A Certain Age (36 page)

"What?"

"None of them know how to give good blow-jobs. I finally figured it out: it's because English men are so bad in bed."

"Come on, Florence," Max said. "Let's go up on the roof." He rose, leaving his plate, napkin and glass on the floor. Dwarf trees in pots and gravel had been arranged to resemble a Japanese garden, complete with stone lanterns and a pool filled with koi. The view was splendid, buildings cutting like cubes into the skyline, though every surface on the roof she looked at closely was covered with a fine film of grayish black dirt.

Two cherubically plump English boys, resembling Humpty-Dumpty and Tweedledee, were standing by the railing, chattering excitedly, apparently having just discovered each other. For some reason they gave the illusion of wearing invisible straw boaters; perhaps it was the effect of their striped, too tight suits, as if they were an old-fashioned vaudeville routine. "And then of course there was the dreaded
cold spoon
treatment," one was saying.

"Oh, the
cold spoon
treatment! Wasn't that wretched!"

"What's the
cold spoon
treatment?" Max asked. Florence knew he was doing his dumb-American-boy routine, which so many seemed to find appealing.

"The
cold spoon
treatment," said Tweedledee, "was back in public school—"

"What you call private school over here," said Humpty-Dumpty.

"And if you were ill and had to go to the nurse, she had to examine you—"

"The
cold spoon
was if you had an"—Tweedledee glanced at Florence with an expression of coy embarrassment and raised his voice—"erection, which of course naturally sometimes one couldn't help—it was an involuntary
response
—but then, you know, Nurse would just briskly give one's penis a quick tap with the
cold spoon
—"

"In order to make it go away!" Humpty-Dumpty said gleefully. "It was
unbelievably
painful!"

These were examples of the simpering idiots who were taking over New York. More than two hundred years ago there had been a Revolution; the Americans threw the Brits out. Now they were welcomed back, ushered back, swooned over—the descendents of the same fops who sneered and looked down on the colonists. And whose descendents were sneered at today, only now maybe rightly so. What had been the point of any of it, the death, the gangrene, lives dedicated to a cause? The only difference was that now a corrupt American government levied a tax on tea bags.

Max joined a group who were standing in a circle smoking a joint. Florence decided to go back inside. She hated smoking marijuana. There weren't many women she knew who actually did like doing it. For some reason it seemed to be a man's drug. All she could ever remember happening to her when she smoked was that she felt incredibly nervous. Anything she said, even an innocuous comment about the weather, resonated in her head and she would spend the next hour wondering how she could have said something so stupid.

A man was pontificating on the stairwell about his new-found obsession with the works of Madame Blavatsky. He was talking to two other men—they all looked heterosexual, or at least they didn't look as attractive, well groomed and dressed as those she knew to be gay. One of them interrupted to talk about his Gurdjieff classes. She thought of hanging around this enclave and listening with rapt attention, but she didn't have the strength. Not another Gurdjieff proselytizer! She had had to listen to too many Elmer Gantrys during her years in New York: the Buddhist chant-

ers, the followers of Guru Mai, the fund-raising acolytes of the Dalai Lama, the worshipers of some new diet that rejected bread and rice.

To join meant to feel superior—at least for a year or two, until the trend or fashion passed in a heap of accusations, pointing fingers and discouragement that the reaping of rewards was not likely to be immediate. She had had to sit through an entire meal at which a wealthy dermatologist lectured the assembled about her conversion to Islam and her trip to Mecca. Since that time her practice had tripled.

If only she had a religion! But she couldn't get any of it to mean anything to her. Honestly, was she so much worse than everybody else? She could scarcely believe that she had less spirituality than these others, who seemed like competing lemmings, trying to be the first to jump into the sea . . . She wandered around the loft, studying the art Mike and Peony had bought or obtained by trading works of their own.

The most expensive contemporary works constituted their collection: a derivative, pseudo-childlike painting, black chicken scratches on a gray background; miniature green-faced clowns cavorting in mud; heavy dull-gray sculptures nine feet high that resembled petrified turds. And the mingling artists themselves— there was Chip Moony, flabby and porcine; there was Dorp Whitman, neurasthenically thin, as if this somehow balanced his huge houses in Telluride and East Hampton, wearing a hooded djellabah, a fake display of holiness—men all.

Okay, so she had no values. Who here did? That lawyer, Neil Pirsig, who had skimmed millions off deceased artists' estates and then went to court to get more? He smiled at her across the room, but she ignored him. Surely he must know just how low she thought he was. As if he could hear what she was thinking, he winced and slunk off like a pariah dog. That artist's wife, nostrils flared, brunette hair flowing, superior, snobbish?

So she had no morals. Who did? Only a Red Guard, beating an old professor in the name of Mao Tse-tung.

She hadn't killed anybody after all, despite what Natalie

claimed—Natalie herself had done that, through lack of love, but that lack was in itself something Natalie couldn't help. Florence hadn't stolen money. Everything that had happened had an explanation. Even if her thoughts weren't so pure, was that a crime? It was just that . . . the child, Claudia, had seemed so pathetic, a child who on the surface had had everything and yet, when the surface was examined closely, had less than the poorest urchin in the barrios of Rio. And somehow . . . Claudia's death was worse than if she had drowned herself.

It was impossible, there were no men at this party. Two women, one of whom she knew vaguely, were standing alongside a telephone and she stepped toward them. "Florence, you're not going to use the phone, are you?"

She couldn't remember the girl's name. "No, I—"

"I'm expecting a call." The girl flashed a coy smile. "From a man, naturally; I told him to call me here and I'd let him know if I could meet him later. I'm trying to play a little hard to get. He's fantastically wealthy."

"He's absolutely gorgeous too," the other woman said. "Fiona always lucks out."

