Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes Read Free Book Online Page B

Julie’s nose, the truth is Julie didn’t want him anyway.
    “Sounds way too creative to me. He’ll never be anyone’s fiancé,” she warned me the next day about Zach.
    This was fine. I mean, it was Julie who was looking for a fiancé, not me. I knew Julie was telling the truth when she said she wasn’t upset about the photographer visiting my Latin zones and not hers, because the only remark she made about Muffy’s party was “Well, that was a total waste of Paris couture.”

4
    S omething happened to me the night I met Zach. Honestly, I never touched profiteroles again. I just went right off them, which is really saying something because they’re literally my favorite food after the vanilla cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery.
    I fell for Zach the minute I laid eyes on him. Something inside me went ping! and there I was, suddenly smack-dab in the middle of my own coup de foudre , just like the brother and sister falling for each other in The Royal Tenenbaums . I’m still not quite sure if it was Zach, or the Jude Law in him, but he was beyond romantic. I mean, get this. After we first met he rang me every day and asked me to have dinner alone with him each night. I said no exactly every other night because when a man looks like Jude Law and can have anyone he wants it’s very important not to be too available. And it’s a huge stressgetting ready for dinner with Jude Law so I needed a whole forty-eight hours between each date for my lovelorn nerves—which were in total shreds—to recover.
    Then, of course, there were other things about Zach that made me melt, like the fact that going to Brazil with him was better than with any of the other very few men I have gone with. I mean, he could find Rio absolutely every time, whereas most men only get as far as the suburbs before they want to go home. He seemed to adore everything about me, even the bad stuff. Like he thought it was charming when I offered to cook him dinner one night and ended up ordering in (being a New York girl at heart, the only thing I can cook properly is a twice-toasted bagel). He rewarded me by doing insanely romantic things, like one time he sent me a bunch of peonies (my favorite flower) every day for five days in a row with a note attached each time. The first note read “For.” On the second was written “My.” The next was “One.” After that came two more notes, one saying “And,” the other saying “Only.” For My One And Only . It was too cute for words. I didn’t eat a thing the whole week.
    Zach was a spectacularly talented gift-giver. He always found things that I really wanted but didn’t even know about until he gave them to me. On my birthday he surprised me with a beautiful black-and-white print of one of his photographs from the “Drowned” series he’d done a few years back. (The photo is of aburned-out truck, half submerged in a lake. I know it sounds like a weird birthday gift, but I was overwhelmed.) Here’s the pick of the other gifts: leather-bound first edition of my personal bible, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; galuchat jewel case from Asprey (that’s a dead stingray by the way); baby pink monogrammed stationery from Mrs. John L. Strong that takes weeks to order unless you’re someone like Zach and can charm them into doing it in a day; fringed antique Peruvian shawl from the flea market in Lima.
    Zach loved to take me for dinner at out-of-the-way, dreamy little restaurants. Of all of them, Jo Jo, on East Sixty-fourth Street, was my favorite. It’s right off Madison Avenue, with a little paned window that you can glimpse twinkling candles and chandeliers through. You sit on slouchy velvet banquettes at little black lacquer tables. The walls are painted a faded old blue and antique screens separate the tables upstairs. Honestly, you can go there and feel like you are the only pair of sweethearts in the world. The night we went there—on an indulgent date celebrating our two-month anniversary—I think Zach