“And so then Ken was like . . . That was the first time . . . I told my mom . . . She said to pretend it never happened . . . Am I nuts?”
“Whoa,” I said, pointing at the TV screen. A black girl had entered the scene in a cheerleader’s uniform. “Do you think that’s his jealous girlfriend?”
“What’s going on in here?” the cheerleader asked, throwing down her pom-poms.
“You know you’re my only single friend?” Reva asked in response. “I wish I had a big sister,” she said. “Someone who could set me up with somebody. Maybe I’ll ask my dad for money to pay a matchmaker.”
“No man is worth paying for,” I told her.
“I’ll think about it,” Reva said.
I was in the fog by then, eyes open just a crack. Through them, I watched the black girl spread the lips of her vagina with long, sharp, pink fingernails. The inside of her glistened. I thought of Whoopi Goldberg. I remember that. I remember Reva setting the empty wine bottle down on the coffee table. And I remember her saying “Happy New Year” and kissing my cheek. I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.
“I love you, Reva,” I heard myself say from so far away. “I’m really sorry about your mom.”
Then I was gone.
Five
I WOKE UP ALONE on the sofa a few days later. The air smelled like stale smoke and perfume. The TV was on at low volume. My tongue was thick and gritty, like I had dirt in my mouth. I listened to the world weather report: floods in India, an earthquake in Guatemala, another blizzard approaching the northeastern United States, fires burning down million-dollar homes in Southern California, “but sunny skies in our nation’s capital today as Yasser Arafat visits the White House for talks with President Clinton aimed at reviving the stalled peace process in the Middle East. More on that story in a minute.”
I opened my eyes. The room was dim, the shades were down. As I pushed myself upright, lifting my head slowly off the arm of the sofa, the blood drained out of my brain like sand in an hourglass. My vision pixelated, moiréed, then blurred and womped back into focus. I looked down at my feet. I had on Reva’s dead mother’s shoes, seascapes of salt rounding across the leather toes. Nude fishnet stockings. I undid the belt of my white fur coat and found that all I was wearing underneath was a flesh-colored bustier bodysuit. I looked down at my crotch. My pubic hair had been waxed off recently. A good waxing—my skin was neither red nor bumpy nor itchy. My fingernails, I saw, were French-manicured. I could smell my own sweat. It smelled like gin. It smelled like vinegar. A stamp across my knuckles showed I’d been to a club called Dawn’s Early. I’d never heard of it. I sat back and closed my eyes and tried to remember the previous night. It was all black, empty space. “Let’s take a look at the snowfall forecast for the New York metro area.” I opened my eyes. The meteorologist on TV looked like a black Rick Moranis. He pointed to a swirling white cartoon cloud. “Happy New Year, Reva,” I remember I’d said. That was all I could recall.
The coffee table was spread over with empty ice-cube trays and a full gallon jug of distilled water and an empty half-gallon jug of Gordon’s gin and a ripped-out page from a book called The Art of Happiness. Reva had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier, saying I’d “get a lot out of the Dalai Lama. He’s really insightful.” I’d never read the book. On the torn-out page, a single line had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen: “It didn’t happen overnight,” it read. I deduced that I’d been crushing Xanax with the handle of a butcher knife and snorting it with a rolled-up flyer for an open mic night at a club on Hester Street called Portnoy’s Porthole. I’d never heard of it. A few dozen Polaroids splattered between my videotapes and empty cases proved that my blackout activities had not gone undocumented, although I didn’t see my camera anywhere.
The photos were of pretty party people—young strangers making sultry, self-serious faces. Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils, some caught unawares by the loud white flash of my camera, others posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles. Some photos appeared to have been taken on a downtown street at night, others in a dark, low-ceilinged interior with Day-Glo fake graffiti on the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody in the photos. In one, a group of six clubgoers huddled together, each holding up a middle finger. In another, a skinny redhead flashed her breasts, revealing lavender pasties. A chubby black boy in a fedora and tuxedo T-shirt blew smoke rings. Male twins dressed as heroin-thin Elvises in slouchy gold lamé suits high-fived in front of a Basquiat rip-off. There was a girl holding a rat on a leash hooked to the bicycle chain she wore around her neck. A close-up shot showed someone’s pale pink tongue, split to look like a snake’s and pierced on both forks with big diamond studs. There was a series of snapshots taken in what I guessed was the line for the toilet. The whole place looked like some arty rave.