Nadya—the belle of the ball, of every ball. If there was ever a ball—any given night; any given venue so long as it was Downtown and so long as they were serving negronis there with a somewhat atypical garnish of grapefruit zest, instead of from the usual orange—you could rest assured that Nadya’d be there and that she’d be the belle of it. You’d most naturally associate her with slinky black dresses, hoisted or holstered around her neck with an asymmetrical loop of fabric that deigns to strap over only one shoulder (if you can picture what I mean), made of very soft and delectable fabrics, like cashmere, perhaps, in the wintertime or just whenever it gets colder, complete with caterpillar piles that would ridge very satisfyingly around the papillated skin of her hips, if that you were fortunate enough to so hold her.
Consummately wealthy—her parents were the Russian and shadowy types: except not so shadowy, their wealth was an open book and their place in Easthampton, always open (a friend of Nadya’s, a friend of theirs, or so they’d have it); or, her father, I should say: her mother was not only not shadowy, but was showy, ostentatious, glamorous, gaudy (I mean of dress; in temperament, a steely silence)—and consummately beautiful—Nadya, I mean, but her mother was too, or was, once. Needless to say she didn’t work. Nadya’s mother, I mean, but obviously Nadya didn’t either. She was Russian—both of them were Russian. Her mother only spoke Russian. Hence her perpetual silence—in our midsts, at least, the midsts of Nadya’s non-Russophonic friends; the silence was steely, as in, the fact of the silence itself, but the woman it emanated from actually did tend to seem overtly warm and cordial, invitative—the kind of woman who tells her daughter, Our place in Easthampton is always open; your friends are always welcome; any friend of yours, Nadya, is a friend of mine, and who, when Nadya (plus all her little friends) takes her up on the offer, regards them warmly and cordially and frozen-smilèdly, like a lawn jockey, bedeckèd in pearls, and make-up all hours of the day; eating her breakfast in a separate room with her boisterous husband, who himself was more inclined to, after said breakfast, come in and give an even warmer, and certainly more vocal, greeting and welcome and top-of-the-morning to us. I had never been to Easthampton nor any Hampton of any other cardinal direction nor Bridge, so these visits—a weekend here and there—held a special allure to me, something like “seeing how the other half lives,” or of checking into a luxury hotel, but with the feeling that, if I ever felt so inclined and if I could resist Julia’s pleading to not be so impolitic, I could actually move right in and live how the other half lives, forever; that’s how warm and how cordial and how invitative Nadya’s parents were. They weren’t shadowy at all, actually—just their wealth was, potentially. Nadya’s father spoke with a cartoonish accent that stayed that way because he learned English only relatively late in life and besides, he only associated with other denaturalized Russians, with whom he would invite us all to go boating, politely and hospitably, with obviously no intention that we would ever take him up on it, and surely no small allotment of chagrin should we ever try—merely hospitably; none of us wanted to go, anyway; certainly I didn’t—I mean, I did, if only to more so “see how the other half lives,” but I wouldn’t last a second among these high-powered Hamptons and recreational-boating types, in their conversations, in their way of things and of conversation; and not just because I don’t speak a lick of Russian, either.
Let me speak plainly of just Nadya now: she did work, “work,” in the technical sense—the work of a publicist or a hanger-on, attending gallery showings, parties, putting her name “out there”—Nadya worked and in effect her job was as a young and consummately wealthy, consummately beautiful, girl from, in, Manhattan. Her ambitions reached solely to the height of the next drink—the next man. Which is not to say—don’t get me wrong—that she was defined by the men in her life; hardly so. Not at all so. Nadya had verve and personality, especially personality, for four. Yes, she was interested in art; being a young and consummately wealthy, consummately beautiful girl in Manhattan—from Manhattan—this was basically required of you by law and with strict penalties incurred should you decide to, I don’t know, go to law school or something; and yes, Nadya “fraternized” (had sex) mostly with artists—young upstarts, all rubble-cheeked and wet behind the ears and wet, greasy, all over; but in my view, Nadya was in the main an artist herself—a painter, let’s say, and her canvas was nothing less than Manhattan itself, her very own life, her personality or her character (in the dramaturgical sense) itself. Like her dad, she spoke bravadaciously and often. She was a dilettante with zero pretensions of depth; which was refreshing; if you brought up art, Fine Art, with capital-letters that you voiced very breathily, she’d bring up Van Gogh and some guy named Mike she fucked. If you brought up books—“Literatoor”; likewise with the Fine Art—she’d bring up Julia, who she’d tout as the literary mastermind of a generation, then she’d bring up something else. If she even stayed around long enough to bring up anything at all—that is, without being swept away elsewhere with pressing social obligations on the other side of the rooftop, living-room, Midtown lounge. No pretensions; for she had no one to pretend to.
