Glamorama (51 page)

8

Inside the black house there’s a doorway that I follow Jamie through and Bentley and Bruce and Tammy scatter, dispersing upstairs to bedrooms, and Jamie and I are in a dark place, and she’s lighting candles and offering me a drink that smells like Sambuca and we both pop a
Xanax to come off the coke before heading toward a hot bath in a room that smells of freshly painted walls where more candles are lit and Jamie tears off the Jil Sander suit and helps me undress, and she finally pulls my Calvin Klein boxer-jockeys off while I’m on the bathroom floor, delirious and giggling, my legs up in the air, Jamie standing over me, candlelight throwing her elongated shadow over the walls and ceiling, and my hand’s reaching for her ass and then we’re in the water.

After the bath she pushes me onto a sprawling bed and I’m drugged out and turned on and a Tori Amos CD plays softly in the background and then I’m lying on my side, marveling at her, my hand running along the sparse hair on her cunt, fingers slipping in and out, strumming along it, while I let her suck on my tongue.

“Listen,” she keeps whispering, breaking away.

“What, baby?” I whisper back. “What is it?”

She doesn’t want to fuck so she starts giving me head and I swing her around and start eating her pussy which is hot and tight and I’m taking it slow, licking with long strokes of my tongue, sometimes all the way up to her asshole spread above me, and then driving the tongue in deeper and faster, sometimes stiffening it, making my tongue rigid and fucking her with it, then taking as much of her pussy into my mouth as I can, sucking on the whole thing, and then I flick the tip of my tongue over her clit and that’s when she sits up on my face, humping it while I reach up, massaging her nipples as she comes touching her clit with her middle finger, my mouth slobbering all over her hand, and she’s making weeping sounds and when I come she tries to steady my hips with her chest because they’re thrusting up involuntarily and with her hand pumping my cock I shoot all over her, ejaculating endlessly and so hard I have to bury my face and mouth back into her pussy to muffle the shouts my orgasm forces me to make and then I drop back, wetness from her vagina smeared all over my chin, lips, nose, and then it’s silent except for my breathing. The CD that was playing has stopped, a few candles have burned out, I’m spinning.

In the darkness I hear her ask, “You came?”

“Yeah,” I pant, laughing.

“Okay,” she says, the bed making rustling noises as she gets off it, carefully holding up an arm as if she’s afraid of dropping something.

“Hey baby—”

“Good night, Victor.”

Jamie walks toward the door, swings it open, light from the hallway causes me to squint, shielding my eyes, and when she closes the door blackness blossoms out of control and still spinning I’m also moving upward toward something, a place where there’s someone waiting to meet me, voices calling out
follow, follow
.

7

I’m waking up because of the sun streaming through the skylight and chic steel beams onto the bed where I’m staring at the geometric patterns etched on those chic steel beams. I tentatively sit up, bracing myself, but I’ve apparently slept off what should have been a major hangover. I check out the surroundings: a room done in ash gray and totally minimalist, a large steel vase filled with white tulips, lots of gorgeous chrome ashtrays scattered everywhere, a steel nightstand where a tiny black phone sits on a copy of next month’s
Vanity Fair
with Tom Cruise on the cover, a Jennifer Bartlett painting hanging over the bed. I open a steel blind and peer out at what looks like a reasonably fashionable London street, though I’m not quite sure where. There are no clocks in the room so I have no idea what time it is but the way the clouds are racing past the sun above the skylight suggests it’s not morning.

I call the Four Seasons asking for messages but there aren’t any and a flicker of panic I think I can control starts spreading and I wash it off in the shower adjacent to the bedroom, the stall made up of pale-green and dark-gray tiles, and the bathtub Jamie and I used last night is drained, melted candles on its rim, Kiehl’s products neatly lined up next to stainless-steel sinks. I dry off and take a Ralph Lauren bathrobe hanging from a hook and drape it over me before opening the door very slowly because I’m unsure of what’s behind it.

