Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly (10 page)

Marco muted the volume on the Lakers and flinched. “Excuse me?”

“Would you please chill
out?
” Melissa scowled, and rested her hands, palms up, on her folded knees. “It’s my mantra. And don’t eat those!” she snapped. “They’re for
POSEUR
promotion.”

“
POSEUR
promotion.” Marco repeated with mock gravitas, and dropped the bulging multicolored pack of Starburst to the floor. He gazed over at his meditating girlfriend and frowned. “What are you, now . . . some kind of Ninja?”

Melissa’s mahogany brown eyes flicked open like a jackknife. “Marco, I am trying to communicate with a
divine being.
And in case you’re wondering?
That does not mean you.
”

Her boyfriend pushed a short burst of air through his lips and faced the TV. “Fine.” He raised his hand. “Do your thing, Jackie Chan.”

Melissa fluttered her eyes shut, inhaled, and prepared to allow whatever thoughts popped into her mind to pass by without resistance. “
Om . . . namo
. . . Kimoraaaa . . .”

“Wait a second,” Marco barked a sudden, comprehending laugh. “You’re not . . . ’Lissa, are you praying to
Kimora
? As in Kimora Lee
-Simmons?
”

“I’m not
praying.
” She leaned back in her velvet upholstered office chair and avoided the question, but after a suspicious length of silence, opened her eyes. Marco was curled into a ball in the center of her bed, convulsing with mute laughter.
“Marco.”
She folded her arms across her daunting double-D chest and frowned. At that, he positively wailed with laughter, tears of mirth streaming down his ecstatic, tanned face.

“Kimora Lee Simmons,” he practically howled, causing Emilio to bark in staccato alarm. “
That’s
your divine being?”

“It’s not funny!” Melissa whipped her Dior glasses from her face and accidentally pitched them across the room. They swooped past Marco like a small skeletal bat, smashing with a cheerful and tragic tinkle against her sliding mirrored closet doors. Her jaw dropped.

“No!”

Pushing back her desk chair, she staggered across the floor and dropped to her velour-clad knees. “My glasses,” she squeaked, cradling the broken frames in her arms. And then, to Marco’s utter shock and sheer delight, she pivoted on her shins and threw her arms around his neck.

“I’m so sorry, Marco,” she shuddered. “I’m just so stressed about the Trick-or-Treater.”

“The what?” he asked, breathing deep the spicy nutmeg scent of her jet black ceramic straight-ironed hair.

“It’s the name of our new couture bag.” She gazed up at him with her best pouty face. “You . . . you think it’s a cute name, right?”

“Oh yeah.” He managed to nod and, at the same time, slip his thumb under the spaghetti-thin strap of her white satin La Mela thong. (Marco was nothing if not a master of multitasking.) “I was just thinking, like . . .” He stalled, having already blanked on the name of her bag (she did say “bag,” right?) “That’s cute.”

“For real?”

“Baby” — he traced a lopsided circle in the small of her back — “you’ve got to stop putting yourself under all this pressure.”

“Putting
myself
under pressure,” she repeated, stiffening in his embrace. Marco squeezed his eyes shut and bit the inside of his cheek. Had he really messed this up already? “I don’t put myself under pressure, okay?
Pressure
puts
itself
on
me.
Pressure looked around and was like: who here has the
strength,
who here has the
commitment,
to take on
me
?”

“And then Pressure was like,
Ho!
That fine woman over there. In the blue T-shirt and the tight-ass booty jeans!”

“My shirt is
purple,
” Melissa sniffed, nevertheless melting back into his arms. Marco exhaled a sigh of relief, especially as her breast (he was pretty sure that’s what that was) seemed to be pushing up under his left armpit.
A definite bonus,
he thought, fighting off a triumphant smile.

“Um . . .” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “You know one thing I heard that was good for, uh, when you’re tense . . .”

She shifted her posture so that she was practically sitting in his lap. Her boob crushed against him in a way that would have been uncomfortable, except for the fact that, you know . . .

It was a boob.

