“What about a fur coat?” he asks.
“Doesn’t she live at the beach?”
“Right.”
“Does she like scarves?” Miriam asks. “Scarves are the best friend of any woman of a certain age.” She gestures at her own scarf-clad neck, and I wonder what’s hiding underneath. Gills or a prison tattoo feel equally unlikely but make me giggle to myself all the same.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lourdes wear a scarf.”
“What about something more personal?” I suggest.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” I sift through the roster of gifts Brooke and I gave our mother as kids: Color Me Mine pottery, Fimo clay bead necklaces, cheap plates screen printed with our school art that she proudly displayed in the kitchen. The Christmas before she died, I made her a photo album. I picked out an expensive pebbled leather album and used the photo kiosk at Walgreens to make copies of my favorite photos of the two of us. One time I found her asleep in the hospital bed in our living room, cuddling it to her chest like a stuffed animal.
“I made my mom a photo album one year and she liked it,” I volunteer.
“Jay Strongwater does some lovely crystal and enamel picture frames,” Miriam jumps in, “and Cristofle has some gorgeous platinum-plated ones. Would you like me to have a selection brought up?”
“Thanks, Miriam,” Theo says.
I don’t bother to correct either of them that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Miriam teeters off in her spindly heels to make it so.
“Do we have to get something for your dad, too?” I ask Theo, who’s sunk back into the sofa.
“No, he doesn’t value things, only experiences,” Theo says, using exaggerated finger quotes to emphasize the word “experiences.”
“I can’t imagine what kind of experiences a billionaire would value,” I reply. “A trip to space? Hunting endangered species? Bankrupting a small-town bookstore?”
Before I can come up with more ideas, Theo chimes in: “He already knows what he wants. He wants us to work together. He offered me a job.”
“A job?” I say, confused. As far as I know, the only job Theo’s had is when he tried to start a private members’ club in London with some of his boarding school friends, a more exclusive Soho House with a younger clientele. It failed spectacularly; there weren’t many twenty-four-year-olds who could afford the exorbitant membership fee. But even then, Theo was the money guy. He didn’t have any operational role outside bankrolling the whims of his cofounders.
Since we’ve known him, he cochairs the Art Party at the Whitney every year and sits on the board of a handful of charities giving underprivileged students access to arts education programming, but I don’t think he’s ever had a meeting that wasn’t accompanied by lunch or cocktails.
Theo drags his hands down his face, horrified by the prospect of working for his father.
“What did you tell him?”
“I asked if he’d broken Colin, his little business boy. I’m just the spare for the day when Colin finally has a nervous breakdown, but I hadn’t expected it to happen until his fifties, at least.”
“Are you thinking about accepting?” I can’t stop a note of panic from creeping into my voice. I assume the job would mean a move to London and I don’t have the stomach for another friend leaving.
“No.” He waves this off like it’s a ridiculous idea. “It’s just some power play.”
He takes a sip of champagne to cleanse his palate of this distasteful notion.
“What’s new with you?” he asks. “You’ll forgive me for saying it, but you seem . . . off.”
“Off?” I echo.
He doesn’t elaborate, just looks at me, waiting me out, and I almost blurt out everything going on with David—our fight on Thanksgiving, the weirdness that’s persisted since, the ring in his sock drawer—but I can’t bring myself to. The more people I tell, the more real it feels.
“Oh, I’m fine,” I lie, but I feel like I need to give him something. “Just stressed about work, I guess. I keep pitching this music history podcast and getting shot down. It would be my first solo project, but I can’t get my boss to see the potential I see.”
It’s especially frustrating given that Mitch has greenlit every flavor of two-dudes-talking show in his three-month tenure. Two dudes talking about cult eighties movies, two dudes talking about actual cults, two dudes talking about fantasy golf. Last week, he made his threat official: if I can’t line up mutually agreeable talent for the pilot of Aural History by the end of the year, he’ll shut the whole thing down. He alluded to needing a lead producer for Porn Stache, his newest two-dudes creation, where two comedians watch and dissect VHS tapes of eighties pornos.
“What’s your show about?” he asks.
I tell him my idea for the podcast and he smiles when I reveal the name. “That’s very clever,” he says. “I think it sounds like a smash. What’s the problem?”
“We can’t agree on which song to use for the pilot. I had my boss sold on ‘Candy’ by Mandy Moore, but her people never got back to me. You don’t happen to know her, do you?”
“Can’t say that I do. But what about Clementine?”
“What about her?”
“I’m sure she’d love to help!”
“That seems like a stretch. I can’t imagine she even remembers me.”
“Of course she remembers you. Didn’t you see her on Fallon last month? She taught him how to play sheet game and the whole thing went bloody viral.” I must have missed that. “Do you want me to call her for you?”
“Are you in touch?”
“Not really.” He shrugs.
As much as I want to say yes, to get the story behind her moody new album and clinch my own podcast—Mitch would go bonkers for this; the album has already gone platinum—I hesitate. It feels disloyal to Finn to bring Clementine back into the mix, just when Finn and Theo are both single. What if he calls and it rekindles their old spark? This is unequivocally against the best friend code. “I’ll think about it,” I tell him, but I already know I won’t take him up on his offer.
I take a sip of my champagne. It’s perfectly dry and tastes like a really good croissant. I don’t know anything about wine, and even I can tell this is the good stuff. “You keep taking me to all these fancy places,” I muse.
“You’re welcome?”
“I feel like it’s my turn to take you somewhere.”
“Where would you have us go?” he asks, and I can hear a hint of fear in his voice.
* * *
? ? ?
?An hour later we’re installed in a brown patterned booth in the Times Square Olive Garden, when Priya joins us.
“This is the actual last place on earth I expected to find you two,” she announces as she slides into my side of the booth. Theo has two matte black Saks shopping bags on his side, one with a bejeweled photo frame and the second with the two-ton limited-edition red handbag. He couldn’t decide which Lourdes would like more, so he bought them both.