sex.lies.murder.fame.
Page 6
But, alas, it wasn’t. He scanned the top of the page. This was the Sunday Times— the New York Times. It wasn’t Page Six. If it was, if this had been the Post, then there might have been another explanation. It could have been a mistake. The Post was prone to mistakes on occasion—that was half the fun of reading it. He’d fucked a girl who used to work there who’d regaled him with a tale of how, one night, she and a couple of disgruntled employees got drunk and made Photoshop pics that bogusly matched people together. They put fake heads on known bodies and fake bodies under known heads, and all of it managed to slip into production unchecked. People were fired, retractions were made, but it was the Post. They were used to taking heat. Penn remembered laughing really hard at the silly girl’s story. It was post-coital laughter. He tended to be generous after sex, less intellectually exacting than usual.
But this wasn’t the Post. It was the New York Times, just like the header said, and there was his graduate-school classmate, one suckass Adam Carville, in the company of the world’s most renowned literati (and titterati). The Times had run an additional page of photos recapping the event, which had taken place during the week. Penn had heard that Adam was a nominee. He’d gotten a group e-mail about it from one of his former professors. But he’d rejected the thought, as though refusing to believe it would make it not so.
Penn found himself imagining what would have happened if some unupdated zealot had decided to carry out the rescinded fatwa on Rushdie and it went badly awry, taking out Adam Carville instead. Adam’s blood, guts, and gore all over Rushdie, Mailer et al. Toni’s mouth hanging open in horror, her panged keen frozen in time, captured for posterity. Jessica Rabbit’s bloodstained boobs. Now that was a picture he would have loved to have seen. That kind of photo would have surely been in the Post. The Post only cared about the trashy stuff. Which was appropriate when it came to Adam Carville.
Penn crushed the paper into a tight ball, hurled it to the floor, and gave the spare wooden chair across from him a hard horizontal kick. The thing hit the wall and disassembled at once, a frail house of sticks. IKEA.
“Fuck!” he screamed, now standing over the broken chair. “You rickety piece of shit!”
He stared at a little white tag on the underside of a slat of wood from the rickety piece of shit. Like everything at IKEA, the chair had a name. Per the white tag, this broken creature had been dubbed Bernby. The fact that the chair was introducing itself at this inappropriate moment reignited his rage. Penn stamped his right foot down onto Bernby, snapping him into splinters. There was some relief in that. Some, not much. It still didn’t erase the reality of those photos of the worst writer in his entire M.F.A. program at Columbia University in the New York Times (!!), beaming astride the lions of literature. Morrison! Epstein! Rushdie! Sexually submissive big-tittied authors! What the fuck!
He should just call it a night, he thought. He needed to. But sleep these days was a reluctant bedmate, making rare appearances, if bothering at all.
That he didn’t wear such internal turmoil and restlessness was a testament to his impeccable genes. To see Penn in all of his lean, sculpted Nordic perfection was not to notice the heated thought weaving in and out, uncontrollably, as evidenced by how he now sat in front of his desktop computer with its oversized, illuminated flat screen, punched in “www.nytimes.com,” and pulled up all the photos from that dreaded National Book Awards ceremony. He couldn’t stop himself. It was a train wreck begging for eyes. He had to see more, even though he knew it would have his colon lurching for the rest of the night.
He got up, went over to the TV, and put in the DVD of Wagner’s Die Walküre. It was the one conducted by James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera with the fabulous Jessye Norman, his mother’s good friend, in the role of Sieglinde. Penn considered the great diva nothing less than a goddess. He had watched the DVD five hundred times too many, just for her, to the point that it was now one of his main soundtracks of solace. He had imagined himself Siegmund to her Sieglinde. Her soaring voice soothed him. He needed to be soothed right now. This Adam situation had gotten him stirred up plenty.
It was a long DVD, just over four hours, enough to get him through his continued investigations on the Internet. He adjusted the TV to a volume loud enough to appreciate the music and Jessye’s voice. Not too loud. His neighbors had a tendency to get touchy at times.
He was barely back at his desk in front of the computer when stomping could be heard from the apartment above.
“Fuck you,” he mumbled. “Just leave me alone.”
Countless surfed sites later, he was still sitting at the computer, the back of his neck hot with sweat. He had the phone in his hands, punching the buttons.
“Yeah,” came the familiar grunt. “It’s late. What do you want?”
“Did you see the paper today?”
“It’s two o’clock, man. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“Adam Carville is in the fucking New York Times. His picture’s all over the Net. He’s on the official website of the National Book Foundation.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Merc, seriously. How could this happen? You know this guy. He’s a bucket of rocks. And now he’s being feted like he’s the fucking Second Coming. What the fuck is that?”
“Three fucks in under a minute. That’s my limit. Good night.”
Dial tone. Penn called right back.
“Go to bed, man. Stop calling me. You knew he was a nominee. We talked about it. This is not news. Stop sweating some shit you can’t control.”
“But Merc, it’s Adam Carville. This is a man who says ‘mischievious,’ ‘simular,’ and ‘irregardless.’”
