by Jonathan Dee
He ordered a bourbon on the rocks. He saw a rare, expensive bottle of Pappy Van Winkle on the top shelf and wanted to ask for that, but he didn’t dare call even that much attention to himself. The bartender, who was at least sixty, didn’t so much as look at him. Excited, Hamilton tried not to power through that first bourbon too fast, but he still found his glass empty by the time the bartender completed a lap. “Again?” the bartender said. At first Hamilton misunderstood this entirely, but then he nodded and nudged his glass forward.
Somewhere behind him he was being watched—in the theater, by hundreds of people who stared at his ten-foot-tall face and had no idea what they were looking at, what he was doing, no apparatus for judging it at all. They corrupted it by looking at it. What was the point? Once he’d said in an interview that his dream was to make movies that were never shown to anybody; even people he considered friends had mocked him for that one. He wanted to give it all up, but it was too late, there was nothing else on earth he was equipped to do. His painting, his poetry, his publishing efforts, all these were ruined for him too by the corrosive quality of people’s attention to them. And the ranch? Please. They were all laughing at him there, or they would have been if he weren’t signing their paychecks. Not literally—someone else signed their actual paychecks, or so Hamilton assumed, never having seen one. He would have to make a note to change the way that was done.
When he watched himself on screen, he had one important thing in common with everyone else in every theater everywhere, and that was the understanding that, even though you were asked to pretend you were watching some fictional character with a made-up name, you knew at every moment that you were really watching a movie star named Hamilton Barth. That seemed like the greatest, most fundamental failing any actor could possibly admit to, and yet his whole life was based on it, it was perversely considered a mark of his success. Why should that seem so particularly humiliating tonight, though? He’d been through it many times before. There was always that strange confrontation between himself and his image on the screen—an image that should have seemed like a memory, since it was in one sense an actual record of something he’d actually done, but somehow it never felt that way to him, it just struck him as a vision of something that might have become of him if he’d led some other life—but tonight, he recalled, there was this third layer, that chick with the Chinese daughter who either had really grown up with him or else was the best-prepared tabloid reporter ever. Helen something, from Malloy. No, of course she was telling the truth, of course she had grown up in Malloy and remembered everything about him, things he had forgotten without even trying. Why didn’t he remember her? Why didn’t he remember anything truly specific or important about those years, the years that had supposedly made him who he was? Whatever the hell that meant. That was your only true, uncreated self, yet Hamilton knew eighty-year-old guys who remembered more of the arcana of their own grade school years than he did. Why? How had this happened? Why did this Helen look so old to him? Probably just because he so rarely came into contact with women his own age anymore. He had an urge to track her down again, recognize more of her thrillingly trivial memories; but what good would that do him, to research his own self the way he would research any other part? At his core he was nobody, and his nobodyness felt like something unforgivable.
He could sort of remember that cigarette-in-the-couch story. Or remember people talking about it. No, it was no use. He’d lost the capacity to look back. The past was too full of mistakes anyway, mistakes and crimes, your own and others’; if you kept your eyes forward, you didn’t have to spend all that energy trying to resolve what couldn’t be resolved. He would just continue moving forward, only forward, like an animal, though it did help a bit, he supposed, to know that there was someone out there who remembered him as he used to be, as he really was, someone in whom that memory still lived, so that he, Hamilton Barth of Malloy, New York, was not yet dead forever.
“On the house,” said the bartender, smiling, and slid him another bourbon. Hamilton smiled back, gratified, until he realized that if the bartender was comping him without recognizing him, that meant this must have been his fourth drink, or his sixth, he forgot what the custom was. He looked at his watch. The movie must have ended about twenty minutes ago. There was no way to stop drinking now. He looked in his wallet again and counted about fifty dollars in there. Enough to pay for four bourbons, but maybe not for six. Where the hell was the afterparty? Somebody had told him at some point. It was fluttering on the outer edges of his memory. Saint something. St. Patrick’s, St. Catherine’s. He caught the bartender’s eye and made a sickly scribbling motion in the air, and then he sweated out the thirty seconds or so before his tab arrived. Forty bucks. Thank God. He put all fifty on the bar and said, “What’s the name of that guy, the old guy with the morning show on TV, shouts all the time, has a blond co-host?”
The bartender pulled his head back warily. Maybe the question was a little too out of nowhere, or maybe Hamilton, despite his best effort to act casual, had made it sound a little too urgent. “Regis?” he said icily.
The St. Regis. That was it. Hamilton had no idea where it was, and yet a short time later he found himself there anyway. Perhaps he had thought to ask someone; he didn’t remember anything like that happening, though, and so he chose to believe the evening was starting to break his way. They were all in some sort of ballroom—he and two hundred other people—and now, instead of ignoring him because they didn’t know who he was, as the good folks at Cornerstone’s had done, they were ignoring him because they were trying to be cool about knowing precisely who he was. One young woman, obviously an actress, waved gaily to him from the other end of the bar. He thought she might have been in the movie with him, but that was the kind of boundary that was losing its sharpness now. Then he saw up close two faces he definitely recognized, the faces of his keepers from the premiere, Sturm and Drang. One looked relieved and the other looked pissed. They were like two halves of the same stupendously boring person.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” one of them said to Hamilton, who was straight-faced as far as he could feel. “We might not have jobs tomorrow. Where were you, in some bar?”
