For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: I Need You Tonight
Installment 1
When I got back to San Fransciso I told Cecilia about my one-off in Brooklyn and she didn’t seem to mind, found it a little amusing, did want to be reassured that she was way prettier than the other girl (which she was), and possibly took it as a bit of a competitive challenge, since as far I knew she hadn’t yet acted on our open-relationship deal.
We continued going out dancing a lot. No used to much exercise, I was thinner than I’d ever been and was really enjoying having a new wardrobe and feeling like I was attractive. I allowed my taste in music to flex in order to accommodate Cecilia’s. As a pretend 18-year old club kid, she liked the dance music that was popular at the moment, this included whatever Duran Duran’s current hit was, George Michael’s song about Faith and wanting to be your father figure, and INXS. I related mostly to the way the Bo Diddley beat had survived the Sixties by way of “I Want Candy” and found its way into these late ’80s pop hits.
“I think George Michael’s kind of gay, though,” I said to Cecilia.
“No way!” she said. “He’s totally macho. Look at that stubble.”
“That’s hairdresser stubble,” I said. “Who looks like that in real life?”
We did agreed that the Beatles had started off as a boy band with ooh-ooh love-you hit songs and that for all we knew Duran Duran might become profound someday as well.
One day we got a phone call from Bella at my place telling us that a friend from college was going to be in town and wanted to get together with Cecilia. The guy, Raoul Fourier, was a friend of Bella’s but I’d never been friendly with him. He had grown up in Paris and New York and spoke without an accent and affected a tough-guy French-gangster sort of way of talking. My impression was that he was immensely wealthy, or his family was at least. He claimed to be doing “import/export” whatever that means. He had hung around with the Eurotrash kids at school and in fact had been friends with this other French guy whom I had run into several times in my life, always falling afoul of him.
I met the other French guy for the first time as a twelver-year-old one summer in Westhampton. His name was Artur Brecque and he was gawky and awkward. I was having trouble fitting in myself, finding my place in a new crowd in a sort of athletic summer-camp type environment. I wasn’t too chubby yet, still retaining my pre-pubescent metabolism and ability to eat without consequences, but I was small and had trouble excelling at tennis and golf. I loved the ocean, though, spending many afternoons that summer riding the waves until my skin was soft as butter, then taking hot open air showers in the cabanas and eating grilled burgers or buckets of steamers for dinner at the beach club.
We also went sailing a lot, taking out little sunfishes and dinghies and learning the basics of tacking and hoisting the sails and such. I didn’t do that well in races but I loved the feeling of being out on the water under my own volition.
Brecque was hopeless in a boat, though, always gettign tangled in the sheets and frequently falling in the water. Having a spaz with a foreign accent around really helped me establish myself socially by giving me someone to pick on. I bonded with the snooty other rich kids by mocking the newcomer, and his family didn’t come back the next summer, so I more or less forgot about him.
A few years later I went away to boarding school and discovered after a month or so that Artur was living in one of the other freshman dorms. Remembering the lanky loser of just a few years ago, I tried to score some points by disparaging him, telling tales of his lameness from a few summers back. What I didn’t realize was that Brecque was an “old boy” already, a student who had started at the school in what I would call eighth grade. He was therefore automatically more established and cooler than the new kids like me, who were called Beanies after a long-dead tradition of making first-year students wear little caps throughout the fall.
Word got back to Brecque that I had been making fun of him and he didn’t respond in any overt way, but I quickly figured out that my smart-alecky attempt to take him down hadn’t won me any status and had in fact made me suspect in the eyes of others. I had to watch my back for the rest of that year, always expecting some kind of retribution, since the school was full of pranksters and bullies. Ironically, no actual punishment ever came, which meant that I could never rest easy.
Finally, in college, I’d met Fourier and somehow ended up telling him all about my earlier two encounters with Artur Brecque before he revealed to me that they were old friends. I began to feel like this fellow was some kind of harlequin nemesis who would dog my heels for the rest of my life.
So now Fourier was in town and he wanted to see us? That made no sense to me. Cecilia told me that she’d met him when visiting Bella in New York a year or so ago. She implied that they’d either flirted or made out or even fooled around. I told her that I’d never really liked him much and she said he was a cool guy and we didn’t exactly argue but we agreed to disagree.
Cecilia said she wanted to go out and have a drink with Raoul and I said I’d stay home. She said she might go back to his hotel afterward and I said fine. When Raoul came by my place I greeted him coolly and gave Cecilia a kiss on the cheek as she went out the door.
About an hour later she called and said she was going to come back and spend the night in my room, as usual. When she did come back I asked her why she didn’t hang out at the hotel with Raoul.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s cool and all, but I wasn’t into it.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“Oh yeah. We made out a little.”
I felt jealous hearing this, despite our rule.
“I told him what you said about me having curves designed by Einstein and he agreed.”
“That was big of him.”
“I don’t know. It just wasn’t happening. Why didn’t you make a big deal when I went off with him anyway?”
“Well, first of all, we have a rule that it’s OK, remember?
“And secondly, it’s like at the clubs - you could spend time with him but he’s just visiting and I figured you’d be back with me eventually.”
“That’s what he said. He kind of told me to he was bored and suggested I leave.”
I thought maybe Raoul didn’t see the point of stealing my girl if I wasn’t going to get upset about it. We went to bed and I felt sort of pleaed about the way things had worked out but not exactly happy.