Bright Lights, Big City (13 page)

HOW IT’S GOING

The apartment has become very small. Michael snores on the couch. Your head is pounding with voices of confession and revelation. You followed the rails of white powder across the mirror in pursuit of a point of convergence where everything was cross-referenced according to a master code. For a second, you felt terrific. You were coming to grips. Then the coke ran out; as you hoovered the last line, you saw yourself hideously close-up with a rolled twenty sticking out of your nose. The goal is receding. Whatever it was. You can’t get everything straight in one night. You are too excited to think any more and too exhausted to sleep. If you lie down you are afraid you will die.

The phone goes off like a shrill alarm. You catch it on the second ring. Through the noise and cryptic epigrams you gather that it is Tad, that he wants you to meet him at Odeon. There is a party. Your presence is requested. You tell him you’ll be there in ten minutes.

You throw a blanket over Michael and a jacket on yourself; check your nearly empty wallet, then close and lock the door. When you hit the street you begin to jog. At the door of the Sheridan Square all-hours bank office you insert the plastic card which a sign tells you is your passport to banking convenience. When the buzzer sounds, you pull the door open and step into a room the color of an illuminated swimming pool. A specimen in camouflage combat gear stands at the cash-machine as if he were playing a video game, body English in his every motion. If he doesn’t hurry up, you think, I will have to kill him.

Finally he turns to you and throws up his hands. “Fucking computers. They ain’t gonna take over the world at this rate. This goddamned Citibank unit—it couldn’t take Staten Island on a Sunday morning. Go ahead, try your luck.” This neo-guerrilla sports a button which reads:
I’M NOT AS THINK AS YOU STONED I AM
.

Not at all confident that your fellow late-night Citi-banker is capable of operating the equipment, you preserve the hope of imminent cash. You step up and read the message on the screen which welcomes you in Spanish and English and asks you which language you prefer to do your banking in. You decide on English; nothing happens. You press the button again. Eventually you try all of the buttons on the console, which keeps flashing the same hearty greeting. You are not the kind of person who beats on recalcitrant vending machines. Nevertheless, just this once, you would like to put your fist through the video screen. You jam the buttons down into their sockets, raise your foot and uselessly kick the wall. Words vile and violent pass your lips. You hate banks. You hate machines. You hate the idiots outside on the sidewalk.

With your last five you stake yourself to a cab. You begin to feel better once you’re in motion.

As you pull up to Odeon, Tad is coming out the door with his friend Jimmy Q from Memphis. Luckily, Jimmy has a limo. You climb in. Jimmy gives the driver an address. The Caddy floats over the downtown streets. You can tell you are moving only by the passage of lights across the tinted windows. Some of the lights have dim halos and others spill crystalline shards into the night.

The car stops in front of a warehouse. You hear the party throbbing like a helicopter above the deserted street. You can’t wait to get up there. You drum your fingers on the doorframe as you wait for the elevator.

“Take it easy,” Tad says. “You’re wired to detonate.”

You ask whose party it is. Tad provides a name he claims belongs to the heir of a fast-food fortune.

The elevator door opens directly into the loft, which is roughly the size of a Midwestern state and at least as populous. There are windows on three sides and mirrors on the fourth. A bar and buffet is set up at one end. The dance floor is down at the other end, somewhere near New Jersey.

At the bar, Tad introduces you to a woman, Stevie, who wears a slinky black gown with a scalloped hemline. She is very tall. Long blond hair, tasseled white silk scarf wrapped around her neck. Stevie says, “Do you dance?”

“You bet.”

You take Stevie’s hand and make for the dance floor, where you add yourselves to the confusion. Elvis Costello says pump it up when you don’t really need it. Stevie carves sinuous figures between the beat. You do your patented New York Torque. The music is just about loud enough to drive everything between your ears down through the spinal column into your bones, and possibly you can shake it out via your fingertips, femurs and toes.

Stevie puts her arms on your shoulders and kisses you. When she says she has to go to the Ladies’, you head for the bar to get drinks.

Tad awaits you. “Have you seen our friend?”

“Which friend?”

“Your formerly deceased not-yet-ex wife.”

You look up from the bottles and scan the immediate vicinity. “Amanda?”

