The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  • • •

  On the walk from the subway across 110th Street toward my apartment, Ashley told me that the makeup job was just something she held on to so her parents would stay off her back. Actually, she was spending more of her time—and making a lot more money—at a strip club, working bachelor parties and pole dancing for tips; occasionally there were arrangements that happened in hotels, too. She relayed the information with the same casual remove she had used to give the waiter her order at lunch: The chopped chicken salad, no onions, honey mustard dressing on the side. So calmly, in fact, that I almost didn’t quite register what had been communicated. We passed the building with the little plaque that said George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue there, and I still had contributed only a few words. Inside, the neurons in my brain were sending off electric shocks.

  You had to have a manicure and pedicure every week, she was saying, which was kind of a drag, but even a tiny chip in your nail polish could ruin the fantasy. She usually did light colors or French; once she had put baby blue on her toes and it hadn’t gone over well. Tanning too—religiously. Men expected you to be a certain way, and attempting to work around that was more trouble than it was worth.

  I tried to appear blasé, to take it in stride, but what I really felt was utter confusion. Was I angry at her? Was she telling me this to brag? Should I be wearing my concerned hat now, or would that be unfairly judgmental? Should I just listen and not react? Did she want a reaction? I hadn’t yet seen any comparable life developments in a friend and didn’t know what it all meant, for either of us or the two of us. I stared at my feet as they advanced down the sidewalk, black sandals one in front of the other. Maybe this was good, cool, right—To each her own? You go, girl?—and I was the one with a problem, a prude. Did everything make sense now, or did it all make even less sense than before?

  We rounded the corner onto Amsterdam Avenue, and there was the power substation building, blocky and ominous with a few vans parked out front. Ashley’s confessions were picking up speed now—actors, crystal meth, the lease to her car being paid for by some guy in his fifties, how much she charged for an hour. She talked of martinis and pills and being on top during sex; the guys always told you they wanted you to go as slow as possible, but she still found ways to get through it quickly. It was almost as if she needed to get everything out before we entered my apartment, an unmasking in public so we could be on the same page in private.

  I looked at her face from the right as we walked side by side, her duffel bag shuffling against her hip, eyes squinting in the August sun. Small chin, even nose, lashes blinking thick with mascara—her head fit almost perfectly into one of the circles lining that metal wall.

  • • •

  Ashley wanted to go out that night, and I didn’t know where to take her.

  She had just turned twenty-one, but I would still be underage for another six months. In her world, I’m sure it meant very little—what with the dates and the limos and all the things that were bought for her—but in mine it did, a lot. I could get alcohol at a few stores and there were a handful of safe college bars I went to, but in reality, my nighttime New York was quite small. The city as a whole felt like a landscape of off-limits places, each one a reminder that I wasn’t really as mature as I felt in my head.

  I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had been in clubs back then. Even though I had lived on my own for two years, I had somehow missed the memo on where to get a fake ID or project the kind of confidence or sex appeal that got you past bouncers. I had no slinky dresses or four-inch stilettos. Taking a shot of tequila made me gag. I had never done coke—the thought of it scared me. I viewed the girls in my classes whom I knew went out a lot—on dates with older guys, to raves, to sceney Japanese restaurants—as if from across a vast ocean. I couldn’t quite decide if they had something I wanted or if they simply had a higher tolerance for discomfort than I did.

  • • •

  From what she had told me earlier that day, I assumed that Ashley had things to which she had become accustomed—velvet ropes, swishy martinis—and that they probably needed to be in place for her to enjoy herself. I pictured her world as one long montage of doors opening, hips undulating, and flashbulbs going off, all with the HOLLYWOOD sign rising up in the background. Contrast that with what I knew—cheap beer, Chinese food, the subway—and I felt a mounting anxiety. My ability to design some epic crazy night out was obviously a referendum on my life, I decided. I needed to show—for both our sakes—that I had knowledge comparable to hers and that I was cool, dynamic, worthy. I had no idea how to do it.

