The Fall of Princes

by Robert Goolrick

  I finally moved out of Hovel Hall and into a small apartment in the Village. I was lucky to get it. My rent is stable, even though prices in the Village have gone through the roof. Every week, when I change the sheets, I look at the half of the bed that has not been slept in, as pristine as the day the sheets were changed, and I wonder what happened to the possibilities of my youth. No one has ever slept in that bed but me, and I have only slept on one side of it. In the same chaste, deathlike position every night. All those years. All those years that have passed, in the utter silence of that apartment—silent except for the clink of a knife against a fork, the shutting of a cabinet door, the opening of an envelope.

  My one extravagance is sheets. They are fine percale cotton, simple but exquisite, and I have them washed and pressed by a Chinese lady in the neighborhood. It doesn’t cost that much, and it is a dying art, pressing a sheet perfectly. Jackie Onassis, they say, had her sheets changed twice a day; once when she got up in the morning, and again after her nap. Imagine.

  I am not that extravagant, but ironed sheets is one thing I insist on. My last, my only extravagance. At night, on Mondays when I change the sheets, when I get into my freshly made bed, when I feel and smell the crisp percale, I think of it all, and I am perfectly happy.

  And I am still loved. I always will be loved. On the street. In a roomful of strangers. Walking up the stairs at the opera, which I attend twice a year, unnoticeable in the jeweled crowd. When I go on a cruise every five years, a single face in that happy crowd of couples, I know something they don’t know. I am loved. Holly gave me that, and it cannot be taken away. I have never forgotten. I amloved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  She Walks in Beauty

  We were short-handed. We often are, in the summer when it’s a good beach day. Come August, a beautiful day, half the clerks call in sick. So I was filling in at the registers. It’s so easy now. It hardly takes any thought or skill at all. Everything is done for you. Scan. Swipe. Sign. Transaction over. I can’t remember the last time I saw cash.

  The hands were lovely, and wore no jewelry at all. Perfect nails. She had two books, popular novels. On top of them was a $50 bill. I looked up, and it was as though no time had elapsed at all since I had last seen her. Not the twenty years it had been. Not a nanosecond. Time, or an assembled team of the world’s finest surgeons, had been good to her.

  Carmela had always been lovely, and there she stood, unambiguously and unimaginably more lovely than ever. She always said that the secret to growing old gracefully lay in wearing a little less makeup every day, and that morning she had no makeup on at all, her hair tied back in one of those things, tendrils still damp against her neck. I stared at her eyes, glittering like sun reflected on an azure sea. Her hair, once dark, was now streaked with highlights. Women do that as they age, they lighten, become air, their souls ephemeral with memory and experience. Men become more ponderous with the passing of the years, heavy with regret.

  “I . . . I just came from Pilates. I never thought . . .”

  “You look astonishing. As always.”

  “I look like a sweaty rat on a barge.”

  “Queen of the barge rats, then. As ever. I’ve . . . well I’ve been thinking—”

  “You were never very thoughtful.”

  “—of you a lot lately. Of those days, and all that happened, all that passed between us, and, well . . . I’ve just been thinking, is all.”

  “It went by so quickly. The flare of a match.”

  “I remember every second of it.”

  “Was I horrid?” She glanced over her shoulder. “We’re holding up the line. They’ll riot soon.”

  “I’ll throw them crusts of bread. Have lunch with me. Not horrid. Ever.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Not for old times sake. I have something I want to say to you. I’ve been thinking about it for, well, for years, and it has to be said. I never thought the chance would come, but here it is, one in a million. Have lunch with me. I promise, no damage will happen to either one of us.”

  “Let me just pay for the books . . . Please, Rooney, I . . .”

  Nobody had called me that for years. I took her money, our hands touched briefly, and once again, when I put the change in her palm. “I can’t . . . let me . . .” she turned to go. The next person stepped forward, but Carmela turned back.

  “What time? Where?”

  I named one of our favorite restaurants.

  “It’s been closed for years. Heartrending. Tragic, really.”

  “Name your favorite.”

  “Marea. The kind of place we always liked.” She spelled it. “Do you know it?”

  “No. I’ll look it up.”

  “Central Park South. One o’clock.”

  I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early. It was very fancy, in an austere, cream-colored sort of way. Beautiful people at lovely tables, the room bristling with servers intent on doing one thing at a time exactly correctly. The summer glare from the street softened by curtains of silk gauze, saffron colored.

  They put me at an obscure table for two near the kitchen, and I knew Carmela wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t have the heart or the clout to ask for another. Why would they give it to me? They probably wondered how I had come to wander into their restaurant in the first place, The table was next to the silverware station, and the calm of the room was constantly disturbed by the busboys hurling clean silverware into the drawers, or the waiters more gently taking out what they needed, piece by piece.

