Sitting on the steps of the great museum, caught in a sudden burst of slanting, golden afternoon sunlight, scanning the Times while he waited for Neela, Professor Malik Solanka felt more than ever like a refugee in a small boat, caught between surging tides: reason and unreason, war and peace, the future and the past. Or like a boy in a rubber ring who watched his mother slip under the black water and drown. And after the terror and the thirst and the sunburn there was the noise, the incessant adversarial buzz of voices on a taxi driver’s radio, drowning his own inner voice, making thought impossible, or choice, or peace. How to defeat the demons of the past when the demons of the future were all around him in full cry? The past was rising up; it could not be denied. As well as Sara Lear, here in the TV listings was Krysztof Waterford-Wajda’s little Ms. Pinch-ass back from the dead. Perry Pincus—she must be, what, forty by now—had written a tell-all book about her years as the eggheads’ premier groupie, Men with Pens, and Charlie Rose was talking to her about it this very night. Oh poor Dubdub, Malik Solanka thought. This is the girl you wanted to settle down with, and now she’s going to dance on your grave. If tonight it’s Charlie—“Tell me what sort of qualms this project gave you, Perry; as an intellectual yourself, you must have had serious misgivings. Say how you overcame those scruples”—then tomorrow it’ll be Howard Stern: “Chicks dig writers. But then, a lot of writers dug this chick.” Halloween, Walpurgisnacht, did indeed seem to be early this year. The witches were gathering for their sabbat.
Yet another story was being half told behind his back; another stranger’s fairy tale of the city poured into his defenseless ear. “Yeah, it went great, honey. No, no problems, I’m en route to the trustees’ meeting, that’s why I’m calling you on my cell. Conscious all the time, but doped-up, sure. So, semiconscious. Yeah, the knife comes right at your eyeball, but the chemical assistance makes you think it’s a feather. No, no bruising, and let me tell you it’s amazing what my visual world now contains. Amazing grace, yeah, good one. Was blind but now I see. Really. Look at all this stuff out here. I’ve been missing so much. Well, think about it. He really is the laser king. I asked around a lot as you know and the same name kept coming up. A little dryness is all, but that goes away in a few weeks, he says. Okay, love ya. I’ll be home late. What can you do. Don’t wait up.” And of course he turned around, of course he saw that the young woman was not alone, a man was nuzzling at her even as she flipped her cell phone shut. She, gladly allowing herself to be nuzzled, met Solanka’s eye; and, seeing herself caught in her lie, beamed guiltily, and shrugged. What can you do, as she had said on the phone. The heart has its reasons, and we are all the servants of love.
Twenty minutes to ten in London. Asmaan would be asleep. Five and a half hours later in India. Turn the watch upside down in London and you got the time in the town of Malik Solanka’s birth, the Forbidden City by the Arabian Sea. That, too, was coming back. The thought filled him with dread: of what, driven by his long-sealed-away fury, he might become. Even after all these years it defined him, had not lost any of its power over him. And if he finished the sentences of that untold tale? … That question must be for another day. He shook his head. Neela was late. Solanka put down his newspaper, pulled a piece of wood and a Swiss Army knife out of an overcoat pocket, and began, with complete absorption, to whittle.
“Who is he?” Neela Mahendra’s shadow fell across him. The sun was behind her, and in silhouette she looked even taller than he remembered. “He’s an artist,” Solanka replied. “The most dangerous man in the world.” She dusted off a spot on the museum steps and sat down beside him. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I know a lot of dangerous men, and none of them ever created a credible work of art. Also, trust me, not a single one of them was made of wood.” They sat there in silence for a while, he whittling, she simply still, offering the world the gift of her being in it. Afterward Malik Solanka, remembering their first moments alone together, would dwell particularly on the silence and stillness, on how easy that had been. “I fell in love with you when you weren’t saying a word,” he told her. “How was I to know you were the most talkative woman on earth? I know a lot of talkative women and, trust me, compared to you, every single one of them was made of wood.”
