They feigned a business relationship for Frank’s nieces, on board again as his interns, so there was no privacy until they landed. The Zabriskie Hotel was right on museum mile, across the street from Central Park, and Frank had booked the penthouse suite. This was a sight more ostentatious than the room she’d booked at the Chelsea Hotel. The suite had more square footage than No Manors. He threw down his luggage, kissed her, she started to unbuckle his pants and he said he needed a shower first. So she wandered the living room, dining room, enormous bedroom with king-size four-poster bed, three full bathrooms. She could hear him in the shower. Wendy felt overwhelmed. She went out onto the limestone deck and caught her breath. She took in the panoramic view of Central Park, all the trees flickered in the lamplight with red and yellow leaves as the last fires of autumn awaited the snuff of winter.
The door to the bathroom was locked. Her mind instantly went to an image of a bald Frank naked under the water and the hairpiece resting on the lid of the toilet. She took off all her clothes and waited for him on the bed, looking up at the moon through a skylight.
Before there was time to pleasure him he fell upon her like a man suddenly so thirsty he was insane. So businesslike in life and in his eagerness to please her (she joked with us later in a phone call). He had to taste every last part of her body. There was a lot of fact-checking and numbercrunching along the way. Meticulous and careful brokering. She was swept up in his negotiations. And the inevitable merger, when it happened, was all one-sided. The opposite of the foreplay. He thrusted, he held back. He bought and sold. It was all about him, the inevitable. And of course he wore the toupée the whole time.
That was … amazing, he said.
She dabbed him. Again?
Oh my god, my heart. I have to work in two hours, you know.
Again, she said and pounced on him. By tomorrow, I think we’ll play very well together.
How does it feel to be in bed again with the so-called junk bond king? It’s the sex I was afraid to remember, afraid to forget, yes, I think this is better than … She was going to say better than Jonjay. She said, … Apart.
We were worried, we said when she’d called. Like, really worried.
I realize Frank’s my type, she told us after she explained where she was and apologized, and yes, we were right: she should have called earlier using Frank’s Motorola.
I want a man with no time for me so I can be alone with my thoughts and work, she told us. And now I have him. He’s perfect. He’s here but not here. I don’t know why I resisted so long. Oh yeah, he’s married.
She called us around noon in Manhattan, alone in the giant penthouse suite. She spotted a stack of bills inside a folded piece of paper with her name written on it resting on top of the thirty-six-inch television. Then her heart sank, it sank all the way to the year 1981 and she was back in a sleazy hotel in downtown San Francisco with a married man. She was afraid to read it, but this note said:
Have a breathtaking day in the Big Apple.
Here’s some madmoney for souvenirs
—Miss your body & soul already—
Meet me @ Bemelmans @ 9:30PM
I’ll reserve a table for 2
~ XOX Love, FF
Not poetry but at least nothing about a return to regularly scheduled programming. Love, FF, this note said. A late dinner. They were on West Coast time anyway.
It was past two in the afternoon before she finally left the penthouse. She decided to carry all of it, a thousand dollars in twenties, because she liked the weight of it, like a small animal, a hamster’s worth of money, almost living inside her purse. And she was also afraid of being mugged. Manhattan was famous for its muggers. She figured that if she was mugged, this much money might save her from being knifed to death. The mugger would let her go. You can’t knife someone you steal that much from. You knife the person who comes up short and begs and begs. The mugger might even count up the bills and say, Gee, lady, thanks for carrying so much dough around. Now I don’t have to mug anybody else tonight. You saved a few lives tonight, not just your own.
That first day out in Manhattan with her purse throbbing with what Frank considered madmoney, spending hours in the esoteric shops that lined every block, she found out how easily she could blow a thousand dollars in this city. She stopped at every comic shop and stationery store, art supplies, pen specialists, used bookstores. She roamed the display cases of an upscale pen store where she threw down three hundred dollars on a few boxes of nibs and two pens from Japan. The way she drew Strays, all she ever needed was a sign painter’s marker, but like any cartoonist she could not resist buying a fancy stylo. You never knew when you might discover an even more perfect pen or nib. Sometimes pen shops had ink that no art supply stores sold and this ink would be more supple and genuine in its flow than the regular art store India inks, and a cartoonist would be driven to buy dozens and dozens of bottles to stockpile.
