group leave, flagging studiedly casual waves and calling over their shoulders, “Laters, Danny.” “Catc
h you, mañana, hombre.”

  The young—statutorily young—women don’t shoo so easily. One holds a CD against her breasts, so that Danny is forced to cop a handy feel as he takes it from her. She looks like a taller, thinner Vanessa Williams, which is to say the woman is an android composed of spare parts left lying around at the Supermodel Factory.

  “Yes, yes, I promise I’ll listen to it,” Danny says, dismissing her with a seignorial wave.

  Another lingerer is wearing a mesmerizing pair of jeans that are literally only legs held up with an intricate rigging of straps and thong bikini. She presses against Danny, whispering in his ear and shooting kittenish glances my way.

  “Thanks for the offer, Shaundra,” Danny booms out. “But I doubt that my ‘date’ is interested in a three-way. Though I could be wrong. Younghole, how about it? You up for a three-way with Shaundra here?”

  “Maybe a rain check.”

  “’Nother time, Shaun.”

  Shaundra doesn’t so much leave as she is reabsorbed into the ether of male fantasies from whence she materialized. I am feeling about eighty-five years old by the time the last of the hangers-on melts away.

  “So, you’re the hip-hop Donald Trump.”

  “Oh no, Younghole, you’re starting in on me already. If that’s the way it’s going to be you are going to need a drink.” He wipes lipstick off one of the snifters littering the table, grabs a half-empty bottle of Courvoisier, and pours. “In fact, you’re going to need lots of drinks to drown that bug in your ass. I love that line.”

  “Jack Nicholson. Terms of Endearment,” I supply.

  “Hallelujah! A woman with a brain. We are drinking to that.” He fills the snifter, hands it to me, then takes it back. “Don’t drink out of that. Too many ho-crobes.”

  He flags a waiter over, and fresh glasses are produced. “Sorry about this.” He waves at the Courvoisier. “And the stretch monstrosity. You’ve got to fulfill expectations, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Word,” I answer dryly.

  Grinning, he taps my shoulder. “You, you. You were always very light on your feet, could dance around. Now, Sister Mary Younghole, remind me, why didn’t we have a mad, passionate affair?”

  “The line was too long.”

  “Hah. Because I had a thing for you, you know.”

  “You did not.”

  “You led me around by the nose. The sophisticated older woman. First you had that sad-sack boyfriend, Edgar—”

  “James.”

  “Same difference. Then that gigolo, that tango instructor from Argentina.”

  “Fencing champion from Hungary.”

  “Again, details. You always had the mens buzzin’ ’round you. God, you look good. What do you do? Zone? South Beach? Personal trainer? You’re a rail. But in a good way. Cameron Diaz would kill to have your figure. Kill.”

  It flabbergasts me to hear Danny Escovedo doing the weight-bonding routine as well as I ever did in my prime.

  Danny holds his arms out wide to clear the view of the Escovedo girth. “Have you noticed what a hog I’ve turned into?”

  “You could never be a hog.”

  “And yet, I am.”

  In that instant, the reedy boy I knew disappears, and I can’t imagine Danny ever looking any other way. Or ever being sexier. I bring the snifter to my nose. The Courvoisier smells like a distillation of every extravagance from my lost paradise. By the second snifter, I’ve told Danny the entire tale of my divorce, preceded by my rise on the swamp gas of the Internet bubble and subsequent fall with bumps along the way against every branch of Austin’s social tree.

  “In fact,” I whisper, enjoying the necessity of leaning in close to Danny, who leans toward me in return until our heads touch and his brandy-warmed breath puffs against my cheek, “the three socialites most likely to lead a lynch mob are right over there.”

  “Where? Show me. Who’s messing with my girl, huh? You mess with my girl, you go down, bitches.”

  I get an atavistic thrill from his joke-vendetta routine. Even kidding, though, I can’t remember the last time a man stood up for me. Certainly Trey didn’t. Trey rolled over on me the instant his mother told him to.

  “What do the bitches like to drink?”

  “Kir Royales.”

  Danny waves the waiter over, scribbles a note on the back of his card, sends him off, and tells me to watch.

  A moment later, the waiter reappears at Bamsie, Kippie Lee, and Cookie’s table with three flutes effervescing brightly.

  As the waiter leans in toward the women, Danny whispers, “And now he tells them who I am.”

  The waiter points to Danny and hands them his note. The women huddle up, read the note, then flash astonished gazes.

  “Don’t look.” Danny nods and winks at the ladies.

  “What did you write in that note?”

  “Nothing much. I told them that my dear, dear friend Blythe Young has informed me that they are all incredibly talented and would they consider a private audition.”

  “They will never fall for that.”

  “You’re right. What they will fall for, though, is the much bigger, much more irresistible illusion that I’m so hot for their bony asses that I would work such an obvious scam. Why, have a look now.”

