by Greg Olear
Asher took the glass, swished the wine around, and held it up to the candle on the table—examining the legs, I believe this is called. He took a small sip, then a larger one, and made a face like he just got wind of a particularly unaromatic fart.
“Something wrong?” the sommelier wanted to know.
“It’s turned,” Asher told him. “How long has that been down there?”
“Let me see.” Marcel took a sip from what appeared to be an oversized coke spoon hanging around his neck. “You’re right, Mr. Krug. My sincerest apologies.”
“Don’t mention it, Marcel. Just bring the Pauillac ’84.”
“I’m sorry about that,” said Asher once the sommelier had left. “I don’t like sending back wine, but for what they charge for the stuff, we’d better enjoy it.” He picked up a piece of bread, buttered it. “I love your hair.”
“Oh,” said Taylor, flipping a stray strand behind her ear. “Thanks.”
“You look amazing.”
Taylor was used to such blandishments, but it was still nice to hear, especially from Asher.
Marcel returned, abashed that one of his prized bottles had gone sour, and lavished them with the new choice. This time Asher approved, and after filling the glasses, the sommelier flounced off.
“To life,” said Asher. “May we live it to the fullest.”
“Amen to that.”
They clinked glasses and drank.
“Holy shit,” she said, surprised. “Wow. This wine is delicious. I’m not a big fan of red, usually, but this…oh my. Asher, you’ve ruined me.”
He said nothing, just smiled that debonair smile and squinted his predatory eyes ever so slightly, like James Bond when introducing himself to the villain’s voluptuous and invariably fickle girlfriend.
The waitress returned. Asher ordered for both of them—strip steak, rare, with garlic mashed potatoes, and to start, portobello mushrooms.
“So this guy you’re living with…Tom.”
“Todd.”
“Are you two…you know…?”
“Who, Todd? Oh, no. He’s a sweet guy, but more of the brotherly type. Although I’ve only known him for a few months. Friend of a friend.”
“I see.”
He shot her a look that she construed as disapproving.
“Does it bother you, that I live with a guy?”
“Bother is a strong word. It’s just unusual, that’s all. I’m traditional, when it comes to cohabitation.”
Taylor knew going in that there must be some flaw with Asher Krug. Gentlemen of his apparent quality were simply not single unless they were damaged goods—not in New York, anyway. Could he be—gasp—a virgin? Her heart sank. “Traditional as in waiting for marriage?”
“Not that traditional.”
Taylor tried not to make her exhalation too obvious. “So you live alone?”
“I have a place at the Dakota.”
The snazzy address meant nothing to the Missourian.
“It’s on Central Park West,” he explained, visibly annoyed that she was not sufficiently wowed. “Did you see Rosemary’s Baby? You know, that baby boomer dreck about how babies of our generation are the devil’s spawn? They filmed it there. That’s why I chose the Dakota, actually. I get pleasure out of knowing that I live in an apartment some baby boom asshole covets.”
A little light went off in the recesses of Taylor’s brain. “Wait…wasn’t the Dakota where John Lennon lived?”
“Yoko still does. I see her and Sean in the elevator sometimes. She’s nice as can be. Hell of an artist. Unfortunately her husband and his nasty heroin habit sort of curtailed her career. She was avant-garde, a rare talent. Why she fell for that guy I have no idea.”
Before Taylor could reply, the appetizers arrived.
Asher was about to change the subject, but Taylor, intrigued, cut him off. “Wait a minute. Did you just say that Yoko Ono was good and John Lennon was bad?”
“No. I said she was a true artist, and he was a fraud.”
“That puts you in a very small minority.” Taylor took a bite of the portabellos. “Just you and Yoko, I think.”
“I hate the fucking Beatles.”
“The Beatles? How can you hate the Beatles?”
“Talentless hacks, the lot of them.” Asher plopped a piece of mushroom into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, as she hung on his every word. “It’s the baby boomers, turned them into gods. The apotheosis of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. They bought all their albums, they packed all the stadiums, they were the target audience—and they still are. Them—not us. Not you and me. Our music gets marginalized. Duran Duran, they suck. The Smiths, they suck. Guns N’ Roses, they suck. But the Beatles, they shit ice cream. You like the portabellos?”