After a few minutes he put the half-finished figure away and apologized for being so distracted. “No apology required,” she said. “Work is work.” They got up to make their way down the great flight of steps toward the park, and as she rose, a man slipped on the step above her and rolled heavily and painfully down a dozen or more steps, narrowly missing Neela on his way down; his fall was broken by a group of schoolgirls sitting screaming in his way. Professor Solanka recognized the man as the one who had been necking so enthusiastically with the mobile-phone prevaricator. He looked around for Ms. Cell Phone, and after a moment spotted her storming off uptown on foot, hailing off-duty cabs that ignored her angry arm.
Neela was wearing a knee-length mustard-colored scarf dress in silk. Her black hair was twisted up into a tight chignon and her long arms were bare. A cab stopped and expelled its passenger just in case she needed a ride. A hot dog vendor offered her anything she wanted, free of charge: “Just eat it here, lady, so I can watch you do it.” Experiencing for the first time the effect about which Jack Rhinehart had been so vulgarly effusive, Solanka felt as if he were escorting one of the Met’s more important possessions down an awestruck Fifth Avenue. No: the masterpiece he was thinking of was at the Louvre. With a light breeze blowing the dress against her body, she looked like the Winged Victory of Samothraki, only with the head on. “Nike,” he said aloud, puzzling her. “It’s who you remind me of,” he clarified. She frowned. “I make you think of sportswear?”
Sportswear was certainly thinking of her. As they turned into the park, a young man in running clothes approached them, rendered positively humble by the force of Neela’s beauty. Unable to speak directly to her at first, he addressed himself to Solanka instead. “Sir,” he said, “please don’t think I’m trying to hit on your daughter, that is, I’m not asking for a date or anything, it’s just that she is the most, I had to tell her”—and here at last he did turn toward Neela—“to tell you, you’re the most …” A great roaring rose in Malik Solanka’s breast. It would be good now to tear this young man’s tongue out from that vile fleshy mouth. It would be good to see how those muscled arms might look when detached from that highly defined torso. Cut? Ripped? How about if he was cut and ripped into about a million pieces? How about if I ate his fucking heart?
He felt Neela Mahendra’s hand come to rest lightly on his arm. The fury abated as quickly as it had risen. The phenomenon, his unpredictable temper’s rise and fall, had been so rapid that Malik Solanka was left feeling giddy and confused. Had it really happened? Had he really been on the verge of tearing this super-fit fellow limb from limb? And if so, then how had Neela dissipated his anger—the anger to combat which Solanka sometimes had to lie in darkened rooms for hours, doing breathing exercises and visualizing red triangles—by the merest touch? Could a woman’s hand really possess such power? And if so (the thought offered itself to him and would not be denied), was this not a woman to keep by his side and cherish for the rest of his haunted life?
He shook his head to clear it of such notions and returned his attention to the unfolding scene. Neela was giving the young runner her most dazzling smile, a smile after receiving which it would be best to die, for the rest of life was sure to be a big letdown. “He isn’t my father,” she told the smile-blinded wearer of sportswear. “He’s my live-in lover.” This information struck the poor fellow like a hammer blow; whereupon, to underscore the point, Neela Mahendra planted on the still-befuddled Solanka’s unprepared but nevertheless grateful mouth a long, explicit kiss. “And, guess what?” she panted, coming up for air to deliver the coup de grâce. “He’s absolutely fantastic in bed.”
“What was that?” a flattered, more than somewhat overcome Professor Solanka asked her dizzily after
the runner had departed, looking as if he were off to disembowel himself with a blunt bamboo stick. She laughed, a great wicked cackle of a noise that made even Mila’s raucous laughter seem refined. “I could see you were on the edge of losing it,” she said. “And I need you here right now, paying attention, and not in a hospital or jail.” Which explained about eighty percent of it, Solanka thought as his head stopped whirling, but didn’t fully translate the meaning of everything she had been doing with her tongue.