  Danny twiddles his fingers at the ladies and I turn, bracing myself to be sliced by three socialites glaring daggers. Instead I find Kippie Lee Teeter, that pillar of Austin society, has undone the top three buttons of her blouse and is sloshing the full bounty of her implants forward. My Pemberton Heights landlady and mother of little Chance and Daphne, Bamsie Beiver, is flipping her hair from side to side, head thrown back, laughing gales of tawny laughter. Cookie Mehan, gardening maven and no-nonsense ranch girl, is licking her lips and shooting Danny the kinds of expressions found above 900 numbers.

  Danny puts his arm around me. “Your worries are over. You are golden. You are their new best friend. But, just to be sure, let’s seal the deal.”

  There is only a second or two when I think that kissing Danny Escovedo in the middle of the Four Seasons lobby in front of Kippie Lee Teeter, Bamsie Beiver, and Cookie Mehan is a bad idea. Then I taste his mouth, all warm from the brandy, spiced with tobacco, marijuana, and coffee, and the kiss seems far and away the best idea anyone has ever had. By the time his mouth moves from mine, I can’t recall who might be watching or why I ever cared.

  “I wanted to do that from the first minute I met you. It was a young lad’s simple dream.”

  “Wasn’t your dream to die playing with your band at some crappy bar?”

  “Dream? Shit, that was me looking into a crystal ball.”

  “Okay, you’ve already heard my pathetic tale. How did you get from local rock god to music mogul? Tell me a story that has a happy ending.”

  “At least one that doesn’t conclude with my getting beaten to death by a biker because I won’t play ‘Freebird’ nineteen times. Which is how my story would have ended if I’d stayed in the band. No, I had my come-to-Jesus moment the winter I ended up wearing a Hawaiian shirt, playing Jimmy Buffett covers on some booze cruise abomination.

  “We were up on deck, banging out ‘Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville’ for about the eight hundredth fucking time. The wives were taking their tops off and shaking their tits at anyone they weren’t married to and it suddenly starts raining. Fine. We unplug and we’re packing up. But, oh no. These shitfaced boomers are having so much fun that they demand—demand—that we keep playing.

  “So there I am looking at all these horny geezers who don’t give a fuck if the music monkeys die. Electrocuted playing bad covers of bad songs was not the death I signed up for. Running into the side of a mountain in a small plane, choking on my own vomit, groupies putting too much of the wrong shit up my nose, sure. That, that, is what I signed up for. Cool rock ’n’ roll deaths. But fried on a booze cruise? Uh-uh. That was not the obituary I was going for. I jumped ship as soon as we hit Puerto Vallarta and hopped the next p
lane to LA. Took the first production job I could swing.”

  “But you are such a great musician.”

  “That and a quarter, huh? Music is a crap business. You can be a seriously mediocre writer and make a living, right? Get some job doing the annual reports for Rape the Land, Inc. But a musician? Doesn’t matter if you have the greatest chops in the world and charisma to burn, you’ll still end up playing the Ramada Inn or teaching guitar at a strip mall. Musical talent is a curse. Speaking of which, I’ve got to get to work. Check out a couple of bands. You coming with me?”

  I pass on the opportunity to hang out at a smoky club while underage hoochies in bondage getups drape themselves over Danny. Besides, my evening is officially complete the moment he escorts me past Bamsie, Cookie, and Kippie Lee. Suddenly, I rate the official high-pitched, Texas-girl salutation audible only to dogs and sorority sisters. “Blythe! Lookatchew!”

  Danny gets into the limo with me, and my appreciation of the stretch increases as we head back to Seneca House. Making out in the backseat of a moving vehicle is a new dimension in transportation. At the house, Danny insists on coming in. “Stroll down Memory Lane. But only for a few minutes. I have a breakfast meeting with a group I signed in San Antonio last month; then I’ve got to spend some serious time in Houston. Amazing rap scene there.”

  “I think I should warn you—” I start to say as we cross the threshold. I never get to finish warning him that he will probably be besieged by desperate musicians because he is immediately besieged by desperate musicians. Jerome and Lute press copies of their demos on him. Yay Bombah and Nazarite casually break into a reggae version of “I Fought the Law.” Olga undulates her snaky body and drenches Danny in smoky Balkan gazes. Presto and Clancy, in high event-coordinator mode, dart about like Chihuahuas on crack.

  Danny searches the crowd pressing in on him. “Where’s Millie?”

  “Right here,” Millie, standing unrecognized directly in front of him, answers.

  “God, another one who got even more beautiful behind my back.” Danny wraps his arms around Millie and the laptop she is holding.

  “I must be some kind of incredible beauty secret. As soon as I go away, the girls get supermodel gorgeous.”