“Because I’m busy.”
“Busy with what?”
“With Mark. My new boyfriend.”
“I don’t get it,” Skipper said. “I thought I was your friend.”
“He does things for me that you won’t do.”
There was a pause.
“But I do things for you that he can’t do,” Skipper said.
“Like what?”
Another pause.
“That doesn’t mean you have to be with him all the time,” said Skipper.
“Don’t you get it, Skipper?” River said. “He’s here. His things are here. His underwear. His CDs. His hairballs.”
“Hairballs?”
“He has a cat.”
“Oh,” Skipper said. Then: “You let a cat in your apartment?”
Skipper called up Carrie. “I can’t stand it. It’s Christmas, and everybody is in a relationship. Everybody except me. What are you doing tonight?”
“Big and I are staying home,” Carrie said. “I’m cooking.”
“I want a home,” Skipper said. “I need a house. Maybe in Connec
ticut. I want a nest.”
“Skipper,” Carrie said, “you’re twenty-five years old.”
“Why can’t everything be the way it was last year, when nobody was in a relationship?” Skipper moaned. “Last night, I had the most amazing dream about Gae Garden,” he said, referring to the famously frosty socialite in her mid-forties. “She’s so-o-o beautiful. And I had a dream that we were holding hands and we were so in love. And then I woke up, totally bummed because it wasn’t true. It was just that feeling. Do you think you can ever have that feeling in real life?”
The year before, Skipper, Carrie, and River Wilde had all gone to Belle’s Christmas party at her family’s mansion in the country. Skipper drove his Mercedes, and River sat in the back seat like a papal personage and made Skipper keep flipping radio stations until he found some music he could tolerate. Afterward, they went back to River’s apartment, and River and Carrie were talking while Skipper complained about how his car was parked illegally. Then Skipper went to the window and looked out, and sure enough, his car was being towed. He started screaming, and Carrie and River told him to shut up and do a line or smoke a joint or at least have another drink. And they thought it was hysterical.
The next day, Stanford Blatch went with Skipper to get his car out of the pound. The car had a flat tire, and Stanford sat inside the car, reading the papers, while Skipper changed the tire.
THE BONE
“I need a favor,” Stanford Blatch said.
He and Carrie were having their annual Christmas lunch, at Harry Cipriani. “I have to sell some paintings in the Sotheby’s auction. I want you to sit in the audience and bid them up.”
“Sure,” Carrie said.
“Frankly, I’m broke,” Stanford said. After he lost his investment in a rock band, Stanford’s family had cut him off. Then he’d gone through all the money from his last screenplay. “I’ve been such a fool,” he said.
And then there was the Bone. Stanford had been writing a screenplay for him and paying for the Bone to get acting lessons. “Of course, he said he wasn’t gay,” Stanford said, “but I didn’t believe him. Nobody understands. I took care of that kid. He used to fall asleep at night while we were talking on the phone. With the phone cradled in his arms. I’ve never met anyone who was so vulnerable. So mixed up.”
The week before, Stanford had asked the Bone if he wanted to go to the Costume Institute benefit at the Met. The Bone freaked out. “I told him it would be good for his career. He screamed at me,” Stanford said. “Insisted that he wasn’t gay. That I should leave him alone. Said he never wanted to talk to me again.”
Stanford took a sip of his Bellini. “People thought I was secretly in love with him. I thought I wasn’t.