“Was that the one with the lamb?” she asked.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Right, right,” she said. “We used Naomi for that, though.”
I looked at Benoit for him to correct her, but he merely stood there smiling. I let it go.
“Sorry to geek out on you guys,” I went on, lowering my eyes as if bashful. “I just think your work together—I mean, those CK campaigns are iconic.”
Cate smiled. “Thank you.”
“Gemma’s was one of my favorites—” I stopped when I noticed their faces. They looked embarrassed. Maybe there was a backstory to that ad, maybe they weren’t proud of the work. Maybe I was right and Gemma and Benoit had broken up, and they were deliberately avoiding her name for his benefit. “I mean,” I added quickly, blushing, “they’re all amazing, though, obviously.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Cate. “You know, sometimes I swear my memory is going—”
“Maybe you have the Brazilian Flu,” joked Benoit.
Kim laughed nervously. Cate rolled her eyes.
“Why do we put up with him, I wonder sometimes?” Cate asked, tilting her head in my direction to include me in the “we.” That made me feel emboldened, in spite of my obvious gaffe. They had me try on half a dozen more looks and I was careful to scan their faces, though I found no evidence of anything useful. They looked pleased. Benoit would flip his sunglasses on top of his head every time I came out and take a few steps closer so he could “really see me.” His fingers often brushed the backs of my arms, the small of my back. I was a little startled at how obvious he was being about it—at one point he actually briefly cupped my ass, while examining the hem on my skirt—but then I started playing into his attentions, smiling coyly at him. Whatever was going on between him and Gemma—perhaps her Instagram break also included a break with him—clearly he did not feel the need to hide his affection for me. While this exhilarated me on the one hand, I found, looking at him under the institutional lighting with his stupid sunglasses, I was more physically repulsed by him than ever.
Eventually they selected six ensembles, which they pinned up on the felt board. Kim took notes. We said our goodbyes: a kiss on both cheeks from each of them. When I came to Benoit, I moved my face a fraction of an inch so that we would kiss halfway on the mouth, and clung to his biceps a little longer than was warranted.
“Can you show me out, Hans?” His first name sounded funny in my mouth. “It’s a maze out there.”
He shifted uncomfortably on his feet, glanced at Cate, who was busying herself with some papers spread out on the table, and followed me out. His hand was on the small of my back.
“I’m really excited for this shoot,” I said.
“It will be grand.”
“It makes me excited for the possibility of working with you further,” I said, reaching back and covering his hand with my own, pressing it firmly into the small of my back, sliding it ever so slightly down…
“I’ve missed you,” I whispered.
We waited for the elevator. He said very little. I understood. It wasn’t the place. Once we stepped into the elevator and the doors closed behind us, he turned to me and jammed his tongue down my throat. Then he pushed me away. He sniffed loudly at my armpits, then pulled back and made a face.
“It is repulsive,” he said. He was smiling but it was a disappointed smile. “There is chemicals.”
“It’s organic.”
“You’re not to wear it again. You’re not to wear any of that again. None of that toxic garbage, you understand? How am I to know if you’re clean if you mask yourself with all this chemical stuff?”
I had to keep my face very still so that I wouldn’t scream or laugh in his face. I remembered Jason’s words. Anything they want. It was clear Benoit was testing me. “Of course,” I said sweetly. “That’s easy. Consider it done.”
But this did not seem to appease him. He stared at our blurred reflections in the closed elevator doors, his face stony. His fists were balled at his sides.
“The other thing,” he said, “is you must learn discretion.”
“Of course,” I said, clenching my jaw. Anything they want. Anything. Anything. When he didn’t respond, I said, my voice as even as I could make it, “I thought I was being discreet.”
“No,” he said, “you were obvious.”
The doors slid open and we walked out together. I had to slow my pace so that I was still beside him. He was walking very slowly, a strained look on his face.
“Are you going to walk out with me?” I asked, hesitating before the revolving door. He followed me out.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to take his hand but I was afraid to touch him. I made my voice flirtatious: “I suppose I lose a little control, being around you.”