And consummately beautiful. Pesteringly beautiful. With eyebrows that looked like the contrail from the flight of the Blue Angels: sweeping, straight as an arrow, then swoop, at the edge of her eyes that could startle an Egyptian iconographer, eyes inlaid at an angle on her face, like a fish, the eyes of whom still, though, point directly forward, because it was so narrow, her face, and drew back so sharply, like one large muzzle—from the sharpest point (of the nose, and the mouth, and the brim of the forehead) in the middle—finishing at a perfect, sharp point, as if to direct your attention towards her ears, or where her ears would, should, have been—but now hidden by her hair, and in fact always invisible unless she ties her back in braids, which she’s been known to do—or otherwise simply tucked behind them, which also wasn’t uncommon. Very freckled, her face, as in their number, but they were very light freckles; there were darker ones on her shoulders you could also see because her shoulders were always bared. The whole effect of Nadya’s face was a perfect oval. It was a High Romantic face, one that any painter, who really knew their stuff, would have no choice but to lend to a seraph, with a threatening glare, or to a high priestess, or an evil stepmother from some fable or another. No, she was all charm and feminine restraint in her interactions with others, she wasn’t mean or threatening or evil—she was joyous and jovial and without restraint in her jubilation and her jubilee and her wantonly, recklessly flung hugs—strewn about but mostly strewn, with the force of something thrown and then left to its own devices to float and toss about, against gravity, air resistance, onto the ground or wherever else it might land—but just the look of her was the look of an evil gaze, something built into her jaw structure: something sharp and domineering; which came out when she was in intimate company—Julia and the rest of their friends, as in, the main handful, two or three others (whom I’ll get to) that were the “core” of their friend group—and when the four or five of them got to discussing, and phone-thrusting in each other’s faces, all their other friends, and everyone else in the scene, and potentially me, and men they’d slept with with whom they always ended things on good terms, and who they uniformly, quote, “respected,” but who they just as uniformly censured in private for his (perhaps minute, perhaps major) patheticicies or weaknesses, or his sexual hangups or preferences or practices—or whom, you know what, they didn’t even censure, but whom they just dissected like a frayed insect, with the benign curiosity of the field entomologist, trying to arrive at the abyssinal secret of human life and psychology and fragility through the case study who, unfortunately or not (it’s really up to you—up to him), happened to wander into their lives. No, she wasn’t evil, or even “mean,” necessarily, she was just honest, wholly honest, rigorously so, and unforgiving (so perhaps threatening) in her upholdance of such honesty; cruel only insofar as the scalpel of the entomologist, or the surgeon for that matter, or the needles of the lepidopterist are cruel. That’s what you saw in her face—which wasn’t hard, far from it, it seemed almost downy, or leopard-fur smooth, tactile-ly smooth though somewhat tough, in the same way rubber’s tough, but also smooth, to the touch; but “hard,” rather, in its intensity, in the luster and focality of its beauty—you saw that she saw you, in all the splendor, so to speak, or in all the fullness of you, without astigmatic blur or conceited disconnect, but just, you; and she would be professionally diligent in her assessment of you should the chance ever arise; should you have the chance to enter into her view, and should she, if chance would have it—though this time, a strictly neutral chance, “chance,” like fate, not like luck—be called to remark upon you. Hers was a very ferocious beauty that seemed very pure and unalloyèd and did seem like you could remark upon it just like you would upon a particularly beautiful, or even attractive, leopard—you can tell it’s particularly beautiful, particularly attractive, even though your sense of context in the sexual world of leopards is completely negligible. Her eyes were either blue or green or were a perfectly neutral grey, like a wan sea—wan in color but resounding with the strength and the fullness, the sheer volume, and the intensity of the sea. Nadya was pretty enough to be a model, was always pretty enough, and of course did her fair share of twiddling, noodling, in the arena of fashion, of demonstrative beauty, as every Manhattanite high-schooler of a certain physiognomical class and with a certain lack of parental oversight (or certain opportunistic presence of parental oversight) tries their hand at once. To this day she’s invited to walk shows, nothing serious (they know she wouldn’t take any more serious or more regular role); again, just like anyone with a certain baseline of cultural, youthful Downtown caché is similarly invited. She’s not so stubborn as to turn them down, either. They pay her in clothes, shipped to her parent’s place since her digs in Chinatown are rife with package thieves, packed in little gift-bags and with cute hand-written messages from the lead-designer—usually something not-too-expensive, “out of season,” sent purely for the purpose of Nadya (or whomever the case may be) bragging about receiving it, posting online about receiving it, thus boosting (somehow) the credibility of the brand in question. But, again, mostly her job is to gallivant and contort and cavort and to frolic. Men want to sleep with her and she goes—not to the highest bidder, and not “to” at all, but with, goes with whomever appeals to her, and in the deepest and most inexpressible way. Or maybe she’ll just sleep with them because they’re a male model, they’re rubble-faced and gaunt and square-jawed, and she’s drunk. Some men want to sleep with her in order to get their portfolio published in the back of Gainful Employment. Even if she sleeps with them, she might publish them and she might not.
Perhaps her most unappealing, or rather, least appealing quality are the tattoos done in a hand-drawn style that she has near the bottom of her left forearm, on the back of her left hip saddling her waist, and on the inward side of her left ankle.
Her resting expression resembled the scales of justice in stasis; that quaked whenever she laughed; a resounding laugh, a laugh that sounded shrill and wholesome and addictive all at once—as in, you heard it once and then had the vague itch to hear it again, at least one more time, addictive in that sense; Nadya was addicted to coke—or at least used it quite a lot—but she was rich and she was beautiful and half her male friends were coke dealers, so she always had plenty on deck; in a similar way, Nadya laughed loudly and she laughed frequently, some might say incessantly, she’d iterate her words and the cricks of her movement with them—if you were addicted to Nadya’s laugh, you’d never have to worry about supply. She was the type of woman where if you saw her on the street, you’d want to ask her, Where’s your champagne flute? And if you happened to be walking your dog, she’d nod at him and not you. Then she’d laugh; at the absurdity of being asked such question by a stranger, and also just by reflex. Funnily enough, she preferred to drink martinis.