“Sure enough. The face that launched a thousand trips to Bloomingdale’s.”

“Where?”

Tad puts his hand behind your head and directs your gaze to a group near the elevator. She is standing in profile, not twenty feet away. At first you think this is just a close resemblance, then she lifts her hand to her shoulder and begins to twirl a strand of hair between the tips of her fingers. Her agent used to tell her she’d ruin her hair that way. There is no doubt.

Not now, you think.

She’s wearing toreador pants and a silver flak jacket. Beside her, a Mediterranean hulk in a white silk shirt emanates a proprietary air. As you watch he smiles at something Amanda has said, and reaches over to squeeze her ass.

Au contraire
, Pierre. Sexual Abandonment in spades.

The man looks like he was carved by Praxiteles in 350
B.C
. and touched up by Paramount in 1947. You wonder if the physique is functional or cosmetic. How well would he respond if you ripped his ears off?

“Who’s the greaseball?” Tad says.

You reach down for a bottle and pour yourself a large drink. “Must be lucky Pierre.”

“I’ve seen him somewhere.”

“
Gentlemen’s Quarterly.
”

“No. I’ve seen him around. I know it.” Tad nods his head up and down, as if trying to dislodge a memory. “I saw him at a party. Note the coke spoon dangling betwixt his hairy pecs.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“He wasn’t with Amanda. Some other bimbo.”

Stevie returns from the bathroom. “Here’s the dancing fool,” she says.

“I don’t need to dance to be foolish.”

Tad says, “Batten down the hatches, Coach. She’s coming at you.”

Sure enough, here’s Amanda.

She says, “
Ciao, bello,
” and before you can react she kisses your cheek.

Is she out of her mind? Doesn’t she know that you desist from strangling her only through the exercise of heroic restraint?

She kisses Tad with the same formal benevolence. Tad introduces Stevie to Amanda. You can’t even believe this is happening. Shouldn’t someone say what a nice party this is?

“Is that your Italian stallion?” Tad says, nodding in the direction from which Amanda has come. “Or your Greek peak? Your French mensch? Or some other species of wetback?”

“That’s Odysseus,” Amanda says. “My fiancé.”

“Odysseus,” Tad says. “Odysseus. Right, the Greek.” You wish Tad would shut up.

Amanda smiles at you as if you were an acquaintance whose name she is eager to remember. Won’t she at least berate you for trying to trash her fashion show?

“So, how’s it going?” she says. You stare at her, craving a glimmer of irony or shame in her big blue eyes.

“How’s it going?” You start to laugh. She laughs too. You slap your thigh. She wants to know how it’s going. A very funny question. Hilarious. Amanda is a riot. You are laughing so hard that you choke. Stevie slaps your back. As soon as you catch your breath you start laughing even harder. Amanda looks alarmed. She doesn’t know how funny she can be. You want to tell her she’s a barrel of monkeys but you can’t speak. You are laughing. People are pounding your back. It’s funny. People are funny. Everything’s so funny you could die laughing. You can’t breathe. You can’t even see.

“Drink,” Tad says. He is holding you up with one arm and holding a plastic cup with the other. “Let there be space,” Tad says to the faces around you. You don’t see Amanda’s.

“What’s the matter,” Stevie asks.

“He’s epileptic,” Tad says. “I know how to handle this.” She retreats, understandably.

“I’m not epileptic,” you say.

“No, just an emotional quadriplegic.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” you say. “
How’s it going?
Can you believe she said that?” You start to laugh again.

“Take a breather, Coach.” Tad deposits you in a Mies van der Rohe chair. “You think
that’s
funny,” Tad says, “wait till you hear this.”

“What?”

“Odysseus, right? You remember who he is?”

“How could I forget?”

“I finally figured out where I saw him before.”

“With his hand on Amanda’s ass.”

“No. Listen to this. I have this account at the agency. No need to name names. But there’s this old babe in Atlanta who runs a company and comes up to New York two or three times a year for a face lift and free meals on the agency’s expense account. Naturally, she expects company for the evenings. So we provide this service through a little outfit called ‘Dial a Hunk.’ Male escort service, very top drawer. And when I say
escort
I am being uncharacteristically discreet. Anyway, about a year ago we dialed a hunk and
voilà
Odysseus.”

