Chloe stopped in the hallway and, bending over the railing, looked down at Jasper’s hopeful, upturned face on the landing below, his shriveled figure sandwiched between the two policemen. Her voice reverberated down the stairwell.
“Wait!”
7
On that day when she left him—a day not long after her twenty-first birthday—Dez woke around noon, as usual. Finding her not in the loft, he assumed that she had gone to one of her absurd modeling or acting classes (for all her natural grace and beauty, she had proved, thank God, peculiarly wooden when posing for photographs or trying to impersonate anyone but herself). Then he found the note, helpfully taped to the coffee machine, where he could not fail to see it. I have left you, it read. I am not coming back.
He did not believe it at first. She would soon return. After all, she had no money (he had not yet noticed the three hundred dollars missing from his wallet) and nowhere to stay. Besides which, she loved him. It could only be a matter of time before she dragged in through the door of the loft, a bag over her shoulder, looking sheepish and apologetic. He even, that night, took the trouble (thoughtful Dez!) of ordering in one of her favorite dinner treats—a noxious Hawaiian pizza, with salty ham and virulently sweet pineapple slices. (Dez contented himself with a couple of garlic knots.) When she failed to return by nightfall, he slid the execrable pie into the garbage. So the little minx intended a more thorough punishment. Fine. He could wait her out.
A week passed. Then two more days. At which point he was forced to accept that she was well and truly gone. His reaction was one of puzzled indignation—the way a grand master chess player might respond when, through a massive oversight (owing to a too-deep calculation into an impossibly elegant thirty-move forced mate combination), his queen is captured by a patzer. The prankish inversion of the way things were meant to unfurl reduced him at first to a state of almost amused confusion, mouth slightly ajar, eyebrows up, an idiot smile trying to tug at the corners of his lips. Bitterness soon followed. Then rage. But a certain instinct for self-preservation made him decide that it was really he who had pushed her out, banished her to the streets—and under those circumstances, he could feel only glad that she was gone. After all, this is what he had long ago dreamed of—years before now, as she lay in the trailer’s bedroom, sniveling and weeping for days on end after her mother’s death. He recalled how he had fantasized about slipping out while she slept. Slipping out to freedom!
Well, he had that freedom now—and a great deal of money with which to enjoy it. Why, when you got right down to it, he had been insane to tie himself down to a domestic partnership with Chloe! Chloe—who, at twenty-two, was an adult now, a mature creature, with hips as wide as her ample bust and a wasp waist that only accentuated the distasteful womanliness of her voluptuous curves. How could he miss such a creature?
The answer was that he could not. He would not. Indeed, on the day when it was finally borne home to him that she was gone for good—the echo of her non-goodbye reverberating off the spare white walls of the suddenly vastly-too-big-feeling loft—Dez resolved that the last thing he would do would be to sit around listening to that mocking silence. Instead, he sprung from the sofa (where he had spent the better part of the afternoon and evening) and lit out for the downtown nightclubs and dance halls on the hunt for a teenaged beauty to soothe him. Only now, he would not have to listen to Chloe’s endless whining about not wanting to “share” him, about how she didn’t really like having sex with other girls. Now, he could flash his bankroll and entice back to his abode an entire harem of oh-so-young, oh-so-jaded teen beauties—and not have to answer to anyone.
He dismissed as sheer sentimentality—as a sign of his own woeful aging—those piercing moments when the image of Chloe, in all her wide-hipped womanly adultness, would flash before him and cause a kind of gulping sensation in his diaphragm, as if he’d been winded by a punch to the gut. At times—for instance, when he recalled the particular purring softness of her speaking voice or the rough, burred sound of her laughter, or her way of waving helplessly a loose-wristed hand when Dez said something she deemed funny—he could even feel an aching sensation, like a bruise, in that part of his chest where he had reliably been told the heart resides.
All of this was too ridiculous to be true, of course, but on those occasions when he could not dismiss these maudlin reactions, he learned that he could douse them with a few tumblers of iced vodka; and when that failed to work, with the mounds of equally icy white powder supplied to him by his grinning doorman.
