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  Sergio heads out holding the tray before him like a frantic intern Code Bluing with his crash cart. He runs a broken field pattern through a line of lady dipsos who hold trembling hands out toward the receding cocktails. Sergio breaks for the end zone, flutes of violet bubbly tilted toward Kippie Lee; her best friend, Bamsie Beiver; and the rest of their inner circle: straight-shooting Cookie Mehan; the ethereally beautiful Paige Oglesby; Paige’s shadow, three-time Westwood Country Club women’s doubles tennis champ Morgan Whitlow; and Missy Quisinberry, who, I fear, does not drink.

  I can live without Missy, she is known for never having a good time anyway. Kippie Lee is the only one who absolutely must accept the kiss of the Roofie.

  I stop breathing and pray silently.

  Then…yes!

  Miss Kip reaches a hand out toward Sergio’s tray. Sunlight dances across the diamonds on her tennis bracelet and over her nails frosted with one of OPI’s new Asian-influenced pinks, Whole Lotta Seoul. I allow myself to hope that the monolithic row of dominoes tottering above my head, waiting to squash me like a bug, might be stayed. She picks up a flute and—

  “Uh, ’scuse me?”

  The voice behind me, aggrieved, postadolescent, does not bode well. The domino slabs creak ominously. I turn and find a full-bore mutiny in progress. My helpers, my little crewmates in their uniforms of white and black, have put down their trays and are glaring in a way that couldn’t make me feel any more like Captain Bligh if they’d all had scurvy and knives between their teeth.

  Their Mr. Christian is Juniper, a junior at UT in American studies. She glowers at me through black-frame glasses. Two-inch-long pigtails bristle above her ears. I had assumed that Juniper with her liberal arts major understood that she was preparing for a life of poverty. I’d even hoped that, coming from such a known hotbed of Marxism, Juniper might extend me a bit of working-class solidarity. Her first words reveal that I have missed that bet.

  “You promised you’d have checks for us at the start of this party.”

  Olga and Doug, the employees who’ve been with me the longest, step forward to back Juniper up. Olga, I had expected Olga to turn on me, but Doug? Doug and I have history.

  I decide that my best defense here is a good offense. “Those trays are not going to pass themselves, Juniper.” I sniff haughtily.

  The traitors exchange looks of eye-rolling exasperation. Too late I recall just how well haughty had worked for Captain Bligh. Juniper stiffens her yoga-limbered spine. “You still haven’t paid us for the last two parties. My tuition for next semester is due.”

  “Tuition? Juniper, I’m living in a carriage house.”

  Doug, looking a bit flushed, dives in. “Yeah, but your carriage house is right around the corner in this ritzy neighborhood.”

  “Et tu, Doug?” I say more in sadness than anger. Long ago, in a kingdom far, far away, Doug had been one of my bright boys in a backward cap. He’d used his bag of venture swag to set up patiopaversbymail.com and to finance some truly remarkable parties which Wretched Xcess coordinated. He had, ultimately, stiffed me on a huge job when his company went Chapter 11. Unlike all the other boy geniuses who’d bailed on their debts, however, Doug is still trying to make good by working off what he owes me. He hasn’t made much of a dent in the balance. Not on what I pay.

  I am forced to remind him, “Doug, you used to live in Pemberton Heights, too.”

  “I haven’t been able to afford Oh Three for a very long time, Blythe. You know that. I scaled back.” There is an unmistakable note of censure in his voice.

  “Doug, you of all people must understand that I have to live here. I have to live among my clientele. Now that I’m a divorcée, these women would forget me in a heartbeat if I didn’t show my face. I represent everything they dread most: the wife who lost her job. They want to forget me. They want to forget that they can be fired. Doug, I have to keep showing my face. I have to live in Pemberton Heights.”

  Doug sounds almost sad when he says, “Blythe, I feel you, I really do. But you gotta pay us.”

  I address my crew, “Look, guys, I don’t know how to make this any plainer to you except to say: I have not had a Pap smear since before the bubble burst.”

  Even more annoyed than usual, Juniper shakes her head. “What did she say? Pap smear? Is she having a stroke?”

  “Pelvic exam,” I clarify. “Can’t afford one. That is how bad off I am.”

