Beautiful You: A Novel Read online

  Not that Penny was stinky. Or fat, not really.

  Not that Monique cared, either. With her flashy streetwise attitude she was angling for a hedge fund manager or a newly minted Russian oligarch. Unapologetic, she told everyone that her only aspiration was to live in an Upper East Side town house, munching Pop-Tarts and lounging in bed all day. Breathing a huge, fake sigh of relief, she said, “Omaha girl, you should let that poor boy put his slippery little tadpole inside you!”

  Penny wasn’t flattered by his winks and wolf whistles. She knew she was only the ugly dog. The stepping stone.

  Aboard the elevator Monique appraised Penny’s workaday outfit. Monique cocked her hip and wagged a finger. There wasn’t room left on any of the stylish girl’s fingers for even one more glitzy ring. Monique pursed her lips, sporting three distinct shades of purple lip gloss, and said, “G’friend, I love your retro figure!” She tossed her beaded braids. “I love how you’re so okay with your big-girl thighs.”

  Penny hesitantly accepted the compliment. Monique was a work friend, and that wasn’t the same as a real friend. Life here was different than in the Midwest. In New York City you had to settle.

  In the city every gesture was calculated to dominate. Every detail of a woman’s appearance demonstrated status. Penny hugged the cardboard box of warm coffees, holding it like a vanilla-scented teddy bear, suddenly self-conscious.

  Monique cut her eyes sideways, recoiling in shock at the sight of something on Penny’s face. To judge from Monique’s grimace, it couldn’t be anything less than a nesting tarantula. “A place in Chinatown …?” Monique began. She took a step away. “They can take care of those crazy werewolf hairs you have sprouting around your mouth.” Adding in a stage whisper, “So cheap even you can afford it.”

  Growing up on her parents’ farm in Shippee, Nebraska, Penny had seen cooped-up hens peck one another to bloody death with more subtlety.

  It was obvious that some women had never gotten the memo about universal sisterhood.

  As they arrived on the sixty-fourth floor the elevator doors opened, and the two young women were greeted by the probing noses of four German shepherds. Bomb-sniffing dogs. A burly uniformed guard stepped forward to wand them with a metal detector.

  “We’re on lockdown above this level,” explained Monique. “Because of you-know-who being in the building, they’ve evacuated everything between sixty-four and the roof.” Sassy as ever, Monique took Penny by the elbow and reiterated, “Chairs, girl. Fetch!”

  It was ludicrous. BB&B was the most high-powered firm in the country, but they never had enough seating to go around. Like a game of musical chairs, if you arrived late to any important meeting you had to stand. At least until some underling like Penny was sent to find you a chair.

  While Monique ran to the meeting to stall for time, Penny tried door after door and found them all locked. The hallways were strangely deserted, and through the window beside each locked door Penny could see the chairs each associate had safely left behind at his or her desk. Here in the rarified air of the executive floors it was always hushed, but this was spooky. No voices or footsteps echoed off the paneled walls or tasteful landscape paintings of the Hudson River Valley. Open bottles of Evian had been left behind so quickly that they still fizzed.

  She’d completed a four-year undergraduate degree in gender politics, and two years of law school, and now she was rounding up chairs for people too lazy or too self-important to take their own to meetings. It was so demeaning. This, no, this was something Penny would definitely not e-mail her parents to boast about.

  Her phone began to vibrate. It was Monique texting: “SISTER, WHERE ARE THOSE CHAIRS?!” By now Penny was sprinting down hallways. With the cardboard box of coffees barely balanced in one hand, she was lunging at doors, grabbing knobs only long enough to see whether they’d turn. Frantic, she’d all but given up hope, hurtling breathlessly from one locked office to the next. When one knob actually turned, she wasn’t ready. The door swung inward, and she was instantly thrown off balance. Falling through the doorway in a great splash of hot coffee, she landed on something as soft as clover. Sprawled on her stomach, she saw close-up the intertwined greens, reds, and yellows of beautiful flowers. Many flowers. She’d landed in a garden. Exotic birds perched among the roses and lilies. But hovering directly in front of her face was a polished black shoe. A man’s shoe, its toe was poised as if ready to kick her in the teeth.

