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“Oops! I Did It Again,” by Britney Spears (know it and particularly hate it).
“Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Can sing it blindfolded.
Unless, of course, it’s at the Wedding of the Year, and I get the shock of my young life.
Cammie Winthrop was to marry Dr. Robert Carrington III, the plastic surgeon who can liposuction your Heavenly Hash-enhanced thighs away, on this particular beautiful sunny day in May—with no humidity—as if her father had ordered up the weather from God himself, which he might have because if God can be bought, Roger Winthrop is buying. He is the king of New Orleans real estate, and the reception Jack and I were racing to in his Buick was to be held in the ballroom of the Winthrop family’s very own plantation. That’s another side of New Orleans for you. Plantations and Greek Revival mansions surrounded by moss-draped oaks. You feel as if any moment someone’s going to hog-tie you into a corset and a hoop skirt.
Jack and I arrived at the Winthrop plantation. Gary was pacing as we entered the ballroom.
“Do you live to torture me?” he asked. Then he put up his hands. “Don’t answer that. I know…the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will ride through the French Quarter before you’re ever on time.” He looked at my leg. “Wite-Out? Please…. please, I am begging you, tell me that’s not Wite-Out. Georgia…when you go to buy pantyhose and tampons, can you not just make a mental note to purchase enough for a few months? Like pantyhose—buy every last pair in your size. I mean, why do I know more about your preference for control tops than you do? Why? Tell me why!”
Gary was clearly panicked, and his voice was rising into a falsetto range usually hit only by Dominique. Did I mention, the Winthrop wedding was the social event of the year? If we played well, which, after years together, we did effortlessly, we would have weddings and functions filling our schedule for the next two years. But Gary thrived on panic. That and ABBA made him tick. Just like antagonizing him brought me small comfort and wrought revenge for the sequins.
“You need to seriously take a Valium. Go to the bar and have a shot of something.”
“Georgie, you are the reason I live on Tums,” Gary whined. “See these?” He pointed to beads of moisture accumulating near his receding hairline. “You cause these.”
“Fine. But I’m the only person in the band who can fill out a sequin dress.”
Endgame.
Soon, I was singing my heart out, hoping, as I often and ridiculously do, that there among the tables-for-ten surrounding the dance floor was some record executive waiting to discover me—the easy way. All right, so this isn’t exactly a formula for being discovered, but I tell myself it’s possible. Like run-proof pantyhose being invented.
I was, this day, quite specifically, singing the infamous, crowd-pleasing, no-wedding-will-be-complete-without-it song, “Celebration.” Ever notice how few words it has? It’s pretty much just endless repeating of “Celebrate good times” and “Come on.” Doesn’t take Billie Holiday to sing it. But Cammie Winthrop wanted to dance to it with all her blond sorority sisters (not a brunette in the bunch, though the band and I had a betting pool on the number of natural blondes, which was likely considerably smaller). And whatever Cammie wanted, Cammie got. Including a five-thousand-dollar muted oyster-colored Vera Wang dress and a diamond tiara.
I was on the small stage that had been built by the dance floor, sparkling in my silver gown, with not one but two pairs of pantyhose on. Well, not exactly. I had one leg each of two separate pairs. I arrived at the wedding in the Wite-Out pair, which I had put on while Jack screeched his way onto the plantation’s grounds, me wriggling into them on the front seat, and which had a run in the left leg—held in check by a smear of white. Gary, obviously tired of my ruining a pair of hose at every wedding, and always in the leg visible through the slit of my dress, almost always keeps an extra pair of my size B’s in nude, with control top, in his keyboard case. I had counted on that all along. I had grabbed them from him as he mopped at his forehead, and I raced to the bathroom, sweating all the while, making my hair frizz and curl faster than ever. Putting on the new pair, my nail made a run in the opposite leg. Again, I cursed the geniuses who could send a probe to Mars but not make a run-proof formula. However, with some creative cutting with a steak knife borrowed from the kitchen, I had, ostensibly, one full pair of pantyhose. One of each leg, with a double set of control tops. I was feeling very tight-tummied.
And I was singing the aforementioned simple-to-remember words to “Celebration.”
And I glanced across the dance floor.
And the words to “Celebration” left my mind.