  Juniper squints her eyes in intense irritation as if there were bees in her head. “I don’t care about your, your twat! Pay us!”

  “I will do what I can, I promise you that. If it means that I have to live in the little minivan, I will pay you, all of you. Justjustjust, please, finish this one party.”

  They seem agreeable enough then a whisper reaches me. “Coke-addled cunt.”

  “What? I heard that, Juniper. I heard that and I’ll have you all know that I am offended. Deeply, deeply offended. Because you are wrong.”

  I rush in to buttress my position, prove my point, gain more moral high ground on my accuser. “I am not a coke-addled cunt. It has been more than a year since I’ve been able to afford to addle myself with even the most anemic, baby laxative–extended line! This!” I hold the Code Warrior cup high. “This bargain-basement buzz is all I can afford!” My stirring summation to the jury does not meet with quite the surge of sympathy I’d hoped for.

  Juniper’s head jerks up and her beady eyes narrow to gun-turret slits behind her glasses. “Pay us.” Her demand has a fatally nonnegotiable ring to it.

  Am I that dead that even the Vultures are now moving in?

  My head swims and I fear I might be infarcting. “Drink.” I rasp out the word, clutching my chest. “Must have something to drink.”

  I yank Kippie Lee’s Sub-Zero open, grab a pitcher filled with a glistening beverage in a ruby-colored Kool-Aid hue, and chug a giant mouthful before realizing it is hummingbird nectar. Fearing that spraying the mutinous band with red sugar water might not be the best play at this critical juncture, I spit the sugary slurry into Kippie Lee’s farmhouse sink.

  Outside the window above the sink, I spy a tableau that eases my defibrillating heart. Sergio, my trusted liege, my loyal vassal, my savior, is, at that very moment, coaxing a flute of forgetfulness toward Kippie Lee’s overcollagened lip bills. With the tip of a brown finger, he taps the glass past her critical regard, beyond the point where she can scrutinize each and every little speck of foreign matter floating behind a past client’s name.

  “Blythe, don’t pretend like you’re having a heart attack. We won’t be put off by your cheap theatrics.”

  “Juniper, shut up for a minute, okay?”

  “We will not be silenced by—”

  I press my hand over Juniper’s mouth to quiet the little Norma Rae so I can concentrate fully on watching Kippie Lee’s formerly weak chin, firmed now with a dimpled implant, tilt slightly upward, bringing with it that slender tube of violet oblivion, that vessel of carbonated amnesia. Up, up, up it tilts. Kippie Lee’s preternaturally pouty mouth opens, exposing the unearthly blue-white of excessively bleached enamel. Then the glycolic-peeled column of her neck undulates. Only when I witness the first big swallow heading south, down toward the Silicone Hills below, do I lower my hand from Juniper’s mouth and announce, “Yes. Yes, I will pay you. In fact I am going to collect from our hostess at this very instant.”

  Speed is of the essence. I have to get to Kippie Lee while she can still sign a check but before she begins talking to her new best friend, Mr. Tree. I stride with all the crisp professionalism I can muster out of the kitchen, through the backyard, and straight into an IRS agent.

  How do I know the intruder is from the IRS? It is not just that he is the only male mussing his Thom McAns on the Teeter lawn that tips me off. It is not even the beige Ford Focus parked in front of the manse or his Men’s Wearhouse suit with its Jerry Garcia tie stab at individualism. No, the big tip-off is that the agent, plump and pasty as a deadly mush
room, opens his jacket and flashes a badge with the name JENKINS and the letters IRS embossed on it.

  No one gets audited anymore. One in a million. They’ve got Enron to worry about. Don’t worry. They’ll never come after you.

  That’s what my accountant, Chester Milt, told me. Unfortunately, in recent months, Milt also offered this same opinion in a sneering tone on several libertarian radio talk shows along with choice comments about the general incompetence of the “Internal ReveNUDE Scurrilous.” Milt then went on to inform listeners of their sacred duty to dismantle “the closest thing we’ve got to a Nazi Gestapo” by refusing to pay taxes. Shortly after Milt made the big time via a phone interview with Rush Limbaugh, the IRS swore a fatwa on Chester Milt and all his clients. They needed a high-profile conviction and they needed it fast. I fit the bill perfectly: a former member of the Dix family who’d been cut adrift from their powerful protection. The IRS could appear to be going after a fat cat with no fear of any political repercussions. Hence, I moved up very high on their Most Wanted List.