Nadya was the lifeblood of every party, she laughed loudly and often and, if she didn’t always know the right thing to say, she never showed it; but more than that, it was her friends who stacked the guestlist—if not for her, if she didn’t invite them, there would be no party. Julia was the brains of their operation, and Nadya was the body, tongue, and soul. She left NYU a furniture design major, or something equally ridiculous, and she would cycle through visual artists (never writers, natch) until finally, one day, maturing, metamorphosing supposedly, in the single span of an instant into the wife of a man just like her father, equally wealthy, though this time Spanish, or American or French—Russian men are a bad word for her and Julia, though both of them Russian be. Part of the reason is the influence of a certain podcast that spent considerable airtime one summer defaming and stereotyping Russian men and their Coney Island, Bergen Beach ilk—a certain cohost of that podcast’s recent breakup with some such man notwithstanding, clearly.
(Drowning City. Hosted by two Russian women, Lena, and Kendall: both of their’s parents emigrés from the Soviet Union, both spotlessly Downtown pedigreed; they moved to the city in their twenties, both; I’ll probably get to both of them later. When they criticized something—anything—their word was bond. The rest of Manhattan aired out their previous thoughts on the issue and when they dragged them back in from the windowsill, they would suddenly and coincidentally bear a striking resemblance to those of Drowning City. Downtown culture at the time was Drowning City. And nothing else. Incidentally, a Russophillic podcast, Drowning City, in general—just not Russian men; whom they found morally detestable to their very genome.)
So that was Nadya. One day the world would be hers—all of Downtown. I’m sure of it. Julia—she would come and go, fretting all the while; it was a problem of ambitional scale, on Julia’s part, for one thing; maybe it was that, she would deal with words, maybe, could deal with words, as in, she could manage that, but objets d’art, blocks of stone, even corpuscles of glass, eminently breakable glass—she just couldn’t handle; Nadya on the other hand was the Rock of Gibraltar, the fundament (the cornerstone, as it were, and you’d have expected a colonial-era date to be inscribed into her lower back—where an awful, and mostly “ironic,” crudely scrawl’n tattoo of a stick-figure hammer-anad-sickle is now—alongside an amendatory note of recognition/apology for the slave labor that helped to install her there) on which Lower Manhattan stands—her, and women like her, going back to the days of the Native American inhabitants of this place (incidentally, a matrilineal, matriarchal society). The two of them—the rock and the hard place; the unstoppable force and the immovable object, and Julia—met in college, at NYU, though they grew up in a similar, nigh the exact same, milieu; and not only that, they grew up very close, distance-wise at least, only a hop and a skip away from one another, a mere pittance of blocks: Julia in the East Seventies and Nadya, in Midtown East, in a brand new luxury condominium tower; from which her parents have since moved—to a brownstone townhouse on the West Side, and more Downtown, Chelsea, almost West Village area; so close to have actually had quite a few mutual friends, and Gainful Employment was just a glimmer in the both of theirs’s eyes when they met, their respective coteries mingling into each other at freshman orientation. By junior year they were both living in Chinatown and not attending classes. They dropped out and Julia’s parents found out when an NYU call-center phoned home asking for donations in honor of their daughter the “former student.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Nadya’s parents still didn’t know; I wouldn’t be surprised if they never realized their daughter was ever in college to begin with.
Well, neither Julia nor Nadya really should have gone to college, in the first place. Colleges don’t train Titans. Julia hated her literature seminars because she didn’t want to write; she wanted to sign her classmates under contract and get ten percent of their first book deal. And Nadya didn’t want to design furniture, she wanted to furnish her very own Park Ave duplex in all vintage, all classics, and she wanted to have (her little secret; what hubby don’t know won’t hurt him) fucked the world-class sculptor whose work graced the glass corner of her living-room on the sixty-first floor where all of Manhattan could see it. And on her way to the sixty-fifth floor she’d gather a swarm like a cloud of kicked-up dust of trainees and attachées, retainers, groupies, jilted ex-lovers and never-lovèds, never-had-a-chancers—and small-press literary newspaper cofounders—in her wake. You see, Nadya was a Titan, and this was to be the change she’d wrought. She would change the culture, change the very landscape of the Downtown, even, by her wits and to her tastes. Julia would do something similar, though she’d do a bit more subtly. Sure, she could be just as cutthroat—Julia could—as Nadya; but for some reason, for whatever reason—maybe because she wasn’t as beautiful, not quite—though no one would ever hold that against her—least of all, Nadya wouldn’t; the way Nadya lauded Julia, you’d think she was a latter-day saint—Nadya even looked up to Julia; she didn’t just say it; I genuinely think she meant it—but the difference is, that with Julia, everything was taken into account: namely, the feelings of those she left behind. She’s even told me she feels bad turning down a writer, if she can tell their heart’s in the right place. The fact of the matter is and remains: some people aren’t good enough; some people must be turned down. Both Nadya and Julia are perfectly comfortable with this fact, the ways things must go; but with Julia, it will stick a little longer, whereas Nadya won’t even feel it—you weren’t good enough, you were turned down, and from then on, in Nadya-universe, it’s as if you ceased to exist. Nadya had exacting standards that lofted her above the sea level of the rank-and-file; so why did Julia, then, persist in her circling and circling with her lifeboats?