Gone. Like a giant black hole had sucked them from my brain. Nothing in my mind but “la, la, la.” Gary looked at me imploringly. Jack stared at me desperately, as if willing the words into my brain. But it was hopeless. Because there, across the dance floor, standing on the perimeter, looking slightly older but still confident and handsome, was Casanova Jones.
The only man I’d ever, even briefly, thought might be The One.
chapter
4
I t was the shriek heard round the world. Or at least round the French Quarter.
The day after the Wedding of the Year and my momentary attack of amnesia, my friend Maggie came over to cut my hair and dye Dominique’s eyebrows to match her new platinum look. As soon as I told them that I had run into Casanova Jones, Dominique shrieked and began hugging me and jumping up and down.
“Did you fuck him in the men’s room?” Dominique squealed.
“No, I did not!”
“The ladies’ room?”
“Give me a break.”
“You thought about it though.” She stepped back and wagged her finger as if scolding a child.
“God help me, you’re impossible.”
“This guy must be something if he’s a possible bathroom screw,” Maggie said, directing me toward the sink. “I need details. Like who is he? And what the hell kind of name is Casanova Jones?”
“I can’t tell you yet. I’m in hair shock. What, exactly, are you doing with your hair?”
Maggie works at a trendy salon near the Garden District. She makes a ton of money—in cash. She makes a whole lot more than a wedding singer, I can tell you—though I guess that isn’t really saying a whole hell of a lot. Still, she doesn’t have to wear sequins to do it. She’s considered one of the best stylists in the city and even does the hair of a couple of well-known actresses when they are in the Big Easy shooting movies. But somehow, despite knowing everything there is to know about cutting hair, and highlights, and foils and all of that, her own hair is what I would gently term “experimental.” It’s art. What kind of art, I can’t tell you. This particular Sunday, I would perhaps call her hair color raspberry, though it was more accurately some strange hybrid of red and purple. And the cut was lopsided. As in uneven.
“It’s asymmetrical. That’s very in this season.”
“It’s lopsided.”
“You call it lopsided.” Her hazel eyes played peekaboo as her hair fell in front of her face as she moved. She has a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and though her skin is very pale, she never wears makeup—which drives Dominique insane. “My clients call it asymmetrical and pay a hundred and fifty bucks to have it cut this way.”
“Fine, but while you’ve got sharp scissors in your hands, remember that I’m still in favor of both sides being even.”
“You can carry the asymmetrical look.”
“I don’t want to carry it.”
“Why are we even talking about hair? Tell me about this guy you two are screeching about.”
“All right. He was my one unrequited love. The one guy that if I could go back and do it all over again, go back to high school knowing what I know now, I would have fucked him. More precisely, I would have lost my virginity to him instead of the asshole I finally did lose it to my freshman year of college.” I liked to pretend my entire two-month relationship with Dan What’s-his-name, Virginity Bandit, never occurred.
“So what happened between you?”
“Nothing much. A lot of flirting. I don’t know. We just never acted on it. Maybe it was timing. That and he was one of the ‘beautiful people.’”
“I know you’ll find this impossible to believe,” Dominique interjected. “But Georgia, despite being one smokin’-hot, overwhelmingly sexy thing now, and me, being the delectable creature standing before you…we were outcasts in high school. For God’s sake, I was a boy in high school.” She shuddered.
“You—” Maggie raised an eyebrow and playfully stared up and down at Dominique “—I could see. But Georgia?”
I nodded. “And he was…I can’t really explain how I couldn’t even speak every time I was within five feet of him. Total lust.”
I knew Maggie would understand. Maggie had wanted Jack from the first moment she laid eyes on him five years ago. He was her one unrequited lust. Jack, on the other hand, gravitated toward magnolia queens, not a Goth, pale-skinned, raspberry-haired woman with a pierced belly button and tribal tattoos encircling her arms.
“We just called him Casanova Jones because he was such a damn slut,” Dominique added. “His real name was…what the hell is his real name, Georgia?”
“Rick.”
The night before, Rick had approached me between sets, raising the eyebrows of my bandmates. Certainly, I was their lead singer, but to them, I was the woman with panty lines and lingerie-obsessed cats. I was the woman who spilled cocktail sauce down the front of her one white gown—which no dry cleaner could salvage. In short, to them, I was Georgie, the woman least likely to attract a guy who owned—didn’t rent—a custom-fitted black Armani tuxedo.