“What’s good for when you’re tense?” she murmured into his neck.

At this juncture, Marco thought it best not to answer in words. Keeping his hands on her hips, he nuzzled into her fragrant neck, planted tiny kisses from her shoulder to the hollow behind her left ear, and, in a move he’d perfected on a dried apricot in the fifth grade, took her earlobe into his mouth and sucked on it — just a little. He made sure to be gentle, because a) the ladies like it when you’re gentle, and b) he didn’t want to gag on that baby-fist-sized diamond in her ear. Running his hand over the spiny bump of her back bra clasp, he pushed up under her cotton-stretch T-shirt and pinched the sturdy triple-hook clasp between his thumb and finger. He expected Melissa to protest, and when she didn’t, he had to admit he didn’t know how to proceed. Should he ask her if it was okay, or should he just go for it? On the plasma screen, a few key black and yellow uniform-sporting players gathered around their coach, hands on their knees, beads of sweat on their brows, the crowd behind them like a blur of pastel confetti. If only Marco could just . . . call a time-out, you know? Consult Phil Jackson for a few pointers?

As if he’d read Marco’s thoughts, Phil Jackson peered through his wire-rim glasses, tugged his white Kentucky Fried Chicken goatee, and made direct eye contact with the camera. It was a sign! From the coach of the Lakers
himself.
Refusing to waste another second of precious time, Marco squeezed his eyes shut in concentration, pinched the three-hook contraption between his thumb and finger, and pushed the two sides together. The stretchy satin strap grew taut across her back, almost stubborn, and then — as if by magic — the clasp popped apart. He’d never, in his life, gotten this far before. “Oh my goodness!” Melissa cried in what he had to assume was unbridled ecstasy. “Marco, you’re a genius!”

He grinned. He was aware some brothers had trouble undoing a bra, but Marco wouldn’t say his finesse qualified him as a
genius.
Then again, he thought, why undermine his talents?
“Thank you,”
he replied, wondering if now would be a good time to get a condom. But before he could say
Durex Maximum Love,
Melissa sprung out of his lap and onto her feet.

“It’s so simple,” she declared, pacing the bedroom in a fit of excitement. “All I have to do is design a signature
clasp
. I mean, once you figure
that
out, the rest of the handbag is just sort of
secondary.
”

At the word
handbag,
Marco experienced what he could only describe as an out-of-body experience. “Baby.” His face crumpled in confusion. “What?”

“In order for
POSEUR
to become a major, like,
iconic
brand, the Trick-or-Treater needs
instant brand recognition.
And how does
that
happen? With a logo. And what do all the best logos look like?” She locked her hands together and raised her professionally tweezed eyebrows.

“A clasp?” Marco sighed, cheerful as a broken umbrella.

“Eggs-zactly!” Melissa kicked the air with excitement. “Like Gucci has those little interlocking G’s and everybody’s just like . . .
Gucci.
And Chanel has the interlocking C’s. And Louis
Vuitton
has interlocking
L
’s and
V
’s, and . . .”

She widened her almond-shaped eyes and held up a Bliss high intensity hand-creamed hand — milking the drama of the moment. “What does
POSEUR
have?”

A beleaguered Marco stared into middle distance. “Interlocking P’s?”

“
That come together like a bra strap.
” She squealed and clapped her hands, bouncing on her bare pedicured toes. “Oh, Marco. How hot is that?”

Marco watched her unclasped bra straps droop apart beneath her purple T-shirt and sighed. If only bras fastened in some other, completely un-purse-like way, like with duct tape, then she never would have had her “big idea.” She’d still be stumped, tense, vulnerable . . . and utterly under his sway.

Melissa plopped into her custom-made office chair (a champagne-velvet upholstered throne — on wheels with adjustable seating and lumber support) and got to work, which, as far as Marco could tell, meant scribbling on a piece of paper, shaking her head, and chanting the word “buh-zilliant.” He sighed, faced the silver-lined plasma screen, and grabbed the remote.

“You know who should get into fashion design?” he muttered, punching a rubbery blue button to unmute the TV. “Me.”