His reliance on both chemical prophylaxes increased sharply in the months following Chloe’s departure. How was it that remembered images from their first year together—of her tenderly protruding pelvic bones or the girlish gap between her thighs—could grow more anguishing over time? More to the point, how was it possible that the memory of her broadened hips, her thickened legs, her increased breast size—all those manifestations of dreaded maturity—could cause him equal pain? A pain that only two thick lines laid out on the surface of his iPad, rinsed down with a tumbler of vodka, could numb?
On a night in December, six months after Chloe’s vanishing act, Dez, wild-eyed and teeth-chattering on two large lines of a lightly saffron-tinged coke, found himself in an unmarked after-hours basement dance dungeon on the extremely Lower East Side, his ephebophile antenna twitching in his silk boxers, pointing him through the crowd like a dowsing rod. Through an atmosphere thickened by dance beats that seemed to convert the air into a solid substance that pounded against his brain and body like oversized hammers swaddled in foam rubber, he spotted her through the DJ’s strobing lights: a willowy young blonde in a shoulderless, second-skin spandex microdress, the concavity at the sides of her narrow nates, the folded-wing protrusions of her delicate scapulae and the telltale negative space between her slender thighs revealing that this was a sylph who had slipped into the club on a borrowed ID, one that misstated her age by at least two years, probably three. But more than these tender indices of illicit youth, it was a certain heart-lifting resemblance, a thrilling echo of gesture and outline, that made Dez halt, then circle in and gently interpose himself into the protective phalanx of girlfriends with which such beauties always surround themselves.
Up close, and in the flashing of the colored lights, the resemblance seemed uncanny—as if the years separating him from that day when he stood at the front of an eleventh-grade classroom in New Halcyon, Vermont, never took place. Dumbstruck, flustered, his heart trying to flee up and out through his esophagus like a panicked man escaping a fire, he could only extend, between quivering fingers, the business card he had had made for just such occasions, a card that stated his name (a pseudonym) and occupation (Professional Photographer, equally specious). He had little hope that she would call, but the very next day, when he was out on a coffee run to the corner bistro, he felt his iPhone stir in his pocket, vibrating against his flaccid member, soon stiffening in sweet anticipation. Yes—yes, of course he remembered her. Certainly, he took model portfolio shots! Why, no—she did not need to have an agent. Yes, of course they could set up an appointment. How about later today? At his photographer’s loft in Tribeca?
In stark daylight, and when Dez was relatively sober (he had drunk only a single vodka-spiked coffee and quickened his reflexes with a single, small key bump), he found the resemblance not as convincing—the skin less ethereally perfect, the features not as sculpturally pure, the hair a little dull, at least in comparison with the remembered gossamer, the movements devoid of that floating, fluid grace that haunted his memory almost more than any other aspect of her ghost—but she was a passable simulacrum and it was a stroke of pure genius when Dez, while snapping pictures against a blue paper background in his “studio,” had the inspiration for her to “try on a few outfits.” They visited Chloe’s closet and for the next four hours, fueled by regular bumps of his yellowy powder, he found himself in an ecstatic dream state, as the increasingly convincing doppelgänger modeled
his lost girl through the ages—not just in that period of prosperity following the civil suit, when Dez showered her with Prada and Lanvin, Burberry and Stella, but right back to that first glimpse, in that costume that he had never permitted her to throw out, the one in which he had first seen her: the faded, homemade denim skirt, cheap white halter top and grubby pink flip-flops.
Her name was Isabel and, like so many New Yorkers (Dez had come to notice), she conformed perfectly to the set of clichés and stereotypes assigned to her by the city: like the red-faced Irish bartenders; the bespectacled Ivy League journalists; the turbaned taxi drivers; the pin-striped, pig-faced bankers; and the bearded artisanal cheese–making househusbands of Green-point, Isabel played her role as faithfully as if her words had been scripted for her, her clothes selected by a costumer, her pose and attitude shaped by an offstage director. She was an Upper East Side princess: the spoiled but neglected eldest daughter of a wealthy philandering restaurateur much in the society pages; a girl jaded, embittered; a sixteen-year-old-going-on-forty Brearley junior with daddy issues and a taste for any drug that could blunt the pain of her infinite, bottomless boredom. To Dez’s initial naive fears that someone would object to her being out all night, she rolled her eyes, then gave him a withering “You’re kidding me” glance.