Taylor wasn’t a big fan of mushrooms particularly, but she lied and said she did.
“Good.” He wolfed down the rest of his as he spoke. “The Beatles embody everything I despise about the baby boomer generation. They went from ripping off Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry to recording these self-indulgent druggie anthems without producing a single song I actually enjoy listening to. And I’m so sick of hearing what a poet John Lennon was, what a wordsmith. ‘There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.’ I’m no Harold Bloom, although I did take his class at Yale, but come on. That’s not exactly Paradise Lost, is it? In a perfect world, Chapman would have killed John Lennon twenty years earlier and spared us all the national embarrassment that was Beatlemania.”
The vitriol, the bile that Asher spewed forth, surprised her, even through the wine-induced haze. At Wycliffe, Taylor’d heard many a suitor’s kill-’em-all polemic against any number of people—Bill Gates, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Michael Eisner, George Steinbrenner—but John Lennon? Asher must be joking. Lennon was in a stratum with Jesus, Gandhi, and Abe Lincoln. He was unassailable. Also, the Walrus was born in 1940, which is to say during the war, so technically he wasn’t a baby boomer. But no matter.
“Forgive me,” Asher said, wiping his chin with his napkin. “I didn’t mean to sound so callous.”
“Whatever, it’s fine.”
Suddenly, the nauseating aroma of charred beef overcame her; the main course had arrived. As the plates were set in front of them, Taylor fought valiantly against her gag reflex. The last time she’d had beef was in college, in the dining hall, when the shepherd’s pie didn’t mix with her hangover.
“Boy that looks good.” Asher set upon his strip of beef with fork and knife, inspected the bleeding raw cow flesh at the center. “Blood red. Perfect.”
Taylor eyed at her dish hopelessly. She watched Asher polish off a few bites.
“God, I love this place.” A trickle of juice at the corner of his mouth gave Asher the look of a vampire, or perhaps a cannibal—he was a headhunter, after all. “Oh, you’ve got to try this.”
The initial wave of nausea had worn off, but Taylor was afraid that, no matter how choice the cut of beef, it would make her ill. The last thing she wanted was to decorate the tan leather interior of his Jaguar XJ12 with chunks of meaty spew. But Asher was waiting. And buying. And she wanted to make him happy. With tremulous hand she forked a small piece into her mouth.
“Well?”
It was delicious. A little too rare, perhaps, but intensely flavorful. She told him so.
“Oh, good,” he said, looking genuinely relieved. “I’d hate for you not to like it. I’ll have to tell Roland next time I see him.”
“Who’s Roland?”
“The…”
The head chef and owner. And there he was, Roland Molineaux, in white apron and cap, looking, despite the French surname, every bit like Dom DeLuise’s long-lost brother. He extended a plump hand, which Asher shook without standing up.
“How’s everything tonight, Mr. Krug?”
“Excellent as usual. Roland, this is Taylor Schmidt.”
“Enchanté.”
Drawing on all her powers of
French 101, Taylor replied, “Enchanté.”
“Bon appétit.” He gave Asher a hearty pat on the shoulder and waddled off.
“Nice guy, Roland. Makes a hell of a steak.”
Taylor only managed to consume half her New York strip. Asher inhaled the rest, along with his own entrée and two helpings of the buttery garlic mashed, with the voracity of a half-starved Bowery bum. As he ate, his jaws clenched and unclenched in an almost animal way. Watching him chew, she understood why the teeth used for ripping into meat were called canines.
When the entrées were finished, they downshifted into small talk—books, bands, movies. His cinematic favorites—La Femme Nikita and The Ipcress File—she’d never heard of. (Hers were Pretty Woman and Steel Magnolias, as I well knew—she owned them both on VHS and often forced me to watch them.)
While the busboy cleared the plates, Asher asked how her job was going.
“So far, so good. I have my first author, which is way cool. Roger Gale is his name. Lives up in New Paltz. I think you’ll really like his book, actually.”
“I’m always up for a good read. What’s it about?”