He nodded.
“Oh, great,” said the angry one. “And I’m sure no one whipped out a phone and took your picture there. I’m sure you were totally incognito there. I’m sure that picture isn’t on TMZ already.”
“That’s all correct, actually,” Hamilton said. “Though weirdly expressed. Why, were you out looking for me?”
The two handlers’ four eyes flashed toward each other, then back at Hamilton. “Seriously,” said the relieved one, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry right now.”
“Have a drink,” Hamilton said, clapping them both on the shoulder, “and for God’s sake, never, ever separate into two people. Because that is a slippery fucking slope.” He made the journey from the bar at one end of the ballroom to the bar at the opposite end. People waved, and he waved back, and he hugged and kissed them lustily whenever they hugged and kissed him, but whenever they spoke to him it was as if they were a hundred feet away, and with no idea what they were saying he had to try to make the appropriate facial expressions until they stopped. Time passed and he had a vague sense of the ballroom being less crowded than it had been, unless it had somehow gotten bigger. He saw a young, red-haired woman in a very short black skirt—hot, but small, like some sort of curvaceous doll—sitting alone with her heavily tattooed arm across the back of her chair; at the far end of the arm was her hand with a martini glass in it; at the near end, her chin was sunk gloomily into her shoulder. With her legs crossed, she was more exposed to Hamilton and the rest of the room than she seemed to realize—
“Whoa!” Hamilton said. “Bettina!”
Bettina raised her eyes, the way a dog would do. “Well great,” she said. “There goes my last shred of hope, which was that you’d forgotten what I looked like.”
She was
very drunk, which was exciting because it ran so afoul of his first impression of her. It was so boring to be right about people. “Bettina, don’t worry, Bettina,” he said, pulling up a chair in front of her; whoever had been at Bettina’s table had abandoned her there. She had the look of someone who had already embarrassed herself, who was regretful but also past caring. “Are you afraid of me? There’s no reason to be afraid of me.”
She looked at him and smirked, as if offended to be considered stupid enough not to be afraid of him.
“Bettina, it is so important that we found each other,” he said. “Let me go get you another martina. Martini.”
The crowd had thinned out to the point where he didn’t even have to wait in line at the bar. He held up the martini glass and then two fingers, as if it were very loud in the ballroom, which it no longer was. The chandeliers were so clean—whose job was that?—but he could not look up at them, he had to look down at the two precious martinis as he made his way across the floor, which seemed to have opened up to the size of a parking lot. Please let her still be there, Hamilton said to himself, please please please.
Not only was she there but she seemed to have perked up a bit. Her head was almost vertical. She accepted her martini with a look of deep cynicism. “What are you doing?” she said.
“I need,” he said, “to get to know you.”
She took a sip and closed her eyes. “You mean you think you’re going to fuck me?” she asked him.
“It is not about that,” he said. “I mean it is honestly only partly about that.”
“I’m sure you’re used to getting whatever you want.”
“If only,” he said. “I wish. As if.” He tried to think of another phrase that meant the same thing.
“Can I ask you something? That old broad at the theater tonight, the one with the Asian daughter: you don’t even know who she is, do you?”
“No,” he said. “No idea.”
She sat back and flipped her hands up in the air, satisfied and disgusted at the same time.
“I get treated like shit in my job,” she said. “This is the part where I say: ‘But I’m not a bad person.’ But you know what? I am a bad person.”
“No,” Hamilton said soothingly.
She closed her eyes and nodded loosely. “This is the part where I say: ‘Seriously. You don’t know me.’ But you know what? I think you do know me. You look at me and say, ‘Oh, I know her,’ and you’re actually probably right.”
“No, I do not know you,” Hamilton said, his voice reverent now, a whisper. You are the one, he was thinking. Though he was unsure what he meant by that. You are the one. She was some kind of kindred spirit, that was for sure, some kind of sinner who understood what an unfairly hazardous world this was, at least when she was drunk, a state in which he determined to keep her. Himself too: usually these evenings shot up like a firework and ended in a blackout that was like a depressive rebirth, but with a partner like this at his side, a partner in crime, he had an interest in keeping things going, in postponing tomorrow morning for as long as humanly possible. He now found himself kneeling on the floor in front of her, in order to hear her better and also to worship her. Right alongside these feelings of worship, but somehow not corrupting them or affecting them in any way, were sexual imaginings of the most baroque, polluted kind, having to do with her smallness, her perfect scale, her miniature manipulability, various humiliating scenarios in which no part of her touched the floor, in which he dominated her as a giant might do.
“I mean I don’t know why I should care,” Bettina was saying, “about my stupid fucking job, whether I lose it, whether I keep it. Public relations—what the hell does that even mean?”
“I don’t know anyone who knows,” Hamilton said. He patted her hand with his. She didn’t seem to notice, and in truth he couldn’t really feel it either. He looked around for her martini and handed it to her.
