The Gorgeous Girls

I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

—
Dorothy Parker

Con

Rose

Wanda

Rose

Con

Wanda

Con

Rose

Rose

Rose

Wanda

Rose

Rose

Con

Con

Rose

Wanda

Con

Rose

Wanda

Rose

Wanda

Rose

Wanda

Part One

“Dorothy Parker once said,
‘I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.'” Upon delivering this Dot bon mot with much waving of sparkly rings and jingly bracelets, Constance Langtry adds a fourth: “Deft tongue. And I don't mean a good talker.”

Con and her two best friends, Rose and Wanda, are gathered at Cherry Beach on a summery evening to sip martinis, roast marshmallows and talk about sex (and love). They offer a toast to their patron saint, Dorothy Parker. St. Dot of the Algonquin Roundtable, St. Parker of Wit's End, St. Dorothy who inked
A Star is Born
,
Big Blonde
and
Smash-Up: The Story of
a Woman
—all titles the girls feel have described them at some point in their lives.

Placing another log on their campfire, Rose observes that Wanda seems to require only two things in a man these days: youth and unavailability. “Babies with good fantasy potential—no commitment, no strings. In fact, no actual contact; just dreaming of a young man from afar, right Wanda?”

Wanda, who turned thirty-three a month ago, has been pining after a lad who lives across the road from her in Toronto's West End. But having been stung not so long ago (three months, one week and five days, to be exact) by a man she'd given her heart, soul, mind and body to, she's not eager to get involved again. So she's chosen this neighbour who looks barely out of high school.

“Sometimes,” Wanda says, staring dreamily into the fire, “I sit on my stoop just waiting for him to come out onto his balcony.” She takes a contemplative sip of her drink and pokes at the fire with a stick intended for marshmallows. “I have come to sense and anticipate his times of arrival and departure, his direction of destinations, the rhythm of his gait, the colour of his T-shirt, the style of his hair . . .”

“Wanda,” Rose says, snapping the dreamer to, “you're beginning to sound like Blanche DuBois. Blanche hid behind gossamer curtains and Chinese lanterns and never realized just how gorgeous she was. But you,
Wanda, must acknowledge that you are a one hundred percent, bona fide gorgeous girl. Go ask that boy out!”

“I don't feel gorgeous,” Wanda murmurs, staring at the glittering city across the lake. A gentle breeze ruffles her short brown curls as a few tears dancing with red and gold reflections spill from her sea-green eyes.

“Just imagine what it would be like to lick cherry soda off his smooth young flesh,” Rose coos in a sultry Southern accent, unaware of teardrops.

“I'm still not over Jag,” Wanda moans, dabbing her eyes with black-lace-covered fingers. This glove, laced with memories of what she thought had been the deepest love and of what she knew to be the hottest sex, was a gift from Jag when their love was new. “I don't think I'll ever get over him.” She places the lacy conduit of erotic dreams beneath her nose and inhales deeply, as if to find her lover once more.

“Oh, you will get over him,” Rose says, popping a gin-saturated olive in her mouth. “And this young man may very well help you do it.”

“Release your inner poodles,” Con commands, smoothing her bubble-gum-pink mane with bejewelled fingers. “And relinquish every last memory of Jag Silvertree. He was nothing but bad news from the get-go.”

“It is true that Jag is far from my mind whenever I lay eyes on my young neighbour,” Wanda confides, dropping her gloved hand to her side. “My heart beats so fast every time I hear that boy's door, the click of the key in the lock, the rhythm of the rap music he listens to at night . . .”

Wanda downs the last of her martini. In the fire's glow she looks innocent as a child, which reminds Rose to issue a warning.

“Just so long as he ain't jailbait, go get him,” urges the fortysomething Rose. “A younger man helped me get out of a bad marriage. This one could make you forget Jag forever.”

As Wanda warms to the idea of the young man obliterating the jagged memories from her mind, Con puts more tomato juice on ice. In the first trimester of her first pregnancy, she is strictly adhering to an alcohol-free happy hour.

“Last week I sat outside on my stoop painting my toenails ‘A Touch of Scarlet,'” Wanda muses. “Like rubies, the tips of my toes flashed a message of magic and surrender. I dreamed the flash set that boy on fire, a burning that could only be quenched by me.”

“Sounds like the opening paragraph of a new novel,” Con suggests, her jewels flashing fire and ice. Con hopes that by evoking Wanda's passion for writing, she will lift her out of this blue funk.

Rose adds, “And the opening paragraph of a new chapter in your life.”

