AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 28

Courty liked mornings.  An extra ten minutes on the cuddle alarm.  She was a morning person, springing alive to greet the day all cheery and energetic.  Reed was not a morning person.  He was a bleary-eyed freight train, trying to get started.  He usually didn’t like to make love in the morning, unless there was plenty of time.  He didn’t like fast, short sex; but he could go for some holding and cuddling.  And so could she!

Goose bumps of pleasure, toasty-warm sensuous body-glow.  105% alive!  Lazy morning conversation, about nothing, and everything.  The lovely scratch of her diamond against her cheek.

Ring!  Boom, she leaped out of his arms, slamming a flat hand down on the clock, slinking out of her naughty-nightie, heading straight for the bathroom.  (Gawwwd.  But Reed really went for the Frederick’s stuff.  She would have preferred to simply sleep naked——she LOVED the feel of him all up and down her body.  Reed liked her giftwrapped: crotchless nonsense, peekaboo teddies, and the like; Thank Goodness He Wasn’t Into Leather!) 

She oozed down into the hot tub for a fast bath.

Oh, she loved Reed sooo much.  She adored him.  It was so dopey.  She had no equality at all.  It was just terrible.  She was his love-slave.  She couldn’t even think straight.

She giggled.  It was great!  It was wonderful.  Reed somehow seemed to know exactly what she needed.  And the sex——it just got sexier and sexier all the time.  And actually, she wasn’t at all sure who was controlling who, anymore.  Every day he asked her five or six times to marry him.  ‘Now!  This minute!  Let’s go!’  He was even getting angry when she refused him.  Nice!

The truly amazing thing was that she was actually honestly expressing her sexual self to him.  She wasn’t faking it.  Well . . . almost . . . maybe she did exaggerate just a tad . . .

Before Reed, she had felt like a piece of ass during sex, as if she were used as a sexual outlet; but she didn’t always feel as though she were valued as a person.  Sometimes with Vlad she had felt almost as if he were making love with someone else, not her.  A couple of times she had felt like an inflatable sex doll, as if he was doing it to her not with her.

But with Reed the sex was aerobic, it was a Dance, ever-changing.  It was a shared, exuberant joy of discovery and physical renewal: a silent, mental soul-searching conversation; sometimes a straight colloquy, other times a raucous trapeze-colloquialism.  Even when it was the same, it was sooo, so different.

“Wake up, now!” Courty called out to Reed at the end of her bath.  “Get up!”

“I’m up,” Reed grumbled.

She looked to be sure.  He was.  A mopey bleary-eyed unshaven, naked lump of man, sitting in the chair at the foot of the bed, looking at the bed, blankly.  He might have been dead; except he blinked.  The blink took about three seconds to complete.

Courtney smiled, and sat down to do her make-up [sic].

Her face took twenty-six minutes [sic].  It was easy for her to learn from make-up artists: she just watched.  She didn’t like people fussing with her hair and make-up and clothes all day, but it was educational, and served to correct all her former idiotic mistakes.  Why just a few weeks ago, she had been using blusher under her cheekbones to create hollows, but shadows aren’t pink!

Two years ago an anarchistic radical, five months ago a progressive Democrat, now a conservative Republican in the politics of feminine appearance, Courtney had converted as powerfully as the atheist who finds God.  Reverse polarity.  She had no explanation for it, no rational.  It made no sense, it just was.  She could still see the links between appearance, sexuality and gender; how women were continuously required to hide their true selves, which might have unacceptable elements, even masculine elements, and wrap themselves in a veneer of conformity to contemporary beauty standards.

But she had begun to doubt her motives.  Was she serious and committed to abolishing The System, to changing the rules of the game?  Or was she afraid that if she played the game that she might lose?  It was a crucial question.  Having left the supportive feminist ghetto of her college life, the answers suddenly didn’t seem so clear.

