by Emma Forrest
A few days later, I came home to a message from Rachel, recommending Cyrinda Del’Aqua, whom she had met at a gallery opening the night before. I screwed up my nose as I wrote down the number, because I had a nasty inkling I had already met my potential room-mate. I opened my eyes and she came into focus: tall, frozen mochacino skin, short black hair, pink diamonds on her fingers, chipped red polish at the ends of them, demanding she be let into the VIP room.
Cyrinda is a downtown nightclub queen. You’ve read about her in Page 6. She organizes parties. People pay her to pick the venue, pick the DJ, the food and the guest list. Her father is a Syrian banker of huge wealth. Her mother was a second-tier sixties supermodel of immaculate WASP stock. In family photos, says Cyrinda, she and her father ‘look like darkies out to steal the silver’.
Why the hell would she need a room-mate? Despite all the money, she is a downtown girl. She likes having someone on hand to listen to her coke rants. That was the deal. She lost the lease on her fabulous SoHo loft because she was too high to bother paying rent. Plus she needed someone to wake her up in the morning, by stroking her ear, because, she says, she ‘can’t abide being woken by an alarm clock’.
I couldn’t believe Rachel thought I could possibly be a stabilizing influence on anyone.
‘Listen, honey, this girl’s pretty screwy. I thought it would be useful for you to realize that you’re a lot saner than you think. And don’t underestimate the cachet it is for her to be rooming with a movie star. It will help her get work.’
And so Cyrinda Del’Aqua moved in the next day, although she didn’t treat me as if I had much cachet. Contrary to what Rachel implied, she was rich enough to know that actors are really not worthy of the tables her father gets in restaurants. I soon realized that I was to be her court jester. ‘Can you help me with that?’ she asked, as she shook my hand, leaving her suitcase on the stoop for me to carry up the stairs.
I was so shocked that I did. When she got it into the apartment she opened it on the cradle bed I had pulled out for her and I saw that it contained almost exclusively underwear and hair accessories. ‘But where are your clothes?’ I gasped and she frowned, ‘You know, I’m really not sure. But you won’t mind my borrowing yours until I get myself sorted?’ She flung open my closet and started picking through. I was extremely relieved to see that very little fit her and assessed that she was a good fifteen pounds heavier than I was.
‘Hmm,’ she pouted, ‘this won’t do. Right. I’ll be back in a minute.’
And she was back in not much longer than that, laden down with bags from Jeffrey’s and Barney’s. She spread her purchases out on the floor and shuffled them like tarot cards, arranging them over and over until she could see a meaning. ‘OK!’ she clapped her hands and selected a gray cashmere skirt, diamanté appliquéd Duran Duran T-shirt, leopard-print tights and Fendi high heels.
As she totted up her purchases she said she was really embarrassed, that she wasn’t usually like this.
‘You’re embarrassed that you spent so much?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m embarrassed that I spent anything at all.’
Usually all her clothes were stolen. She steals from Jeffrey’s. She steals from Barney’s. She steals from Saks. ‘I am so rich,’ she cheerfully confessed, ‘that I feel I shouldn’t have to pay for anything.’ At her WASP houses – a compound on Martha’s Vineyard, a mansion in Malibu, a London pied-à-terre and a retreat in Connecticut – she has to wear dresses and use the correct knife and fork. She loves dressing up, wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of jeans, so the rigidity of family dress code is not a problem for her. The knife and fork business is more problematic, since she is wont to dip her fingers in a bowl of ice-cream she finds particularly enticing, rather than bothering with a spoon. At other people’s dinner parties, she puts her heeled shoes on the chairseats, not realizing that they are her host’s best chairs, because to her they’re really nothing.
I know she sounds unbearable. She sounds like she’d inspire Princess Margaret to class war, but her saving grace is a big one: she is fat. It sounds ridiculous, but in a world of ADBs (anorexic dumb bitches – shorthand the twins came up with) she is something of a minor heroine. Put her next to a Vogue cover girl, Revlon spokeswoman, ballet dancer and Playboy centerfold and she’ll outshine them all. The guys love her. In a sea of ADBs, her uncontainably real DD fat-girl tits are like buoys to a drowning man.
