“You don’t love me,” she said one day.
“But I do,” I lied. “I do love you.”
“Well, you don’t love me enough!” she yelled back, and I thought to myself, Define that, please. When is enough enough? But, for her, as they say in Texas, “Too much ain’t enough.”
So we broke up. I had met a photographer, a rich, good photographer who looked, in her retro way, like Tamara de Lempicka. She lived on a large allowance from her mother, who had buckets of money from her second husband, and came to our relationship with Tiffany silver for twenty-four, and that Tiffany china that has a black border with chinoiserie painted around it, also for twenty-four, and I wanted
her like the desert wants rain, and I broke up with the eyebrow girl.
“We’re turning into the kind of people I don’t want to be,” I said. And left her at her kitchen table, this time genuinely surprised. She had thought our life, fighting like two cats in a bag and then making love that would cause the angels to sing, was just fine.
Photographer and I moved in together. Her mother was on everybody’s best-dressed list, at least in Philadelphia, and she had an attic full of couture clothes dating back to the fifties and had Norman Norell’s home number in her phone book, and the photographer spent her days taking magical pictures of her friends in her mother’s clothes and showed them at a very prestigious gallery. She took my picture naked for my thirtieth birthday, and of all the girls and all the detritus of all those liaisons, it is the best of the souvenirs I keep. Just a look at it and it all comes back to me and I just stare and say I’m sorry over and over and over. I owe them all my most sincere apology, but as occasionally happens, if I pass one of them on the street, they invariably look at me with such hatred that I am frightened to speak to them. Sometimes they have husbands and babies with them, and I think of my child, which I learned about in a message left on my answering machine.
We met. She claimed I owed her a hundred dollars for some reason, and an abortion. I gave her the money, and I arranged everything, and took her in at seven one morning and waited in the waiting room, learning household tips like how to keep your stockings from running by keeping them in the freezer, about how to polish your dining room table with mayonnaise, and then it was over, and she left with me and I put her in a cab, still surprised, and we never saw each other or spoke again.
I wept at the funeral, where her great and magnificent height was reduced to ashes in a box eight inches square. Death reduces us so. On the way out of the church, after saying hello to her large and universally tall family, I stopped to talk to a mutual friend, well, her best friend, actually, who asked why I was crying so much, and I confessed it was not so much for her as for my lost child. I wanted children.
She got scattered into the sea off of Montauk Point and I went for a stint at Miss Valentine Lutrell’s Home for Persons Who Have Lost Their Minds, Either Through Negligence, Recklessness, or Theft. I was there for eight weeks, and didn’t get a single phone call, except from my mother, who said, “What did you do this time?” and I hung up on her. As though, whatever I had done, I had done it to her, and did it all the time.
I don’t have such a bad record, if you ask me. It’s funny about being in the slammer. I’ve been four times, twice in rehab for various addictions, and twice to the loony bin. Not a bad record for somebody my age. I look at it like taking the car in to be serviced before the engine burns or freezes, whatever engines do.
So, the cake eaten and now suffering the trampling and gnawing of rats, the tie hung up with the dozens of others, I sit and wait for my son to call. Over the years, I have taken possession of him or he of me, and I have watched him grow, and never missed a Little League game or a school play. Hi, Dad. He’s a good man. Grown now, and married.
The phone, however, will not ring, will never ring, except a call from some telemarketers whom I will engage in conversation until they are sure I am a lunatic and sign off.
Other than that, what is there to offer you by way of reparations? A tiny parting of the curtain. Her name was Diana. Her name at birth was Dianne, but she changed it. She pictured it on a marquee, on a magazine cover, and Diana just seemed more elegant. Another surprise.
And mine? My name? It hardly matters. When I go to work now, it’s on the nametag I am forced to wear. Ever since 9/11, wearing a name tag gives me the willies. Once my name was on my license plate. But nobody even looks at my name tag, and the ladies who write my name on my birthday cake have forgotten it before the icing sets. I know it comes late in the game, but the only thing that matters is what I would say after my son called to say Hi, Dad.
I’m sorry.
CHAPTER THREE
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death
When it came time to fire me, it took our man behind Napoleon’s desk, three people from HR, my immediate supervisor, and four lawyers. I could hardly blame them. They had done everything they could. It started with good, sound advice, then formal counseling, then two rehabs, three fat files of “incidents,” as they called them, and finally, a meeting in the Big House where nothing had changed since the cards were first dealt, except that the model of the yacht had been replaced by a bigger model of an even bigger yacht, one hundred and sixty-two feet of teak. All this so that I could be summoned bright and early, seven in the morning, to a meeting where the only thing that was to be said of substance was two words.
It was on a Thursday. It’s always on a Thursday, so you have a long weekend to kill yourself.
I stood there, the exact model of the white collar drunk and addict, clean-shaven, buffed nails, whacked out of my skull.
The silence lasted what seemed like an eternity, not a movement, not a breath, as my grandmother used to say on particularly hot days. Finally, The Man spoke.
“You’re fired,” he said.
