A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Bella and Baxter

For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 2

I’d been keeping in touch with Bella, seeing her when I visited family and friends in New York, writing the occasional letter, and making her mix tapes. I’d string together a collage of songs with common themes and not-so-hidden messages. I put “Eyes Like a Cat” by Little Johnny and the Nightcats on one mix. By then I was pretty well resigned to never getting together with Bella but I couldn’t resist flirting. For a while I turned my attention to her best friend Suzy Baxter, who everyone just called Baxter.

Baxter had been hanging around Bella for those same two or three years that I was haunting her, my last couple of years in school. That whole time she’d had one boyfriend, Brett, a guy who went to one of those private colleges in New England for rich kids who were either dumb or too rich to study. He wasn’t dumb. I think he majored in skiing. He’d drive down on weekends in his convertible and they’d smoke together and make out. He was reasonably good looking in dark-haired preppy kind of way but also a little round, a little soft. He was one of those frat-boy party-time deadheads and I thought Baxter could do much better.

Within a year of us all graduating, Brett broke up with her. She’d been talking marriage and kids and he told she was moving too fast. Within six weeks he was engaged to someone else and Baxter was devastated. I almost flew out to New York because she sounded so messed up. We spent a lot of time talking on the phone, me and Baxter, me and Bella. Baxter was short and had very wavy blonde hair. I remember after knowing her for about year suddently noticing that she was extremely busty. Somehow, she’d managed to disguise it. After that, I had to fight not to stare at her boobs, especially when she was relaxing and not made-up and wearing a loose t-shirt and lolling around on a bed or couch as we sat around passing a bong and listening to music.

The next time I was back in the city Baxter seemed like she was doing better but she looked much smaller. Her bust was almost gone and she really seemed tiny. I remember ending up talking to her in the bathroom of her little apartment and it was like she was tring to cram herself under a shelf as we stood around chatting. I didn’t smoke anymore but she was chainsmoking cigarettes and Bella told me she was worried that Baxter was drinking too much.

Then a year or so later it was rehab and 12 steps and she didn’t drink anymore but she still seemed shrunken and I missed her breasts.

Bella was from the midwest but she had moved to New York with what seemed like a third of my college classmates and she was trying to make it as an actress. She was working as a waitress and a bartender but she was aslso taking acting classes and going to auditions and one time she showed me a bunch of head shots that were truly stunning.

She told me her mother was skeptical about her acting ambitions but had said to her that if that’s what she wanted to do, then to “get on with it.” Bella had acted in a lot of plays and musicals in college and like a lot of beautiful girls she was extremely adept at acting a part, projecting an illusory personality, and making people believe whatever she wanted to. She could talk her out of almost any kind of trouble.

At one point in school we’d had similar academic problems. You could only drop so many failing classes before you were down to the minimum. We spent a lot of time getting stoned and skipping class and so partly way throguh the semester it would always reach the point where you had to do some triage: drop the worst classes and scrape by in the rest. We’d both started with six that spring and we were both failing three. One of my classes I’d never been to once. The professor had stopped calling my name because he thought it was a phony name someone had slippedi nto the list to make fun of him.

So I dropped two classes and ended up failing one of the remaining four that semester. Bella just “talked to the dean” and was permitted to keep only three classes that term. I imagine I could have done the same if I’d been willing to cultivate the powers that be, but it hadn’t even occurred to me, just as I’d probably never try to talk or cry my way out of a speeding ticket.

We were all finding that real life was a bit harder and a lot less glamorous than the sort of bottled socialism of a privileged private college, where you are fed and housed and healed and bailed out when things go wrong. We’d been pampered and most of us had been near the tops of our high school classes before eembarking on our elite university excursion and now we were out in the world without much to show for it, starting off in jobs at the entry level, if we had jobs. Or scraping by trying to do creative things like dee jay parties or write screenplays or act without much of a leg up or a way in.

Bella had even roomed with a fairly famous actress for to years in school. You’d have heard of her. They kepy the deoderant from one of her commericals on the mantlepiece in their off-campus apartment. Paulie made a point of scraping his armpits with it whenever we were partying at Bella’s. But in the real world, Bella’s friendship with the actress (let’s call her Marybeth) didn’t translate into any advantages at all. They had started drifting apart already anyway. For one thing, Marybeth didn’t do drugs. Anymore.

I was out in San Francisco trying to write novels and summarizing legal depositions to get by. I learned a lot about multiple chemical sensitivity long before that movie came out. Baxter had an entry-level job at a nonprofit. I had even thought of Cecilia for a few years until out of the blue Bella told me she was moving the the Bay Area and would I show here around. I told her of course and said she should give me a call once she got settled.