They made fast friends, so fast of friends you’d expect them to have had actually known each other, back in their respective Upper East days, you’d expect them to be bosom pals, old preschool playmates and never separated since—a misconception they played ready party to: the point-in-fact circumstances of their introduction long since abated and reformed into the realm of myth and plausible deniability. Even in their most private moments I wouldn’t be surprised if Julia and Nadya both almost believed it themselves, that they didn’t meet so banally, at freshman orientation—NYU freshman orientation, what’s worse—like everybody else, like any two other bourgeois, weekend-brunch and nights-out-in-LES (where a group of thirty of all your old college pals rent out the upstairs room of a bar that seems only to exist for the very purpose of troupes of old college pals renting out their upstairs room) friends—I wouldn’t be surprised if they told themselves, eschewing spiritual longing in literally every other aspect of their spectacular existence, that their friendship was merely a matter of cosmic insistence, and NYU, and all those pre-Gainful-Employment years spent waiting in line in the cold outside Ballerino, was a formality, an unfortunate but necessary one, necessary for the sake of a certain decorum, once, but that, now that it is they who’ve come to rest at the top of the totem-pole, or one micro-totem-pole of many, will seek right out to upend for their Downtown progeny; the scene, more open and just, where NYU—where the whole Village, its tourist-traps, cut-rate yet overpriced bars and lousy “bro”-scene restaurants where you always need a reservation and old-guard literary magazines (the ones that’ve survived, that are still, for some reason, kicking: so, the worst of the worst, the mealiest and the schemiest and the most desperate, the most outsider-funded and thus just the worst) and old-guard literary-magazine readers—but mostly NYU, and all the NYU kids, the Chinese exchange students in their tasteless designer products, designer in name only, designer the same way animatronic birds at Disneyland are birds, to use a crude and fast and not at all elegant metaphor—designer the same way that that metaphor just now was literature—and hipster out-of-towners, transplants in the making, soon they’d be patronizing the very same coffee-shops that are opening by the prefab-croissant-baker’s dozen in Chinatown, holes in the wall that used to house wok-shops and the last desiccated vestiges of the only bodegas that’d still sell cigarettes for less than seventeen bucks, for a time, or, even, that used to house people, the last hardo New Yorkers we had left on the island proper, illegal tenants in retail-zoned real-estate, newly renovated and lying in wait for these conceited journalism and marketing and “graphic design” majors to graduate, that is, unless they get a “drug problem,” which is to say, which actually means—since, everyone has a drug problem, or everyone in Manhattan does, or should, or definitely everyone in college has or should have a fucking drug problem, definitely NY-fucking-U, one would, or should, think—they did coke a handful of times but are willing to expedite the process of calling it a drug problem in order to have a good and credentialed-medical-expert-approved pretext for returning home after only a few years, going back to the womb and the breast, in other words, New York being “too tough” for them, and the film-school bros, walking around Union Square eating popcorn or something, but mostly just the recollection of it all, the hangover of having nothing to be proud of but having been proud nonetheless, of having no identity, no talent, no knowledge, no craft nor skill, no focus, no drive to speak of, yet professing, and professing, and professing it nevertheless—of being young and having o’er-vaulting ambition—but just, no killer instinct—I wonder: did Julia and Nadya ever envision a new scene—they must’ve—a new Downtown, where Manhattan is a rug on the floor, and even a toddler at play could step right from the West Side over to the East, the West Village to the East Village, and right over the Greenwich one, and all it represents; somewhere, a new, younger Nadya; a new, younger Julia—nothing unlike their selves only a few years previous, high-schoolers taking the downtown train to Canal Street, stalking the cobble-stoned, glass and steel and glass and steel and hand-painted-designer-ads streets of SoHo—at this very moment—somewhere—could a scene exist, that could accommodate them? Install directly into Chinatown and insurrect a literary mode; disrupt the channels of MFA to SoHo gallery to Uptown gallery to the Whitney, to morbid alcoholism to death by pneumonia to the MoMa; could the new Nadya, the new Julia—this time, black, or Puerto Rican, and working-class, and Lower Manhattan housing-projects, Chinatown loft after high-school with no NYU in between, their taste for art—for art, for everything art is and could be and what it represents, what it says about us—curated on the streets, not at the Met, not at MoMa (where Nadya’s surname can be found etched on the walls of the entrance hall, listed under the column “Highest Tier Donors”)—could their parents read about them in the Times? Could new black Julia stare transfixed down on Times Square, in thirty-second intervals, in between six other ads for globally-dominatory corporations?
Could Nadya become the golden egg that actually lays the very goose?
In their private moments: could that be what they thought, what they really imagined? It must be. Well, on the ground, this is how it really went down: they both kept the company of almost exclusively gay men, and women who keep such company will often run into each other and they often, then, make fast friends. They were eighteen at the time; Nadya may have been nineteen; and the two of them decided—outside of the odd assignment that was actually required, outside of what they couldn’t get—which wasn’t much—just from emailing the professor and claiming personal crisis, family emergency—that college pretty much wouldn’t be for them; and that’s when the two of them took to Downtown with abandon, both of them outfitted with the new de jure freedom of studio apartments found for them each by their fathers’s assistants and paid for by their fathers. Both at time had headquarters in the Village—right by their classes, if they had ever gone.