I didn’t flinch. The sweat on my back was soaking through my $5,000 suit. The HR people took notes, the lawyers looked at their own reflections in their highly polished shoes.
“Do you want to know why?” he said.
I didn’t speak or move.
“Do. You. Want. To. Know. Why.” His voice was rising perceptibly.
“Of what possible use would that be to me?” I answered.
“Then get out of my office,” he yelled, causing me, for the first time, to flinch.
I walked out. The eight secretaries did not look up at me. They were embarrassed. I heard his voice behind me, yelling for real now.
“Wait! You! Get back in here!”
I stopped. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I feel like that. I’m not doing it.”
The secretaries, all eight of them, now looked up at me, horrified. Nobody had ever said no before. Not to that voice.
“Yes, you are,” he said forcefully. “If you ever want to work on the Street again, you’ll get your ass back in this office this second.”
I knew he was right. I turned and walked back into the office. He got up from behind his desk and came around to my side.
He stood in front of me, glaring at me with bald hatred in his eyes. I had a good eight inches on him, but, somehow, he stared at me at eye level. We stood. We just stood, him bristling with loathing, me sweating so heavily it ran down my cheeks and dripped onto my Charvet tie.
How long did it last? Two minutes? Three? Whatever. It went on for a long time.
He erupted like Vesuvius, spewing venom and spit as a volcano spews lava. I have never heard a voice like that, before or, thank God, after.
“NOW GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY OFFICE!”
Manners are such an elusive thing. Once you have them, they are on you like your skin. You have them all the time, every hour of every day, and they never leave you bereft.
Outside his thirty-eighth-floor office, there was a sudden swirl of brilliant birds, brilliant colors, soaring and drifting, so alive, so precious in their gentle beauty, driven, in the early morning light, to fly with joy in unimaginably beautiful patterns. My only wi
sh at that moment, was that I could jump through the window and join them, dazzle with color and swoop, before I fell all thirty-eight floors to land on top of one of the black cars waiting, as they eternally did, on the street.
Instead, I held out my hand. I actually thrust out my arm to shake his hand in farewell.
He slapped me in the face.
I left his office, leaving behind my last shred of dignity, my one triumphant gesture. I left, and I left behind a life that had once been mine and would never be mine again.
How sad, how beautifully elegant the swoon of birds.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Sweetheart of My Youth
My wife Carmela divorced me the day I got fired. Despite the fact that we loved each other with our whole hearts, and had lived together for five years before we got married in a half-million-dollar wedding in East Hampton, only a year before, with both Lee Radziwill and Henry Kissinger in attendance. She was a smart girl, and she could easily see when the last card in the deck had been played.
At our wedding reception, on the dunes, in front of the house we had been given as a wedding present, klieg lights had been shone on the ocean so the guests could see the breakers rolling in, just for us.
She wanted everything, loft, furniture, art. I gave it to her with a glad heart. She was used to nice things, and I loved her and I had nice things, so I just let her take it all. When the guy came to serve me the papers, I knew what they said before I opened them, and, still, all I could think of was my love for her, the only real love I had ever known, and I wished her all the best even as I saw that she intended never to see me again.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead
The details haunted me as I read the document. Never again would we hire a caterer and white-coated waiters to host dinners for twenty-four. We would never tandem water ski in St. Barth’s. Worst of all, we ended without issue, as they say. I would never have the children who would adore me and warm my old age. My youth ended in that moment.
She gave me twenty-four hours to get my personal
effects—I love that phrase, like something out of a murder crime scene: “to get my personal effects”—out of the apartment. She went to stay at the Plaza, and have lunch at Grenouille with her mother, who was practiced at the art of divorce, having done it three times.
Fanelli, my raucous but lovable coworker and my best friend, called. “Here’s what we do. Get three rolls of quarters, meet me at some dive bar, and we drink ourselves stupid in the daytime while you call every headhunter and contact you have in town. In the world. London. Geneva. Tokyo. We’ll get you set. Don’t worry.”
And so we did. All those quarters dropping into the box. The phone ringing and ringing, the polite secretaries who greeted me as though I were a brother home from the war, yet refused to put my calls through to whoever it was I needed to speak to.
I had gone from BSD to almost a nonperson when The Man slapped my face, a story that racketed through the whole game, so that everybody knew it within an hour. I had been the most valuable bull in the pen. Suddenly I was horsemeat, headed for the slaughterhouse, and nobody would take my calls.
Ever again. That much was clear. Crystal.
Carmela had heard about it from her stepfather before the swirling birds came to roost, and he instructed her step by step about how to set out to leave me with nothing. The first thing she did was empty the joint bank accounts, leaving me only a small but secret stash in Grand Cayman, and put our money, once mine, then ours, now hers, securely in her name in her stepfather’s bank. Then to the lawyer’s (stopping on the way for a manicure and pedicure), where she was coached about what to do to ensure that there was nothing left in my name. She ran her perfectly manicured hands through her perfectly disarranged hair and signed document after document until there was nothing left to get.
