·CHAPTER TEN·

Barry

“Christmas we usually sail from Tortola to Mustique. But this year Paul insisted we stay in the States. Personally, I like to be with the St. Barths crowd at New Year’s, but Paul prefers Mustique. He’d rather be with a Brit aristo than anyone really interesting,” Adrienne Strong-Rodman explained to her old friend Shelly Landon as her breasts heaved up and down in her skintight gold lamé Versace slip dress.

“Isn’t Mustique where Princess Margaret lived?” Shelly asked as she looked back at the coastline of Palm Beach. Her husband, Mark, the former chairman of two movie studios, had just left her for his twenty-six-year-old acupuncturist. Shelly felt at ease for the first time in months on Adrienne’s yacht.

“Yes, Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger have homes there.” Adrienne wanted her friend to get the full picture. “The way Paul sees it, if you look at the Caribbean Islands as Manhattan, then Anguilla is the Upper East Side, Mustique is the new Time Warner Center, a superexpensive development, and St. Barths is Greenwich Village—it’s just a little more downtown, a little more with it, and a little more ‘caj.’” Adrienne was now in the process of trying to make her entire life more “caj,” or casual, but she was having difficulty just letting go. In fact, she was gearing herself up to do a little producing next summer. Adrienne saw herself as the red-hot center, and to stay in the red-hot center she didn’t mind working now and then. Also she never liked the idea that other women were now having her career. Adrienne was raised to want it all.

A waiter in a lamé micro bikini and a matching gold conquistador helmet passed by with a three-tiered raw bar tray.

“No thank you,” both women said simultaneously.

“I’d like something raw, but it isn’t a clam.” Adrienne ogled the waiter as he walked away.

“Where did you find these waiters? They don’t even look this good at the Equinox gym in West Hollywood.” Shelly lit a cigarette. She had cut caffeine, alcohol, carbohydrates, wheat, and dairy out of her life, but cigarettes were her one remaining treat.

“The waiters are mostly from the Miami Ballet.” Adrienne smiled. “We pay them up the wazoo. Believe me, they don’t make this kind of cash doing pirouettes.”

“Adrienne! Adrienne!” Paul Rodman walked over to them. For a man who prided himself on his worldwide influence, he was surprisingly inconspicuous-looking. “Adrienne, my mother says there’s nothing for her to eat here.”

“Paul, your mother’s insane!” Adrienne’s voice changed completely. “There’s half a million dollars’ worth of raw food on this boat.”

“She doesn’t want raw. She wants it cooked.”

“Then tell her to get in a rowboat and go to the Burger King in West Palm Beach.” Adrienne blurted out the “Beach.”

“I told you not to talk that way about my mother.”

“I told you not to invite her.”

“Shut up, Adrienne.” Paul took her wrist while a helmeted waiter walked by with a tray of sushi spread out on gold doubloons.