Arm Candy (3 page)

“Hello again,” Cam said to her with a sexy chin jut. “I met you last time I was here. I never forget a face. Well, a face like
that
.”

He invited Eden to come see him play at a nearby rock club. As she stood in the front row, watching his fingers grind the guitar, she felt as electrified as the amps he roared over. She saw the girls screaming to her left and right, dancing as if drugged by not only the throbbing chords but also by Cam’s hotness. He looked down at her after a string-shredding solo, and she grinned coyly.

She was packing boxes by the month’s end, making it almost to the year mark in the tiny models’ apartment. And that had been more than enough.

Installed in Cameron’s apartment, she felt the hope of things starting to come together.

“I’m wild about you, Eden,” he said to her in bed one night, as she stroked his long hair.

“Me, too,” she said.

“Can you come with us to Baltimore tomorrow? You know I love having you at the shows.”

“I don’t know. I’d really like to, but I have a go-see at noon. I’m not sure I can move it . . .”

“Just skip it, then, just this once. Hammerjack’s is major.”

Eden didn’t miss that show, or any others. Or rehearsals. Every day, Cameron would pick her up at Tower and they’d go hang out with the band, and Eden would sit on the side, loving life, swaying to the addictive music of their practice jam sessions in an underground space on Ludlow.

“We’re playing Arlene’s next week, big gig. It’s finally happening, guys!” Cam walked to the side and kissed Eden. “Maybe you can come and sell our tapes.”

“Sure, totally.” Eden nodded.

“The T-shirts just came in, too,” the bassist, Paul, added. “You can sell those, too; they’re badass.”

“Okay.” Eden nodded enthusiastically. She could feel in her bones they were taking off.

“Hey, hon,” Cam said with a whispered growl in her ear, his muscular arms wrapping around her waist, guitar slung on his back. “I was thinking of getting a tattoo.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked. “Of what?”

“Well, I was thinking, maybe we could get each other’s names.”

Um . . . yeah, no.
“You mean, like . . . I get one, too?” Eden asked.

“Yeah, that’s the whole point. I’m yours and you’re mine.”

Eden considered this for a moment but shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I don’t like needles,” she confessed.

“You don’t like needles, or you don’t like my name on you.”

“It’s not that, Cam—”

“All right, whatever,” he said, turning to the band. “Let’s take it from the top of the set again, guys!”

Things progressed amazingly well for Desperate Measures, whose album was doing better and better as they booked larger gigs in bigger venues. When they were invited to play CBGBs, both Eden and Cam suspected his star was really on the rise. When it sold out in two days, they actually
knew
it.

“This is a new song we’re workin’ on and it goes out to my Eden,” he said through the silver mic over the loudspeaker at CBs. “The foxiest girl in New York.”

As Cameron strummed the opening notes, a bolt warmed Eden’s chest: It was her first brush with fame. Everyone in the packed club craned to stare at her, off to the side, backstage but visible in the wings. She loved it. It was her first hit of the potent drug of recognition, a high she had experienced only on a microscopic level when students at school would look at her. But this was different. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

Cam’s place was way east on Ninth Street, in a neighborhood that was, at the time, sketchy and skeevy. But it was crawling with the young and the vibrant, their seething ambition like a palpable mist in the lamplit air. And as Eden roamed the crowded, hot-blooded sidewalks with Cam gripping her waist, she felt her own ambitions expand exponentially. She suspected, to the core of her soul, that soon she would trade Avenue A for the A List.

—Norman Vincent Peale

 

 

 

W
hile the months passed, as Cameron’s success was growing, unfortunately Eden’s seemed to be faltering. She booked fewer and fewer modeling jobs, though ironically, it seemed more and more men were hitting on her. But she was thrilled for Cam and ecstatic to cheer on his string of sold-out shows. Still, there was a growing feeling gnawing inside her; she needed to do something more.

Luckily, just as her rut was growing deeper, Allison graduated. Eden pounded the pavement to find a studio apartment for her nearby, and soon enough the girls were hugging at Port Authority and celebrating Allison’s arrival in 212 land over drinks before Cameron’s concert.