“I thought it was you.” Rick had smiled, leaning in to kiss my cheek, and allowing his lips to stay there for that fraction of a second too long. He took my hand and held it, his index finger stroking the inside of my wrist ever so slightly. “You’re still as beautiful as ever, Georgia.”
“Thanks. You look the same. Shorter hair… A little more corporate, but other than that…” His eyes still crinkled in the corners when he smiled, and his teeth were toothpaste-commercial perfect. His hair was still thick and a deep black; he had a strong jawline and very broad, former football-player shoulders.
“You know…you were the one girl I’ve wondered about…. Have you stayed in New Orleans this whole time?”
“Can’t get beignets anywhere else.”
“I never left either. Even went to law school here. New Orleans is my town. Must be destiny that we ran into each other finally.”
Yeah. Destiny. Or another cosmic mind-fuck.
“And then what?” Maggie asked.
Dominique held up her hand. “Wait…was the kiss on the lips or the cheek? There are more important things to discuss first.”
“Cheek,” I said firmly. “Ladies, he was there with a date. A gorgeous date, I might add. She looked like a Swedish supermodel. And she was perched on these four-inch stilettos and walked around in them like she was in sneakers. Effortlessly.”
“Don’t you hate women like that?” Maggie asked as she stuck my head under the faucet and started washing my hair.
“Hold on, girls.” Dominique sashayed over to the counter and hopped up on it, sitting there, legs crossed and fluffing her hair. “I walk effortlessly in stilettos—you can’t judge a woman for that.”
“Yes, we can,” Maggie said.
I have never seen Maggie in a pair of heels. She always wears black boots, even in the dead of summer. If she dresses up, it is only to wear her black boots with a black skirt, topped with a black jacket. She saves all her color for her hair.
Maggie lathered me up with her secret shampoo. I talked loudly over the water, my voice kind of echoing in the sink. “So his date was hovering in the background, a few feet away, trying to look disinterested but giving me the evil eye. And he asked if he could take me to dinner on Friday. For old time’s sake. To catch up.”
“Once a male whore, always a male whore,” Dominique called out over the sound of the faucet.
“I don’t know. I didn’t get the feeling she was his girlfriend. But I barely know him. I don’t even know if we could figure out enough things to talk about over dinner.”
“Oh please,” Dominique clucked. “I thought he would bend you right over a desk and take you from behind the way you two talked in homeroom. I remember wishing someone would talk to me that way.” She sighed. “If things go right, you won’t be doing very much talking at all.”
Maggie finished rinsing and piled my hair into a towel, which she did up into a turban.
“Shut up, Dominique! I don’t usually have sex on the first date.”
“You don’t usually date, period,” she countered. “You’re always busy with the band. You should take up sleeping with one of them—not Gary. One of the other ones. Not Jack—Maggie has dibs. That leaves Mike or Tony. And Tony has a British accent, so I vote for him.”
“Irish.”
“Irish what?”
“It’s an Irish accent.”
“Fine. I mean, if you’re going to spend every weekend with those guys, you might as well.”
Maggie sat me down in a chair and started trying to pull a comb through my hair, which is akin to pulling a comb through Brillo. My hair falls to the middle of my back, though with the curl in it, when it’s dry, it’s usually just past my shoulders.
“Ouch! What are you doing?” My eyes teared up from the tugging.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Listen, you have to go out with him. Come on. I’d go out with Jack in a heartbeat.”
“And I’d go out with George Clooney if he asked,” Dominique said. “Well, if he begged.”
Dominique takes her Clooney obsession very seriously. And she firmly believes if he just for a moment put aside his rampant heterosexuality, he would, indeed, go for a six-foot-two-inch drag queen with platinum hair and a collection of vintage transvestite go-go boots.
“Look, dating is hard enough without being with a guy so good-looking that all the women in the room want to sleep with him.”
“Is that what this is all about? Personally, I want to date a man everyone wants to fuck because I’m so deliciously fuckable myself,” Dominique said, pushing her fake tits together and admiring them. “You know, Georgia Ray Miller, you have had some ridiculous theories before. And this from the woman who takes advice from a ghost.”
