Killer WASPs Read online

  I’d spent most of my thirty-­three years working at the store, helping out weekends and in the summers during high school, and the presence of my grandparents there, cheerfully presiding over a quirky inventory of everything from Indian tea tables to English buffets, had always been an anchor, especially after my parents had moved away from Bryn Mawr when I was seventeen. My father, a math professor—­he possesses a rogue logical gene never before or since found in the Clark family DNA—­had been offered a job as head of the math department at Central Arizona College, in Winkelman, Arizona, the same month I graduated from high school. Just like that, he and Mom had gone southwestern, moving to the desert without a backward glance. Mom had opened a small art gallery, and the two had embraced a lifestyle of adobe and 110-­degree days with enthusiasm.

  Winkelman had some amazing mountains surrounding it, and more than its share of hot guys, including one Joe Manganiello look-­alike who worked in a local quarry and with whom I shared several steamy make-­out sessions during a two-­month fling. But in my opinion, Winkelman bordered on the too-­rustic. Actual restaurants included Antlers, a local watering hole, and the Butcher Hook (where I met the aforementioned hot quarry guy at Rockin’ Rib Night, held every Thursday).

  Even the excellent margaritas at Papi Juan’s, in nearby Vega, Arizona, where the management wasn’t overly concerned about whether patrons were of legal drinking age, couldn’t numb the pangs of homesickness. I sweltered through three months in Winkelman the summer after high school, then immediately fled back to Bryn Mawr, where I helped put myself through college working at The Striped Awning, spending holidays and vacations out in Arizona with my parents. While Bootsie embarked on her newspaper job after Duke, and my closest friend, Holly Jones, focused on spending a hefty monthly stipend from her dad, who’s loaded, I couldn’t imagine a career other than running the store—­despite repeated remonstrations by Holly that it was a “furniture graveyard” constituting a dusty social death. This was pretty much true. I’d found myself involved with several be-­scruffed carpenters and artists over the past decade, most of whom had gone through an early midlife crisis and moved to Southeast Asia a few months after I’d started dating them. “There’s something about you that sends guys running to the other side of the world,” Bootsie had told me recently. “No offense.”

  Despite my epic-­fail romances, though, I sincerely enjoyed running The Striped Awning. I loved attending estate sales and auctions to unearth pieces to sell at the shop, then polishing, painting, and restoring these treasures, and watching customers fall in love with a funky chandelier or vintage mirror. In my grandparents’ day, the store had been successful enough to support a quiet, low-­key lifestyle, in which the biggest splurge was their membership at Bryn Mawr Country Club. Until the 1990s, the Main Line—­the suburban area anchored by Bryn Mawr and named for the well-­traveled commuter train lines that ferried lawyers and bankers into Center City Philadelphia—­was a fairly subdued community. Everyone knew one another, and socialized with no great distinction in social strata. At any Friday night gin-­and-­fondue-­fueled cocktail party in the 1970s, you could find members of the Potts family, who reigned over the lordly grounds of Sanderson, side by side with longtime residents such as my grandparents, who had been in Bryn Mawr forever, but had no great wealth or social status. But over the past two decades, thousands of new homes had been built on the Main Line, and its residents had gotten decidedly more glitzy (this was largely due to the fact that a sumptuous Neiman Marcus had opened in the 1990s, just a few miles away off the main highway to Philly).

  Business at The Striped Awning had slowly fallen off as new houses constructed by ­people like Barclay Shields rose up around Bryn Mawr. The new houses were centered around vaulted “great rooms,” and featured kitchens bigger than Barbados and bedrooms the size of hockey rinks. These mansions-­on-­steroids required giant furniture, not antiques, and consequently, my shop was foundering. Holly would happily lend me money to help pay the mortgage or help keep the store afloat—­no questions asked—­but I’d rather die than accept it.

  Anyway, Mr. Webster had strongly suggested that I pay the rent owed on the store in a timely fashion, or eviction might ensue. I couldn’t think of any way to raise funds other than taking out a mortgage on my inherited cottage, which would eventually only add to my financial woes.

  Despite the warmth of the evening, I shivered as I looked around my beloved home while Waffles inhaled his dinner of kibble. While the house itself is tiny, the property is beautiful. With its location right across from Sanderson, the acre-­and-­a-­half lot is a builder’s dream, even in the current dreary economy. Someone like Barclay Shields could buy it, tear down my place, and bang out a massive new mansion in less than six months.