In her heart of hearts, she had always felt inexcusably individual.  She had felt this as a personal failure.  She had so wanted to be the acceptable California Girl, cute anonymous blond, like all the other beach girls, with all the other beach girls.  But no, she had always been instantly recognizable, like an icon.  All eyes turning, lingering; an icky feeling, distressing to be the focus of such attention; attention almost unnaturally obtained, as if her mere presence had startled people; attention laced with female hostility.  All through school she had experienced the vulnerability of the outsider, never learning a social tool other than self-effacement.  She now realized——or now interpreted——that she had somehow done an emotional mistranslation somewhere along the line: for different, she had read ugly, when the reality was closer to exceptional.

Thrown into one school after another——Swim!——her individual excellence had been social suicide: taboo.  Mediocrity was how the kids achieved togetherness . . . they talked a good game of wanting to be artists, but they boycotted the exceptional to keep the group together.

This reinterpretation had changed all her conclusions.  Male and Female stereotypes existed.  Ideal images of masculinity and femininity.  In the light of cold, analytical logic, they were both impossibly polarized and incomplete.  Thinking about it, perhaps American Men didn’t have it so easy, after all.  They had the same problem American Women had: no set of beliefs allowed men to value themselves without respect to the market place.  Masculinity wasn’t biological fact, but a thing that required daily proving and re-proving.  They had to make it.  They had to be functional, spend their time working or thinking or problem solving; be unwaveringly tough.  Men failed or succeeded IN ACTION, which certainly wasn’t easy, and this failure or success was almost a direct measure of their masculinity.  The more successful a man was, the better he appeared, the more attractive he was.

And that brought up another question: were sexual stereotypes based on biology?  Were they genetically encoded?  Guys since the beginning of time were hung up on big tits——was that a genetically encoded holdover from the days when breast feeding might have been crucial for rearing children?  And, darn it, rich and successful men were more attractive.  Did she have neurons in her brain that fired in parallel whenever she got close to her brain’s unconscious definition of hunk (support-system seed, perhaps)?

Courtney realized that she didn’t want to shed the stereotypes.  She didn’t want a feminist revolution to banish the stereotypes; she was not quite ready to dump the role models.  It was not the simplistic point of perception that women were cruelly doomed or preordained successful exclusively by their physical appearance, be it beautiful or ugly.  No.  So much of ‘beauty’ was learned rhetoric, by far the greater part of it.  And it was AWESOME how many, many people were almost exactly: pretty as they feel.  Male ideals were seemingly Aristotelian, grounded in Action.  Female ideals seemed Platonic, based on Being.  Was the masculine “to do is to be,” any fundamentally better than the feminine “to be is to do?”

At college Courtney had expected that sexual stereotypes were on the way out, but nothing much had changed in the America of the 1990s, except a vague awareness of the problem; and the Women’s Liberation movement had gone out of fashion.  It was no longer hip.  She wondered if she had been a phony libber in those days.  She recalled the resolutions against the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, against artificial gender distinctions; well, equal rights, sexual preference, and racism were fine topics of focus, But Why Can’t I Shave My Legs?!

Then, of course, there was the problem of revolutionaries in America.  There can’t be any successful ones.  As soon as an American revolutionary gets a little successful, they have money and begin to experience real power, and instantly they become conservative and want to keep the game just the way it is——Because They’re Winning!

But her thinking found no answers that fully explained her new sense of values.

Courtney felt like a female impersonator.  It was ludicrous, the layers of feminine rhetoric she was learning to project.

Courtney plucking her eyebrows with tweezers.   Regularly.  Amazing.  Courtney, that former nail-biting animal, turning vegetarian, going on a cuticle-free diet, refusing to be seen with even a chipped nail, applying a fresh coat of polish every two days between manicures.

Courtney seeing a specialist to get her legs waxed.   OUCH!!

Assimilation & accommodation?  What about assertion!

Peach taught her the trick of lining the insides of her eyelids with a light blue pencil.  Nothing like it to whiten up the whites, after a sleep-starved night.

Lauren showed her how to mix foundation with Evian from an aerosol, dab in some moisturizer, than apply: ooooh, her face looks like silk.

Courtney washed her hair EVERY morning, checked it for bounce, and usually WASHED IT AGAIN.  Jojoba shampoo, pH balanced with vitamin E, especially useful for Outer Limits hair cut to Twilight Zone dimensions.

