For a moment, Janey stood staring after her in shock: She knew she’d been
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thoroughly and rudely dismissed, but she couldn’t understand why. Petie, seeing her expression, said, “Don’t worry about it. Everyone knows Mimi hates other women,
especially if they’re younger and prettier than she is . . . You’ll get used to it,” he said with a laugh as he handed Janey her drink.
Janey took a sip but her eyes never left Mimi. She was destroyed but fasci-
nated—by the way she moved her arms, by the way she tilted her head; as she
opened her mouth to speak, Janey imagined she heard Mimi’s voice again, and she
was transfixed, wondering what Mimi might be saying.
But she never got the opportunity to find out, because even though she would
run into Mimi again and again over the next ten years, each time Mimi’s eyes would look over Janey’s shoulder, and her cold, rich voice would declare, “Nice to see you again”—the greeting New Yorkers used when they had no idea if they’d met before.
The message, Janey understood, was clear: She and Mimi might be in the same
room, but Janey was as far from Mimi’s world as she’d been as a six-year-old kid,
staring at Mimi’s photograph in Good Housekeeping.
But eventually, Janey began to notice a subtle change in Mimi’s attitude.
Whereas before Mimi had merely been noncommittal, in the past five years her
“nice to see you again” began to take on a tone that bordered on open dislike. Janey suspected that this was because she’d slept with many of the same men Mimi had
slept with, and Mimi was jealous.
Janey figured that she and Mimi had at least ten lovers in common, including
Redmon Richardly and the screenwriter Bill Westacott. It continued to gall her
that while everybody knew Mimi was a wild party girl who slept with whomever
she pleased, nobody ever called Mimi a slut or looked askance at her behavior. It
proved yet another truth about New York society: A rich girl could sleep with a
hundred men and people would call her bohemian, while a poor girl who did the
same thing was labeled a gold digger or a whore.
But all that had changed the day Janey became a Victoria’s Secret model. It was
as if, after all those long years in New York, she’d suddenly emerged in full color.
People suddenly got her, they understood who she was and what she was doing. And then the coveted invitation to Mimi’s party had arrived.
Exactly one month ago to the day, a heavy cream envelope had been messen-
gered to Janey’s apartment in New York. She lived in the same walk-up building on
East Sixty-seventh Street that she’d moved into ten years before, and she mused
that she was lucky she was home at the time, because if she hadn’t been, there was no doorman to receive the missive, and then what would have happened?
On the envelope was written only her name, “Miss Janey Wilcox,” with no
address—implying that an address might be tacky—and even before she opened
the envelope, she knew what it contained.
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Carefully sliding her finger under the flap, so that the envelope would remain in
pristine condition (these were the kinds of things she liked to save), she removed the simple ecru card inside. Written on the upper-left-hand corner in the English
style, her name was written out in calligraphy, and printed below were the words:
“Mimi Kilroy and George Paxton, at home, Friday, May twenty-seventh.” And in
that moment, Janey’s deep hatred of Mimi evaporated. It was difficult to sustain
hatred, especially when it was bathed in the warm light of attention and acknowl-
edgment. And Janey had reflected that while New York could certainly be superfi-
cial, it was a glorious sort of superficial, especially if you were on the inside.
Three years ago, at the age of thirty-nine, Mimi Kilroy had finally settled down and married George Paxton, the billionaire.
Five years earlier, George Paxton, who supposedly hailed from outside of
Boston, which could mean anywhere really, had suddenly popped up on the social
scene in New York. It was practically a rule in New York society that every few
years, a billionaire would appear as if from nowhere, usually in the form of a middle-aged man who had suddenly made a fortune and was in the throes of a midlife cri-
sis. Having slaved for years to make money, he was now in the position to finally
enjoy his life, and the very first thing to go was always the first wife. Such was the story of George Paxton.
His first two years in New York followed the usual lines: He was feted and pet-
ted, and continually fixed up on blind dates, because there is nothing more exciting to society than a newly single man flush with a fortune he isn’t exactly sure how to spend. And after he’d had two years of dating the finest single women the Upper