Glamorama (43 page)

“Victor, please—”

“You wanted to talk to me,” I point out. “I’m here. I’m ready. I’m in a fairly responsive mood.”

“I just wanted to tell you that you can’t come to Paris—”

“Hey baby, please look at me,” I tell her. “Let’s go into the bar and I’ll order some coffee, a nice cappuccino, huh?”

Reaching around, she grabs my hand without turning to face me and whispers something about my room.

“What? What did you say, baby?” I whisper back, leaning into her, suddenly woozy with the prospect of sex, all the champagne, the smells coming off the Prada overcoat.

“Let’s go to your room.” She breathes in, her voice husky and thick.

“Baby,” I start. “That is such a good—”

Still holding my hand, she turns and walks away, cutting a path through the fog along the deck, and it’s hard to keep up with the long, wide strides she’s taking and I’m mumbling “Baby, baby, slow down” but I just let her pull me along, rushing toward my cabin.

Once at my door, giggling and out of breath, I pull a key out of my pocket and drop it—laughing “You’re taxing my mind-eye coordination, baby”—and I reach down, fumbling for the key, but she grabs it first and I try to grab her hand but when I finally stand up straight, gasping, she has already pushed the door open and is walking into the room, dragging me along and switching off all the lights, her back still to me. I fall onto the bed, reaching out for her leg as she walks by.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she says from the bathroom before closing the door.

Grunting, I sit up and slip my shoes off, hearing them drop by the side of the bed, and then reach over to turn some of the lights back on but I can’t reach them and quickly realize I’m just too tired and too drunk to really do anything right now.

“Hey baby?” I call out. “Can we keep the lights on?” I fall back onto the bed. “Honey?”

The bathroom door opens and Marina briefly stands in the entrance, the hood now draped over her shoulders, but even by squinting I can’t make out her features since she’s backlit in the doorway, just a dark shape moving toward me, the door slowly closing partway behind her, and it’s so freezing in the cabin that my breath steams in the half-light coming from the bathroom and she drops down onto the floor, her hair covering her face, and she proceeds to yank down my tuxedo pants along with the Calvin Klein boxer-jockeys and tosses them in the corner and with both hands on my thighs spreads my legs open, moving in between them until her head is at my waist, and my dick—amazingly—is rock hard and she starts rolling her tongue around the head while sucking on it at the same time, her hand gripping the base and then, keeping the head in her mouth, she starts sliding her hand up and down the shaft.

“I want to kiss you,” I groan, hooking my hands underneath her arms, trying to pull her on top of me, but her arms are bound up in the bulky jacket, which I finally manage to move down a little, revealing muscular pale shoulders and what looks like a tattoo, partly covered by the strap of a white tank top, on the right shoulder blade. Reaching out, I try to touch the tattoo. “Come on,” I groan, “take your clothes off,” but she keeps pushing me back, my cock moving in and out of her mouth, her hair hanging down, brushing across my hips, her tongue expertly sliding up the shaft, and then I’m angling myself so I can push the entire dick back into her mouth and with both hands holding my hips she starts swallowing it over and over and I’m making soft moaning noises, pulling my shirt up, not wanting to come on it, and I start jacking myself off while she eats my balls, a finger pressing against my asshole that I keep brushing away but she slips it in and I start coming and afterwards, panting, things spinning away from me, through a blurry lens I notice her moving around the room opening drawers and I’m murmuring “Why are you wearing a wig?” before I
pass out, which I don’t want to do because there are so many things I need to show her.

5

The noon whistle is what stops the dreaming. In the middle of the night I was wrapped in blankets after I passed out but no one removed the tuxedo shirt and bow tie. Unable to stay motionless in the tightly curled fetal position I’m in—due to a great deal of pain—I reach for the phone but in mid-reach realize I’ve missed brunch and there’s no possibility I could keep anything down anyway so I nix room service. In desperate need of water, I stumble up, stagger to the bathroom in pain, squealing “Spare me, spare me,” and drink greedily from the sink, which tastes awful, and then I stare at my reflection in the mirror, utterly confused: my face looks completely dehydrated and splotchy, the hair on my head is sticking up at weird angles in a totally ungroovy ’80s kind of way and below that the sparse hair on my stomach is matted with dried semen. After a shower the day seems halfway salvageable and much less grim. I get dressed, take three Advil, flush my eyes with Visine, then fall into a violent heap on the bed. I call Marina’s room but there’s no answer.

