Only Fanelli went on, married to Anthea, fathering one beautiful child after another, hitting on thirty-two in London and Cannes and Monaco.
But at that moment, warmed by cash and Remy in the sun-blasted first-class cabin, I felt invincible. I loved the feeling of the movement of my body inside my clothes. I felt like the Christ child floating in the warm amniotic waters of his mother’s womb.
Yes, that’s it. I felt like the little baby Jesus, just waiting to be born on Christmas Day.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ball Gowns of the Eighties
You want to know the difference between a mouse and a rat? Here it is, simple. If the rodent is in your apartment, no matter how large and voracious it may be, it’s a mouse. If it’s in my apartment, no matter how small and timid, it’s a rat. Now let me tell you about Alexis Tayloe. In the first place, she was in my apartment.
To be specific, she was standing in my apartment wearing a navy blue satin ball gown made by Oscar de la Renta, with the $12,000 price tag still hanging from a beaded sleeve. Satin, as women are always telling you, is the cruelest fabric to wear, and Alexis Tayloe did not look particularly good in this creation, but there she was. In my apartment.
And she had breast cancer.
These two facts were in no way related, and only one fact, the price of the dress, was certifiably true. Perhaps I should go back a bit.
I went to one of those almost-but-not-quite Ivy League schools. The first night I was there, I noticed that almost all of my hallmates were wearing sweatshirts from the schools they really wanted to go to—Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, schools they had worked their whole lives to get into and then been turned away from with a banging of the door that was the first irrevocable failure of their young lives. The air was filled with the silent memory of opening that letter that said, basically, we were eighteen and already losers
for life.
In my last year at what I quickly learned to call “university” instead of the more prosaic “college,” when I won the fellowship, my girlfriend, who was two inches taller than I was and as beautiful as a sunrise, won the same fellowship, and we set off to have adventures, sailing to England on the France, in one of its last crossings, and we spent the year in London, she in drama school, I in art, a practice for which I had tremendous zeal and almost no talent. We did nothing but fight and have our hair cut at Sweeney’s
on Beauchamp Place. We lived in a rented room, the former tenant of which had been Heathcote Williams, the nervous-breakdown-riddled playwright, and we slept in a single bed from which you could see where Heathcote had written “Good Old Shortass” on the ceiling. One wondered during which nervous breakdown it had occured to him to stand on a chair with a Magic Marker in order to write that.
When we were happy, we stopped people dead on the street with our youth and loveliness. When we were unhappy, we lay in our single bed, trying not to touch each other’s skin, the light from outside the window illuminating Heathcote’s strange greeting.
Somewhere along the way, I met Alexis Tayloe. She was older than I was by maybe ten years, and she had a dull husband named Cyril who was always standing for a seat in Parliament somewhere. They were very rich, and had an immaculate townhouse on Onslow Square. Alexis was a graduate student of something obscure, and spent all her days in the British Library. They had a baby, who was attended almost solely by a live-in nanny. Alexis would study all day, and then have dinner out with friends, and then go home, where she would rush up to the nursery and wake the baby to embrace her and sing her a lullaby, even though she was already happily sound asleep. The baby, Olympia, developed a severe rash that wouldn’t go away, and the doctors determined that the rash was caused by being awakened in the middle of the night by a virtual stranger to be showered with kisses and off-key singing. She literally did not know who her own mother was. The result was that Alexis was told to leave the baby alone altogether.
So, Alexis and I met in a restaurant, while my girlfriend was rehearsing late for a production of some esoteric Jacobean play. The rehearsals often ran very late and, when she came home, I could tell she had been kissing somebody because her look was sly and her lips were puffy, and because, when she got into bed, she would immediately hug the wall and turn her head away. Some things you don’t need a diagram to understand. You just know.
