“Hey, sorry, man, whatever,” I said.
Don Sanchez said, “Well, I’m hitting the hay. It’s past my bedtime.”
“Me, too,” I said. A week or two later, Don e-mailed me a picture of himself in running apparel, arms raised skyward. He’d made it to the top.
Naturally, the incident in the Sherlock Holmes is mortifying to recall. I had too much to drink. I misread the situation. I embarrassed everyone concerned.
Ollie was of the opinion that my blundering was even greater than I thought. When I told him about meeting Mrs. TW2, he said, “How do you even know it was her?”
“I can’t be sure,” I admitted.
We were having a sundowner at the Code of Hammurabi, which is one of the Unique’s six bars/eateries.
Ollie said, “Well, let’s hope you’re right. Good to know she’s landed on her feet.”
He was trying to be kind to me, which made me feel a little foolish. I decided to drop the subject, which was, as I’ve said, by that point regarded as ancient history. Nor was it the occasion to mention that Mrs. TW2, or the person I’d believed, rightly or wrongly, to be Mrs. TW2, was now a Mrs. Svengali, outwardly smiling and singing and inwardly robotic. (I believe that the conjecture retains its validity even if the woman I met was someone other than Mrs. TW2. I saw what I saw.) Ollie doesn’t go in for that kind of thinking.
“I might be leaving town,” he said.
“Oh? Where to this time?”
“I mean leaving for good. There’s this opportunity opening up in Shanghai.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, we’ll know a bit more in a few months. It depends on a few things falling into place.”
“Shanghai,” I said. “Cool.”
“Yeah. Lynn is pretty psyched. I think she’s ready for something new.”
“Cool,” I said.
Ollie went on to say that although Dubai was a “great market,” China was a “truly exceptional market,” even allowing for widely expected drops in its GDP growth rates. Ollie said it would be a super place to “headquarter” going forward, although he would of course retain a “strong presence” in the Gulf.
“That makes a lot of sense,” I said.
“It’ll be an adventure,” Ollie said.
This was some months ago. I’ve heard nothing more about it.
Don’t go, Ollie. Don’t leave me stranded.
Hello, here’s the cavalry—Mila. I should get a special bugle tone for her texts.
You want two friends tonight? You can handle???
THE THREESOME. The trio with brio. I’m well aware of the appeal. I’ve done the porn.
It’s not for me. A sexual encounter should retain at least the structure of the real thing, i.e., the one-on-one. The two-on-one, or the one-on-two, or the one-on-one-on-one—these are in formal contradiction, in my opinion, of the raison d’être of the coming together in closeness of persons. The problem of the third person is not the problem of the third wheel, which was solved once and for all, one would think, by the invention of the tricycle. It is the problem of the third as the third. His/her presence abolishes the bilateral relation of the first and the second—already fraught with difficulty—and installs in its place a trilaterality that, by its very multiplication of the possibilities for pleasurable physical interaction, by its generation of a beast with three backs and six arms and six legs and eight holes and one cock, involves the sexual participants in a metamorphosis in which they are turned into organs of an organism seeking only its sensual organization. Gone is the great promise of mutual caring enabled by one special other, whereby the carers together eliminate the terrible problem of space. (By “space,” I don’t just mean the isolating sea of interpersonal separation. I also mean the cosmic sea.) Even a fiction of this caring (of the kind I happily settle for in my semi-pro pairings) is impossible. In its place comes a nonfiction of meat and bones, of blow jobs and hand jobs and you-name-it jobs, of stick-that-in-here and my-turn-your-turn-her-turn, of you-do-this-while-he-does-that-and-I-do-this. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Everything turns to crap.
One friend please
is my reply to Mila.
I’ve showered, shaved, and shat, and am all set to head out, when a doorman calls: Mr. Ali is here.
I meet the great man in the lobby. “Well, Ali, how are you keeping? Everything OK?” We shake hands. I tell him, “One more day. Then Alain will be gone.”
