“What are they doing?” Libby says, staring, transfixed. “Don’t they know they need to stand closer to the ropes?”
“Libby, come on,” Caron says, pulling her toward two taxis at the curb.
“McDermott?” I ask. “What in the hell are you doing?”
McDermott’s eyes are glazed over and he’s waving a dollar bill in front of the woman’s face and she starts sobbing, pathetically trying to grab at it, but of course, typically, he doesn’t give it to her. Instead he ignites the bill with matches from Canal Bar and relights the half-smoked cigar clenched between his straight white teeth—probably caps, the jerk.
“How … gentrifying of you, McDermott,” I tell him.
Daisy is leaning against a white Mercedes parked next to the curb. Another Mercedes, this one a limo, black, is double-parked next to the white one. There’s more lightning. An ambulance screams down Fourteenth Street. McDermott walks by Daisy and kisses her hand before hopping in the second cab.
I’m left standing in front of the crying black woman, Daisy staring.
“Jesus,” I mutter, then, “Here …” I hand the black woman a book of matches from Lutèce before realizing the mistake, then find a book of matches from Tavern on the Green and toss them at the kid and pluck the other matchbook from her dirty, scabbed fingers.
“Jesus,” I mutter again, walking over to Daisy.
“There are no more cabs,” she says, hands on hips. Another flash of lightning causes her to jerk her head around, whining, “Where’s the photographers? Who’s taking the pictures?”
“Taxi!” I whistle, trying to wave down a passing cab.
Another bolt of lighting rips across the sky above Zeckendorf Towers and Daisy squeals, “Where is the photographer? Patrick. Tell them to stop.” She’s confused, her head moving left, right, behind, left, right. She lowers her sunglasses.
“Oh my god,” I mutter, my voice building to a shout. “It’s lightning. Not a photographer. Lightning!”
“Oh right, I’m supposed to believe you. You said Gorbachev was downstairs,” she says accusingly. “I don’t believe you. I think the press is here.”
“Jesus, here’s a cab. Hey, taxi.” I whistle at an oncoming cab that has just turned off Eighth Avenue, but someone taps my shoulder and when I turn around, Bethany, a girl I dated at Harvard and who I was subsequently dumped by, is standing in front of me wearing a lace-embroidered sweater and viscose-crepe trousers by Christian Lacroix, an open white umbrella in one hand. The cab I was trying to hail whizzes by.
“Bethany,” I say, stunned.
“Patrick.” She smiles.
“Bethany,” I say again.
“How are you, Patrick?” she asks.
“Um, well, um, I’m fine,” I stutter, after an awkward byte of silence. “And you?”
“Really well, thanks,” she says.
“You know … well, were you in there?” I ask.
“Yeah, I was.” She nods, then, “It’s good to see you.”
“Are you … living here?” I ask, gulping. “In Manhattan?”
“Yes.” She smiles. “I’m working at Milbank Tweed.”
“Oh, well … great.” I look back over at Daisy and I’m suddenly angry, remembering the lunch in Cambridge, at Quarters, where Bethany, her arm in a sling, a faint bruise above her cheek, ended it all, then, just as suddenly, I’m thinking: My hair, oh god, my hair, and I can feel the drizzle ruining it. “Well, I gotta go.”
“You’re at P & P, right?” she asks, then, “You look great.”
Spotting another cab approaching, I back away. “Yeah, well, you know.”
“Let’s have lunch,” she calls out.
“What could be more fun?” I say, unsure. The cab has noticed Daisy and stopped.
“I’ll call you,” she says.
“Whatever,” I say.
Some black guy has opened the cab door for Daisy and she steps in daintily and the black guy holds it open for me too while I get in, waving, nodding to Bethany. “A tip, mister,” the black guy asks, “from you and the pretty lady?”
“Yeah,” I growl, trying to check my hair in the cabdriver’s rearview mirror. “Here’s a tip: get a real job, you dumb fucking nigger.” Then I slam the door myself and tell the cabdriver to take us to the Upper West Side.
“Didn’t you think it was interesting in that movie tonight how they were spies but they weren’t spies?” Daisy asks.
“And you can drop her off in Harlem,” I tell the driver.
