The Gorgeous Girls (6 page)

Part Five

“‘Heterosexuality is not normal,
it's just common.'” Rose had another Parker nugget in mind but proudly announces this one in honour of a wedding party convening in a nearby park. The girls have met at Rooster Coffee House for afternoon java and, upon arrival, Rose picks up the resident binoculars to get a closer look at the wedding couple.

He, tall and handsome, dressed in a dark suit with a dazzling purple scarf cutting across its formal expanse; and he, shorter but equally handsome, clad in crisp white pants with a silvery Indian shirt embroidered with pink flowers.

The wedding guests have gathered under the blossoming trees of early spring. After a cold, drizzly winter, the girls can feel their bodies blooming forth just like the trees. Con's body is the most obvious of the blossoming trio, with the birth of her child mere weeks away. Her breasts, like buds eight months ago, have come into full flower, like glorious white peonies. She flaunts this voluptuousness, her décolletage adorned with shiny strings of Swarovski crystals.

“Tyler likes this change,” Con says, proudly patting her full mams. Bright blue veins run through them, a presage of the day the milk will flow.

“He loved them before, though, right? When they were just small?” Wanda asks.

“Hell, yeah! How do you think I got into this pickle . . . uh . . . this lovely state? Besides, I'm not so sure I would call my pre-preg tits small, exactly.”

“Me, I've had 'em big and breastfeeding and I've had 'em slight and chaste,” Rose proclaims. “I refuse to use the word
small
until I can take it back like the night. I once heard a man describe a woman's chest as ‘small' and ‘lacking.' Excuse me? Lactating, maybe, but never lacking!”

“Ha!” Con laughs loudly.

Like a circus ringleader, Rose announces, “In the corner of less big, I give you Charlotte Rampling as Lucia Atherton in
The Night Porter
, her suspenders curving ever so slightly over her naked breasts.”

Con and Wanda applaud.

“And the wonderful French actress Arletty, who, as Garance in
Les Enfant du Paradis
, sheds her beautiful gown and accidentally, oh-so-fleetingly exposes one perfect teacup breast.”

Another round of applause.

“Finally, I give you, among many examples, Renée Zellweger as Roxy Hart in
Chicago
.”

“I love that movie!” Con exclaims.

“I had a line in it,” Rose reveals.

“I didn't know that!” Wanda shouts.

“I was in an ending they shot but never used,” Rose explains. “They dressed me in an authentic flapper dress, heavy with faux pearls, and they forbade me to wear a bra. The look of the twenties was flat and the weight of the pearls did the job on my un-brassiered chest.”

“No flapper flatness for Queen Latifah,” Wanda says.

“Right!” Rose agrees. “And from Latifah's gloriously overflowing cups to Zellweger's slight but splendid mounds, that flick celebrates a gamut of sizes.”

“Vive la différence!”
Con says, downing the last of her creamy latte.

“Also in the corner of less big,” Rose continues, “I give you Kate Hudson and her mom, Goldie Hawn. Goldie before the implants, that is.”

“I heard someone describe Hawn's pre-implant breasts as ‘nonexistent' once,” intones the fulsome Constance.

“Let me guess. It was a man,” Rose says.

“Bingo! Say, how about Twiggy in the corner?” Con replies. “Twiggy was my mom's idol in the sixties. My mom told me that scores of flower children and mod chicks, herself included, grew into splendiferous, slenderiferous glory with Twiggy as their role model.”

“It was a decade of bra burning following a decade of bullet bras,” Rose adds. “Who wouldn't want to burn those!”

“Now my mom and I shop together for bras—gel, underwire, push-up, double click. Anything but bullet,” Con admits.

“Nursing bras?” Wanda asks.

“Not so much,” she answers. “Those can get a little complicated for my taste. Right now I like a good push-up with a front clasp for easy access.”

Leaning in, Wanda confides, “I have heard that in some cultures toe cleavage is so desirable that men's eyes might never rest on a girl's face, let alone her breasts.”

“So let alone her breasts,” Con jests. “As in, let alone her breasts . . . and suck her toes!”

They all look down at their feet. “Rose, your shoes!” Wanda exclaims.

Rose clicks her cyan-sequined heels together. “You like them? They were part of that estate sale.”

“Very nice, and they actually give you toe cleavage!”

