For You, The Stars
Chapter Fourteen: Installment 3
Oddly enough, through the entire time with Cecilia, my friendship with Bella seemed to remain unchanged. She took an interest in us, of course, and I knew she was hearing things from Cecilia because from time to time we’d talk on the phone and she’d give me the latest from her grapevine. As things were starting to fall apart, or maybe drift apart is more like it, I found myself turning to Bella for advice every now and then. She had a sort of hands-off attitude. She made it clear that our friendship was not in jeopardy but also that her loyalty to her little sister was likewise not in question. She more or less said it didn’t make a difference to her if we stayed together or not. She thought it was kind of cool - actually “cute” I think is the word she used - when we started seeing each other, but she also told me flat out she didn’t expect it to last. I didn’t argue with her, and I didn’t tell her about the time I asked Cecilia to marry me, but she was totally in the loop when we thought we were pregnant and she was completely nonjudgemental about that too.
I called Bella partly to let her know I was going to be in New York in a week to visit my family and partly to probe her and find out if she knew whether Cecilia nda Evan were a couple or just friends. Bella had moved to the upper east side, only a few blocks east of where my folks lived, in fact, in a third-story walkup. She was still trying to be an actress, taking classes, getting headshots, going to tryouts, but she was also working most nights as a waitress at the Top of the Sixes. She said her mother didn’t really approve of her squandering - her word - her Princeton education doing off- off- off-Broadway plays, but also told her that if she was serious about an acting career that she should “get on with it.”
Bella had no insight to offer about Evan, but indirectly she told me to take things at face value. Both Bella and Paulie had always believed there was no such thing as a coincidence. They were no longer a couple themselves, what with Paulie in LA and Bella in New York. In fact, Bella was seeing someone now, a really good looking sous chef named Tony. She had convinced Tony to take a few modeling shots himself with his shirt off and she showed them to me when I was visiting. He obviously worked out. He was in great shape. I could see why she was attracted to him. She teased him about the fact that his hair was starting to thin at the crown and I told her to lay off, that women have so many dimensions to their vanity and that we men seem to invest it all in our hair, so don’t be mean, but she just laughed.
Tony was a good guy. He told hilarious stories about life in the kitchen, where it sounded like it was 200 degrees and full of illegal immigrants. He said they were all drinking cold beers all the time to fight the heat and that knifeplay and fistfights were not entirely unheard of. It was partly the job of his boss, the head chef to enforce discipline. He told me a bunch of stories about two busboys in his restaurant who were apparently from India based on this south Asian accent he put on while talking like them. He said one day they came to him and said, “What is this ‘New Jersey’ people are always talking about?” so he tried to explain to them that New Jersey was a state right next to New York that New Yorkers looked down on as an inferior suburban wasteland and that people from New Jersey were mocked for their lack of city smarts. He said the two of them looked at each other and then shouted “New Calhi!”
The point of the joke was that there was apparently an exactly parallel place outside of New Delhi where the analogy to New Jersey was perfect. It definitely cracked me up, but next time I was home I tried to locate this city in my historical atlas - I tried several possible spellings - and I didn’t find anything. So I figured he either made the story up or they said some city name that he totally misheard or misunderstood.
Tony liked a bonghit as much as Bella did so I knew when I visited her we’d get high and talk for hours. Or she’d be out and we’d go meet her dealer on the west side. Buying drugs was so different in New York. It was both more dangerous and in some ways much more social and casual.
On this visit I got together with Bella and Baxter and had drinks and then dinner at the restaurant overlooking Times Square station, one of my favorite locations in the city although to be honest I prefer the Oyster Bar over the place up on the balcony, which is may more expensive and foo-foo. I don’t remember what it was called then. It’s changed hands numerous times since. Michael Jordan owned a piece of it for a while. The Oyster Bar is more of a dive and is somewhat grungy by comparison, so I kind of understand why the girls wanted to eat on that high perch. I had to admit that the view of the station floor was stunning, too. There were times when I regretted having left New York, with its imperial Roman sense of itself and its occasional glimmers of soaring cathedral architecture.
As usual we talked freely about nasty stuff. Somehow, for example, we got on the subject of anal sex, something both Baxter and Bella freely admitted they had tried although neither of them said it was all that great. “Does it always hurt?” I asked. “If you’re doing it right,” said Bella, laughing. Then they talked about lube, and relaxing, etc., but Bella said in her inimitable lockerroom way, “It still always makes me feel like I’m taking a shit.”
“That sounds so sexy,” I said, with a straight face. Then we cracked up again. Baxter made a scrunched up face and then turned to Bella and said “Push back, push back!” like it was some kind of private joke. I filed it away for future reference.
Sometimes I saved up questions about women or sex or women’s bodies for these guys because I knew I could ask them anything and I didn’t always feel that way about whoever I was with. Like this one time when Simone shaved herself “down there.” This was towards the end of our relationship when I suspect she sensed I was starting to lose interest and she was trying to make herself more exotic or exciting to me, anything short of biting the bullet, so to speak, and learning to give head, I suppose.