“My boy leaned back by the plastic tulips on his balcony and took off his shirt,” Wanda continues, as if dictating the next paragraph. “He did that for me. He knew I was watching. I looked him straight in the eye from above the rim of my coffee mug, full Dark City sliding down my throat.” She stabs a marshmallow with her stick. “Then his mother came out and looked at me sideways.”

“Never mind Mama,” Con instructs. “Like Rose, I, too, have had the pleasure of a younger man, one who saw me through a very nasty breakup. Yes sir, let the boy take your mind off ol' what's-his-name.”

With that, Rose and Con start to count as Wanda, with an understanding of what must happen on three, peels the glove from her hand. It actually takes until twelve before she sends it flying into the fire, but then she gleefully roasts a marshmallow over the last of its gossamer dreams.

Tell him I was too fucking busy—or vice versa.

—Dorothy Parker

Breaking up is hard.
Real hard. Hard in ways I never knew. For the first week following a bad breakup a few years ago, I couldn't sleep or eat. I became a walking anorexic zombie.

The week after that I slept a little, but cried a river and still couldn't eat. I wanted to go to Mexico and drown my sorrows, lose myself in a bottle of tequila and never return. But I didn't have any money. I couldn't even afford tequila.

I contacted my spiritual adviser, who told me to envision something better for myself. Visions flooded my consciousness. Still, every morning I'd wake up with a pall hanging over me, a dark cloud, a scum of sour relationship clinging to my skin and bones in the humid days of August.

I'm not a religious person, but I took to praying for deliverance from my living nightmare. It had been a particularly fucked-up split after years of what (I now see) was a particularly fucked-up relationship. I began to pray that I'd find bliss, but mostly I just prayed that I'd survive the hell ride that was turning my world upside down and inside out.

In my fourth week, just when I thought I wasn't going to make it out alive, I met a man. A vision. One of those tanned construction-worker types who work on the site half-naked and yell, “Hi baby!” at you when you pass. Only sweeter.

I was leaving Value Village on Queen Street East when I first saw him: big and tattooed, with a thin layer of sweat glistening on his shirtless muscles. He was leaning against a post and I couldn't help staring. “Hi,” I said, and kept walking.

He called out, “How are you?”

“Good. And you?”

He answered, “Better now.”

I certainly felt better—I was smiling for the first time in weeks. I kept walking. He caught up to me at the corner. I tried not to be too obvious as I checked out his body. I could see he was somewhere in his early twenties. At the time I was thirty-five and welcomed any chance to play Mrs. Robinson. Coo coo ca-choo.

He told me he'd had a feeling he should walk a certain route coming home from work that day, one he didn't usually take. He happened to see me through the window of the store, but he felt shy about talking to me. Then I'd walked out and said hello.

“Can I take you out for dinner?” he asked. I caught the scent of him on the breeze: sweat, sand, heat, sex. I hesitated, so he said, “Lunch . . . breakfast . . . a drink?”

I ended up giving him my cell number, and he called a few times and left messages in a soft, low voice dripping with sex, like velvet soaked in Drambuie. “Hi, beautiful,” he'd say, and with every syllable he sounded like he was making love to me. I was scared of the intensity of my attraction, but at the same time realized I wasn't thinking about what's-his-name anymore.

We couldn't get together for a while—my days were filled with deadlines for illustrations needed for this newspaper or that magazine—and our phone messages and conversations took on a hot I-need-to-fuck-you-now quality. I felt like I'd found my bliss, and we hadn't even got together yet.

Finally we met one sunny Sunday for a beer. Afterward we strolled the streets of the Annex and got to know each other a little. We sat on the front steps of Central Tech High School and talked. After a while he kissed me. It was fitting that we were on high school steps, because I was as horny as a teenager when I kissed him back.

The kisses were hot, wet and biting, and through them he murmured, “Can I tie you up and go down on you for hours?” He made me woozy with desire and I straddled him right there on the stairs in broad daylight. I was wearing a skirt and I wanted so badly to unleash his raging erection and ride it to the rescue. Only the thought of an obscenity charge deterred me.

So we went behind a pillar, and he brushed my G-string aside and fingered me. “Blonde,” he mumbled. “I've never had blonde pussy before.” Holy, a blonde-pussy virgin!

Although my fleece is actually light brown, this was no time to split hairs, so to speak. “Dirty blonde,” I mumbled.

He mumbled back, “Sticky, wet, hot blonde,” and then directed my own fingers there, pushing them as far in as they could go, then yanking them out and bringing them up to my mouth. He joined me in the finger-sucking while he teased my cunt with the head of his cock. Then he fucked me against the pillar until I came and he came—hard.

