The Rules of Attraction
“Yeah, walk on the wild side,” Rupert said, turning away from me.
I grabbed the stuff, left, hopped on my bike and was back to school by ten.
LAUREN It’s stupid but I called Victor. From The Dressed To Get Screwed party. I had one number left that he said he might be at in New York, and like an idiot I stood in the phone booth downstairs in Wooley, crying, wearing that awful-looking toga, and watching the party start, waiting for Victor to answer. I had to call twice because I really had forgotten my Calling Card number and when I finally got it right and the phone started ringing fuzzy and far away, I broke into a sweat. I started shaking, my heart beating like crazy, waiting for Victor’s happy, surprised voice. A sound I hadn’t heard in over eight weeks. Then I realized that I shouldn’t be nervous and that this was just a really sad scene. I hadn’t planned on calling this number. I had gone to the phone booth not with the intention of calling Victor, but because Reggie Sedgewick had come up to me, completely naked, and asked, “I want you to…”
He looked ugly and pathetic and was staring at the p**n o movie that was being shown on the ceiling and I was looking for the bar, and said, “Yes?”
And he said, “I want you to … suck my cock.”
And I looked down at it and then back at his face and said, “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”
And I thought of Victor and started for the phone booth. “Suck your own,” I said, near tears, walking blindly for the door.
“You think I’d be asking you if I could?” he called out, pointing at it, drunk out of his mind or, even worse, maybe sober.
I got so depressed I just yelled “Fuck off!” and almost slammed the door of the phone booth and made the call, only slightly mortified that I knew the number from memory. When I gave the operator the final number of the Calling Card, and during the silence that followed, I knew it was over. I knew it standing in that phone booth waiting for Victor to answer at this strange, hostile number. I knew it was over even before I met Sean Bateman later that night. How long had I been deluding myself so completely, I wondered as the first ring came over the line. I felt ashamed of myself and I needed a cigarette and the phone kept ringing and Reggie Sedgewick started knocking on the door blubbering an apology and someone answered the phone and it was Jaime and I hung up and went back to the party, pushing Reggie out of the way. I was determined to get some fun out of this night.
So I got drunk, then met Sean, then watched Stuart Jackson dance to an old Billy Idol song, then got high in Gina’s apartment. In that order.
PAUL The four of us—me, Richard, Mrs. Jared, my mother—are sitting in the middle of the dining room at The Ritz-Carlton. Classical music is being played by an expert pianist. Waiters dressed in new expensive tuxedos move quickly, gracefully, from table to table. Elderly women with too much make-up on, slumped lazily, drunkenly in the red velvet chairs, stare and smile. We’re surrounded by what Mrs. Jared likes to call, “old, very old money,” as if the Jared’s money was new, very new. (Yeah, those banks have been in the family for only about a century and a half, I refrain from saying.) The whole thing is just really unnerving, especially since Richard, even after a shower and a new suit, hair still greased back, sunglasses still on, as of yet, hasn’t sobered up. He looks, unfortunately, pretty hot. He sits across from me, making lewd gestures that I pray neither mother will notice. His foot is now in my crotch but I’m too nervous to get hard. He’s drinking champagne Kirs and he’s downed about four, all of them carefully and with what looks to me a definite sense of purpose. He’ll alternately stare at his glass or raise his eyebrows up suggestively at me, then dig his shoeless foot into my crotch and I’ll squirm and make faces and my mother will ask if I’m okay and I’ll just cough, “Ahem.” Richard stares at the ceiling, then starts humming some U2 song to himself. It’s so quiet in this elegant, tacky, big cave that I’m afraid people are staring at us and, if not us, then at least at Richard, and they probably are and there’s nothing to do but just get drunker.
After Mrs. Jared asks Richard for the sixteenth time to take his sunglasses off and he refuses, she finally uses the reverse psychology bit and says, “So Richard, tell us about school.”
Richard looks at her and reaches into his pocket pulling out a Marlboro and grabbing the candle from the middle of the table, lights it.
“Oh, don’t smoke,” Mrs. Jared says disapprovingly, as he places the candle back.