Morgan’s boyfriend was an MD, supplying her with purse-loads of Valium.  10s.  Courty pulled the beg & plead routine, and was rewarded with a private stash of
belladonna.  Shhhh!  Labeled atropine, the alkaloid crystal’s proscribed use was to relieve muscular spasms.  But Courty knew that courtesans throughout history used belladonna to dilate their pupils.  And she remembered reading that the pupil of the human eye expands when the person is looking at something that interests him.  Her!  Interested is often interesting.  Also, dilated pupils seemed to be sexual signals, which perhaps evolved to encourage copulation.  Might as well fight dirty.  Had to be careful, though, not to use it when shooting in the sun, and to get several pairs of UV-resistant sunglasses.  And actually, when using, Courtney really did feel like a loose woman.

Eye makeup just slightly out of boundary, creative and playful.

Of course, first thing on the job the make-up girl might scrub her face and start anew.  Do-be-do-be-do!

Courtney bent down to kiss Reed on her way to her clothes, just a fast don’t-smear-me touch.

“What’s with you?” she asked.  He was still sitting there.  By this time, he should be dragging himself around in a daze, with a cup of coffee in one hand (pants, no shirt yet), out among his music toys, powering up his loft’s music-studio.  It took him ten minutes just to turn everything on.  He usually worked for a couple of hours before going in to SoundSync.

“I’ve got a headache,” Reed said.

“I’ll get you some aspirin.”

“Mmmmmmm.”  He shook his head, and rubbed his stomach, with a sour expression on his face.

“You’re shattering my faith in you,” Courtney said, as she dressed.  “I thought you were indestructible.”

“So did I.”  He was hunched over, posture-terrible, still naked, showing no inclination to get moving.

Well, as long as she had his ears captive, she talked while she dressed.  It would be a few minutes before Michael would arrive to pick her up.

“I’m going over to Europe soon,” Courtney said.  “GTG and FF Femme want to book me.  Michael says that in order to make it big here in the States, I have to make it big over there first.”

“Mmmm.”

“It’s your own fault, Reed.  You started all this.”

“I’ll just have to start up a Paris SoundSync, I guess.”

“Actually, I think Michael’s crazy.  Do you know I’ve had two movie offers, and a TV offer?  Course, they just want me for bitsy parts.  You know: walk on, get shot, die.  There’s five or six companies that want me to endorse their products; um, liquor, perfume, and stuff.  John Stein’s Clothes even wants me to lend my name to a new line of clothes.  I don’t even understand what’s happening anymore, it’s happening so fast.  Michael keeps raising my rates and raising my rates; I think I’m like . . . oh, I don’t know, way up there, anyway.  I think I’m like one of the twenty or thirty highest paid models in the world right now!  It’s so crazy.”  Dressing didn’t take her so long.  Ten minutes tops.  She had an ironclad rule that saved her hours of early-morning agonizing: wear the first clean
color-coordinated things she could find.  That would leave five or ten minutes to scarf down OJ, toast, and cold cereal.

Reed staggered up out of the chair, and started to get dressed.

“Estelle hates me,” Courtney said, matter-of-factly.  “I think she’s playing some sort of game.”

“Estelle’s always playing: she’s an actress.  Do you have an aspirin?  I think I can handle one aspirin.  This headache is killing me.”

“Yes.”  Pause.  “I think . . . that Estelle thinks, that somehow she’s going to get you back.  Here’s the aspirin.”

“Thank you.  You’re crazy.”

“No, I really feel strongly about this, Reed.”

“Courty; Estelle and I are so far apart, we’re not even in the same universe anymore.”

“She kept giving you ga-ga eyes all last night.”

“She’s an actress.  She gives everybody ga-ga eyes.  She’s just practicing.”

“Blue sure didn’t seem to think so.  Blue was going nuts there in the restaurant, she kept giving me weird looks, she was embarrassed.  She whispered to me that ‘Mom’s really blowing it tonight.’”

“That reminds me,” Reed said as he crawled into a turtleneck, “no more Ethiopian food.  Ever!”

“You liked it last night.”

“Well, it was funky, and it was different, and it was fun to gross out Estelle by eating with our fingers.”

“You ate as much as all of us put together!”

