I have pursued my women and kept them close, the better to bask in the spell of their influence. Perhaps what unites them, then, is simply that I’ve entrusted each one with my story. My women are the portrait of my history, and the portraitists, too. I am, it seems, the real collector here.
To collect is to understand, to cherish. To collect is to demonstrate what you value, what you love. To collect is to extend the self, arms open, unguarded.
MY FAIRY GODFATHERS
Cecil Castellucci
17–18. New York City. Stefan.
I am at N.Y.U. I am going to be a filmmaker.
Stefan. Tall, elegant, handsome. Prone to wearing turtlenecks. Never flashy, always debonair. Big, strong arms. Impeccable taste. Studying theater design. Loves opera. Interned at Julliard.
I live in dorm room 1119. He lives in room 1118.
He and I are always walking down the street with our arms around each other’s waists. He catches me midswoon when I discover my dorm room in flames because my roommate got overly exuberant with candles. I lose almost all of my Super 8 films. He lets me cry in his arms.
Stefan.
Sits on the warm spot in the space between our doors drinking illegally bought beer. Me with a pen and a composition notebook. Him with a paintbrush, painstakingly filling in hundreds of squares, going from white to black, doing his gray scales.
Club kid. On occasion he comes over, dresses me up, and takes me along to the clubs he frequents with more flamboyant acquaintances. Notorious names cross his lips: Michael Alig, James St. James, Michael Tron. Out all night. Limelight. He passes the club gossip along to me.
Often he finds me sitting outside my dorm room dressed up, like a geisha, white face, tiny red lips, dark eyes, wrapped in a 1920s red smoking jacket, drinking a beer. He never blinks twice at my dressing up to go nowhere. He sits down and joins me.
“You look gorgeous, Cecil. You are a real classic beauty.”
And then he kisses me on the lips. Holds for a second. I linger. Soft lips. No spark. Means nothing. Feels like a brother. We pull apart.
Walking down streets in N.Y.C. in 1987. “Silence = Death” posters everywhere. Stefan goes to clubs and parties, but he does not smooch carelessly.
We agree on one thing: Love. True love. True deep passionate love. Romance. Wooing. Something real. Something beautiful. Love is a treasure.
Stefan loves a boy that he met at Julliard. It’s an unrequited love. And me, I love Mitch, a boy from the fifteenth floor.
My favorite thing to do is to gather a group around me and tell a story. Usually it’s a fairy tale. I love to spin a yarn sitting on top of my bed while my friends gather around me quietly. I love the look on their faces. I notice Mitch. He hasn’t moved to the front with the others. He’s in the back. Still just an acquaintance, but he is listening to me.
“Tell me the story again of the Little Mermaid,” Stefan says when we are alone and I cozy up in bed with him, spooning. I tell the story. I draw it out. Make it longer with more details for him. He embraces me like a lover and we hold hands. I am safe in his arms.
Stefan is never afraid to point out my flaws or tell me where I could improve as a person.
Learn to listen.
Don’t walk away.
Stop being so sensitive.
Stop being a baby.
Don’t take everything so personally.
Learn to laugh at yourself.
I get angry sometimes and I slam doors. I cry and shake. I beat his chest and I sob. I tell him he is wrong.
But I know he is right. And I learn in little tiny doll steps, how to grow up.
I stay when I want to leave.
Listen when I want to yell.
Smile when I want to cry.
Zig when I want to zag.
We would plot out our future. Our fabulous future over cappuccinos and hot apple ciders and wine or beer when they don’t card us at cafés on Bleecker Street or St. Mark’s Place. Café Borgia. Café della Lanterna. Café Orlin. Dojo’s. Edith Piaf always playing in the background. Like me, he knows the words in French by heart. We sing together and to each other. Our voices kiss in the air. Oh, why can’t Stefan be straight? I could spend my whole life talking and hanging out with Stefan. Our babies would be beautiful. With dark brown eyes and a love of Princess Turandot.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you, too,” I say.