Benoit stopped walking and turned to glare at me. Then he erupted in laughter. He laughed and laughed and laughed, and just to humor him I started to laugh, too. It was all an act with him. He wanted to control me, and knowing that gave me a perverse sense of power; I would allow him to think he was in control, all the while working to get what I wanted. Thus, I would be the one actually in control, since I would be the only one aware of the true nature of the transaction. I did not, however, account for the pernicious ways in which a person’s influence can embed itself within you, changing you from the inside out. I had imagined that my actions, so easily faked, would not impact who I was; yet added up together, it turned out those actions amounted to my life.
Benoit caught his breath, then pulled me to him again and bit me lightly on the neck.
“Oh, you are a peach, aren’t you?” he said. “I bet you taste just like a peach.”
“Thank you,” I muttered.
“You’ll be at Bianca tonight?” he asked. “Your kind goes to that, no?”
I smiled. That night, there was a party to celebrate the reopening of the Bianca Inn, a fabled club that had been shut down a few years before due to noise complaints. Everyone talked about it like it was the Garden of Eden, an oasis of possibility and debauchery the likes of which simply didn’t exist anymore, even though from what I could see from the photos, it was really just a shitty split-level basement bar in an old West Village building. People actually wore shirts that said Free Bianca, as if the nightclub’s struggle were akin to that of someone wrongfully convicted.
“Of course,” I said, though I’d had no intention of going until that moment.
“I will see you there,” he said. “You can make it up to me then.”
He kissed me again on both cheeks and then roughly squeezed my crotch.
“What about the CK campaign?” I blurted out. “Do you—well, do you have a girl for that yet?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Not yet,” I repeated, with a suggestive lilt.
“Maybe soon,” he said, and winked. “We’ll see how it goes tonight.”
* * *
—
Julia and Blake were thrilled. I’d told them I was feeling antsy, that I could use a night out with the girls, and asked if I could come with them to the Bianca after all—this, after I’d turned down the invite twice already.
Benoit asked me to go with him, but I’d rather go with you guys, lol, I wrote.
COME!
Yay!
After a few minutes I wrote: Benoit’s kind of sad I’m not going WITH him, but I think that’s crazy right? Like, stop being so needy ma dude.
Totally.
Like, whatever, I’ll just see him there.
I received a thumbs-up emoji, and the details of the night. They would be dining with Joe and the faceless men beforehand at Pastis, the reopened Keith McNally joint in the Meatpacking District.
Living like it’s five years ago, wrote Julia. Act accordingly.
I wore vintage Levi’s 501s, the RE/DONE Classic Tee i
n Vintage White, Mansur Gavriel Monogrammed Dream Ballerina Flat in Red, and a Clare V. Black Nubuck Wallet Clutch. Dressed like a 16 yr old boy for the reopening of Bianca, oops, read the caption on the Instagram I’d put up, though of course no one would mistake me for one: in the photo, my nipples are erect (I pinched them just before, thanks Julio), and my jeans are so tight I had to lie on my back and suck in to put them on. Still, I knew the deceptively simple outfit would create the right effect, a kind of humblebrag—Look how good I look and I didn’t even have to try—and when men and women complimented me on how “refreshing” it was to see a woman like me “so natural” and commended me for “not caring so much what I looked like,” I would smile at them as if bashful and secretly revel in smugness, as if the allure of my supposed “naturalness” owed any credit to my character, rather than to the completely arbitrary biological process which had shaped my physical form. Never mind that I paid $425 for the jeans. The photo already had 4,013 Likes, which gratified the effort it had taken to explain to the middle-aged passersby that I didn’t want to be looking at the camera; apparently they didn’t have the word candid in Kansas or wherever the fuck they were from. After some strenuously worded instructions, through which I bit back my rage, they finally got it right and then scurried away as if I were crazy.
I was planning to arrive late, and told Julia and Blake to save me a seat next to one of them. Sometimes Joe liked to split the girls up, to make sure everyone’s ego was equally massaged. When I got there, Pastis was busy, low-lit, and successfully passing off its generic, no-nonsense decor—rickety wooden tables, mismatched chairs, juice glasses in place of stemmed wineglasses—as rustic charm. Twelve of them—mostly men, and a handful of girls—were crammed into four pushed-together tables in the alcove behind the bar, coveted and sought after for its relative privacy.