They holed up for days—weeks—at a time in the increasingly sordid loft and indulged their mutual appetite for what Dez’s doorman cheerfully supplied. Isabel, who had connections of her own, introduced Dez to the dangerous delights of the speedball, and to an array of prescription medicines culled from the vast pharmacopoeia of her father’s medicine cabinet. Isabel’s own antidepressants and antianxiety pills also came in handy, as did the street Ritalin for which she bartered with her school pals, trading this or that frock bought (or stolen, just for the dangerous thrill of it) from Bergdorf’s or Barneys.
Sex is also a drug of sorts, and, as with any drug, one builds up tolerances. So it was that the pair, around the one-year anniversary of their union, went in search of ever-greater novelty and began to bring home a parade of playthings: teen girls, of course (Isabel had exactly no restrictions against sapphic excursions), but also an increasingly eclectic array of men, women and boys, a confused and confusing mass of random limbs such that Dez would often awake, at some unknown, ungodly hour, with the sky outside the window a predawn purple with a single bright red slash, like an incision, along the horizon of distant Queens, to find himself afloat on his king-size mattress like one of those half-dead survivors piled any which way in Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, bodies hanging off the bed edge, with one lone figure, Dez, atop the pile and waving a grotesquely come-stained and-stiffened white T-shirt for rescue.
On one of those hungover, coke-jangled, OxyContin-numbed mornings, he surfaced to find himself in the spooning embrace of a reeking, white-bearded, tawny-toothed leprechaun—the amiable, if addled, outpatient who begged for change by holding open the door to the local Associated grocery store for patrons and who kept up a running commentary on everyone and everything in a squeaky voice like an unoiled wheel. Shouting in alarm, Dez leapt from the bed, which, he only then became aware, was peopled by three or four other entwined couples, including the floppy-haired Gallic-faced fruit seller who operated a stand at the corner of Morton Street, the apparently less-prim-than-Dez-thought female clerk (an exceptionally pretty black girl) at their local Tribeca branch of the New York Public Library, and Isabel herself, her ankle encircled by a chain looped through the nipple ring of the dreadlocked, white, trustfundian piercing enthusiast who lived one floor below them.
“We need to talk,” Dez told her later that day, once their guests had been redistributed through the neighborhood.
“About what?” she asked, peering into the iPad propped on her knees. She was sitting on the begrimed and tattered Roche Bobois, smoking a menthol Benson & Hedges. As he contemplated her naked, monkey-thin body, breastless and smoothly tanned, her flat-ironed blonded hair, her affectless, empty-eyed, sad-mouthed dead end of a face, he realized, with a soft shock, that he was a little afraid of her.
“About us,” he ventured. “About what we’re doing. About last night. I think it’s time—”
“Huh,” she interrupted, dull eyes still on the screen. “That perv just got out of jail.”
“What?”
“That guy—writer guy, whatever? Who was doing his daughter?” She held up her iPad for him to see. Dez, sitting opposite her on the matching white leather armchair, equally soiled, could make out only the bright red letters “TMZ. com” and a headline: Daughter Despoiler Free after Five-Year Stint. He jumped up and grabbed the device from her. “Hey,” she stated tonelessly, “I was looking at that.”
Dez ignored this limp protest and walked off to a far corner of the loft, peering into the screen, sweeping his fingertips with increasing speed across its smooth surface, flicking through the pictures. The first showed a stooped, impossibly aged, infirm, blind man, a white cane extended in front of him, stepping with obvious caution through a wide gate onto a stretch of sidewalk. Then a series of photographs, each at closer range, of this same man, confused, frightened, his mouth a black hole, waving his helpless cane, surrounded by paparazzi. Finally, a sequence that showed the arrival on the scene of the home care worker—Padma? Deepak? (he could no longer recall)—pushing away the lensmen, waving her hands, shouting—and finally leading the halting old man down the sidewalk to a car, photographers in pursuit. The final shot was of the expressionless man, hair shaved down to a glinting white stubble, slumped into himself in the passenger seat, an explosion of reflected flashes bursting from the black lenses of his glasses.