“I will design the greatest sets ever for the most wonderful operas at the Met,” he says.
“I will travel the world, become an expatriate, recruit a lover, and write novels!” I say.
Mitch snakes his way down from the fifteenth floor. Sitting with us at the tables in the student dining hall. My friends and I watch him perform with his guitar singing sweetly at the talent nights. He is a glowing light and we are moths.
“He’s cute,” we say.
“He’s smart,” we say.
Everyone we know agrees and we make more and more room for him in our social activities. Except for Stefan. Stefan is not so easily charmed.
Mitch has a girlfriend at another college in another state. He flirts with all the ladies. He likes to impress older women.
But he picks me.
Mitch begins to come into my room after midnight asking me to play pool at the twenty-four-hour billiard hall. Or to talk physics and fairy tales over black coffee and French fries and gravy. Or to kiss me awake and to make love.
“This will end badly,” Stefan says.
But I am like the Little Mermaid. I am in love with a dream. I am convinced I am the only one.
Mitch is singing Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall. I get box seats for Stefan and me. We dress up and Stefan brings lorgnettes for us to share. I only look at Mitch. Beautiful Mitch.
After the performance, Mitch does not hang out with me. Our friend Gail has been sleeping with Mitch behind my back. I am in Stefan’s room, crying. Stefan lets me fall asleep in his arms. He strokes my hair.
He whispers to me, “Someone will love you. Someone will.”
He says, “I love you, Cecil. I do.”
“I hate Handel,” I say. “There can be no hallelujahs when my heart is breaking.”
The next night, as usual, Mitch joins our table at dinner. I do not talk to him, but I move over to make space for him.
It is hard to be friends with Mitch. But I can’t let him go. I always leave the door open. Sometimes there are still midnight visits. How I hope for the midnight visits.
Once, when Mitch leaves all of his love letters from his ex-girlfriend who attends a different college on my desk for a week, I am strong. I resist reading them. But my roommates, like evil stepsisters, convince me that I deserve to know what is in the letters.
They are too strong, these girls. I succumb. I open the first letter and bounce on my bed. Bounce right into the wall, unread letter open in my hand. A wobble. I black out for one second.
Stefan takes me to the E.R.
“A concussion,” the doctor says.
Stefan shakes his head. He tsks. “That’s what comes of reading love letters that are not yours.”
Stefan takes it upon himself to follow the doctor’s instructions to wake me up four times a night for three days to make sure I am okay.
I never know the contents of the letters. I press them into Stefan’s hands to give to Mitch. To tell him never to leave love letters for another woman with me again.
Tuition is too high. I cannot make ends meet. There is no financial aid for me. I have to drop out of N.Y.U. I am devastated because I will leave my friends behind.
But mostly, I know in my heart, it is because of having to leave Mitch.
The little voice inside of me tries to tell me that boy from the fifteenth floor does not love me.
Stefan writes me a letter good-bye.
“Forget that guy,” Stefan writes. “Only ‘La Vie en Rose’ for you.”
18–19. Montreal. Jerry.
I am working in
a video store. A college dropout. A going nowhere. A slacker.
Jerry comes into the store and we share a love of two movies: Another Country and My Beautiful Laundrette.
“There is a hollow at the base of his neck that wants me to pour honey all over it and lick it up,” we quote.
“Eyelash!” we quote.
Jerry is always smartly dressed. It is winter and he wears his scarf well. He loves an ascot and leather gloves. In another era, he would have been called a dandy.
He lives in the neighborhood, so he just stops by to talk. And oh—how we talk about boys and boys and boys!
I have heard from Stefan and my friend at N.Y.U. that Mitch calls me a bitch because I stole his soft gray sweatshirt. The one that says “Echo Hill” on it. He always wore that sweatshirt. I wanted it. So I took it. Now I always wear it.
I pass it off like I don’t care. But I do.
I hear that whenever anyone gets too emotional or sensitive, Mitch calls it “pulling a Cecil.”
I pass it off like I don’t care. But I do.