“You look amazing,” Blake said, her voice aghast as if I’d betrayed her. I knew what she meant was that I looked particularly emaciated.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “I’m like a boy.” An allusion to my Instagram caption.
I kissed Blake on the cheek and then fingered her faux-silk blouse. “And what’s this?” I asked, even though I knew it was from Mango. “I love it!”
“Ugh, really?”
I slid into a seat between her and a man with disturbingly pink skin.
“Yeah, it’s super cute.”
“It’s just from Mango,” she said dismissively, giving the appropriate girl response. This was the language afforded to us women, speaking in brand names and I love it and Where’d you get this?, all of it a white noise disguising the emptiness and rage that yawned just beneath the surface.
“She’s ba-a-a-a-ck!” Julia sang, rushing from her seat across the table to kiss me. She was wearing a nearly see-through diaphanous dress, through which you could see her nipples and her black thong. I had Blake and Julia wrap their arms around me and took several photos of the three of us, smiling like we’re on ecstasy. It took a few tries because the lighting wasn’t great, and Blake said her nose looked big in all of them, which really wasn’t the camera’s fault. Eventually we got it though. Living like it’s five years ago, I wrote, tagging Pastis and Bianca, and uploading the picture to my Stories.
By the time we sat back down, the starters were on the table, and I forked a bunch of greens onto my plate indiscriminately. The photo already had 432 Likes, averaging roughly 73 Likes per minute. Beyoncé “throwing shade” at some random woman at a basketball game was going viral. What happened was: This woman leaned over Beyoncé a little bit to say something to Jay-Z, and Beyoncé’s face, as captured on film, was unimpressed. Now that woman was receiving death threats. Carli, a blogger I Followed, had a pimple. Chiara Ferragni ate spaghetti. Galveston cops had apologized for leading a handcuffed black man down the street with a rope while mounted on horses, but really they were just apologizing for the photo of it that had already circulated online. Trump had tweeted, Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun, following another shooting by a white supremacist, in El Paso. Kylie Jackson was not dating a basketball player I’d never heard of. A judge had said that Epstein’s trial on federal sex-crimes charges could take place in mid-2020. My cousin had had a late-term miscarriage.
At some point, I looked over towards the end of the table and noticed that one of the faceless men at the dinner was in fact Andrew. I waved, and he smiled at me awkwardly. It occurred to me then that he did not remember me, and that made me laugh, and then it made me seethe. I turned away from him abruptly and nodded to the man beside me, whose skin had somehow grown even pinker over the course of the dinner, taking on the hue and texture of a pig’s skin, and he obediently picked up the wine on the table and refilled my glass. He mistook the gesture as some sort of overture, leaning in to ask me some nonsense or other, and I had to turn from him pointedly, too, leaning over Blake’s plate to insert myself in her conversation.
“…we’re in an inflection point, I can feel it,” Blake was saying, and I knew she was talking about Blakies, a line of hair accessories she was developing. “After our last pivot,” away from hair ties and towards scrunchies, “I knew we were on to something because I just got so many messages from people, and compliments, and people were really feeling them, plus, like I told you, Magda”—that was her psychic—“told me it wouldn’t manifest until this year, but it just feels so good, to be putting my money where my mouth is, you know, walking my walk, and—”
I nodded along, not really listening. In my head, I went over my plan. The plan was: find Benoit, impress him, make him want me, get him to a place where he promises me the cover. I had a fantasy that he would see me, preferably surrounded by one or two attentive men, and say something like Don’t you look peachy, and take out the Nikon he often kept in his chest pocket and snap a photo of me and post it online later. Maybe we could do a whole series of “candid” images of me. I imagined the two of us sitting side by side in a little booth. Eventually, I’d bring up Gemma, very casually. I wouldn’t ask him if she was okay, I’d just let him talk. I wouldn’t normally tell someone this, he would say, his lips just inches from my own, but you’re different…I was jolted out of my reverie as Blake’s hand flew in front of me, making contact with my wineglass, which I quickly caught before it toppled. Blake hadn’t even noticed. She was gesticulating wildly, her voice gaining velocity like a wheel going faster and faster until it becomes an indistinct blur. I nudged her with my elbow.