After the pen and stationery shops, she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Room after room mesmerized her until she felt too drunk or stupefied to absorb any more. She turned her attention to the masses of tourists. Sometimes the room of a gallery would be full of dumbfounded families. She would sit down on a Mies van der Rohe chair and draw. The young kids on dates, the wives who stood in front of their husbands and said, That is my style, and the stiff way students moved from artwork to artwork seeing their own reflections in the centuries of creativity. In every room there stood a security guard in a boxy black suit and black shoes with thick soles so that when one of the visitors got the insatiable urge to put a finger to the paint on the bright blue background of a Mary Cassatt, or touch the marble skin of a Greek sculpture, someone was there to say, Please don’t touch the artwork, ma’am, or sir . Wendy was not someone who touched artworks. The same desire to breach the divide was there but she knew better. Washington Crossing the Delaware made an impression for its almost cartoonlike composition and for the ostentatious room in which it was kept, as if this relic was all that remained of the kingdom of heaven. And so she sat in front of this painting for a few happy minutes surrounded by tourists and the guard. She sketched her own Strays version of the painting, with Francis the rabbit at the helm of the rickety woodslat pontoon spooning through a river of soft ice cream. She added a velvet rope. And Buck in a black suit stood guard beside the painting.
With a Pentel she made some more drawings of Buck as a security guard in an art gallery. As visitors studied the art, she sketched them interacting with her dog.
In the Met’s gift shop she saw Munch’s Scream on magnets. Pens and pencils swirling with van Gogh’s Starry Night. Calendars of Klimt, notebooks with Picasso’s whores on the cover, Goya’s hungry Saturn on umbrellas. T-shirt prints of Pollock splatters. Warhol posters of Marilyn and Mao. She had a market in these same products, magnets, shirts, posters, notebooks. Her Strays stuff sold in Zellers, Kmart, Consumers Distributing, and corner pharmacies. According to Frank, Strays sold more calendars than Cézanne and more magnets than Monet and Manet combined. After all, this was one of Frank’s specialties—that is, Frank was known to guide his clients by the teeth all the way through their debt obligations. Even from the sidelines, after years of dealings with the man now her lover, Wendy could see how Frank operated. Her ubiquity was no stroke of luck. Her animals were in every home in America because Frank’s ambition constantly stroked her Strays. Stroked them for all they were worth.
It was six o’clock. Still three and a half more hours. Back out in the street, she ordered a hotdog from a vendor and watched people enter and exit Central Park.
Behind the treeline, a wall of stone and brick buildings visible through a haze of icy fog. She took in the whole vista. After a while it was dizzying, the grandeur.
She took a brisk walk through a few acres of the park and came out having settled the hotdog, so she went to see the Frick Collection and spent the next two hours in its rooms sketching more visitors. It was near impossible to focus on the people, thou
gh, when every room was so full of priceless antiquities. It was like a No Manors of rare Oriental porcelains, one-of-a-kind Fragonards, Rembrandt’s masterpieces, Goya’s cruellest portraits, and the seductresses of Whistler, Renoir, and Ingres. Here, in the middle of New York, beside Central Park and the grand hotels and museums, were palatial rooms filled with the world’s rarities. Objects of unfathomable value, protected by security guards in double-breasted black suits. The guards didn’t show any interest in what they guarded, or in their own dapperness. Again she sketched them. That was part of the job, to watch the visitors, not the art. But at least one of these guards might have gone to the museums as a child and dreamed of one day keeping fine art from harm’s way.
If Wendy were an artist, she might pitch Justine Witlaw a show of oversized portraits of the art museums’ security guards, twice or three times human scale. But she was a cartoonist and must be contented with two- or three-inch boxes.