6

I’m standing on what looks like the second floor of a three-story town house and everything is stark and functional and so open you can’t really hide anywhere. I’m moving down a hallway—passing bedrooms, a study, two bathrooms, rows of empty shelves—heading toward a staircase that will take me to the first floor, and the color scheme incorporates aqua and apple and cream but ash dominates—the color of chairs and couches and comforters and desks and vases and the carpets lining the bleached oak floors—and then moving down the stairs, gripping the cold steel railing, I step into a huge open space divided in two by a series of tall steel columns and the floors are suddenly terrazzo and the windows are just cubes of opaque glass. There’s a dining area where Frank Gehry chairs surround a giant Budeiri granite table below diffused lighting. There’s a salmon-hued kitchen where shelves hang by steel rods and the vintage refrigerator contains yogurt, various cheeses, a tin of unopened caviar, Evian, half a round of focaccia; and in a cupboard, Captain Crunch, bottles of wine. The whole place seems transitory and it’s freezing and I’m shivering uncontrollably and there’s a profusion of cell phones piled on a fancy pink table and I’m thinking this is all too 1991.

The sound of Counting Crows on a stereo coming from the giant space in the middle of the house is what I’m moving toward and as I turn a steel column what comes into view is a massive pistachio-colored sofa and a big-screen TV with the volume off—Beavis and Butt-head sitting rigid—along with an unplugged pinball machine standing next to a long bar made of distressed granite where two backgammon boards sit and I’m coming up behind a guy wearing a USA Polo Sport sweatshirt and baggy gray shorts hiked up a little too high and he’s leaning over a computer where diagrams of airplanes keep flashing across the blue screen and on that desk is an Hermès rucksack with a copy of a book by Guy Debord hanging out of it along with various manila envelopes someone’s doodled drawings of caterpillars all over. The guy turns around.

“I am freezing,” he shouts. “I am
fucking freezing.”

Startled, I just nod and murmur, “Yeah … it’s cold, man.”

He’s about six foot one with thick black hair cut very short and swept back, his impossibly natural-looking tan covering an underlying pink hue, and when I see those cheekbones I’m immediately thinking: Hey, that’s Bobby Hughes. Dark-green eyes flash over at me and a bleachy white smile lifts up a chiseled jawline.

“Please allow me to introduce myself,” he says, holding out a hand attached to a muscular forearm, bicep bulging involuntarily. “I’m Bobby.”

“Hey man,” I say, taking it. “I’m Victor.”

“Sorry if I’m a little sweaty.” He grins. “I was just down in the gym. But sweet Jesus it’s cold in here. And I have no idea where the goddamn thermostat is.”

“Oh?” I say, stuck, then try to nod. “I mean …
oh.”
Pause. “There’s a gym … here?”

“Yeah”—he gestures with his head—“in the basement.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, forcing myself to be more casual. “That’s so cool … man.”

“They’re all at the store,” he says, turning back to the computer, lifting a Diet Coke to his lips. “You’re lucky you’re here—Bruce is cooking tonight.” He turns back around. “Hey, you want some breakfast? I think there’s a bag of croissants in the kitchen somewhere and if Bentley didn’t drink it, maybe some OJ left.”

Pause. “Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay. I’m cool.” I’m nodding vacantly.

“You want a Bloody Mary?” He grins. “Or maybe some Visine? Your eyes look a little red, my friend.”

“No, no …” A pause, a shy smile, an inward breath, then exhaling, barely. “It’s okay. It’s cool.”

“You sure, guy?” he asks.

“Um, yeah, uh-huh.”

Expelled his first term from Yale for “unruly behavior,” Bobby Hughes started modeling convincingly enough for Cerutti at eighteen to skyrocket from that gig into an overnight sensation. This was followed by becoming Armani’s favorite model and then various milliondollar deals, sums unheard of for a man at that time. There was the famous Hugo Boss ad where Bobby was flipping off the camera, the tag line “Does Anybody Really Notice?” below him in red neon letters,
and then the historic Calvin Klein commercial of just Bobby in his underwear looking vacant and coughing while a girl’s voice-over whispered, “It will co-opt your ego,” and when
GQ
still ran models on the cover, Bobby’s face was there endlessly, dead-eyed and poised. He was the boytoy in two Madonna videos, the “sad lost guy” in a Belinda Carlisle clip and shirtless in countless others because he had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze. During his career he walked thousands of runways, garnering the nickname “The Showstopper.” He was on the cover of the Smiths’ last album,
Unfortunately
. He had a fan club in Japan. He had great press, which always pushed the notion that beneath the drifting surfer-dude image Bobby Hughes was “alert” and had a “multifaceted personality.” He was the highest-paid male model for a moment during the 1980s because he simply had the best features, the most sought-after look, the perfect body. His calendar sold millions.