Jack! Jack! he reproved himself. The subject for this afternoon was Rhinehart, his pal, his best buddy, and not his friend’s girlfriend’s tongue, no matter how long and gymnastic it was. They sat on a bench near the pond, and all around them dog walkers were colliding with trees, Tai Chi practitioners lost their balance, rollerbladers smashed into one another, and people out strolling just walked right into the pond as if they’d forgotten it was there. Neela Mahendra gave no sign of noticing any of this. A man walked past with an ice cream cone, which, owing to his sudden but comprehensive loss of hand-to-mouth coordination, completely missed his tongue and instead made contact, messily, with his ear. Another young fellow began, with every appearance of genuine emotion, to weep copiously as he jogged by. Only the middle-aged African-American woman sitting on the next bench (who am I calling middle-aged? She’s probably younger than I am, Solanka thought disappointedly) seemed impervious to the Neela factor as she ate her way through a long egg salad hero, advertising her enjoyment of every mouthful with loud mmms and uh-huhs. Neela, meanwhile, had eyes only for Professor Malik Solanka. “Surprisingly good kiss, by the way,” she said. “Really. First class.”
She looked away from him, across the shining water. “It’s over between Jack and me,” she went on quickly. “Maybe he already told you. It’s been over for a while. I know he’s your good friend, and you should be a good friend to him at this time, but I can’t stay with a man once I lose respect for him.” A pause. Solanka said nothing. He was replaying Rhinehart’s last phone call and hearing what he had missed: the elegiac note beneath the sexual boasting. The use of the past tense. The loss. He didn’t push Neela for the story. Let it come, he thought. It’ll be here soon enough. “What do you think about the election?” she asked, making one of the dramatic conversational tacks to which Solanka would soon enough become accustomed. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think the American voters owe it to the rest of the world not to vote for Bush. It’s their duty. I’ll tell you what I hate,” she added. “I hate when people say there’s no difference between the candidates. That Gush-and-Bore stuff is getting so old. It makes me hopping mad.” Not the moment, Solanka thought, to confess his own guilty secrets. Neela wasn’t really expecting a reply, however. “No difference?” she cried. “How about, for example, geography? How about, for example, knowing where my poor little homeland is on the damn map of the world?” Malik Solanka remembered that George W. Bush had been ambushed by a journalist’s crafty question during a foreign policy Q-and-A one month before the Republican convention: “Given the growing instability of the ethnic situation in Lilliput-Blefuscu, could you just indicate that nation to us on the map? And what was the name of its capital city again?” Two curve balls, two strikes.
“I’ll tell you what Jack thinks about the election.” Neela swerved back to the subject, the color rising in her face along with her voice. “New Jack, A-list Black-and-White-Ball Truman Capote Rhinehart, he thinks whatever his ‘Caesars’ in their ‘Palaces’ want him to think. Jump, Jack, and he’ll jump sky-high. Dance for us, Jack, you’re such a great dancer, and he’ll show them all the obsolete thirty-year-old moves old white people like, he’ll swim and hitchhike and walk the dog, he’ll do the mash, the funky chicken and the locomotion all night long. Make us laugh, Jack, and he’ll tell them jokes like some court jester. You probably know his favorites. ‘After the FBI tested Monica’s dress, they announced they couldn’t make a positive I.D. from the stain, because everybody in Arkansas has the same DNA.’ Yeah, they like that one, the Caesars. Vote Republican, Jack, be pro-life, Jack, read the Bible on homosexuals, Jack, and guns don’t kill people, ain’t that right, Jack, and he goes, yes, ma’am, people kill people. Good dog, Jack. Roll over. Fetch. Sit up and fucking beg. Beg for it, Jack, you ain’t gonna get it, but we do like to see a black boy on his knees. Good dog, Jack, run off now and sleep in the kennel out the back. Oh, darling, would you throw Jack a bone, please? He’s been so sweet. Yes, she’ll do, she’s from the South.” Oh, so Rhinehart had been a bad boy, Solanka thought, and he guessed that Neela wasn’t used to being cheated on at all. She was used to being the Pied Piper, with lines of boys following wherever she was pleased to lead.
She calmed down, slumping back on the bench, and briefly closed her eyes. The woman on the next bench finished her hero, leaned over to Neela, and said, “Oh, dump that boy, honey. Cancel his ass today. You don’t need no relationship with nobody’s pet poodle.” Neela turned to her as if greeting an old friend. “Ma’am,” she said, seriously, “you’ve got milk in your refrigerator with a longer life than that relationship.”