“Cheers,” said Allison, raising her glass. “To the window instead of the poster.” The girls clinked goblets. “Even though it’s facing a brick wall.”

“Thank God you’re here,” Eden said. “I am so ecstatic I can’t even take it.”

In the packed Irving Plaza, Allison and Eden stood with their credentials in a VIP section of the mezzanine along with record executives and allegedly someone from MTV. The label was considering investing in a video and wanted feedback on their sound. Eden and Allison screamed and clapped when the band came on-stage and afterward Cameron gave them a quick hug before darting off to the side with his managers.

“So what now?” Allison asked.

“Now I usually just kinda wait for him.”

 

 

A couple more months passed, and while Allison’s fabulous arrival had sprung Eden from her worries temporarily, she started to feel a pit growing inside her stomach.

One night after a party off Houston Street, Cam and Eden headed up the Bowery.

“Let’s get some food,” he said in a moody tone.

“Okay.”

They strolled in silence.

“Are you . . . all right?” Eden asked.

“No, not really,” he said, pulling open the door to a diner on the corner.

Inside, Eden looked at Cam’s annoyed face. A guy with a sketch pad and a yellow pencil took notice of them and moved down a stool at the crowded counter so the couple could sit together.

“Thanks,” Eden said to him with a smile.

“Sure,” he replied.

She turned back to Cameron. “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

“You were ALL OVER that guy Rick at the party!” Cam fumed at her.

“I was not,” she retorted.

“You were.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Eden unfurled her muffler and took off her hat. Her fiery green eyes blazed against her chilled cheeks.

“Come on, you were practically throwing yourself on top of him,” Cam accused. “It was pathetic. You were so flirtatious.”

“Excuse me. I wasn’t flirting with him! This—is in your head,” Eden stammered.

“I can’t take this shit anymore,” he said, enraged. “There are a ton of girls who would kill to be with me.”

At this, Eden’s face turned red with anger.

“So let them.” She shrugged, her voice not rising to meet his fervor.

“What do you mean?”

“Honestly, Cameron, I don’t need to be accused, and frankly, I don’t need to follow you around, selling T-shirts, waiting in the wings. I’ve had enough,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess we both have.”

“Are you fucking joking me?” he fumed, standing up. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“I guess.”

“You
guess
?” he screamed, his face reddening. “Why are you so fucking detached? What are you, like, some robot?”

“Nope,” she replied matter-of-factly and turned to the counter as the short-order cook approached to take their order and see what the drama was about. “I just think it’s time.” Eden turned away to face the waiting chef. “Hi! I’ll have a large coffee, black, please. And also a hot chocolate. And an oatmeal with extra raisins, please.”

“Ma’am, no more raisins, sorry.”

“No raisins? Oh bummer.” She grimaced, dejected. “I’ll have pancakes, then.”

“Am I going crazy or are you literally more upset about fucking raisins right now than me?” Cameron raged, steam coming from his multiply pierced ears.

Her flippant, silent stare confirmed that, yes indeed, plain oatmeal would be a greater tragedy than this one-way express ticket to Splitsville.

“I’ll be out tomorrow so you can come get your stuff,” he said like a child and stomped to the door. “Have a nice life.”

Eden exhaled and unzipped her windbreaker nonchalantly as the guy with the sketch pad watched her casually hang it on a nearby hook on the wall next to her.

“You guys always have that large red box of Sun-Maid raisins up on top of that coffee machine,” Eden said to the guy behind the counter.

“Oh yes, yes, we all out. Tomorrow, tomorrow.”

The guy next to Eden couldn’t take his eyes off her as she waited for her pancakes, unfazed by the breakup. She looked up to meet his glance as he looked down. He was wearing a worn-i n, well-loved navy hooded zip-up sweatshirt.

“Hot chocolate? Coffee?” the short-order chef called out.

“Yes!”

“Thank you.”

Both Eden and he replied at the same time, reaching for the steaming cup of coffee.

“Oh, sorry, go ahead, I got the same thing—you take it,” the guy on the stool next to her said.

“No, no, no, don’t be silly! I’ll get the next one. Look, here it is!” She smiled, reaching for the second cup placed on the counter.

