My son came in with the Russians and his friend Nathaniel who looks like security since he's six foot seven, without the added inches of his afro, and I relaxed, finally - somebody from home. Really, though I had nothing to worry about. For a person who is essentially in a strange city, the room was packed with friendly faces. Though Audrey's kids who I've known since infancy, had invited their friends, I recognised most of them. Over the years and many visits, I've go to know a lot of people and gratifyingly, a lot of them turned up. It was lovely. Hugely glamorous and achingly sophisticated. It sure beats a bag of crisps and a bottle of house red at The Perseverance or the Queen's Larder...
Raymond, who rescued me from an apartment in Brooklyn on my very first visit to New York thirty years ago came in a safari jacket. The cute uncles came - I delayed the party specially so they could get back in time from Europe to be here - and then gorgeous style guru arrived with his tall, handsome ex-basketball playing boyfriend, looking like he had been polished prior to being set in gold and displayed in the window of Cartier. I don't know how a man can look so perfect. I am suddenly all too aware that my dress is a tad tighter than it was when I left London, even with the anaconda knickers, and it's recoiling from my knees like they've sneezed in the underground and wrinkling over my hips that are double the size of every other woman in the room. Before I came here I thought I had lost weight but it's a drop in the ocean of skinniness where there are only two sizes and I'm the wrong one, built to a different scale. Even the Russians have been exercising and Zina, previously with a figure I would have killed for, is now a shadow of her former self.
'Did you want to change?' asked Audrey - Patsy to my Eddy - as I desperately tried to smooth the material over my hips - something that nobody else even has above 53th Street. But nope, this is the dress I bought to wear to my book launch, and tight or not, and even though it made me look like I should have a tray in my hand or be working the coat check with a name tag, it was being worn. I had no alternative.
Style guru introduced a couple from South Carolina with an accent you could eat from a jar if you wound it round a spoon. The man was expensive looking with a wide, friendly smile and a yellow bow tie, and moved enthusiastically while he talked like he was singing in a band from the sixties. His wife, pretty and somewhat aghast but so well brought up that she tried not to show it, didn't move at all.
I signed books bent over the table and only realised half way through the evening that I unwittingly spent more time displaying the one thing I was trying to hide, and that concealing it in the throne like chair I didn't want to sit in would have been the better option, if anatomically nigh-on impossible since the dress was so tight. My friend Alex arrived, thankfully without his wife. He said I looked good. He had to. Thirty years of friendship depended on it. The Ambassador arrived, thankfully with his wife who is sharp and funny and laughs at my jokes, although I could have lived without him telling her that he had accompanied me to Bloomingdales to buy fat pants (Oh don't worry, she said, I wear them too!) My old boss from Oxford and his wife who happened to be visiting their daughter in New York, arrived, followed by Jamie, from my book club back home, now relocated to her native Manhattan.
I signed books and I signed books and I signed books - and let me tell you, American names are not straightforward... Joao, Zinita, Mattia, Caren... Finally, Jackie (no that's Jacqui, with a 'q') arrived who sits on a formidable educator's board with Audrey approached holding her own copy of the book which she'd already bought and read.
'I loved it, Marion. I got up early in the morning to finish it, and I don't get up early for just anything. But I just have to ask...'
I waited for the inevitable, did this really happen, question.
...'There's no Adam Davenport, is there?'
I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. 'No Jackie (I mean Jacquie), 'fraid not. I made him up.'
'Damn it, I knew it. But I just hoped...'
We looked around the room of predominantly gay men and sighed.
'We all hope...'
'I wanted you to sign a copy of your book for me,' said the Southern Gentleman, with a duck and a dive and a spin of an invisible microphone. 'I was hoping to get you to bend over the table again.' He added. So, okay, maybe not so much of the Gentleman. But hey. Thank goodness for the straight man. They can still manage to make you feel you have an asset instead of just a big ass.
So, then I made the speech.
That at least was half-assed.