I loved her with every cell of my being. She was in my brain and in my blood, and the loss of her was infinitely worse than the slap in the face. And I know she loved me. Or at least she loved me when I was on the come. And still. And still. She knew it, and I knew it. The ink in my pen had turned from blue to black, and whatever contracts had been signed, even promises made from the heart, whispered pillow to pillow in the night, were null and void.
I resented nothing. Didn’t have the strength.
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there a second Troy for her to burn?
Irreconcilable differences. The two saddest words in the English language.
I called the movers, and watched as my beautiful things went onto racks and into boxes, suits and shirts and shoes that were worth the price of a house. I took the sheets, so beautiful they might have comprised a museum exhibit. I took the towels, monogrammed with my initials. I took the toothpaste.
All these things went to Hovel Hall, my rat-infested starter apartment, and as they entered the doors of that apartment, after climbing five flights of steps, you could see the disappointment and sympathy on the faces of the movers, and I tipped them overly generously so they could forget that they had ever been in those shabby rooms, seen the failure inherent in that sad move.
I looked around the apartment. Hopeless. I began to put my things away in the inadequate closets. A bad wind was rising, all of the world’s seven malevolent winds were blowing in my heart, flattening and desiccating the landscape, once verdant, into a desert.
I had never loved anybody more than I loved Carmela at that moment. And I knew it was permanent. Romance, Inc., had shut its doors forever.
Forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Place I Really Live
I wake up in the dark. Au bout de la nuit, 4:06 on the LED. Take a leak. Cigarette. I know I shouldn’t; I mean, in general, generally speaking, nobody should, not after everything we know, not after we’ve watched loved ones die, not to mention movie stars, but I do. I’m an addict. But I especially shouldn’t smoke at 4:06 when I have a hope of getting back to sleep. It makes my heart race.
It makes the heavy covers feel like prison garb. It makes you feel like you live in a cheap bungalow in Los Angeles, California, in a noir decade.
If I did live in Los Angeles, I would never call it L.A. But if I lived in Las Vegas, I would always call it Vegas. These are the games your mind plays when it’s 4:07 and your heart is racing from the nicotine intake.
I turn on the radio and listen to alternative rock from the University of Pennsylvania for a while. My Morning Jacket. Placebo. Ray LaMontagne, who used to work in a shoe factory. Pink Martini, a twelve-member West Coast band that sold 650,000 copies of their self-made CD from their basement.
I keep the volume low, and I feel completely free of anxiety, even though my heart is racing and I’m excited about tomorrow.
Tomorrow, or today, actually, is the first Tuesday of December. On the first Tuesday of every month, I go look at apartments.
I work at Barnes and Noble, and I have Monday and Tuesday off, since I work on Saturdays, and I work the late shift on Sundays, after I go to church. I go to church every week, and put money in the plate, even though I have long ago lost my faith. I guess it’s a kind of hope I feel, a hope that faith and a sense of the miraculousness of life will return to me. It hasn’t, and the priests’ voices drone on in that way that is supposed to be comforting but is actually kind of irritating, but I still go. I sit, in one of my decades-old suits, in a sea of mink and the finest tailored wool, and then I go to work, still in my suit.
I am the only clerk in the store who wears hard-soled shoes. Even though it makes my feet hurt, and even though nobody ever looks at my feet, I wear leather-soled shoes every day I work there. It makes me feel more like a member of the professional class, and less like somebody who just swipes your card. I’m very fastidious, and the kids in their Barnes and Noble T-shirts think it’s weird, but I banter with them, banter is the word, and I know everything they know about alternative rock, and
I’m good at helping them out with the inevitable glitches in their computer cash registers, and so we get along fine.
Let’s not talk about what I do with my days off the other three weeks of the month. Let’s not even get into that. I turn the phone off, for one thing, even though hardly anybody ever calls me, my sister from upstate once in a while, but let’s not go into that.
I go to the grocery store and buy a whole week’s worth of groceries, even though I mostly eat in the diner around the corner. I just like the way a full refrigerator looks, the endless possibilities. I pay for the groceries with my debit card. At the end of the week, I throw out stuff that’s gone bad and go get other stuff.
I take the laundry to the wash and fold, the sheets to the Chinese lady who does them for me. I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the same twelve paintings. I have a membership.
But it’s all just normal. You probably do the same things, on your day off. Take your shirts to the laundry. Run an errand. Take a nap. Work in your woodworking shop, whatever your hobby is.
My hobby is looking at apartments I will never move into.
On Monday, I go in and make the appointment. I always dress well, not too well, not a suit or anything, but a nice blazer and a pair of trousers with double pleats, fresh from the dry cleaners so the pleats are razor-sharp.
They make you fill out an application; how much you make, what you’re looking for, how much you’re willing to spend. I always lie. I say that I’m a fashion retail executive. If they ask, I’ll say I work at Saks. I put down that I make $375,000 a year. I put down an address where I do not live, and a phone number that is one digit off my real phone number. It’s not like you have to show proof or anything. You could be anybody. Everybody does it, so you don’t get the follow-up calls.
The Fall of Princes Page 3