  I felt like crying at this gloomy prospect, so I did what anyone would do under the circumstances. I went to a party and got drunk.

  “This is not a Gap kind of event,” Holly had told me when she showed up at six-­thirty and announced that I was going with her to the opening of Restaurant Gianni. (I started to defend myself, but then realized I was in fact wearing a yellow sundress bought on final sale at the Gap for $17.99.) Holly was holding a pink, knee-­length Trina Turk dress in a hanging bag in one hand and a pair of high-­heeled sandals in the other, both of which she handed to me as she ordered me upstairs to straighten my wavy hair. Her best guy friend, Joe Delafield, the area’s self-­proclaimed foremost interior designer, came through my back door right behind her.

  Joe had arrived at our high school in tenth grade after his family had relocated from New York City, and within a week convinced school administrators to let him repaint the student lounge a natty, Billy Baldwin–ish chocolate brown. This was the birth of a stellar design career, during which Joe attended Parsons and interned at Philly’s most insultingly pricey decorating firm, owned by a trio of willowy blond socialites who have convinced many a Main Line ­couple that not one stick of furniture can be installed until the clients and decorators have made at least four field trips to the Clignancourt furniture market in Paris on the client’s dime. Joe’s currently running his own design business, with Holly as his star client. And truthfully, his sense of color is unerring: Tonight, he had on a pale green checked sport coat, a striped pink-­and-­green shirt, and impeccable khakis. Joe may be the only straight decorator in the tri-­state area, and he’s definitely the best-­dressed straight guy anywhere.

  “Gianni’s party is going to be obscene!” announced Joe, who immediately started rearranging my furniture, which he always does whenever he comes over. “Three truckloads of illegal baby lobster arrived at the restaurant an hour ago from Maine, and they’re grilling as we speak. Get dressed.”

  I ran upstairs, did my hair, loaded on as much extra makeup as I could, and put on my borrowed Trina Turk (two hundred and seventy-­eight dollars, according to the tag that still hung from it). I felt better immediately. It’s amazing what berry-­colored lip gloss can do for your mood—­I mean, imagine the percentage of women walloped by major depression if they’d never invented makeup, I thought, as I looked in the mirror. I knew men would slobber over Holly at the party tonight in the manner of Waffles presented with a leg of lamb. With my brown eyes, small nose, and long wavy brown hair, I’ll never be able to inhabit the gorgeous-­tanned-­blond realm in which Holly wafts through life, but with a ton of mascara double-­wanded onto my lashes and my hair free of its usual ponytail, I felt quite festive in my borrowed pink frock. I’m not as tall or model-­skinny as Holly, but I’m lucky to be able to fit into most of her dresses, since I‘ve been so broke lately that I’ve been living on cans of Progresso soup.

  Joe pulled into the immaculate, beige-­pebbled driveway at Gianni at seven-­twenty, while Holly checked her makeup. She had on a short black Jason Wu dress with skinny straps that looked amazing on her, since she subsists on champagne and shrimp cocktail. “You look great!” I told her as we got out of the car.

  “I know,”
she said blithely. “It’s because of the divorce. I feel horrible, but I look amazing.” I’ve noticed this among everyone I know who’s in the middle of bitterly dividing up marital assets amid mutual recriminations: Anyone going through a divorce tends to look fantastic, thereby proving to their ex how little the split is bothering them.

  “Well, at least they didn’t totally ruin the place,” said Joe, as he tossed the keys to a valet parker and eyed the restaurant’s elegantly weathered stone façade, its doors flanked by potted lemon trees, its French windows anchored open, and a jazzy bossa nova percolating from an indoor/outdoor sound system. More accurately, Restaurant Gianni—­named, of course, for its chef/owner, Gianni Brunello—­looked absolutely beautiful. You’d never know that until a few months ago, it had been the old firehouse, a stone and stucco building built in the early 1900s, with eaves and a slate roof. Bryn Mawr’s volunteer fire company had just moved to a new, state-­of-­the-­art building over by the post office, and now, thanks to some artful masonry restoration and the addition of new dark green shutters flanking floor-­to-­ceiling windows, the old firehouse resembled an Umbrian villa. The level of manicured, obsessive-­compulsive perfection in evidence was truly impressive: The circular driveway of tiny stones looked as if someone raked it every five minutes, whether it needed it or not.