Set in 1909 Russia, The Lap of Uxory is the story of Natasha, a sexually repressed housewife who contrives to murder her abusive and impotent husband. Boris, a disabled foot soldier in the czar’s army, spends the first few chapters subjecting his vivacious young helpmate to drunken fits, verbal and physical abuse, and the beheading of her beloved kitten, Koko. The drinking, cussing, and beating Natasha can endure. But when she finds Koko’s severed head in the butter churn, swarming with flies, she vows revenge.
After several attempts at poisoning go awry, she seeks out one Madame Popova, a pioneer in the field of marriage counseling. For a modest fee, Popova & Co. will eliminate conjugal strife—by eliminating the husband. Natasha contracts with Popova & Co. to finish the deed. She purloins the purse of the passed-out Boris, forks over the rubles, and five pages later her hubby’s body is found by a dashing young constable in a dark alley behind the second-largest brothel in Russia.
Once free from the bonds of matrimony, Natasha indulges her inchoate saturnalian desires, shacking up with, among others, the aforementioned constable, the local apothecary, and Zydrunas, her sister’s husband. She also gets it on with Katya, the Popova & Co. assassin who whacked Boris. A malevolent minx peculiar to the novels of Sacher-Masoch and the screenplays of Joe Ezsterhas, Katya is a proponent of androcide. “All men deserve to be murdered—not just abusive husbands,” she remarks to Natasha, between delirious sessions of soixante-neuf. “But we’ve got to begin somewhere.”
Seduced by her lover’s rhetoric (to say nothing of her shapely body), Natasha agrees to help Katya murder her next victim, who turns out to be—bet you didn’t see this coming—her sister’s husband, Zydrunas. Predictably, the plan to slit his throat while he is asleep backfires. Natasha trips over a broomstick, Zydrunas wakes up, and in the ensuing melee, Katya is knocked unconscious. It is up to the heroine to finish him off. Which Natasha does, driving a knife into the heart of her hapless brother-in-law.
This is followed by an introspective chapter in which Natasha is overcome with guilt, which she demonstrates by—wait for it—compulsively washing her hands. Afterwards she pays a visit to her friend the constable, to whom (after a fellatio sequence more superfluous than the one in The Brown Bunny) she confesses all. Popova & Co. is raided by police, Katya is hanged in the public square, and Natasha commits suicide by jumping in front of a locomotive, Anna Karenina–style. The constable, carrying her limp body off the tracks, gives a speech in the tradition of Fortinbras or Albany, and thus ends The Lap of Uxory.
(This tripe actually got published, believe it or not; it’s long out of print, but you can still find it in used bookstores.)
Though overwritten and tragically flawed, the manuscript held Taylor’s interest. The ending she wasn’t crazy about. And the Natasha character proved as three-dimensional as a Mercator projection. But the whole business of Popova & Co., an organization devoted to the killing of husbands—that made for an intriguing hook.
“Industrious, don’t you think, to start a business like that? Of course it’s only fiction.”
“Actually,” Asher said, “Madame Popova was real. I’m sure the story itself is bullshit, but she really did run a husband-killing service. For almost thirty years, if memory serves. It was famous for its discretion and its low rates.”
“No way.”
“It’s not that hard to believe, is it? Why not a husband-killing service, back before fingerprints and databases and video surveillance, when the life expectancy was so short? All she had to do was bribe the cops and the coroner—easy enough to do, with all those undersexed widows at her beck and call.”
“You’ve really thought this through.”
“I read about an article about it once.” Asher tapped his temple. “Steel trap. You want coffee?”
Without waiting for a reply, he flagged down the waitress and ordered. Taylor drew a Parliament from her silver cigarette case and lit up. His eyes squinted, like he was taking aim. Judgment was about to be passed; she could feel it.
“How long have you been smoking?”
“Sophomore year of high school.”
“Ever thought about quitting?”
“I don’t want to quit.”
“Those things’ll kill you, you know.”
“Yeah. It says so on the package. That’s why I throw it away.”
“There are better ways to be rebellious.”
“I don’t smoke to be rebellious. Maybe I did back in high school, but not anymore. I smoke to relax. I enjoy a nice cigarette after dinner.”