*
Snow—she hadn’t seen snow in years—fell over the Upper East Side’s streets outside the window to the sound of the white and black keys of a grand piano plucking out a ragtime rhythm, a hand jumping up and down the neck of a standup bass, and the neurotic sound of a clarinet. Jazz flew into her ears from the side of the stage at Bemelmans she couldn’t see from her leather bucket seat in a booth the size of Venus’s halfshell. The glass pools of ice turned the sidewalks outside into mirrors, black as the top of the jazzband’s grand piano reflecting the red and green holiday lights strung up along every awning. Outside, billboards and sandwich boards. Inside, a playful watercolour mural by the eponymous French artist ran across all the walls of Bemelmans Bar where she met Frank for dinner, promptly at nine thirty. Frank was already there when the stork of a hostess dropped Wendy at the table, and once she’d sat down he kissed her deeply and publicly.
Ravishing, Frank said of her dress.
It’s a Nolan Miller, she said, this fuchsia thing with the sea-green batwing shoulder pads, gold satin appliqué patterning across the chest, and a bosom-enhancing collar. How’s my hair? I didn’t have much time.
Wendy, your hair’s the sexiest. Black Friday’s not for another four days so let’s just sit back, drink expensive French wine, listen to celebrity ragtime, and deliberately try to enjoy ourselves.
His hand dropped two felt boxes on the table with the deftness of a magician. One was a pale silver, the other a dark navy blue. He told her to open the pale silver box first.
Inside the pale silver she found an elegant slender Rolex with a shimmering wristband so thin it looked spun from a thread of unbreakable spider silk, dotted with dewdrop diamonds, and a timepiece that showcased a single eye-shaped blue-tinged diamond at twelve o’clock. On the reverse of the watch was the engraving With love, FF 11/84.
She kissed him. It’s so beautiful. I never wore a watch before. But this is one I always will, it’s so sexy. Should I open the second box?
You should, but it’s for me.
Wendy laughed. You bought yourself a gift?
Inside was another Rolex. His and hers Rolexes. His had a chunky wristband made from silver and gold bricks that interlocked in a nonrepeating mosaic pattern. On the reverse she read Let time stop for me when with Wendy.
You know that I love you, he said. Of that I am certain.
Once an awareness of their surroundings returned to their conscious vision, Frank handed Wendy a leather portfolio. He said, there’s some mouth-watering hors d’oeuvres.
Her eyes tried to focus on the menu. As she scanned each page her concentration fell between the words. She went up, up, and down, down the pages trying to make sense of the options: Green Turtle Consommé au Xeres, Essence of Fowl, Boiled Ox Tongue, Roast Stuffed Capon in Giblet Sauce, Fried Scrapple, Calves Head Piquante, Rumaki of Chicken Livers, Hearts of Celery … Eventually she realized something was on her mind.
I guess there’s nothing else we can do, right? They either come back on their own, or they don’t.
He shook his head side to side and tapped her new Rolex, said, We’re all on borrowed time.
Bemelmans was on the main floor of the Carlyle Hotel, a mountain of elegantly carved limestone. And the almost carbonated Royal Sterling caviar Frank had her try did go well with the gin-gin mule she ordered. Whenever Wendy put her head back on the leather-upholstered seat to rest her mind a little, she saw a lovely dog with shaggy ears and a long snout painted on the wall next to her head with a fine-tipped brush in the inimitable style of Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the Madeline books. The mural wrapped along the wall behind them and the other guests, and featured a park scene with rabbits at lunch and ballerinas dancing, teams of dogs, ducks and geese, not to mention the famous blue nuns and girls in yellow hats.
These murals are so beautiful, Wendy said with a burp. He draws the same animals as me with so much less anxiety. His lines are singing and dancing when my lines are crawling on their bellies. Can I have my own bar named after me, Frank?
Ashbubbles? Sounds great. Will you do a mural?
Oh yes, I would love to paint a mural, she said.
Back in the twenties, Hexen Diamond Mistral had financed the construction of this hotel.
You’re so stupidly powerful, she said. You can do anything. Do you want to be president someday?
I’d much rather be me.
Power is your cartoon, she said.
And cartoons are your empire.
Frank, my feet are sore and I’m drunk. Take me home to the hotel and bathe me.
Not yet, said Frank. Let’s stay a bit longer. I ordered you another drink. I might get something to eat. I’m hungry.
All I ate today was a hotdog.
You like it here in New York?