I’m in my bathroom, shirtless in front of the Orobwener mirror, debating whether to take a shower and wash my hair since it looks shitty due to the rain. Tentatively I smooth some mousse into it then run a comb over the mousse. Daisy sits in the Louis Montoni brass and chrome chair by the futon, spooning Macadamia Brittle Häagen-Dazs ice cream into her mouth. She is wearing only a lace bra and a garter belt from Bloomingdale’s.
“You know,” she calls out, “my ex-boyfriend Fiddler, at the party earlier tonight, he couldn’t understand what I was doing there with a yuppie.”
I’m not really listening, but while staring at my hair, I manage, “Oh. Really?”
“He said …” She laughs. “He said you gave him bad vibes.”
I sigh, then make a muscle. “That’s … too bad.”
She shrugs and offhandedly admits. “He used to do a lot of cocaine. He used to beat me up.”
I suddenly start paying attention, until she says, “But he never touched my face.”
I walk into the bedroom and start undressing.
“You think I’m dumb, don’t you?” she asks, staring at me, her legs, tan and aerobicized, slung over one of the chair’s arms.
“What?” I slip my shoes off, then bend down to pick them up.
“You think I’m dumb,” she says. “You think all models are dumb.”
“No,” I say, trying to contain my laughter. “I really don’t.”
“You do,” she insists. “I can tell.”
“I think you are …” I stand there, my voice trailing off.
“Yes?” She’s grinning, waiting.
“I think you are totally brilliant and incredibly … brilliant,” I say in monotone.
“That’s nice.” She smiles serenely, licking the spoon. “You have, well, a tender quality about you.”
“Thanks.” I take my pants off and fold them neatly, hanging them along with the shirt and tie over a black steel Philippe Stark clothes hanger. “You know, the other day I caught my maid stealing a piece of bran toast from my wastebasket in the kitchen.”
Daisy takes this in, then asks, “Why?”
I pause, staring at her flat, well-defined stomach. Her torso is completely tan and muscular. So is mine. “Because she said she was hungry.”
Daisy sighs and licks the spoon thoughtfully.
“You think my hair looks okay?” I’m still standing there, in just my Calvin Klein jockey shorts, hard-on bulging, and a fifty-dollar pair of Armani socks.
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “Sure.”
I sit on the edge of the futon and peel off the socks.
“I beat up a girl today who was asking people on the street for money.” I pause, then measure each of the following words carefully. “She was young and seemed frightened and had a sign that explained she was lost in New York and had a child, though I didn’t see it. And she needed money, for food or something. For a bus ticket to Iowa. Iowa. I think it was Iowa and …” I stop for a moment, balling the socks up, then unballing them.
Daisy stares at me blankly for a minute, before asking, “And then?”
I pause, distracted, and then stand up. Before walking into the bathroom I mutter, “And then? I beat the living shit out of her.” I open the medicine cabinet for a condom and, as I reenter the bedroom, say, “She had misspelled disabled. I mean, that’s not the reason I did what I did but … you know.” I shrug. “She was too ugly to rape.”
Daisy stands up, placing the spoon next to the Häage
n-Dazs carton on the Gilbert Rhode-designed nightstand.
I point. “No. Put it in the carton.”
“Oh, sorry,” she says.
She admires a Palazzetti vase while I slip on the condom. I get on top of her and we have sex and lying beneath me she is only a shape, even with all the halogen lamps burning. Later, we are lying on opposite sides of the bed. I touch her shoulder.
“I think you should go home,” I say.
She opens her eyes, scratches her neck.
“I think I might … hurt you,” I tell her. “I don’t think I can control myself.”
She looks over at me and shrugs. “Okay. Sure,” then she starts to get dressed. “I don’t want to get too involved anyway,” she says.
“I think something bad is going to happen,” I tell her.
She pulls her panties on, then checks her hair in the Nabolwev mirror and nods. “I understand.”
After she’s dressed and minutes of pure, hard silence have passed, I say, not unhopefully, “You don’t want to get hurt, do you?”
She buttons up the top of her dress and sighs, without looking over at me. “That’s why I’m leaving.”
I say, “I think I’m losing it.”