“I know.  And now I’m all f—— . . . I’m all messed up.”

“The food gave you a headache?”

“I don’t get headaches!” he snarled, as he put on slacks.

Courtney was completely dressed, energetic, looking as stunning as a model.  Reed was a grouchy scraggle of grim male.  She couldn’t resist edging him on a bit more: “I think Blue was sent here to spy on you.”

“Oh, for Christ sake!”  He groaned and then held his head, as if the outburst had actually hurt.  Then he sat on the disheveled bed, and held his stomach with both hands.  He was silent for a moment, and Courtney started to worry about him.  He really wasn’t feeling well.  She had never seen him sick before.  “And while you’re on this kick about Estelle,” Reed said, “remember Vlad?  We almost got in a fucking fight about you!  He barged into my Hollywood studio one day, drunk or something, with a handful of videos he wanted me to see.  He flat out told me he was going to take you away from me.”

She laughed.  Now that was funny.  Reed and Vlad were now working together!  Vlad was directing the music-videos for Reed’s solo album.  What a way to get hired.  But it was just like Reed to do something like that: hire the guy who threatened to fight him.

Reed pulled off his pants, and crawled back in bed, in his underwear and turtleneck.  He pulled the covers over himself.

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes.  I got too much sleep last night.”

“Too much sleep?  Eight and a half hours?”

“Yeah, I never should have eaten so much so late.  It just put me right out.  I slept too much.  I get a headache when I sleep too much.”

“But you only got the same as me.”

“If I get more than about seven hours of sleep, I get a headache.”

Courty was amazed.  “I have to get at least seven hours or I’m a complete wreck.”

“Different strokes for different . . . oh, shit.”

After he said that, there was a pounding on the front door.

“There’s Michael.  Well, I have to go.  Please, get better, Reed.  I’ll call you in a few hours to see how you’re doing.”

“God damn it.  God damn it.”  Reed threw the covers off, and sat up.  “God damn it.”  He got up and headed for the bathroom.

Courtney noticed a strange expression on his face.

“God damn it.  God damn it!”  He bent over and started spitting into the toilet.  Spit.  Spit.  Spit.  Spit.

She started to go answer the door, but then Reed got down on his knees, and she suddenly realized that he was nauseated.

“Oh, Reed.”

Reed started to throw up.  And throw up.  And throw up!  Of course, there wasn’t anything in his stomach except an aspirin and a tiny amount of water.

He was having such a rough time of it, and he looked like he was in such agony, that Courty completely ignored the knocking, and quickly went to him.  She held him, and tried to comfort him.  Oh, God, it HURT seeing him hurt like this, feeling his whole body in agony.  She held his forehead and put her other arm around him; it was terrible, it was awful, seeing him hurting, feeling him convulsing, and not being able to do anything.

It just went on, and on!  Retching, retching, just tiny bits of food coming up, mostly nothing at all, just the drool of stomach acids.  It lasted a full three minutes!

She was really getting worried.  But finally, he more or less had himself under control.  He was completely drained, so exhausted he could hardly hold his eyes open, still going through involuntary muscle tremors.  His system still wanted to throw up, Courty could feel it.

“Go on,” he said.  “Go on.”

Michael was still knocking on the door; pounding on it like a maniac.

“I can’t leave you like this,” Courty objected.  “Let me go talk to him, I’ll be right back.”

“Courty.  I’m OK.”

“You’re not OK!”

“Aaaaaaarg-uuuuuh!” Reed tried to heave his guts out.  His body seemed intent on vomiting all internal organs up through his mouth.

Michael pounded on the door out there——what did he have, A Hammer?  She was torn in two directions at once, but Courty quickly ran out to answer the door.  She opened it so quickly, she hardly saw who was there, and immediately streaked back across the loft toward the bedroom.

“Goodmor——” Michael started to say, but she was running away from him.  “Good morning!” he yelled at her receding back, letting himself in and closing the door behind him.

