Eat My Heart Out (5 page)

Samuel was trying to talk: ‘Yeah cos there are five ways of saying
getting money from your parents
in Williamsburg because it's like an informal economy. Because it's based on love not money.'

‘Do you mean privilege?' said Freddie.

‘It's a privilege to be loved,' said Samuel, confused.

‘I'm not sure you know what your value system is,' said Jasper, slurping up the head cheese. A gland spilled down his shirt. ‘I know what mine is. Do you know what yours is, Fred?'

‘Naturally,' said Freddie. ‘It's zero. Zero degree. Start from nothing. Nihilism.'

‘You know,' said Jasper, his mouth full. ‘Baudrillard said dandyism is an aesthetic form of nihilism. That must be why you're such an effortless dandy, Fred.'

Freddie put down his knife and fork. ‘Jasp. Dandies are painful.'

Samuel was ticking the terms off on his fingers. He wasn't eating the pig. ‘Getting the cush, picking the berries, waxing Oedipal, getting the patrimony, changing the diaper.' He paused. ‘I'm not sure about the last one because surely it's like your
parents
are changing your diaper if you're getting their money?'

The pop star was still crying when I was called upon to get her out of the restaurant via the kitchen slave exit. She wanted to avoid the cameras.

‘They are
monsters
,' said her boyfriend's mother.

I was reminded of one of the pop star's early videos, in which she had cried non-stop for the duration of the song. In a twist on the miracle of the saint crying milk, her neo-goth eye make-up had made her look as though she were crying black crude oil. She had been done up in a saint's outfit, sitting on an oil rig. The North Sea had raged in the background.

The kitchen slaves sodomised the pop star with their eyes when we went downstairs. The pile of skinned rabbits had diminished almost to nothing.

The reception was quiet.

Stephanie Haight was eating a lemon posset. The ballerina was eating a chocolate fondant. The Marge woman was saying: ‘I'm not getting mad. I'm not getting mad. I just don't know how you can defend that woman.'

Madeline was eating rabbit scraps off guests' plates in the cloakroom.

I moved closer to Stephanie.

‘Oh, but I do,' Marge went on. ‘I do know how you can defend her. You defend Gabriella because you created Gabriella. How many times, Stephanie, are you going to root out a fine young thing and turn her into a
whatever you want
and then cry yourself to sleep at night when she takes what you taught her and turns her back on you?'

‘She hasn't turned her back.' Stephanie halted. ‘She always picks up the phone when I call her. Sometimes. Her work is very demanding.'

‘Yes, I imagine that ritualistic self-harming is quite demanding.'

‘And Gabriella was not
fine
,' said Stephanie. ‘She had a natural body, sure. She had a supple, a
Rabelaisian
body. A body of excess. Oh, the monstrous feminine excess!' She laughed. ‘But she was just a life model. She would have been a life model all her life if I hadn't pulled her out of that phallocentric head space and turned her into an artist in her own right.'

‘Yeah,' said Marge. ‘I remember. You were writing that piece on life models – right?'

‘Right.' Stephanie ate another spoonful of posset. ‘For the
LRB
. Or was it
Spare Rib
?'

Marge shrugged.

‘Gabriella stood out right away,' said Stephanie. ‘She looked so sorrowful, the standing female nude. And when she opened her mouth and I heard that she was
common
like me, I couldn't resist. I couldn't resist any single one of my prodigies, Marge. Like you, Marge.'

Marge smiled. ‘Yes, I remember when I first walked into your class on feminist rereadings of the Hegelian unhappy consciousness at Harvard. You looked so beautiful in that African robe. I was so impressed by you – we all were. When was that?'

‘'78. Must have been. I was in my third year of grad school. And the Kappa Alpha Theta initiations – such fun!' Stephanie finished her posset.

‘Gabriella's from a later world,' said Marge. ‘She's from a later, more disenchanted world. She's
Third Wave
.' She bent her fingers in parentheses. ‘If that is a thing at all.'

‘Maybe she doesn't wanna be part of any
wave
, Marge,' said Steph, expressively. ‘Have you ever considered that? Maybe she's not into
waves
. Listen. Gabriella's just doing what we did. She's just using what she's got. Her own experience.'

