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Show Motherlunge a novel 97 Later on that evening, I called Eli at his house in the big city., It was two hours later there, almost midnight, and I wondered if he would be asleep. "Hello?" It was girl's voice, half-laughing, on the line. The phone was passed to Eli. "We're a little wasted," Eli announced unnecessarily. He meant himself and his roommate, Cassandra. I had never met her; she was a friend from the three semesters he spent at art school. I had reasoned she must be sexy in a modem-dancy sort of way; clouded in the smell of essential oils and used to rolling around on the floor. "What are you doing?" I asked in a high, stenotic voice. "I mean, what are you up to?" "Well, we're drinking of course. And playing poker. And listening to music. And what else?" Cassandra said something in the background. "Oh yeah, we're reading personal ads in the Urban Weekly." "Sounds fun," I said. "Who all's there?" "Nobody. Cassandra. Steig is out of town." Steig was Cassandra's boyfriend. He was an Israeli painter, a professor at the art school, who had a wife and child back in Tel Aviv. Cassandra modeled for him, and thus hit the whole trifecta: girlfriend, model, muse. Muse sounded like a good job. What were the qualifications, I wondered? Possess an inner fire. Embody feminine mystery. Be beautiful, unusually limber? "I was just calling to say I made it." With my tongue, I found the tattered edge of my thumb's cuticle; I gripped it with my front teeth and pulled down hard. "I made it to Supernal. Quite a drive." |