Ali smiles. “I have information for you, boss,” he says. During his brief sabbatical, this most diligent of assistants has made it his business to repeatedly visit the Project X site. “Today, I speak to a man there,” he says. “He is American. I ask him, ‘What is this building?’ He tells me, it is a ‘mah-kp.’ ”
I ask Ali to repeat that last word.
“Mah-kp,” Ali repeats. “This is what he says. They are building a very big tower somewhere else. This is the mah-kp.”
“A mah-kp? What does that mean?”
Ali cannot tell me. He is relaying what the man told him.
“OK,” I say. “That’s very helpful. Thank you very much.” I’ll get to the bottom of this later. “Anything else?”
Ali shakes his head. I give him taxi money and send him on his merry way. I/Godfrey Pardew also go on our merry way, to the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel.
I valet-park the Autobiography and brace for the Nubians. They’re nowhere to be seen. I breeze unseen past the front desk: a first. It’s exhilarating. The childhood dream of invisibility has come to pass.
My hostess is Oksana. She has an amazingly high forehead, very black hair in a ponytail, and small, decidedly elliptical eyes. (Where is she from? I’m guessing Novosibirsk.) The good-time girls I’ve had dealings with are usually dressed up, and made up, semi-formally and semi-glamorously, as if en route to the commercial attaché’s reception. Some even look as though they’re about to ice-dance. Oksana looks like she’s come back from the gym. She has come back from the gym: her discarded gym shoes are over there by the TV.
Good for her, I say.
She lights a cigarette. “You want to fuck?” she says. “You want to drink something?”
“Maybe a drink,” I say.
Oksana responds with an eye roll toward the minibar.
I’m getting disdain? I’m being put in touch with my unworthiness? Here? By her? I don’t want to sink to the contractual level, but submitting to a personal assessment by Oksana isn’t part of the deal. I insist only on niceness, and this isn’t being nice. If she doesn’t want to be in this room, neither do I.
I’m about say something when I see, on the bedside table, something extraordinary: a Martial Arts Sudoku book, Black Belt.
I ask her, “May I look?”
She sucks on her cigarette. We’ll call that a yes.
My God, over half of the puzzles have been solved. The numbers are written down in a flawless, invariable hand. There isn’t a correction or marginal notation in sight. These solutions are totally clean.
Oksana is a Black Belt?
“Bravo,” I say. “These are very difficult. You must be very intelligent,” I say. (Clumsy, I know, but it’s incumbent on me to speak to Oksana as if English were a foreign language for me, too.)
All I get out of her is more smoke.
Very shy, I hold out the book. “Can you teach me? How you do it?”
Oksana is beautiful, I realize. How wonderful it would be to lie on this bed with her doing Sudoku puzzles, laughing and sharing and solving. And then a breakfast of fava beans, and then a car journey on sand flats and corniches, and then a trip by speedboat to an island, and there a small cabin build of clay and wattles made.
Oksana terminates her cigarette. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she begins to remove her clothing, starting with the white socks. Then it’s off with the leggings and the T-shirt. In her underwear—sports bra and regular panties—she goes into the bathroom. She locks the door.
Oh, woe is me. Oh, woe is she.
Clearly, Oksana isn’t aware of the protocol. I explain to her that I pay Mila and Mila pays her.
“Mila will not pay me,” Oksana says. “My friends tell me this.”
I didn’t come here to argue and bargain and transact.
“How much?” I say. The evening has now been spoiled.
“Two hundred American,” she says. “This is what Mila promise.”
Two hundred? Out of five hundred? Mila gets to keep three hundred bucks plus tip? I’ve never heard of a booking agent taking 60 percent plus. It’s unconscionable. I cannot be party to such an arrangement. The Mila connection can no longer be.
I’m carrying cash. I pay two hundred dollars and make an announcement. “I’m sorry, but I have a headache. I will go home now.”
Her eyes narrow even more; one glimpses the steppe, wild horses, the Great Khan. “You are angry? You make problem for me?”
“No problem,” I say. “I’m happy, really. I just have a headache.” I smile. “It was nice meeting you.”
I see myself to the door. It’s bye-bye, my Black Belt, and it’s farewell and adieu, Godfrey Pardew.