“Fine. Don’t come screaming into my room in the middle of the night when you hear her footsteps in the hallway and her slamming doors.”
“Uh-huh, girlfriend.” She hopped from the counter and wiggled her hips. “Let’s put aside the ghost for a minute, and consider Casanova Jones. First of all, I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to realize how beautiful you are. I have to work for my beauty! You think all this waxing and dyeing and primping and plucking is easy? Hmm? Georgia Ray, I remember Casanova, and he was one of the fuckable gods of high school. But you—” she came over and stood directly in front of me “—you are an equally fuckable goddess. A beautiful, sexy, voluptuous goddess. I have breast envy. I mean, yours are perfect.” She reached out and squeezed one of my breasts. I didn’t even blink. She’s had breast envy since I got my first padded bra in seventh grade, and feeling me like an overripe cantaloupe was just typically Dominique.
“Well, you’ve slept with your quota of men since high school, so I’d say it’s time to consummate things with this Casanova guy,” Maggie said. “Most of us would do anything to be with that one guy we crave.”
Maggie is fearless enough to wear lopsided hair and not care about it. She gets her tattoos without getting drunk first, and she doesn’t even flinch. She will speak her mind to anyone—from a drunken Mardi Gras reveler, to a snobbish customer, to her very formidable father. She was the first person I knew to pierce her belly button. And the only person I knew who pierced her nose—and her tongue. She eventually took out the stud in her tongue, but a tiny diamond in her nose remains. Maggie never cares what anyone thinks about her. Not when her hair is pink, not when her tattoos are displayed in all their glory when she’s wearing a tank top.
Dominique is also fearless—though not about spiders or scary movies or any one of a dozen things she’s ordinarily terrified by. Still, she was a he—Damon—in high school. After we graduated, Damon told his father, a retired captain in the army, that he was gay. When his dad promptly threw him out of the house, he came to live with Nan and me, heartbroken, with a black eye, but grateful our door was open. Three years later, he was Dominique, and the beautiful voice he had raised to the rafters in his gospel choir was now used to belt out show tunes and disco hits onstage. His father has refused to see him all these years, yet Dominique will not change who she is, not even for her family. She volunteers at an AIDS crisis center, and instead of beads, she hurls silver-foiled packages of condoms at Mardi Gras. She’s vocal and in-your-face sometimes. And she tells everyone she’s not gay—but queer. And proud of it.
Maggie finished combing my hair, and the three of us went out on the side porch so we could sweep up my hair cuttings when we were done.
I continued, “But you should have seen this girl he was with. She had cheekbones to die for and perfect hair. Shampoo-commercial perfect. You know, like the one with the blonde who’s acting like she’s having an orgasm while she’s getting shampooed by young, hunky men.”
“I love that commercial,” Dominique cooed.
Maggie began snipping. “He obviously hasn’t forgotten you, so go for it. What’s the worst that could happen? A bad date. Big deal. You’ve had plenty of those.”
“Amen.” Dominique chimed in.
I looked up at Maggie, hearing the metal snip-snip of the scissors clicking away. “Remember…I want a trim—not lopsided hair.”
“What about a bob? A sort of European, angular thing?”
“If you cut my hair in a bob, I’ll look like a troll doll. I like it longer, and I like to go with my natural curls. For God’s sake, you’ve been cutting my hair for four years now. You know what I want.”
This was true—after much trial and bad-hair error. Dominique and I were Maggie’s guinea pigs. This fact itself was a mark of our friendship, because long before she was cutting her own hair lopsided and dyeing it raspberry, she was doing all kinds of things to ours. I’ve had bobs and pixie cuts, punky spikes and Madonna-like platinum. Dominique has had fades that make Grace Jones’s hair look conservative. She once even ended up bald thanks to a chemical straightening process gone awry.
“So…you’re finally going out with the love of your life.” Dominique clapped her hands.
“He’s not the love of my life.” I shot her a glance.
“Then the lust of your life,” Maggie offered as she bent over and cut angled pieces near my face.
“Well—” Dominique put her manicured hands on her hips “—I say go for it.”
“I’m not even positive I’m going.”
Maggie picked up a pair of clippers from her “house call” bag of scissors and combs. “If you don’t go I’m buzz-cutting you right now.”
