Agnes Among the Gargoyles (8 page)

   "You know why every fucking phone line in the city is busy?" Wegeman growls.

   "Sure. A.T.& T. should never have broken up."

   "No," he says, his face darkening. "It's because it's impossible to have a thought by yourself in this cocksucking city. Think about getting tickets for next year's Fourth of July game at Yankee Stadium, and you can bet your ass someone else is thinking the same thing at the same time. That's why all the fucking phones are tied up. If Fred Geister wanted to shoot me, others do, too. The idea of killing Ronald Wegeman is in the air, and I don't like it."

   His intravenous unit empties with a small belch.

   "Maybe you want to kill me too," says Wegeman. pulling the covers up to his chin. He does not have the hands of a wealthy man. There are tufts of hair on his knuckles, and his nails are bitten to the quick. "You're one of those lunatics in the Telamones Society. You weren't at the dedication to congratulate me. If you want to kill me now, go ahead. Just do me a favor and make it fast."

   His musings unsettle her. She didn't imagine that he even knew about the Telamones Society. She's glad she didn't bring Gandalf with her.

   "I don't want to kill you," Agnes assures him. "Maybe at one point I did. But I'm a lot older now."

   "I can't walk, you know," he says with remarkable calm. "The bullet did something to my spinal cord, shocked it or nicked it or exploded the filaments or something. They explained it to me with charts and slides, and I can't even program a fucking VCR. They just looked at me, like I'd have a suggestion about what to do." He rubs his temples and goes white,. and licks the accumulated crust from his lips. "I may never walk again."

   "I'm sorry," says Agnes. "That shouldn't happen to anyone."

   "Not even to a dog, right?" he says. "I like you, Travertine. Your disgust is so apparent."

   He grins with malice.

   "What is it about me that pisses everyone off? I don't want anyone taking any more shots at me. Tell me and I'll change."

   "I can't do that," says Agnes primly.

   "Now what?"

   "It's not my job to redeem you. Look into your own soul."

   "I'm sure you don't think I have one."

   "That's true. I guess you're in a pickle, aren't you?"

   "Compassion, Travertine. Have some compassion. Show me the way. Give me a makeover."

   Agnes can hardly believe she's having this conversation with him. Ron Wegeman. Weege. The Great Man. His Competency. The Billionfuckingaire. The Ruthless Cocksucker. The Master Builder—of buildings that are sleek and insubstantial and lacking in all grandeur, the sorts of places that look as though they might sustain structural damage if you went into them dripping wet on a rainy day.

   "I want to live, and if that means being maybe a little nicer, maybe a little more responsive to public opinion, if it means walking around in a purple chicken suit, then I'm gonna fucking do it," he tells Agnes. "And I know that right this second you're thinking, 'That little weasel, why can't he stand up for himself and be a man?' With people like you, I can't win."

   As if by prearranged signal, several aides converge on the bed. They present Wegeman with newspapers and reports. He puts on his glasses, and opens the International Herald Tribune. "I'll be in touch, Travertine. And by the way, the mayor is thinking seriously of privatizing the subways. By the time this dark night of the soul is over I could own the City Hall station."

   Agnes stiffens at the thought.

   "I plan to turn it into a chichi cafe. You can have lunch with me there. We'll have fabulous linguine with truffles and eggplant bread and tiramisu. And when I own the subways, there's gonna be handicapped access like you wouldn't fucking believe.

* * *

Madelaine interrupts her lunch with Agnes to take a phone call from Betsy Steinfeld, the pharmaceuticals heiress, who has been in Europe. They try to make a lunch date, but neither has a free afternoon until after the house party that Alice Winters is giving Ron in Palm Beach.

   After she hangs up, Madelaine grows pensive. She says, "As you can see, Ron is very upset."

   "Taking a slug will do that," says Agnes.

   "Ron took it personally. As soon as he's feeling better I want to force him to get out and see people. In his current state of mind, I think he needs to see how much his friends love him. And they do love him. That's why we're going to Alice's. He'll kick and scream, of course, and be an absolute nightmare and try everyone's patience to the limit. But it'll be worth it."

