Upper East Side #10

by Ashley Valentine

  Not that she was uncool enough to say anything.

  “Aye, aye, captain.” Chanel made a wide right onto the FDR Drive that sent Kaliq and Porsha hurling to the left as she did.

  “Don’t kill us.” Porsha tucked her wind-whipped hair behind her ears.

  “Don’t worry.” Kaliq gave her right knee a reassuring squeeze.

  Porsha looked up at him, her eyes glazed and sleepy but the same brilliant brown they’d always been. She smiled and rested her head on his shoulder, still looking up at him.

  Kaliq grinned back, feeling foolish and a little embarrassed, like he was fifteen again. He lost himself in the sensation of the wind in his hair, the thrum of the road beneath him, the smell of the girl he loved leaning against him. It took ten minutes for Chanel to zip through the early morning traffic on the highway, and five minutes of navigating the twisting downtown streets before they reached the docks at Battery Park, where Captain Braxton kept the Charlotte docked.

  “We’re here, kids,” Chanel announced, playing mommy as she guided the tiny car into a curbside parking spot and turned off the ignition. “Ready to sail?”

  Kaliq opened the door and clambered out of the backseat. He breathed in the mingling scent of traffic and salt water and warm asphalt; it was a mix of everything he loved—the city, especially in the early morning, and the seaside, where he’d spent the happiest weeks of his life. Maybe he’d been cooped up in the tiny backseat for too long, or maybe he was just excited at the thought of the illicit cruise he was about to undertake, but whatever the reason, Kaliq actually started to run, dodging pedestrians and leaping over a low gate that separated the docks from the street. The rubber soles of his sneakers thwacked noisily against the ashy wood slats of the dock. His heart was pounding in his ears: it was really, finally happening—the summer was beginning at last. Once he and Porsha stepped on board that boat, everything would change.

  “Sir? Sir?” A uniformed dockhand was running down the pier toward Kaliq, waving his hands in the air above his head like bees were attacking him. “This is private property, sir, you’re going to have to leave.”

  “I’m looking for my boat,” Kaliq explained, scanning the forest of masts for its familiar profile. He’d helped his dad build the thing—he’d have known the boat anywhere. “The Charlotte. It’s around here somewhere. I want to take her out.”

  “The Charlotte?” The dockhand—a college-age kid who seemed cool enough—stared at Kaliq, clearly confused. “The Braxton boat?”

  “Yeah.” Kaliq nodded, glancing behind him: Porsha and Chanel were perched on the security gate, swinging their legs in the air and laughing at something. “It’s my family’s boat. Can you give me the slip number?”

  “Sorry, man.” The dockhand shook his head, slowly. “She’s not here. Captain Braxton sailed up to Newport at the beginning of June—he told me he was planning on keeping her there for the season.”

  Shit. Kaliq frowned at the dockhand, then looked back at Porsha once more. She was kicking her little chocolate legs up and down when a sudden gust of wind off the water caused her gauzy dress to flutter up around her waist. Underneath she was wearing pale pink cotton underwear. He could just make out little white polka dots decorating them.

  Forget the boat: for now all he wanted was to lie down next to her, hold her hand, and never let go.

  14

  “Male. Ball. Male, ball. Male balls.”

  Mekhi groaned and flopped over in the soft, once-white, now coffee-and-nicotine-stained sheets of his bed. Male balls? Sweating profusely, he rocked his head from side to side.

  “You awake in there?” Rufus Humphrey, Mekhi’s boisterous and eccentric dad banged on the bedroom door urgently. “Mail call! Mail call! Are you listening?”

  “Mail call!” Mekhi sat upright in bed. Mail call, you idiot, not male balls. “I’m awake,” he announced, his voice cracking.

  “Remind me to tell you about the early bird and the worm sometime!” Rufus stormed into Mekhi’s bedroom purposefully, clad in a typically demented outfit: a pair of carpenter’s pants splattered with the same dingy off-white paint that covered the apartment’s walls—making them around nineteen years old—and an official Breakfast at Fred’s crew jacket he must have stolen from a pile of Yasmine’s dirty laundry. It was unzipped, revealing a chest of furry gray hair. He held a massive cardboard box that someone had haphazardly sealed with twine, butcher paper, bubble wrap, and two kinds of tape. The word FRAGILE was scrawled all over the box in five different languages. Rufus dropped the package onto the bed. “You’ve got mail.”

