Glamorama (9 page)

“When were you around dogs?” she asks again.

“Baby, you’ve made your point.”

She stares at the scratches once more, passively, then silently gets into her side of the bed and reaches for a script sent to her by CAA, a miniseries set on another tropical island, which she thinks is dreadful even though “miniseries” is not a dirty word. I’m thinking of saying something along the lines of
Baby, there might be something in tomorrow’s paper that might, like, upset you
. On MTV one uninterrupted traveling Steadicam shot races through an underfurnished house.

I scoot over, position myself next to her.

“It looks like we’ve got the new space,” I say. “I’m meeting with Waverly tomorrow.”

Chloe doesn’t say anything.

“I could open the new place, according to Burl, within three months.” I look over at her. “You’re looking vaguely concerned, baby.”

“I don’t know how good an idea that really is.”

“What? Opening up my own place?”

“It might destroy certain relationships.”

“Not ours, I hope,” I say, reaching for her hand.

She stares at the script.

“What’s wrong?” I sit up. “The only thing I really want right now at this point in my life—besides
Flatliners II
—is my own club, my own place.”

Chloe sighs, flips over a page she didn’t read. Finally she puts the script down. “Victor—”

“Don’t say it, baby. I mean, is it so unreasonable to want that? Is it really asking anyone too much? Does the fact that I want to do something with my life bore the shit out of you?”

“Victor—”

“Baby, all my life—”

Then, out of the blue: “Have you ever cheated on me?”

Not too much silence before “Oh baby.” I lean over her, squeezing the fingers lying on top of the CAA logo. “Why are you asking me this?” And then I ask, but also know, “Have you?”

“I just want to know if you’ve always been … faithful to me.” She looks back at the script and then at the TV, showcasing a lovely pink fog, whole minutes of it. “I care about that, Victor.”

“Oh baby, always,
always
. Don’t underestimate me.”

“Make love to me, Victor,” she whispers.

I kiss her gently on the lips. She responds by pushing into me too hard and I have to pull back and whisper, “Oh baby, I’m so wiped out.” I lift my head because the new Soul Asylum video is on MTV and I want Chloe to watch it too but she has already turned over, away from me. A photo of myself, a pretty good one, taken by Herb Ritts, sits on Chloe’s nightstand, the only one I let her frame.

“Is Herb coming tomorrow?” I ask softly.

“I don’t think so,” she says, her voice muffled.

“Do you know where he is?” I ask her hair, her neck.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Arousal for Chloe: Sinead O’Connor CD, beeswax candles, my cologne, a lie. Beneath the scent of coconut her hair smells like juniper, even willow. Chloe sleeps across from me, dreaming of photographers flashing light meters inches from her face, of running naked down a freezing beach pretending it’s summer, of sitting under a palm tree full of spiders in Borneo, of getting off an overnight flight, gliding across another red carpet, paparazzi waiting, Miramax keeps calling, a dream within the dream of six hundred interview sessions melding into nightmares involving white-sand beaches in the South Pacific, a sunset over the Mediterranean, the French Alps, Milan, Paris, Tokyo, the icy waves, the pink newspapers from foreign countries, stacks of magazines with her unblemished face airbrushed to death and cropped close on the covers, and it’s hard to sleep when a sentence from a
Vanity Fair
profile of Chloe by Kevin Sessums refuses to leave me: “Even though we’ve never met she looks eerily familiar, as if we’ve known her forever.”

27

Vespa toward the club to have breakfast with Damien at 7:30, with stops at three newsstands to check the papers (nothing, no photo, small-time relief, maybe something more), and in the main dining room, which this morning looks stark and nondescript, all white walls and black velvet banquettes, my line of vision is interrupted frequently by flashes from a photographer sent by
Vanity Fair
wearing a Thai-rice-field-worker hat, a video of
Casino Royale
on some of the monitors,
Downhill Racer
on others, while upstairs Beau and Peyton (ahem)
man
the phones. At our table Damien and me and JD (sitting by my side taking notes) and the two goons from the black Jeep, both wearing black Polo shirts, finish up breakfast, today’s papers spread out everywhere with major items about tonight’s opening: Richard Johnson in the
Post
, George Rush in the
News
(a big photo of me, with the caption
“It Boy of the Moment”), Michael Fleming in
Variety
, Michael Musto plugging it in the
Voice
, notices in Cindy Adams, Liz Smith, Buddy Seagull, Billy Norwich, Jeanne Williams and A. J. Benza. I finish leaving a message under the name Dagby on my agent Bill’s voice mail. Damien’s sipping a vanilla hazelnut decaf iced latte, holding a Monte Cristo cigar he keeps threatening to light but doesn’t, looking very studly in a Comme des Garçons black T-shirt under a black double-breasted jacket, a Cartier Panthere watch wrapped around a semi-hairy wrist, Giorgio Armani prescription sunglasses locked on a pretty decent head, a Motorola Stortac cell phone next to the semi-hairy wrist. Damien bought a 600SEL last week, and he and the goons just dropped Linda Evangelista off at the Cynthia Rowley show and it’s cold in the room and we’re all eating muesli and have sideburns and everything would be flat and bright and pop if it wasn’t so early.