   She tells Agnes and illustrative story. "The last time we were at Grotta del Cane, Sooks served a Mouton-Rothschild that was really undrinkable." Agnes's head spins a little, but Madelaine's assumption that she understands the set-up of the anecdote is correct. Is there anyone in New York who doesn't know that Susan "Sooks" Metalous, dog-fancier and fund-raising dynamo on behalf of the American Ballet Theater, lives for part of the year at Grotta del Cane, her villa on St. Leon, her private Caribbean retreat? Barbara Foucault probably knows how the retaining walls are holding up. Madelaine presses on: "Everyone expected Ron to do something—you know, to break the tension. I thought he'd spit it out, or pretend to shine his shoes with it for a laugh. But he just kept drinking it. Sooks opened bottle after bottle. It turned out he was pouring it into some potted trees next to the table. They were bonsai trees. He killed every last one of them, but then he's the last person I'd say has any affinity for things Eastern."

   Agnes and Madelaine dine on one of Wegeman Tower's scores of terraces. Lunch is grilled red snapper and raw vegetable salad and small, warm sourdough rolls the size of a half-dollar. A waiter stands by ready to pour the tea, and then Mrs. Blair Stanhope, Madelaine's special assistant, appears to meet Agnes and to check on the sourdough rolls, which are from a new starter just flown in.

   "She's a whirlwind," Madelaine confides to Agnes when Mrs. Stanhope steps inside to take a call. "I snatched her away from Christie's Geneva. She organized the whole place. Brought them into the twentieth century. She doesn't take any shit, if you know what I mean." Madelaine giggles, as though she has been very naughty.

   When Mrs. Blair Stanhope returns, Agnes looks at her carefully. She seems about twenty-two or twenty-three years old, tops. She exudes good breeding and athleticism. A short black sheath dress covers her ninety-odd pound frame. She looks like the woman on the Breck bottle.
She
brought Christie's into the twentieth century? Agnes, who wasn't even aware there was a problem, feels hopelessly inadequate. Mrs. Blair Stanhope makes her feel worse by being friendly and not in the least condescending. It's easy for her to be well adjusted, thinks Agnes.

   Mrs. Blair Stanhope goes back to her duties. Madelaine fires questions at Agnes, then asks the very same question that everyone winds up asking when getting to know Agnes.

   "Why the army?"

   Why indeed? There is no easy answer. It is difficult for Agnes to summon up all that she was thinking upon her graduation from St. Mary-Star-Of-The-Sea Academy, an all-girl Catholic high school perched on one of the few verdant hilltops in the East Bronx. Agnes had a three-quarter scholarship to Yale and a belief that the conventional routes in life were traps for the unwary. Favorably impressed by Israel's compulsory national service, she had argued for years in Social Studies classes that America needed the same thing.

   "So I enlisted," says Agnes.

   "Just because you believed in it?"

   "I was very silly."

   "What on earth did your mother say?"

   "In my mother's world, it's still V-J Day. She thought it was a perfectly sensible thing to do, which should have been a tipoff."

   "Would you do it again?"

   "Of course not," says Agnes. It was an absurd decision, even though the experience left her with some fond memories, and she did learn a few things—the types of hornets and wasps indigenous to the Carolinas; black slang and Spanish curses; she was stationed outside Stuttgart and picked up a good working knowledge of German; she learned to think on her feet while avoiding the sexual advances of a dyke quartermaster with a nose like a potato, Sgt. Avis; she learned about court-martial proceedings and how to prepare meat loaf and turnip puree for 1500 and—too late—why you should be very careful not to plunge your hands into a pot of simmering soybean oil. They took her to the base hospital but, delusional with fever, she chose not to stay. She wandered around the compound for an hour, somehow avoiding the M.P.s, her eyes wide, her bandaged hands preceding her like steamed lobster claws. She was amazed at the warlike atmosphere of the place. Her thoughts were profound.
They're acting as if there's a war on in
the hope of bringing one on! If war is an industry, then this is a shutdown plant!

