In Heaven Above

Back in Paris during the 1980s some of my friends were involved in fashion. World-class Claude Montana and Azzedine Alaïa invited me to their pret-de-porter shows and I was lucky enough to have known the most beautiful women in the world. Few were more exotic than Marpessa.

Half-Dutch and half-Surinam, her beauty was frightening, but in 1984 I invited her to a dinner at the infamous Chez Dave on Rue St. Roch with the infamous art dealer Vonelli by saying that we wanted to exploit her beauty for NASA. Candida and Bridget were away on photo shoots. Both of us were safe to be with one of their modelling rivals. We knew better than to try anything funny.

"NASA?" asked the cinnamon-skinned mannequin in her sleek Azzidine cat suit and I forgave her benign ignorance, since Man hadn't stepped on the Moon for over a decade. "They want me to go to Space."

"NASA sends rockets into Space from Florida. Vonelli is from there. He knows people."

In truth no one knew what Vonelli did. Rumors said CIA. I didn't know, but no one ever said different.

"From Miami Beach?" Marpessa regarded us with an accusatory stare. She was used to hearing bullshit.

"Close, but a little farther to the north." Vonelli had abandoned his family lucrative Fort Meyers seed business in 1966 to pursue a career as a piano player in London. Many people in Paris thought he was CIA. They thought the same of me. "But I've been contacted by Mission Control to find the most beautiful woman in Paris.

"Why?"

"Because NASA is broke and they are holding a lottery to see who will be the first man to have sex in Space," Vonelli explained to the exotic half Indonesisan-Dutch twenty year-old over a plate of Dave's famous BBQ ribs. His hummorous spiel cast a spell of trajectories, cosmic rays, G forces, and weightlessness.

"Why me?" asked Marpessa.

I sucked the meat off a bone like the caveman in Kubrick's film 2001 and said, "And why you? The head of NASA saw your photo on the cover of Vogue and said this woman could launch a Space Shuttle."

"C'est Vrai?" the Azzedine Alaia cabine model spoke four languages and a fifth was saved for her lovers.

"Absolutelment." Vonelli was in his prime. He looked 50% MI-5 in his Sixties Savile Road suit and Swining London was well remembered in Europe.

"Your face will grace posters across the globe. One night with Marpessa. $1."

"$1? The whores on Rue Std. Denis get 500 francs."

Millionaires would have halved their fortune for a single night in the glow of her dusky beauty and destitute Paris artists would have bathed clean to paint her nude.

"Times one billion people. We will make you rich." I couldn't believe she was buying our hooey, but Vonelli dropped a card on the table. It was only partially stained by BBQ sauce. "We will guarantee you $10 million for your efforts."

"And I'll have to go to Space?" Vonelli and I pingponged a glance.

"Yes." We nodded like a senators okaying a secret assassination. "We call the project IN HEAVEN ABOVE."

"I'll do it."

"Fantastique. You will save NASA."

We toasted our future.

This utopia lasted to the door of Dave's.

"That was a funny story, but I hear many funny stories, but mostly from unfunny men looking to have sex with me and not the someone else."

"So you saw through our story?" asked Vonelli.

"From word one. All men are trying to have their way with me. Promises of money. Lies about their wealth. So many lies, but all stores are true, if interesting or funny like yours, esepecially since you made it up without any practice."

"You saw right through us?" asked Vonelli.

"Like a new shower curtain."

Marpessa hailed a taxi and disappeared into the Paris night.

Vonelli and I repaired back to our table.

Dave, the cloy Chinese owner sat down and hissed, "You two are mean." “And beauty is even meaner.” Vonelli ordered a bottle of bourgogne. We drank it and regaled everyone about IN HEAVEN ABOVE leaving out Marpessa sussing out our tale, then again everyone wanted to believe in a lottery to have sex in Space, because like she said, "All stores are true, if interesting or funny."

Both of us have always wanted that to be true.

In Paris or Outer Space.