New York is a giant underwater cave. It’s Atlantis. Under a spell. The fish-people hurry in schools down the streets, eat, and spawn. I keep waiting to come up for air but never do.
What about Central Park? Isn’t it something?
Yes, it’s beautifully manicured. It looks like a picture postcard from every angle. Where I’m from, there’s wilderness—dangerous, imperilling wilderness. There’s no hungry bears or cougars in Central Park.
Maybe we shouldn’t go back to San Francisco, he suggested.
Yes, let’s not. Let’s stay in that bed in the penthouse forever.
The setlist scattered frisky versions of standard Christmas fare jazzed up alongside dance classics up to and including Cole Porter. The rickety band on stage knew every ragtime number ever pressed onto a shellac plate through the twenties and forties, and even though the middle-aged musicians did not look like the real thing, they ripped into hot jazz with a scrambling-eggs tempo. The tunes stirred the room into motion, whole tables leaped to their feet and multiple couples of upscale tourists shimmied out onto the hardwood dancefloor to cut loose. The house lights dropped and spotlights formed. Small neons and candles in coloured glass jars lit the various corners and tables. Wendy saw not a single candy cane or Santa Claus or other holiday trinket in Bemelmans that wasn’t classed up and posh.
On the crash of a cymbal she spilled some of her drink.
Frank slid the Rolex onto her wrist and clasped his hand around hers and launched her onto the dancefloor.
27
She wanted in on his secret kink. What really got him cranked up? What turned him on? Tell. Tell all. What was that special thing his body needed? Some men did not know for themselves and she had to seek out that kink. Frank showed her his.
Once the two of them were naked and on or near the bed he slipped off his new Rolex and asked her to take off hers and take them and wrap them around his erection. That was his kink. He wanted her to keep the two Rolexes there dangling from his prick as she went down on him. Then came the idea of penetrating her while he wore the Rolexes, so that’s how he fucked her the rest of the night.
It was two or three in the morning and she lay naked and awake in the king-size bed on top of the sheets staring at the moon’s pitted face through
a window. Watching her. She imagined Buck about to land his spacepod on its inhospitable surface. Beside her, Frank yawned and scratched under his chin where beads of sweat had hardened into salt.
Are you tired? she asked when his eyes opened.
He checked his Rolex, back on his wrist. I’ll sleep for another hour. On average, all I need is two or three to function.
What if you could not function?
A lot of money in the American economy is riding on my ability to function.
A lot of what is riding on your ability?
Money. Loans. Investments. Debt obligations. Multimillion-dollar portfolios are at stake.
How much?
Hundreds of millions. Possibly billions are at stake.
Would the entire world economy collapse?
Possibly.
Wow, really? The entire world? The whole globe collapses?
Could.
Because I fucked you all night?
She pulled off his watch, swung his and her Rolexes in the air, and caught them one after the other in her mouth.
What was it about the Rolexes that turned him on? The extravagance, the beauty, the way they made his prick look like a prince? The sound of them ticking against his balls? Who cares, it was a kink.
She concluded that Frank would never take off the hairpiece, but especially during sex—the hairpiece’s ultimate mission might in fact be for sex, this exact sex, and then secondly for his impression on others at work, and who knows what else.
Frank was long gone by the time she awoke, around noon, on his side of the mattress.
She got the gist of what kept him so busy. Frank was financing Shepherd Media’s cascading series of leveraged buyouts for a dizzying amount of copyright ownerships, and a simultaneously escalating sequence of highpriced corporate takeovers. Shepherd Media’s bid to buy outright the full rights and ownership to practically every classic American film produced before Robert Kennedy’s assassination was still confidential, Frank said. Nobody can know. One day it dawned on the big Hollywood studios that they spent millions every year just to store their old, falling-apart film reels in giant warehouses and a lot of their titles were literally turning to dust under the poor conditions. When Piper heard this he immediately went around to all the executives to make a bid. He wanted to own them, all the films, and the copyrights to them, so he could rerun them on his TV stations at no additional cost, and then also license old movies to other TV stations he didn’t own to add profit, sell permissions for repertory film screenings, and make subdeals to turn the whole catalogue into VHS tapes and LaserDiscs and so on.
The Road Narrows As You Go Page 30