He didn’t say anything, just studied her with an intimidating intensity. Was her dirty little habit going to spoil her chances? Well, tough shit. Taylor wasn’t going to quit smoking just because a guy asked her to—even if the guy was Asher Krug.
“I was thinking we’d have a nightcap,” he said, letting the matter drop. “They have fantastic bartenders at the Rainbow Room. Real pros. Have you been?”
“To the Rainbow Room? Oh, sure. I go there all the time. Me and Todd, we like to cut a rug. No, of course not.”
“We should go.”
The Rainbow Room was—and is, although now under new and more corporate management—on the sixty-fifth floor of the GE building. It was, and is, something of a tourist trap, where real New Yorkers rarely deign to set foot, but unlike, say, the World Trade Center (I mourn its loss, like everyone else, but let’s not kid ourselves: Windows on the World sucked), the Rainbow Room had much to recommend it. Because it was not the Twin Towers or the Empire State Building, you could see the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building from its vantage point. The orange juice in the screwdrivers was fresh-squeezed. Plus, it had cachet. Even Billy Ray and Darla had heard of the Rainbow Room.
It was three piddly blocks on foot, but Asher, oblivious to and unaffected by the recession that had crippled even some of the big spenders on Wall Street, and looking to show off, insisted on taking a cab. “Too hot,” he told her. Taylor didn’t argue.
Ever try to find a cab in the Theatre District on Saturday night? It’s nigh impossible, for us mortals. But no sooner did that smooth sonuvabitch raised his arm then a taxi magically appeared.
Once nestled in the cool backseat, Asher put that same magical limb around her, and Taylor rested her hand on his thigh. Just as they were comfortable—she could have stayed in that cab all night, truth be told—there they were. He took her hand from his leg and, after overtipping the cabbie, led her into the dark and deserted lobby of the GE Building.
Once in the elevator he suddenly, and with an almost nervous urgency, kissed her. If Taylor was unprepared for this turn of events, it didn’t show; she went from zero to sixty faster than the Millennium Falcon. Her left and right hands found the nape of his neck and the small of his back, respectively, and urged him closer. Asher tilted her head one way and his the other, sucked the w
hole of her lower lip into his mouth, and bit down hard. Before Taylor could retaliate, the doors opened, and they had to separate.
There was a long line out front, but Asher—if his truck with maîtres d’ was supposed to impress her, it was working—said two words to the right person and the next thing she knew they were sitting at a cozy, candlelit table in the bar area. Taylor had been to the top of the Empire State Building once, when she first came to town—her mother insisted she send pictures—but the view from the Rainbow Room was far superior. But then, Asher Krug was better company than the herd of bewildered tourists on the observation deck. For one thing, he knew the names of all the buildings. Not that she cared about the skyline just then. All of her being was focused on him, and what she wanted to do with him as soon as possible.
Asher, meanwhile, was admiring a different view. His eyes were trained on her like twin gun barrels. Taylor found it difficult to stand his gaze, she wanted to continue the elevator hanky-panky so badly, so she feasted her eyes on his fingers instead. Ten strong digits resting on the table, interwoven with her own. On his right middle finger, he wore a thick silver band, engraved with some sort of hieroglyphics.
“I like your ring,” she said.
He held his hand out and examined the band. “Thanks.”
“Is there some significance to it?”
“It’s a fraternity ring,” he told her.
“What were you, like, in Skull and Bones?”
“If I were,” he winked, “I wouldn’t be able to tell you. You know how secret societies are.”
“I heard Averell Ross was in Skull and Bones. Same year as President Bush. Nathan, too.”
“Is that a fact.”
An effete waiter came and took their drink orders. When he sashayed off, there was a lull in the conversation—a long, pleasant lull—during which Taylor and Asher fondled each other’s fingers, in that ardent way lovers fondle fingers when circumstances prohibit fondling more.
“Do you take all your girlfriends here?” Taylor asked. This was a calculated move—an open-ended question, as they called it in her journalism classes, designed to get him to reveal more about himself. She was possessed, as I’ve mentioned, of great journalistic instincts.