Page 10 of The Favorite Sister

CHAPTER 2

Stephanie

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations. I myself am down to two, side by side in my rift-sawn white oak custom closet: the Saint Laurent boots or the platform sneakers that everyone is wearing these days. I am not much for the sprezzatura pox that’s claimed most of the women in New York. When I moved here, twelve years ago, women wore ballet flats on the subway, work heels hooked over the lip of their monogrammed Goyard totes. Sneakers were exclusively aerobic in purpose, never for cocktail dresses and Chanel, New York Fashion Week, and martinis at Bemelmans. Sometimes, even on Madison—even in theeighties—I feel like the last of my kind. Nobody gets dressed anymore.

I consider the boots, worried they say I’m doingtoowell, which I am. When your memoir about your abusive teenaged boyfriend has been top three on the bestseller list for the last four months with no sign of slowing down, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and an Oscar-nominated director’s next passion project, there is never more of a right time to bow your head. People prefer acutely successful women to haveno idea how we got here, to call ourselves lucky, blessed,grateful. I hook a finger through the sneaker’s ornamental laces, considering their message on a spin. The sneakers literally level me. And people respond to approachable women, don’t they? It’s part ofwhat the audience loved about Brett, part of what I loved about her, at least in the beginning. I pluck the other sneaker from its custom perch. Show, don’t tell. The bedrock of what I do.

The Rangers’ game goes mute as I descend the stairs to our living room. We have stairs in our prewar brownstone on the Upper East Side. This is not just architectural fact, it’s consolatory, something Brett pointed out to lift my spirits two years ago, when my third book came out and bombed.You have stairs in your apartment, Brett said.Fuck it. Not everything you do can be a win.I thrill every time I upset these stairs. Vince is always threatening to fix them—rather, use my money to pay someone to fix them—but I savor their squeaks and grunts, audible reminders of my earning power. It is one of the few times I allow myself to dissociate, to think about how I will never be at the mercy of Lynn from Creative and Marketing Staffing Pros again,creak, because I started writing the blog on my lunch break, and,creak, through the 3:00P.M. slump too, and it became popular enough to net me a mid-six-figures book deal. I will never have to deposit seven dollars into my bank account,creak, just to be able to make the minimum withdrawal of twenty,creak. Because I have sold over three million copies of my first two books and am on track to surpass that with my memoir, which the SundayReviewembraced, breathlessly. (Finally.) Then there is the million Warner Bros. paid for my life rights, and the half I’m getting to adapt my memoir for film.Creak. Creak. The last two stairs sound absurdist, like a witch opening a door to a haunted house that you will tour, scream-laughing. Vince is watching me from his favorite navy club chair. Navy is the only color I’ve allowed on this floor.

Vince looks confused when he sees me. “You’re not going?”

It’s the sneakers. My mother wore heels in her bathrobe and that’s what I was taught. “I’m going,” I say, sinking into his lap. “Do I look like a slob?”

“Oof!” He grimaces, squirming a bit. “Wait. Wait.” He shifts me around on top of him. “That’s better.” He breathes a sigh of relief.

“Thanks,” I crack, digging my knuckle into his bicep, still far from solid though I’m paying Hugh Jackman’s trainer three times a week.

“Hey-ayy!” He clutches his shoulder, his lips an astonishedo. How couldanyonewant to hurt Vince?

“You never answered me.”

“What?”

“Do I look like a slob?”

Vince pushes his hair out of his eyes. Between him and Brett, sometimes I just want to superglue their hands to their sides. “But a sexy slob.”

“Really?” I frown at my feet. “I just wanted to be comfortable.”

“You look cool, babe,” Vince says to the TV screen, lifting his glass of wine from the marble-topped side table. I can smell the vintage.

“Is that the 2005?” I ask, an edge creeping into my voice. I don’t know much about wine, but I know I had to put a hold on Vince’s credit card last year after a Christie’s online auction for Fine and Rare Vintages ended in obscenity.

Vince quickly sets the glass back on the table and his hand gets lost in his hair again. “Nah. 2011 or something lame like that.” He squeezes my side, and in a suggestive voice says, “You could stay, though.” His hand moves lower. Squeezes there too. “And we could open that one.”

I swat him away with a giggle. “I can’t. I need to see them.”

Vince holds up his hands.He tried. “I’ll be waiting up.” He purses his stained lips.

It’s a chaste kiss—it always is, these days—but when I lean in, I get a whiff of his old Rutgers tee and can’t help but feel pleased. BO is the scent of devotion in our marriage. Vince is not getting up to anything smelling like that. He means it when he says he will be waiting up. My husband is never more faithful than when he has to crane his neck to look up at me.

Jen and Lauren are already seated by the time I arrive at L’Artusi, which is an unremarkable observation unless you are dining in NewYork City, where no restaurant will seat you until your entire party is present. A rule designed to keep your own illusions about yourself in check, I imagine. You’ve seen the originalHamilton—with Leslie Odom Jr.!—and you’re wearing the Gucci loafers that are on back-order until next fall? Please let us know when your entire party has arrived.

Celebrity doesn’t help. I’ve seen Larry David pacing the corridor of Fred’s and Julianne Moore told it will be an hour-and-fifteen-minute wait at the original Meatball Shop, before the Upper East Side expansion robbed it of its kitsch mystique. So it’s genuinely remarkable that when I arrive Jen and Lauren are seated, and it’s genuinely a shame that it has nothing to do with the show, and everything to do with Jen Greenberg’s mother. Yvette Greenberg isn’t a celebrity, she’s acause.

I am self-conscious about the sneakers as I tail the hostess through the restaurant. I’m used to turning heads at this point, but before, I was half-defensive about it, feeling like people were gawking for the wrong reasons. No woman in New York would admit to reading my books before this year. Opening Didion or Wallace on the subway is as much a part of the dernier cri as the bedhead hair and the jeans that asexualize your butt. Whatarethose about, anyway?

Up the stairs we go, to a table in the corner, where Lauren Bunn and Jen Greenberg are sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing me as though schoolgirls on a school bus. I am breathless to discover that they’ve left me the outside seat. It’s customary for celebrities to sit with their backs to a restaurant, so that no one can snap a picture while they’re sipping wine with one eye closed and sell it toIn Touchto be strung up with the headlineRehab for Reality Star!When theDiggersdine out together, it’s always a passive-aggressive tango for the outside chair, and it almost always ends up sagging beneath the weight of Brett’s big butt. To have it reserved for me will go down as a flash point in our history. That isn’t a chair; it’s a throne.

Lauren rises when she sees me. “Rock star!” she cries, the way townsfolk would chargewitchin seventeenth-century Salem.Witch! Witch!She flings her arms around my neck and I note the emptymartini glass over her shoulder. Jen holds up two fingers. It’s her second. We need to move fast.

She pulls away and holds me by the shoulders. “Youare a rock star!” Her $250 micro-bladed eyebrows come together as she studies me up close. “You even look different.” She pats me down, her hands finishing on my rear end, which she pumps and jiggles, her platonic expression that of a doctor performing a routine checkup. “You feel different.”

“All right, all right.” I laugh, removing her hands.Blond and oversexualizedis Lauren’s beat. She’s like the poor man’s Samantha Jones—too drunk to enjoy all the sex she has. “And what’s different is these.” I kick up the septuagenarian sole of my sneaker.

Lauren expands a hand over her breast and becomes momentarily Southern. “As I live and breathe.”

Jen does not get up and fawn all over me, but she does provide me an excuse for my tardiness. “Traffic?” she asks, as I take my seat and spread a dinner linen over my lap.