“Great,” Cici said. “Every night I get all dressed up and I go out and no one pays attention to me and I go home and cry.”
“Oh, Cici,” Carrie said. Then: “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a phase. Now listen, I have to . . .”
“I know,” Cici said. “You don’t have time for me. It’s okay. I’ll talk to you later.” And she walked away.
Cici York and her best friend, Carolyne Everhardt, are two twenty-five year olds who, like most now thirty-five year olds, came to New York to have careers.
Carolyne Everhardt is a nightlife writer for a downtown publication. Came here from Texas three years ago. She’s one of those girls with a beautiful face, who is just a bit over-weight but not concerned about it—at least not to the point that she’d ever let you think she was.
Cici is the opposite of Carolyne—blond, bone-thin, with one of those oddly elegant faces that most people don’t notice because she isn’t convinced that she is beaut
iful. Cici works as an assistant to Yorgi, the acclaimed yet reclusive flower designer.
Cici came to New York a year and a half ago from Philadelphia. “Back then, I was like a little Mary Tyler Moore,” she says. “I actually had white gloves stashed in my purse. For the first six months, I didn’t even go out. I was too scared about keeping my job.”
And now? “We’re not nice girls. Nice is not a word you would apply to us,” Cici says, in an East Coast drawl that manages to be sexy and apathetic.
“We mortify people all the time,” Carolyne says.
“Carolyne is known for her temper tantrums,” Cici says.
“And Cici doesn’t talk to people. She just gives them dirty looks.”
ARABIAN NIGHTS
Carolyne and Cici are best friends through the usual conduit of bonding female friendship in New York: Over some jerky guy.
Before she met Cici, Carolyne met Sam, forty-two, an investment banker. Carolyne kept running into him every time she went out. Sam had a girlfriend—a Swiss girl who was trying to get into broadcasting. One night, Sam and Carolyne saw each other at Spy and they were drunk, and they started making out. They ran into each other another night and went back to Sam’s place and had sex. This happened a couple more times. Then his girlfriend got deported.
Nevertheless, the “relationship” continued along the same lines. Every time Carolyne and Sam ran into each other, they would have sex. One night, she saw him at System and gave him a hand job in the corner. Then they went outside and had sex behind a Dumpster in an alleyway. Afterward, Sam zipped up his pants, kissed her on the cheek, and said, “Well, thanks a lot. I’ll see you later.” Carolyne started throwing trash at him. “I’m not through with you, Samuel,” she said.
A couple of weeks later, Cici was at Casa La Femme, when she saw two guys she knew. A third guy was with them. He was dark and he was wearing a thin, white, button-down shirt and khakis; Cici could tell that he had a great body. He seemed shy, and Cici began flirting with him. She’d just gotten her hair cut, and she kept brushing her bangs out of her eyes and looking up at him while sipping a glass of champagne. They were all going to some girl’s birthday party at a loft in SoHo; they asked Cici to go with them. They walked. Cici kept giggling and bumping into the guy, and at one point he put his arm around her. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-four.”
“Perfect age,” he said.
“Perfect? For what?” Cici asked.
“Me,” he said.
“How old are you?” Cici asked.
“Thirty-six,” he said. Lying.
The party was crowded. Beer in a keg, vodka and gin in plastic glasses. Cici had just turned away from the bar and was about to take a sip of beer when she saw an apparition barreling toward her from the other side of the loft. A large girl with long dark hair, wearing red lipstick and, rather inexplicably, a long “dress” (If you can call it that, Cici thought) that appeared to be made of flowered chiffon scarves. Arabian Nights.
The guy turned just as she was about to run into them. “Carolyne!” he said. “Love your dress.”
“Thanks, Sam,” Carolyne said.
“Is that that new designer you were telling me about?” Sam asked. “The one who was going to make you a bunch of dresses for free if you wrote about him?” He smirked.
“Would you shut up?” Carolyne screamed. She turned to Cici. “Who are you, and what are you doing at my birthday party?”
“He invited me,” Cici said.
“So you just accept invitations from other girls’ boyfriends, huh?”