Free Last Night at Chateau Marmont by Lauren Weisberger

version of Joe’s Pub. What was this? No line fanning out to the sidewalk. No marquee announcing the night’s talent. There wasn’t even the requisite sullen girl with a clipboard, petulantly telling everyone to take a step back and wait his turn.
    Brooke felt a small wave of anxiety until she heaved open the vaultlike door, stepped inside, and was enveloped in a warm cocoon of semidarkness and low laughter and the subtle but unmistakable scent of marijuana. The entire space was the size of a large living room, and everything—the walls, the sofas, even the paneling on the small corner bar—was swathed in plush burgundy velvet. A single lamp restedatop the piano and cast a soft light onto the empty stool. Hundreds of tiny votives were magnified by the mirrored tabletops and ceiling, a look that somehow managed to be impossibly sexy without so much as a twinge of eighties-throwback.
    The crowd looked like they had been hand-plucked from a poolside cocktail party in Santa Barbara and dropped in New York City. Forty or fifty mostly young and attractive people milled about, sipping from lowball glasses and exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke in long, languorous wafts. The men were dressed almost uniformly in jeans, and the few who still wore their daytime suits had ditched their ties and loosened their top buttons. Almost none of the women wore stilettos or the short, tight black cocktail dresses that made up the Manhattan uniform; instead, they were all roaming about in beautifully printed tunics and tinkling beaded earrings and jeans so perfectly worn in that Brooke actually yearned to strip out of her black sweater dress then and there. Some had hippie-chic headbands around their foreheads and beautiful hair falling to their waists. No one appeared the least bit self-conscious or stressed out—another Manhattan unlikelihood—which of course made Brooke doubly anxious. This was a far cry from Julian’s usual audiences. Who were all these people and why did each and every one of them look a thousand times better than she did?
    “Breathe,” Nola whispered in her ear.
    “If I’m this nervous, I can’t even imagine how Julian feels.”
    “Come on, let’s find ourselves some drinks.” Nola flung her blond hair over her shoulder and held out a hand for Brooke, but before they could move through the crowd, Brooke heard a familiar voice.
    “Red, white, or stronger?” Trent asked, magically appearing next to them. He was one of the only men in a suit and looked uncomfortable. It was probably his first time away from the hospital in weeks.
    “Hey there!” Brooke said, hugging him around the neck. “You remember Nola, right?”
    Trent smiled. “Of course I do.” He turned to Nola and kissed her on the cheek. There was something in his tone that said O
f course I remember meeting you, because you randomly went home with my friend that night and he was very impressed with both your willingness and your creativity in the bedroom.
But Trent was much too discreet to joke about it, even after all these years.
    Not so with Nola. “How is Liam? God, he was fun,” she said with a huge smile. “Like,
really
fun.”
    Trent and Nola exchanged knowing looks and laughed.
    Brooke held up a hand. “Okay then. Trent, congratulations on the engagement! When do we get to meet her?” She couldn’t bring herself to say Fern’s name, didn’t trust herself to say it without laughing. What kind of name was
Fern
?
    “Considering we are almost never
not
at the hospital at the same time, possibly not until the wedding.”
    The bartender motioned to Trent, who turned to the girls.
    “Red, please,” they said in unison, and all three watched as the bartender poured from a bottle of California cabernet. Trent handed them each a glass and downed his own in two swift swallows.
    He turned to Brooke with a sheepish look on his face. “I don’t get out much.”
    Nola excused herself to do a loop of the room.
    Brooke smiled at Trent. “So