The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [95]
The revelers at Camille Stypnick’s upslope, split-level townhouse have come to celebrate the launch of Betancourt Rum and its concomitant ad campaign, scheduled to hit the phone booths and bus stands next week. Placards bearing the ads dangle just over the partygoers’ heads from long threads affixed to the ceiling. The lead image is of Fidel Castro, his perennial fatigues cashed in for a pink Hawaiian shirt and purple Bermuda shorts. He stands on a Florida beach, a makeshift raft pulled up on the sand behind him. A bulky camera hangs from his neck, and a frayed stogie rises like an erection from his teeth. His smile has been morphed unnaturally wide, along with his eyeballs, at the sight of a model in a string bikini stretched out on a blanket before him. The follow-up ads are variations on the theme: Che Guevara as rock star, Huey Newton as pimp, V. I. Lenin as oil tycoon, and Crazy Horse cruising down Route 66 in a ’57 Chevy, all of them armed with eerily morphed smiles and cadres of nubile women. The supporting slogan, plastered across the tops and bottoms of the ads, makes Ursula’s brain hurt. For the life of her she can’t figure out what it means.
IT’S MORE THAN REVOLUTIONARY
IT’S COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY!
She considers turning around right here and leaving, going to find some anonymous bar where she can spend the night drinking herself sick and fending off men with supersized lecherous smiles. But then she thinks of the savage girl, her skinny body covered with scabs and pus and scars, and she starts making her way through the crowd. She’s been feeling those scars acrawl on her own skin for the last day and a half. Those scars, she has decided, originated in the depths of her own twisted, selfish brain. She turned the girl’s self-expression into a commodity, forcing her to differentiate herself even further by doing something no one else would do. Ursula has stopped sleeping, stopped eating, but her weariness makes her anxious rather than drowsy, and the emptiness in her stomach makes her want to retch rather than eat. It’s like she’s trapped in some nightmare in which she walks up a hundred flights of stairs only to find herself in a dank subbasement farther underground than before: everything she does seems to produce an effect opposite to the one she intended.
Present at the party are several of the nubile models and none of the revolutionaries. Sonja didn’t make the cut for the campaign, but she’s here nonetheless, commending to the public a short mesh dress of interwoven bird bones and a long pair of legs. Ed Cabaj and his colleague Lucien have her cornered, and next to them stands Chas, aloof and uninterested, in a pair of lightly tinted sunglasses. With a twinge of panic Ursula looks around for Ivy, but she doesn’t see her. Deciding she needs a few more minutes to gather her courage, she steers herself toward an arrangement of bottles beckoning from the dining table. She pries through the crowd, fixes herself a triple vodka on ice with a lemon twist, takes a swig, then makes her way around the room the long way, scanning for Ivy some more, then loitering for another couple of minutes on the periphery of a small group of people scrutinizing another of Camille’s campaigns, a series of subway ads mounted in curved light boards along the wall, in which severe-looking fashion models pantomime pleasureless sex with one another. It isn’t clear what the product is. Clothing, maybe. Or perfume.
The onlookers murmur in vague appreciation and venture no comments. These are my people, Ursula thinks with self-loathing.
But not for much longer.
By the time she reaches her associates, James T. Couch has arrived as well, dressed in an eye-searing, wasp-waisted white suit and T-shirt that reads GROOVY: An Airily American Restaurant.
“How do how do,” he says, wedging himself between Lucien and Sonja and switching on his thousand-toothed fluorescent grin.
Introductions and greetings ensue, and then Cabaj takes Chas by the arm and makes a joke about how Ivy beat out Sonja for the Litewater campaign and about how jealous Sonja