Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck
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getting off that easy.” Rex grinned, a really fun guy, just a swell fun camper, and he leaned out, away from Polly, and reached across the table to grab Amelia by the arm. In his swell-guy, fun-party mode, he was going to playfully grab her, I guess, make her sit in his lap, and tickle her, or something.
Amelia took a step back, so Rex’s arm swung through midair.
Okay. A second before, old Rex couldn’t have been less interested in what was going on at our end of the table; there were something like twelve people hanging on his every word, waiters coming and going, drinks and people laughing and talking about nothing, and he wasn’t anymore interested in Amelia than he was in anything else. But boy, that little step back got to him. He looked at her, surprised, and then you could tell he really liked that. That she wouldn’t let him grab her by the arm, and make her sit on his lap? He thought that just was so cool.
“Whoooa. Hey, what’s that? Where you going? What’s that, what’s that?” He was on his feet now, reaching for her, forcing her to dodge him, making what looked like a game out of it. Amelia laughed at him, playing along, batting his arms away from her, and the hangers-on all started to laugh. Then old Rex grabbed Amelia and swung her in the air, just like somebody having a good time rough-housing with a little kid. She was kind of laughing and squirming, like a little kid, trying to keep it light, even though it wasn’t light, the whole thing was creepy as hell. Rex started to whisper something in Amelia’s ear, or maybe he was blowing in it, I don’t know, she was smiling and wriggling and pushing his hands down, away from her chest, and he was holding on tight, enjoying every last bit of this. Polly was watching this with no expression on her face, looking more like Daria than like herself. Daria by this point was in the dark, you couldn’t even see her, all the way down in Siberia at the far end of the banquette.
Someone snapped a picture. Rex swung Amelia into the air, grabbing her in between her legs, by her crotch, making like he was going to carry her off. And she bit him.
She did, she bit him. On the arm. And she must’ve bit him pretty hard, because he suddenly howled and dropped her, yelling, “Jesus Christ!” Everybody leapt to their feet and a couple of the hangers-on rushed to Rex’s side, including Mom, even though Amelia was the one who got dropped on the floor.
“She bit me!” Rex yelled. “That little bitch bit me!”
Then there was a moment of huge chaos, people looking for napkins and ice water and smelling salts, during which Amelia rolled away from the table, got up, and took a few steps backward. She was mad and scared and totally confused; later on she told me that for a second there she thought maybe she could get arrested. For biting a movie star? That has to be against the law, at least in SoHo. She didn’t mean to do it, she told me, but she just freaked, this total strange guy had his hands all over her, and she freaked. But for about ten seconds, at least, no one was paying attention to Amelia freaking. They were all obsessed with Rex, who was, no surprise, kind of a big baby.
“No, it’s okay,” he said, tough, like he had survived a gunshot wound, and wanted to make sure his men knew he could still lead the assault. “I don’t think it broke the skin.”
“You should have someone look at that, man, it could get infected,” said one of his genius friends.
“It didn’t break the skin, I said!” said Rex.
“It’s gonna bruise, though. Wow, she really got you, man.”
“Relax, it’s not that big a deal,” said Rex, magnanimous now that he had had his moment of making a big deal out of it. And then he looked over at Amelia, not very friendly, but ready to make up.
Amelia by this point was long gone. I was too. We ducked out during the mayhem and didn’t stop running until we were on the Q Train, snaking our way back to the relative sanity of good old unhip, movie-star-less Brooklyn. We stopped for pizza and coke and, when we got home, I walked her through all the shit she missed in chemistry, while she was off taking meetings with agents and PR people, so that she had a shred of a chance of passing that test. Mostly I was walking her through all that chemistry so that we both could focus on something other than the disaster that was right around the bend. And sure enough, when Mom and Daria and Polly finally got home, Mom reamed us both. I’ve never seen her so mad; she was purple and kind of spitting, which Mom obviously never does because it isn’t attractive, but she was really mad. At one point she threatened to ground us both, but we knew she’d never make that stick. The New Yorker was hitting the newsstands the next day, and drinks with Rex Wentworth was maybe the tip of the iceberg as far as their social life was concerned, so there was no use pretending to ground Amelia.
Later on, Polly snuck in to Amelia’s room to tell her what happened after we left. I heard them giggling in there, so I snuck in too, and she told us how everybody had gone ballistic about Amelia and the fact that she was maybe unhinged, or had rabies or something. We all thought this was hilarious, but not as hilarious as the end of the story, when the mighty Rex decided that, after all, they should take him to the emergency room at St Vincent’s, just to “make sure” he was all right.
My favorite part of the story involved Maureen Kafka, the green ogress, who really was all for dragging Amelia into court on grounds of assault—apparently you actually can get arrested for biting a movie star—until Daria pointed out that to a lot of people, it might actually look like Rex was the one who was doing the assaulting. Apparently that insinuation shut old Maureen up, and it also seems to have turned the tide on the let’s-arrest-Amelia issue.
And it’s the only part of the whole mess that I was sorry to have missed. Daria doesn’t say much, but she’s no idiot. None of my sisters are.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Rough-housing with the stars got a little rough Tuesday night at W, where pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller took a bite out of Rex Wentworth,” claimed Rush & Molloy the very next day. There was a huge photograph of Rex swinging Amelia through the air right before she bit him, and an unnamed source giving it up that Rex had to go to the hospital, although there would be no charges filed.
Meanwhile, everyone in America was paging through their New Yorker, and stopping to look at a spectacularly fun picture of three gorgeous redheaded teenagers, dressed in green, dancing and looking like fairies or princesses or mermaids or whatever your own particular female fantasy might be. Under the picture they ran the clever cutline, “Daria, Polly and Amelia Heller, granddaughters of lit giant Leo Heller, on the verge of their own breed of greatness. Herb Lang photographs the terrific trio in a loft on Spring Street, high above the isle of Manhattan, site of their grandsire’s many triumphs.” Cool, huh? But that old La Aura, the hair stylist, was dead right: Nobody really cared about who our literary grandfather was. What they really cared about was: “Which is the one who bit Rex Wentworth?”
School was hell. Everyone was screaming at me all the time. “Did your sister really bite Rex Wentworth? What’s that about? Is she crazy? Awesome, man! Were you there? Did you see it? Why’d she bite him? Your sisters are hot. Are they all like, going out with movie stars now?” All the teachers spent the whole day digging me out from gangs of kids I didn’t even know. I mean, the Garfield Lincoln School isn’t exactly Stuyvesant; there are only sixty kids per grade level, so you pretty much know everybody in the high school by the time you’re a junior. But kids I never even heard of were everywhere all of a sudden, swarming all over me like a pack of rats.
Polly actually made an appearance at school that day, because who in their right mind would miss this spectacular opportunity to be the center of so much attention? She totally enjoyed the whole ruckus, wearing her fishnets, posing in the hallways, laughing and tossing her new spiky do about like a total pro. She was brilliant. You really do have to give it up to Polly; she makes being famous look like more fun than anybody I ever saw. I mean, she was having a great time, until it sank in that the picture was losing first position to the biting incident, as reported in the Daily News. I passed behind her, in the middle of the chaos, and heard her explaining, in the most discreet terms, that it wasn’t Amelia who was the center of the Rex Wentworth event, actually. It was her. “She didn’t bite Rex—god, that whole thing is just, you