Who else?
Do you know who Michael Piedmont is? I nodded yes, and Sean lowered his voice. He was sniffing around the movie business a couple of years ago; this was before the indictments and the plea bargains. He was looking to be a big-shot producer. Believe me, there were a lot of people more than willing to take a meeting with him. But he couldn’t adapt to how we do business. Word was, all he really wanted to do was meet Sharon Stone or Hilary Swank. I should go over there and let him know his cover’s blown. I sort of wonder why he’s even here. I guess he’s doing this the way I am.
Why are you doing it?
Me? Just for the fun of it, really. No particular reason. Maybe I’m a little bored. I like to travel, and to be honest I don’t have anyone to travel with at the current time. My wife’s Iranian, and she just opened a carpet store, very high end, one-to two-hundred-thousand-dollar rugs, antique, silk, all of them hand-knitted by teeny tiny hands, and the shop takes all her time. The kids from my first marriage are grown, and the boy Maya and I had together is so in love with his nanny, I can’t get near him. So what the hell, right? I can afford it, it’s here, so why not? If I don’t like it, I won’t do it again. If I really hate it, I’ll just leave. There’s no big deal. Being around beautiful women makes me feel great. I just feel so alive. And, to tell you the truth, I like hookers. They’re really a lot of fun; they’re very realistic, very little bullshit. They’re more like men, in terms of being direct. This idea that they’re all crying themselves to sleep, it’s just not true. And people talk about how dangerous it is for the girls; that’s bullshit, too. I mean, dangerous compared to what? To being a cop or a fireman? To working in a coal mine or a steel mill? More dangerous than building a bridge or washing windows in a high-rise? More dangerous than working in a nuclear power plant or driving a truck? I once developed a project about industrial accidents—more people lose their lives like that than in war, did you know that? Hooking’s an easy job. What’s the big deal? You’re lying around in bed, some poor putz comes in, you snap a rubber on him, boop boop boop, he’s over and done, and the money’s on the dresser top. So every once in a while, a hooker’s found dead. Not that that’s not a terrible thing. And, by the way, I’ve never known this to happen, and I’ve known hookers since I was fifteen years old. It happens more on TV than in life, but it happens. What I’m saying is it happens to everyone who works. People get killed on movie sets, too. You ever hear of Vic Morrow? How’s that for a waste of life? He was doing a goddamned remake. But when a hooker dies, people like to seize upon it because we live in a puritanical society. What about you?
Me?
Yeah, what brought you here. Is this your first time?
Yes, it is. My uncle gave it to me as a cheer-up present. That’s a hell of an uncle. Westin sounded skeptical, so I had to add My girlfriend was, shall we say, less than faithful to me. Westin nodded sympathetically, and then, speaking in little more than a murmur, he said It must be fun, being a woman. You know? Having so many people wanting to fuck you. I thought women found that dehumanizing, I said. Westin laughed at the idea. I’ll take it; I’ll take it any day of the week. To have people obsessing about you, willing to do anything or pay a shitload of money to touch you. How bad can that be?
Just then, I felt a hand suddenly land on my shoulder, horror movie style. I looked up and saw Castle looming over me, also horror movie. Everything all right here, gentlemen?
We nodded eagerly.
You mind switching seats with me for a sec? Castle asked Westin, and Westin waited a moment, expecting Castle to offer some reason for the request, while I was filled with hopeless hope that Westin wouldn’t move. Castle maintained his commanding silence until Westin relinquished his seat—though not without a sarcastic little voilà in its direction, as if the entire matter were rather silly.
Lincoln oomphed down next to me, patted my knee a couple of times. Do you have a dog? he asked. Me? I said. No, I don’t. Wish I did, but I don’t. I love dogs, he said. When I was a kid, all I wanted in life was a dog. There was this FBI agent, very interested in my father, he had a dog. Captain. A little black and white dog, maybe part Cocker, had those ears. He walked the dog around the playground where I hung out. One day he lets the dog off the leash, and Captain runs up to me, jumps up, licks me all over my face, like we’ve known each other all our lives. Pretty soon this FBI agent lets me walk his dog. Then he says he’s going out of town, can I come over and feed Captain, gives me the fucking keys to his house. Extraordinary. Before I knew it, I was more a part of this FBI agent’s family than I was of my own. He never laid a finger on me, but he seduced me, and pretty soon I’m telling him everything he wants to know about the old man. It would have been enough to put him in prison, if he’d stayed around, but…Castle splayed his fingers out, to connote taking flight. Unfortunately, that left me with a mother who hated me for fucking up her marriage and an older brother who used me as a punching bag.
