AANYA LITWIN ♠ THE GOLDEN GIRL ♠ PATRON ♠ THIRTY-TWO
“Angels with long tresses and hearts of olive oil.” Federico Garcia Lorca
Every Sunday afternoon, she dons her mink coat ( lush and luxurious but faux, of course, for she has to keep up with the causes ) and pearls to brunch, white wine with her egg whites, on a rooftop that might as well have her own name gilded in gold around it. They serve her with trembling trays and small smiles, men and women who tend to fall in love with her over merely a glimpse, this iron Aphrodite, playing cards with all the hearts in her hands.
Dolce vita. Some girls truly have it all.
It’s hard to think that the limousine she’s stepping into with one stiletto is about to whisk her away to Clinton Hill, where there’s something baking in the kitchen, where there’s a man who loves her, where the city is a view in the distance and not home. She slides her Chanels over her eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun over the bridge, but really, it’s not the light that stings. It’s the fall from it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
If you’re wondering why this reads like a Gossip Girl blast or text from “A,“ it’s because Aanya Sai was born one of those girls. The ones who never seemed to have a hair out of place or shortage in their cash flow, the ones with the golden auras, the ones who things happened to, the ones who everyone wanted to be and be with. She wasn’t just a girl, she was a brand - silky curls tossed over one shoulder, a bright white smile to match the camera flashes, wrap gowns in warm hues, diamonds trickling down every inch of her skin like vines on a marble statue. And as the Sai’s did, with their name plastered over every inch of luxury across South Asia, Aanya sold it.
Of course, to be a socialite is a careful, calculated full-time job. She grew up in a gallup of coordinating committees, photoshoots, galas, and bashes, always at the right place at the right time wearing the perfect dress. She used her sex appeal to her advantage, rolling her list of virtues in her hands like a dice to a dealer who’d never roll. As it turned out, a bitten lip and cock of the head was all it took to be underestimated.
And while the world slept on her wide eyes and lush lips, Aanya was collecting connections, gaining fame, and ruling a queendom over the Upper East Side. There was not a party nor venue she was not at the top of the list for. No couple formed or romance shattered without her say of approval. In a sea of “it girls,” she was the only one that mattered, nights ending with her mood up and her hair down, flying down Park Avenue after midnight in her sleek little Bentley, smiling brightly at any officer who thought to stop her. Just bad enough to make it seem good.
Oh, the beautiful, bold, and ignored. The golden life didn’t come without its catches. Her parents had as many neuroses that they projected on her as the next power duo. Obsession, control, superiority. She was allowed to do no wrong, but despite her beauty, status, and successes, she could do no right in their eyes either. Their critical glares and snide remarks ( Not an A-plus, hm? Isn’t that Bvlgari a little tight on you, Aanya? The benefit you planned didn’t exactly make Page Six, so I wouldn’t call it your finest hour. )
She inherited them as easily as one would a tennis bracelet or mantle vase. The need for control, for status, for appearance, had her wrapped in an uptight chokehold well into her college years. Her smile was plastic, the midnight rides came screeching to a halt, and it was all Ivy League, porcelain, and platinum. She didn’t bat an eyelash when her parents secured her an executive position under the family’s brand of luxury foreign resorts and getaways, nor when they arranged her marriage with a man who had an empire of his own. Parker Mallory-Dwine, who never smiled when he was smiling, whose truth-telling even sounded like blatant lies. When he kissed her cheek, she felt her skin frost over.
When he kissed her elsewhere, it was as thin and trapping as a signed contract.
But she was young and beautiful, her wedding dress was picked out, arrangements were being made a year in advance, and her mother was finally looking at her as if she were the sole pride of their last name.
And then the traffic light stopped working on 89th Street.
She hadn’t been paying attention, just stormed across the crosswalk in her tall heels, a gaggle of acquaintances struggling to catch up behind her, gazes focused on their phone screens. She had brunch on the same rooftop every Sunday, a tradition that dated back to her early childhood, stationed at the table between her two parents as they read the newspaper to avoid looking at each other.
The car came, Aanya’s purse fell, and a pair of hands seemed to appear out of thin air, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back onto the sidewalk. She was out of breath and half on some stranger’s lap when she finally registered what had just happened. Her life in the hands of someone else, bright and astonished blue eyes blinking right back at her. Kismet.
“Get your hands off of me,” she still remembers saying, shoving her skirt back into place and snatching it up from the ground.
Even in anger, even in shock, Gordon Litwin’s voice had been smooth and kind. There, the moment she was doomed. There, the moment she fell in love. “That is some way to say thank you.”
Aanya pursed her lips. “Thank you.”
Gordon smiled. “How about one more time? Over dinner.”
