“But you said you’re not in love with him. Wouldn’t you like to be friends with me as well as with him? I’m an interesting person too, you know. Maybe even more than him.”
She did indeed seem rather interesting, even if it was just her naive boldness.
Perhaps in an effort to get me to know her, she sped me through her childhood, her background, her life. She tried to be charming, and was. She asked me some questions about my life, which I answered reluctantly and without revealing much, and she responded with interest, insight, and even wit. When she asked me what my occupation was, I did mention that I was trying to be an actress.
She said there was a movie party the following night, and asked if I would please go with her. It was going to be a small, private party for a big movie that was about to be released, and the cast would be there. She said it might be a good opportunity for me.
I had to admit it sounded very exciting, more exciting than any party I had ever gone to. It seemed like an opening into a world that I had never expected to get a glimpse of before I got at least my first movie role. Nevertheless, I felt guilty for accepting, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to help her, that there’d be nothing she’d be able to detect about me that could explain Nathaniel’s interest in me.
I told her these thoughts, and she said it didn’t matter, that she would still be very grateful if I’d go to the party with her. So I accepted, feeling uneasy.
At the party, men flocked to her while she flocked to me.
She told me about her feelings for Nathaniel. She told me how incredible she thought he was, how he wasn’t only incredibly good-looking and charming, but so intelligent: he was the most intelligent person she knew, by far, and so independent in his thoughts, and so caring. And his cello compositions! They were amazing. They were confessions, and reproaches, and expressions of anger, she said. Personally, I had never thought of them that way, but now that she mentioned it, hers was not the most unsuitable way to describe his music.
“And what do you think of the fact that he strips at Chippendales and works at Weight Watchers?” I asked.
“That makes him even more perfect, because it contrasts so mysteriously with his deep personality and genius.”
I had a good time at the party. Chriskate was charming and tried to please me, and almost wooed me like a lover would, just because she wanted to study, scrutinize, and examine me. She hung around me “to learn,” she said. She interrogated me. I found it grotesque: this gorgeous creature, sitting there in front of me, wondering how she was inadequate. All the men buzzed around her, and yet she was observing me, the fool, the poor girl.
I felt ugly and inadequate next to her, yet tried to be strong and unbothered. Not a single man paid any attention to me, and yet I felt sorry for Chriskate. The world wasn’t fair: that this most beautiful of creatures couldn’t get the one she loved, and that plain old me was the one he loved. Then I realized that this reasoning was ridiculous and that what would be unfair was if only beautiful people got love (which was actually often the case).
I finally decided I could be more useful to Chriskate by trying to crush her obsession with Nathaniel. I tried to make her see that there were plenty of other men out there, even better men. I told her she should forget about him, have no more contact with him.
“So that you can have him?” she asked, uncharacteristically suspicious.
“No. I’m in love with someone else anyway. And speaking of men who are more impressive than Nathaniel, this man I’m in love with is a hundred times more impressive.”
“You’re deluded. I’m sure he doesn’t have the talent and genius that Nathaniel has.”
“Oh yeah?” I took Chriskate into the bathroom with me and locked the door. I took the cloud out of my handbag and showed it to her. “You don’t call this talent?”
She was suitably amazed.
I had intended to keep the cloud a secret, even though Damon hadn’t asked me to. But I had been unable to resist showing Chriskate. I put the cloud back in my bag, and as we exited the bathroom, I asked, “Did that impress you enough?”
Three men swarmed around her, smiling, kissing her on the cheeks, offering to get her drinks. “It’s incredible,” she answered me, shooing them away.
I went on: “The man I’m in love with invented a way to make small clouds. I’d say that rates at least as high as Nathaniel’s cello compositions, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, it doesn’t even come close,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing, this little cloud; a beautiful little scientific concoction, but it doesn’t move me. It doesn’t speak to me. It’s not art.”
“I think it’s art.”
“Science cannot be art. It’s a contradiction in terms.” Two new men accosted her, one of whom was the star of the movie this party was for.
I felt strange hearing a model talk that way, undoubtedly due to the stereotypes about models.
“Perhaps,” I said. “But then if science isn’t art, it’s greater than art.”
We talked of other things for a few minutes, while Chriskate resumed studying me. Suddenly, she looked depressed and edgy, and said to me, “Come.” She quickly walked toward the front door with her face in her hands, and I followed her. People watched her leave the apartment.
We were alone in the hallway. She was crying.
“They all look dumb to me, compared to Nathaniel,” she said, pacing. “I often flip through magazines looking for male models, and they all look dumb.”
“Why would you look to male models as a source of high intelligence? You should go to bookstores and look at author photographs.”
“I do. It’s the same thing. They look dumb. I walk down the street and no one I pass looks as smart as him. His expression is very intelligent. You can immediately see that he must have a really interesting way of looking at life, that he must have really interesting and original thoughts. Don’t you think so?”
“Not particularly. Your perception is skewed by your love for him. That’s what love does. Or infatuation. You’re not objective. If you were to let a year pass without having any contact with him, I think you would be cured. You would see him for what he is: not exceptional. You think there is no one else like him, and you’re right. Even though there may not be any man who has the same specific qualities he has — because no two men are alike — there are many men who have different qualities, more extraordinary qualities.”
Even though I had had a good time with Chriskate, I felt a bit overwhelmed by her obsession, and I needed to take a break from her. So I turned her down when she suggested that we have dinner the following night, and instead I had dinner with my family, at their apartment.
The cloud had rained in my bag at the party, after it had been shown off in the bathroom. When I got home after the party I decided to do an experiment and freeze the water, to prevent it from turning back into a cloud right away, just to see what would happen, if anything. By morning, the water had turned into an ice cube, which I brought to my parents’ apartment when I went for dinner, because I couldn’t bear to be parted from Damon’s gift for very long. Damon had been gone for a week, and I missed him.
I placed the ice cube in their freezer. There were no other ice cubes there, which was good; there would be no risk of my not recognizing it when time came to go home.
My parents and my brother and I sat in the living room and chatted before dinner, catching up on things. My brother and I hadn’t seen each other in a while, and I asked him how school was. He was feeling down, felt uninterested in anything, didn’t know what he was going to do in life, had low self-esteem. We were drinking soft drinks as we talked, and when I asked him about his grades, he seemed reluctant to answer. He took a gulp of his Coke and chewed on the ice while mumbling his response, making it conveniently impossible to understand, which annoyed me. Suddenly, my annoyance changed into horror, and I got up and screamed, “Spit that out! Stop chewing! Don’t swallow the ice!”