It is almost Valentine’s Day and I get a card in the mail from Mitch. It is not the declaration of love I longed for.
It is the picture of a dunce looking straight ahead while walking off a cliff with jagged rocks below. The outside of the card says, “Another Romantic Enters the World.”
Inside, Mitch has written the word careful.
He probably thought it was funny. But I feel like the dunce splattered on the rocks below. I am broken and hurt.
I show the card to Jerry.
“Jerk,” he says.
He comes back to the video store later that day.
“Cecil, look your best on Valentine’s Day. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
Jerry picks me up. He is wearing a tuxedo. I am wearing a vintage 1950s cocktail dress with my grandmother’s fur stole. It is real fur, but I don’t care. We both cut a fine figure.
My parents think he is a gentleman caller. I have to inform them that he likes gentlemen, too.
We drink champagne at a bar at the top of a hotel that spins us a view of the city.
“What are your dreams?” Jerry asks. He is interested in me. He really listens. He makes a video store clerk feel like a queen.
“I will recruit a lover, travel the world, and write novels,” I declare.
“Sounds yummy,” Jerry says.
My dreams like pearls, spilling on the table. He will make me a pair of earrings with those dreams. I will wear them. They will sparkle for the rest of the evening.
But maybe my dreams are stupid. Perhaps they are too flashy. I panic.
“I probably won’t go anywhere,” I confess. “Everyone is going to Paris next year for their junior year abroad, and me, I’m working at a video store!”
“Everyone is going to Paris?”
“Mitch is going to Paris.”
“Well, if you want to go to Paris so badly, you should go to Paris.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yeah,” he says. “Go write your novel.”
We toast our champagne glasses. I will do it. I will really do it.
Jerry opens his coat and pulls out a card from the inside pocket of his suit.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He pushes the envelope toward me. I open it up. It’s a sympathy card. It says “My condolences on this sad day.” Inside the card are all the spades from a deck of cards and also the two of hearts. On the hearts Jerry wrote, “You and Me.”
“Hearts Day is so silly,” Jerry says. “I think we should call it Spades Day. I wish you a happy Spades Day, Cecil.”
There is nothing else to do but order another bottle of champagne.
19–20. Paris. Jeff.
I am studying theater at L’Ecole Florent. I am a fille au pair to a two year-old named Aymeric. I am obsessed with a French play called Feroe, La Nuit.
My eyes are always scanning the crowds for Mitch, in the Metro and the cafés and the museums. I am always standing on the banks of the Seine. On a bridge. Casting my wishes across over to the ile Saint-Louis.
I sit in front of Notre Dame, reading poems. I have a theory that if I sit in front of the cathedral, the whole world will pass me by. I think that maybe Mitch will show up.
Mitch. He doesn’t know I am there in the City of Light with a heart in my mouth that longs to cover him in kisses. I imagine that if we are destined to be together, then he or I will just emerge from a Metro station one day and find the other sitting there at a café, having a Pernod, smoking a cigarette, writing a great novel.
I have been in the city nearly six months and I haven’t run into him.
Sometimes, you have to give up a little before fate steps in.
He said his name was Jeff.
He was American, like me, at the dinner party we both attended. He was handsome, had floppy two-toned hair with too-long bangs and an asymmetrical jagged edge that was so 1980s fashionable. He looked like he belonged in a new-wave band. A British one.
When we met, I had two broken hands.
“What’s wrong with your hands?” he asked, pointing at the two claw-like casts I had on my extremities.
“Tumor,” I say.
“Cancer?” he asks.
“No. Benign. I have to get a transplant. The bone won’t grow back.”
“Drag,” he says. “But you still look fabulous.”
We smile. I ask him to cut my turkey into smaller pieces. Someone has to cut my meat. I have claws for hands.
He told me he was doing his N.Y.U. semester abroad.
“Do you know a boy named Mitch?” I ask.
“No. Why?”
“I followed him here.”
“Here to Paris!?”