  She walked in from the torrid day at one fifteen, carrying a shopping bag, and she looked as though she moved in a cloud of air-conditioning. Red shoes, and nobody ever wore red shoes better, a pale, rose-flowered silk dress, carrying a red, wide-brimmed straw hat in her right hand. She looked expensive. Also fresh, perfectly at home in the world, in that way some New Yorkers of means have. Lovely from toe to head, her eyes concealed by dark glasses that she took off with a grace that defies description. A lowering of the head. A lifting of the glasses, revealing the eyes. A slight smoothing of her hair. Stunning.

  She spoke graciously to the maître d’, who actually kissed her on both cheeks, and he then led her to me, but decided instantly to change our table to one for four in the center of the restaurant, like the crown jewel. She gracefully laid her red hat on one of the empty place settings, and took no notice of the fuss that was being made of her. A kind of all-encompassing and gracious gratitude pervaded her every gesture. The busboy might have been her long-lost son.

  “Hello, Giovanni. How is your mother?”

  “Very well, signora. She comes home soon.”

  “You must miss her.”

  “I miss her cooking. Flat or sparkling?”

  “Sparkling, I think. It’s so hot out.” He turned to go. “And a glass of champagne. The usual.”

  She turned to me. “I gather you don’t drink anymore.”

  “Why would you say that? I don’t, but how did you know?”

  “Because, my sweet, once-upon-a-time husband, that is the arc of your life. Wretched excess followed by pious sobriety.”

  “I’m hardly pious.”

  “You’d be the first, in my experience.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Sober libertine, then? Did you become a homosexual, as I always thought you would?”

  “I did. Not that I march in parades or anything.”

  “Not Out Loud and Proud?”

  “Just not out loud.”

  “And is it fun, being a homosexual?” Her smile was not in the least sarcastic.

  “I’m not very good at it, to tell the truth. I was better with the other. I was a killer with women. How about you?”

  “Children, yes. Nicholas, Jack, and Carmela. I couldn’t help myself. Husband, not at the moment.”

  Before I could speak—and I didn’t want to speak because we were too quickly falling into the old ways, the thin, heartless badinage—the water appeared and was poured,
not a single drop on the pristine tablecloth, and then the waiter came to take our order.

  “You’ll have the skate?” I asked Carmela.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’ve never known you not to order the skate whenever it was on the menu.”

  “That was years ago, darling. Years and years.” She turned to the waiter, “I’ll have the skate.” She turned back to me with a radiant smile full of perfect teeth with which she had not been born.

  “I have a present for you.” She handed me the shopping bag. Inside was a mink lap robe, lined with chamois. Exquisite. Vastly expensive. At the height of summer. Something told me that somebody else had once given it to Carmela, perhaps as recently as last Christmas.

  “I know you were always mad for exquisite bedclothes.”

  “It’s magnificent. Thank you.”

  “You were saying?”

  I put the bag on the floor by my seat. “I wanted to say something. I’ve been waiting for years to say it, and, when it’s said, we can talk about anything you want. Anything but that.”

  “Your lunch. Your rules.” The smile was gone from her face, but not the radiance.

  I paused a minute, took a sip of water. I wanted to, had to get this right. This moment would only come once. “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you. Totalement, completment, tragiquement. It was at that dinner at my loft. You brought the saber dancers. You had on red shoes, like today, and a red suit, and ruby and diamond earrings. The minute I saw you, I was lost in love. And then things happened as they did, and, for a time, you were mine. You were my world. And then the world fell apart, my fault entirely. But I have never stopped loving you. Not for a minute, not for a second. Never. I love you still.”

  She sat for a long minute, looking, not at me, but at the chic diners in the exquisite room. Then she turned to me, and the full force of her eyes burned for the last time into my heart. She reached out a hand as though she were about to touch me, on the arm, on the and, and then she withdrew and put her hands in her lap.

  She looked at me, then, not with love or passion, but with her whole heart’s worth of sympathy and compassion. “I know” was all she said, with a tenderness and a sweetness that would be enough to last a lifetime.

  I thought of Holly. I said, “I’m telling you this because the greatest sin is to love somebody and not to tell your love. If you stay silent, they don’t know, when they walk down the street or into a room full of strangers, that they are loved. You are loved, and that can never be taken from you. It’s not much. It’s all I have. Maybe it’s enough.”

  “I’ll hold it in my heart for as long as I live. Thank you.” I could tell she meant it genuinely.

  The food arrived, and we ate in silence, the way couples who have been married for twenty-five years do. Occasionally one of us would mention the weather, or the baseball season, but never the past, and never the present. We were no longer a part of the conversation we were having. It was just generic talk. We might have been strangers thrown together at a table on a train or a cruise. But it felt nice. Comfortable. I was going to be late getting back to work, but I didn’t care.