"Of course, the way he made his money wasn't exactly so great!" Fiona and the other woman laughed uproariously.

"Why?" said Florence. "How did he make his money?"

"He had this Thai girlfriend—and she had a kid, a little girl about eight or nine years old, and she and Jason would get the dope from Thailand into this country . . ." Fiona's voice faded.

"They would stick the heroin up the kid's ass!" the other woman said. "Nobody would ever think to search a little girl. Isn't that gross?"

"That was ages ago anyway, and Jason's retired from that business. He's completely legitimate now. What am I going to do if he doesn't call me, though? I thought I was coming awfully close to getting him to propose."

10

She was about to
go home when Max came over. "Let's get out of here. This sucks."

"And go where?"

"Home."

She was disappointed. "You don't want to go out someplace."

"No." He looked spoiled and petulant.

"That's fine by me," she said, though the thought of returning, alone, to her empty apartment sent her into a panic. "Where's the host and hostess? Shouldn't we say good-bye?"

"I already did. They're upstairs in their bedroom, pretending to be John and Yoko. I'm not going back up there—I'm sick of paying homage to people. I'm leaving. Stay if you want to."

"No, no. I'll come." The dinner had been cleared from the buffet table and displayed now were plates of strawberries—each as large as a fist, pointed ends dipped in chocolate—all kinds of ornate butter cookies and tiny tartlets of various kinds. Only the chocolate interested her. Three little girls—one about ten, the other two perhaps thirteen or fourteen—were wolfing down the sweets. All three were quite plain; or if not plain, then completely uninteresting-looking. She recognized two of them as Mike and Peony's girls, the other as the daughter of an even richer and more famous artist. The two older ones, she thought, might have been called Babcock and Gudrun. She hoped she didn't wake up in the middle of the night still trying to remember what they were called. "Hi!" she said, thinking they might reintroduce themselves.

The girls looked at her balefully, somehow already conscious that their social status was superior to hers. Dressed in baggy jeans, hair in dreadlocks and braids; no doubt from the earliest age they had been sent to the fanciest private schools, spent their winter break in Greece or India. They seemed completely, hermetically sealed off from the world, as if continual exposure to what their parents considered to be culture had been wasted on three marshmallows. She wrapped two of the strawberries in a dinner napkin and followed Max.

They shared a cab uptown. "Thank God I didn't see Colin there with his new boyfriend," Max said. "I still think he was the one who stole those photographs from me. That Tina Modotti that I found in the Paris flea market! And my grandmother's silver. It just kills me. I keep thinking, it had to be Colin. I mean—"

She couldn't bear to hear this saga again. "Yeah, and thank God I didn't see Natalie," she said, hoping to distract him. She took one of the strawberries out of the napkin. It was so perfect it appeared unreal, tiny green seeds flecking its red hide, stem intact, dipped in sleek brown.

"Yeah?" Max said. Her tactic had worked. He snatched the

other strawberry from the open napkin. "I heard she started screaming at you at some cocktail thing the other night."

"Who told you?" The berry had no flavor. It was only a soft, tasteless pulp, an alien's hydroponically grown interpretation of an earthling's fruit. Even the chocolate part was flavorless. Nevertheless, she popped the rest into her mouth.

"Oh, I have my sources."

"I didn't realize the whole family was nuts. I had no idea Claudia had died—the poor kid, I remember how she loved horses, and Natalie was constantly putting her down and making fun of her that she wasn't any good at things—and I had no idea that Natalie would blame me. It was just an accident that she picked up that virus, or bacteria, whatever it was—wasn't it? It doesn't seem real. And meanwhile, you know John? She blamed me, but he came into my room at their house and basically raped me. And I had the feeling it was all a setup, that she put single women up there and looked the other way so that she didn't have to sleep with him. But to make matters worse, John was going to help me, and he took my money—to invest in a new restaurant of Derek Richardson's?—and I saw Derek tonight, and he doesn't know anything about it—"

Max didn't appear to be listening. He was looking out the window, checking out some boys on Rollerblades who were weaving in and out of the cars, grabbing on to the back bumpers of taxis when they slowed at the light. "Oh, that is the best-looking kid I've ever seen," he said. "I wonder if he comes here every night. I could use a new assistant. Do you think he's over eighteen? He looks like he's younger."

Her stop was first. She rummaged in her pocketbook for some money to give Max toward the fare. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I've got it."

"Are you sure? Thanks." They pecked and she slid out of the cab. Too late, it wasn't until she was walking in her door that she remembered she hadn't intended to tell him anything at all.

In the morning she felt strangely energized, as if, despite her regrets at confiding in Max, the sense of having been unjustly accused had been lightened. She still had her headache, a permanent condition, but it was now only a physical irritation. She showered, dressed, shaved her legs, put on makeup—things that in the previous weeks she had been unable to accomplish until well into the afternoon.

Her old resume had appeared and she hand-wrote the updated information: her position at Quayle's, job duties, goal-objectives. Then she took it over to the printer's to have it retyped and photocopied. She got a copy of the
Times
on the way back, though there were far fewer Help Wanted listings during the week than on a Sunday. Besides, she wasn't all that certain if the ads in the paper were legitimate. The real jobs were all obtained through word of mouth. But there was certainly no harm in looking.

On the way into her building she was stopped by Milton, one of the doormen. He was an older man with a huge, carefully waxed handlebar mustache, who usually worked only on weekends. "Miss Florence!" He had a booming voice and old-fashioned manners. "How are you! I didn't expect to see you. What a nice surprise. Taking the day off work?"

"Hi, Milton. Actually I'm involved in a job search."

"You outgrew your old position."

"Kind of."

"Let me see. You're involved in the antique auction business, am I correct?"

"That's right."

"You were working at Sotheby's, I believe?"