‘Bullshit.' Marge put her fork down. ‘She's using her cunt.'

The ballerina looked at Marge, who said: ‘Don't worry, honey. It's not a pejorative.' Marge went on: ‘Gabriella wants a new cunt. And new eyes – better to see out of. Better to see herself out of. She's just like a … She's a paradigm of selfish fucking neo-liberal individualism, Stephanie.'

‘We all wanted to be individuals, Marge, remember? We all wanted to be
ourselves
. That's why we got involved. We didn't want to be what our mothers—'

‘Yes, but we sought solidarity!'

‘But Gabriella is a visual
artist
,' said Stephanie. ‘She's not a sociologist like you—'

‘Do artists have the right to disavow their foremothers? To pretend that Second Wave feminism never happened? That they owe us
nothing
?'

Stephanie sat back and laughed. ‘Oh, I get it. So you want her to defer to
us
. The great wall of us. You want her to pay homage to our grand narrative—'

‘Grand narrative?!' spat Marge. ‘You're the one constructing the big, macho, monolithic grand narrative, lady. Going around on your book tour. With your fancy agent—'

‘Not all of us wanted to stay in the academy, Marge.'

‘I entered the academy because of
you
, Stephanie. I became an academic because
you
inspired me.
You
told me that that was my path.'

‘Well,' said Stephanie. ‘It's not
my
path. The academy is not necessarily the best way to communicate—'

‘Communicate what exactly?!' Marge grabbed her glass of wine and glugged it. ‘That romantic love is structurally akin to the subliminal power dynamics of sadomasochistic relationships? That domination and submission inform the way we treat each other? Ha! Shulie Firestone, Jess Benjamin were talking about that thirty, forty years ago.' Marge closed her eyes and became still.

‘Mommy?' said the ballerina.

Marge opened her eyes. ‘You're a
populist
, Stephanie.'

There was silence.

‘Bite me,' said Stephanie.

An alarm started across the street.

Stephanie grabbed her handbag.

The alarm got louder until guests were covering their ears and lowering their heads as though intending to hide under the tables from the noise.

William emerged from the toilets, his eyes googly like a cartoon. He demanded that I check what the fuck and what the fuck was I doing here anyway loitering near people trying to eat—

I went outside.

The townhouse across the street was on fire. Its roof burned against the black night, smoking out the stars. Great gusts of red were rising, getting bigger and bigger. I saw arms reaching out of three top floor windows. The paps had started taking pictures. There were sirens. Fire engines screeched around the corner of Frith Street and firemen leapt out and operated their neon machinery as the smoke curled higher still. Despite the fact that I knew he was nowhere near at all, I wanted to run into the building and save Vic's life.

William was telling the guests to leave their minks behind.

Marge was gripping the hand of her child ballerina, who looked excited. Her eyes were gleaming in a satanic way. Stephanie had disappeared. Samuel, Jasper, and Freddie had disappeared. There was the sound of glass shattering; glass rained down, shattering more on the pavement. From a door on the right of the burning building, people were sprinting into the frozen air, holding hands and pushing each other out of the way. They were men, well-heeled and mostly middleaged, some younger, mostly bankers and lawyers, slick, cleanshaven, too terrified to look guilty. There were women too, all young, pretty, or at least women who had cemented a mask that could pass for prettiness over their plain or ageing faces. Women in short red skirts and patent-leather thigh-high boots, women with topknots out of which sprouted synthetic hair, women who were accustomed to being tired. The men and their prostitutes shared neon blankets tossed over their shoulders by firemen.

Soon the power of the hoses had beaten the fire into submission and the area was cordoned off. The guests filed back inside to pay their bills.

The toad gentleman remained seated at table twenty-two while I matched guest to mink. There was a lot of shouting about lost items; William was called, but the fire seemed to have endowed him with an ancient kind of Zen and even his verbal abuse was tranquil.

The toad gentleman caught my eye as I said thank you so much for coming, we do apologise for the disruption – a thousand times or more. He was holding up his iPad for me to see. I squinted at it. He beckoned me closer.