“Don’t you wish you could become someone else,” she said, “just like that? Just say, ‘This is the night I am absolved for every mistake,’ and then just start again as this other person? Look who I’m talking to, though. Hamilton Motherfucking Barth. Like you’d be free to change who you are even if you wanted to.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “I could do it.”
She laughed at him. “No way José,” she said. “You’re fucked in that department. The world owns your ass.”
He stood up. His anger only sharpened the sexual outline of his every thought. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, with no idea what his next sentence would be. But he needed to stay with her, and he needed to be somewhere that was not here. “Can you rent a car?”
“What?”
“I can’t. I mean I can, but I know from experience that if they see it’s me they’ll drop a dime and five minutes later there’ll be photographers up our ass like Princess Di. So can you rent it?”
“Don’t need to rent any car. I own a car. I drove here. But where do you need to go?”
“We, Bettina. We. We need to go somewhere and be alone together.” He lifted her gently to her feet. She was like a feather. “You have a coat somewhere, right? Where are you parked?”
“Is this really happening?” she said. They started toward the door. Already he felt reborn and invisible. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “Back at the theater? I lied to you when I said my name was Bettina.”
“That is the best news of all,” Hamilton said.
SARA AND CUTTER did not have any classes together—not so unusual, in a school that size—and by third period on Wednesday she still hadn’t seen him, though they’d been texting all morning, after texting well into the night before. They’d snarked on every camera-phone photo she’d sent him of that stupid ass-kissing zombie movie premiere, where everyone was so in love with themselves; still, she looked forward to doing it in person all over again. But when she got to the cafeteria, he wasn’t there. She went to his French classroom before the start of next period, and he wasn’t there either. Where had he been texting her from? She typed the question and received in return a photo of Cutter, grinning and wearing pajamas, in what she presumed was his own kitchen.
So he’d ditched. He did that more often lately. It wasn’t as bad as the day he’d actually come to school but then skipped all his classes anyway, hiding in the library or the unlocked maintenance rooms or other little interstices he managed to know about—exercising a sort of pointless, arcane freedom, and waiting for pushback, which he never seemed to get.
Things with Cutter had progressed quickly, in ways good and bad. Sometimes there would be afternoons spent in each other’s company—at some Starbucks, or on one of the benches in Carl Schurz Park watching the river traffic and the joggers and the checked-out nannies pushing strollers toward the playground, or even just in Sara’s apartment cracking each other up in front of daytime TV—that felt like love, or at any rate like ease. On the couch with their shoulders pressed into each other, they would laugh and eat leftover takeout and mock the clueless neediness of the Real Housewives or whatever other sad sacks were whoring out their dignity on reality TV, a genre of which they never tired. They made out a lot too. Which was great, but if she was honest with herself the major appeal of having him in her home with the TV on lay in the reduced risk of his acting out in some public way that might embarrass her, or endanger him, or both. She had already begun, for instance, finding excuses not to go into stores with him, because no matter what sort of store it was—a Duane Reade, a Starbucks, a Sephora—when they were back on the street he would pull out of his jacket something he had shoplifted for her. She started to understand why his other friends were always so careful to limit their exposure to him, to stay outside his bubble. She did not want him to get caught, of course, but she couldn’t think of anything else that would stop him; and he never got caught.
What was worse was how bad he tried to make her feel for stressing. He mocked her for her fear of getting into trouble, bu
t then, when she insisted she wasn’t afraid of that—and she wasn’t, not really—he critiqued her even more sarcastically, saying she was like someone whose jail cell door had been opened but she was too scared, too guilty to walk through it. Jail cell? As was often the case, she could follow what he was saying only so far, but no further. He’d always seemed older than she was, and one day he’d let slip that in fact he was almost sixteen. He’d been left back, despite being the single smartest person she had ever met.
His provocations could turn casually mean. But she forgave him everything. She could feel herself committing that cardinal feminine sin, the one you saw on reality TV shows all the time: she thought she could save him.
She answered the kitchen-photo message with a plea to return to school the next day. He promised that he would, but then on Thursday there was still no sign of him. She missed half of first-period chem standing in the hall outside his homeroom waiting to see if he would show up. Glumly she went back to her own schedule, and then, out of nowhere—at ten in the morning, in Spanish class, at a moment when she wasn’t supposed to have her phone on but had forgotten to switch it off—she got a call. Mortified, she pulled the phone out of her bag and held it below the level of her desk, as if that would make any difference when it was blaring its ringtone; she started to shut it off, but then she recognized the phone number, even though she hadn’t seen or used it in many months now. It was still programmed into her contacts, though; above the number on the tiny screen was the word Home.
“Señorita Armstead?” the teacher said testily.
When lunch period came Sara ran into the corridor and turned her phone back on, but by the time she had two bars she’d decided not to return the call anyway, whoever it was from. The whole thing was too creepy. Like a horror movie: The call is coming from inside the house. Whoever it was hadn’t left a voice mail. She thought briefly, reflexively, about calling Cutter to get his take on it, but there was more than half a chance the call was from him in the first place—just using the time on his hands to prank her. They gave her only twenty-five minutes to eat anyway.