To be honest, the whole shaved look was not that big a deal to me. The girls in Penthouse and other magazines and in the pornos were all shaved and I still felt that was kind of weird. The hippie in me thought that women should be natural. Also, I was a little creeped out by the whole prepubescent look of a shaved pussy. I didn’t want to be with an underaged girl, or pretend I was, or anything. The whole ideas was a turnoff. In fact Cecilia kept herself shaved and that was one thing I was never too keen on exactly because of my sense that she was somewhat arrested in that way, by what her brother had done.
The one advantage to the whole deal was practical - you didn’t get those maddening little hairs stuck in your teeth, or in the back of your throat, but then there was the whole stubble thing to deal with. Simone complained about itching from like day 2 and quickly let it grow back. Actually, when the hair was very short and downy that was kind of nice, sort of a compromise. It didn’t look defoliated but there wasn’t that thick bush and it was soft instead of prickly to the touch.
But the weird thing I remember is that like the day after Simone shaved I was going down on her and I noticed this extreme assymetry to her minor labia, like the lip on the left side, her right I guess, seemed twice as big or more than the one on the other side. It also kind of stuck out or hung down. I had to admit that the whole “clam” analogy that seemed so weird and gross sort of did fit visually, although the idea never worked for me since clams have that hard shell.
We both noticed it. She went and got a handheld mirror and she started kind of freaking out, like it was bee sting or something, although she admitted that it felt normal. I asked Bella about it next time we talked and she didn’t really have any good ideas but she did say that maybe it was just the normal way Simone was and that her pubes had hidden it, or maybe it was some sort of reaction to the added stimulation she was feeling on the newly exposed skin.
Bella had a way of putting my mind at ease about things like that, but I wasn’t really able to reassure Simone because I knew intuitively that she would not have wanted to know I was talking to another woman about her pussy. Fortunately, the problem went away or she forgot about it at least.
On this trip Bella and Baxter and I went out dancing. It felt kind of funny being out in discos in New York without Cecilia with us. We all agreed she would have been fun to have along. Bella had scored some mushrooms and we choked some down with beer at a club in the meatpacking district. I wanted to go to a nightclub a friend of mine was running one night a week inside another club, near Union Square, the real Union Square. Baxter called it a night, since she had to work the next day. She hadn’t eaten the mushrooms. Bella was willing to tag along even though she’d never really been close to my friend Andrea who was running the club. Andrea had been the year behind me at Princeton. She had dated my roommate for two years, tried a little modeling - she was beautiful in a totally unaffected way, as pretty in sweats as with makeup and high fashion - gotten bored with that, and was now out of school and poking around New York before heading back home to Alabama where she had grown up.
I suspected that Bella was a little jealous of Andrea. Or not jealous really, I just sensed the oil and water antipathy of two very pretty girls who were kind of used to getting their way and fawning over each other. We went to the club anyway and while I was on the guest list there wasn’t a plus one listed. The cover was only five bucks so I paid it for Bella. We went in and sat on one of the couches until I was able to catch Andrea’s eye. She screamed and ran over and gave me a hug and was very cordial with Bella who was equally smiley and friendly, but before long she flitted off again, mentioning her hostly responsibilities. The music was primarily Latin dance tunes.
It was incredibly hot and stuffy in there, what with it being late summer and all. The dog days. Hearing Buster Poindexter’s pseudo-Latin hit song for the umpteenth time since the previous year didn’t make the heat any more appealing. After a while Bella told me she was bored so we found Andrea to say goodbye. Andrea said if we wanted to we could meet her at the club under Indochine - she called it Underchine - late night after she was done at her club. We told her maybe and walked down the stair to the street.
A few weeks later there was serious fire in that club and a locked exit door and a lot of deaths and injuries. Fortunately it wasn’t on the Friday night that Andrea sublet the place but it put at least a temporary end to her impresario days.
Out in the busy street on a weekend night we suddenly felt the shrooms much more strongly than we had in the controlled claustrophobic confines of the nightclub. Without warning I felt intimately aware of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of other human beings, all within a block or two of me, all of whom would have been in my line of sight without the building walls to hide them, like cockroaches teeming in a tenement, all going about their lives with intention, all doing things, all trying to get something done, all pushing some object around or carrying something or rolling a ball up a hill or cleaning up a mess or making one. I almost swooned from the overwhelming awareness of this sea of people around me, totally ignoring me, going about their business.
I said, “Let’s sit down,” and we walked half a block to Union Square and sat on the steps there.
For a long time we just sat there saying nothing. Bella in fact hadn’t said a word since we walked out of the club when she had said, “I don’t like having to pay $5 to see my own friend.”
As I sat and watched the people and the lights I felt myself starting to calm down. Maybe it had just been the peak coming and now going. Still I was in no hurry to go anywhere. It was nice just sitting.