  This wasn’t a real garden. The birds and flowers were merely patterns in an Oriental rug. Hand-dyed and woven from pure silk, it was the only one of its kind in all of BB&B, and Penny realized exactly whose office this was. She saw herself reflected in the dark shine of the shoe: her coffee-drenched hair swinging in her eyes, her cheeks flushed, and her mouth hanging slack as she panted on the floor, out of breath. Her chest heaving. The fall had lifted her skirt, leaving her bottom stuck up in the air. Thank goodness for old-school opaque cotton panties. Had Penny been wearing a racy thong, she would have died from shame.

  Her eyes followed the black shoe up to a strong, sinewy ankle sheathed in an argyle sock. Even the jaunty green-and-gold pattern of the man’s sock couldn’t disguise the muscles within it. Beyond that was the hem of a trouser cuff. From this low angle, her gaze followed the sharp crease of the gray-flannel pant leg upward to a knee. Meticulous tailoring and cut revealed the contour of a powerful thigh. Long legs. Tennis player legs, Penny thought. From there the trouser inseam led her eyes to a sizable bulge, like a huge fist wrapped in smooth, soft flannel.

  She felt the hot wetness between her and the floor. She was wallowing on the squashed cups. A combined gallon of soy latte skinny half-caf mocha chai venti macchiato was soaking into her clothes and ruining the room’s priceless floor covering.

  Even in the buffed, murky leather of the shoe, Penny could see the blush in her cheeks deepen. She gulped. Only a voice broke the moment’s trancelike spell.

  A man said something. The tone sounded firm, but as soft as the silk carpet. Pleasant and bemused, it repeated, “Have we been introduced?”

  Penny’s eyes looked up through the veil of her long, fluttering eyelashes. A face loomed in the distance. At the farthest point of this gray-flannel vista, there were the features she’d seen so often in the supermarket tabloids. His eyes were blue; his forehead was fringed by a boyish ruff of his blond hair. His gentle smile put a dimple into each of his clean-shaved cheeks. His expression was mild, pleasant as a doll’s. No wrinkles in his brow or cheeks suggested he’d ever worried or sneered. Penny knew from the tabloids that he was forty-nine years old. Neither did crow’s-feet offer any proof that he’d smiled very often.

  Still sprawled on the floor, Penny gasped. “It’s you!” She squeaked, “You’re him! I mean, you’re you!” He wasn’t a client of the firm. Quite the opposite, he was the defendant in the palimony case. Penny could only assume he was here to be deposed.

  He was seated in a guest chair, one of the firm’s highly carved Chippendale armchairs upholstered in red leather. The smells of leather and shoe polish were pungent. Framed diplomas and leather-bound sets of law books lined the room’s walls.

  Behind him was a mahogany desk that glowed crimson from a century of hand rubbing and beeswax. Standing on the far side of the desk was a stooped figure whose bald head glowed almost as red, spotted and blotched with age. In the gaunt face the rheumy eyes blazed with outrage. Thin, palsied lips revealed tobacco-stained dentures. On all of the diplomas and certificates and awards, inked in elaborate gothic calligraphy, was the name Albert Brillstein, Esq.

  In polite response to her stammering, the younger man asked, unflustered, “And who might you be?”

  “She’s no one,” snarled the man standing behind the desk, the firm’s senior partner. “She shouldn’t even be here! She’s nothing but a girl Friday. She’s failed the bar exam three times!”

  The words stung Penny as if she’d been slapped. In shame she looked away from the blue eyes and once mo
re caught sight of her reflection in the younger man’s shoe. Her boss was right. She was just a gofer. She was nobody. Just some stupid bumpkin who’d moved to New York with dreams of finding some … destiny. Something. The brutal truth was that she’d probably never pass the bar. She’d spend her life filing papers and fetching coffee, and nothing wonderful would ever happen to her.

  Without waiting for her to get up, Mr. Brillstein snapped, “Out.” He pointed a trembling, bony index finger at the open door and shouted, “Remove yourself!”

  In the pocket of her skirt, her phone began to vibrate. Penny didn’t have to look to know it was Monique, justifiably exasperated.