Cyrinda is nothing like the immaculately in-condition Seurats she throws parties for. They are pointillist paintings – beautiful until you get up close and realize they’re just a series of dots. ‘I am the opposite. You see me from a distance and think who let in the fat girl? I’m not hugely overweight, certainly not obese. It would be no big deal, except that I love expensive clothes so much.’
Clothes she can fit into if she gets the biggest size, but that stretch across her ass and thighs, wrinkling and tugging. Ignoring the tugs and wrinkles, she strokes a diamond mochacino hand across her fat ass and drawls ‘Look what my father bought me at Prada!’ or ‘Look at the shoes Marc Jacobs sent me!’
The first week she moved in with me, she wore the same thing every day. Although her shoes changed, the black crêpe dress and Gucci python jacket that I had been admiring for a month stayed. The jacket cost $6,000 so I had continued to admire it as though it were a live python in the Bronx Zoo rather than the Park Avenue Gucci boutique. I told her how much I loved it and that I would die to own one myself. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘buy it! Why don’t you just buy it?’ I couldn’t answer her. There’s no point trying to explain about money to people who don’t think of it as a barrier.
I found myself often silent around Cyrinda, watching delightedly as she spent all morning applying her make-up, almost all of it stolen from Sephora. I put ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran on the stereo, in order that she might have fitting musical accompaniment as she worked on her lips. She has a funny snub nose that turns up so much she can never quite close her mouth (her father’s fault for insisting she got the nose job in Syria). White teeth gleaming hungry at her own reflection in the compact, she Clara Bowed two hot-pink grooves above her upper lip. The more she went out, the more I stayed in, waiting for her to return. She invited me along, but I couldn’t watch her properly in a darkly lit nightclub, with ADB chatter all around, as spiky and foolish as stiletto heels on sidewalk gratings.
When, around two or three each night, I heard her key in the door, I would tap on the partition and join her as she kicked off her pumps and crawled, fully clothed, under the covers. Yawning, she’d précis her night, reeling off a list of who showed and who didn’t, who dazzled and who made a fool of themselves, who was asked to dance by DiCaprio, and who was caught giving a blow-job in full view of the entire room.
Her mochacino jaw would be grinding and she’d waver between party fatigue, dragging sleepy-time oxygen through her upturned nose, and the desire to sit up and talk. She’d turn away from me, her face burrowed into the pillow, her hair ornaments billowing about her like Prada ribbons on a Marc Jacobs maypole. Then she’d sit bolt upright, tucking pillows behind her back, holding her face with her hand so she could have perfect eye contact. She liked to control things. I liked to be controlled.
‘Be a honey and fetch me a bowl of cereal. Make sure the milk is nice and cold and that the bowl is filled to the top.’ And I’d do it immediately, balancing the brimful bowl with utmost attention, all the while trying to maintain eye contact so that she wouldn’t turn over and slump into sleep. Taking the bowl from me, she shoveled spoonfuls of cereal into her still-glossy lips, timing the spoon so it would avoid the chomps of her coke-stimulated teeth. Chomp and chomp and spoon and swallow. Chomp and chomp and spoon and dribble. Bored of a bite, I’d have to remind her the food was still on her tongue, as she recalled the electric-blue jumpsuit worn by Leo’s lady friend.
I thought about the girls I was usually put up against in auditions. In LA, they were slim as pins with soft, fat lips. In New York they we
re even thinner, with lips to match (which is the New York indie scene’s notion of anti-LA elegance: thin lips). Cyrinda was lucky that she considered acting so lowly. If she had ever had to put herself through auditions, her belief in her own infallible beauty would have been considerably knocked.