So Alexis and I met, and after one of these dinners while the girlfriend was off making puffylips with some Bohemian theater person, Alexis and I got into a cab and rode around Hyde park for four hours, making love, something that gave me a special thrill, such a frisson of erotic play that I remember every kiss to this day. Fucking in a London cab is like making love in a sensory deprivation tank, except that the tank is moving and the meter is running. Alexis always paid, of course. Sometimes the fare was ten pounds, if she felt guilty about the baby, and sometimes it was sixty. Fucking in a London taxicab is not a memory that leaves you, ever, and we got into the habit of doing it two or three times a week, after which I would go home and crawl into bed with what might as well have been a six-foot two-by-four with puffy lips.
We never spoke of it. We just fought more, and every time we had a fight, we would get our hair cut at Sweeney’s, until eventually we were not only beautiful but perhaps the two most finely coiffed people in London.
I ran out of money, and the girlfriend moved in with the director of the Jacobean lip puffer, and my father refused to send me a penny, instead sending me a letter advising that I give up my pretensions to art and come home and do something solid, like go to business school. I could always paint as a hobby, he said, act in amateur theatricals.
Actually, Sweeney’s on Beauchamp Place was where the most mortifying thing that ever happened to me happened, one of those things that you know, even at the time, will shape your self-image forever. When my very first haircut was over, I tipped the barber an enormous amount, wanting him to think I was some mysterious big shot worthy of his ministrations, and he gave me a brush of a sort I had never seen before and I proceeded to brush my perfect hair with it, until he leaned and whispered in my ear that what he had given me was a clothing brush, sir, with the utmost degree of condescension that an Englishman can muster, which is a vast amount. I determined, from that moment, that I would never be less than accurate in my public behavior, lest I be revealed to be the country hick I, in reality, was. To this day I recall the mortification.
I had run completely out of money, so Alexis wrote me a check for a thousand dollars to get me home. She wrote me the check from her secret dollars account, money that rolled in every month from an accounting firm in Shaker Heights, and I went home, and then on to Wharton, and then to the poker game and then to my first year at The Firm. I never paid Alexis back her thousand dollars. It slipped my mind.
In your first year at The Firm, they paid you hardly anything, on the theory that you didn’t have any time to spend money anyway. The day went from six in the morning until after ten at night. At six, they brought in dinner. After ten, there was a fleet of black cars to take you home to your horrible little apartment.
My horrible little apartment was a fifth-floor walkup. With skylights. The ground floor was a Spanish restaurant and the second floor was a Chinese whorehouse, the remaining floors being filled with identical rat-infested apartments. Outside, the streets were alive all through the night with crackheads and hookers. God, New York was so filthy then. It was great. There were drugs everywhere for you to spend your discretionary income—of which there wasn’t any—on, and dance clubs that sprang up for two nights and then vanished, only to pop up a week later two doors down the street.
In these clubs, men danced bare-chested together, and the bathrooms were unisex, dark caverns of sin where you could buy pure cocaine while fucking Puerto Rican girls or boys, for whom, I discovered, I had a long-suppressed taste, depending on how I felt that night, or who touched your ass first. This idea of seeing men as objects of sexual desire both excited and terrified me. I kept tel
ling myself I was just experimenting, having fun. I certainly wasn’t a homosexual.
But anything was possible. Anything was allowed, suddenly. It was a vibrant cauldron of desire, New York in those days, desire and freedom and garbage—there was garbage everywhere all the time. It has now been totally and completely erased, until all that’s left is a mall for luxury goods. I could never understand why anybody would want frozen yogurt when you could have a blowjob in a dark doorway, the same doorway where the crackhead had held the knife to your throat two nights earlier, ripping the gold cross from your neck, leaving marks, and asking as he galloped off to the next rock of crack, “Hey! Is this real gold?” And what would you say in that situation?
Anyway, that apartment was known to all my friends as Hovel Hall, and we were all learning to cook out of Julia Child then, so I would prepare and serve boeuf braise Prince Albert while rats slunk beneath the stove. I made croquembouche in that apartment at three a.m., high on coke and gin, a recipe that started out, “First, make 306 cream puffs.”