The word “trust-fund kid” gets tossed around a lot and Julia was always quick to make apparent she wasn’t one if the subject was ever broached; e.g., “I’m not some trust-fund kid,” she might say, apropos a strawman she’d introduced in the previous breath (“Some people say I’m some trust-fund kid, but—”). Sure, Julia had dotted her ‘i’’s and crossed her ‘t’’s, made sure that under no circumstances were the funds her parents delivered to her personal account on a regular basis schematized or prearranged by a certified public accountant, that that regular basis was not regular to any plottable degree, and that it was to her personal account, not to any intermediary trust—were just that, gifts from her parents, just like anyone might receive gifts from anyone’s parents—even if they’re poor! even if they’re working class, that is—gifts, which just so happened to be money, which happened to be sent to her with the regularity of a salary or of discriminately-allotted trust fund issuances; but who are we trying to fool here—we all know—everyone knows—what we mean, what “one” means, when you say “trust-fund kid.” She knew it—when I ran with that tribe, I knew it—everybody knew it—she was a trust-fund kid, full-stop.
Nadya, for one, couldn’t give less of a shit what anyone deigned to call her, be it trust-fund kid or slut or bourgeois social-climber or “worse than a starfucker, a low-grade-Brooklyn-tier-artist fucker” or obnoxious or retrograde or reprobate or aberrational or drunk or bad drunk or cokehead or what. In casual conversation, friends called her “Nads.” In any case, though, another of Nadya’s commendable, gleaming qualities was her debonair attitude towards outside celestial bodies in the general sphere of the Nadyaverse. Never did she feel the need to hide or feel guilty about, to fear that she would scandalize anyone with, her wealth. She didn’t necessarily flaunt it, either; money to her was like water, as dependable as water, water perhaps from the same Russian wellspring she used for drink. And if you’re already coated in a layer of rain, you’re past the point of caring about whether you look wet or not, or whether you’re dripping all over the carpet once you duck in somewhere dry for respite; and maybe you’ll be surprised—though Nadya wasn’t—but no one else really cares about the goddamn fucking carpet either. It rains, people drip, carpets dry, and life moves on without anyone having to go to even the slightest bit of struggle, not even the inward struggle of apologizing—of feeling the need, that is, to apologize—for the soggy carpet, and please may I reimburse you?, not even that. It was this philosophy she followed everywhere—you feel embittered towards her wealth? She felt sorry for you. You felt embitterment, scorn, remorse, hatred, sorrow, second-hand shame, appallance, shock, repulsion, towards her, in any way, shape or form—towards any way, shape, or form, of her—well, she wishes you the best. Have a nice life, and she hopes your appallation abates. Nadya was Saint Margaret benevolently floating in a little orb all to herself, above the churnings and conflagrations of the rest, which were always so petty, anyway. So long as she could stay drunk on carbonated plum wine, smoking (as it were) of the finest cigars—and she could—isolated by wealth, but that’s not even close to the most important part, no, that has nothing to do with it: instead, that she was isolated by taste, and good taste at that, as well as drive, an insatiable and unstoppable (endogenously, at least) urge to not remain allayed or sated or quenched, by her wealth, by just, being beautiful, and the rest working out; by settling, as most would, and not for any low margin either, not by any standard, but to not settle still—but, certainly, isolated by wealth, too—so long as she could remain, and this one is important, a viable and enviable and unavoidable guest, at high-class functions looking for a spry kick (us Downtown artists the entertainment for the suits and the sprackets and mulch) and tough-rumbling Bushwick bunker blowouts alike—and that, to her, came naturally—: she could use this, her lofty, leapèd position and pose, to eagle’s-nest survey and design a career; a place for herself, but a place on her own terms, not one—and this is important, both to her, but also in general, in understanding what was so special, almost, so powerful about Nadya—that her dad had given her; but also, at the same time, not one that anyone else had given her either, not one that was preconfigured, that had precedence and antecedent; but her own place, a Nadya-place in the Downtownscape, a seat of power both democratically earned and despotically reigned. So what was important to her, was not that you called her a trust-fund kid, or a social-climber, but only that you—some rando, she didn’t even know—even bothered to make a point, of making a reference, to her—she who would never make reference to you.
And her trust fund, by the way, was impeccably arranged.
In such high esteem did Nadya hold herself, and so quickly was her star rising, that no force save gravity could afflict her orbit already in motion and, so, which would remain in motion, motion of the upward variety, natch—“upward,” as in, relative to stagnant spectators like us stuck down on the surface of the Earth. Gallery owners needn’t take note; she took it for them: Gainful Employment was her own press, and the press-press took it from there, so ravenously it’s like she asked them to (weirdly, though—she didn’t). Besides, she hated the gallery owners: bourgeois, old-guard, stuck-up, hidebound, tattered, shopworn, dusty, and lame. Decidedly Uptown, the lot of them. One night spent blotting out the sun in the East Village with Nadya and the rest of the bats has been known to send many a “fresh voice in the mixed-media landscape” and “young and very hot new artist” packing their bags and rolling up their canvases, moving out of the West Side and Midtown galleries and over to the upstarts in the LES—who, if they weren’t Nadya’s friends when they started out, they certainly were (or, all the most vital and thoracic ones were; the ones even worth talking about) past a certain point—past the point, honestly, of nothing so precocious as Nadya’s sophomore year of college.
