Arm Candy Page 2

  As the girls licked soft serve ice cream cones, they walked by The Poster Shop as an image in the window caught Eden’s eye. Normally the window display posters were photos of saccharine nightmares, like a basket of puppies or a kitten dangling from a branch with a script caption of “Hang in There!” But this time, it was a shot worthy of Woody Allen’s lens: Manhattan at dusk, a man and a woman running through the street, holding hands.

  “Look at that, Allison,” Eden said, her tongue circling the chocolate ice cream. “New York City. I love that black-andwhite—”

  “I’d kill to go there. Like literally. I’d murder someone I don’t know.”

  “Should I buy it?” Eden asked.

  “Let’s see how much it is,” said Allison, walking in, ignoring the NO FOOD sign.

  “Excuse me, how much is that framed photo in the window, the New York image with the couple?” Eden asked the guy with Buddy-Holly-slash-serial-killer glasses who worked in the store.

  “It’s eighty,” he responded.

  “Eighty clams? Forget it, Eden,” Allison said, turning on her feet to leave.

  “Well, that’s framed. I do have it matted for twenty-two,” he said.

  Eden walked away smiling with her new eighteen-by-twenty poster tucked under her arm as the girls headed back across the food court to Allison’s dad’s car.

  “Excuse me—excuse me, miss?”

  The girls turned to find a tall, good-looking man in a black leather jacket. He spoke with a crisp British accent, and with his aviator shades and gleaming smile, he looked nothing like the guys the girls usually saw around.

  “Pardon me, I hate to interrupt you,” he said with an unbroken stare at Eden, taking off his shades. “I’m Pete MacGregor,” he said. “I’m a modeling scout for Ford in New York City.”

  Carol and Eden packed the boxes while Allison giddily raced around like a jackrabbit on crack.

  “Oh my God, this is it. This is so exciting. I can’t even deal. I mean, we, like, just bought that poster of New York, and now instead of that dumb photo you’re gonna have a window!”

  “Eden, knock it off with the sulking,” Carol said, noticing that her daughter looked like she had just vampired a lemon. “It’s gonna be amazing there for you.”

  “Mom,” Eden said, sounding frustrated, “you were the one who said to hold on to Jason. You told me he’s got it all.”

  “Yeah, for Shickshinny. And that was then. This is now.”

  As Carol loaded her daughter’s bags in the car, Allison walked with Eden, giving her a last pep talk.

  “Eden: remember when we were little girls and used to watch The Wizard of Oz on a loop?”

  “Yes,” Eden recalled warmly, putting her arm around her best friend.

  “You know when Dorothy leaves all that black-and-white boringness? That’s this place. You are going to Emerald City.”

  “Allison, the whole frigging point is that Dorothy missed the black and white,” Eden replied.

  “Well, Dorothy was a dope. With that dumb apron. Look, you said it yourself in geography: We live in a box. Our state is a fucking rectangle.”

  “I know,” laughed Eden. “I remember thinking the interesting states always have cool shapes. But not us. We just have four straight lines. Whoever made the borders didn’t care about fighting for the squiggles.”

  “That’s right. No more lame-ass boxes for you. New York has tons of jagged lines. So pull it together and get in the car.”

  After a tearful phone call to Jason saying good-bye, Eden loaded her last bag into Carol’s car. At the bus depot, Eden hugged her mom and then turned to give Allison something wrapped in newspaper.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s the poster of New York,” Eden said. “You can keep it until you come and get your own window.”

  Allison hugged her at the bus so tightly, Eden thought she’d snap.

  “I’m coming the second I get my fucking diploma, so you better be on your feet,” Allison said. “That means a year and a half to make bank. You can do it, Eden! Cindy Crawford can suck it!”

  Eden turned with a lump in her throat to climb the three stairs of the bus, then sat in her seat and took a last look at her mom, waving with her cigarette. As the bus pulled away and drove through Main Street, Eden watched as they passed the field where Jason had scored so many touchdowns, including one with her when they had snuck onto school property over the summer. She whizzed by, looking at the quaint rows of houses, the store where she’d worked, the market, and shuddered. Not because she was intimidated by the huge all-caps NEW YORK on the front of the bus. But because deep inside her, she knew she was never coming back.