“Yeah, kind of not really.” I feel stupid. Want to take it back. What kind of girl admits that the hope of running into a boy made her go across an ocean? When I say it out loud, I know what I sound like. I sound like a crazy girl.
“Oh, that’s sooooooooooooo romantic!” Jeff says.
We exchange numbers. I write mine down in his notebook. He writes his name on a scrap of paper along with his phone number:
Jeff. I have a summer house and
a small Pomeranian.
A few days later, Jeff calls.
“Let’s go to the Marais! Let’s go clubbing! Let’s have a sleepover! Let’s make you beautiful! Let’s go see jazz! Let’s go to the Bastille! Let’s go to the Louvre! Let’s go meet boys!”
We go to clubs and there are boys, beautiful boys. Jeff has a French boyfriend named Etienne. And they dance with their eyes closed. And the umsk, umsk, umsk of the beat pounds in my chest and makes my feet ignore the floor. And I fly. And the walls start to come down. I am free.
In the news, the wall comes down in Germany. I have a piece of it a friend brought back from New Year’s in Berlin. She tore it off that wall with her own hands. It sits on the shelf with my books and my hopes that it means the Cold War is coming to a close.
I am cast in a play at school. Greek Chorus Girl Number Three, one of the supplicants in Aeschylus’s play. The play is full of dancing, falling, and throwing. The director does not want to kick me out of the play because of my broken hands. He places me on a dais above everyone else so that I am alone, like a goddess.
I watch Jeff and Etienne from my perch as they hold hands and enjoy the show. They take care to watch the action, but always their eyes come back to glance at me. I can see that they brought me a dozen red roses. Over lunch they say, “You were the best one. You were the queen of the chorus.”
We are all broke. There are never enough francs. I am hungry in Paris. It is the oldest story in the book. It is now my story, too.
“Oh, what a bummer that living on love and red wine is not enough!” we say, though the wine we have left flows freely and the stars shine brighter for us.
Etienne gets us all invited to the vernissages of his Beaux Arts friends. We haunt the tiny galleries around the city. We feast o
n hors d’oeuvres and free wine. The food is sometimes better than the art. When no one is looking, I fold finger sandwiches into napkins and put them in my purse.
At Shakespeare & Company, I buy a book of the letters of Héloïse and Abelard. All the other Americans we hang out with make a pilgrimage to Pere-Lachaise to see Jim Morrison’s grave. I ignore it and head straight for the greatest letter-writing lovers of all time, Héloïse and Abelard.
I want to write a letter to a true love that lasts for a millennium.
I am a stage-door rat at the Theatre de la Ville and see Michel Deutsch’s play, Feroe, La Nuit, three times. I am invited by the dwarf in the play to the closing night party. He and I have a postparty drink across from the Moulin Rouge. The red windmill blinks on and off.
I feel like a true bohemian.
It is Moliere in the mornings. Café Pompidou with my notebook at lunch. And Aymeric’s dirty diapers in the afternoon.
I try not to get upset when Aymeric’s parents get angry that he calls for me when he wakes up in the middle of the night. He calls for me because they are never around. Aymeric is like an accessory to them. Like a new coat of paint on the wall. Like their condo on the Riviera. Like a four-course meal at the hippest restaurant.
I decide the boys and I should have picnics once a week in front of the Eiffel Tower. We pack baguettes and cheese and fruit and watch the skateboarders do tricks. Jeff, Etienne, and I walk down the Parisian streets together arm in arm. They are both beautiful.
“Will you marry us and have our babies?” they ask me.
“Yes, oh yes,” I say. “Can we have a chateau where they can run around and grow?”
“Yes, oh yes,” they say.
“I will write novels. I will take lovers. I will put on plays in the garden. I will make experimental films. There will be feasts with wine and Chinese lanterns and everyone will stand up and speak poetry.”
“Oh yes,” they say. Jeff and Etienne make out passionately, and then take me in their arms and cover my face in kisses and we roll on the lawn of the Trocadéro laughing.
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