Another solo celibate night in The Situation it is.
I get in, or on, the Pasha for a twenty-minute session. After three hundred seconds, I can’t take one more rub of the roller. Off, or out, I get.
Night has fallen, and it’s safe for me to approach the windows and look out. When I try this in daylight, I keep re-seeing that shadow, or bird, or dropping thing, out of the corner of my eye, and I find myself jerking my head leftward time and again, always too late to catch sight of it. It’s uncontrollable. It does no good to remind myself that in all probability I saw nothing in the first place and my post-traumatic flashbacks, if that’s what we’re talking about, are founded on a trauma that never occurred. The falling shadow nonetheless appears; my head nonetheless jerks over my shoulder. This has been going on for a few days, and it’s not getting any better, i.e., it’s getting worse. It’s got to the point where I can’t take in the view from my apartment until the sun has set and all is dark. Is this what I’ve come to? Nocturnality? I have to keep a vampire’s hours?
What with the moonlight and the lunar/man-made glow of the Marina, I have no problem discerning the pale X of Project X—the “mah-kp.”
I permutate the vowels: “make-up”; “mark-up”; “mock-up.”
Mock-up. Let’s consult the sum of all human knowledge. Let’s Wiki it.
In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes.
No mention of the construction of buildings. I Google “mockup + building.” Here we go: a “pre-construction mockup” is not uncommon, it seems. It seems that “scale representations” of “exterior wall systems” and “other structures” may be useful to builders, engineers, and architects, for a variety of purposes.
It follows that Project X is a scale representation of part of another building. It is, if I correctly recall what Ali told me, a representation of part of the “very big tower” they’re building “somewhere else.”
So Project X isn’t a project at all. It’s a dummy run. It’s a mock-up. There’s no actual residential proposition going up down there. The action has moved somewhere else. Privilege Bay is toast and The Situation is fucked. The Uncompromising Few and the Pioneers of Luxury™ and the Dreamers of New Dreams must be re-named.
I’m going to bed.
And in the morning, immediately on waking up, I am jolted by gladness as I see blue sky through the window, and spontaneously I get out of bed and empty my bladder. The joy of this routine—invariably, the happiest time of my day—is, unfortunately, a simple matter of oblivious recurrence: in the drowsiness of renewed consciousness, the current blue morning is indistinguishable from the blue mornings of yore. I forget where I am and where things stand and what lies ahead. Then I remember.
It’s the kid’s last day. I’ll get through it. Then Ali and I will regroup.
There’s no sign of Alain at the office, though. His driver usually deposits him at 11:00 a.m. sharp. It’s not till an hour later that a Batros shows—and it’s Sandro. He makes straight for my chair.
“OK, so who is this guy—Ali,” he says.
“What do you mean, who is he?”
“That’s what I mean: who is he? Why’s he here?”
“He’s my assistant. He’s worked in this office for a long time. You’ve seen him a million times.”
Sandro says, “What are his qualifications? Where’d he go to college? Where’re his references?”
What is he talking about? “Sandro, he’s an office boy. He gets paid peanuts. I don’t need references. He’s a superb worker. I trust him totally.”
Sandro nods. “You trust him. Right.”
“Yeah, I do. He’s one hundred percent honest.”
“More honest than my son?”
“What?”
“You’re saying he’s more honest than my son?”
“I don’t understand the question,” I say, even though I do understand that this is big trouble.
He smiles at me like a mafioso. “Alain says he didn’t shake your guy down. He says your guy is making it up.”
“Why would he make it up?”
“You tell me,” Sandro says. Oh no—he’s spotted my rubber stamps. He takes one and bangs it on my blotter. “Why would my son lie?”
I say, “Alain’s a terrific kid, but he’s a kid. Kids are always making stuff up, saying stuff that’s not accurate, denying stuff. They’re kids. They screw up.”
“These things are really great,” Sandro says. He’s trying out another stamp, pressing it into the wrong ink pad. Bang. “You made Alain go with this guy to the bathroom?” Bang.