   "It was then that I realized I was feeding the war machine. Two years in fatigues and third-degree burns later."

   "And what about love?" says Madelaine.

   Agnes butters another sourdough roll. "What about it?"

   "Where does it fit in your life?"

   "I could squeeze it in, if something came up."

   "Then you're not seeing anyone?"

   It strikes Agnes as odd that she cares. "No."

   "My daughter hates it when I ask her that," says Madelaine. "She calls me a sexist. But I'm not. I just want her to be happy. I want her to have someone special. Loving Ron's made all the difference to me. That's why I owe you everything. Really, I couldn't go on without him."

   The woman must surely be batty. How could she possibly feel love for that piece of flesh convalescing on the other side of the triplex? It doesn't make any sense. If loving Ron's made all the difference, then she's got to get out in the world a little more. Agnes finds her fascinatingly grotesque—the tears she cries for her husband's fate which she allows to adhere to her cheeks for an unseemly length of time; her undulating blond pageboy; her expressive, perfectly painted mouth (undercoat and highlights and glosses, three coats)--as the meal progresses Madelaine's presence starts to bear down on Agnes, like a movie viewed from the front row.

   Agnes should have wiped out the lot of them.

   Daintily, Madelaine blows her nose. "I wish you luck, Agnes. It's not easy to find someone out there."

   Agnes agrees. "It seems harder than it was meant to be. We are supposed to mate, and all."

   "I consider myself nothing but lucky. If not for Ron, I'd probably be shut up in a house somewhere in Long Island with my mother and a dozen cats."

   A rather large house right on the tip of the island, thinks Agnes unsportingly.

   "My problem is I've imagined someone who may not exist," says Agnes.

   "I used to think the same thing!" says Madelaine, growing excited. And Barbara thought
she
and Madelaine were similar—wait'll she hears about this. "You can't believe the relief I felt when I met Ron."

   The Great Man is the culmination of her desires? She dreamt of him, and didn't wake up bathed in sweat?

   "What do you want, Agnes?"

   "Someone intelligent."

   "Oh, yes."

   "And not effete."

   "You don't want a librarian."

   "A very tough librarian would be okay," says Agnes. "Someone tall enough to reach the top shelves. Someone who never has to shush anyone, whose sheer presence commands silence."

   Madelaine telephones Bob Syker. She brings Agnes into her office to wait for him. She shows Agnes a picture in a silver frame.

   "My daughter Sarah," says Madelaine. "She's in her last year at Miss Clavelle's."

   Agnes sees a broad-shouldered girl clutching a lacrosse stick. She has a flat face and a wide nose, and she smiles amiably for the camera.

   "Handsome girl," says Agnes.

   "Thank you. She's the image of her father. She's going to film school at NYU next year." It must occur to Madelaine that Agnes is someone with a fresh perspective. "What do you think about film school?"

   "I think it's a million dollar idea for a business. I wish I'd thought of it."

   "Do you think NYU can turn out a good filmmaker?'

   "You may be asking the wrong person. I think the last thing we need is more filmmakers. They're already a blight.

   Madelaine, despairing of getting anything resembling an answer, stops asking the question. "Sarah insists on going, but I think she'd be better off just making films, don't you?"

   "It's lovely that she has that option, of course, but I understand the allure of school. I've always enjoyed it—the enrolling, the posted grades, the pastries in the cafeteria, the registrar and the bursar and the ombudsman. If you decide to make movies on your own, then you pretty much have to spend all your time making movies on your own. But school gives you a comforting direction. Even when you're doing nothing, you're doing something—you're in school. Once you finish your homework, you can sit around and eat pastries with a clear conscience."

   "I caught that little thing in your voice," says Madelaine.

   "What thing?"

   "When you said it was lovely that she had that option. You think everything is easy when you're rich, don't you?"

   "I suppose I do, to be honest with you."

   "Just remember this, Agnes. Nobody wants to shoot you."

   A blood-curdling scream sounds on the other side of the triplex. Agnes looks at Madelaine with alarm. Has somebody jumped off one of the terraces?