  Brillstein was right. She shouldn’t be here. She should be in suburban Omaha. She should be happily married to a pleasant, even-tempered Sigma Chi. They would have two babies and a third on the way. That was her fate. She should be covered in baby spit instead of expensive double-shot espressos.

  Reflected in the shoe, there she was, made as tiny as Alouette D’Ambrosia had been shrunken in the screens of so many cell phones. Penny felt tears well up in her eyes and watched one spill down her cheek. Self-loathing flooded her. With her hand, she dashed the wetness away and hoped neither of the men had noticed it. Spreading her fingers against the carpet, she tried to push herself up, but the combination of whipped cream, caramel, and chocolate syrup was gluing her down. Even if she could get to her feet, she worried that the hot liquid would make her blouse transparent.

  Despite their cheerful color, the blue eyes watching her were as focused and unblinking as any camera. They were measuring and recording her. He wasn’t any more handsome than she was beautiful, but his jaw was firmly set. He oozed confidence.

  Mr. Brillstein stammered, “Mr. Maxwell, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this rude interruption.” Lifting his telephone and punching a few numbers, he said, “Rest assured that I’ll have this young lady evicted from the building immediately.” Into the receiver he bellowed, “Security!” Judging from the vehemence in his voice, this would be no simple dismissal. It sounded as if he planned to have her flung from the roof.

  “May I offer you a hand?” asked the blond man, reaching down.

  A signet ring with a large red stone gleamed on his finger. Later, Penny would discover that it was the third-largest ruby ever mined in Sri Lanka. It had belonged to sultans and maharajas, and here it was coming to her rescue. Its sparkle was blinding. The fingers that closed around her own were surprisingly cold. An equally amazing strength lifted her as the lips, those lips she’d seen kissing movie stars and heiresses, said, “Now that your evening is free …” He asked, “Would you grant me the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight?”

  The saleslady at Bonwit Teller eyed Penny with a disdainful expression. “May I show you something?” she asked, a sneer in her voice.

  Penny had run every step, all eight blocks from the subway to the department store, and hadn’t yet caught her breath. “A dress?” she stammered. More resolutely, she added, “An evening gown.”

  The associate’s eyes looked her up and down, not missing a detail. Not Penny’s tragic knockoff Jimmy Choos, bought at an Omaha factory-outlet mall. Not her shoulder bag with the fraying shoulder strap and pecan pie stains. Her almost-Burberry trench did little to hide the fact that her clothes were drenched in cold coffee and sticky whipped cream. A few houseflies had found the sweet scent and followed her from the crowded train platform. Penny tried to wave them away with a cavalier gesture. To a stranger, she must’ve looked deranged. The saleslady’s evaluation felt like an eternity, and Penny fought the urge to turn on her scuffed heel and stalk away from the snobbish woman.

  For her part, the sales associate could’ve been a penthouse socialite slumming from Beekman Place. Chanel everything. Immaculate nails. No pesky black flies hovered around her perfect French braid or roamed the flawless skin of her forehead. After taking cold inventory, the associate’s eyes met Penny’s. With an aloof tone she asked, “Is it for a special occasion?”

  Penny started to explain the situation, but caught herself. The world’s richest man had asked her to dinner tonight. He’d suggested eight o’clock at Chez Romaine, the most exclusive eatery in the city. Perhaps in the world. People reserved tables years in advance. Years! He’d even agreed to meet her there. No way did Penny want him to see the sixth-floor-walk-up, one-bedroom she shared with her two roommates. Of course, she was busting, absolutely dying to tell someone. Good news didn’t seem real until you’d told at least a dozen friends. But this suspicious stranger in the dress department of Bonwit Teller would never believe her. Such an incredible story would only serve to confirm the impression that Penny was a homeless nut job, here to waste the associate’s valuable time.

  A fly landed on the tip of her nose, and Penny shooed it off. She willed herself to calm down. She wasn’t a lunatic. And she wasn’t going to run away. Smoothing the fear from her voice, she said, “I’d like to see this season’s Dolce and Gabbana wrap gown, the one with the shirred waist.”

  As if testing her, the associate narrowed her eyes and asked, “In crepe chiffon?”

  “In satin,” Penny countered quickly. “With the asymmetrical hemline.” All those long waits in the grocery checkout line had paid off yet again. The dress she had in mind was the one Jennifer Lopez had worn on the red carpet at last year’s Oscars.

