3
We had sex for the first time in a suite at the Sands Casino, then ordered cheeseburgers from room service and went down to the floor to gamble.
After, things cooled down almost immediately. I was disappointed, but found a broken heart was not so hard to bear, provided you didn’t know it was broken until after it had been fixed. Lex let me down easy by skillfully not bothering to let me down at all. Instead, he simply began referring to the fact of our friendship, as if from the start there had been nothing more. Since nothing was changing, nothing need change, was the message—no need to stop sleeping together. And because he was older, because he knew everything, I figured he must know about this, too. Not wanting to appear foolish, I didn’t ask any questions but just rushed to adjust my perspective to his.
And I was happy to be his friend finally. That I was the one he talked to about girls made me feel special. More special than if we’d been dating, because if we’d been dating, I’d be his adversary, not his confidante. When you’re dating, we agreed, during one of our marathon phone calls, you’re basically just strangers trying to trick each other, opponents trying to win. Dating, we decided, is more about what you don’t share than what you do. Lex and I, on the other hand, that summer, shared everything.
Including our secret. Because Lex had a reputation for seducing young girls—a habit I teased him for, as if identifying the others proved I was not one of them—I made him promise not to tell anyone about us. “Wouldn’t it be fun to keep you and me a secret?” I whispered feverishly, after our first kiss. With nothing to gain from publicizing our relationship, Lex pulled me close, agreeing it would make for a terrific time.
Because of all this then, because I really liked Lex and was afraid of anyone finding out, I made jokes about him, told my friend Caroline that his close-cut hair made his head look like it was made of felt, told her that I wanted to stick felt animals on it and felt continents, called him “felt-head.”
And catching sight of him scowling at karaoke one night, annoyed as usual, this time because his song hadn’t come up yet, I tapped Caroline on the shoulder and pointed. “Look, the denim gargoyle!” And when I spied him flirting with yet another young girl at the bar, I’d say, look how old and sad Lex is, how pathetic his chasing girls half his age. I’d remark how he was getting older but not growing up, how ten years from now he’d be wearing the same Converse sneakers and Eddie Grant T-shirt and whispering the same words he was whispering just then to someone else.
4
That August, as I did every summer, I left for Greece to visit my family. Day after day, I’d lie on the beach, sweating under the sun with my eyes closed, my face covered by a straw hat, imagining what it might be like were Lex to visit. I’d pick him up from the airport in our old limping Mercedes, and after passing through the brush and pulling into our gravel driveway, presided over by clay replicas of Grecian statues, I’d introduce him to my parents.
My father wouldn’t like him at first. He’d be put off by his tattoos and would hate him as a matter of course—clearly a disc jockey wasn’t good enough for his only daughter. But then, convinced by the strength of Lex’s love for me, my father’s disapproval would melt away and the two men would eventually shake hands and laugh. Looking out at the sea in front of our house, they’d go on talking wisely about life, about the future, about Lex’s with me, both of them agreeing solemnly that I ought to be treated with care.
When I returned to New York a month later, Lex finally confessed his love. For that girl—he pointed her out. The girl he loved was seventeen, a soon-to-be senior in high school, and because of her age, because she had school the next morning, harder to get than I ever could be. Lex had mentioned his crush on her before I left, but I had assumed it was like his crush on so many others.
It didn’t bother me when he’d spoken about them or her, because they were passing fancies, while I was the one that stuck. Because his feelings for me ran so much deeper, I had been promoted from crush to best friend. I understood: Lex was a lifelong playboy who could never love only one girl. But as he enumerated all the ways in which she was different from the rest, I realized I had understood nothing. He just didn’t love me.
5
In autumn I began dating someone, too. It was the start of my senior year at NYU, and I had taken an internship at The New Yorker where I met Jed, with whom I thought I was falling in love (again), and about whom I began, in detail, to tell Lex.
Lex was much less receptive to discussions of my relationships than he had been about his. Indeed, the sophisticatedly comprehensive terms of our friendship, which had always included frank conversations about his intrigues, seemed to come apart on the occasion that I had my own. “I think I’m falling in love,” I told him, on the drive down to Atlantic City. Lex said Jed sounded like a loser, popped a cassette into the stereo, and turned up the volume.
Since Lex dropped so much money in the casinos, he was regularly sent comps to all sorts of casino events. And since his girlfriend couldn’t go on account of her having school in the morning, Lex regularly took me with him. Together we saw Don Rickles, Tony Danza Live! and watched Bob Dylan from the comfort of our own private booth.
We’d get a big suite, order milkshakes and grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries to eat in our room, before going downstairs to gamble before the show. “What do the Caribbeans know about poker?” I said supportively, after he lost a few hands. We moved on to the roulette table, his favorite, where he sometimes asked me to pick his numbers.
I’d think hard about what numbers were important to me. “Sixteen,” I’d say, because I had been that age once, and according to the Sinatra song I’d sometimes sing at karaoke, “It was a very good year.” Or I’d calculate the difference of years between us: “Fifteen!” Or I’d choose the age at which I wanted to be married: “Thirty! No, twenty-eight . . . I’m not sure.” “Fourteen!”—how old I was for my first kiss. Or I’d think hard and choose a number based purely on a feeling. Why not? It was the same way I chose my boyfriends. I’d close my eyes tightly and ask myself, “Which number do I love?”
After the show, Lex would continue gambling and I’d sit beside him happily, playing with his chips, ordering screwdrivers from the Caesar’s Palace waitresses clad in their short white gold-trimmed skirts. The drinks were free, but Lex would slip me chips to tip them. Smoking my cigarettes and cheering him on, I’d pray for him to win so the fun could continue, so I could be hailed as his good luck charm. On the other side of that prayer was the fear that he’d lose and, hating me by association, would scowl as he asked me to pay for our chicken tenders at the Burger King near the highway leading back to New York.
It was on one of these trips to Atlantic City that I first met Justin, Shawn, and Richie. Lex and I were on the boardwalk on our way to the beach one Saturday morning when Richie and his model girlfriend flew past us on a rickshaw. They stopped after a few feet, having recognized Lex. They were going to see Stevie Wonder that night, Richie said.
“Cool. We’re going to the Alfonso Ribeiro convention,” I interjected.
“This is Iris,” Lex said. “She’s really into Silver Spoons.”
I smiled and offered my hand.
Later that night, they found us at the roulette table. Wearing anti-wack baggy pants and baseball caps pulled low in order to fend off the bright glare of wackness in others, they approached with their entourage of models in tow. They’d just come from the Wonder show they said, frowning. “It was incredible.”
“Hi,” I said, brightly.
Justin