The Black & The White (9 page)

Suddenly, M.D. moved over to our end
of the table and leaned over Kim’s shoulder.

“
What are you girls
gossiping about over here?” he asked, smiling, making his dimples
more prominent.

“
None of your business. Just
girl talk,” Kim said.

Finally, the waitress arrived at our
table to take our orders. It was time. I was starting to get too
drunk because of my empty stomach.

Kim ordered without looking at the
menu. “Miso-glazed cod and the octopus salad.” Then she turned to
me. “We’ll do it family-style, but I recommend that you get the
yellowtail with the jalapeno slices and ponzu sauce. That is one of
my favorites. Or try the creamy spicy crab.”

“
That sounds tasty,” I
responded. What was Ponzu sauce?

M.D. sat down. Seeing me struggle with
ordering, he asked from across the table if he could help. He
recited a list of entrees. Like Kim, he hadn’t looked at the menu.
The waitress bowed and left but M.D. beckoned her back and gestured
by twirling his pointer fingers for four more bottles of the same
sake. I looked over at Kim and mouthed the word “four?” She just
nodded and smiled.

The delectable entrees came in a
simple Japanese presentation. The food was fabulous, a perfect
texture and taste combination.

Zozo, at the other end of the table,
wasn’t eating.

“
Shit, I’ll take her share,”
Carin said. “This is Neo-Nippon at its best!”

Kim and I watched Carin struggle with
her chopsticks. Being Asian, we both chuckled at the
effort.

“
That girl never eats,” Kim
said, pointing to Zozo with her eyes. “She’s a model. Cocaine is
her food, and that guy”—Kim indicated David with her eyes— “is the
chef that feeds her. But whatever, we all like having her around.
She’s not so bad on the eyes, and she gets us all into the clubs.
And apparently, she gives good blow jobs.”

“
Kind of like the Blow for
Blow program?” Carin said.

“
At least she has added
value,” I said. I caught myself talking as if everything was
transactional.

When the bill came, I knew not to
offer to pay for my share of the meal. Andrew had taught me that
such dinners were ordinarily company expensed.

“
Oh, God. I can only imagine
what that bill is like,” Carin said.

“
Don’t worry about it. Was
it good?” Kim asked Carin.

“
Oh, my God. Soooo good,”
she said. “Makes my deli sushi look like a bad idea.”

“
Then that’s all you have to
know. That guy there”—Kim gestured at M.D.—”he’s
funding.”

“
I want a funder! God, my
boyfriend hardly takes me out. I could get spoiled hanging out with
you, Kim.”

“
And you should!” Kim
said.

We all had been drinking our fair
share of cold sake.

“
To bottle number 185!”
Carin said.

We lifted our sake glasses in the air
and toasted before M.D. interjected, “Shouldn’t you be toasting to
Isabelle’s new job instead?”

I suddenly became shy over his efforts
to have me be the center of the toasting affair.

“
Nope!” Kim said. “To
Isabelle being single.”

We all laughed.

“
Oh, yeah. But any reason to
drink, is reason enough for me,” Carin added. Carin was a
self-proclaimed alcoholic.

To that, we all toasted
again.

“
To the bottle, our best
friend,” Carin said.

We all left the restaurant and met
outside where Kim, Eric, and the rest of the group finalized plans
on where to meet.

“
Let’s go to Serafina
tonight. I think Sysco and Romeo are throwing the party there. But
Suite 16 is still hot on Sundays with Pankaj.”

These were the first words I’d heard
from Zozo all night long.

“
Hold on,” she said. “Let me
see where my girls are.” She stepped to the side and made a call
before returning to the group. “Suite 16. They’re having the Paper
Mag and DNA agency party there. Should be fun. Sheri will get us
through the door.”

“
Sheri is her modeling
booker at DNA, and Paper Mag is a magazine,” Kim explained. “They
usually throw a good bash. Don’t worry. We’ll get a table. Getting
a table is the only way we’ll get in.”

“
I can go, right?” Carin
said. “I also have the invite?”

“
Of course, baby!” Kim
assured. “You’re with me!”

We took three cabs to the event. Zozo
explained something to the bouncer while the rest of the group
stood back. She was just as tall as the bouncer without
heels.

“
This is a club?” I asked.
It certainly didn’t resemble Lotus with its fancy exterior. The
only similarities were the large bouncers in black garb and the red
velvet ropes.

“
Yeah, a small one. A hot
spot. It’s like the VIP room in Lotus, but the whole
club.”

We watched Zozo point to us, and a
moment later, a short brunette came outside and gave Zozo a hug and
a kiss before she gestured for all of us to come in. I knew
immediately by the way the girl kissed Zozo and directed her that
it was her booker.

“
Phew, someone plain,” Carin
added, “I’m starting to get a complex hanging around skinny, pretty
people.”

We walked in a single line through the
club. The music was piercingly loud, and the room was very dimly
lit. The bar to the left was packed. I looked around. Kim, Carin
and I were by far the shortest people there, despite my height of
five-foot-eight and Kim’s wedge heels. Towering over us were
international models.

Carin and I danced to the hip-hop
music on our way to M.D.’s table in the back of the club, which was
already prepared with three bottles of Grey Goose vodka, carafes of
cranberry and orange juice, along with a silver bucket of ice. Kim
and M.D. were nowhere in sight, and I wondered where they’d
gone.

Carin and I stood around dancing,
until Ben, the guy from dinner, turned to her and started dancing
against her. I sat down on the red leather ottoman and watched
them. Carin leaned back against him until she lost her balance and
he caught her. She continued to sway left and right, sometimes
spilling her drink on the floor.