  “Jesus.” Mekhi picked up the gawky box. He could have tossed it into the air, it was so light. “It doesn’t feel like there’s even anything inside here.”

  “Open it, open it,” Rufus urged. “Your sister sent it all this way and the shipping could not have been cheap, so I’m guessing there’s something good in there.”

  “Sure.” Mekhi started tugging at the twine.

  “I didn’t hear you come in last night.” Rufus grinned down at Mekhi. “Guess your first meeting went pretty well, huh? Stayed up late, debating the merits of the minor Shakespeare plays, did you?”

  “Something like that.” Mekhi burrowed through another layer of paper before finally reaching the flaps of the cardboard box. If there had been any discussion at all the previous night, he couldn’t remember it. He could barely remember anything except the sensation of Gabriel’s tongue on his, the fuzz of Gabriel’s facial hair against his own stubble.

  Eek.

  He couldn't believe their intellectual salon went from swapping literary to swapping spit—and fast. Talk about an introductory “getting to know you” meeting. He wondered if that’s what Gabriel had in mind when they sought out “like-minded young men and women” and asked applicants to attach their pictures.

  “I remember my old salon days.” Rufus perched on the windowsill and watched as his son reached into the depths of the cardboard box. Mekhi pulled out fistful after fistful of crumpled-up newspaper. “We had some pretty crazy times back then.”

  “It wasn’t so crazy,” Mekhi replied defensively. At last his hand gripped something firm inside the mush of newspaper. Grabbing hold tightly, he pulled on the narrow object until it popped out and the loose cardboard fell to the ground, showering balled-up newspaper all over his floor.

  Rufus laughed. “Too bad. You kids today. No passion, no guts. I remember back when I was your age, me and some friends, we’d go out to the lakes, up in New England. Camp out, write poetry, stay up all night talking.”

  Mekhi half-listened as he pondered the object in his hands: it was about two feet long and wrapped tightly in a cocoon of bubble wrap and packing tape. He dug at the wrapping with his fingernail, anxiously going over the events of the night before. How far had he gone with Gabriel exactly? How had he gotten back home? He had almost no memory of putting himself to bed. And he’d woken up in just his favorite pair of red Gap boxers—had he been wearing them yesterday? He couldn’t remember.

  Rufus had a faraway look in his eye as he continued: “I remember this one afternoon, out on the lake, things got pretty heated. We were all out skinny-dipping and I had this very passionate argument with Crews Whitestone—you know, the playwright. We were arguing about the elemental nature of truth, and things just got so heated, wouldn’t you know it, before long there we were, rolling around on the beach, wrestling one another to the ground, each trying to get the other to admit that his conception of the truth was the superior one.”

  Mekhi was only half-listening to his dad’s pornographic mumblings. He’d found a gap in the bubble wrap and unwound it from the long, ceramic...thing.

  “Yeah, your literary get-togethers today are probably much more dignified, aren’t they?” Rufus went on. “But that’s how we liked it then: naked, vibrant, duking it out over the truth. God, those were the days.”

  Still trying to tune out his dad, Mekhi tossed the excess wrapping aside and considered
the vessel in his hands: it was a long, hollow, tapered column of white ceramic, finished in a soft, inviting glaze. It was about eighteen inches tall, and open at the top, so it must have been a vase. At the base were two small, rounded pieces, one on either side, which helped stabilize the tall, central shaft. It was a vase. It was something. It was...well, a nicely glazed penis.

  This was his sister’s idea of a present? He put the vase—or whatever it was—on his bedside table and eyed it warily.

  “Well, I’d recognize that anywhere.” Rufus chuckled, interrupting his reminiscence. He picked up the vase and stroked it gently. “You know who made that, don’t you? Your mother. That’s her handiwork.”

  “Really?” Mekhi took the vase back from his father and studied it more carefully. Maybe he was mistaken: maybe it resembled a rocket ship in flight, or an alien, or maybe it was an abstract representation of an earth mother flanked on either side by her children.

