(September, 2000)

Denim Prix (‘Pree’) met Marwa on what he considered his bench on the esplanade of Battery Park City. He recognized her from their building as ‘that Moslem girl’ but it was not his business to pay attention to other people. They paid attention to him. They paid him to pay attention to him. A lot of money. It was his magnified face and form that looked down on mortals at the Crossroads of the World in Times Square and in similar intersections worldwide. Prix did not remember meeting Marwa the weekend after school started in September, 2000. He did remember what she said.

“Did you know that if you put a pure, large diamond,” she stuck out her pink tongue and pointed, “it drains heat from the tongue?” She slurred the last words, pronouncing them with her tongue out the whole time.

Prix was accustomed to people of all ages and genders trying novel approaches with him, and he considered himself a connoisseur. He laughed. “How do you know that?”

“We did it, in chem,” Marwa said.

“You had pure, large diamonds in your classroom?”

“We approximated with quartz, but the chem teacher got another teacher who just got engaged to come in, and she let some of us put her ring on our tongues. We tried measuring the heat differential. We couldn’t, but it’s literally a cool theory.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Yeah, we do some strange things at Stuyvesant. That was my sophomore year. Last year.”

Denim Prix remembered Marwa because of the diamond.

But it was from her first meeting with Prix that Marwa reckoned the disestablishmentarianism of her childhood beliefs, of her “medieval religious fascism.” When she was seven years old and showed she could spell that long word and her older brother, Sharif could not, Marwa thought for the first time that being left-handed and a girl were not necessarily bad things. Despite the birth of her younger, much-awaited and heralded brother Yusef — called Joey — as the first ‘real’ American born in their family because he was a boy, Marwa remembered her spelling mastery as her First Sign, her own ayah, the verse of a Qur’an she wrote just by being.

The day after Marwa met Denim Prix on the bench, she removed the head scarf she had only begun to wear as a high school freshman when her parents, for her sake, and eventually Joey’s, had moved from Far Rockaway to lower Manhattan to live as close to Stuyvesant High School as they could. Marwa’s parents never doubted that Joey would exceed even Marwa’s scholastic successes.

“I never had a sophomore year,” Prix (“Pree” she was still spelling him that way then) said. “My mother had me modeling from the time I was three years old.”

“You’re Nautica!” Marwa realized.

Prix recoiled; he had hoped she wouldn’t recognize him.

“Yeah, and Hilfiger and Lauren… etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” To himself, Denim Prix echoed the bald, bare-chested hero of “The King and I”. Yul Brynner’s image had been Prix’s longtime object of comparison for exposed skin. “My name has never been my own. Not even the one on my check, for that matter, ‘Robert Doucette.’”

“No one ever looked less like a ‘Ro-bear’ that you,” Marwa observed. “You sound Haitian.”

Denim Prix had told Marwa his mother was Haitian, had been a model herself, which was how she’d met his possible father, a Caucasian entrepreneur from Jamaica. They lived on the Upper East Side near the Mayor’s Gracie Mansion (and a house on Jamaica and other residences around the world). Denim’s original name, if his mother was to be trusted, which he doubted, was Prix Freeman (her maiden name), and her mother’s last name had been ‘De Nimes’, the city in France where the fabric denim was originally woven.

“Why am I telling you this?” Denim Prix said.

“What do you want to be called?” Marwa asked.

“My friends call me Prix. My agent and the fashion world call me Grand Prix.”

“Why?”

“I make more money for them than any other male model.”

He told her he was 22 and he had bought his apartment in their building because the view reminded him of Alexandria , Egypt , and because he could look upriver.

“On a map, the Hudson River looks like a vagina, don’t you think?” Prix said.

Marwa stood up.

“Sorry,” he said. “That was mean. I felt mean.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just wished — I mean, it would be a relief to wear one of those circus tents you people wear –”

“Burkas?”

Marwa started walking away. Prix caught up to her. “C’mon, two sorries in five minutes. Let’s make it a record. I don’t even have a dog to talk to. I travel too much to have a dog. Only animals and small children actually listen to me. I can always tell when a kid stops being a kid: they stop listening and just stare. No one can take me seriously as an actor. They tell me I’ve got ‘no depth’, when it’s them putting their hands inside me and pulling me out and throwing my insides away. All anyone cares about is this –” he waved his open palm from the top of his curly blond hair down his brown-skinned, handsomely attired length. “—so sometimes I’m mean. But you were staring.”

“Just like everyone else. I’m sorry, too.”

It’s the Fashion Fascists. People think I’m what they want to look like because the F.F. tell me how to look. I don’t know what I’d look like without the costumes they put me in. I’m their — design. Don’t run away again, but in my apartment, alone, I stay naked and I have no mirrors.”

They returned to Prix’s bench. Marwa thought of him as Prix (“Pree, pre-what?”) from that moment on. She also thought that it would be easier talking to him online or if he were masked. His hair was golden curls, his skin Hispaniola aborigines-slaves-conquistadors-all mixed, his brown-rimmed emerald eyes, no, not the green of stone, but the green of new leaves, and in-forming all, his face was regal, as was his carriage, the lithe, undulant gait of Africa.

“Even naked, you’re still Nature’s and your parents’ design. And all of theirs. We all are. They’re inescapable, Nature and Nurture,” Marwa said.

“You think so?”

“It’s a Western obsession, this free will and individuality thing. The rest of the world thinks it’s a joke.”

“So I only feel — what?” Prix struggled.

“Defined by others? ‘Even a hermit belongs to a guild’ — my friend said that, and you wishing you could wear a burka!”

“I want to get away. Get out. Go away. Where? I’ve been everywhere –”

“Yeah, and you’re still there when you get there. Y’know, that name business, there’s no way out of it. It’s like coloring outside the lines, changing your name or anything. I mean, even if you color outside the lines, you’re still in a coloring book. Someone else drew the pictures, right? Even if you draw your own pictures to color outside of, you’re still limited to what you’re drawing outside of. That’s what drawing lines does. Every time you draw a line, you create a limit. That’s what definition means. It’s like math, too.”

“I heard about Stuyvesant High School , but now I believe it. Do you understand half of what you say?”

“Sometimes. Not often.”

Prix laughed. Marwa saw the colors of his laughter, but this was no time to mention synesthesia or left-handedness or any of the rest of it. It was enough. Her friend Judy would shout ‘Dayenu!’

“My parents are from Alexandria, Egypt,” Marwa said.

“Get out,” Prix tried to sound like a teenager.

“I have to go now,” Marwa said.

Prix was adept at letting-go. “See you around,” he said and turned to look upriver.

The next day, a Monday, when Marwa went to school, she didn’t wear a hijab. Everyone noticed, but only her closest friend, Judy, said anything. And, of course, her parents that night at dinner.