They sipped their scalding mugs side by side.

“I like raisins, too,” he offered sweetly. “In half my childhood pictures I swear I’m holding one of those little red boxes.”

Eden was charmed by the innocent interjection of the guy with the sketch pad.

“Me, too,” she replied, swerving her stool to face him. “I think my mother thought it counted as part of the fruit group.”

“I moved from California to Tennessee when I was four, and my mom said that on the drive I asked if there would be raisins in Memphis. It was like the little red box would make it all okay,” he said with a smile.

His book-packed messenger bag was slung across him, his blue eyes beaming through his little circular gold glasses. He was one of the kindest-looking men she had ever seen.

“I’m Eden,” she said, extending her hand.

That figures
, he thought. She was perfect. Of course he could never say that, as he knew instantly she had heard it a million times over.

“Hi, Eden, I’m Wes.”

“Nice to meet you,” she smiled. “Cheers.”

Their ceramic coffee mugs bumped and they chatted the hour away about everything from music (he favored The The) to the best secret little streets in the city (Grove Court, MacDougal Alley, Washington Mews). Before long it had become clear to Eden that this guy had somehow tripped an invisible wire inside of her. He wasn’t quite like anyone she’d met before.

 

 

As a young architecture student, working late in the libraries and at the drafting table with his little gold glasses over his bright blue eyes, Wes Bennett found that he learned more by following his feet than by following textbooks. Wes loved buildings. He explored every last alleyway, each cozy row of mews, every looming skyscraper. He was a passionate intellectual, drinking in every last gargoyle, arched doorway, and Doric column.

While most of Wes’s classmates were funneling beer and keg-standing till they got their graduation sheepskins—ripping and rolling
lambskins
each Saturday night, getting lucky, Wes spent most of his time alone. He had elected to live off campus, away from the pricier meal plan and in an apartment by himself in a less-than-desirable neighborhood on Tompkins Square Park. He could barely afford the tiny studio apartment on the junkie-packed Avenue B, where heroin needles were more common than diagonal-slung book bags. But he had befriended his blind super, Max, not knowing he was also the owner of the building. Max was a fifty-three-year-old African American from the neighborhood who, as a child, also loved to build towers and structures with his blocks before he lost his sight. And when the older man took a liking to the earnest student and kind, responsible tenant, Wes found his lease renewed with a yearly increase of 0.00 percent.

It was an unlikely friendship, marked by weekly walks around the city during which Wes would describe the architecture to his sightless friend, who relished the eloquent, detailed descriptions of cantilevered design and shiny new materials. Wes was breathless and excited to share his passion with a like-minded person.

“Okay, Max, we’re rounding the corner onto Park Avenue,” Wes would say. “I’m looking at a row of buildings, each set back so that people can walk the expanded pavement. There are fountains to the right.”

“I can hear ’em,” Max said.

“Across the street is the Lever House,” Wes explained, drinking in the gleaming façade. “It’s a tall, steel and glass prism and has really clean and simple geometries. It’s sleek.”

“What are the fountains under?” asked Max.

“They’re part of Mies van der Rohe’s plaza for the Seagram Building, which is also glass, but more of a warm-toned wall of translucent, coffee brown. There’s a man sitting on a bench with his family eating lunch,” Wes said. “They’re unfolding tinfoilwrapped sandwiches. Maybe the dad had to work on a Sunday and I guess the wife and little kid came to meet him for lunch.”

Max beamed. He shook his head, knowing no one else but Wes could or would have done that for him.

During his downtime, Wes loved to discover inspiring places, big and small, from the main reading room at the New York Public Library to the Temple of Dendur at the Met to his favorite hole-in-the-wall diner, where he’d sit and study and draw.

 

 

In the buzzing fluorescent light of the shitty Bowery diner, Wes couldn’t fathom a more beautiful paradise. It was as if the nasty dead-mosquito-covered lightbulbs were pale moonlight, the gnarly heater blowing bacteria-laced air on them were an ocean-front breeze, and the glazed hams in the cold-cut window a lavish buffet fit for kings.