Pineapple Street(31)
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Sebastian had everyone meet at his apartment in the East Village before the dinner so that they could ride out to Brighton Beach in a party bus. They were going to a Russian dance hall, and Georgiana had to admire her friends’ commitment to the theme. The guys were wearing shirts unbuttoned to reveal half their chests, layers of thick gold necklaces on display. The women wore all manner of fur and leather, heat be damned, but somehow Oligarch Chic had morphed into a more general nineties club look, their eyes winged with liquid liner, their hair huge, their heels five inches high.
There was a bar in the back of the bus with vodka, mixers, and big magnums of champagne, and when the driver turned on flashing colored lights Georgiana felt like she was wasted at seven p.m., the road bumping beneath them. Along with Lena and Kristin, Sebastian had invited their usual circle plus his freshman-year roommate, Curtis McCoy. Georgiana didn’t know Curtis well, but she remembered visiting his family home on Martha’s Vineyard with Lena once and realizing that they owned an entire gated compound, that the Clintons and the Obamas had spent summers in houses on their property. He was next-level rich. Curtis’s father was the CEO of a defense company and that had somehow always made her feel nervous around Curtis, like the fact that his family made Tomahawk missiles gave him an inherent dangerous power that she should steer clear of.
When they arrived at the dance hall, they spilled out of the bus and into the grand foyer. Georgiana suddenly felt like they were crashing a wedding, seeing the big groups of families, teenagers in suits, and middle-aged women in ruched satin dresses. A man in a starched white shirt led them to a banquet table in the center of the hall, and a swarm of waiters set about pouring them vodka and delivering massive platters of pickles and smoked fish, pancakes dotted with piles of chilled pink roe, sliced beef, and blintzes stuffed with cheese. Sebastian and his friends skipped the food and set about drinking with single-minded dedication, but Georgiana knew she’d end up a sloppy mess if she weren’t careful, so she made herself a plate of blintzes and pickles.
There must have been three hundred people in the hall, eating and drinking and mostly ignoring the two women in Jessica Rabbit cocktail gowns standing on stage and singing a duet to Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb.” As the evening progressed, more and more performers came onto the stage and groups made their way to the dance floor. The guys, now fully drunk, took selfies with the towers of empty vodka bottles stacked atop their table. Lena and Kristin wanted to dance, so Georgiana followed them out to the floor, happy she’d skipped the fur coat as she joined the sweaty crowd. It was like a bat mitzvah on steroids, like being onstage for the Super Bowl halftime show. The fact that every other partygoer was Russian and lived an hour from their part of New York set them free to dance like maniacs, to let sweat pour down their temples, to feel their careful makeup washing away.
Georgiana had to pee and left the dance floor to find a restroom, climbing a marble staircase to a beautiful lounge filled with puffy chairs and gilded mirrors. She used a paper hand towel to blot her face, and she fixed her makeup in the powder room vanity. She had long ago abandoned her hat and had her big Chanel sunglasses pushed up like a hairband. Her feet ached and she was dying of thirst, so instead of returning to the dance floor she followed the maze of carpeted halls back to the banquet table, where she saw Curtis sitting alone at the end. Slightly buzzed and feeling friendly, Georgiana grabbed her water and pulled out the chair beside him.
“Hey Curtis, having fun?” she said, smiling.
“Not particularly, no.” He frowned, glancing at her briefly before looking off over her head.
“What’s wrong?”
“The fact that you have to ask that means that it’s not worth discussing,” he said.
“What?” Georgiana asked, completely confused. Why was he being so rude to her?
“Do you not see how fucked up this whole thing is? I can’t believe I’m here.”
“How fucked up a birthday party is? No, I guess I don’t see it,” Georgiana replied, annoyed.
“You think it’s cool that a bunch of rich white kids who met at private school are dressed in costumes to ridicule an immigrant group in their own neighborhood? That seems fine to you?”
“It’s Oligarch Chic. It’s making fun of rich people. And Russians are white,” Georgiana said with a frown.
“As I said, the fact that you had to ask meant it wasn’t worth me discussing it with you. Nice sunglasses.” Curtis turned away from her and picked up his phone.
“Fuck you, Curtis. You don’t know me.”
“Of course I know you. You’re a rich real estate brat living off your trust fund, only dimly aware that an entire world exists outside the coddled one percent.”
“Oh, so you live in Zuccotti Park? You went to the School of Hard Knocks? Didn’t you go to Princeton?”
“Oh, so you don’t live off a trust fund?”
“I work for a not-for-profit providing health care for developing countries,” Georgiana said icily.
“And who pays your rent?”
“I own.”
“And your rich parents bought that apartment.”
“My grandparents left me money, not that it’s your business.”
“And how did they make that money?”