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Torch Song
Katie Roiphe
My memory of Stella, at nineteen, is neither as crisp nor as
detailed as it should be. It's only with a tremendous effort of
will that I can bring her into focus at all. She is wearing a
complicated black outfit that looks like rags pinned together
with safety pins, and black stockings, with deliberate runs
laddering her legs. Her skin is translucent, the color of skim
milk, and her matted, dyed blond hair looks about as plausibly
human as the hair of a much loved doll. Under her eyes are
extravagant circles, plum colored and deep. She always looks
haggard. No one that age looked haggard the way she looked
haggard. And yet, as one came to know her, that was part of her
romance.
Stella was from the South. I remember her being from a trailer
park, but it may have been a small, sleepy town. She had some
sort of unspeakable tragedy in her background, which added to
the quality of southern gothic she cultivated. In my picture of
her, she is curled up on a mahogany windowsill, with a Faulkner
novel, but in reality, she was one of those brilliant college
students whose minds are clamoring too loudly with their own
noise to read much.
On good days, Stella looked as if she were late to the most
important meeting of her life; on bad days, she looked if she
were being hunted down by organized and insidious forces. She
was also one of the most powerful people in our Harvard class.
She was monumentally, conspicuously damaged in a way that was,
to us then, ineffably chic. She had an entourage of followers
and hangers-on, mostly men of ambiguous sexual preference whose
mothers had given them exotic, weighty names like Byron and
Ulysses. She had an authentically doomed streak that was to the
rest of us, future bankers, editors, lawyers, future parents of
one point five children, and mortgage holders, uniquely
appealing. And the whole time I knew her she was writing
something--a detective story? a play? a thriller?--something
with a murder in it, I think, but whatever it was, it added to
the impression that she was engaged in more important endeavors
than the rest of us. She talked in the cartoon bubbles of comic
book characters: "Oh ho." Or "Jumping Juniper." Or "Iced cold
beverage," or "Eek." This was part of an elaborate, stylized
defense, against the softness associated with sincerity.
And yet, the perfection of her cool was pleasantly undermined
by an ambience of frazzled vulnerability. She was overweight,
and had a flinching relationship with her own body. If you
caught a glimpse of her coming down Plympton Street at dusk,
you might mistake her self-deprecating shuffle for that of a
homeless person. In retrospect, I can see that she was kind of
wonderful looking, with her fabulous, disheveled gestalt, but
at the time being overweight was an enormous, almost
insurmountable, taboo. She had a great, pure throaty laugh,
which went along with a child's pleasure in the smallest
things. I can see her clapping her hands in delight over a
chocolate sundae or a gardenia-scented candle.
Excerpted from The Friend Who Got Away by Edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell Copyright © 2005 by Jenny Offill. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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