  “I would have gone with a cerulean blue for the front door,” said Joe, gesturing dismissively at the spectacular scene before us while the ridiculously delicious scent of grilling shellfish wafted our way. Clearly, since he hadn’t been awarded the job of designing Gianni’s restaurant, Joe had come to the party only to catalog the nonexistent flaws in its decor. “And they should have added about seven hundred more of those dinky lemon trees and a vintage Etruscan trellis to form an arbor . . . what is that racket?”

  Blood-­chilling, horrific screams had erupted from the restaurant. The teenage valet parkers looked scared.

  “That’s the chef, having one of his tantrums,” said Holly, tipping a valet ten bucks as she dashed up the smooth stone steps to the front door of the restaurant. “Hurry, we don’t want to miss it.”

  We all rushed into a beautiful terra-­cotta colored room lit by a huge old wooden chandelier, with a long mahogany bar and lots of white-­cloth tables in a roomy dining area. Over by the bar stood the eponymous Chef Gianni, who had arrived five years ago from a verdant corner of Tuscany to conquer the Philadelphia dining scene. A slim, muscular man dressed in chef’s whites above the waist and MC Hammer–style parachute pants below, he had a glistening bald dome and spoke with an accent as thick as a Parma ham.

  “What the fuck is this?” screamed the chef, his crimson face nose-­to-­nose with two cowering, well-­dressed young men, waving what appeared to be an invoice at them. As usual, Gianni wore orange Crocs in the manner of Mario Batali, his culinary idol, and had his sleeves rolled up to reveal intricate tattoos including the Italian flag, the distinctive boot-­shaped map of Italy, and a lavishly rendered façade of St. Peter’s Basilica along his forearms.

  I’d never actually met Chef Gianni, but he’d been anointed one of America’s rising-­star chefs by a top food magazine just a month ago. Deeply tanned, he wears several gold earrings in each lobe, and at thirty-­eight, has a proclivity for dating women in their twenties. His downtown Philadelphia restaurant, Palazzo, occupies the penthouse of a luxurious hotel in Society Hill, decorated with lacquered black walls and bright red banquettes upon which patrons enjoy forty-­eight-­dollar pastas. Gianni, who has the touchy temperament of a star TV chef in the making, likes to threaten to dangle the busboys over the edge of Palazzo’s balcony while techno music pulsates in the dining room, which customers absolutely love. “He’s so mercurial!” they invariably giggle.

  Given that Holly happens to the only daughter of a billionaire—­seriously, her father is in the chicken business, and recently out-­Perdued the Perdues—­she visits Palazzo frequently. Joe does a fair bit of business with clients over dinner at Palazzo, too. They were definitely on the list for tonight’s party, while I filled the “And Guest” slot on their invitations.

  “You know those guys he’s screaming at, right?” Joe whispered to me. “They’re the hot florists of the moment, Colkett and Colkett. No one knows if they’re brothers, cousins, or if they’re a ­couple. Very talented. They use lots of fruits and vegetables in their work. Remember when Holly used them for her Non-­Valentine Valentine’s Party last winter? Their big thing is that they’re incredibly overpriced.”

  “I love the Colketts!” Holly sang out, giving the florists a wave.

  Normally, Holly evokes rapturous greetings in all men, women, and even cats and dogs, but the Colketts didn’t seem to notice her. They were cringing nervously next to two topiaries the size of Volkswagens made of artichokes, pomegranates, and lemons that they’d just wheeled in. Chef Gianni studied their bill, ranting in Italian.

  Bills were a sore point at the moment with Gianni. According to the front-­page stories about him in Bootsie’s newspaper, he’d spent months combing the hill towns of Italy for antiques for the restaurant with his young decorator-­slash-­girlfriend. This had proven to be a very expensive extended vacation/buying trip, which resulted in some rather testy meetings with his investors when he’d returned home with that deep tan, a lot of Versace luggage, and crates full of overpriced furniture.

  As we watched, transfixed, the chef glared at the bill, tore it in two, stuck both halves into a lit votive candle, and threw the flaming paper on the glossy restaurant floor, where it ignited a tablecloth and came perilously close to setting aflame a very pricey-­looking silk curtain. As the flames leaped higher, a stunned-­looking waiter ran over, snatched the burning tablecloth, and ran out the front door to the driveway as smoke billowed behind him. We watched the hapless waiter stomp out the fire, but then flames began to lick the edges of his long white apron, too, so he flung the apron onto a flagstone walkway, where the little bonfire appeared to die down.