On the screen, a mauve heart was efflorescing with digital emotion: it was spurting something. His tongue darted out again; it was the same colour as the heart.

‘Your fucking friends have left without paying again,' said Madeline, bulldozing into reception. ‘It's coming out of your pay cheque.' She looked at the receipt. ‘£790.'

I tried to call Freddie, but he didn't answer.

Reluctantly, I called Jasper.

‘Come and play,' he giggled. ‘We're playing.'

‘Where?'

‘Upstairs. Up.'

I went back through the restaurant towards the slanting stairs that spiralled up the interior of the building.

The toad man shot out a toad hand as I passed. He held my wrist. He was wearing red and gold cufflinks. ‘Please,' he said in a gentle voice.

I stopped.

His pond eyes looked up into mine.

‘The restaurant's closed now, sir. If you wouldn't—'

‘Sit with me for just one moment.'

I did.

We were alone, side by side, on the leather banquette. He plucked the single white orchid out of the vase on the table and gave it to me.

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘But that's restaurant property. They get put in the fridge overnight. There are CCTV cameras everywhere.'

His comb-over fell into his face. His scalp was slick. There were brown speckles on his forehead and veiny networks on his cheeks.

‘My wife died last year,' he said. ‘Breast cancer.'

I frowned.

‘Yes, it was a terrible, irreplaceable loss. We'd been married for thirty years.' He looked down. ‘I've been waiting for a woman like you. I've been waiting to impart jouissance to a woman like you. Do you know what jouissance is?'

I shook my head.

‘It is the extreme of pleasure,' he said. ‘Where pleasure meets non-pleasure and life, existence, the cosmos becomes a black hole. It is the threshold of pleasure and pain, of sanity and insanity.' He paused. ‘Of Eros and Thanatos.'

I stood up and gave a sunny, American smile. ‘I do hope you enjoyed the salmon.'

‘Where are you from?' he asked me.

‘France,' I lied. ‘Paris.'

That tongue again. It was actually the colour of beetroot. He extended it to maximum length, as though trying to catch a fly. He waggled it around. Then he put it back in his mouth. ‘Please come to the ASH Hotel bar after your shift.' He slid a business card towards me. ‘I will be waiting for you from midnight onwards. I will wait all night.'

Jasper was shooting balls off the end of the billiard table in the private members' club upstairs. Samuel had been ordered to stand at the end and catch the balls on the premise that the ballboy was an esteemed and essential figure in any game. ‘Play up and play the game,' Freddie was repeating, stupidly.

‘You're not supposed to be in here,' I said. ‘This is members only. Get out.'

‘Why are you always telling people to get out?' said Jasper, sipping his negroni.

‘And I want my money,' I said.

‘What money?' said Freddie.

‘For dinner,' I said.

Freddie laughed. ‘I want my money for the booze earlier this afternoon. Think I'd forgotten about that, did you? Nice little outfit you came home with.'

‘I'll call the police,' I said.

Now they all laughed – even Samuel.

‘Tell Ann-Marie where you got that babygro, Samuel.' Freddie chalked his cue.

‘It's a onesie,' said Samuel. ‘I made it! Yeah cos I read this article on
Vice
that had the coolest headline ever –
Please Snort Me!
' He gestured to his chest. ‘So I like copied it!'

‘What was the article about though?' said Jasper.

‘I don't know.' Samuel looked ashamed. ‘I didn't read it.'

Now Freddie and Jasper nearly killed themselves laughing.

‘I'm calling William,' I said.

‘Ann-Marie.' Jasper tried to slink one well-moisturised arm around my shoulders, but I punched him.

‘Ow!' He rubbed his gut. ‘You can take it as payment for all the times you fucked me and then left me and went back to your whirling dervish of a boyfriend. Like what about that time in Vietnam in the Agent Orange forest, where there were just stumps. That was fucking romantic. When Sebastian was supposed to be chugging that fucking dreadful cod trawler around the Thanet coast but he was off poking Allegra in Paris. Wasn't she doing a summer school at Lecoq?'

‘Yeah,' said Freddie.

‘For that one night at least,' said Jasper. ‘You didn't think about Sebastian. You didn't care about Sebastian at all. Did you, Ann-Marie?'