9:38
What most worries America is that, on one hand, they control the world; on the other hand, they’re no longer in control of anything. I read somewhere that these days David Emil, the owner of Windows on the World, always carries a poem by W. H. Auden everywhere in his wallet:
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow There must be reasons why the leaves decay Time can say nothing but I told you so.
Since I arrived in New York, my old reflexes as a society chronicler have taken over: I’m going through Time Out with a fine-tooth comb, picking up fliers in hip stores, phoning old buddies of mine who are still up for partying, taking notes on the dance floor like I used to when I was twenty and wrote for Glamour…Nightlife seems to me a good barometer of how sick or healthy a city is. This one has passed out, stoned on grief and “Grey Goose,” a new brand of vodka distilled in France. After a string of empty, depressing bars, someone drags me off to Scores, the biggest lap-dancing club in the Big Apple. It’s a big, dark space where men, singly or in groups, are prepared to pay twenty bucks, not for the striptease in itself (the girls, who are stunning, strip off onstage anyway), but to be tantalized, aroused, bewitched. They pay twenty bucks for the scent of freshly washed hair in their nostrils, the caress of a honeyed knee, the weight of a hand on their shoulder and the burnt-caramel flavor of ass against their jeans. People who don’t understand lap dancing will never understand America. Here, you pay to get it up without getting it on. You’re not buying a girl, but a dream. Eye candy. The United States is the only country where a man is prepared to blow his savings for a whiff of virtuality, to enter an imaginary world. They’re not getting a hard-on for nothing, they’re doing it for the pleasure of having a hard-on. They’re turned on by the unobtainable. It’s moralistic (their wives get the benefit when they get home), but above all it’s optimistic, ambitious, cerebral: unlike a Frenchman, an American doesn’t want to fuck straight off, he prefers the idea of pleasure to pleasure itself, fantasy to reality.
“What are you writing?” Bianca asks, as I jot down this theory in my notebook.
“Nothing, darling.”
And she pushes her G-string aside to show me her slit coated with sweet oils. And suddenly I feel very like a typical Frenchman…She breathes into my ear. I can feel her breath, talks to her friend Nikki, how lovely they smell…(Chanel No. 5?). Twenty-dollar bills take wing all by themselves in the sweet velvetiness of this convalescent city. They pay to be frustrated. They believe it is a good thing that not all dreams come true. In America, dreams come true not because Americans want their dreams to come true, but simply because they dream. Dream without thinking of the consequences. For a dream to come true, it must first be dreamed. Run away, girls in Lycra minishorts, girls in push-up bras, girls with auburn hair, girls in lace-up boots, girls with polished teeth, girls with oversize breasts, girls who know J-Lo’s lyrics by heart (“Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block / Used to have a little, now I have a lot / No matter where I go, I know where I came from”), girls in pink high heels, girls with open blouses and black bras, girls showing their bellies, girls with jeweled bellybuttons, girls with tiny flowers tattooed above the cleft of their butts, a sort of profusion, an ever-replenished rain of fresh girls, run away! Should you kiss me or give me your number, your empire would crumble.
Later, at the Mercer, I intend to send out for a call girl (by typing www.new-york-escorts.com or www.manhattangirls.com into the computer in my room), but I hesitate because the photos can be deceptive: you never know if the girl you’ll wind up with will be pretty or ugly. And I’m not drunk enough to fuck ugly. Or too much in love?
9:39
Lourdes just got a text message on her phone saying the Pentagon has been hit too. This is total war. Where the hell’s the army? Is it reassuring to know that we’re not the only ones to die? Hell, no. If I knew I was going to buy the farm, I’d have lived my life differently. I’d have fucked bareback. I’d have dumped Mary a lot earlier, traveled a lot more, tried heroin and opium. I’d have spent less time studying and less time working out. I’d have hit on a lot more women instead of hanging back, forever shit-scared of being humiliated. I should have been a gangster, robbed banks, instead of meekly, foolishly obeying the law. I should have married Candace so she could be a beautiful widow. I wouldn’t have given up smoking. For what? My health? I’d have started a rock band, might as well die of starvation as stick at some pain-in-the-ass job for the money.
I’d have told my boss where to shove his job a lot sooner. I’d have lived in New York, worn a long black coat and sunglasses at night, had a fake tan all year round and had dinner in restaurants where it looks like someone’s just turned out the lights, unless maybe there’s a power failure—why is it that restaurants are always candlelit in rich countries? Poverty is the luxury of the rich. I’d have bought a lot more cars: what a waste, all that money I’ll never spend. I would have tried to have myself cloned. I’d have shaved my head, just to see. I’d have gambled more—whatever way you look at it—I’ve lost.
Or perhaps I should just have been a better man.
9:40
I’d like to invent a new genre: autosatire. I’d like to know why I’ve forgotten everything. Why I scribble out my past in my diaries. Why I have to be blind drunk before I can talk to anyone. Why I write rather than create.