“So Dolph and I walk backstage at the Calvin Klein show yesterday—just two guys passing a bottle of Dewar’s between them—and Kate Moss is there, no shirt on, arms folded across her tits, and I’m thinking, Why bother? Then I drank one too many lethal martinis at Match Uptown last night. Dolph has a master’s in chemical engineering, he’s married and we’re talking
wife
in italics, baby, so there wasn’t a bimbo in sight even though the VIP room was filled with eurowolves but no heroin, no lesbians, no Japanese influences, no
British Esquire
. We hung out with Irina, the emerging Siberian-Eskimo supermodel. After my fifth lethal martini I asked Irina what it was like growing up in an igloo.” A pause. “The evening, er, ended sometime after that.” Damien lifts off the sunglasses, rubs his eyes, adjusts them for the first time this morning to light, and glances at the headlines splashed over the various papers. “Helena Christensen splitting up with Michael Hutchence? Prince dating Veronica Webb? God, the world’s a mess.”

Suddenly Beau leans over me with the new revised guest list, whispers something unintelligible about the Gap into my ear, hands over a sample of the invitations, which Damien never bothered to look at but wants to see now, along with certain 8×10s and Polaroids of tonight’s various waitresses, stealing his two favorites—Rebecca and Pumpkin, both from Doppelganger’s.

“Shalom Harlow sneezed on me,” Damien’s saying.

“I’ve got chills,” I admit. “They’re multiplying.”

I’m looking over the menu that Bongo and Bobby Flay have come up with: jalapeño-cured gravlax on dark bread, spicy arugula and mesclun greens, southwestern artichoke hearts with focaccia, porcini mushrooms and herb-roasted chicken breasts and/or grilled tuna with black peppercorns, chocolate-dipped strawberries, assorted classy granitas.

“Did anyone read the Marky Mark interview in the
Times
?” Damien asks. “The underwear thing is ‘semi-haunting’ him.”

“It’s semi-haunting me too, Damien,” I tell him. “Listen, here’s the seating arrangements.”

Damien studies Beau suspiciously for a reaction.

Beau notices this, points out certain elements about the menu, then carefully says, “I’m semi-haunted … too.”

“Yesterday I wanted to fuck about twenty different strangers. Just girls, just people on the street. This one girl—the only one who
hadn’t
seen the 600SEL, who
couldn’t
tell Versace from the Gap, who didn’t even
glance
at the Patek Philippe—” He turns to the goons, one who keeps eyeing me in a fucked-up way. “That’s a watch
you
might never own. Anyway,
she’s
the only one who would talk to me, just some dumpy chick who came on to me in Chemical Bank, and I motioned sadly to her that I was
mute
, you know,
tongue
less, that I simply couldn’t
speak
, what have you. But get this—she knew sign language.”

After Damien stares at me, I say, “Ah.”

“I tell you, Victor,” Damien continues, “the world is full of surprises. Most of them not that interesting but surprising nonetheless. Needless to say, it was a mildly scary, humiliating moment. It actually bordered on the horrific, but I moved through it.” He sips his latte. “Could I actually not be in vogue? I panicked, man. I felt …
old.”

“Oh man, you’re only twenty-eight.” I nod to Beau, letting him know that he can slink back upstairs.

“Twenty-eight, yeah.” Damien takes this in, but instead of dealing he just waves at the stacks of papers on the table. “Everything going as planned? Or are there any imminent disasters I should be apprised of?”

“Here are the invites.” I hand him one. “I don’t think you ever had the time to see these.”

“Nice, or as my friend Diane Von Furstenberg likes to say—
nass.”

“Yeah, they were printed on recycled paper with boy-based—I
mean
soy
-based ink.” I close my eyes, shake my head, clear it. “Sorry, those little mos upstairs are getting to me.”

“Opening this club, Victor, is tantamount to making a political statement,” Damien says. “I hope you know that.”

I’m thinking, Spare me, but say, “Yeah, man?”

“We’re selling myths.”

“Mitts?”

“No,
myths
. M-y-t-h-s. Like if a fag was gonna introduce you to Miss America, what would he say?”

“
Myth
… America?”

“Right on, babe.” Damien stretches, then slouches back into the booth. “I can’t help it, Victor,” he says blankly. “I sense sex when I walk around the club. I feel …
compelled.”

“Man, I’m so with you.”

“It’s not a club, Victor. It’s an aphrodisiac.”

“Here is the, um, seating arrangements for the dinner and then the list of press invited to the cocktail party beforehand.” I hand him a sheaf of papers, which Damien hands to one of his goons, who stares at it, like duh.

“I just want to know who’s at my table,” Damien says vacantly.

“Um, here …” I reach over to grab the papers back, and for an instant the goon glares at me suspiciously before gradually releasing his grip. “Um, table one is you and Alison and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger and Tim Hutton and Uma Thurman and Jimmy and Jane Buffett and Ted Field and Christy Turlington and David Geffen and Calvin and Kelly Klein and Julian Schnabel and Ian Schrager and Russell Simmons, along with assorted dates and wives.”

“I’m between Uma Thurman and Christy Turlington, right?”

“Well, Alison and Kelly—”

“No no no no. I’m between Christy and Uma,” Damien says, pointing a finger at me.

“I don’t know how that is going to”—I clear my throat—“fly with Alison.”

“What’s she gonna do?
Pinch
me?”

“Cool cool cool.” I nod. “JD, you know what to do.”

“After tonight no one should get in for free. Oh yeah—except very good-looking lesbians. Anyone dressed like Garth Brooks is purged. We want a clientele that will
up
the class quotient.”

“Up the class quotient. Yeah, yeah.” Suddenly I cannot tear my eyes off Damien’s head.

“Ground Control to Major Tom,” Damien says, snapping his fingers.

“Huh?”

“What in the fuck are you looking at?” I hear him ask.

“Nothing. Go ahead.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. Just spacing. Go ahead.”

After a brief, scary pause Damien continues icily. “If I see anyone and I mean
anyone
un
hip
wandering around this party tonight I will kill you.”