  Agent Jenkins asks, “Could you point out the caterer?”

  “Caterer?” I blink several times and shake my head as if puzzling out the meaning of the word. “Oh, yes, caterer. Actually, I believe that Kippie Lee did it all herself. She’s an absolute wizard in the kitchen, our Kippie Lee is.”

  Jenkins looks around suspiciously, fixing on the abundance of seventy-dollar manicures that give the lie to the presence of any “kitchen wizards” among the pampered group.

  “Yes, I’m looking for”—Jenkins checks a document that has the unsettling look of a subpoena or bench warrant and reads off the very last name on earth that I ever want to hear spoken by a representative of the United States Internal Revenue Service—“Blythe Young.”

  Thank God, it has been months since I have been able to talk my face guy into so much as the merest prick of Botox on credit. I can wrinkle my brow in utterly convincing puzzlement and answer, “No. No one here by that name.”

  “We have it on good authority that she’s here.”

  “Sorry, I’m best friends with Blythe and I happen to know that she’s out of the country. Borneo, I believe. Possibly Kathmandu.”

  “I spoke with her former mother-in-law, Peggy Biggs-Dix, just moments ago, and she assured me that Blythe Young is here.”

  Curse that bitch.

  “Oh goodness, the dear old lady’s care provider must have let Mrs. Dix wander out of her sight. The Alzheimer’s, bless her heart. Was she dressed?”

  Beefy Agent Jenkins casts a suspicious glance at my grubby, sawtoothed nails and asks, “Where’s the kitchen?”

  I point the agent toward the outside door of Kippie Lee’s media room, hoping that Hoot’s double feature might hold his interest for the few precious minutes I need.

  When I turn around I notice that the minions all have their noses pressed against the kitchen windows. I try to subtly wave them back to work, but the mutineers remain frozen at the window, pointing frantically. Finally catching their drift, I slowly turn to face what they are pointing at and find Kippie Lee wobbling about and muttering, “I feel all floaty.”

  I see now that it was a mistake to use myself as a guinea pig in the drug trials. Clearly, I should have made adjustments for the amateur. Kippie Lee lists heavily to starboard and I rush to her side.

  Too late.

  Like a tipsy debutante attempting the deepest of curtsies, Kippie Lee sinks slowly onto the thick, green mattress of her ultraluxuriant lawn and passes out cold, completing the starburst pattern formed by her four already unconscious friends, Bamsie, Cookie, Paige, and Morgan.

  My panicked gaze finds Sergio’s. He shrugs in his winsome way, an apology for poleaxing our hostess, whose next check is now far more likely to be written to a crack neurologist than it is to Blythe Young.

  In the next instant, Agent Jenkins emerges from the media room blinking and unamused. The first celebrant he approaches is the disastrously abstemious Missy Quisinberry. Standing upright over her fallen friends, wearing a look she doubtless learned in her Old Testament Bible Study Group, Missy lifts a long, bony finger and points it, deadly as a Smith & Wesson. The agent follows the damning index, and his double-barreled gaze settles on me.

  Some spasm of residual manners combined with a vestige of guilt causes me to smile and wave with a cringing sickliness.

  I reflect that it is in just such sticky moments as these that character is tested. I call upon my girlhood heroines, those icons of courage and moral clarity, who have always guided me through life’s toughest tests. I consider what Marie Curie, Margaret Mead, or Florence Nightingale would have done in such a situation as this. In the end, though, I decide that my best model in this particular test has to be the plucky Wilma Rudolph, who overcame polio to win three Olympic medals, and I tear ass out of Kippie Lee Teeter’s garden party.

  April 3, 2003

  2:15 P.M.

  FIND YOUR STILL and quiet center. Fully inhabit this singular moment in time.” Wasn’t that what Lakshmi Pettigrew, my ashtanga yoga instructor at AbsSolution, was always telling her students? I careen onto Exposition Avenue, then perform a few select pranayama breathing exercises to keep from stressing about being hunted by the IRS and feeding controlled substances to currently unconscious clients.