I never knew my parents when they were married. I only ever knew them divorced and forced to see each other because of me. Friends, but not lovers. I don’t remember ever seeing them kiss other than on the cheek. Is it important? No, because I did the same thing they did. In fact, most people do the same thing: splitting up after the birth of a child has almost become the norm. But if it’s so unimportant, why do I feel so choked up talking about it?
A definition of happiness: shrimp fishing at Guéthary. I’m six years old. My grandfather is carrying the butterfly nets (we fish for shrimp with butterfly nets, if Nabokov could see us!). Happiness is the beach at Cenitz at low tide, the rocks pricking your feet, the salt on your back and the sun above. Back then, there was no such thing as an oil slick. They were glorious adventures, except for the shrimp which ended up being boiled alive in brine. Why is happiness like Guéthary? It must be coincidence that it was at Guéthary that my parents met, fell in love, married.
I feel empty, I want to get smashed, fuck my balls dry and read books that are not as good as mine. All this to forget that I have no past, that I ring hollow.
When I was five, when my parents were getting divorced, I had nosebleeds so often that the doctors thought I had leukemia. I was happy just to cut class for months on end.
My motto: become what you despise.
Why do we all want to be artists? All the people that I meet who are my age write, play, sing, direct, paint, compose. What are they seeking, beauty or truth? It’s just a pretext. They want to be famous. We want to be famous because we want to be loved. We want to be loved because we’re hurt. We want to mean something. To have purpose. To say something. Not to die anymore. Compensate for the lack of meaning. We want to cease being absurd. Having children is not enough for us. We want to be more interesting than the guy next door. But he wants to be on TV too. That’s what’s different: our neighbors want to be more interesting than us. Everyone is jealous of everyone else now that Art is completely narcissistic.
In Times Square they’ve just opened a huge Toys ‘?’ Us, even more enormous than the great toy store FAO Schwarz. I ride the escalators of the megastore, a five-floor building bursting with toys, Muzak, garish colors, merchandizing spinoffs. I’m attacked from all sides by giant robots, tame tyrannosauruses, PlayStations 2, 3, 8, 47…Why do I find these places so appallingly depressing? Toys have become one of America’s most important industries. Every day a new Disney megastore or a new Toys ‘?’ Us opens. Here, parents spend more and more money to assuage their guilt. Megastores make it possible for kids to escape their parents,
and vice versa.
9:41
“Dad, you mean you’re really not a superhero?”
It was 9:41 when David, who had never cried in his life, started to cry. Oh, not all of a sudden, no; it took him some time to realize what was happening to him. The corners of his mouth dropped, making a circumflex, like Charlie Brown in the funnies. His eyes widened to three times their normal size. He stared at the securely sealed door, the broken lock, the worthless handle, the red plastic sign on which was written the barefaced lie: EMERGENCY EXIT. Suddenly, his bottom lip swelled, reaching up toward his little nose, and his chin began to quiver uncertainly. Jerry and I looked at each other, speechless: what did this new expression mean? It was hardly the moment to be trying out new faces on his poor family. David rubbed his hair, unsure of what was happening to him. We could hear his breathing get faster. I thought he was suffocating again, though there was less smoke than there had been earlier. His breathing became labored, as if an alien buried inside him for eons was trying to find a way out. David the dispassionate, David who was toughness incarnate, David the phlegmatic, was dissolving into tears for the first time. His mouth opened wide to let out a great howl of rage. He stuttered frantic syllables: “but, but, why, but, it’s, we, but, what…” which, added together, ended up as one long “WAAAAAA” which set off the sprinklers in his eyes, the heavy tears rolling down his pink cheeks. Jerry stared hard at me so as not to cry too, but since I burst into tears, he broke down too. We hugged each other hard, like a football team at halftime—except we weren’t wearing helmets, and we were crying because we’d lost the game.
I used to think that having kids was the best way of triumphing over death. Even that’s not true. It is possible to die with them, and it is as though we had never existed.
9:42
Difficult to imagine a more fragile city. Such an intense concentration of people in such a small area makes an attractive target for destroyers of all sorts. If you want to cause maximum damage for minimum effort, New York seems an ideal target. And New Yorkers know this now: towers are vulnerable, the whole city is potentially a heap of scrap iron, a monument in crystal. Never in the history of humanity has such a commanding location been so easy to obliterate. And yet intelligent people still live there. It’s like San Francisco: they know that one day a horrific earthquake will plunge the city into the ocean, but they don’t run away. This is another admirable American phenomenon: New York and San Francisco are both megalopolises with apocalyptic destinies, but no one thinks to desert them. A New Yorker’s personality is forged by this contradiction: the awareness of the threat in no way slows the frenzied pace of life; on the contrary, it provides the fuel.
Amnesiac memories of the American nights of my childhood…Ronald Reagan was President…every night we had the choice…the five-floor Danceteria…the Palladium, where the john was decorated by the latest graffiti artists…Webster Hall with its interminable line…the Area which was redecorated every month, with actors in glass cages…Nell’s which looked like a huge private apartment, the neo-Gothic cathedral that was the Limelight…Club USA…How many countries do you know where a nightclub is named after the country itself? All these nebulous places, long since disappeared into the mists of the past, the amnesia of far-off parties…And now, nothing…Lounges with subdued lighting…Meager customers…Microscopic clubs which are empty all the same…Sleek restaurants…Candlelit cellars…Bygone magic.