“He’s still in the paper.” Merc yawned. “Irregardless of how he speaks.”
“You’re kidding me, right? You’re just trying to fuck with me. Adam Carville blows. We’ve had a million conversations about that.”
“What difference does it make? Get over it. Focus on making your own shit jump off. I don’t know why you’re even panicking. You know your stuff is good.”
Penn was so discouraged from the pictures of Adam and Merc’s cavalier response, he could feel his chest constricting. He cranked up the TV. The orchestra was deep into “Ride of the Valkyries,” playing the song with vengeful gusto. Penn had lowered the music to appease the stomping earlier, but he didn’t care now. He needed to hear something loud and booming. The three-hundred-pound gorilla in the apartment above him pounded the floor. The sound resonated throughout the room, above the music.
“Is that the fat man?” Mercury asked.
“Who else?”
“Turn that down and go to bed before he calls the cops on you again. What happens to Adam has nothing to do with you. His book struck a chord, and that’s that with that.”
“What did you say?”
“I said Adam’s book struck a—”
Penn was halfway across the room. The phone had been thrown to the floor. He shot an angry glance at Bernby, still fractured in the corner, streamed some consciously pissed thoughts about how much he hated IKEA with all its sleek, cheap trappings and the fact that it was all he was able to afford, then made his way toward Ekeberg, his sleek, cheap IKEA bed.
Two hours later, he was fucking his neighbor from two floors up, a broad in every sense of the word, with fleshy gams and a rough tongue, which he liked her to flick around his bum, relishing the sensation of the cold wetness against his puckered flesh. She had twenty-four-hour availability, and a wide, sturdy back. She was flat on it, and he was Paul Revere.
Forty minutes later, he was writing in his journal.
Thank goodness for Eunice. If it wasnt for her deep pussy and low self-esteem, I might have gone stone postal today.
Pennbook A. Hamilton was that most tragic of things: a jealous genius. And he was, in fact, a genius, having scored at the highest end of the intelligence spectrum, ten points past two hundred, two hundred being the number where it became moot to continue to measure.
It was a ridiculous score, one that his parents took great care not to reveal to him for fear of the pressure such an extreme number would bring. Theirs was a world immersed in academics and the arts, peopled with a wide range of talented individuals. They had seen the circus act that sometimes came with the celebration of prodigy and genius, and wanted their only child to enjoy as normal a life as possible, not one lived under a microscope of curious scrutiny. Penn was allowed to gravitate naturally to the things he enjoyed without being forced in any particular direction.
It had been obvious from early on that he was different. He had an ear for melody and could read both music and polysyllabic words before he was two. He entered his first piano competition at age four. The event was at Tanglewood, one of the most prestigious music centers in the world. It was a concerto competition for high school students, but he was allowed to participate because of his mother’s close friendship with Harry Ellis Dickson, the late, venerable music director laureate of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Penn wasn’t considered a formal contestant. It was all just whimsy, really, as his mother tried to reinforce on the drive up to the Berkshires.
“So there’s no pressure, darling,” she said, mussing his hair playfully. “This is only for fun.”
Liliana Clarke Hamilton was a mezzo-soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. At five nine, she was lissome and elegant, a graceful swan with classic features and lustrous blonde hair that fell upon her shoulders and around her face in a way that made her seem otherworldly. Penn and his father, Dane, considered her presence a fortuitous occurrence, as though she were a seraph on holiday and had somehow floated into their world. Dane, a theoretical physicist with substantial inherited wealth who served as a consultant for the United Nations, took great care not to do anything that might send her rushing back to whatever celestial place she had descended from. To her credit, Liliana acted as though she didn’t recognize her own beauty or believe herself more entitled than anyone else, even though she held sway over every room she entered, every man within reach, and every woman who ever dreamed of possessing such ethereal luminosity. Penn adored her almost as much as his father did. She was his original measure of perfection. There would never be another on such an impossible par.
Almost everyone in their circle found it necessary to point out to Dane his tremendous luck in snagging Liliana. He was a man of letters, not looks. Not that he was a hunchback. Seeing the two of them together didn’t drive passersby into hushed huddles of shock over their gross mismatching. Still, he wasn’t her visual equal, not by leagues, and he knew it. But Liliana respected intellect, and he possessed it in great abundance. Their union, to her, represented a harmony of music and the mind. She didn’t give the aesthetic issue much consideration until the birth of their son. When Penn arrived, he was gorgeous and golden, just like her, with her musical leanings and his father’s brains, and he had it all in spades, at even greater, more accelerated levels. Seeing the way people reacted to the child’s physical appearance alarmed Liliana and made her finally come clean about herself and how she had achieved much of what she had because of society’s shallow fixation with beauty. She was determined to not leave to chance how Penn dealt with the way people reacted to his. She was equally insistent that his artistic and intellectual talents not be overindulged. If Penn believed he was special, it could prove more harmful than good. Liliana convinced her husband of this and he stood firm alongside her decisions regarding the boy. She read books on parenting children, she attended lectures and seminars. She was careful about everything when it came to her boy.