She’d told him off, of course. And he’d told her that his humility would be the perfect match for her lack thereof. Every day after that, the steps of the brownstone by her favorite rooftop in Manhattan became his favorite hangout. Every day after that, Aanya pretended not to search for him in the street. Those stubborn glances soon became the occasional dinner, the occasional dinner burst into the set of butterflies in her belly, a quiet and marvelous affair. He was a dancer ( and trapeze artist at Parker’s Cirque no less, the world so damn small it was getting claustrophobic), a lover, a poet, a brave heart. He was unyieldingly kind to her and everyone he met. When he kissed her, the moon went full just to see it. It was a classic tale, a sweet tooth for a secret. Every blaring sign in Manhattan shining down on her with the words: “You are in love.”
That was how Aanya found herself in a torn Vera Wang in the pouring rain one year later, sitting on the steps of the very same brownstone where Gordon had rescued her, Parker’s diamond sitting in her lap. She’d run from the altar, she’d left Hades in hell, and everyone had seen it except, it seemed, the man who mattered most.
There was a sigh from behind her when she pulled off her veil, mascara painting watercolors down her cheeks.
“That is some way to say thank you.”
When she turned, he was there.
And so Aanya’s new life began. She was the girl who’d left it all for love, crossed the bridge and built a beautiful home with a beautiful man and tried to stomach the regret that came with some happiness. For in social circles like hers, privilege was the only stain one would want on themselves. And it was impossible to get out.
Realizing that her heart was with glamour, she started her own clothing line from the ground up and proved to her parents ( who had nearly outright disowned her after the debacle ) that she could do anything she set her mind to in order to maintain the life of leisure and beauty she loved. Ironically, she drew most of her inspiration from the circus, a brand named Carnivale, where couture was dragged through the funhouse and confetti was the color of rose gold.
But there were still the bad days. The honeymoon stage soon faded into one of slight resentment. Aanya’s story was no longer her story at all, just another his and hers. Gordon had stood still as she’d traded in. And it was still Parker’s world every time they descended beneath Manhattan or Gordon’s act was toyed with and manipulated by the king.
Parker had, after all, warned her the morning after she’d abandoned him.
My dearest Aanya, rose of my thorn. Here is a parting promise for my ex-fiancé, a vow I never got to make. You’re going to regret the fucking day you left me, darling. I’m going to make sure of that. Yours faithfully and sincerely, Parker.
But you see, unlike that of others, Aanya’s story is not the circus. She is not the bones of it, the blood of it, the glory. She does not own a piece of the stage or know the fire that burns from draping yourself in velvet and both dining on the stars. For Aanya, Cirque Empire is both her cage and her escape. The threads that bind her to it are surprisingly strong - Parker’s hold, Gordon’s loyalty, her parents’ account numbers - but in other ways, she herself has bound her wrists to the empire.
She’d never say this to Gordon, but there’s a lift in her chest when they depart Brooklyn and escape into the faraway night, an usher dragging the shawl from her golden shoulders, a few businessmen at the bar instantly standing to attention, a champagne flute her only torch in all that dark. The fall from grace doesn’t live here, nor does any girl she’s ever been.
Some call it the heart. Some call it the body.
In red, in lipstick, in gold, Aanya calls it home.
♠ GORDON LITWIN ♠ HUSBAND Something out of Shakespeare that tragedy forgot to touch. There isn’t a day that passes that leaves Aanya loving him less. Though it hurts her heart, that nothing will ever be as simple as the twilights they’d spent dancing over the city or in bed speaking softly on everything but they ways in which they were so unbelievably different in the year of her engagement to Parker. She’d eloped with Gordon shortly after leaving Parker at the altar and tried in earnest not to look back.
But that’s a difficult task when the entire city is in her rearview mirror.
♠ EVELYN WISE &. KRISTOF PATEL ♠ OLD FRIENDS She takes comfort in seeing that it wouldn’t have lasted even if she had tried. That all gleam and glow had to tarnish eventually, that if the golden trio of friends still spoke, they could commiserate over Kristof’s dark loss, Evelyn’s red rebellion, and Aanya’s step down on the totem pole. But her old friends remind her most of choice. Getting wasted on Dom, sliding down the staircases of their penthouses, attending various soirees with linked arms.
Choice. Or more specifically, if she made the right one.
♠ PARKER MALLORY-DWINE ♠ EX + ENEMY She never loved him. Never would. Aanya had been Persephone dragged straight into hell kicking and screaming from behind pursed lips. She’d like to think that she would have run from the altar had there been no Gordon anyway, that Parker’s hands by her throat had been enough to dare fate to be wrong. They are civil now, she and Parker both married to others and coexisting, even if there is a chill in the air every time they cross paths. In her heart, guilt and hatred are a confused pair, and towards him she somehow feels both. But that all burns into rage when Parker axes the trapeze just to screw Gordon, a bully on the play yard, toying with pay and tormenting them both.
AANYA’S FACECLAIM IS PRIYANKA CHOPRA &. SLIGHTLY-NEGOTIABLE. SHE IS OPEN.