Very carefully, like a lawyer, I say, “You requested that Alain be weighed. Alain wished to be weighed in the bathroom, which was entirely appropriate. I asked Ali to accompany Alain to the bathroom to take note of the weight readings. He did not accompany Alain into the stall. Alain was in the stall by himself. When Alain stood on the scale, Ali could see the reading through the gap at the bottom of the stall. All he ever saw of Alain was his feet. If you recall, you oversaw the procedure the first day it happened.”
“Don’t tell me what I recall and what I don’t recall,” Sandro says. Bang. “You let this guy, this stranger, take my son to the bathroom and be alone with him there.”
I’m trained for these situations. You have to push back, firmly and calmly. “I put in place, with your approval, an appropriate procedure for carrying out your instructions.”
He grabs another stamp. Bang. Bang. “I asked Alain if he was comfortable with the arrangement. He told me he wasn’t. I said, Why not? No answer. I asked him did this guy, Ali, did this guy try anything funny. You know what he said? Nothing. I’m like, Did he or didn’t he? He didn’t want to talk about it.”
He’s building a case out of a non-answer to a leading question? Has he gone mad?
“He told me something else,” Sandro says. Now he’s handling one of my embossers. “Your friend is an illegal. That right?”
“He’s a bidoon. I e-mailed you about it a long time ago. What about it?”
“You know what? I’ll be the judge of what you e-mailed me, OK?”
“I’ll send you a copy, to refresh your memory,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it, he’s fired,” Sandro says. “I don’t want to see his face again.” He says, “How does this thing work?” He’s put a sheet of paper in the embosser’s jaws. “Do I just …?” Crump. “That’s neat.”
“If you fire Ali, I’m quitting.” I say this serenely, because I’ve thought through and fantasized this scenario many times. I am ninety-nine percent sure Eddie will be in my co
rner. He’s not going to lose a high-value asset (me) on account of his crazy brother’s whims.
Sandro says, “If I fire him? I just did.”
“In that case, I quit.”
“In that case, I’m calling security.”
Another line borrowed from TV. Or maybe Sandro, too, has often dreamed of this moment and knows his script backward.
I get the cardboard box I’ve set aside for just this eventuality, and I rapidly box my personal embossers and stamps and the other possessions I keep here, which are very few. “Here,” I say, and with great satisfaction I toss Sandro my Batros employee’s I.D. card and credit card.
“The car keys,” Sandro says, wiggling his fingers. I almost forgot. The Autobiography is his, not mine. I hand over the keys.
Back at The Situation, the first thing I do is e-mail Eddie.
I’m sorry to inform you that, with effect from 12:36 PM today, I am no longer serving as the Batros Family Officer and related positions. Earlier this morning, Sandro capriciously and in bad faith terminated the employment of Ali, my assistant. This action, along with various actions taken and statements made by Sandro on this and on other occasions, makes it impossible for me to discharge my responsibilities and/or remain in my job. I will happily provide you with more details, if you wish. Please note that I have not resigned. I have accepted the unlawful repudiation of my contract of service and am entitled to compensation on that basis.
I look forward to receiving your proposal of financial settlement.
Eddie responds within the hour:
Your resignation is not accepted old amigo. I’m in New York. Why don’t you fly over tonight and we’ll talk it over.
I knew it. When backs are against the wall, Eddie will come out shooting.
FROM THE BELT PARKWAY, the city looks ragged. Manhattan shows in distant dribs and drabs. The three-quarters-built Freedom Tower, if that’s still its name, looks—I’m afraid there is no other word for it—unintelligent. I saw the Burj Khalifa at a comparable stage of completion. The Arabian spire had the natural inwit of a blade of grass. Its American counterpart, for all its massiveness, looks like a stump—a gargantuan remnant. From my inspection through the taxi window, I actually find it hard to accept that this protrusion is indeed the so-called Freedom Tower. The building seems, as I say, not without nationalistic embarrassment, dumb—a meathead tower. It’s not even that tall. Mistrustful as I am of the first impression; conscious as I am of my limitations as a critic of architecture; wary though I may be of the personal ruling: I cannot hold back a thumbs-down.
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