From the get-go, Nadya knew she just wasn’t the type to do the whole nightclub-drinking, roommatèd-two-bedroom-apartment-living-room-dancing, frat-bros-and-brunch-after, college thing; so she cashed in a little ambition and began taking a couple galleries to task—it started with a few Midtown ones, the ones that “worked with” NYU fine-arts students, but were really just scamming somewhat-talented, desperate no-names—up-and-comers, but no-names nevertheless. Nadya would connect those no-names with an older friend of hers from her Canal Street days who ran a tiny, one-artist-at-a-time room on Rivington. Then came the fun part: affecting the artsy, artsily eccentric it-girl, beautiful but intelligent—beautiful, and drunk, and loud, obnoxious, in-your-face; but yes, intelligent—the role she’d been idolizing, practicing, training for, consciously and subconsciously, for almost a decade of Downtown romping and rambling, that, once finally embodied, she could inhabit effortlessly, entirely naturally—fitting like a glove—at every party she could sneak her way into, and out front with the smokers at every party she couldn’t (the rare “society event,” usually, and usually when she was sloppily drunk to begin with when she tried approaching the precarity-labor-guarded entrance despite the pleas from friends like Julia to not even try and bother, to come on, let’s go). But the thing is—that ineluctable charm of hers. The “society” people took to her instantly. And her Downtown friends introduced her to more Downtown friends—is how I imagine it roughly went down, from what I can gather—and these Downtown friends with a little more heft to throw around, not just party-girls and party-boys but self-directed, -directing—able to direct themselves, to navigate this city with the rarified acumen of a nuvo-Hudson—and impactant friends, like art critics and all the career-writers (the freelancers); and soon she herself was one of the auto-dirigible and impactiful, one of the dreadnought Downtownanites and new New World explorers—more precisely, by the time she got to her junior year at NYU, school was just a formality, and really, if she had had the perceptual wherewithal to’ve rememendered to, she really should’ve dropped out the year previous. But Nadya was concerned with other, bigger things, and her tuition check in any case wasn’t in any risk of bouncing.
It’s no wonder why she made such a big splash, her youth and her attractiveness notwithstanding—the way she talked: first off, Nadya could hold court on any subject as the occasion may require, from geopolitics to esoteric psychoanalytic offshoots to the cheapest place to buy cigarettes in Manhattan (to wit: Two Bridges, at the somewhat ironically-aligned—and of particular interest to any long-term-grudge-holding Catholics—corner of Henry and Catherine Streets; and in case you’re wondering, Nadya would in fact be quick to note that while cigarettes are cheaper in Brooklyn as a rule, she would just as quickly tell you that in her consideration what the four or five dollar discrepancy between the cheapest Manhattan cigarettes and the most expensive in Brooklyn amounts to is an excise tax for the privilege of not having to go into Brooklyn—one of those rare self-imposed taxes, you know, that billionaires like Warren Buffet are always bandying off about, how they “wish they could pay more of their fair share,” and how for this reason they never step foot in Brooklyn)—and those are just a choice selection of the subjects she actually knows a little something about; truly, however, she could hold court on anything, and therein is where her talent lay: the gift of the gab drawing in literati, artists, as well as just homosexual social elite types—those who you’d call “bohemians,” I suppose—as lief as the bourgeois “suit” strata, your stodgy old-guard gallery curators—inly seething with jealousy at the young and attractive upstart they suddenly found themselves running into at every “industry function”—and shadowy Russian oligarchs and oligarchy-adjacents, whom she regaled, much to her father’s pleasure and her mother’s cold and lithe, subduèd pride, at summertime patio-parties out in Easthampton. I don’t seem to be expressing it well; or at least, very “artfully.” But there’s no other way to put it—or perhaps it’s that I can only baldly express the fact, She was a sensation, she had a way of conversation, and of personality, that drew people in, without any deeper insight into said ways, because in fact the machinations, or mechanisms, of how she managed this feat have persistently, to me, only ever been able to be intimated at through the opaque glass of awe and delusion or else some vicious tandem of the two. All I knew was the dazzling effect of it, and whenever the machine of her, her entrance into a party and the subject seizure thereof, was in motion, I was always either too drunk or not good enough of a true writer, a writer-at-heart, a writer to-my-very-core—for I’m told writers are supposed to be eminently perceptive and opaque-glass-piercing and all that—to ever really take note of how it was achieved. No doubt about it, Nadya was destined for success: she had the je ne sais quoi, the “x factor,” the indelible mark of the all-congenial, unstoppable, all-eluctifying yet ineluctable; should she ever have it that you not “eluct” her—you wouldn’t… you couldn’t; you got the sense, when intoxicated under her spell, that she was the sort of woman upon whose upper lip, when playing tennis at some little country club or another out in aforementioned Easthampton, no faint mustache of perspiration ever appeared; and upon whose path not a one proverbial brambleberry snaggle, ever appeared—she either had the grace to steer well clear of them, and always very nonchalantly and demurely, natch—or the sheer force of reptilian will to refuse to acknowledge them, thus militating their appearance, nigh, their very existence. But, if they did appear—if Nadya encountered the brambleberry bushes of trials and tribulations upon the Sixth Avenue, SoHo-area, of her life—and if she did ever happen to tumble through one of them, thorns and all: either she genuinely (blissfully ignorant) didn’t notice it; or, out of some sense of pride, or obsession, possession, she boldly, haughtily, perhaps, or perhaps just stubbornly—even in the insuperable face of her misstep, her blood—boldly continued to refrain her acknowledgement.
