Cyrinda is nothing like the immaculately in-condition Seurats she throws parties for. They are pointillist paintings—beautiful until you get up close and realize they’re just a series of dots. “I am the opposite. You see me from a distance and think, who let in the fat girl? I’m not hugely overweight, certainly not obese. It would be no big deal, except that I love expensive clothes so much.”

Clothes she can fit into if she gets the biggest size, but that stretch across her ass and thighs, wrinkling and tugging. Ignoring the tugs and wrinkles, she strokes a diamond mochaccino hand across her fat ass and drawls “Look what my father bought me at Prada!” or “Look at the shoes Marc Jacobs sent me!”

The first week she moved in with me, she wore the same thing every day. Although her shoes and T-shirts changed, the shorts and the Gucci python jacket that I had been admiring for a month always completed her outfit. It cost $4,000 so I had continued to admire it as though it were a live python in the Bronx Zoo rather than the Fifth Avenue Gucci boutique. I told her how much I loved it and that I would die to own one myself. “Ooh,” she said, “buy it! Why don’t you just buy it?” I couldn’t answer her. There’s no point trying to explain about money to people who don’t think of it as a barrier.

I found myself often silent around Cyrinda, watching delightedly as she spent all morning applying her makeup, almost all of it stolen from Sephora. I put “Rio” by Duran Duran on the stereo, in order that she might have fitting musical accompaniment as she worked on her lips. She has a funny snub nose that turns up so much she can never quite close her mouth (her father’s fault for insisting she get the nose job in Syria). White teeth gleaming hungry at her own reflection in the compact, she Clara Bow’d two hot-pink grooves above her upper lip. The more she went out, the more I stayed in, waiting for her to return. She invited me along, but I couldn’t watch her properly in a darkly lit nightclub, with ADB chatter all around, as spiky and foolish as stiletto heels on sidewalk gratings.

When, around two or three each morning, I heard her key in the door, I would tap on the partition and join her as she kicked off her pumps and crawled, fully clothed, under the covers. Yawning, she’d précis her night, reeling off a list of who showed and who didn’t, who dazzled and who made a fool of themselves, who was asked to dance by DiCaprio, and who was caught giving a blow job in full view of the entire room.