She had reminded Dane beforehand to back up her comments on the drive to the Berkshires for the piano competition. He didn’t like denying his son anything and was secretly ecstatic to be the father of such a unique child. Dane knew Penn would want the spoils of victory, whatever they were, if he happened to win. The little boy was doggedly competitive. But Liliana always prevailed. She was the only god in Dane’s otherwise scientific, atheistic universe. Penn would just have to accept that this would be one of those times when it wasn’t about winning, and that needed to be clear before they arrived at Tanglewood.
“Son, there’s no prize or anything,” Dane said. “You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Daddy. Mommy just said it’s only for fun.”
“Very good. So if they like you and try to give you something, don’t accept it. Just bow with respect and say ‘Please, thank you, but could you give it to someone else?’ Can you repeat that for me?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Please, thank you, but could you give it to someone else?”
“Good boy.”
Penn looked up at his father. Dane and Liliana always spoke to him plainly. There was no need to dumb things down for a child with an IQ of 210. He didn’t behave like a typical four-year-old.
“But why can’t I have it if they want to give it to me?”
Liliana intervened.
“Because, dear, the kids in this competition are on the verge of becoming adults, and this is a chance for them to go on to scholarships and more public appearances, maybe even a serious music career. This event could be life-changing for one of them. You won’t be an adult for a long, long time, so you can’t even take advantage of what this kind of exposure brings. You’d be taking something away from someone who could really use it, just to please your ego, and that would be wrong. Very wrong. We don’t want to be wrong now, do we?”
“No, Mommy.”
She kissed the top of his head. The little boy stared at the road in silence, his hands folded in his lap. Liliana was relieved.
“But do you think I could win, Daddy?” Penn asked after a moment.
“Sure, son. Anything’s possible.”
Dane glanced over at his wife, anticipating the slight downward turn of the left side of her mouth. Their eyes met. She moved her head a fraction, just enough for her husband to recognize it as both a shake of disapproval and a command for him to amend his statement to the boy.
“Just enjoy yourself, son,” Dane said obediently. “Play because you love it, not just to win. That’s the only reason to ever do anything in life. Do it with zest, or don’t do it at all.”
“Do you think the people will love me?” Penn asked.
The question startled his mother, particularly his use of the word “love” instead of “like.” Penn was not one to make casual slips of the tongue. When he said a word, he meant it.
“Don’t worry about the people, Penn,” she said, pulling him close. “Daddy’s right. Don’t just do things for prizes or money or to impress other people. Do it because the very thought of touching those keys and creating beautiful sounds excites you. Let that be your motivation, not adulation. Adulation fades.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
Penn was the last to perform at the concerto competition. He was the unexpected finale to an array of outstanding performances.
Everyone thought it was cute at first, the minimaestro in tails climbing onto the piano bench and bowing his head in quiet contemplation. A smattering of giggles and coos could be heard in the audience. Little Penn had already made up his mind after the conversation in the car. He inhaled and exhaled four times. Deep, slow breaths of fresh oxygen that filled his blood with a conviction of spirit. He lifted his head, raised his fingers in dramatic display, wriggled and cracked the knuckles, then launched into Franz Liszt’s arrangement of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture, one of the most difficult works for piano. It began slow and simple enough, then moved into a series of complicated runs and flourishes at octaves his tiny hands did not physically have the capacity to accommodate, yet somehow pulled off. Penn played it from memory, with remarkable execution and agility. He had played it a few times at home. His only exposure to the piece had been at a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic a year before, yet he had captured and retained every note.
When he finished, the crowd sat in a collective stupor, blown bac
k by the sheer enormity of what had just happened. It was the kind of synaptic logjam that occurred when one saw a UFO, a check for thirty billion dollars, a giraffe at close range. It was the opposite of a gasp, which would have meant the body was still functioning properly with the ability to defend itself against surprise. Seeing a four-year-old play something most masters wouldn’t attempt had brought about that arrested deer-in-the-headlights kind of moment where the brain, clobbered with disbelief, struggled to sync itself with what the eyes had just witnessed.
The little boy waited. The stupor swelled to its maximum capacity and exploded. A moment later, the audience was on its feet with thunderous applause, foot-stamping, and cheers.
He was proclaimed the winner. The teens looked on in shock.
Penn stood at the front of the stage, golden, glowing, awash in adulation. It was the greatest feeling he had ever known. He wanted to feel it again and again.
His hands lingered upon the prize as it was offered to him. He hesitated a moment too long, devastated that he couldn’t take it. He heard a familiar sound coming from the front row. His father had a unique way of clearing his throat, in staccato clacks, almost a hacking sound.
“Please,” Penn finally parroted, “thank you, but could you give it to someone else?”
The crowd was on its feet again, roaring with approval.
People who had been in attendance still talked about the beautiful towheaded boy, the “little Liszt” who wowed them that day. There was a standing offer for him to return when he could really compete.
Later that night, back at home in New York, Penn made his first journal entry in a diary his mother had given him for Christmas. He was an excellent speller. Even at four.
I won today. I played the piano and beat everybody. They were all bigger than me. I feel good. I want to win again.
He would keep such journals the rest of his life.