  Carmela had sorbet and an espresso. She didn’t rush, and I was grateful for that. I would never see her again, at least not to speak to, and I wanted it all, the flowered silk dress, the carmine hat and shoes, to burn themselves into my mind so I could hold on to every detail forever. And she knew that, she who would pick up the hat and gather her bag and go back to her life, her children, to whatever awaited her that afternoon. Hair appointment. A meeting with a decorator to pick new curtains for the library.

  But it couldn’t last. It was now after two, and she gathered up her bag and the red hat, and shook my hand in leaving.

  I said in parting, “Carmela? It was nice, though, wasn’t it? For a while?”

  She paused. “It was . . . amusing,” she said. “There’s a difference.”

  I watched until she disappeared, Carmela speaking to the maître d’, and then walking out the revolving doors and into the sunshine, where she put on her sunglasses and turned toward Fifth Avenue, walking without haste.

  When I called for the check, I was told the lady had taken care of everything. Somewhat embarrassed, but also touched, I left forty dollars on the table and went out into the stifling heat and walked back to my job, to the bookstore, to the whole of my ordinary life.

  The next day, I went to a jeweler and bought a wedding ring. On the inside, I had engraved “Love Always—Carmela.” I wear it because when I do, people on the street can look at me and see that there is some woman in this world who loves me enough to marry me. It gives me comfort, and a certain sense of pride.

  And, on some days, certain good days, or some nights when I slip into my crisp and perfect sheets, I almost believe it.

  Love always.

  Carmela.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Coda

  We were closing the store for the night. It was my night to lock up. One of the young employees, this marvelous girl named Tara who had every kind of tattoo and piercing available on the planet, was restocking the shelves, but she was totally inept at it, and so I pitched in, and finished in minutes what it would have taken her another hour to do.

  We checked the café on the third floor for any bums or homeless people who might be hiding out there for

  the night, but found nobody. Not tonight. As I was turning out the lights, Tara turned to me and said, with enormous admiration, “Man, you really, like, know what you’re doing.”

  I turned to her. “ ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’ ”

  “What?” she said. “Could you say that again?”

  Acknowledgments

  This book was intended as a paean to a city that no longer exists, and a tour of a magical and lethal landscape for those who never knew it. It was marvelous, rich, and dynamic, and in it lived the sweethearts and the darlings of my youth. Some were destroyed, but most were not, and to all, both living and dead, I offer this scrapbook of our youth. It would not have been written had their memories not stayed so clear and cherished in my heart. I embrace them all.

  Anne and Mame Kennedy, sisters who came and conquered, Peter Nadin, Katherine Rayner Johnson, who moved me to love her profoundly at first sight, in every detail down to the red shoes, and whose memory is alive and with me every day, may she live forever, Ty French and Rick Grimaldi, gone savagely and too soon, though not uncared for, Dale Engelson Sessa, who found her prince, Shirts, who once told me, “A clean bar is a happy bar,” good words to live by, Holly Woodlawn, who left me knowing that I would never in my life be fully alone, David Gould, a king and a priest and a true and good friend unlike any other, Jeanne Voltz and The Dutchman, Catherine and David Dunn, Eugene Orza, Nancy and Bonnie Axthelm, the Sisters Karamozov, Bob and Lynn who came and never left, whom I admire and thank every day with all my heart, and, of course, Hazel and Mariah, Susan Sarandon, who illuminates far many more lives than my own, Jean Pagliuso, Tommy Cohen, Diane Sokolow, John Loeffler, Kathleeen Seltzer and Diana Van Fossen, two more graceful creatures never walked the earth, Larry and Penny Bach, Sally and Larry Mann, Tommy Spencer, Nora Champe Leary, Dana Hoey, Jan Groover, who showed me finally what I looked like, Dan Zanes, who saved my life, Alexandra Como Saghir, so many, so many . . . if I have forgotten to mention you, do not think you are forgotten, their names and faces and voices fill my mind at random moments every day, and my love for them endures everything—the changing of the times, the fluctuations of fortune, the cruelties of age. In my mind they are happy and well and alive. I hope I die before they do. To live without them would be unbearable.

  Also, for Lynn Nesbit and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein. I hope and trust they know why.

  And, of course, for Guy Trebay, who knew and survived the city far better than I, with grace and brilliance, and whose genius for friendship surpasses any I have ever known. More anon.

 
acknowledgments

  ROBERT GOOLRICK is the author of a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It, and two previous novels, Heading Out to Wonderful and A Reliable Wife, the latter a #1 New York Times bestseller. He lives in Virginia. Find him online at robertgoolrick.com. (Author photo by Robert Andrew Watkins.)

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  © 2015 by Robert Goolrick.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary

  perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN 978-1-61620-538-6