  Getting ready for the evening, Ashley paced back and forth from the bathroom to her suitcase splayed open on my bed. She wore nothing but a black thong. She looked outstanding. No one with that kind of body—aspirational, curvy, golden—had ever before been naked in my apartment, stalking the railroad hallway as if in some defiant erotic runway show. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t stop myself. What I felt looking at her: What happened, how did it happen, and can I have some too? Could I have an ass like hers and the jadedness that comes with it, or would the price attached be too much for me to bear?

  I wondered what she thought looking at me: curly hair, platform boots, nowhere near comfortable in my own skin. I sometimes stared into my closet—with its racks of cheap denim and cotton T-shirts—and wished for sequins and silk shorts, plus a whole new life and body to go with them. I wondered if Ashley saw her former self in me, the self before she’d woken up—before she’d gotten it. “It” could be so many different things, it seemed: sex appeal, mercenary pride, the way the world worked.

  • • •

  She settled on leggings and a tank top with superhigh heels, and I wore a loose black shift dress and cardigan—the closest I came to a date outfit. We took a taxi downtown to a restaurant that had been impossibly trendy about six months earlier and was now merely buzzing. I had been there once for dinner in June with an earnest guy from my literature class in a halfhearted attempt to make Nick jealous. It was the best I could do, given my limited arsenal. I knew that the place had a basement lounge with futuristic egg chairs and if we got there early we could bypass the doorman. I knew that it looked just trendy enough that it would probably still pass for New York cool to an out-of-towner—even one from LA—but that it wasn’t the real thing, so we (I) wouldn’t have a problem getting in. Once we were seated, waiters never carded—we could order cocktail after cocktail until things started to blur.

  • • •

  The space was white on white with lots of vinyl and sleek surfaces. There were flickering votives and packed-together tables and a hostess who was probably a model. You could smoke at the bar and on the side of the room closest to the street, so we opted for that part and pulled out our cigarettes the first moment we could. I eyed the corner table where the literature guy and I had sat. That night had been a wash that I remembered with a vague, cringing regret. My date had alternated between nervous and aggressively tone deaf, staring searchingly into my eyes one minute and then, in the middle of our salads, asking me if I had ever considered getting the mole below my lip removed. I had been perplexed and mildly stung but slept with him later anyway.

  Conversation between Ashley and me was equally uncomfortable. It was as though the stories of earlier had given a name to the distance between us and now we had nothing left to do but to sit with it. The silence felt like a hole. There were the sounds of the room—forks, heels, legs crossing, laughs—but they were far, far away, as though the space around our table were a bubble of dead air. At one point I accidentally let my eyes grow heavy, staring out the window across Seventh Avenue until my cigarette burned down almost to my fingers. It felt worse than a bad date, where at least then the promise of saying good night and going home alone was ahead.

  The things I could think of to say now if I were sitting at that table again, having had more than a decade to prepare.

  After getting throu
gh half of one dessert—something chocolate—we headed to the lounge for drinks. Descending the narrow back stairway felt like traveling through some dark tunnel of a birth canal. Thumping music grew louder with every step, and I clutched the railing, hazy images of what could be at the bottom spinning in my vodka-addled brain. That moment, that last one before opening the door to a party or a new classroom or a date, always contained a bit of a steeling against the unknown, gathering up the parts of myself I wanted to put forward and holding them tight.

  When we emerged from the doorway, things were decidedly moodier than they had been upstairs—darker, charged, a tad illicit. A disaffected DJ was set up in the corner, and there were low tables and clusters of people smoking and trying not to catch your eye as they sized you up. I glanced at Ashley as we headed toward an empty table, expecting to see her more relaxed, smiling, in her element, but she didn’t look like any of those things. She appeared blank, rigid, and almost resigned. Perhaps we should have stopped there, gone upstairs, gone somewhere else, gone home. But we didn’t.