Michael looked around.  He was jealous of all this space.  You needed binoculars to find the far drapes over the picture windows.  Michael had just moved into a fancy bachelor’s pad, himself——fancy yes, with tens of thousands of dollars of custom interior decoration . . . and about one fifth this size.  He wondered when they were going to finish the apartment.  As far as he could tell, they hadn’t done any construction in the past month; surely, they didn’t intend to leave the place like this, did they?  It was half-built, the walls along the edges exposed the electrical wiring, and they hadn’t even put in the dividers yet.  The only change, as far as he could tell, was that the far area of electrical equipment, under the main strips of track lighting, had tripled or quadrupled in the amount of electrical and musical gear.

Michael figured he had really lucked onto something with Courty.  She was exploding onto the fashion scene faster than anything he had even heard of.  Faster and harder even than that English twit, Nina Lindsay, a decade ago.  Nina didn’t model anymore, but in her time, she had been nearly as big as Twiggy.  Maybe every ten years the modeling world needed someone to go absolutely bananas over, a new face that everybody, everyfuckingbody wanted to look like.  Or look at.  Courty was that face.  She was the Nineties Look.  Michael loved the way all the people who had been treating him like he was a farce, were now crawling on their hands and knees to lick his arse.  He really had them all playing by His Rules all the way now.  He sprinkled out his broken glass obstacle course, and fashion editors & photographers raced, competed with themselves, to be the first to pay the most money for Courty.  He would just snidely smile and say, “Now this time, don’t crawl around the sharp glass, crawl on the sharp glass.”

Michael wandered toward the bedroom.  On the way there, he heard the telephone ring twice, and he heard the answering machine in the loft’s living area answer it.  When he got to the bedroom he could see Byron Reed and Courty sitting on the edge of the giant bed together.  He looked like shit; Medusa-hair, half-undressed.  She looked like designer Angel Food Cake.  She had her arms around him, talking in a low voice Michael couldn’t hear, while he slumped there.  Michael noted that the guy had a bod, not like most of the wimp-weak musicians he had seen.  But Michael could see that Reed was not a dedicated bodybuilder; probably he just pushed himself hard at one sport.  And actually, he was sort of ugly.  And totally out of it: get a haircut, guy!

At first, Michael had wondered what Courty saw in Byron Reed; but Michael quickly decided that it had to be Reed’s money.  Money was a powerful aphrodisiac; Byron was a rich dude; simple as that.

“Good morning, people,” Michael said, and crossed his arms in the walkway.  He noticed for the first time, that the doorway wasn’t even finished, no handles on the door, although the bedroom itself seemed completely decorated and comfy (a little harsh, on the masculine side).

“Noooo, I don’t think so,” Reed told Michael.  “Courty, get out of here.”

“I will not!  Michael, cancel our first booking.  I can’t make it.”

“What?”

“Courty, for Christ sake, get out of here.  I’m fine.  I’ve just got a headache.”

“And you’re nauseated!  And who knows what else!  Michael, cancel the first booking.”

“I can’t,” Michael said.  “You’re doing the cover, THE COVER for City Lady!  Circulation is 4 million!  You can’t just cancel.  It’s the biggest thing you’ve ever done!”

“I just did cancel.  Now you tell ’em.”

“Courty . . .”

“Courty, will you stop playing Mother, and go to work?  I’m fine.  I’m just . . . God damn it.  God damn it!”  Read headed quickly for the John.  He started spitting into the toilet again: always, just before he threw up, he started salivating like crazy.

Courty pushed Michael physically out of the bedroom.  “Tell them I’m sick!  Just do it!  Good-bye!  Call me at noon, maybe I can work this afternoon.  Maybe!  Now get lost!”

Michael stood there stupidly, with the door pushed closed in his face.  It wasn’t even latched——there was no latch.  He saw, through the hole for the nonexistent doorknob, the bright red of Courty’s skirt scamper in the direction of the bathroom.

Women!

“Aaaaaaaarg-uh-uh-uh-aaahrg!” Reed said.

“Now, come on, Reed, let’s use positive thinking.   You’re getting better.  You feel fine.”  Please?

“Aaaaaarrrrrruuuuuuuuuhhh-uuh!”

Her touch soothed Reed.  She was bent there on the tile-floor with him, on her knees.  She held him tight, radiating love, and warm comforting protection, as the awful convulsions of his body became gentler.

