October 19
The Present
11:35 P.M.
So the Vanity Fair photographer finally arrived when the party was almost winding down? It was practically midnight! They would be heading out to the first after-party soon—the drag queens and their raucous game of bingo. Ellie tamped down her irritation, as it would lead to frown lines and wrinkles in the subsequent photographs and there were some things even injectables couldn’t hide.
“Hi, I’m Ellie Stinson,” she said, dropping the “de Florent” because Todd was standing right next to her. “Welcome to our home,” she said, the consummate hostess.
“You’re the birthday girl?”
“That’s me!”
The photographer was a rumpled, distracted older gentleman in a safari vest. Ellie knew the type; she had worked with many a lensman during her short-lived modeling career. There was the lecher who’d gotten into the business to ogle pretty girls and ask them to take off their clothes (most of whom would later be fired during the industry’s MeToo movement); then there was the artist type who was annoyed he’d never made it in the galleries and was stuck shooting stupid bitches in clothes; and there was the celebrity stalker, who was in it for the proximity to boldfaced names (most of those started out as paparazzi); and the actual photojournalists, guys who had gone to war zones and shot famine and violence but had gotten too old, or were close to retirement, and so ended up doing party photographs for the newswires and the photo agencies and the occasional glossy magazine.
This was one of them.
“Can I just have a moment to touch up my makeup?” she asked. “Do you want to take a few shots of the atmosphere? And Madison here can get you a guest list if you want to shoot some people now.”
The photographer—let’s call him Gary since Ellie couldn’t be bothered to find out his name—removed a crumpled piece of paper from his vest. “Um, I think this is for Vanities, so really I don’t need that many pictures.”
“Vanities? I thought this was for a four-page profile. Madison!”
“Yes?”
“I thought this was a profile. Isn’t someone going to interview me later?”
“Um, they haven’t decided yet.”
“PARDON?” asked Ellie, who had learned to use that word only after hanging out with Blake, who visibly shuddered every time she asked, “What?”
“They changed editors. They fired the one who ordered the profile, and the new editor doesn’t know what she wants to do yet,” Madison explained.
Ellie seethed. All this expense and effort and all she would show for it was one dinky photo in the collage of photos in the middle of the magazine that no one looked at? If she was even that lucky! Okay, fine, but maybe there was still a chance she could get a profile? At the very least, she would settle for being the featured celebrity in My Stuff, which was at least a half page and she could plug her line, since Wild & West was certainly her stuff.
“Shall we get a family shot?” asked Gary.
“Yes, let’s,” Ellie agreed.
The kids were wrangled, and Todd had managed to locate Samantha, who, curiously enough, was talking to the girl Todd had been speaking to earlier. Ellie fumed at the audacity of her husband—flaunting his little minx in front of the children! She made a face, and the camera flashed. She would look constipated in the shots, which wouldn’t end up in Vanity Fair at all but in some obscure bottom-feeding blog that no one had heard of and would turn out to be run by some twelve-year-old in Idaho.
When the photo shoot was done, Ellie immediately turned to her husband. “You’re fucking her, aren’t you?”
“Who?”
“Her!” she whispered fiercely, gesturing to the hot young thing.
“Her!” yelped Todd. “I thought you said you’d talked to Sam!”
“I did! What does Sam have to do with it?” asked Ellie as Sam walked over, hand in hand with the buxom blonde. “Mom,” she said. “I want you to meet Sofia.”
“Oh, hi,” said Ellie, trying not to sound too shrill.
“Hi, Mrs. Stinson. Sam told me so much about you.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
Sam colored. “We’re dating.”
“Oh!” Ellie said. So she had been right. Her little stepdaughter was a cute little butch lesbian. “Oh! Which means . . .”
Todd glared at her.
Ellie laughed, somewhat hysterically.
“Sof, why don’t you go grab a drink. I need to talk to my mom and dad,” said Sam.