Paul Owen
I screened calls all morning long in my apartment, taking none of them, glaring tiredly at a cordless phone while sipping cup after cup of decaf herbal tea. Afterwards I went to the gym, where I worked out for two hours; then I had lunch at the Health Bar and could barely eat half of an endive-with-carrot-dressing salad I ordered. I stopped at Barney’s on my way back from an abandoned loft building I had rented a unit in somewhere around Hell’s Kitchen. I had a facial. I played squash with Brewster Whipple at the Yale Club and from there made reservations for eight o’clock under the name Marcus Halberstam at Texarkana, where I’m going to meet Paul Owen for dinner. I choose Texarkana because I know that a lot of people I have dealings with are not going to be eating there tonight. Plus I’m in the mood for their chili-wrapped pork and one or two Dixie beers. It’s June and I’m wearing a two-button linen suit, a cotton shirt, a silk tie and leather wing-tips, all by Armani. Outside Texarkana a cheerful black bum motions for me, explaining that he’s Bob Hope’s younger brother, No Hope. He holds out a Styrofoam coffee cup. I think this is funny so I give him a quarter. I’m twenty minutes late. From an open window on Tenth Street I can hear the last strains of “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles.
The bar in Texarkana is empty and in the dining area only four or five tables have people at them. Owen is at a booth in the back, complaining bitterly to the waiter, grilling him, demanding to know the exact reasons why they are out of the crawfish gumbo tonight. The waiter, a not-bad-looking faggot, is at a loss and helplessly lisps an excuse. Owen is in no mood for pleasantries, but then neither am I. As I sit down, the waiter apologizes once more and then takes my drink order. “J&B, straight,” I stress. “And a Dixie beer.” He smiles while writing this down—the bastard even bats his eyelashes—and when I’m about to warn him not to attempt small talk with me, Owen barks out his drink order, “Double Absolut martini,” and the fairy splits.
“This is really a beehive of, uh, activity, Halberstam,” Owen says, gesturing toward the near-empty room. “This place is hot, very hot.”
“Listen, the mud soup and the charcoal arugula are outrageous here,” I tell him.
“Yeah, well,” he grumbles, staring into his martini glass. “You’re late.”
“Hey, I’m a child of divorce. Give me a break,” I say, shrugging, thinking: Oh Halberstam you are an asshole. And then, after I’ve studied the menu, “Hmmm, I see they’ve omitted the pork loin with lime Jell-O.”
Owen is wearing a double-breasted silk and linen suit, a cotton shirt and a silk tie, all by Joseph Abboud, and his tan is impeccable. But he’s out of it tonight, surprisingly untalkative, and his dourness drizzles over my jovial, expectant mood, dampening it considerably, and I have suddenly resorted to making comments such as “Is that Ivana Trump over there?” then, laughing, “Jeez, Patrick, I mean Marcus, what are you thinking? Why would Ivana be at Texarkana?” But this doesn’t make dinner any less monotonous. It doesn’t help lessen the fact that Paul Owen is exactly my age, twenty-seven, or make this whole thing any less disconcerting to me.
What I’ve mistaken at first for pomposity on Owen’s part is actually just drunkenness. When I press for information about the Fisher account he offers useless statistical data that I already knew about: how Rothschild was originally handling the account, how Owen came to acquire it. And though I had Jean gather this information for my files months ago, I keep nodding, pretending that this primitive info is revelatory and saying things like “This is enlightening” while at the same time telling him “I’m utterly insane” and “I like to dissect girls.” Every time I attempt to steer the conversation back to the mysterious Fisher account, he infuriatingly changes the topic back to either tanning salons or brands of cigars or certain health clubs or the best places to jog in Manhattan and he keeps guffawing, which I find totally upsetting. I’m drinking Southern beer for the first part of the meal—pre entrée, post appetizer—then switch to Diet Pepsi midway through since I need to stay slightly sober. I’m about to tell Owen that Cecelia, Marcus Halberstam’s girlfriend, has two vaginas and that we plan to wed next spring in East Hampton, but he interrupts.
“I’m feeling, er, slightly mellow,” he admits, drunkenly squeezing a lime onto the table, completely missing his beer mug.
“Uh-huh.” I dip a stick of jicama sparingly into a rhubarb mustard sauce, pretending to ignore him.
