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Bruce Calls From Mulholland

Bruce calls, stoned and sunburned, froeles and tellshere, at caht, that he should have flown to the workshop this summer, and he tells me that he’s sorry he’s not in New Hampshire and that he’s sorry he hasn’t called eles and don’t mention that it has been two months

Bruce tells s went bad ever since Robert left the apart on Fifty-sixth and Park and went on a white-water-rafting trip with his stepfather down the Colorado River, leaving his girlfriend, Lauren, who also lives in the apartether, for four weeks I have never irl Robert is attracted to and I can picture what sheof the girls who are attracted to Robert, beautiful and pretending to ignore the fact that Robert, at twenty-two, is worth about three hundredon Robert’s futon, head throw back, Bruce htly

Bruce tells me that the affair started a week after Robert left Bruce and Lauren had gone to Café Central and after they sent back the food and decided just to have drinks, they agreed it would be sex only It would happen only because Robert had gone out West They told each other that there really was no mutual attraction beyond the physical and then they went back to Robert’s apartment and went to bed This went on, Bruce tellsa twenty-three-year-old real estate tycoon who is worth about two billion dollars

Bruce tells htly bothered” the weekend Lauren’s brother, Marshall, who just graduated from RISD, came down and stayed at Robert’s apartment on Fifty-sixth and Park Bruce tells er sier Marshall stayed a week and a half And then Marshall went back to his ex-boyfriend’s loft in SoHo when his ex-boyfriend, a young art dealer who is worth about two to three million, said he wanted Marshall to paint three functionless columns in the loft they used to share on Grand Street Marshall is worth about four thousand dollars and soe

This was during the period that Lauren moved all of her furniture (and some of Robert’s) to the twenty-three-year-old real estate tycoon’s place at the Tru this period that Robert’s two expensive Egyptian lizards apparently ate some poisioned cockroaches and were found dead, one under the couch in the living roo, the other sprawled across Robert’s Beta one cost five thousand dollars, the sift But since Robert is soet in touch with him Bruce tells me that this is why he left the apartment on Fifty-sixth and Park and went to Reynolds’ house, in Los Angeles, on top of Mulholland, while Reynolds, who is worth, according to Bruce, a couple of falafels at PitaHut and no beverage, is in Las Cruces

Lighting a joint, Bruce askshere, that he’s sorry again I tell his, receptions, that Sam slept with an editor from the Paris Revieho came up from New York on Publishers’ Weekend, that Madison shaved her head and Cloris thought she was having chemotherapy and sent all her stories to editors she knew at Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and that it justthat he wants his guitar case back He asks if I’ to East Hampton to see my parents I tell him that since the workshop is just about over and it’s almost September, I don’t see the point

Last summer Bruce stayed with ether and it was the suht and the su froh whenever he sang the song not because the song was funny-it was just the way he sang it: face stern yet utterly blank That was the suust, Bryan Metro The sue I never saw:over his smooth, wet back

Bruce tells ht now, in the phone booth The house I’m in is silent I wave away a mosquito “I can’t touchthe phone

“Being rich is cool,” Bruce says