That’s amazing, I said. Sad story.
Yeah, very sad. I think that’s why I got into the travel business. Figured somewhere along the way I’m going to run into the old man, though he may be dead and buried in Moscow for all I know. He’d be about eighty-eight by now.
A lot of people live longer than that, I said.
Well, you never know, Castle said. I keep my eyes peeled, like Ahab looking for the big fish, except I don’t want revenge, obviously. He clapped his hands together, signaling a change of subject. Anyhow, Avery, there was something in your paperwork that puzzled me. Some irregularities. His tone was good-natured, yet I was on guard. Castle gave the appearance of friendliness. The large space between his two front teeth, the melancholy cast of his bloodshot green eyes, his powerful, darkly furred forearms, all contributed to an aura of tolerance and forgiveness—I assumed he had seen enough of life’s blurred edges, sudden reversals, and broken promises to give him a philosophical nonchalance. How upset could he be that I had fudged a few items on the forms I’d filled out? How much of a stickler for truth and accuracy could a man be while fronting an international pimping firm?
Irregularities? Are you sure?
Castle patted my knee again, and this time left his hand there. You didn’t mention your occupation or any employment.
I’m sort of between things. Is it a problem?
I was figuring maybe private income.
I wish.
Yeah, sure. Though I’ve seen it exact a terrible toll.
We were silent for a moment. Then Castle said, I did an Internet search on you. How come you didn’t tell me you’re a writer by trade?
Maybe it’s someone else, with the same name.
Like a condor folding its wings, Castle laid his arms across his chest. He tucked his chin down and looked at me in such a way that implied Oh please, come on, don’t embarrass either of us.
All right, I said, you got me. And before Castle could ask why I would try to obscure the fact of my profession, I added I really didn’t want to put that on my application. I didn’t want you to think that this was some sort of writing assignment.
Castle let that hang in the air a few moments and then asked, Is it?
Oh my God, no. I shook my head, laughed. Are you kidding me? Absolutely not. Writing is about the last thing on my mind right now.
I saw you writing in a notebook, on the plane.
Force of habit. Listen, do you want to know why my uncle Ezra gave me this trip?
He said you were having girlfriend troubles.
That stunned me for a moment. Ezra had spoken to Castle about what Deirdre had done to me? One of the most upsetting and degrading aspects of having been cheated on is wondering how many other people know about it, and how it colors their thoughts about you. I understood why some people—men, particularly—keep it a secret if they’ve lost their job or received a bad diagnosis from the doctor. They don’t want to be that person. They don’t want to be culled from the herd, left behind, or eaten.
To say the lea
st, I managed to say. Then I decided to go further: I always sort of suspected her.
Castle raised his ghostly eyebrows and then went back to work on my knee, this time slipping in a couple hard squeezes between the pats. You don’t need to make excuses for her. She can burn in hell. Demons can spread her legs and pour hot lead into her pussy. I blanched at the violence of this. It was all I could do to stop from turning away. I’m into men’s liberation, Castle said, as if this explained it all. So. Let me ask you a question, Avery. You ever really give it to someone in an article and then there’s all this blowback? You ever really piss anyone off?
You mean like letters to the editor? I asked.
Well, I was thinking more like someone wiring your car so it blows up when you switch on the ignition.