Dez brought the iPad back to the living area. The photographs, to his surprise, had given him no pleasure.
“Funny, right?” she said as she took back the computer. “He looks like an owl. I saw his daughter on Tovah. What a low-rent skank.”
Dez, who had begun walking toward the kitchen in search of some steadying vodka, stopped and turned. “What did you say?”
“This girl,” she said, “his daughter, was on—whatever—Tovah? And like giving this whole big sob story about how her dad, like, fucked her or whatever and how she sued him and got him put in jail? And I mean, my friends and I were like, ‘Uh, yeah, if we all went on Tovah and talked about our dads, every man on the Upper East Side would be in jail.’ It’s like, ‘Uh, grow up, attention whore.’”
Dez stood contemplating her. She was flicking and clicking listlessly now on the iPad, probably on a shopping Web site. That the incident at the center of the disaster he had visited upon Ulrickson’s family could be perceived—by this denizen of Manhattan’s serenely untouchable, ultra-privileged money class—as simply a dreary, dull, quotidian occurrence hardly worth mention; and that Chloe’s emotional devastation could be seen merely as a sign of how hopelessly déclassé she was, how poorly bred—this brought him up short. Dez was hardly naive or unworldly. But suddenly, and for the first time ever in his adult life, he felt the urge to go home to North Carolina.
He did not, of course, go home. Instead, he lived on, in the ruined loft, with Isabel, in that grim parody of his former relationship with Chloe. Their sex life, inevitably, dwindled to nothing, a casualty of overfamiliarity and rampant drug use. Other pursuits filled the void. They became habitués of the casinos in Atlantic City, staying in a succession of high-roller luxury suites in the hotels overlooking the bleak expanse of sandy swamp and watery wasteland that stretched to infinity around them. Buoyed by whatever concoction or combination of substances was their current favorite, sipping the free cocktails borne on serving trays by the miniskirted waitresses, they joined in the gloomy gaming halls the tobacco-tinged senior citizens bused in every day from their old folks’ homes to play the computer poker machines, eat the Early Bird specials and ply the nickel slots. Desiccated Dez, with a spectral, hollow-eyed, skeletal Isabel draped upon him, started at the blackjack tables, placing heavy bets, and it to
ok him a mere four months to work his way, with steady deliberation, through the fortune Chloe had been awarded.
Soon enough, he could not even afford the two roundtrip bus tickets from Lower Manhattan to Atlantic City and they were reduced to playing online betting games on Isabel’s iPad, gambling via PayPal. Meanwhile, each day’s mail brought frightening threats from Dez’s various creditors: MasterCard, Visa, American Express. When the condo folks started to write to him, and then phone, about his nonpayment of the five-thousand-dollar monthly fee, he was obliged to admit that things were getting serious. Forced to switch from premium cocaine and the purest of heroin to cheap street meth and cough syrups to keep sickness at bay, they soon found that even these substitutes were beyond their means. (By now, they’d pawned everything pawnable.) Isabel, cut off by her family, was game to sell the only item left to them of any value, but Dez put his foot down, at first, insisting that he had more pride than that—not because he was especially averse to trading on the sexual allure of a girlfriend (what, after all, had his plot against Ulrickson hinged upon?), but because of the sheer lack of imagination—the inelegance—inherent in being a pimp. But when the illness became too acute (Dez spent a dreadful two days and two nights lying on the bathroom floor, hugging the toilet bowl between bouts of seizures), he let her go. She first raided Chloe’s now almost empty clothes closet, and emerged dressed in the immortal denim skirt, white halter and pink flip-flops. “Not those,” Dez weakly protested, “not those.” But she had already slipped out, shivering, sniffling, into the cold March night.
When the phone rang less than an hour later, he pulled himself along the stained broadloom and answered it. She was phoning from the police station. Her first customer—or what she, in her illness and misery, took to be her first customer—turned out to be a pair of uniformed cops in a marked squad car. She was in the precinct house, under arrest, and she didn’t know what to do.
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