She was gorgeous, touchable. I caught her touching herself once or twice, sometimes in masturbatory poses, sometimes just running a finger across her soft forearm, smiling at the high-quality silk that kept her insides from falling out. It was as if her impossibly rich family had opted for the most expensive materials when conceiving Cyrinda. It is not just a healthier diet and standard of living that makes rich people appear prettier than poor people. Their parents spend more on them. Her parents knew, perhaps, that they were going to divorce while their baby was learning to toddle, and they wanted to make up for emotional trauma by swapping it for looks, no expense spared.
The first thing that you see about Cyrinda is her skin. Like Marilyn with self-confidence, she has flesh impact. But before you see her, the first thing you smell about Cyrinda is that she never showers. Nobody minds because she is so rich and she smells of the dirt that lines paper money, not the dirt of the streets or the farm. Because she is so rich and so popular, nobody says anything.
Nobody tastes it when they kiss her or go down on her, because they will not allow themselves to. Her money is there, so her smell is not. They do not see the visual side effects of her money dirt. There’s dirt under her nails and mascara collecting in the corners of her eyes. Men have mentioned that, the nail filth and eyelash gunk, but only in the context of it being attractive. They say she is the filthy girl made flesh.
If I were a guy, and I had no nose, I would want to screw Cyrinda.
Many have, although it has never altered her continuing appeal to those who have yet to have a go. She is the only woman I have ever encountered whose sexual exploits are, like men’s, celebrated rather than frowned upon.
The more disgusted I became by her, the more I wanted to look at her. And the more I wanted to look at her, the more I wanted to touch her.
The twins thought she had rad style. They liked that she was fat. They loved her crazy hair and vintage T-shirts. But they didn’t like her voice. They didn’t like the way she talked to me or the way that I responded.
‘That girl is so fucking arrogant,’ hissed the Red twin, cornering me at the laundromat. ‘I mean, she has got great clothes. Good taste. For a rich person.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘She fucking stinks, for one thing.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh come on, Ruby, I can smell her from across the street. And you can too. So tell me. Do you like her for her T-shirts? Or for her money? Because I can understand wanting a room-mate who has good clothes you can borrow. But if it’s money, then that’s just dumb ’cos you made your own already. All by yourself.’
‘My parents had money, I’m sorry to tell you.’
‘Yeah. But you didn’t take any of it. You made it all yourself. Why is this girl so arrogant? Who is she to judge you? So far as I can see, all she does is swan around being fat with a credit card.’
‘What is so wrong with that?’
‘It is wrong. You know it’s wrong. Not for her. That’s probably the best her she can be. But it’s wrong for you.’
Cyrinda went to a gallery opening that night, followed by a dinner in honour of someone at Miramax. It was funny that she was invited and I wasn’t. I made that studio money last year. But I guess a year is a long time ago. She had never made them any money, but she had never stopped having it either.
When she came home, she was so fucked up, she tripped over the humidifier. I opened the door to see what was happening, and water from the tank was sliding across the floor, where the wood tiles tipped. She had managed to find her way to the bed, but only to the very edge of it. She was lying face down, with her head and torso falling over the side. Mustering more strength than I had bothered to use since the last time there was no one around to unscrew the top from my marmalade, I rolled her over onto her back. In doing so, I placed her closer to the center of the bed.
‘Mmmlaghpersatma.’
I knew, even half conscious, that Cyrinda was issuing an instruction, so I leaned in above her lips, as though straining to hear the final words of a dead person.
‘What was that you asked?’
She opened one eye and answered, clear as a bell, ‘LIE BESIDE ME’.
Chided, I leapt onto the bed beside her, at which she groaned, ‘Jesus, go easy on me. I’ve had a bit of a night.’
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s OK,’ she whispered and turned away from me.
We lay there for some time, her breathing heavy toward the wall, me flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling. An hour passed, and she never turned back toward me. A little chilly over the covers, I inched closer toward her for warmth, snuggling up against her back. She was fast asleep, the deep, true sleep of the hedonist. Her hair, unclipped in places, was sticking up. She was wearing fur boots. Cyrinda wore her fur proudly, answering my criticism of her latest purchase with, ‘But this is Gaultier!’ as if that overruled any notion of animal rights.