  3

  If you’re gonna screw up, do it while you’re young. The older you get, the harder it is to bounce back.

  —Winston Groom

  Modeling was not what it had seemed at first. Crammed into a tiny apartment with six anorexic girls, a fat, bulimic chaperone, and three bunk beds, Eden knew right away this was not her dream scenario by any means. She ran around town, headed to go-sees, where they’d look her over, snap a Polaroid, and send her on her way.

  To escape the claustro digs, she walked the streets and eventually found her way around. She relished spying through large picture windows in the Village, wondering who the glamorous people were who lived in such lofty locales. She loved sending Allison New York postcards—from the dramatic and dreamily picturesque (Empire State Building at dusk) to the amusingly grotesque (a St. Marks punk with seventy-six facial piercings). She booked two photo shoots for catalogues and continued auditioning. But instead of getting down when she didn’t get a job like the other girls would, she still had hope—because the casting people always told her booker that while she wasn’t right for this particular gig, she had a striking look like no one else they had ever seen.

  She got a part-time job at Tower Records to save money since twice-weekly jobs as a model for fashion designers on Seventh Avenue weren’t exactly keeping her in ka-ching, and she was an indentured servant of sorts to the agency, which paid for all her headshots and living expenses.

  Her post at the record store allowed her to get almost-free cassettes, and to meet many customers, plenty of whom asked to see her again. She dated several men—a Wall Street banker, an eye doctor, a trust fund baby, each for a few weeks or a couple months. Until one day, in wandered Cameron Slade. Leather jacket, ponytail, pierced ear, gorgeous face. Eden knew who he was; she had seen his local band, Desperate Measures, play in the store at their record release party. He hailed from Southern California, smoked tons of weed, and never met a hairbrush he liked. His fingers burned through the fret, ripping riffs that made guys bang their heads and girls bang him.

  “Hello again,” Cam said to her with a sexy chin jut. “I met you last time I was here. I never forget a face. Well, a face like that.”

  He invited Eden to come see him play at a nearby rock club. As she stood in the front row, watching his fingers grind the guitar, she felt as electrified as the amps he roared over. She saw the girls screaming to her left and right, dancing as if drugged by not only the throbbing chords but also by Cam’s hotness. He looked down at her after a string-shredding solo, and she grinned coyly.

  She was packing boxes by the month’s end, making it almost to the year mark in the tiny models’ apartment. And that had been more than enough.

  Installed in Cameron’s apartment, she felt the hope of things starting to come together.

  “I’m wild about you, Eden,” he said to her in bed one night, as she stroked his long hair.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Can you come with us to Baltimore tomorrow? You know I love having you at the shows.”

  “I don’t know. I’d really like to, but I have a go-see at noon. I’m not sure I can move it . . .”

  “Just skip it, then, just this once. Hammerjack’s is major.”

  Eden didn’t miss that show, or any others. Or rehearsals. Every day, C
ameron would pick her up at Tower and they’d go hang out with the band, and Eden would sit on the side, loving life, swaying to the addictive music of their practice jam sessions in an underground space on Ludlow.

  “We’re playing Arlene’s next week, big gig. It’s finally happening, guys!” Cam walked to the side and kissed Eden. “Maybe you can come and sell our tapes.”

  “Sure, totally.” Eden nodded.

  “The T-shirts just came in, too,” the bassist, Paul, added. “You can sell those, too; they’re badass.”

  “Okay.” Eden nodded enthusiastically. She could feel in her bones they were taking off.

  “Hey, hon,” Cam said with a whispered growl in her ear, his muscular arms wrapping around her waist, guitar slung on his back. “I was thinking of getting a tattoo.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked. “Of what?”

  “Well, I was thinking, maybe we could get each other’s names.”