  Cocktails appeared. We stared outward and inward and all around the room, and it didn’t take long before the first guy made his approach. He was younger, or maybe older—it didn’t much matter, because there would end up being all kinds. They would wear blazers and collared shirts or pullovers and jeans. They would shout over the music, or they would lean in low and whisper. They would crouch awkwardly, or they would pull up a chair. They would have a drink or offer a drink or ask for a light or provide one. Their come-ons would be confident or surprisingly meek, delivered fast and clipped or slow and steady—and they would all be directed squarely at Ashley.

  • • •

  Guys had hit on me at bars or on the street or at parties before, but I had never seen anything like this. The men who talked to Ashley were fearless and stupid at once, and she looked right through them each time. “I’d like to get to know you. . . . I’d like to spend some time with you,” they’d say. Men actually talked like that? “I felt like I had to come over and meet you. I felt this pull.” What? How unafraid they were of looking idiotic, how focused on their goal. “Let’s get out of here, I know a great place downtown,” one said, looking past me as if I were a piece of furniture.

  I had never felt more invisible or irrelevant. It was as if I were watching a movie in a dark theater, anonymous and hidden, the action continuing to flicker in front of me whether I was looking at the screen or not. I felt as if I were seeing a portal to another world, one where it was apparently possible—if you were Ashley—to have invitations and affirmations and opportunities laid out in front of you without even having to try. I felt it in my body like a chill, a dizziness. I felt like a creature.

  Ashley was cool and removed every time. “No thanks, I’m with my friend tonight.” She could get firmer than that, too, when they persisted, turning her head away, tightening her smile. I wanted to ask her how she did it. How certain she could be that none of them were worth her time. Was she even flattered anymore? I would have been. I almost told her that she should just go ahead and do what she wanted, talk to one of them if she thought he was cute, but then I realized it would only make me look naive. Didn’t I get it? There was nothing special about this kind of attention—to her.

  The next day we went shopping in SoHo. The small boutiques on the side streets and the designer stores on West Broadway and the people and the buses in between. Ashley seemed delighted by all of it. She had loosened up in daylight. She wore black jeans and flip-flops and chatted up store clerks and smiled often. I passively grew sullen to compensate, like a petulant teenager being dragged along by her mother. The emotions that had come up for me the day and night before—the insecurities, the inadequacies, the dark musings—I found impossible to shake off. I resigned myself, for the time being, to the uncomfortable feeling I had while walking next to Ashley on the street. That sense that she and I were operating on two completely different planes and the one I was on was clearly just kidding itself. That we were separate, practically different species and that my form of femininity was somehow lesser. That we were more like distant cousins than present-day friends, our connection was deep and historical and integral to both of us, sure, but we weren’t the same. She had the things that made her feel—or appear to feel—in control of her life, and I did not.

  She’d be here for only a few more days, I reminded myself, and then she’d leave, and everything could go back to the way it was. At least that—though it wasn’t ideal—I knew how to do.

  • • •

  At Steven Alan, Ashley pulled a pair of white cargo pants off the rack to try on, and they slipped over her legs and hips as though they were made for her. How did it feel to have a body that fit perfectly into anything you chose? I had no concept of shopping like that. I felt perpetually confined by the endless workarounds of too-round thighs and upper arms I didn’t want to be seen. Those restrictions cut off whole sections of a store’s stock before I even got to the dressing room. What was it like to know definitively that if something didn’t look good, it was the fault of the clothes, not you?

  Dolce & Gabbana lit her up. She wanted to go right in, and I was confused. She had heard of the brand, and she felt adult enough to wear it? She didn’t worry that the salespeople wouldn’t take her seriously or that they would judge her? I always looked at stores like that—the ones with impossibly thin South American tourists and the $900 dresses—as something that would fit into my life only sometime in the vague and distant future. For Ashley, apparently, that future was now.