I put a hand on her shoulder blades, one of the only sharp areas on her otherwise soft body. I walked my fingers up the back of her T-shirt to her bra strap and felt, with my thumb, its texture against her skin. I moved up to her neck, pulling aside her hair like a dark velvet curtain. Beneath the dark velvet was crèmebrûlée silk. And beneath the crème brûlée was, I supposed, blood and other slimy things, although I could hardly imagine it. I saw her getting harder the further into her body one traveled because Cyrinda was an inside-out crab, with all the delicious, soft meat on the outside and nothing you would want near you underneath.
A car skidded outside. I waited for it to hit a tree, but it didn’t. And because the car and its driver escaped unscathed, I decided it would be OK for me to proceed along her body. Slipping my arm around her broad rib cage, I started stroking her breast. I was so scared, I didn’t know if it was her left or right breast, or even if it was a breast, only that it was flesh. I did it very lightly at first as if it were a mistake. I kept going, like a dirty old man on the subway, holding my breath, waiting for her to shout, ‘Pervert!’ Am I still in the shape of a beautiful girl? I asked myself. Touching another beautiful girl, needing her lush prettiness, am I still pretty, if I need it so badly?
As if in answer, Cyrinda stirred. I sensed her eyelids flutter open. But she didn’t say anything, so I kept stroking. I waited for another car to zoom past the window, but there was no sound, except us: her breathing hard, me breathing soft, too scared to breathe properly in case I made too much noise. It felt like we were alone in the city. She turned to face me, her beautiful bunny face inquisitive.
‘Were you doing what I think you were doing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I liked it. Don’t stop.’
As soon as she said that, I couldn’t do it anymore. I withdrew my hand so fast; she might have been about to bite it. I nursed it as though she had bitten me, holding it to my mouth until, stirred to action, she sat up straight, took my hand and, holding it behind my back, kissed me on my bitten lips. There was so little love to the kiss she gave me that I wanted to give it back.
But I had started something that she seemed to think was a terribly good idea, because now she wouldn’t let me stop. The more she kissed me, the less I wanted it. I realized too late that I want to admire and even touch beauty, but not to taste it. Because, as I should have known, from everything I already knew about her, beauty tastes filthy. When she slid down my body and, with the disinterest of someone who had done it a hundred times before, began to unhook my underwear with her thumbs, I had to push her head away.
‘As you like it,’ she snapped, and, turning her back on me again, pulled herself back under the covers and, within seconds, feigned loud snores, all the more d
iscourteous for their voluminous fakery. If I slept with someone with fake tits I think I would just find it rude. Like, do they think I’m that dumb? Big spherical balloons jutting from their rib cage? Cyrinda’s snores sounded like fake tits.
i invented russell crowe
The next morning she was up and out uncharacteristically early. She had no office to go to, so she occupied her ‘business hours’ pounding the streets, cafés, flea markets and boutiques of the city. Discovering a half-price sweater at Gucci gave her a warm feeling of achievement that provided her with a week of wellbeing and self-worth. All her business was done over her cellphone and she had a knack of taking stunningly personal calls during business meetings and long business calls during evenings in front of the video.
She was not a stupid woman and yet there was absolutely no point lending her your favorite book or inviting her to watch your favorite video with you, since she would talk all the way through either. In a pure party environment she passed for charming, chatty and vibrant. In daylight-hours scenarios where she was required to be still in her own body, she came off as absolutely crazy because she couldn’t even read a magazine article, let alone a novel, without having someone to talk to while she did it.
She didn’t come home that night, or the next. Within days I noticed that, little by little, her clothes were being moved out. I feel so depressed by gradual falling outs, where the person and their life float away from you piece by piece, like luggage from a shipwreck. I would much prefer the friendship to go down with the boat than to float with the luggage, washing up eventually on a remote island where no one would find it but where it would still exist.