Lust for Accessories

By Crispin Sartwell

A New York Love Affair

Scene 3. Pursuit

She opens her leather agenda. To the date, that date, November Fifth. 730 Fifth Avenue. Ten p.m. circled in felt-tip pen. Under that, underlined, "espresso bar." Different pen, different handwriting.

Now she has all the information.

Candace Bushnell for Bulgari

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Our love was forbidden, but that made it all the more fashionable. The insatiable lust that pulled us together kicking and screaming until we couldn't tell whose limbs were whose was based on three things. Caffeine. Vulgari accessories. And the fact that neither of us could write. A complete sentence.

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, but in my girlish heart I knew it was wrong, so wrong. He was married. A Franciscan monk. HIV positive. And only twelve years old. I was working as a professor of pure mathematics at Columbia and moonlighting as a love slave at a mid-town bar.

We were so different. Yet we were the same too. Maybe it was the information in our Vulgari agendas. Maybe the leather. Maybe the diamond-encrusted felt-tip pen that he wielded like a rapier. I had one too. Maybe the fact that we both swilled espresso until we lived twenty feet outside our own bodies and could not utter a single coherent. Phrase.

Maybe our lives were incredibly empty.

But for whatever reason, we pencilled each other in. Or perhaps our secretaries made the assignation. It's hard. To remember. We came together that evening in the espresso bar like Antony and Cleopatra. Like a religious leader communing with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Like a tractor-trailer colliding with a Yugo. Like a felt-tip pen caressing an agenda. Like a sex columnist encountering a book. On grammar.

I remember most of all what he was wearing. He was so haute. Leather jeans. A ruby brooch that perfectly matched his corneas. An i.v. by Tommy Hilfiger. Jewel-encrusted latex. It was enough to make any professor of pure mathematics melt into a puddle of womanly desire.

Our Orphan-Annie eyes met over the demitasse. Uninhabited eyes. Eyes like pools of impure possibility. Pools that could only be filled by continuous conspicuous consumption. Eyes that wanted. That silently begged "please, please." That saw only designer boutiques, platinum cards, and each other.

We had no desire to talk or even to touch. We wanted only to shop, and we shopped with orgiastic fury. That night we bought things that it had never before occurred to anyone to want: fur toaster ovens; nose implants; cosmetics distilled from icebergs; smallpox; flawless appliances that did nothing at all; Elton John's tribute to Mobutu Sese Seko; full-body tattoos of the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo; computerized wigs; huge Eskimo girls; self-improvement books made of human skin; former Soviet republics. And still it was not enough.

We were living in a dream or perhaps nightmare of lust for accessories. We took cabs. We looted. We smoked rock caffeine. We dodged the paparazzi. We wept together for the homeless. Our passion was torrential, deranged, credit-worthy, postmodern as the next Calvin Klein campaign

But it was over as quickly as it began. Over the next few moments, I noticed that we were drifting insensibly apart. Soon he was wearing Gucci and I, I was working on a proof of Fermat's last theorem. His wife found out about our forbidden agenda. His home room teacher found out. God found out. The public health authorities found out. Then came the fateful moment when one of my sentences featured a verb, and I knew that it was never to be. I quit my jobs, traded my condo for a simple yet daringly bare Donna Karan burqa, and joined the Taliban.

But every time I open my agenda to the date, that date, I am reminded of the importance of effective accessorizing.