  Nope. No matter how he squinted at it or turned his head, it just looked like a big wang.

  He turned the vase over to study the base, where he found a tiny, hand-carved inscription: “A totem for my son. Imparted with love.”

  A totem? What the hell did that mean? Was his mother trying to tell him something, something about himself that he’d somehow never managed to figure out before? He hadn’t seen his mom in years, and then this—a penis-shaped vase coincidentally shows up in the mail just hours after he’d made out with a guy? But he wasn’t gay. How could he be gay? He loved girls. He had loved Chanel. He had loved Nicole. And he had loved Yasmine most of all.

  Right: the girl who looks like a boy.

  Was it possible that he was gay and that everyone but him had known it all along? Was he one of those obviously gay little boys who like to have tea parties with their stuffed animals and carry their mothers’ old purses to school?

  Sighing as he placed the vase on the floor by his bed, Mekhi looked up at his Dad, who was lost in thought. “So, you were telling me about the skinny-dipping and the literary discussion.” Mekhi paused. “Was that like, um, normal? For your literary conversations to end up...with you, like, naked with some other guy?”

  “Normal!” Rufus laughed heartily. “Believe me, when it comes to literature there’s nothing more normal. Passion. Fire. When you’re young, you’re just filled with it. It’s got to play out somehow.”

  Mekhi nodded, brow furrowed. “So you’re saying that, in your experience, it’s not uncommon for a literary salon to turn into a naked same-sex orgy?”

  “More common than you think, sonny.” Rufus ruffled his son’s mussed bed-head affectionately. “Too bad times have changed.”

  Yeah, too bad.

  15

  “Turn your head now, just to the left a tiny centimeter...Another centimeter...”

  Yasmine complied, turning her head slightly to the left to allow Bailey Winter an unrestrained look at her profile.

  “My goodness, isn’t that just yummy?” Bailey was talking to no one in particular as he scribbled furiously in his sketchbook, wielding his pencil and turning the pages like a madman. “Yes, yes, Yasmine, my dear, this is it, you’ve really got it. You give Naomi and Tyra and those little chickadees a run for their money now, don’t you, dearest? Mmmm!”

  Only half-listening and unsure who Naomi and Tyra were anyway, Yasmine fiddled with the camera that was perched on her lap like a kitten. She was reclining on a long stone sofa laden with enough pillows and fur throws to actually make it pretty comfortable, but hot for a July afternoon, with a nice, clear view of the pool. She watched Jaylen Harrison frolicking in the shallow end, clad only in a floral-print, European-style bathing suit that left nothing to the imagination, while his monkey perched on the diving board, eating a bowlful of grapes.

  How erotic.

  She wasn’t supposed to fiddle too much, so she couldn’t study the shot through the viewfinder, but she was confident it was all cinematic gold: there was Jaylen wading through the waist-high water, chattering into his Bluetooth headset with Sweetie chomping in the background. Behind him, Stefan, the skinny houseboy, was sweeping the flagstone path that led from the tennis courts to the main residence, trying not to accidentally whack the five overindulged pugs that were angrily attacking the broom. Every so often, she slid the camera across her lap to face Bailey Winter himself, who was wearing a vintage boy’s khaki suit—short pants and all—that he’d had remade to accommodate his girth. It was the raw material for a jaw-dropping documentary.

  “Don’t fiddle too much, darling,” clucked Bailey disapprovingly.

  Yasmine smiled placidly and turned her camera back to the action in the pool. As she sat still like that, her mind drifted idly over the whirlwind of the past couple of weeks. She’d gone from Hollywood player to friendless Hamptons servant to kept woman. It was all pretty exciting, in a way, but the thing was, she missed having someone to share it with.

  Yasmine surprised herself when she realized that she wasn’t just staring idly into space: she was admiring Jaylen’s perfectly toned torso, the little ripple in his muscles as he ran his fingers through his damp-but-still-perfectly-mussed hair. Forgetting for a minute everything she knew about the guy, every interaction she’d ever had with him, and every grody rumor she’d tried to ignore, she kind of wanted to reach out and...touch him. She licked her lips involuntarily.

