Read Online Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried - Free Book Online

been reborn with the recent opening of a restaurant and nightclub called Artemis. The cuisine at Artemis was the sort of college gourmet fare of elaborate burgers, French onion soup and spinach salad that was beginning to find a niche between fast food and fine dining. The decor was simple wood walls and butcher-block tables. But it was what the owner referred to as the “bouillabaisse of people” that made the place unusual. Artemis was one of the first establishments that attracted crowds that were white and black, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, straight and gay, young and not-so-young, sports fans and art aficionados. It was where local heroes met for drinks: it was the one place that out-of-towners—businessmen from Texas or fledgling rock stars from London—simply
had to go
while in Philadelphia. It had a supper crowd, which even Gia and Karen could join, and a glitzy late night party scene. Artemis was where girls like Gia and Karen dreamed about dancing the night away.
    In the evening, Gia and Karen would ride the El train—or, if it seemed too late, the bus—back to the Northeast. Gia didn’t really have a curfew that anyone was going to enforce, but Karen had to be home.
    Karen’s rebelliousness did not include ignoring her parents’ wishes. Her mother and father—a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic—cringed at her outfits, and twinged with each plucked eyebrow hair. But they sort of understood what was going on. Mrs. Karuza would sometimes recall her girlhood fascination with Frank Sinatra, and suggest thatperhaps Karen was going through a similar, if more colorful, phase. And besides, her grades were good.
    Gia—who Karen’s father called “Danny,” because her haircut reminded him of Daniel Boone’s cap—was a different story. She was an incredibly loyal friend to Karen and had a very endearing, little girl side. But something about her was unsettling. She was, if nothing else, a constant reminder of how normal their daughter with the clothes from Mars really was.
    The mommy-daughter relationship between Gia and Kathleen was far from perfect, but at least they finally
had
a relationship. And even though Gia flaunted her disinterest in Henry and Kathleen’s house rules, “the girls” were, in some ways, “the girls” again. They would go shopping together occasionally or go out for lunch. “We would talk, and Gia wanted to know everything about my marriage to her father,” Kathleen recalled. “And I told her everything. She knew in explicit detail all the things about Joe I didn’t like. She knew about his sense of humor. She knew the ins and outs of our sexual relationship. I thought he had a lot of fetishes. He couldn’t be in a loving situation, he always needed me dressed up. If I was Mrs. Mommy in my nightgown, he had no interest. If we went to dinner he expected, you know, a
payback
.” Kathleen also explained the gruesome details of her last year of marriage: her suicide attempt, where she really had been when she disappeared for several weeks.
    In return for her mother’s openness, Gia divulged one of
her
most closely held secrets: she had been sexually abused when she was six years old. Gia said that a teenage boy down the street from their old house—a member of a large family the Carangi boys often played with—had been her abuser. The abuse had occurred only once, but she was traumatized by the incident. She worried silently, as abused children often do, whether the violation made her a “bad girl.” And she lived in fear that someone might violate her again—a fear that could manifest itself in many different ways.
    Gia told Kathleen about how uncomfortable she had sometimes felt after the divorce living with her father andbrothers. Sometimes late at night, when Joe Carangi returned from work and everyone was asleep, he would wander around his home and look in on his kids. “Gia told me he would come into her room in the middle of the night and sit on her bed,”