LAUREN A lightbulb. I’m staring at the lightbulb above Sean’s head. We’re at Lila’s and Gina’s apartment in Fels. Two lesbians from the poetry workshop I recently joined. Actually, Gina in strict confidence told me that she’s on the Pill, “just in case.” Docs that mean she’s a lesbian technically? Lila, on the other hand, has confided in me that she’s worried Gina will leave her since it’s “in” to sleep with women this term. What do you say to someone? Well, what about next term? Actually, what about next term? You watch Sean too, you watch him roll a joint and he’s pretty good at it which makes me want to sleep with him less, but oh who cares, Jaime answered the phone, right? and it’s a Friday, and it was either him or that French guy. His hands are nice: clean and large and he handles the pot rather delicately, and I want him suddenly to touch my br**sts. I don’t know why I think this but I do. Not exactly handsome, but he’s passable looking: light hair combed back, smallish features (maybe a little like a rat?), maybe too short, maybe too thin. No, not handsome, just vaguely Long Islandish. But a big improvement over that Kir-sipping Iranian editor you met at Vittorio’s last party who told you you were going to be the next Madonna. After I told him I was a poet, he said he meant Marianne Moore.
“So, who’s going to help us bomb the weight room?” Gina asks. Gina is part of Camden’s “old guard” and the arrival of the weight room and an aerobics instructor has made her livid (even though she wants to sleep with the aerobics instructor—who, in my opinion, doesn’t even have that nice a body). “Lila is devastated,” she tells me.
Lila nods and rests her head on the Kathy Acker book she’s been flipping through.
“B-U-M-M-E-R,” I spell out, sighing. Look at the Mapplethorpe photo of Susan Sontag pinned above the sink and snicker.
Sean laughs and looks up from the joints as if I said something brilliant and it’s not funny but because he laughs I laugh.
“Tim loves it,” he says.
“Let’s kill him and we’ll call it art,” Lila says. How does Lila know Tim, I wonder. Does Tim sleep with lesbians? I am drunk.
Still holding a glass of the pink punch it occurs to me that I am so drunk I cannot get up. I just tell Lila, “Don’t get depressed,” and then to Gina, “Do you have any coke?” too drunk to be ashamed.
“Depression becomes some,” Lila says.
“No,” Gina.
“You want some?” Sean asks.