I Call This Look…
Margot’s French cousins are hiding out at the Gansevoort.
When Uncle Didier showed up at Sara Marie’s coming out party without Anastasia two weeks ago in New Orleans, Margot could tell the twins, Christophe and Christine, were already making their post-divorce demands. Anastasia had been a good stepmother to the twins and a useful substitute for Margot whose own Russian mother had been distant. Everything had changed around the 1994 Winter Olympics when Nina Vasilyevna Gavrylyuk, a one-time friend, took her mother’s place on the cross-country ski team and went on to three gold medals. Anastasia cheered them up with practical tips on the use of cocaine and didn’t even raise her voice when they destroyed some artwork at Gore Vidal’s villa at an age when they certainly knew better.
Margot didn’t remember a whole lot from that night because she got wrecked on brandy cocktails and Hartley Walton cornered her to say that he’d wanted to marry her since their first kiss at Mélodie Marcel’s First Communion party. He wasn’t a real Walton but his mother fucked an Onassis of note for long enough to get Hartley a decent job dealing surplus firearms in the Global South, mostly Kalashnikov rifles but a handful of more elaborate machinery as he met his quotas.
In any case, Christophe and Christine checked into the Gansevoort and they’d brought their American cousin Margot in as a co-conspirator and conduit to send occasional proof of life so that Didier wouldn’t do anything rash like sell their GDF Suez (GSZ:EN Paris)stocks or release the vaguely legal art film they’d made as a family in their early teens. And the only thing those French teens loved more than their tasteful but unearned fortunes was FUCKING SWIMMING. And so they swam four days in a row, ordering gin cocktails by the pitcher and ordering their steaks to their deck chairs “as rahre az ze American lahws weel pairmit.”
When Margot had a sufficient base tan, she told Christine that she wanted to sent a selfie to Hartley, prompting the twins to insist that she forego her typical black Calvin Klein one piece. “Zis is too zeriuz!” Christine had declared, insisting on a strapless aqua and coral floral. “Margot: you can show a leetle skeen to heem!” Margot hesitated until Christine noted the particular resemblance to the Soviet pin-ups who had once been the envy and awe of her own Russian mother as a girl.
She escaped the twins momentarily and snapped several selfies in the full-length mirror in the bathroom on the pool deck. She toggled between the options and ultimately landed on one that made her appear ill-at-ease with selfies but still captured her outfit to her satisfaction. In lieu of a flirtatious note for Hartley, she added the photo and typed, “Я по тебе соскучилась,” and sent it to her mother. It bounced back as undeliverable, just as “I miss you” so often is.