9:42 PM. I’m visiting a great French writer, now eighty years old, in an apartment laid on for him by the New York University. His wife tells me that all the S/M clubs have closed: the Vault, Hellfire, La Nouvelle Justine no longer exist. Tonight, she’s going to a “Submit Party” but she can’t take me because it’s a women-only night. I’ve brought a bottle of Francis Ford Coppola’s California red, but the great writer does not open it, preferring to offer me a glass of sherry which tastes like maple syrup. It’s like drinking pancakes; it’s exquisite. I feel infinitely comfortable with this free, happy couple, married since 1957. The great writer tells me about his meeting with William Burroughs in La Coupole. A sinister guy, like all addicts.
“He killed his wife,” he says, looking over at his own. “But he took her to Mexico to do it.”
“If you ever take me to Mexico, I’ll be on my guard,” she retorts, smiling.
I tell them there’s a new bar in SoHo called Naked Lunch. The great writer quips: “And is one obliged to lunch in the nude?”
His latest novel has just been translated here, under the title Repetition. Then the great writer informs me that I am to be published in the United States and that we are shortly going to dine with his friend Edmund White to celebrate the fact. There is a rapprochement between my origins and myself. I am returning to my grandmother’s country. I have not managed to rid myself of my roots, my history, my blood. Not such a man of the world as all that, anchored in spite of myself.
“Why come to New York to write about it?” the great writer asks, stroking his white beard. “I’m writing a novel set in Berlin, I’m not going to Berlin to write it.”
“Well, I’m writing an ancien roman. I leave the nouveau to young men like you!”
A little later, in Thom’s Bar, warmed by the fire in the hearth and a frozen margarita, I consider asking my fiancée to marry me. You see, I’d like us to be free and beautiful for fifty years like the Robbe-Grillets.
9:43
The lights go out, come on again. The bulbs start to flicker like strobe lights in a disco. Then, it’s black as night. The kids scream inconsolably in the darkness. We are in the depths of hell. I have no choice anymore. Either we wait to die here or we go back down to the restaurant. I don’t hesitate for long, it’s too awful to stay put.
“Come on, sweethearts, we’re going back downstairs.”
They cry even harder. I grip their hands tightly and we stand up. Lourdes shakes her head, she prefers to stay here. We hug her for a long moment. She takes off her Windows on the World lapel badge and proffers it like a relic.
“See you; if not here, then somewhere…”
“Bless you, Carthew. With your two little angels beside you.”
“You sure you don’t want to come back down?”
“Pray for me. When they come open the door and I’ll come get you. Go on, now, git!”
And we leave her, sitting in the dark, beautiful as the world.
Passing the offices of Windows, I find an iBook hooked up to the Internet. I make the most of it to type an email to Candace as fast as I can without rereading or correcting the typos. “Canda, you cheated on me because you thought I wasn’t serious. So what? It’s not important you body doesn’t beloing to me. The only thing that belongs to us is our loneliness, and you interrupted mine with your cheeerfullness, your pink lips, your sadness, your shaved vagina. I was scarend to say ‘I love you.’ But I wasd a poor schumk not to take you seroiusly. I’ve found my only memeories are of you. Candae, try to forgibve me. I am going to die here, I’m getting weaker every minute and you can save me, when I rememerber us, I can see that I was trying to eb someone else, I was playing a part, I don’t know what I wanted frmom you, for you to touch me, but you aved me, you came into my life to late, I’d already done everything, I didn’t give you the space you deserved, I don’t know where to start, but I’ve gotan excuse it’s because I was dying, Don’t forget your Carthe.” Okay, that’s what I should have liked to write if I’d had the time. The email she received was shorter: “I loved U. C.Y.”
I step over an upended pile of CD-ROMs, a shelf has collapsed and the office craft knives are scattered over the linoleum.
9:44
“I am dazzled by the glorious collapse of the world.”
Henry Miller, Black Spring
I’m going mad: I collect every newspaper clipping with my name on it. I cut them out and file them away so I can show them to my daughter twenty years from now when I’m a has-been.
“See, honey? Daddy was really famous
when he was young. It’s a pity you didn’t see that! People loved me, I swear, ask your mother, it was out of control, that’s why she kicked me out!”
“Yeah, sure, you were a star, Dad…You’ve shown me this file, like, four times…And don’t bullshit: I know why Mom kicked you out and it had nothing to do with that. You were just impossible to live with.”
“But, you…you do love me?”
At this point, I prefer not to imagine what my daughter’s response will be twenty years from now.
With success, some people do a disappearing act; I decide to go for omnipresence, overexposure. I don’t see why I should disappear because people like me. I prefer to wait until everyone’s well and truly sick of me before disappearing for good. That time is coming.
Windows on the World Page 15