  At a cheap and trendy shoe store, she bought huge, chunky heels with big Lucite platforms and turquoise straps around the ankles. She thought they were hilarious and would work well onstage, and I couldn’t believe it when she wanted to walk out of the store wearing them. To me, they weren’t even on the level of fuck-me pumps. They looked like straight-up “I’m a working girl, no doubt about it” shoes. People stared. I tried not to notice. Ashley appeared oblivious to both.

  The last stop was some clubwear store by the subway, a place I would never have gone on my own. It was filled with tube tops and loud music with a disco ball overhead. Ashley played with rainbow-colored feather boas and considered a vinyl miniskirt, and I tried to occupy myself with the key chains by the register while she browsed. There was a photo booth in the corner, and we decided we’d give it a go. In we went and pressed ourselves together in front of the mirror, and out spat a strip of four stickers in black and white. Our heads, the size of postage stamps, shone fixed in overanimated smiles. The images told a story: We are friends, they said. We know each other well. We shared things, lots of things, long, long ago.

  Ashley took two, and I kept the others. They’ve been stuck to the corner of my refrigerator ever since.

  • • •

  I couldn’t wait for Nick to meet her. I had told him that she was coming a few weeks before, but now it was a whole new script. She wasn’t just an old friend anymore. She was that friend, the friend. She was the girl with a backstory they wrote movies about, the one with an almost mythic level of sexual energy, confidence—otherness. A girl who would almost certainly never cross our paths in our current insular-academic Morningside Heights lives—though if she did, we’d be talking about it for weeks after. And bizarrely, preposterously, she was connected to me.

  That idea was both absurd and exciting at the same time, and I even thought it could score me something of a mental double-take from Nick: This girl is Carolyn’s childhood best friend? Didn’t see that coming . . . I had to admit that I was taking more than a little bit of prurient delight in the whole thing. Also, after days of the confusing one-on-one time between Ashley and me, I was emotionally exhausted. I was grateful for any potential dynamic change, even if there were risks involved. I hoped that being around Nick could help reclaim a bit of the confidence I had lost track of, and I was more than curious to see what Ashley would think of him. Those eyes, that cockiness, would they have any e
ffect on her at all, or was that kind of thing just for beginners, like me?

  Jump cut. Another cab. This one with the three of us in the backseat. I knew Nick would enjoy being in the middle, so I wordlessly let him climb in after Ashley, who was wearing her new shoes with the clear heels and leggings as pants. I played like I knew what I was doing, like I had a handle on the suggestions I was putting out there. Like I was comfortable with the two of them having their thighs touching as the city lights whizzed past, like I didn’t mind if a little tension built. Why would I? Ashley could drop one of her provocative laughs, and Nick could stare at her breasts and ass, none of it was a big deal. It was all free and easy and certainly not threatening—or terrifying—because I was above all that, obviously. Who knew where the night would take us, right? I could hang. The idea that we might all end up in bed together seemed to float in the air—in a fun way!—because that’s the kind of thing that could happen when you were twenty (or twenty-one and twenty-five) and good-looking and it was a Saturday night in the summer of 1999. Wasn’t it? Sure. Right. Yeah. Let’s all have a good time. I could do that, totally.

  Even though Ashley was technically the third wheel, from the moment I introduced her to Nick, I felt like the odd one out. He gave her a slow once-over immediately, not even trying to disguise his blatant leering. It was disrespectful to us both, of course, but at the time I only registered the personal slight. I sensed a subtle shift in him that was unfamiliar, almost as though he felt off his game. He’d likely assumed that Ashley would be a girl similar to me, someone younger, whom he could handle and even manipulate if he chose to. Instead, her looks and her attitude made it clear that this was going to be nothing like what he had expected. To get her attention and validation, which he appeared to want—to get along with her at all, really—he’d have to work for it. Part of me liked seeing that, as unpleasant as it all felt. Like, See, look: it’s happening to you, too.