  “That’s it!” Bailey Winter threw his pencil into the nearby swimming pool, then grabbed another. “You look amazing. You look satisfied and hungry all at once. Like you’re ready for dessert, even though you’ve just had the yummiest meal ever!”

  Yasmine blushed, embarrassed, and then reminded herself she wasn’t admiring Jaylen, necessarily, just his various physical attributes. The truth was, her type was a little skinnier and darker than Jaylen. The thought of Mekhi suddenly tugged the corners of her mouth down.

  “Chin up, dear! Where’s that smile gone?” Bailey Winter clapped his hands once, twice, three times, like a demented cheerleader.

  Yasmine tried to will a smile onto her face, but somehow the thought of Mekhi had tainted everything. She missed him. And Jaylen's beefy chest was no substitute for love. Yasmine sighed, panning the camera around the property’s emerald green lawn. Once again, all she really had was her art.

  She trained the camera back on Jaylen, who was now leaning up against the edge of the pool chatting with Stefan. Sweetie bobbed up and down behind him, teasing the pugs, which were barking angrily.

  “Girls! Please! Quiet down!” Bailey stuck his fingers in his mouth and gave a shrill, surprisingly loud whistle. “Daddy is working! I can’t concentrate with all this racket!”

  “Sorry, Bailey.” Jaylen turned and grinned over his shoulder. “I’ll try and make sure Sweetie doesn’t bother them.”

  “What is that plague-ridden monster doing in my swimming pool anyway?” Bailey screeched, his skin turning from bronze to scarlet.

  Yasmine focused her camera on the other side of the pool, and it was immediately clear to her what that plague-ridden animal was doing: Bailey’s discarded pencil wasn’t the only thing floating on the pool’s surface.

  “Tell me that is not what I think it is!” Bailey was definitely screaming now.

  “I’m sorry, Bailey.” Jaylen waded toward the offending turd. “Sweetie can’t control himself sometimes.”

  “Get out! Get out! I will not have you turn my sanctum sanctorum into some kind of sewer! This is East Hampton, not Calcutta!”

  Yasmine pushed herself up from the divan, using both hands to steady the camera as she zoomed in quickly. This was a cinematic gold mine.

  Yeah, or a land mine.

  Air Mail - Par Avion - July 12

  Dear Bree,

  I’m gay.

  Love,

  Mekhi

  16

  “We’re h-o-o-o-o-o-me!” Chanel’s voice echoed through the foyer and deep into her parents’ apartment, which she knew, as soon as she pushed the door open, was empty. It ha
d that dark, quiet, cold quality of a home without anyone inside it, which was hardly surprising, since her parents spent more time out of the country than they did curled up on the couch. She wasn’t even sure when she’d last seen them on the couch.

  “God, I have to pee.” Porsha shoved past her and into the apartment, turning on lights as she went—the landscape of Chanel’s penthouse apartment was as familiar to her as that of her own home. She disappeared down the gallery hallway, making a beeline for Chanel’s bedroom. Kaliq shuffled in behind them, closing the door a little too noisily. The slam magnified in the eerily quiet rooms.

  “Sorry.” He shot Chanel a crooked smile.

  “It’s okay.” Chanel tossed her keys onto the mahogany console table, where they landed with a clatter. “Let’s find something to eat.” She led Kaliq into the apartment and through the kitchen’s swinging door.

  Peering into the nearly barren fridge, Chanel considered their options. “We’ve got some olives,” she announced. “A bag of baby carrots. I think there’s some cheese. You can probably find some crackers or something somewhere. I don’t know where the new maid keeps everything.”

  It is so hard to find good help.

  “I’ll take care of it.” Kaliq charged over to the pantry and started plundering it, removing jars and containers and setting them on the counter with a bang.

  “I’ll load up on supplies, I guess.” The whole reason they’d come back to the Crenshaw apartment was to crash before they embarked on a road trip to find the Charlotte, and to stock up on the essentials: clothes and alcohol.

  Chanel made her way to the liquor cabinet that her parents had never had the foresight to lock, placing bottles of Grey Goose, Bacardi, Ciroc and Patrón into her Hermès tote. There was something about raiding her parents’ stash while Kaliq and Porsha puttered around her house that reminded Chanel of days long past. Nothing had changed and yet everything had. That thought made her unexpectedly sad.