“Don’t try to cheer me up.”

“It’s true. I had to go out with these freaks two nights running, and needless to say the Allagash Express was derailed. The agency paid for his services, which definitely did not include witty conversation.”

When you start to laugh, Tad says, “Careful.” But it’s under control.

“Dial a Hunk.”

“That’s it.”

“Dial a Fucking Hunk.”

“Now
that,
” Tad says, “is funny. The wily Odysseus.”

“Amanda’s finally got the right number,” you say, wishing you found it funnier. You wish this laughter could lift you out of your heavy body and carry you beyond this place, out through an open window and up over the city until all this ugliness and pain were reduced to a twinkling of faraway lights.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Actually, it’s not that funny. It’s just pathetic.”

“Don’t pour good sympathy after bad,” Tad says.

“Where’s Stevie?”

“That’s another sob story. You want to steer clear of that, Coach.”

“Why?”

“Stevie, aka Steve, had his third operation a few weeks ago. Convincing, isn’t he?”

“You expect me to believe that?” You replay images of Stevie in your mind. “Bullshit.”

“Would I lie? Ask Jimmy Q if you don’t believe me. What do you think the scarf around the neck is for? You can’t remove an Adam’s apple.”

You have no idea whether Tad is serious or not, having been taken in by him on numerous occasions. Your curiosity about Stevie’s chromosomes is by now exhausted. It is too late in the night to care.

“I was going to tell you.”

“Thanks.” You stand up.

“Take it easy, Coach.” He puts his arm around your shoulders.

“I just realized something.”

“What’s that?”

“You and Amanda would make a terrific couple.”

“I suppose that means that you get Odysseus all to yourself.”

“Later, Tad.”

A set of bedrooms is tucked away in a corner of the loft. The first two rooms are full of coke fiends and earnest conversers. The third is free, and a phone sits on a table beside the bed. You find the number in your wallet.

“What time is it?” Vicky says after you identify yourself. “Where are you?”

“It’s late. I’m in New York. I just wanted to talk.”

“Let me guess; you’re with Tad.”

“I
was
with Tad.”

“It’s a little late for a chat. Is something wrong?”

“I just wanted to tell you my mom died.” You hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. You are moving too fast.

“Oh, God,” Vicky says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was … when?”

“A year ago.” The Missing Person.

“A
year
ago?”

“I didn’t tell you before so I wanted to tell you now. It seemed important.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s not so bad. I mean, it was.” You can’t manage to say what you mean. “I wish you could’ve met her. You would’ve hit it off. She had hair like yours. Not just that.”

“I’m not sure what to say.”

“There’s something else I didn’t tell you. I got married. Bad mistake, but it’s all over. I wanted you to know, in case it makes a difference. I’m drunk. Do you think I should hang up?”

In the ensuing pause you can hear the faint hum of the long-distance wire. “Don’t hang up,” Vicky says. “I can’t think of anything to say right now, but I’m here. I’m a little confused.”

“I tried to block her out of my mind. But I think I owe it to her to remember.”

“Wait.
Who?
”

“My mother. Forget my wife. I’m talking about my mother. I was thinking today, after she found out she had cancer, she was talking to Michael and me …”

“Michael?”

“That’s my brother. She made us promise that if the pain became unbearable we’d help her, you know, end it all. We had this prescription for morphine so there was this option. But then it got really bad. I asked her and she said that when you were dying you had a responsibility to the living. I was amazed she said that, the way she felt. And I was just thinking that we have a responsibility to the dead—the living, I mean. Does this make any sense?”

“Maybe. I can’t tell, really,” Vicky says.

“Can I call tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow. Are you sure you’re all right?”

Your brain feels like it is trying to find a way out of your skull. And you are afraid of almost everything. “I’m fine.”

“Get some sleep. Call me if you can’t.”

•  •  •

The first light of the morning outlines the towers of the World Trade Center at the tip of the island. You turn in the other direction and start uptown. There are cobbles on the street where the asphalt has worn through. You think of the wooden shoes of the first Dutch settlers on these same stones. Before that, Algonquin braves stalking game along silent trails.