  Um . . . yeah, no. “You mean, like . . . I get one, too?” Eden asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the whole point. I’m yours and you’re mine.”

  Eden considered this for a moment but shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I don’t like needles,” she confessed.

  “You don’t like needles, or you don’t like my name on you.”

  “It’s not that, Cam—”

  “All right, whatever,” he said, turning to the band. “Let’s take it from the top of the set again, guys!”

  Things progressed amazingly well for Desperate Measures, whose album was doing better and better as they booked larger gigs in bigger venues. When they were invited to play CBGBs, both Eden and Cam suspected his star was really on the rise. When it sold out in two days, they actually knew it.

  “This is a new song we’re workin’ on and it goes out to my Eden,” he said through the silver mic over the loudspeaker at CBs. “The foxiest girl in New York.”

  As Cameron strummed the opening notes, a bolt warmed Eden’s chest: It was her first brush with fame. Everyone in the packed club craned to stare at her, off to the side, backstage but visible in the wings. She loved it. It was her first hit of the potent drug of recognition, a high she had experienced only on a microscopic level when students at school would look at her. But this was different. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

  Cam’s place was way east on Ninth Street, in a neighborhood that was, at the time, sketchy and skeevy. But it was crawling with the young and the vibrant, their seething ambition like a palpable mist in the lamplit air. And as Eden roamed the crowded, hot-blooded sidewalks with Cam gripping her waist, she felt her own ambitions expand exponentially. She suspected, to the core of her soul, that soon she would trade Avenue A for the A List.

  4

  Live your life and forget your age.

  —Norman Vincent Peale

  While the months passed, as Cameron’s success was growing, unfortunately Eden’s seemed to be faltering. She booked fewer and fewer modeling jobs, though ironically, it seemed more and more men were hitting on her. But she was thrilled for Cam and ecstatic to cheer on his string of sold-out shows. Still, there was a growing feeling gnawing inside her; she needed to do something more.

  Luckily, just as her rut was growing deeper, Allison graduated. Eden pounded the pavement to find a studio apartment for her nearby, and soon enough the girls were hugging at Port Authority and celebrating Allison’s arrival in 212 land over drinks before Cameron’s concert.

  “Cheers,” said Allison, raising her glass. “To the window instead of the poster.” The girls clinked goblets. “Even though it’s facing a brick wall.”

  “Thank God you’re here,” Eden said. “I am so ecstatic I can’t even take it.”

  In the packed Irving Plaza, Allison and Eden stood with their credentials in a VIP section of the mezzanine along with record executives and allegedly someone from MTV. The label was considering investing in a video and wanted feedback on their sound. Eden and Allison screamed and clapped when the band came on-stage and afterward Cameron gave them a quick hug before darting off to the side with his managers.

  “So what now?” Allison asked.

  “Now I usually just kinda wait for him.”

  A couple more months passed, and while Allison’s fabulous arrival had sprung Eden from her worries temporarily, she started to feel a pit growing inside her stomach.

  One night after a party off Houston Street, Cam and Eden headed up the Bowery.

  “Let’s get some food,” he said in a moody tone.

  “Okay.”

  They strolled in silence.

  “Are you . . . all right?” Eden asked.

  “No, not really,” he said, pulling open the door to a diner on the corner.

  Inside, Eden looked at Cam’s annoyed face. A guy with a sketch pad and a yellow pencil took notice of them and moved down a stool at the crowded counter so the couple could sit together.

  “Thanks,” Eden said to him with a smile.

  “Sure,” he replied.

  She turned back to Cameron. “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

  “You were ALL OVER that guy Rick at the party!” Cam fumed at her.

  “I was not,” she retorted.

  “You were.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Eden unfurled her muffler and took off her hat. Her fiery green eyes blazed against her chilled cheeks.

  “Come on, you were practically throwing yourself on top of him,” Cam accused. “It was pathetic. You were so flirtatious.”

  “Excuse me. I wasn’t flirting with him! This—is in your head,” Eden stammered.