Con picks up the binoculars and zeroes in on the ceremony, which is about to get underway in the park. Wanda believes she hears a wistful sigh emanate from Con's cardinal-red lips, while Rose's gaze climbs up into the branches of the magnificent tree above the conjoining couple.

“They should seal it with a kiss up in that tree,” she says mysteriously.

The stars are soft as flowers, and as near; The hills are webs of shadow, slowly spun; No separate leaf or single blade is here—All blend to one.

—Dorothy Parker

In an infamous black-and-white
photo, a naked but out-of-focus movie star sits on a branch holding his erect penis. The star is purportedly James Dean, but we will never know for sure. Is it the young actor, or just an extremely good look-alike? I like to think it actually is him, although it hardly matters fifty plus years after his death.

James Dean lassoed a million teenaged hearts in the vast emptiness of 1950s America. A rising star with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and a cold bottle of milk pressed against his brow. A shooting star who ignited pining hearts into rebel-red passion then was suddenly gone.

Frozen on a branch in the Hollywood Hills or created in some photographer's darkroom, this shot, which I found in a soft-porn magazine from the eighties, holds me rapt for three reasons: Dean himself (I am a fan), the marvelous erection (also a fan) and the tree (fan again).

Ah, trees. Like marvelous erections themselves, tall and strong and sensuous. Oak, linden, pine—they gather me to their majestic selves like a moth to a flame. As a child I spent hours perched on their strong limbs, swaying back and forth, eating their fruit, showering myself with their blossoms, daydreaming in their sun-dappled leaves. The big cherry trees in my front yard, the apple trees on our boulevard, the maple beside our house.

That majestic maple's first branch was as high as the second storey of our house, so I needed a ladder to climb it. The perch was a great place to stargaze at night or to blend in with the leaves by day.

One afternoon, while balancing on that high-up perch, I slipped and spun around such that I was left clinging to the limb with just my bare nine-year-old hands. I had to work with all my might to pull up my legs and wrap them around the branch.

As I dangled and struggled in those moments, with death itself waiting to claim me should I lose my grip—think Cary Grant on Mount Rushmore, Norman Lloyd on the Statue of Liberty—the most amazing thing happened. A delicious orgasm pulsed through my body as I hung in peril. Starting at my groin, it spread out deliriously, waves of ecstasy reaching the ends of my toes and the top of my head. It made me feel gloriously, if perilously, weak.

This marked the beginning of a beautiful relationship between the trees and me.

Once the climax had peaked and rolled away, I secured myself on the branch, where I rested in joyous, post-orgasmic bliss. From that day on, lovely orgasms transported me as I hoisted myself up from branch to branch in other, easier-to-climb trees.

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

—Dorothy Parker

Through the seasons, Con
persisted in her practice of sex magic. The man across the way moved out and Con put up blinds without ever learning of his lustful viewing. Every night she donned her vintage black velvet cape, lit several tall candles, breathed in jasmine incense, chanted melodious incantations and brought herself to exquisite, supernatural climax.

The book kept her busy with exercises meant to sharpen her magical powers: rites and rituals, hexes and elixirs. She even overcame her aversion to naming her sex organ and settled on “Elspeth.”

As an artist she was appalled by the lifeless, sterile drawings in the book, so she transformed them with her pencil crayons and paints, giving a skinny woman wearing a tawdry teddy a little oomph by adding a carmine feather boa and some vivid jewelry.

In her sketchbook she worked on symbols, one for every desire. She created beautiful symbolic renderings of her wishes and prayers with oil pastels. Experimenting with stars and hearts, busting them out of clichés and into sensual territory, she readied them to send up through her chakras and out the top of her head with orgasmic determination.

In time she had to acknowledge that it worked. She'd used the magic of sex to conjure gifts for friends and family. She didn't tell them, though, realizing that they might not appreciate knowing she'd sent orgasmic messages into the astral network for them. The point was magic of the sexual kind often worked.

She also came to understand that when she placed a large amount of positive energy into something, it stood a very good chance of coming into being. Sexual energy, mental energy, physical energy—the key was to remember that just one kind of energy wasn't always enough. Sex magic alone wasn't always enough, just as praying on its own wasn't always enough. She learned that it is the follow-up that counts, the action you take in the real world.

