Snow Job

Isabel sat cross-legged on the huge bed, chopping blow on a mirror with a single edged blade. She stretched it out in long lines with the razor’s corner, then pushed it back together in a heap and chopped it some more. There was something very satisfying in chopping up rock. How you started with a small blue white chunk and processed it until it became a little white mountain of glittering powder. Like grinding corn, or making butter: a process with a beginning, middle and end. And a far better yield. Pierce walked in and tossed a handful of rubber–banded stacks of hundreds onto the bed, disturbing the cat, whose tail swept across the mirror. The pile of coke scattered, catching the light and glistening the same way as the snowflakes, falling diagonally outside, sparkled as they crossed the beam of the streetlamp on 90^th street.

“Oh, shit. That was a lot of blow, babe. Here, you snort the stuff off Bogey,” she shoved the cat at him, “and I’ll get what’s here.” She laughed and buried her nose in the Indian bedspread. He dove onto the bed and tackled her, and for a few minutes they rolled around, grinding coke diamonds into oblivion.

“Let’s get high.” She sat up.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Isabel reached for the mirror that lay at the far corner of the bed reflecting prisms on the ceiling. Antique boxes with hidden compartments concealing stashes were scattered all around. She chose a heavy silver one and fiddled till she found the spot that popped the secret drawer. She withdrew a small foil rectangle, selected a rock from inside, then tucked the packet back in the box and made it disappear. She started to chop again. The cat came back. Pierce fished the biggest roach out of the ashtray, lit it, and passed it to her. It was the last of those crazy Thai sticks with each bud meticulously wrapped onto its bamboo twig like a little reefer shish kabob. She took a deep hit and kept it in as long as she could. Spicy sweet resinous smoke filled her lungs and spread to the ends of her hair before she allowed what little remained to slowly escape through her nose.

In a few minutes she had broken the new rock into a sparkling little mound of snow. She centered the pile on the mirror and cut it this way then that, extending each quarter into a long thin furrow and ending with four white parallel lines. “Pass me some money,” she said.

Pierce reached down without looking and extracted a wad of bills from under the cat. She chose a crisp hundred and rolled it tightly into a tube. Balancing the mirror on her knee, she bent over and put the straw to her nostril, pressing the opposite shut with the tip of her finger. She carefully moved the rolled bill from one end of the line to the other, then switched nostrils and did the same with the second, hoovering them both cleanly.

The drug hit the inside of her nose high up between the eyes first; then the sharpness smashed into her throat. It dripped down the back, spreading chemical numbness behind. Eyes closed, she let her head fall back and inhaled deeply, drawing in each last speck. In the moments it took for Pierce to remove the straw from her hand and the mirror from her knee, the thrilling familiar surge of pure white energy thrummed throughout Isabel’s body, but especially in her head. The back of her skull lifted off and burst like the evening’s best and final firework; straight up into the stars, hesitating for a moment way high up, before exploding outward in blooming, unfurling, chrysanthemum petals of light. Every synapse in her brain was perfectly timed and firing correctly. Crystalline thoughts fizzed like champagne. Blow made you bloody brilliant.

Somewhere on the bed the phone rang.

“Don’t think for a second I’ll get it, Pierce.”

“You should. You know it’s going to be for you. It always is.”

“Do you honestly expect me to screen my own calls?”

Pierce shook his head and picked up. “Lady Isabel’s residence,” he said in British butler. “Certainly, Sir, may I tell her who’s calling? Yeah, who the fuck else do you think it is, dickhead?” He threw the receiver at her feet. “It’s your boyfriend.”

“Which one?” She reached out, laughing, trying to hook his belt loop with her finger, but he evaded her grasp and pirouetted off the bed.

“Well, let me see, Madam… I believe it’s the one you screwed in the swimming pool in Sand’s Point last year while the whole party watched.”

“Jesus, Pierce, I can’t understand how you put up with that shit. I would never take that crap.” She blew him a kiss from the tips of her fingers, then picked up the phone.

“Long time,” she purred.

Pierce went into the living room, kicking off his boots to opposite corners as he wandered through. He picked up the large Tiffany box that sat on the floor near the coffee table and looked it over. Not long ago it held six Waterford double old-fashioned glasses his father had sent as a wedding gift. Now it had a slot in its top and a label that read “What Shall I Do About Isabel?” affixed to its front. He shook it a couple of times, hoping that perhaps this time some suggestions might have found their way inside. Then he moved to the stereo and dropped the needle precisely onto a track in the middle of the record. The Stones leapt into the room and Jagger howled “…And there will alwaaaaaays be a spaaaa-aaaace in my parking lot/ When you need a little coke and sympa-theeeeeeee." He twisted his Marlboro into a half eaten slice of pizza congealing on the kitchen counter and vanished into the bathroom.

“I’d really like that,” Isabel said into the phone crunched between cheek and shoulder, hands busy rolling one of her famous joints. She licked the gummed edge of the paper, glued it down and twirled the ends, then held it up to examine the faultless white cylinder.

“Yeah, Thursday works well. I have to set up a job at Chanterelle in the afternoon, but it’ll only take a few minutes to get to Prince Street afterwards. Will your friend lend you the loft again?” He answered. She smiled.

She groped around on the bed for her dad’s old Dunhill lighter. Her fingers wrapped around it and its cool gold heft warmed into her palm. The impossibly smooth roll of the cylinder yielding to her thumb pleased her, and she flicked it a number of times. So few things are perfect. Beautiful objects embody the possibility that things can be as we’d like. They offer hope. Isabel had more than once confused the confident closing thud of a European car door and the car’s primal leather pheromones with the guy whose hand had shut it behind her.

She’d smoked half the joint and was getting mellow when the bedroom door flew open and crashed into the wall behind it. A huge erection hovered momentarily in the doorway before sailing into the room, followed, in due course, by the naked and just-showered Pierce. The thing was breathtaking --a star from the East—and it drew him towards her like a magnet to true north. Isabel had never met another dick with such gravitas and presence. It caused her penis envy beyond the standard female yen for the convenience of being able to pee standing up – she yearned to know how it felt to wield such a protean appendage. He called it a gift across time from his Cherokee ancestors; a legacy from a brave named something like Dick Doubles as Tent-Post. It glided to a halt inches from her face, and she watched it bob and weave until its mission was revealed. Along the length of the rosy shaft, in blue eye pencil, she read the words Get off the phone. Now.

“Hey, listen, I’ve got to run. Something’s come up. Yes, tomorrow, 4:30-5ish.”

She hung up and kicked the cat off the bed.