But the way Nadya talked—to see her in motion was to be elevated. She was the rising tide that quelled all currents, flooded all shores and lifted all boats. She didn’t enter a room, didn’t mingle, walk through a party, so much as she coursed through it, coursing, coursing—and, more often than not, Julia by her side, I was swept along with it, with the force of her. For that brief time I was cast in the tributary, phosphorescent glow of her radiance; I could be seen as with her, as of her party, as in; and for that brief time—and at any given time therewithin, for but a moment—I was the life of the party, too; I was a lion in the court of Phaedra, with all the privileges so held.
Generally I think it’s true, that a woman doesn’t have to become, but only to be; and I guess my only proviso would be that just for the beautiful woman, one needs only to be—to be beautiful. Nothing need be achieved, proved, insisted; she, the beautiful woman, is beautiful, and all accommodations are granted for her. Now, Nadya wasn’t just beautiful—by which I do mean, come to think of it, that she is more than just beautiful—she’s very beautiful in a way that defies description: like the beautiful, short and simple song, that you listen to alone, and feel the all-girding urge, a need, almost, to share it with everybody—at least, with somebody—to open up the beauty, and your private pleasure in it, and the transcendent, almost, quality to it—but then you realize, as you read the lyrics, and take a brief intermission, at some point in the brief span between urge, and the all-girding pleasure, and action, and upon even that briefest reflection you realize, there’s nothing to share; both that nothing would be gained by sharing, but also, that the whole time, there was nothing there, there was nothing to share even if something, anything, was to be gained—she’s long and spindly and gorgeous, and exceptionally beautiful, and exceptionally beautiful, and exceptionally beautiful in the face, exceptionally beautiful with the dignity of the sunflower, with a face that, I think I’ve even already made reference to it, is distinctly dignified and regal, a beauty of power and kingdoms and kingships and queenships, a beauty that belongs on that sphere and deigns to be held elsewhere now that kingdoms have fallen; elemental; a core, almost ur-beauty, that’s a component in any and all other beautiful women and beautiful women’s-faces, a variation, or invention, on a theme. But it wasn’t just that she was beautiful, Nadya, she was also, as I said, a veritable personality, what I guess you’d call “larger than life.” And what I was getting at was, reflected in her splendor, I felt that I had something of a small taste, a life-affirming taste but soul-crushingly small, of what it might be like to simply be, and to not be compelled in any way to become. Awash in her cavernous pall, I was the party, too, and as Nadya entrained me through this that she created I also found that “the party” as it’s more commonly understood—not in spirit, that is, but in pure terms of people gathering, perhaps also of drinks—came to me, with no exertion required on my part. Truly, they—“the party,” the meat of the party—were coming to her, and I just happened to be caught, salutarily on my end, in their line of sally. And how they took to me! How I was perceived! Just by being in company of the beautiful and outrageous girl with the grapefruit negroni I was considered quite important, quite cool and quite “hot stuff.” People had a gentler, smilier air around me when I was adjacent to Nadya. I felt no pressure to prove nor assert myself because my mere being—in relation to Nadya’s mere being, her being-amicable to my being-present—was suddenly enough to satisfy all those doubts I always suspected were tacitly rumbling beneath the pleasant California greenery of others’s affections, this idea that every encounter was a confrontation, a social crucible freely passed through by everyone in the world except me, to prove the worthiness of those they might come into conversation with, but of me in particular. What right, if any, has this man to be at this party? He doesn’t smack of Downtown, or he seems bourgeois, or is he even that good of a writer? Is he even a writer at all?—these and all other scathing, penetrative, penetrative-then-scathing, or -scorching— -cauterizing, too, perhaps, but sharply so—remarks and aspersions against my character and my authenticity and my right of free passage and free drinks, though of course never broached in my direct presence, were in any case rendered null and void by the trump-card of Nadya. Nadya: just her name, in our scene, in Downtown at that time, was the answer to silence all questions, to replace inquisitive sneers with palliated, propitiated nods of approval.
And then of course there was, more literally, the way she talked: one’s always anxious to use the word “mellifluous” but I don’t think that’s quite the ticket here; for, for sure it was a pleasant voice—eminently pleasant—but the quality was more rakish and boyish and ingenuous, childish, than anything sing-songy or sonorous or especially what you would categorize as “full” or “honey-like” or even “watery and fresh.” No, it was girlish in pitch—boyish in cadence, is what I meant to say earlier, though perhaps you could have it both ways by saying ephebian—somewhat scratchy, especially when drunk; and the whole proceedings distinctly gummy, or pencil-eraser rubbery in consistency, or untensèd muscle—her words suspended in aspic and tied with a sanctimonious bow; although, it wasn’t that she intentionally tried to affect a derogatory tone—and this is what’s interesting: in her voice you could make out both an unignorable supercility yet at the same time a commendable broadness that assured you the former was an arrogance born from phonetics alone, and not at all reflectant of—belying, even—her actual feelings about the people with whom she happened to be talking or on the subjects of which she happened to be treating; you could even almost make out that Nadya herself was aware of both these prior facts and the tension between them, which brought out yet another layer to the voice.
And always Julia by her side.