Iceland slipped serenely past the windows. A barn. Extravagant clouds like steam surrounding a half-dormant volcano. Castle stretched out in his seat. Unfenced pastures with small horses and swaybacked red cows. Castle’s voice was mild, amused. When I was a kid—and this was way, way before your time—there was this columnist named Victor Riesel. He was what my parents used to call a real sonofabitch. He had a column in the old New York Mirror, but it ran all over the country, syndicated. About 1955 or ’56, Riesel writes a column about how some dinky little union with connections to the Lucchese crime family is shaking down contractors. The story runs, and that night Riesel goes to Lindy’s up on Broadway and someone comes in and throws sulfuric acid at him, right in his face. They rush him to St. Clare’s Hospital—I always remember that part because that’s where my brother was born. But the doctors can’t save his eyesight. No one did any time for it, either. The guy who threw the acid was this young kid named Abraham Telvi, and when he realized he’d just blinded someone with a national following he started bellyaching, wanted more money, and he ended up with two bullets in the head in Little Italy. The guy who really engineered the attack was the guy they called Johnny Dio, but they never got anything to stick on Dio until the early ’70s—he was serving time for some crazy kosher meat scam when he died in Danbury Prison hospital, in 1979.
Kosher meat scam? But Castle waved off the question. Outside, great steaming fissures in the rocky world, gray geysers shooting up forty or fifty feet and then dissipating into mist. Reykjavik was in the near distance, it looked clean, utilitarian, and slightly past its prime, like an Olympic village built twenty years ago. A long thick braid of white clouds curled a half inch above the horizon.
We’re almost there, Castle announced, and I’ll tell you what: you’re going to absolutely love Icelandic women. They’re not the brightest people on Earth, but they’re very, very friendly, and oh my, are they ever sexual. He sighed dreamily. Word of warning? Don’t let them drink too much. Some of them really go overboard.
My stomach turned over. It seemed best for my overall peace of mind and certainly better for the book I wanted to write if I could get through this trip without having sex with a paid escort. But I also sensed a certain distance between my resolve and my current state of mind. Crossing an ocean, being suddenly far away from anyone who knew me, created anonymity, and with no one to watch, no one to know, who could say what I would end up doing?
9
AN HOUR LATER, I was with Sigrid. You know what would be nicest for me? I said to her. I had allowed myself to be seated in a therapeutically designed chair, and now my knees were up as high as my chin. I would have to struggle if I wanted to stand. Sigrid sat across from me. She had a spacious, friendly face, polite, reserved, with little tugs of resignation at the corners of her mouth. Her dark brown hair framed her pale oval face. There was something transparent in her, plain, but a plainness that was alluring, the plainness of something unmarked, undiscovered, a stoical, pioneer plainness. She looked like a woman stuck in a ho-hum job, in a car rental kiosk or a bank. She was dressed in a dark skirt and a white blouse, as if she had stopped to have sex with me on her way to work.
No, what would be nicest? Was she mocking me? Her voice was foggy, thick. I wasn’t quite sure how I had ended up with her. As soon as the minivan had arrived at the hotel, the men had been shepherded into a conference room on the ground floor of the Royal Reykjavik, a room with a blue and white carpet and dark purple draperies, recessed lighting. A buffet breakfast had been put out for us, and we ate nervously. The women were already there, waiting. At first, I couldn’t tell one from the other; they were all simply beautiful. A basket full of kittens, just as Castle had promised, but most of the men were unexpectedly reticent, diffident. The Metal Men, Webb, and Cobb all gravitated toward a sturdy-looking blonde with bright lips and fingernails, long curling eyelashes, dressed in a silver jumpsuit; she looked as if on the days she wasn’t working as a prostitute she was a superhero. The others seemed to be milling about, as if waiting to be chosen. I had expected it to be like the Oklahoma land grab, yee-haw, hats waving, spurs digging into horseflesh, the native population running for their lives. Instead, the guys circled the buffet table, slowly filling their plates with scrambled eggs and bacon, little triangles of cheese with caraway seeds, tomatoes grilled to black.
Eventually, the Icelandic women made their way to the buffet, and each one attached herself to one of the men. Was it at all based on our questionnaires? Sigrid had just come up to me at the buffet and said Hello, and then took my plate, as if everything was settled. She was in front of the breadbasket, and she asked me with a simple movement of her eyes if I wanted some bread. I shook my head No. If she was trying to act somehow maternal, that really wasn’t the right foot to start out on. She saw the look of concern on my face. Don’t worry, she said, after, if we want to remain together that’s good, but those who don’t can choose again. Again? I wanted to say, but didn’t. Considering the underlying depravity of the whole situation, I felt stiff and shy. We went to a table, pretended to eat, and then Sigrid asked me if I’d rather come to her apartment than stay at the hotel—It’s so plastic here, she said—and I leaped at the chance. How much better for my reportorial purposes to go to where she lived, and how much better for my peace of mind to be away from the others, for a while.