“Let’s walk now,” she commanded, and Solanka rose to his feet. When she was sure they were out of earshot, she said, “Look, I’m pissed at Jack, that’s one thing, but I’m scared for him, too. He really needs a true friend, Malik. He’s in a pretty bad jam.” As Solanka had guessed from his phone call, Rhinehart was depressed, and not only about the collapse of his perishable milk carton of a love affair. The Sara Lear encounter, which had begun as an interview for an article about the power divorces of the age, had rebounded badly against Jack. Sara had taken against him, and her enmity had hit him hard. After the loss of the Springs place to Bronislawa, he’d found himself the tiniest of shoe boxes in the middle of a golf course way out toward Montauk Point. “You know his thing for Tiger Woods,” Neela said. “Jack’s competitive. He won’t be happy till Nike—the other Nike, I mean,” she said, flushing with undisguised pleasure, “the Nike he hasn’t disgusted yet, starts sponsoring his game too, right down to the swoosh on his cap.” After Rhinehart’s offer for the little house had been accepted by the seller, two things happened in quick succession. On Rhinehart’s third visit to the place, to which the broker had handed him the key, the police showed up less than ten minutes after he did and invited him to assume the position. Neighbors had reported an intruder on the property, and he was it. It took him close to an hour to persuade the cops that he wasn’t a burglar but a bona fide purchaser. A week later the golf club blackballed his application for membership. Sara’s arm was long. Rhinehart, for whom, as he said, “being black’s just not the issue anymore,” had rediscovered, the hard way, that it still was. “There’s a club out there that got started so Jews could play golf,” Neela said contemptuously. “Those old Wasps can sting. Jack should’ve known the score. I mean: Tiger Woods may be of mixed race, but he knows his balls are black.
“That’s not the worst of it.” They had reached Bethesda Fountain. Double takes and slapstick routines continued all around them; they walked on until they reached a grassy slope. “Sit,” said Neela. He sat. Neela lowered her voice. “He’s become involved with some crazy boys, Malik. God knows why, but he really wants in with them, and they’re the dumbest, wildest white boys you could imagine. Did you ever hear of a secret society, it’s not even supposed to exist, called the S & M? Even the name’s a bad joke. ‘Single and Male.’ Yeah, right. Those boys are twisted way, way out of shape. It’s like that Skull and Crossbones thing they have at Yale?, right?, where they buy up stuff like Hitler’s mustache and Casanova’s dick?—only this one’s not school-specific, and it doesn’t collect memorabilia. It collects girls, young ladies with certain interests and skills. You’d be surprised how many, especially if you knew the games they’re expected to play, and I’m not talking strip poker now. Zips, nips n’ clips. Saddles, reins, harnesses, they probably end up looking like the surrey with the fringe on top. Or, you know, lash me with lashes and tie me with strin
gs, these are a few of my favorite things. Rich girls. I swear. Your family owns a horse farm, so you get turned on being treated like a horse? I wouldn’t know. So much that’s so desirable comes so easy to these kids”—Neela couldn’t be more than five years older than the dead girls, Solanka thought—“that nothing turns them on. They have to travel further and further in search of kicks, further from home, further from safety. The wildest places of the world, the wildest chemicals, the wildest sex. That’s it, my five-cent Lucy analysis. Bored little rich girls let dumb rich boys do weird stuff to them. Dumb rich boys can’t believe their luck.”
Solanka reflected about Neela’s use of the word “kids” to describe what were, after all, members of her own generation. The word seemed honest in her mouth. Compared to, say, Mila—Mila, his own guilty secret—this was an adult woman. Mila had her charms, but they had their roots in a childlike wantonness, a greedy whimsicality born of this same crisis of dulled response, this same need to go to extremes, beyond extremes, in order to find what she needed in the way of arousal. When forbidden fruit has been your daily diet, what do you do for thrills? Lucky Mila, Solanka thought. Her rich boyfriend hadn’t understood what he might have done with her, and had let her go. If these other rich boys had ever heard about her, how far she was willing to go, what taboos she was willing to ignore, she could have been their goddess, the child-woman queen of their hidden cult. She could have ended up in the Midtown Tunnel with a smashed-in skull. “The affectless at play,” Solanka said aloud. “A tragedy of insulation. The unexamined life of the folks who’ve got their units.” He had to explain that, and was happy to hear her laugh again. “No wonder so many of those horny gorillas—those Stashes, Clubs, and Horses—want in, no?” Neela sighed. “The question is, why does Jack?”
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