Julia, and Nadya—Nadya, and Julia. As far as Downtown goes, the two names were inseparable, the invocation of one invariably spurring that of the other. They were Gainful Employment, yes, in an abstract, almost academic sense, but it wasn’t Gainful Employment, or, their shared enterprise, that you’d usually think of when you saw or were with the two of them; they had amassed into a larger—as in, on a higher level—being; summoned a gestalt. When you saw the two of them at a party, it was always the two of them, never one or the other; but in a certain respect, you didn’t really differentiate between them; Julia on one hand, Nadya on the other; what you saw was the academic entity of the two conjoined, the higher entity that the two represented—or, more precisely, what the presence of Julia and Nadya at a given party tended to signify. Their presence signified that this function, whatever function, was now a Gainful Employment party—it had a certain flair, or a flare, a flaring aura, of cool, and of elite inaccessibility; if you had happened to stumble onto this party, whatever party, you now knew you had stumbled upon the right one. Julia and Nadya gracing it with their presence now made this party a veritable event—something that’d be written about in Gainful, something that’d be talked about among the Theo Krejčis of the world for weeks and weeks to come; something that your own stature, little as it may be, could stand to be elevated just by your being there. You’d surely make it a point of mentioning—That party that we ended up at last night? The Gainful Employment girls were there…
That isn’t to say—just because the two distinct entities were treated as one prolix, profligate being—that the readily apparent differences between Julia and Nadya weren’t, well, readily apparent—escaping of no one’s notice—and indeed widely commented upon.
Physically they couldn’t be more different. (And Nadya couldn’t be more different, for that matter, physically, from Elia, but that’s a separate point). Julia was a woman of sturdy stock—was stocky—whereas Nadya was built like a model, exceptionally tall and stick-thin; her composition, on the whole, spindly, entrenched in the same laws as dictate the legs of a horse—the bones of which, if broken, can never heal, being so thin and the body of the horse being so immense, and often the most expedient, the most efficacious operation in such a case is just to shoot it.
Julia was more earthy looking, still very beautiful, of course, but an earthy sort of beauty, like someone had just gotten through brushing all the dirt off her, this after a gestation period involving pleas made in a dance-like manner to some or other rain-god and plenty of manure; whereas to Nadya there was something alien about her, not necessarily to say celestial, but as if a mad scientist had extracted a gem of some sort from an outer-space meteorite and somehow crossed its DNA with that from a lotus flower or a cyprus tree, as well as from a praying mantis and a lynx and only then from a woman, a human woman, perhaps of the gentry as I’ve suggested though perhaps from the tomb of Saint Teresa of Ávila. But despite all this there was an air, no, an aura, of purity that surrounded Nadya, of something quite pure, almost tonally, emanating off of her. With Julia, I mean, I could always feel we were able to strike at the same wavelength—which is special, too, you know, in an earthier and more earth-tethered way, more appealing too perhaps; not at all, I’d say, shared by most women I’ve encountered—or even most people, because I do think it’s quite rare to actually meet someone face-to-face and seemingly pass through intervention, to knock at its gates and be adjudged as worthy of unlocking them for (by which I mean, adjudged not by the other person, not by Julia for example, but by the objective, somehow, guardsman of intervention itself)—but with Nadya, there was nothing of the human about her, of the all-men-having-been-created-equal-under-God; rather a distinct and unwavering conflict of wills being settled at all times on a higher plane even as our two vessels were communalating; or maybe it’s just that with some people your gut biomes are more compatible—who knows.
Julia looked like when she wrote, she wrote in a cursive assemblé, twinged with girlish wonderment, open-mouthed, wide-eyed blinking, like a twittering (the blinking); Nadya looked like she didn’t write at all. Then again, Julia was of a different, endomorphic profile; it could be that Nadya ate her words for want of caloric input; and, only when strictly necessary, to get a point across or to make an impression, she took to a squeal—Nadya.
Immediately, there was a disjunction between the two; but maybe just on Julia’s part—a never-mentioned discomfort, an unmentionable discomfort, again, on the part of Julia’s: obviously, I can’t entirely speak for her, but I’ve always been able to sense from Julia a certain discomfort, about her own stature in relation to Nadya. Although they somehow never managed to run into each other back when they were younger, back in their respective Canal Street days—running all over Downtown after their respective high-schools let out, the festering petri dish of youth culture that was Canal Street—they did run in the same circles; had a lot of friends in common. To Nadya, this was yet another glee, yet another reason why, as she saw it, the impending friendship between her and Julia was long since written in the stars. Nadya was always excited running into old friends from that period—especially after her and Julia had gained a foothold, so to speak, and running into them had become the whole event it was—because to her it was the joyous reunion of past and current lives—and, from Nadya’s perspective, why wouldn’t it have been so for Julia, too?
But as far as Julia saw it, who Nadya saw as her “old friends” were for Julia, simply, objects of perennial repression—and the River Styx of Gainful Employment, and of her and Nadya’s incumbent upsurge to the fore of the social pecking-order of the Downtown, couldn’t fail, but fail, to cover and avert the Achilles’s heel of Julia’s checkered past… Here I don’t know the specifics—like all fallings-out of female friendships, the specifics probably matter very little, but a falling-out did once occur. Coming out of NYU, Nadya would run into all her old friends, with Julia in tow, at some Fashion Week party or another; all kiss eachother on both cheeks and exchange cheery, overly cheery greetings (lots of squealing involved); they—all of them old Canal Street compatriots of Julia’s, too—they would all quietly refollow her on social media and Julia, for her part, pretended nothing’d ever happened.