But the game was already over.

The Guy: Jake Farrish

The Getup: Faded red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt, used gray cords from Wasteland, and black Converse All-stars.

Monday morning and here they were again: inching uphill on Laurel Canyon in their black 240 Volvo sedan, stuck in morning traffic. Behind them, the San Fernando Valley stretched out, gray as the ocean and with only the occasional palm tree to break the flatness, rising up like SOS flares. Jake, for one, appreciated the metaphor.

He was, after all, a sinking ship.

A heavy sky hung over the horizon, clouding the canyon view, and he was grateful. For once, the weather matched his mood. Rain swept the slick road in gusts and muddied the hills; tall mustard grasses leaned together, bobbing and tipping their heads, and rivers of brown water gurgled by, skipping over rocks and upsetting orange construction cones. Jake leaned forward and squinted, wiping the windshield with the back of his plaid flannel sleeve. The Volvo’s trusty defroster roared with the force of forty Boeing jets, and yet had managed to clear no more than a butt-print patch of glass.

God, he hated this car.

“Why’d you turn it off?” his sister asked as Jake withdrew his hand from the round plastic knob on the dash and returned it to the wheel. “We just had it fixed.”

“Oh really?” Jake tugged his invisible beard in contemplation. “We just had it fixed, you say?” Thrusting his indignant finger to the misted windshield, he wrote in squeaky, wet script:
my sister says you’re fixed.
As his words fogged over, Janie frowned, straining against her seat belt. She wrote:
you are ridic.

“No,
you’re
ridic,” came Jake’s pithy reply.

“How am
I
ridic?”

Jake fixed his eyes on the black Audi directly ahead. The cold heat of brake lights glowed red in the rain, and he muttered, “I can’t believe she said she was in love.”

Janie hid her face in her hands and moaned. She couldn’t believe she’d told her brother. Then again, had it really been her fault? From the moment she’d returned from the Viceroy, Jake had done nothing but relentlessly demand she recap everything Charlotte said. He insisted there was something she wasn’t telling him, even though she swore there wasn’t, and fed him the same line every time: “We talked about our periods.”

But Jake was like a Stasi officer in 1960s East Berlin, asking her the same day-old questions — over and over, again and again — until at last she’d cracked. She’d been faced with a choice: either confess to Jake and hurt his feelings, or peel her own face off. As the latter hadn’t really been an option (she was almost convinced her face was starting to get pretty), she’d surrendered, confessing one teeny-tiny illicit detail:

“She said you never really challenged her and she’s in love with someone else; the end.”

Okay. Maybe “one” and “teeny-tiny” weren’t the best word choices.

“And she didn’t say who?” Jake asked her now, slouching in his tan weathered vinyl seat. His faded red-and-black-plaid cowboy shirt wrinkled around his narrow hips, and the scuffed toe of his black Converse eased on the brake. “Come on, Janie. Does he go to our school?”

“I already
told
you. . . .” She looked out the window. “I don’t know.”

Jake eyed her with suspicion. “Is it Luke?” he asked. “Is it Theo? Is it, oh God . . .” His boyish face crumpled in disgust. “It’s not that little Emo tool, Tim
Beckerman,
is it?”

Janie tightened her mouth like a disapproving nun.

“I can just see it,” Jake continued, undeterred. “You guys are sitting there. On swively little bar stools. Drinking your girlie Cosmos, or whatever.” He scowled, slouching deep into his seat.
“Giggling.”

Janie looked at her twin brother in disbelief. He’d seriously said “giggling” as though it described the act of pooping on a breakfast plate.

“You’re insane,” she realized out loud.

“Yeah.” Jake nodded, as if taking her diagnosis into serious consideration. “But you know who I bet’s
not
insane? Tim Beckerman.”

Janie groaned.
“Jake.”

“And I bet he’s
challenging,
too. In fact, that’s all he does . . . just goes around . . . challenging people.” He swiped the turn signal, which flipped to attention like a middle finger. “Well, good for you, Tim. Good. For. You.”