  “I can’t take this shit anymore,” he said, enraged. “There are a ton of girls who would kill to be with me.”

  At this, Eden’s face turned red with anger.

  “So let them.” She shrugged, her voice not rising to meet his fervor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Honestly, Cameron, I don’t need to be accused, and frankly, I don’t need to follow you around, selling T-shirts, waiting in the wings. I’ve had enough,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess we both have.”

  “Are you fucking joking me?” he fumed, standing up. “Are you breaking up with me?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?” he screamed, his face reddening. “Why are you so fucking detached? What are you, like, some robot?”

  “Nope,” she replied matter-of-factly and turned to the counter as the short-order cook approached to take their order and see what the drama was about. “I just think it’s time.” Eden turned away to face the waiting chef. “Hi! I’ll have a large coffee, black, please. And also a hot chocolate. And an oatmeal with extra raisins, please.”

  “Ma’am, no more raisins, sorry.”

  “No raisins? Oh bummer.” She grimaced, dejected. “I’ll have pancakes, then.”

  “Am I going crazy or are you literally more upset about fucking raisins right now than me?” Cameron raged, steam coming from his multiply pierced ears.

  Her flippant, silent stare confirmed that, yes indeed, plain oatmeal would be a greater tragedy than this one-way express ticket to Splitsville.

  “I’ll be out tomorrow so you can come get your stuff,” he said like a child and stomped to the door. “Have a nice life.”

  Eden exhaled and unzipped her windbreaker nonchalantly as the guy with the sketch pad watched her casually hang it on a nearby hook on the wall next to her.

  “You guys always have that large red box of Sun-Maid raisins up on top of that coffee machine,” Eden said to the guy behind the counter.

  “Oh yes, yes, we all out. Tomorrow, tomorrow.”

  The guy next to Eden couldn’t take his eyes off her as she waited for her pancakes, unfazed by the breakup. She looked up to meet his glance as he looked down. He was wearing a worn-i n, well-loved navy hooded zip-up sweatshirt.

  “Hot chocolate? Coffee?” the short-order chef called out.

  “Yes!”

&nbs
p; “Thank you.”

  Both Eden and he replied at the same time, reaching for the steaming cup of coffee.

  “Oh, sorry, go ahead, I got the same thing—you take it,” the guy on the stool next to her said.

  “No, no, no, don’t be silly! I’ll get the next one. Look, here it is!” She smiled, reaching for the second cup placed on the counter.

  They sipped their scalding mugs side by side.

  “I like raisins, too,” he offered sweetly. “In half my childhood pictures I swear I’m holding one of those little red boxes.”

  Eden was charmed by the innocent interjection of the guy with the sketch pad.

  “Me, too,” she replied, swerving her stool to face him. “I think my mother thought it counted as part of the fruit group.”

  “I moved from California to Tennessee when I was four, and my mom said that on the drive I asked if there would be raisins in Memphis. It was like the little red box would make it all okay,” he said with a smile.

  His book-packed messenger bag was slung across him, his blue eyes beaming through his little circular gold glasses. He was one of the kindest-looking men she had ever seen.

  “I’m Eden,” she said, extending her hand.

  That figures, he thought. She was perfect. Of course he could never say that, as he knew instantly she had heard it a million times over.

  “Hi, Eden, I’m Wes.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she smiled. “Cheers.”

  Their ceramic coffee mugs bumped and they chatted the hour away about everything from music (he favored The The) to the best secret little streets in the city (Grove Court, MacDougal Alley, Washington Mews). Before long it had become clear to Eden that this guy had somehow tripped an invisible wire inside of her. He wasn’t quite like anyone she’d met before.

  As a young architecture student, working late in the libraries and at the drafting table with his little gold glasses over his bright blue eyes, Wes Bennett found that he learned more by following his feet than by following textbooks. Wes loved buildings. He explored every last alleyway, each cozy row of mews, every looming skyscraper. He was a passionate intellectual, drinking in every last gargoyle, arched doorway, and Doric column.