With this understanding, she'd realized several desires for herself: a grant for her book of illustrations, a dinner ring of pink crystal, a Betsey Johnson dress of cream and violet silk.

As for her most ardent wish, an abundance of lovers was tossed her way. Alphonse was the first she'd had since the construction worker. A shiatsu therapist with an office in a shabby east-end building, he always shouted “Lexus!” when he came. The night he yelled “With leather seats,” Constance knew it was over. Long afterward, she still saw him putting around town in his beat-up Volkswagen. No magic there.

Next she bedded Brian, an accountant who liked to walk around the “sacred bed” in robes and turbans and little bells, which Con felt was fine, so long as it facilitated the magic. But then he named his penis Randall. “Randy for short—although there's nothing short about Randy, right, baby?” It was true, Randy wasn't short, but their affair was. Two weeks was all she could handle of “Take Randy in your mouth, baby.”

Then came Connor—she had no idea why she seemed to be working her way through the alphabet with these potentially magical lovers—but the C entry on the list got a big kick out of the resemblance of their names to one another. It inspired in him poetry of the worst kind—doggerel and ditties weaving a panoply of cons: Comic Con and Con Ed, Genghis Khan and
The Chronicles of Narnia
, and every other con this side of Sing Sing.

After Connor she packed the book and the robes and the gongs away and went back to sex with herself purely for sex's sake, a reconnection to the big blank space she travelled to when climaxing. No ulterior motives, no symbols, no pet pussy names. A month into that and she found she'd skipped the bulk of the alphabet and gone straight to T.

And this new lover, this delightful musician named Tyler, couldn't help but think he'd met her somewhere before. It wasn't until she disrobed in front of him for the first time (or so they thought) that he recognized her: the woman in the window, the gorgelicious lady across the way from his old apartment.

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

—Dorothy Parker

I have been called
a sparkle diva and a glitter critter and a magpie. The fashion world's current preoccupation with all things sparkly is only just catching up to me. Bejewelled shoes, rhinestone pins, twinkling earrings—I've been wearing them for ages, darling. Glass, rhinestone, crystal, diamond, zircon, ruby, emerald—I've donned the faux and the real, the precious and the semi.

But three days ago I was given the most beautiful bit of dazzle for my finger that I have ever seen: an engagement ring of diamonds and a single sapphire. Yes! Tyler asked me to marry him!

So began my search for my inner bride, my search to uncover the true meaning of holy matrimony. It has always made me feel slightly nauseous to read about the latest teenaged celebrity sporting a huge diamond engagement ring that cost as much as a small mansion. And I can't stand shallow chicks who flash their rocks at the grocery store as if proud to be owned by someone who can afford such a thing. I was pleasantly surprised to find a ring with a difference in that little box. A large, clear, deep-blue gem surrounded by twenty or so little diamonds, all displayed in a classic gold setting. It matched my eyes, Tyler said. And it spoke of his unending love for me.

He told me he'd searched long and hard for this ring. Knowing I'm not a traditional sort, he didn't want to give me a traditional ring. Indeed, long-held customs often ring empty in the smiling face of love. Give me true love, not rote vows; give me fresh sparkle, not dusty old traditions; give me your heavenly self, not your hell-bent ego. Take me to the altar, but take me daily with your passionate, unbridled loving.

You see, a nicely cut but generic diamond in a nicely appointed but generic setting would not do. Not to mention that the price of such a nicely turned-out ring could feed a family of four for years. Hence the regal sapphire and her circle of dazzling friends.

Last night Ty's band was the entertainment at a party I attended, and I wore that humungous hunk of hot-pink crystal I'd conjured with orgasmic spells. Next to it sat my new engagement ring. Pink dazzle threatened to upstage its blue glow, but the engagement ring far outshone the pink bauble with a glorious purity of refracted light and a depth of radiance that was downright heavenly.

The very giving of this ring was an expression of love. And that's my idea of marriage: a daily expression of love and faith and trust. If you truly love and trust your partner, then you need no legal binding, no formal vows, no signing of contracts, no flashing of jewelry. Then, and only then, can you hold a ceremony with words (vows) and gestures (kisses) and objects (rings and papers) to share your divine and everlasting love with friends and family, or simply whisper the affirmation to each other.