I noticed Zozo sitting on the other
side of the room, next to the DJ’s booth. She was chattier than at
dinner, laughing and talking with her other model friends. I
recognized one of the models from an ad I had seen in a
magazine.

Kim and M.D. finally reappeared after
thirty minutes. As she danced her way to the table, I asked, “Where
did you go?’

“
Where you probably thought
I was,” she winked. It was hard to hear her through the
loudspeakers. “Pent-up sexual tension,” she laughed. She then took
Eric’s hand and began dancing with him next to Carin, who was now
fondling her dance partner’s pants zipper. I watched her in
bewilderment. Carin seemed so out of character.

Alone, I decided to walk across the
room to thank Zozo, who was sitting on the leather banquet chairs
with her booker and several other models, for getting us into the
club. It was a small room, but getting to her through the crowd of
people on the dance floor was difficult.

I sat down next to Zozo and told her
thank you.

“
Hey, no worries. What’s
your name again?” she asked.

“
Isabelle,” I
said.

“
That’s right! I’m so bad
with names.” She introduced me to several of her
friends.

“
Hey, you want to go to the
ladies room?” she asked.

She stood up and took the arm of her
friend from the ad I recognized, turned, and beckoned me to come. I
looked to find Carin, but she was not in sight. However, I ran into
her in the bathroom hallway, sloppily kissing her dance
partner.

I followed Zozo and her friend into a
bathroom stall. Zozo removed from her purse the same sort of
contraption Kim had put in her nose, and offered it to her friend,
who took it and began snorting. Then she passed it back to Zozo,
who also snorted. They offered it to me, but I said no. I found it
disgusting that they would share the same inhaler.

The girls giggled.

“
You’re such a mess,” Zozo
said to her friend. “Look, you have it all over your face.” Zozo
leaned forward and licked the white specks across her friend’s
cheek.

“
You can’t waste
it.”

Gross, I thought. I wondered why
hygiene didn’t seem to be a concern to either of them.

We walked back to M.D.’s table. There
were several new female faces.

“
Where’s Carin?” I asked
Kim, who was seated on a banquet chair, preparing herself a
cocktail.

“
She left with that guy. She
was wasted. I love that girl! She cracks me up.” Kim handed me a
drink. “Here. Have a drink. Where were you?” she asked.

“
The bathroom, with Zozo.” I
explained.

“
Blow?” she asked. “Those
girls have noses like vacuums. They do it all day!”

I looked over to Zozo. She looked so
young. I wondered at what age she had started to do
drugs.

Kim then handed me another drink.
“No,” I replied to her question.

I hadn’t thought about Dani all night
until that moment. I didn’t quite know what spurred the memory, but
I suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion.

I remembered one of the first few
times I had gotten drunk. It was my twenty-first birthday, and
college friends of mine kept handing me shots of vodka. By the end
of the night, although I didn’t want to drink anymore, the social
pressure was strong enough to make me force the liquids down my
throat. Dani was next to me the whole night, keeping me upright and
wiping me down as I spilled drinks on myself.

“
Haeti
, you don’t have to drink it just because they bought it for
you.”

Moments later, he carried me up the
stairs as my friends cheered to me, “Happy Birthday!”

I suddenly now wanted Dani to be
around, to comfort and look after me, much like he had done many
times before.

Kim must have noticed a change in my
mood, because she asked me if I was upset with her.

“
No, I’m just tired and I
drank a lot. We’ll talk, just not here.” I kissed her cheek then
waved goodbye to Zozo, who was dancing with two of her equally waif
model girlfriends.

I came home to yet another quiet night
in my apartment. I resisted the urge to call Dani.

The next day, after work, I went to
get a cat from the local shelter. I named him Meowser.

“
He is a precocious Bengal,”
the lady at the shelter explained. “Some lady left this guy here
and traded up for a more exotic cat.”

“
Oh, that’s sad,” I
said.

“
You’re telling me. You get
all sorts of reasons, but they’re never any good,” she explained as
she opened the metal cage so that I could get acquainted with the
cat.

“
You’re going to love this
cat. He drools.”

“
A drooling cat? That’s
awesome,” I said. “A cat with identity issues was a cat made for
me.”

He purred immediately as I held him in
my arms. This cat was made for me.

The next day at work, I was excited to
email Stephen about my new acquisition.

“
Good Morning. Great news. I
just adopted a new cat. It’s called a Bengal.”

Within moments, Stephen wrote back. “I
have a Bengal too. Are you serious? I knew I liked you for a
reason. Now you’re just giving me more reasons.”

I blushed each of the four times I
read that message.

“
You’re sweet. Thank you,” I
wrote, losing the words to write anything more colorful.

“
Does that mean that I get
to see you today for a drink? I am getting desperate
here.”

“
You’ve always been
desperate,” I wrote back.

“
Does that mean it’s a yes?
You really do make a guy work hard for your attention!”

“
You get everything easy as
it is. Drinks sound possible, although not probable.” I knew that
at this point I was playing hard to get. Stephen was a good
distraction for the moment.

“
What’s going on over
there?” Andrew wondered. I quickly changed the screens of my
computer to my Excel spreadsheet and began to intently stare at my
trading monitors. The keyboard shortcut to
switch between screens was something I started to use so often, it
nearly became automatic.

That weekend, I took a bus home to see
my mother. She lived in a small house. I was born and raised in
this all-American small town called Amersham, Pennsylvania,
populated by many Amish.

Coming home was always a treat—the
perfect mental escape. Immediately upon arriving, I always found
myself lounged on the sofa in my favorite black sweatpants and
white tank top with the quilted blanket my mother had bought from
an Amish woman down the road. Mom would always hand me my warm
lunch whilst I lay cuddled up in front of the
television.