“Kdo je to?”
“It’s Dominic—”
“Moment, please—”
Every time I’m here, the place is filled with girlfriends and bumming students, poets I’ve met around, politicians scoring cocaine, models passed out on the couches, editors, business associates of some sort waiting aimlessly, actors fixing sandwiches for themselves in the kitchen—who knows who all these people are, but the place is like a social lounge and there’s never anywhere to sit. Cousin Gav—my mother’s sister’s son. He grew up in Prague, a scene-star installation artist by the time he was seventeen, a college dropout once featured at Art Basel, but after Pittsburgh he gave up that momentum to be with me in the States. I love him for that, for everything. Since coming here he’s abandoned art but gone freelance with fashionporn and photography—he’s done well for himself.
One of Gavril’s women opens the door—this one a willowy blonde almost as tall as I am, so pale and thin it’s like her skin’s translucent. Twenty? Twenty-one? She wears a XXL Manchester United jersey belted like a dress but nothing else, the pink saucers of her nipples clearly visible through the sheer fabric.
“What’s with all this Frost bollocks?” she says.
“You’re English,” I notice and she rolls her eyes.
Her profile’s an obvious fake—Twiggy, it says, born 19 September 1949. Occupation: IT girl. The American Apparel sponsorship’s real, though, her profile displayed in arcs of copyrighted font.
“I asked a question,” she says. “Frost? Are you trying to be fucking funny?”
“You must be the poet,” I tell her. “Gav mentioned you might be around—”
“He says he’s reading Frost to find inspiration for his Anthropologie shoot. I told him if he wants pastoral imagery, then Wordsworth’s a better bet than Frost, but you have him reading all the wrong stuff anyway—”
“Wordsworth? Christ, don’t pollute him like that. Are you a student?”
“Georgetown,” she says. “Ph.D. 20th-Century American Modernism. I’m a Plathist—”
“‘Mad Girl’s Love Song,’” I tell her. “I like that one.”
“She should have used Adware,” says Twiggy, “to distract her from all that shit she obsessed about. She was a gorgeous girl, would have been brilliant for the Mademoiselle app—”
“I shut my eyes and all is born again,” I tell her, misquoting the lines.
“Gavril expected you’d like me—”
The never-ending party is spare this morning, only a quartet of scenesters shuffling cards at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and eating eggs. Twiggy joins another young woman, a brunette, playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the VIM, the furniture pushed to the edges of the room, Tyson prancing bullish. The brunette’s in spandex and thigh-high tube socks, jabbing and kicking riotously, so model thin and gangly she’s like a spastic female skeleton raging in fits of laughter.
“You suck,” says Twiggy, readying herself for Tyson. “You’ve got to, like, sidestep the uppercuts—”
BBC America talking heads hover in my sight: Executions in the terrorist courts, a stroke of Meecham’s pen beheads a thousand jihadists, a thousand thousand—
Gavril’s in the back bedroom, the room he calls his darkroom even though he doesn’t develop anything, preferring digital work on his iMac even over imprints or holograms. Oversize prints of his static photography decorate the walls—young women he finds on the street, impossibly gorgeous the way he shoots them, catalog ready. Gavril’s in a tracksuit and smiles when he sees me. Jockish, when it comes down to it—his hug ends in a double fist bump handshake that I blunder and he laughs. The room smells like him—apple-scented Head & Shoulders, Clive Christian cologne. Cigarettes smoldering in emptied coffee mugs. When he first moved to the States he was wiry, but now he’s filled out from fine food and smiles easily, his physique rock hard from all the soccer and sex. He only wears pajamas or a tracksuit—I’ve never seen him in anything else.
“John Dominic,” he says.
“Gav—”
“What the fuck, man? Are you translate me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m translating,” I tell him, the app keeping up well enough as he speaks in Czech, but making him look like poorly dubbed cinema.
“I tell you I want to learn English to be inspired, to read Robert Frost in the original—”
“I’m teaching you Robert Frost—”
“I’m expecting trees and snowing woods and bullshit like that, but what do I get? Some kid cutting off his fucking hand with a saw and no one gives a shit—”
“They get him a doctor,” I tell him.
“For Christ’s sake,” says Gavril, “I want horses and trees and snowy fields and barns, and shit like that—”
“I know what you want—”
“Yeah, man, the road less taken,” he says, poets.org spam fluttering at the fringes of my sight—free credit scores, click here! FREE! FREE! FREE!
“We’ll get to it. How’s business?”
“Business,” he says. “Is good. Listen, if you want some work, I could use some copy for a few things—”
“Sure,” I tell him. “E-mail me—”
“I’ll also send you the contact sheets for Twiggy,” he says. “What do you think, eh? You let me know what you think—”
“About the girl out there? Christ, Gav—”
“Listen,” he says, “I was in preproduction for the Anthropologie winter catalog, up in New England, when American Apparel pings me out of the blue. They tell me they have a rush job, some last-minute interactive campaign they want to launch but their photographer pulled out, some guy I’d never heard of, and they wanted to know if I could do the work. They offered double what I usually get, so I told them, sure, sure, I can fit it in. The only condition is that I have to use the girls they send me. They want to use amateurs and Twiggy out there won an Internet modeling poll, a ‘Real Girl Next Door’ click-to-vote. You let me know what you think, okay? Built like a fucking—twenty-one years old, her tits point straight up. Vivian’s her real name, from England—hey, Dominic, that’s the job for you, cousin. Model scout—”
“No, no. Not for me—”
“I could hook you up, Dominic. Cure your depression better than all this bullshit therapy you go through. Get you with an agency. They’d fly you to Iceland or Brazil and all you’d have to do—You can work a camera, can’t you?”
Anthropologie and American Apparel portals in the Adware. Young women in flower prints in the Parisian countryside, farmlands, abandoned barns—the Anthropologie summer catalog portal so paradisiacal I can almost let myself forget I’m in this apartment, in this city, this life. I peel off ten bills and lay them on the desk. Gavril counts and pockets the cash, handing me a blister packet of brown sugar. We do this casually, almost as an afterthought, without words.
“What do you think?” he says. “You tell me about Twiggy. She told me she wanted to meet some poets, so I mentioned you were the best I knew. She’s interested—”
“I don’t think I’m all that interested—”
“Pittsburgh was ten years ago,” says Gavril. “That’s an eternity, cousin. You wallow in Pittsburgh, but you need to forget. You need distraction—if you want, I can let you be the stand-in while I film those two girls. I’ll film you in a threesome—”