  Crisis averted. Sort of.

  “Six thousand dollars,” screamed Gianni at the Colketts. “You think it is okay to charge Chef Gianni six thousand dollars for flowers?” The florists looked at each other and giggled nervously, the kind of laughter that comes from near-­hysterical terror. The chef turned purple, tore off his apron, and stomped up and down on it. He ripped a piece of round red fruit from a topiary and beaned it at the florists, who ducked, but one didn’t duck fast enough and screamed in pain when he took the object, which appeared to be a dried pomegranate, in the ear. “Yesterday, I got an estimate from florist who says she can do all the flowers for five hundred bucks a week. You charge Chef Gianni eight times that!”

  “Actually, six thousand is twelve times that,” pointed out the chef’s girlfriend, who’d appeared from the back of the restaurant, and was languidly rearranging her long hair and lighting a cigarette. I had met her once before—­she’d gone to design school with Joe. I couldn’t understand how this girl put up with the perpetually angry chef. His cooking skills seemed to be his main selling point, and she didn’t look like a big eater. Maybe she liked the trips to Italy.

  “Not at all, Chef,” ventured one of the flower guys. “These topiaries will last forever. They’re really quite a bargain. They’re freeze-­dried.”

  “They are bullshit!” The chef’s face was turning a color that could only mean an imminent stroke, but just then, a small horde of guests crowded in through the front door, and a waiter started passing glasses of Barolo, which we all grabbed and started gulping down. Suddenly, Chef Gianni snapped back to normal, noticing that the party had actually commenced, that the candles were lit, and that baby lamb chops, cheeses, and olives had been piled upon a lavish buffet. The waiters surreptitiously repositioned the topiaries so that the bald spots didn’t show.

  Gianni straightened his cuffs, started breathing again, and spied Holly in her teeny black dress. His mood totally changed. Very bipolar.

  “Holly Jones!” said the chef
. His face paled to magenta, and he ran over to kiss Holly’s hand. “You are gorgeous!”

  In this second, I suddenly understood Gianni’s charisma. His shaved head and tattoos took on a sexy, bad-­boy quality. He began lavishly greeting women ranging in age from their thirties into their eighties with an athletic swagger. When smiling attentively and doling out triple kisses, he made each woman feel like he’d love to rip off her clothes, if only they were alone together. So that’s what his girlfriend saw in him!

  Dozens of ­people were crowding in behind us, and a minute later, I lost Holly and Joe in the haze of Chanel No. 5 and knots of well-­dressed men bragging about their golf handicaps, so I made my way to the bar, hoping that the contraband lobster tails would appear soon.

  “Two vodkas,” I heard a voice growl behind me. I peeked around and found that this was the not-­very-­feminine intonation of my neighbor, Honey Potts of Sanderson, a seventyish woman dressed in a blazer, white shirt, and khakis, her skin the leathery texture of George Hamilton’s after a month in Mexico. Everyone on the Main Line knows who Honey Potts is—­she’s a grande dame in the old tradition, and she’s always front-­page in the Bryn Mawr Gazette, judging a local dog show or leading a garden tour. Honey, her nickname since childhood (real name: Henrietta), didn’t really fit her anymore, since she’s more intimidating than sweet, but then, these WASPy names never make any sense. I mean, who would name a girl Bootsie?

  Next to Honey was her best friend since childhood, Mariellen Merriwether. Mariellen was slimmer, taller, blonder, and wearing a pink dress and beige heels. And pearls—­always pearls. There was something about Mariellen that made you feel instantly inferior, which it seemed was the point of her existence. She lived on a smaller property than the adjoining Sanderson, but it was still huge by any standard, consisting of fifteen acres with a charming old farmhouse and a horse barn, where her prizewinning gelding Norman lived in Ritz-­Carlton-­like conditions. According to Bootsie, who’d attended charity functions chez Merriwether, the entire house was covered in toile, and what wasn’t toile was monogrammed, including her toilet paper and ice cubes. Norman’s barn was almost as cozily fitted out, and Norman himself dined on organic hay and carrots from Mariellen’s personal gardens.