Waking Beauty

1  

At 7: 45 A.M. I awoke to the gaudy ululations of my
roommate, Virginie, getting vaginally plumbed by her latest conquest. This one was called Fraser, and as usual he was good-looking, albeit in a deliberately grungy, vaguely artsy, I-may-be-harboring-pubic-lice kind of way. He was dimmer than most of Virginie’s cerebrally challenged boy toys, but cuter, too, bigger—and I liked the way he smelled. He exuded a strong but healthy sweat smell that was likely loaded with pheromones. My ex-roommate, Elda, once told me that man-smell falls into one of two categories: cat urine or Campbell’s tomato soup. She was joking, but she wasn’t far off. Fraser existed somewhere in the tomato soup camp. He tried to camouflage it with cologne, but it came through anyway, and I found the effect of the two comingling quite devastating. Sometimes, after he showered, I’d nip into the bathroom, scoop a wet towel from the floor, and sniff it before depositing it in the hamper. On a couple of occasions I almost wanked to his image, but I stopped myself, realizing that that’s exactly what Virginie figured was going on in my sad-sack room. Fat, ugly Allison probing her sweaty flesh folds, drooling and dreaming about the handsome hunks who paraded half-dressed around the apartment, who were allowed to strut muscled through the kitchen in tiny towels, or lounge lanky in the living room in their threadbare Calvins because clearly pathetic Allison represented no threat whatsoever. So I stopped myself. And one night after overhearing Fraser regale Virginie with an insipid regurgitation of some fresh-faced faux-journalist’s view on the cultural
significance of reality-based television shows, the urge, mercifully, diminished.

“Listen,” I said on that particular occasion, trying in vain to enliven, or perhaps, I’m mortified to admit, momentarily enter their conversation,
“we
are
God’s
reality-based entertainment. That’s why there are earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis. God isn’t dead; God is bored. The Mesozoic Era seemed like a good idea at the time, sure, but the dinosaurs turned out to be dull stuff—God’s juvenilia. Like the people on that show
Big Brother
, the dinos were okay to gawk at for a while, but they didn’t really do much—eat, sleep, fight, fuck—so God turned on the deep freeze or coin-tossed a two-hundred-mile-wide asteroid at our blue ball and started over with a marginally more interesting cast.”

They didn’t say anything, they just stared at me like chickens with their heads cocked to one side. I continued, not believing a syllable I was slurring, but vaguely amused by the concept anyway.

“I’m not saying Darwin was wrong. We do evolve and adapt. It’s just that God is watching the process as a form of entertainment, you know? So anyway,” I went on, “this new cast of characters was more engaging, because they could invent things, like Silly String or stuffed-crust pizza or hair plugs. They made pyramids and giant sporting arenas with retractable domes—that was sort of nifty. And the Chrysler Building. They filled the sky with hot-air balloons and helicopters and rocket ships. They had a field day with the water—everything from breezy galleons to sneaky submarines. Under the ground they put subways. On top, they put baby-blue 1959 Cadillacs. I mean, this cast would erect entire cities and then flatten them with a Little Boy and a Fat Man. They came up with stuff like ‘Ode to Joy’ and
Pride and Prejudice
and ‘I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.’ It was better than the dinosaur show. There were plenty of big-time baddies: Stalin, Adolf, Papa Doc—and lots of little heroes, too. Plus, this show had Shakespeare and Chopin and Harry Houdini…. But I guess
there aren’t enough of those types in the cast—too many extras, not enough stars. Or maybe everything gets tired after a while. Who knows? All I know is that if you want to save the world from another tidal wave or ice age, you’d better do something unusual. Do something that will amuse God.”

They seemed surprised that I had spoken more than six words in their presence. I usually didn’t. But on that night, I was absurdly hammered (I remember because it was my twenty-second birthday and I had spent the evening in my room with my Discman, a Chet Baker box set, and a jumbo bottle of Baileys Irish Cream).

Fraser lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out of his mouth with a long “whew.”

“What’s she on about?” said Virginie, as if I wasn’t even in the room. And then I wasn’t. I was in the bathroom, emptying my creamy Baileys guts into the toilet.

Funnily enough, Fraser was a gaffer. This dimmest of bulbs made his living by plugging in lights on film sets—low-budget film sets, I might add, but he swaggered cocky like some super-sized Scorsese coming off a Palme d’Or victory. Likewise Virginie. She was assistant wardrobe person on one of those
Little Hose-Bag on the Prairie
-type TV series. Fraser got her the job. He introduced her to a production manager who liked her French Canadian accent and thought she was cute. She
was
cute. She tried very hard to be cute. She never sat in a chair, she
curled up
in it. She wore pigtails and little girlie clothes: knee socks and Mary Janes and tiny plaid skirts that forced you to see her underpants every five seconds—she was a terrible exhibitionist—and big, loose-knit sweaters that slipped off her bare shoulders or let her perky tits poke through, and she offset the whole Junior Miss Slut look with a chunky pair of Buddy Holly glasses. Uch. So anyway, the pedophilic production guy thought she was cute and, bingo, she went from making eight bucks an hour as a hostess at the Pasta Garden, to eighteen bucks an hour as assistant wardrobe thingy, and even though she spent her days steaming the
creases out of period frocks or blocking saggy bonnets, the I’m-in-the-biz attitude she exuded was titanic. Between the two of them you’d have expected Brad and Jennifer to be dropping by for cocktails every evening; you’d have expected Wolfgang Puck over every morning to rustle up their breakfast.

Alas, it was I who usually prepared the morning coffee, after Dumpster-diving in the sink to locate the filthy Bodum. My aim was always to brew up a pot and get it to my room before the bloodhounds sniffed it and came panting, but on the morning in question they caught me. I had just set the water on to boil and was spooning out the coffee when they emerged, scantily clad, from their love lair. Fraser was wearing one of Virginie’s shorty kimonos. He had a cigarette hanging macho in his mouth. Virginie was wearing a pink pop-top and Fraser’s cotton boxer shorts. Cute. Her hair was mussed and her face was all red and scratched from sex with Fraser and his two-day growth of Marlboro Man beard. She curled up on a kitchen chair and said, “Mmm, coffee.”

Fraser opened the fridge and surveyed the contents. “You want eggs?”

She stretched languorously and sniffed her left armpit. “Yummy,” she said.

I concentrated on the kettle, willing it to boil. I surreptitiously tugged at the front of my sweatshirt, pulling it away from my gut so it wouldn’t cling and reveal. I thought about bringing up the smoking thing again—there was supposed to be no smoking in the common areas, since I’m allergic to it, and it makes my eyes water and my nose clog up. “I thought you weren’t going to smoke in here,” I said with a little quaver in my voice. That fucking quaver fucked me up.

“Ahh,” said Virginie, throwing her arms in the air. “I haven’t even had coffee and she’s starting with this business!”

I decided to let it go. I turned back to the stove.

Fraser plonked the
egg
carton onto the counter. He
cupped his private parts in his hand as he squatted to look in the lower cupboard for the frying pan. He gazed, as if mesmerized, at the soup pots and mousetraps therein. His face was blank. An ash fell from his cigarette to the floor. I thought perhaps he had frozen into position, but then a synapsis succeeded in firing and he straightened abruptly and blinked at the sink.

“Shit,” he said helplessly. “The pan’s dirty.”