Tomorrow and Tomorrow Read Free Page B

up in Prague, a scene-star installation artist by the time he was seventeen, a college dropout once featured at Art Basel, but after Pittsburgh he gave up that momentum to be with me in the States. I love him for that, for everything. Since coming here he’s abandoned art but gone freelance with fashionporn and photography—he’s done well for himself.
    One of Gavril’s women opens the door—this one a willowy blonde almost as tall as I am, so pale and thin it’s like her skin’s translucent. Twenty? Twenty-one? She wears a XXL Manchester United jersey belted like a dress but nothing else, the pink saucers of her nipples clearly visible through the sheer fabric.
    “What’s with all this Frost bollocks?” she says.
    “You’re English,” I notice and she rolls her eyes.
    Her profile’s an obvious fake—
Twiggy
, it says, born
19 September 1949
. Occupation:
IT girl
. The American Apparel sponsorship’s real, though, her profile displayed in arcs of copyrighted font.
    “I asked a question,” she says. “Frost? Are you trying to be fucking funny?”
    “You must be the poet,” I tell her. “Gav mentioned you might be around—”
    “He says he’s reading Frost to find inspiration for his Anthropologie shoot. I told him if he wants pastoral imagery, then Wordsworth’s a better bet than Frost, but you have him reading all the wrong stuff anyway—”
    “Wordsworth? Christ, don’t pollute him like that. Are you a student?”
    “Georgetown,” she says. “Ph.D. 20th-Century American Modernism. I’m a Plathist—”
    “‘Mad Girl’s Love Song,’” I tell her. “I like that one.”
    “She should have used Adware,” says Twiggy, “to distract her from all that shit she obsessed about. She was a gorgeous girl, would have been brilliant for the
Mademoiselle
app—”
    “I shut my eyes and all is born again,” I tell her, misquoting the lines.
    “Gavril expected you’d like me—”
    The never-ending party is spare this morning, only a quartet of scenesters shuffling cards at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and eating eggs. Twiggy joins another young woman, a brunette, playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the VIM, the furniture pushed to the edges of the room, Tyson prancing bullish. The brunette’s in spandex and thigh-high tube socks, jabbing and kicking riotously, so model thin and gangly she’s like a spastic female skeleton raging in fits of laughter.
    “You suck,” says Twiggy, readying herself for Tyson. “You’ve got to, like, sidestep the uppercuts—”
    BBC America talking heads hover in my sight:
Executions in the terrorist courts, a stroke of Meecham’s pen beheads a thousand jihadists, a thousand thousand—
    Gavril’s in the back bedroom, the room he calls his darkroom even though he doesn’t develop anything, preferring digital work on his iMac even over imprints or holograms. Oversize prints of his static photography decorate the walls—young women he finds on the street, impossibly gorgeous the way he shoots them, catalog ready. Gavril’s in a tracksuit and smiles when he sees me. Jockish, when it comes down to it—his hug ends in a double fist bump handshake that I blunder and he laughs. The room smells like him—apple-scented Head & Shoulders, Clive Christian cologne. Cigarettes smoldering in emptied coffee mugs. When he first moved to the States he was wiry, but now he’s filled out from fine food and smiles easily, his physique rock hard from all the soccer and sex. He only wears pajamas or a tracksuit—I’ve never seen him in anything else.
    “John Dominic,” he says.
    “Gav—”
    “What the fuck, man? Are you translate me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
    “I’m translating,” I tell him, the app keeping up well enough as he speaks in Czech, but making him look like poorly dubbed cinema.
    “I tell you I want to learn English to be inspired, to read Robert Frost in the original—”
    “I’m teaching you Robert Frost—”
    “I’m