He’s so drunk by the time dinner is over that I (1) make him pay the check, which comes to two hundred and fifty dollars, (2) make him admit what a dumb son-of-a-bitch he really is, and (3) get him back to my place, where he makes himself another drink—he actually opens a bottle of Acacia I thought I had hidden, with a Mulazoni sterling silver wine opener that Peter Radloff bought me after we completed the Heatherberg deal. In my bathroom I take out the ax I’d stashed in the shower, pop two five-milligram Valium, washing them down with a tumblerful of Plax, and then I move into the foyer, where I put on a cheap raincoat I picked up at Brooks Brothers on Wednesday and move toward Owen, who is bent over near the stereo system in the living room looking through my CD collection—all the lights in the apartment on, the Venetian blinds closed. He straightens up and walks slowly backward, sipping from his wineglass, taking in the apartment, until he seats himself in a white aluminum folding chair I bought at the Conran’s Memorial Day sale weeks ago, and finally he notices the newspapers—copies of USA Today and W and The New York Times—spread out beneath him, covering the floor, to protect the polished white-stained oak from his blood. I move toward him with the ax in one hand, and with my other I button up the raincoat.
“Hey, Halberstam,” he asks, managing to slur both words.
“Yes, Owen,” I say, drawing near.
“Why are there, um, copies of the Style section all over the place?” he asks tiredly. “Do you have a dog? A chow or something?”
“No, Owen.” I move slowly around the chair until I’m facing him, standing directly in his line of vision, and he’s so drunk he can’t even focus in on the ax, he doesn’t even notice once I’ve raised it high above my head. Or when I change my mind and lower it to my waist, almost holding it as if it’s a baseball bat and I’m about to swing at an oncoming ball, which happens to be Owen’s head.
Owen pauses, then says, “Anyway, I used to hate Iggy Pop but now that he’s so commercial I like him a lot better than—”
The ax hits him midsentence, straight in the face, its thick blade chopping sideways into his open mouth, shutting him up. Paul’s eyes look up at me, then involuntarily roll back into his head, then back at me, and suddenly his hands are trying to grab at the handle, but the shock of the blow has sapped his strength. There’s no blood at first, no sound either except for the newspapers under Paul’s kicking feet, rustling,
tearing. Blood starts to slowly pour out of the sides of his mouth shortly after the first chop, and when I pull the ax out—almost yanking Owen out of the chair by his head—and strike him again in the face, splitting it open, his arms flailing at nothing, blood sprays out in twin brownish geysers, staining my raincoat. This is accompanied by a horrible momentary hissing noise actually coming from the wounds in Paul’s skull, places where bone and flesh no longer connect, and this is followed by a rude farting noise caused by a section of his brain, which due to pressure forces itself out, pink and glistening, through the wounds in his face. He falls to the floor in agony, his face just gray and bloody, except for one of his eyes, which is blinking uncontrollably; his mouth is a twisted red-pink jumble of teeth and meat and jawbone, his tongue hangs out of an open gash on the side of his cheek, connected only by what looks like a thick purple string. I scream at him only once: “Fucking stupid bastard. Fucking bastard.” I stand there waiting, staring up at the crack above the Onica that the superintendent hasn’t fixed yet. It takes Paul five minutes to finally die. Another thirty to stop bleeding.
I take a cab to Owen’s apartment on the Upper East Side and on the ride across Central Park in the dead of this stifling June night in the back of the taxi it hits me that I’m still wearing the bloody raincoat. At his apartment I let myself in with the keys I took from the corpse’s pocket and once inside I douse the coat with lighter fluid and burn it in the fireplace. The living room is very spare, minimalist. The walls are white pigmented concrete, except for one wall, which is covered with a trendy large-scale scientific drawing, and the wall facing Fifth Avenue has a long strip of faux-cowhide paneling stretched across it. A black leather couch sits beneath it.
I switch on the wide-screen thirty-one-inch Panasonic to Late Night with David Letterman, then move over to the answering machine to change Owen’s message. While erasing the current one (Owen giving all the numbers he can be reached at—including the Seaport, for god’s sake—while Vivaldi’s Four Seasons plays tastefully in the background) I wonder aloud where I should send Paul, and after a few minutes of intense debating decide: London. “I’ll send the bastard to England,” I cackle while turning the volume down on the TV and then I leave the new message. My voice sounds similar to Owen’s and to someone hearing it over the phone probably identical. Tonight Letterman has on Stupid Pet Tricks. A German shepherd with a Mets cap on peels and eats an orange. This is replayed twice, in slow motion.
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