And here was Alexis Tayloe, that first summer, in a blue satin ball gown and a tumor in her breast. Or so she said.
You have to understand that nobody ever spent the night at Hovel Hall. Ever. A friend had given me guest towels on which he had had embroidered, “Don’t be here when I wake up,” and now Alexis Tayloe’s bras were hanging over the rack of my shower stall. I had forgotten to pay her back her fucking thousand Shaker Heights dollars, so what choice, when she wrote from London and said she wanted to stay with me, did I have? Zilch choice, that’s what.
She had appeared with two enormous suitcases, and told me immediately that she had long since ceased to love me (I never knew she did in the first place), and that she had breast cancer and had come to New York, filthy, gorgeous New York, my New York, my sexy, drugged out, work-like-a-dog and play-like-a-tiger New York, for radiation treatments at Mt. Sinai. And so began our short life together.
I would get up at five every day, be at the office by six, scream and yell and feint and parry all day long with my fellow conspirators, until we had no voices left, then go out and eat chicken wings at some bar and get drunk on well vodka, and then I would go home after midnight, sometimes puking in the cab, often losing the coke on the floor of some darkened unisex bathroom downtown.
Now, I would go home to find Alexis Tayloe, still awake, expecting to be fucked, dressed like some middle-Europe dowager in some extravagant ball gown, which I would then laboriously take off her and leave in a bejeweled puddle on the floor, while we made desultory love, emotionless, sexless, which makes it hard if you’re the man, particularly if you’ve been doing cocaine for seven hours. But I was twenty-eight. I rose to the challenge and made listless love to this dying woman with large, fleshy breasts and a growing pile of ball gowns on my floor, crawled over by rats in the night.
It is very hard, when you’re on top of a woman with breast cancer, not to feel her breasts for lumps. I found nothing, but then I didn’t really know what I was looking for, and then we would sleep and I would wake at five to find her in my fucking bathrobe, her ample body spilling out of the terry cloth, my goddamned bathrobe, her flat, broad, bare feet on my filthy floor, and we would be off to work, I to The Firm, she to her radiation therapist at Mt. Sinai and then to her personal shopper, Mrs. Selma LePage, at Saks Fifth Avenue. Death and its approach gives you both an enormous amount of energy and a total disregard for going into debt, as the victims of the coming plague were to find out in a very short while. But this was before the plague, when everybody was having unprotected sex with any living being who happened to be there when your dick got hard.
And with Alexis, the day ended the same way, every day. I would pull up to my nearly derelict building, enjoy, for a moment, the rich smells of the Spanish restaurant, climb up past the whorehouse, watching the johns leave with their furtive glances, and on up to Hovel Hall, where I would find Alexis waiting in another, more elaborate ball gown. I asked her why she was buying so many.
“Oh, Cyril is always dragging me to some function or other. Charity things. Biafran children. Unwed mothers. I need to look the part of the politician’s wife.” One could only imagine the yawn factor involved in going to something called a function with Cyril, whom I had met once, and whom I found to be the human equivalent of landfill.
This went on for eleven days. Eleven days, eleven radiation treatments, which I began to suspect never actually took place, eleven ball gowns, at least $100,000 worth, the alleged lump in her breast that had either gotten smaller or not, if it ever existed at all.
I had made love to Alexis Tayloe eleven times, like a good boy, the perfect host. During the sessions, she lay there motionless and bored, almost so uninvolved that she found it difficult even to spread her legs. A woman can simply lie there and think of the mother country. A man has a rougher time when it comes to sex without desire. An erection is required. But I somehow found the thought of Alexis Tayloe’s imminent death, God forgive me, to be intensely erotic, so I made love to her as a necrophiliac dreams of corpses.
The last morning, shaved and showered in an effort to wash Alexis Tayloe’s smell off of my skin, I said my awkward good-bye, managing to do so without kissing her lips.