We drove back to her apartment in her car. Sigrid and I barely spoke. She seemed absorbed in the music playing from her car stereo, some sort of sexy international hybrid, Brazilian, French, maybe West African. I had never been able to figure out where people developed a taste for that sort of music, or where they found it. It all seemed like the sound track from a movie I had missed or a party I hadn’t been invited to. We stopped at a traffic light; she shifted the car into neutral, leaned over, and kissed me on the mouth. You’re a shy one, aren’t you, she said.
You took me by surprise, I said.
There was something in that remark that pleased her, or so it seemed. I had no real hold on what was going on, exactly. In fact, I had never been in such an ambiguous, confusing situation in my life. Because at the root of our being together was a transaction that would mean sooner or later we were going to be in bed together, every gesture she made, her rhythmically tapping her fingers on the steering wheel to the coffeehouse samba, her small shudder of fright when a couple of guys on mopeds buzzed past us, her considerateness in cracking the window before lighting up her cigarette, her kissing me, of course, and her little ersatz insight into my so-called shyness had to be weighed against the strong possibility that everything she said and did was a lie, or, to put it less stridently, a show. Her name was probably not Sigrid, and though I told her I was Avery, that could just as well could have been made up, too. All that was true was the transaction that had come before; the true identity beneath our masks was that I was a man who had somehow come into enough money to allow me to be on this side of her funky little car and she was a woman whose life had come to this.
I was in an unreality more total and opaque than any I had ever experienced under the spell of any tequila or drug, more insanely inevitable than a dream, I was way the hell over the rainbow. Yet the more I thought this—and I was
quite literally repeating to myself This is just so unreal—the less the concept of unreality meant to me, and what took its place was the suddenly seductive notion that there could be no unreality because there was no cardinal, ruling reality, and what the world (space, time) actually consisted of was countless competing realities, some of them parallel, most intermingled, and what I had all this time been calling the Real World was simply a series of routinized actions and perceptions, nothing more persuasive than the sum total of my rickety life. This improvisation of cordiality and attraction being acted out between Sigrid and myself was as valid as any of the transactions large and small that comprised my daily life heretofore, no less genuine and valid and frank than the Hi, how are you? I exchanged with the Egyptian who manned the newspaper kiosk near my apartment, or the little beckoning finger I raised at the corner diner when I wanted the waiter to bring me a refill of coffee. There were the lies you told to trick someone out of that which they would not give you under other circumstances, and then there was this, the lies you told with the understanding that they would not be actually believed, the lies you agreed to tell, and the lies you agreed to hear. You did not believe these lies, and you did not expect the lies you told to be believed. All that decency demanded was staying in character.
What I was not prepared for was the pleasure I felt in this strange, luxurious darkness…
We pulled into the little circular drive in front of her red corrugated apartment house with its green roof and white trimmed windows, surrounded by tall green shrubbery and presided over by an extremely tall but empty flagpole. Out we go, she said. An orange cat patrolled the parking area, and it approached Sigrid, its tail flicking. Come on, she said to me, taking my hand, up we go.
In her apartment, I must admit I felt a degree of paranoia. Where am I? I wondered. A wave of exhaustion went through me, disorienting, belittling. It seemed as if only an hour or two ago I was in my broken home, and now, somehow, I was here. My mind reeled at the strangeness of this. Okay, I’m in an apartment in Reykjavik, a two-minute ride from the hotel. Her mango-colored Scana had smelled of vitamins and cigarette smoke. I had happened to glance in the backseat and noticed the upholstery bore the marks of a child seat that had once been there, chalky indentations in the black vinyl; the vanished seat left an impression of itself like a picture that had been taken down from its customary spot on the wall. Was there a child somewhere? Or was it merely someone else’s car, or a car Sigrid bought used?
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