4

I find Marina’s room and knock on the door but there’s no answer and, predictably, it’s locked. I knock again, place my ear against the door: silence. While lingering in the corridor, out of it, still hazy, wondering what I should do after I apologize for being drunk, I notice maids five doors down cleaning rooms, moving slowly this way. I take a walk along the starboard deck but end up pacing just one small stretch of it, sunglasses on, mumbling to myself, the wind off the Atlantic causing
me to weave around, until I move back to Marina’s hall. Her door is open now and a maid is given her cue to enter, leaving in the open doorway a giant canvas hamper piled high with laundry.

I knock, peering in, clearing my throat, causing the maid to look up while she’s stripping the bed. Without smiling and with some sort of bossy Scottish accent, she asks, “May I help you?”

“Hello,” I say, trying to be genial and totally failing. “I’m just looking for the girl whose room this is.”

“Yes?” the maid asks, waiting, holding the bundle of sheets.

“I, um, left something here,” I say, moving into the cabin, noticing an unopened fruit basket, knocked over, on the dressing table, the phone Marina used to call me on the floor in the corner next to the bed instead of the nightstand, as if whoever was last talking on it was huddled down on the floor, hiding behind the bed.

“Sir—” the maid begins impatiently.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I’m saying. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“Sir, you should come back later,” the maid says.

“No, no, it’s okay,” I’m saying, realizing that the room seems totally unlived in. I move past the maid to the closet and open it.

“Sir, you should wait until—”

I hold up a hand. “I said it’s okay,” I murmur.

The closet is completely empty: no clothes, no luggage, not even any hangers. I close the closet door and move past the maid over to the dressing table and start opening drawers. All of those are empty too.

“Sir, I’m asking you to leave,” the maid says, looking me over unfavorably. “If you don’t leave I’m going to have to call Security.”

Ignoring her, I notice that the wall safe is open and a Prada handbag—nylon with the trademark metal triangle—is halfway hidden inside. As I move toward the safe, behind me the maid walks out of the cabin.

Slowly I unclasp the purse, opening it. I reach in and it’s basically empty, except for an envelope.

Queasy, suddenly breathing hard, the hangover washing back over me intensely, I pull a series of Polaroids out of the envelope.

There are eight photographs of me. Two were taken backstage at what looks like a Wallflowers concert: a poster for the band in the background; a sweaty Jakob Dylan holding a red plastic cup behind me, a
towel draped over his shoulders. Two were taken during a magazine shoot: hands in the frame with a makeup brush touching up my face, my eyes closed serenely, Brigitte Lancome setting up a camera off to the side. The other four: me standing next to a pool wearing shorts and a vest with no shirt, mattresses on the ground everywhere, and in two of the Polaroids it’s bright out and a giant orange sun beats down through smog, and behind a long glass partition near a teenage Japanese waitress wearing a sarong, Los Angeles is spread out behind me. The other two Polaroids were taken at dusk and Rande Gerber has his arm around my shoulder while someone lights tiki torches in the frame next to us. This is a place I recognize from various magazines as the Sky Bar at the recently opened Mondrian Hotel. But my nose is different—wider, slightly flatter—and my eyes are set too close together; the chin is dimpled, more defined; my hair has never been cut so that it parts easily to one side.

I’ve never been to a Wallflowers concert

Or had my photo taken by Brigitte Lancome.

I’ve never been to the Sky Bar in Los Angeles.

I drop the photographs back in the Prada handbag, because I don’t want to touch them anymore.

The bathroom reeks of bleach and disinfectant and the floor is wet and gleaming even though the maid hasn’t started cleaning in here yet; a bath mat is still crumpled by the tub and towels lie damp, oddly stained, in the corner. There are no toiletries anywhere, no bottles of shampoo, no bars of soap lining the tub’s edge. Then someone positions me by the tub so that I’m crouching next to it and I’m urged to move my hand to the drain and after feeling around in it my fingers come away stained slightly pink and when I move a finger farther into the drain I feel something soft and when I pull my hand away again—involuntarily, alarmed at what I’m touching, something soft—the pinkness is darker, redder.

Behind the toilet there’s more blood—not a lot, just enough to make an impression—and when I run my fingers through it they come away streaked with pink as if the blood has been watered down or someone had tried to clean it up in a hurry and failed.

Just off to the side of the toilet, embedded in the wall, are two small white objects. I pull one of them out of the wall, applying pressure at a
certain angle in order to extract it, and after inspecting the thing in my hand I turn to the crew. There’s an empty silence, people are fixating on the bathroom’s cold light.

“I may be out of it,” I start quietly, breathing hard, “but this is a fucking tooth .…” And then I’m talking loudly, as if I’m accusing them of something, holding it out to them, my arm outstretched, offering it. “This is a fucking
tooth,”
I’m repeating, shaking hard. “This is a fucking tooth,” I say again, and then I’m told to race out of the room.