“Bathroom?” I asked.
She nodded and followed me in the direction of the bathroom, all without stopping her monologue. The bathroom was even dimmer than the restaurant, almost laughably so. I made Blake chug two glasses of water, even as her steady patter continued, while I cut a line for myself on the back of her gold compact.
“That Andrew guy is here,” she said, eyeing my handiwork.
“Yeah, I saw that, whatever though, he’s a douche.”
The emotional exchange concluded, I tipped forward and hoovered up the beautiful white stuff. Purity spiked through my brain. I handed her the compact and let her dip her fingers in the remnants and rub it on her gums.
“We need to make sure Joe orders the donuts,” I said.
“Ew, why?”
“The ’gram,” I said in an ironic, jokey voice.
“Oh yeah, the ’gram.” Blake’s was even more dripping in irony.
We both rolled our eyes and laughed. Then, back at the table, we told Joe to order the donuts. They came, as we knew they would because we had seen them repeated in slightly different variations and angles on our grids, piled high in a perfectly constructed pyramid of alternating colors. I took twenty-three pictures of them and, feeling almost as though I’d already consumed them, ate nothing. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I wheeled around.
“Hey.” It was Andrew. Probably come to introduce himself to the “new girl,” a new conquest. I wouldn’t give h
im the satisfaction.
“I’m Mickey,” I said, sticking my hand out abruptly. “I don’t think we’ve met before, have we?”
Andrew laughed, looking flustered. “Haven’t we? I think…” He trailed off, clearly not able to place me. The fucking bastard.
“Are you going to shake?” I prompted.
He took my hand, and I tightened it around his, then let it drop. He was staring at me, as if at a loss for words; perhaps only now some sort of recognition was dawning on him. I wasn’t about to make anything easier on him.
“And what’s your name?” I prompted.
“Andrew.”
“Huh. I had a dog named Andrew once.”
He laughed, and ran a hand along the top of his receding hairline. Involuntarily and instantaneously I remembered what it felt like to kiss him, his stubble along my cheek, the stale taste he had. Andrew seemed at a loss for words. I looked towards Julia and Blake, who were bent over a cell phone, their hands overlapping around it, almost as if clasped in prayer.
“Is the Uber here?” I called to them. “Benoit’s already texting me like, where are you, he’s so needy! But, like, I feel like we should go soon.” I turned to Andrew and said, “So nice to meet you, Aaron.” Then I walked away.
By the time we got to Bianca, I was pretty obliterated—we’d done more coke, I was fucked up enough to think that the weird tincture Julia offered to dose my drink with was a good idea. “It’s mellow,” Julia had told me. “A good body high.” It was mostly psilocybin, something she had cooked up at home with the apparatus she’d bought last year when she thought she was going to get into the essential oils business. Almost everyone I knew was, or had been, the founder of some dubious enterprise; it made doing nothing sound a lot better.
A thousand and twenty-nine people had viewed my most recent Story, the one with the tower of donuts. Dozens of people had sent me donut emojis, pictographic echoes.
“Is Benoit here?” Jules asked.
“Not yet. He got held up.” I refilled my drink, my body humming with anxiety. Impatiently, I searched the crowd, looking for the glint of his aviators. I held my phone in my hand, flipping it over every fifteen seconds, using the button on the right to make the screen blink suddenly bright, showing me the time, showing me nothing. If he isn’t here in thirty minutes, I told myself, I’m going to text him. In the meantime, Julia and I sat in the booth—which wasn’t really a booth but an alcove set with upholstered benches and low tables—sandwiched between the pink man from dinner and a skinny Frenchman who was still dressing like the Strokes and maybe going a little bit bald. They kept talking about how it wasn’t the same as the old Bianca, which, they wanted everyone to know, they’d practically lived at.
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