The Best Laid Plans

By Lynn Schnurnberger and Janice Kaplan

The Botox Diaries
Mine Are Spectacular
!
The Men I Didn’t Marry

A
RE THE MARZIPAN MUMMIES
too much?

Anxiously I look around the Temple of Dendur—the two-thousand-year-old ancient Egyptian pantheon reconstructed brick-by-brick in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which we’re turning into a party room tonight for New York’s rich and famous. The setting seems appropriate. Diane von Fürstenberg, Mayor Bloomberg, Jay-Z, and all of my darling investment-banker husband Peter’s well-heeled clients should feel right at home among the statues of Cleopatra, King Tut, and the powerful sun god Ra—although I’m hoping they don’t read too much meaning into the temple’s wall paintings of vultures. Tea candles flicker and the faux topiary letters spelling out the reason for tonight’s fund-raiser, RACE AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING, are flawlessly clipped and placed. My nightmares about them being lined up in the wrong order and reading CAR ANGST GLOB WAR—or, in the worst of my delusional anagrams, WARM LABIA GIRL—were nothing more than the product of a too fertile imagination. Or Ambien.

A platoon of black-clad junior volunteers swirls around the ballroom with impeccably calligraphed place cards. I’ve spent months agonizing over the seating arrangements, but Rosie O’Donnell’s last-minute RSVP is throwing everyone into a tizzy. I knew that Hulk Hogan didn’t like her, but now that the readers of
Parade
magazine have voted Rosie “America’s Most Annoying Celebrity,” I have to worry about not seating her next to any of them, and the magazine has more than thirty million readers.

And then there’s the marzipan. Each of the eighty intimate tables for six has been swathed in gold cloth—600-thread-count Egyptian cotton, of course—and festooned with centerpieces of chocolate papyrus leaves and towering marzipan mummies that the guests can snack on for dessert. But although I haven’t so much as tasted them, the sugary sarcophaguses are giving me heartburn. Are they just a little too Hollywood-on-the-Nile? Why oh why didn’t I pick something safer, like simple glass bowls filled with peonies or the green orchids everyone’s raving about?

“There’s time,” I say, eyeing the trees in Central Park, just outside the museum’s pitched glass wall, as a quick check of my watch tells me that we still have twenty-six minutes until the first guest arrives. “We could chop down some branches and scatter the leaves in the middle of the tables.”

“Cut down trees? Not exactly in keeping with the global warming theme of the evening,” my friend Sienna Post laughs, a tinkling sound that bounces around the room like a ray of sunshine. It still surprises me when I turn on the six o’clock news each night and see Sienna sitting at the local anchor desk, although after all this time it shouldn’t. She’s smart and tenacious, a born newscaster. Plus, Sienna’s gorgeous. She has glowing porcelain skin, eyes as intensely blue as the night sky in an El Greco painting, and enough well-placed curves to stop
traffic. I was named for Truman Capote, a short pudgy writer who ended up friendless. But Sienna’s mother named her after an Italian city known for its soft round hills and glorious light—and she lives up to the description. “Don’t worry,” Sienna says, looking around the room with a satisfied grin. “The mummies are inspired. You’ve done a great job, everything’s perfect!”

“Oh no, don’t say that!” I reach under one of the cheetah-covered couches that we’ve brought in for the party, searching for the sofa frame—which is likely to be unvarnished and the closest thing to real bark—to knock on wood. “Never say ‘perfect’!”

“I swear, Tru, you’re the most superstitious person I know. If you spent as much time pitching baseballs as you do throwing salt over your shoulder you could be the next Derek Jeter.”

“Well, I have to have something to believe in. Being raised by the beauty queen Naomi Finklestein didn’t exactly nurture a sense of self-esteem.”

“Does Miss Subways May 1959 still pinch your cheeks when she sees you?” Sienna giggles, fussing with a napkin.

“Of course. ‘Tru, your color, you look like a dead salmon!’ she shrieks. And remember the story about the day I was born?”

“How could I forget?” Sienna laughs.

It was Easter morning and the nurse had fashioned the fuzzy pink corners of my swaddling blanket into bunny ears. Naomi took one horrified look and handed me right back.

“That’s not my baby!” she cried, refusing to set eyes on me again for another three whole days. “My husband and I are good-looking!”

Still, I guess some good came out of the whole thing because it was telling Sienna that story in the junior high school cafeteria that bonded us for life. “I’m sure you were adorable back
then and you’ll be adorable now!” she’d declared, giving me a dab of Dep hair gel to sweep my badly cut bangs off my forehead. It was Sienna who taught me the importance of using conditioner, sweet-talked her own mother into paying for my braces, and who, as we got older, introduced me, literally, to the international world of beauty: Brazilian waxing, Thai massages, and Japanese hair straightening. With Sienna’s help I eventually got over Naomi constantly calling me an ugly duckling. I can even laugh about it now. Most of the time. The same way Sienna made me laugh about how my mother named me Truman. Not because she loved
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, but because Truman Capote hosted the world’s most exclusive party, the famous Black and White Ball.

“That was some shindig. Everyone who was anyone in the world was there,” Naomi would say dreamily, as though, if she hadn’t been so inconveniently detained in Queens making dinner for my father, she would have been sipping mimosas at the Plaza Hotel with Frank Sinatra—or at least George Hamilton.

Watching Naomi has been an up-close cautionary lesson in the folly of chasing rainbows, of being resentful about what you don’t have and not appreciating what you do. Surely being Miss Subways and having your photo plastered in every New York City subway car for one whole month would lead to a life-changing call—from a casting agent, a modeling agency, or at the very least a rich suitor. But when that call didn’t come Naomi married my blue-collar dad—and until the day he died four years ago she never let him forget that he was nothing more than a consolation prize, a plastic ring plucked from a Cracker Jack box that Naomi reluctantly accepted when the sparkly-diamond-life she was hoping for never materialized.

Not me. If nothing else, I learned from Naomi’s mistakes. When my sexy, funny, wonderful, loyal, loving college sweetheart
Peter Newman asked me to marry him I knew I’d struck gold. Even if Sienna did have some misgivings about his name.

“I know he’s smart, ambitious, and all you can think about is jumping him. But do you realize that if you two get married you’ll be ‘Truman Newman’?” Sienna had teased. “Think you can live with that?”

Two months later I had the answer. Peter and I were walking through Washington Square Park back to our dorms at NYU to cram for senior finals when he bent down on one knee to propose.

“Yes!” I squealed, nearly knocking over my husband-to-be as I tumbled onto the sun-scorched grass to give him a big, long kiss.

I let out a sigh.

“Earth to Tru,” Sienna says, waving a hand in front of my face. “Where did you go?”

“Sorry, I was thinking about how I became Truman Newman.” I smile, fingering the tiny diamond chip ring that Peter had saved up for months to buy and that now—even though we can afford something more extravagant—I’d never replace. Then I nervously turn my attention back to the party and see a million things that still need to be fixed. I grab a napkin off one of the tables and start vigorously rubbing the crevices of an ancient sculpture.