At last, he could talk again.  “I think I just threw up my balls.”

Courty looked over his shoulder into the toilet bowl, and then felt between his legs to check.  “Nope.  Still there.”

He smiled weakly, his head still over the toilet bowl.  “I think I’ll be all right now.  Why don’t you go see if you can catch up with Michael.”

As an answer, she rested her head on his back, and squeezed him gently.

After two or three minutes in that position, he thought he was strong enough to go back to bed, so she helped him back there.

“Can I call a Doctor?”

“I don’t like Doctors,” he said weakly.

“But they can give you a shot for nausea.”

“Not necessary.  I already threw up everything, even the muscles in my left leg.  There’s nothing left.  Except this God damn headache.  Somehow I wasn’t able to throw that up.”

“Are you still nauseated?”

A long slow inhale.  A long slow exhale.  “Yes.”

Courtney was laying next to him, on top of the sheet.  Reed was under the sheet.

“How about some Pepto-Bismol?” she joked.

He turned his head just enough to give her the hairy eyeball.

She laughed.  “Reed!”  OK, let’s get serious.  “OK, Reed.  First we have to get rid of your upset tummy, then we have to get rid of your headache.  Now, you have to trust me, OK?  Do you trust me?”

He nodded.

She went out to the kitchen and got out four of her 400 IU vitamin E softgels.

“What the hell is this?” he said, when she held them out to him.

“Aunt Courtney’s sure-cure anti-nausea pills.”  She gave him a hard look, and held the pills out to him.  “Take ’em, Mister!”  She narrowed her eyes, dangerously.  “No water, just swallow ’em.”

Well, he did.  Not very enthusiastically, but they did all go into his tummy.

“You will feel better almost instantly,” she pronounced.  Quickly, she went into the bathroom, scrubbed off her make-up, shucked all her clothes, and crawled back into bed with him.  Naked.  Under the covers.

“Feel better, don’t’cha!”  She smiled brightly, and then lay her head down on his chest.

About ten minutes later, he admitted that yes, he did feel somewhat better.

She snuggled closer.

“What are you doing?”

She snuggled closer.  “How’s your tummy?”

“Pretty stable, actually.  Hey.”

She snuggled closer.

“Courty, give me a break, will you?  I’ve got a headache.”

“That excuse is not acceptable in this household.”

“Oh, we’re a household now, are we?  So, are you finally going to marry me?  Come on, say yes.  Tell me when.  Today?  Tomorrow?  I want to own you.  I want legal rights to you.  I want social-chains holding you to me.  I want my gold ring on your finger.  I want . . . Hey!”

She shifted around, threw the sheet back, hunkered down between his legs and pulled his enlarging penis out through the slit of his briefs.

“Courty, you’re pulling on the wrong thing.  There’s a Samurai sword stabbed through my head at the temples.  Pull that out first.”

“Aunt Courtney’s sure-fire headache cure,” she said, holding his erect penis straight up, kissing the tip as gently as a goddess kissing a rare and beautiful holy flower.  Her teeth delicately nibbled, bit amorously as if she would pull the petals of that flower one by one.  Her tongue swirled, the quintessence of tenderness, like a warm waterfall, a quixotic but amazingly effective headache remedy.

Courtney persisted with her romantic Rx, prolonged her oral ministrations, noting occasionally with her contact-covered eyes, the position of the minute hand on the bedside alarm.

Thirty-five minutes of slow-motion cock-worship seemed enough.  Courtney then turned up the heat, and gave Reed some awareness of her mouth.  It was like the final explosive sunset starburst of colors, racing across the clouds, as the sun gives up the day.

A minute later, Courtney got out of bed, and did some spitting of her own into the toilet.

“How’s your headache?” she asked, as she put on her sweatshirting robe.

“Son of a bitch,” he said slowly, realizing that his headache was almost completely gone.

“That was a quinquennial cure,” she informed him, holding out a hand to help him out of bed.

“Quin-what?”

“Quinquennial.”

“Which means?”

“It means . . . don’t get any more headaches for a long time.”

He smiled.

“Come on.  Get up.  Let’s try you on some 7-Up and crackers.”

COURTNEY, Chapter 29
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47