"I'm her... yeah, well..."
"You two knew each other at college, right?" Damien asks, still staring at us.
"But we haven't seen each other since then," Lauren says, and I'm wondering if Damien catches the harshness of her tone, which gratifies me.
"So this is like a little reunion?" Damien jokes. "Right?"
"Sort of," I say blankly.
Damien has now decided just to continue staring at me.
"Well, Damien, um, you know..." I stop, start again. "The DJ situation is-"
"I called Junior Vasquez today," Damien says, lighting the cigar. "But he has another party tonight."
"Another party?" I gasp. "Oh man, that is so low."
Lauren rolls her eyes, continues studying her nails.
Damien breaks the silence by asking, "Don't you have a meeting soon?"
"Right, right, I gotta get outta here," I say, moving back toward the door.
"Yeah, and I have a how-to-relax-in-cyberspace seminar in ten minutes," Damien says. "Ricki Lake told me about it."
JD buzzes on the intercom. "Sorry, Damien-Alison on line three."
"In a minute, JD," Damien says.
"It's hard to tell her that," JD says before getting cut off.
"Victor," Damien says. "You wanna walk Lauren out?"
Lauren gives Damien an almost imperceptible glare and gets up too quickly from the sofa. In front of me she kisses Damien lightly on the lips and he touches the side of her face, each of them silently acknowledging the other, and I can't look away until Damien glances over at me.
I can't say anything until we're outside the club. I picked up my Vespa from the coat-check room and am now wheeling it across Union Square, Lauren listlessly moving next to me, the sound of the vacuums inside the club fading behind us. Klieg lights are being rolled across patches of lawn and a film crew is shooting something and extras seem to be wandering aimlessly all around the park. Guillaume Griffin and Jean Paul Gaultier and Patrick Robinson stroll past us. Hordes of Japanese schoolchildren Rollerblade toward the new Gap on Park Avenue and beautiful girls drift by wearing suede hats and ribbed cardigans and Irish jockey caps and there's confetti strewn all over the benches and I'm still looking down as my feet move slowly along the concrete, walking across large patches of ice so thick that the wheels on the Vespa can't even crack them and the bike still smells of the patchouli oil I rubbed into it last week, an impulsive move that seemed hip at the moment. I keep my eyes on the guys who pass Lauren by and a couple even seem to recognize her and squirrels skate over the patches of ice in the dim light and it's almost dark out but not yet.
"What's the story?" I finally ask.
"Where are you going?" Lauren hugs her wrap coat tighter around herself.
"Todd Oldham show," I sigh. "I'm in it."
"Modeling," she says. "A man's job."
"It's not as easy as it may look."
"Yeah, modeling's tough, Victor," she says. "The only thing you need to be is on time. Hard work."
"It is," I whine.
"It's a job where you need to know how to wear clothes?" she's asking. "It's a job where you need to know how to-now let me get this straight-walk?"
"Hey, all I did was learn how to make the most of my looks."
"What about your mind?"
"Right," I snicker. "Like in this world"-I'm gesturing-"my mind matters more than my abs. Oh boy, raise your hand if you believe that." Pause. "And I don't remember you majoring in Brain Surgery at Camden."
"You don't even remember me at Camden," she says. "I'd be surprised if you even remember what happened Monday."
Stuck, trying to catch her eyes, I say, "I modeled... and had a... sandwich." I sigh.
Silently we keep moving through the park.
"He looks like a goddamn schmuck," I finally mutter. "He gets his shorts tailored. Jesus, baby." I keep wheeling the Vespa along.
"Chloe deserves better than you, Victor," she says.
"What does that mean?"
"When's the last time it was just you and her?" she asks.
"Oh man-"
"No, seriously, Victor," she says. "Just you and her for a day without any of this bullshit around you?"
"We went to the MTV Movie Awards," I sigh. "Together."
"Oh god," she moans. "Why?"