  The breathing doesn’t do much to get me into the singular moment, since the moment I am currently inhabiting seems to be one that will lead directly to federal penitentiary. Thank God, I have managed to retain possession of the Code Warrior. I take several chugs and my friends Stoli and Ativan quickly set about smudging out tension faster than any ten Hindu sages. So efficient are mis amigas that I have nearly forgotten I am on the run from the IRS when I glimpse a beige Ford Focus approaching in the rearview mirror. Who would have thought that a bureaucrat could move so fast?

  I cut a sharp left across traffic and a horrendous thunk from the back of the van causes me to wonder if there is an anvil loose. As I whip the minivan through a maze of turns, I long for my Escalade, lost now to the repo man, though I was very careful never to park it twice in the same spot. I could really use Barry, my OnStar concierge, right now. I wish I could dial Barry up and quiz him about the extradition policies of various foreign countries as well as maximum penalties for not paying taxes for how many years? I don’t want to know.

  How could I have found the one CPA who preached tax evasion? on the radio? I have to admit that one way to locate such an individual might have been to ask everyone you knew for the name of the most “easygoing” accountant around. “Easygoing” would have been fine. “Fomenting revolution” is not working.

  One more bubble—that is all I need. That would really put me on my feet again. As the oil barons used to say around the time crude plummeted to fifteen dollars a barrel, “Please, Lord, send me just one more boom and this time I won’t piss it away.” Well, the barons got their boom, all right. Or installed it in the White House. Whatever. I am no Bolshevik. All I want is my second—okay, third—chance. Give me one more boom and I promise I will not piss it away. Or snort, or swill. Or buy shoes and titanium chafing dishes. Or sign prenups. Especially not sign prenups.

  A Bruce Springsteen song about debts no honest man can pay runs through my brain.

  That’s it. I am honest. I will, metaphorically, sing the Boss’s poignant lyrics to Agent Jenkins and throw myself on his mercy. I will explain how the situation snowballed out of control until the only possible way I could get through my life was on a river of Code Warrior. Surely the Enron debacle must have stretched the grading curve a little. What are my paltry thousands in comparison to their millions? Billions?

  I decide to surrender. Swelling with righteousness, I focus on the clouds of pink blossoms haloing the redbud trees that line the street. I note the banks of daffodils turning their sunny yellow faces up to greet a newborn world. With prison now a certainty, I force myself to fully inhabit this singular moment of golden yellow, free-world goodness. Unfortunat
ely, it also happens to be the same singular moment in which I pass a covey of cyclists. So European, so Lance, in their stretchy caps with the tiny brims, spandex riding shorts padded in the seat like a baby with soggy Pampers. Unfortunately, this singular moment is also inhabited by a landscaping truck loaded with pallets of sod approaching in the opposite direction.

  I skid off the road, transforming at least one sunny bank of newborn daffodils into a mustard-colored tire track. The mysterious object in the back hammers the cargo area like a bowling ball in a fifty-five-gallon metal drum. The mystery is solved when the next abrupt correction in course causes the side door of the van to slide open and my Chef’s Choice Professional Meat Slicer to rocket out, landing directly in the path of the cyclists.

  I whisper a prayer of apology to the universe as the cyclists jam on their brakes and execute face-plants of varying degrees of difficulty.

  Bumping back onto the roadway proper, I get that this might not be the perfect moment to find my still and quiet center. Or to surrender. This might, in fact, be the perfect moment to double back and strip my house of all pawnable possessions that have not yet been repoed before the long tentacles of the IRS attach suckers and liens to them.

  I swear that if I am allowed to survive this one extremely sordid episode, I will make reparations, massive offerings, generous donations, alms for the poor in perpetuity. I squeal around and head south, passing the spandexed cyclists sprawled around my meat slicer.

  Along with panic and fear, a soggy tide of doubt, moral qualms, and bottomless regret wells up. I fight it down with more Code Warrior. Memories of the Zac Posens, Pradas, Marc Jacobs, and all the other designer apparel waiting for me in Bamsie’s carriage house are also soothing. If a woman is forced to leave a marriage with nothing but the clothes on her back, those would be the clothes to leave with. All I need is an Internet connection and I’ll make a fortune selling my finery on eBay.