Yes, breaking up is hard. Coo coo ca-choo.

To hell, my love, with you!

—Dorothy Parker

Long before I had
my affair, Curtis and I were divorced both in soul and in heart. We were really only married on paper. We lived separate lives, but out of some sick need Curtis would not let me go. Oh, how I do not miss Curtis! Staggering home at 2 a.m., crashing through the door and falling into bed. His inebriated tongue like a jellyfish upon me, a muscle with no muscle—just drunken, disoriented dallying. I would pray for him to stop beating around the bush. No, I don't mean Curtis was into S/M. I mean I wanted him to get to that place I was coming from. But if you can barely navigate your way home, how the hell are you going to find the jewel?

Time and again I'd draw him a map—X marks the spot—but it was useless when he'd been drinking. And if I tried to talk to him about it when he was sober, he'd just sit there, morose, saying nothing. “What's the matter, Curtis?” I'd say. “Cat got your tongue?”

Jell-O! I've had guys do more with their hot breath down there in five seconds than he could do in five minutes with that drunken tongue. And the more I'd push against it, the more he'd melt away. Then, finally, when my climax was on the tip of his tongue, so to speak, he'd stop. “No,” I'd plead, “don't stop!”

Well, the day came when I stopped the pleading and had an affair with a soundman, which left me pleading in a different way—for more. We met while working on a cross-gendered production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. I was thirty-six, still fit enough to play a young buck like Stanley. I took a lot of my character studies from Curtis and nailed Kowalski on the nose.

Now I'm a down-to-earth sort of actor and I like hanging out backstage chewing the fat with the crew. At least until it's time to go onstage and chew the scenery with the cast. On my second day of rehearsal, I was having a catnap on the couch in the green room. When I awoke, my eyes came to focus on the bleached denim crotch of the soundman. As he sauntered toward me and introduced himself in a smoky, blues-singer voice, I had an urge to breathe hotly into the faded blue.

My co-star, the diva playing Blanche, whispered in my ear, “Rose O'Connell, your consciousness is in your crotch.”

To which I promptly responded, “No, it's not. It's in his.”

And that was the shape of things to come for two transcendent summer months, at least when I could get away. When I couldn't be with him, I engraved my young lover in my brain, branded him in my heart, tattooed him in my pussy. I played him back in my mind as he slipped his key into the keyhole that first time he showed me around the sound booth.

He moved his eyes up and down the considerable length of my tanned legs that first night, and my eyes followed his agile fingers as they deftly inserted the key—the same fingers I'd dreamed of sucking and biting as I'd watched them through the sound-booth window—slender, silver-ringed fingers that stroked keys and danced on buttons. Now ensconced in the dark sensuality of the sound booth, these deft digits raced juicy circles around my own buttons and switches.

Ohms, sound bites, hot-spot power speakers, perfect pitch, good vibrations—the man had it all. And a tongue piercing, to boot! He amplified my pleasure to peak decibels and we shook the rafters of that old theatre with our wild, electrified lovemaking.

During the course of the show I cherished his every wet kiss, and when we were apart I wrote about him in my journal. I had to. In code, of course—you know,
uckfay emay abybay
. Nights when I couldn't be with him (which were often, as my real-life role as a mother made me the most happy) I'd lay awake in the wee hours dreaming of biting his lips till they bled—lips that were apt to curl into a sexy, sly smile like a bent Cupid's bow.

And then the show closed. At the closing night party, I had a glass of wine on the catwalk with the soundman and whined about my bad marriage and my being out of a job. I bemoaned the fact that I didn't think anyone was taking me seriously enough—in the industry or out of it. And then he took me. Seriously. Right there on the catwalk, far above the madding crowd, amid the spotlights and other equipment.

And suddenly a light went on: What was the worst that could happen if I walked out on Curtis? Just left him there, blathering threats and drowning in his own emotional blackmail? Would he really pummel me, as he'd always said he would?

He'd hit me before, but my guess was that the booze and drugs would win out over the exertion required to exact revenge. The next night, while Curtis was at the bar, the kids and I took a cab ride to freedom. We hid in an attic room at a friend's house.

I heard through the grapevine that Curtis was furious, but apparently not furious enough to find us, which he easily could have done. Anyway, in a few months it all blew over and I went on with my usual life. Only there hasn't been anything usual about my life since I left Curtis. I cut the rebop, as Stanley Kowalski would say. And it feels glorious.