She said, “You never paid me back the thousand dollars you owe me. So I figure it would have cost me at least a hundred dollars a night to stay in a hotel, so I’m considering the loan paid back, since I’ve been here eleven nights.”
It took a lot to shock me in those days, or to hurt my feelings, since I had so few genuine feelings anyway, but I was appalled. I said, “Well, if you were hiring me as a rent boy, I would have thought the going rate was either nothing at all, or a good deal more than ninety dollars a night. Good-bye.”
With a sigh of relief I closed the door behind me, and when I came home that night, drunk at two a.m., she was gone without a trace except for the price tags from the ball gowns, which littered the floor, in an effort, undoubtedly, to fool the customs people in England into thinking that she always traveled with eleven brand-new ball gowns.
That was it. Alexis Tayloe was gone, and I was never to know whether or not the cancer was real, whether, if it was real, she had survived, whether Cyril ever got into Parliament, whether Olympia ever stopped getting a rash every time her mother picked her up.
There was only this: at Christmas, a card arrived, with Cyril and Alexis Tayloe printed on the inside with some vague nonreligious wishes for a happy holiday season, so it must have been the card they sent out to Cyril’s supporters, people they didn’t really know. The stamp on the card had a picture of the Queen of England on it.
At the bottom of the card, there was this note: “I can’t tell you how many ways I would like to hurt you. I can’t express how may ways I would like to cut you to the quick.”
It’s hard to talk about the eighties without using the word “fucking” a lot, since I spent a great deal of my time either in a rage or seeking out someone to have sex with me, or both simultaneously, even though it’s a word I rarely if ever use now.
When I looked at Alexis Tayloe’s printed Christmas card, not even engraved, merely printed, I thought, So much for fucking hospitality. Fuck you, Alexis. Fuck your breast cancer. Fuck your fucking dresses. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
And then I never thought about her again, except at Christmas when the cards would come in, although never again from Alexis Tayloe.
Luckily, almost nobody sends Christmas cards anymore.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Do’s and Don’ts of Rising and Falling
We used to play a game called Misery Poker. The greatest bartender in the world, Shirts, so called because he had been literally known to give the shirt off his back to some hopelessly drunk twenty-four-year-old who had puked all over his Turnbull & Asser shirt, would be the judge, the final arbiter. He presided behind the bar at the rundown place that was closest to The Firm, Callaway’s, and was always waiting with a smile and
a Tanqueray at two a.m., which is when we often reluctantly hung up the phone for the night. He’d listened to so many horror stories about selling and trading, about the terrors of the first years, that he could have been one of us.
The game was simple. If your workload was a bigger nightmare than any of your colleagues’, you got to drink for free all night. “I’ve pulled four all-nighters in a row.” “I’m staffed on three deals, and I haven’t seen daylight since Easter.” It was taken for granted that you would lie and embellish, to gain sympathy and get free drinks. Not that we needed anything for free, but drinking without paying felt like a mother’s soothing touch on your sick brow. How we loved it. Our misery. We ate and drank the rigors of our chosen profession, the road to ultimate riches stretching straight ahead of us, littered with land mines of misery. We had T-shirts printed up, emblazoned with The Firm’s logo on the front, and the slogan WE EAT OUR YOUNG printed in bold letters on the back. It was the Superbowl of hard jobs, which is why we put up with the shit, because, if you survived, the rewards were tangibly enormous. Our greatest goal was to invoke fear in the hearts of colleagues and clients alike. And we thrived on it.
Except not everybody thrived. Two guys died in the same month in 1984, marking clearly where at least some of the land mines lay. Both deaths were tragic, of course, but each was also irritating, creating a caesura of silence and schadenfreude in the otherwise unblemished culture of success. I mean, somebody dies, for God’s sake, you have to stop betting against oil futures in Dubai for at least a few minutes, by which time the whole canvas of the world’s economy may have changed, leaving you no longer in the picture.
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