  The woman scrutinized her body and asked, “Size fourteen?”

  “Size ten,” Penny shot back. She knew houseflies were landing in her hair, but she wore them like they were Tahitian black pearls.

  The associate disappeared in search of the dress. Penny almost prayed she wouldn’t come back. This was crazy. She’d never spent more than fifty dollars on a dress, and the one she’d asked to see couldn’t cost less than five thousand bucks. A few keystrokes on her phone showed she had that much available on her credit limit. If she charged the dress, wore it for two hours during dinner, and returned it in the morning, she’d have a story she could tell for the rest of her life. She wouldn’t allow herself to imagine anything beyond tonight. Tonight was a gamble. A longshot. Cornelius Maxwell was renowned for his gallant gestures. That was the only way to explain this. He’d seen her humiliated on the carpet in front of her furious boss, and he was trying to salvage her pride. It was chivalrous, really.

  From what Penny had read in the tabloids, Cornelius Maxwell was famous for his chivalry.

  Their backgrounds weren’t all that different. He’d been born in Seattle to a single mother who’d worked as a nurse. His dream had always been to someday support her in high style, but his mom had been killed in the crash of a bus. When it happened Cornelius had been a graduate student at the University of Washington. A year later, he’d founded DataMicroCom in his dorm room. A year after that he’d be among the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world.

  Among the glamorous women first linked with him had been Clarissa Hind, an unlikely candidate for the New York state senate. With his financial backing and political connections, she’d won. Before her first term was complete, she’d set her sights on becoming the youngest senator the state had ever elected to Washington, D.C. It didn’t hurt that the media idolized the couple: the statuesque junior senator and the maverick high-tech billionaire. Between his money and her determination, she won by a landslide. Fast-forward to three years ago, when Clarissa Hind had fulfilled not just her own dreams but the dreams of millions of American women. She’d been elected the first female president of the United States.

  Throughout it all Corny Maxwell had stumped tirelessly on her behalf, always praising her, always supporting her in public and private. But the two had never married. A miscarriage was rumored. There was even gossip that she’d asked him to be her running mate, but once the election was over, they’d issued a joint press release to announce that they were dissolving their relationship. Sharing the podium at a press conference, the madam president-elect and her dashing consort had affirmed their continued affection an
d respect for each other, but their romance was complete.

  Penny knew that such success involved hard work and sacrifice, but the paparazzi photos made it look seamless and effortless. President Hind had been her inspiration for becoming a lawyer. Dared she dream? What if Corny Maxwell was looking for a new protégée? It wasn’t impossible that he saw some innate potential in her. Tonight might be an audition, and if she passed it then Penny Harrigan might find herself being groomed to take a major role on the world stage. She was about to enter the world’s most exclusive sorority.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a large housefly buzzing into her mouth. There, daydreaming in the dress department of Bonwit Teller, Penny began to cough and hack.

  It was just as well. She was getting too carried away with her fantasy, and the future had a way of breaking your heart if you expected too much. Just look at C. Linus Maxwell, who smiled through one failed romance after another. Following Clarissa, he’d been involved with a member of the British royal family. A princess, no less, and not one of the ugly, inbred ones. She was no slouch. Princess Gwendolyn was beautiful. She was third in the line of succession, only two heartbeats away from becoming the queen. Again, it seemed like an ideal match of European aristocracy and Yankee high-tech know-how. The world waited for them to set a date. When the king had been felled by an anarchist’s bullet, it was Corny who supported the weeping princess at her father’s funeral. And when a freak accident, a plummeting satellite of all things, had killed the heir apparent, Gwendolyn’s brother, her coronation was assured.

  By all rights Corny Maxwell should be a prince living the high life in Buckingham Palace, but history repeated itself. The tycoon and the aristocrat had parted amicably.

  Twice he’d sidestepped marriage to one of the most powerful women in the world.

  If you believed rumors, he felt threatened by women whose status began to rival his own. The tabloids despised him. But Penny suspected, as did most people, that C. Linus Maxwell would forever be an orphan still looking for the lost mother on whom he could shower his adoration and riches.