Mere Duchess

Two of Hearts

Kate and Naomi, the two of them as besties, is an impossibly unlikely weather event that, in a compounded form of unlikelihood, stays bound to the sky, day after day.  Pantheonic in its aggregation of power, you’d expect quarrels and mortal impacts on the scale of swan rapes, pillars of salt: Naomi hurls a phone that smites an island nation; the fruit of Kate’s cigarette-filled womb is not a child but a fashion anti-Christ.  Instead, this one is a peaceable kingdom, refracting light that shines like the 90s, the 60s, the revival of disco all at once.  

Naomi is a contemporary Josephine Baker who has danced a George Michael dance of Amazonian splendor for heads of state.  With the bearing of an almighty dragon, her Versace-sequined wings flapped her to a position in the Russian aristocracy; she shed her ill-reputed upbringing like a mythical shape-shifter.  Kate is: lying on the sidewalk outside a London nightclub with three cigarettes in her mouth, the everymuse; an embodied decade never static, effortlessly channeling everything that has ever been British and salty and a lady, Heroin Chic to the good ship Cocaine Kate and not since Queen Victoria has an empire resided in a woman AND such a pert and portable package, jet set and flight-ready.

And Oh the beaus! Kate & Johnny forever, Naomi’s chain of fools, but then each one tossed asunder like a handbag until now there is Naomi with her nobleman, in her palace, and has anything made more sense than the gauche and garish of that? 

The great mystery and sense of the friendship lies in the divergences but also the parities—a parity of power, mostly, unmatched anywhere.  There is no alpha or beta, only The Alpha and Omega.  That’s where it goes back to an eternal girlhood—the place before bitchiness, the moment at age 10 where you are closest to your girlfriends and everything is a moveable sleepover that happens in hairbrush singing, nail painting, school dance whispering.  The moment before one friend develops a rack and the other a case of acne and nothing can ever be the same again.  Such different looks but such a singular essence, no territory the same, no grounds for competition—even though they have always been competitors, and with the highest stakes…

It’s one of those things where why is there no day to honor such things?  Year after year there are award shows, months of remembrance.  Jamie Fox opens an envelope and gives Katy Perry a gold plated shoehorn instead of any homage to what remains of true-hearted, sustained delights.  Surely, Kate and Naomi deserve to be congratulated.  They should be given honors, medals, tax credits to encourage this behavior until they reach the comfortable haven of their Golden Girls years.