Glamorama (56 page)

First we sipped Stolis at Quo Vadis in Soho for some European MTV benefit, then we arrived at the party in Holland Park in two Jaguar XK8s, both of them red and gleaming, parked at conspicuous angles in front of the house. People definitely noticed and started whispering to each other as the six of us walked in together and at that precise moment Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’Aime” started playing continuously for the rest of the evening. There was no discernible center at the party, its hosts were invisible, guests had to come up with strained explanations as to why they were there and some had completely forgotten who had invited them, no one really knew. Emporio Armani underwear models moved through a crowd consisting of Tim Roth, Seal, members of Supergrass, Pippa Brooks, Fairuza Balk, Paul Weller, Tyson, someone passing around large trays of osso buco. Outside there was a garden filled with roses and below tall hedges children dressed in Tommy Hilfiger safari shirts were drinking candy-colored punch made with grenadine and playing a game with an empty bottle of Stolichnaya, kicking it along the expanse of plush green lawn, and beyond them, just night. Smells floating around inside the house included tarragon, tobacco flowers, bergamot, oak moss. “Possibly,” I muttered to someone.

I was slouching in a black leather armchair while Bobby, in a suit he found on Savile Row, kept feeding me Xanax, whispering the sentence “You’d better get used to it” each time he departed. I kept petting a ceramic cat that was perched next to the armchair I was frozen in, occasionally noticing an oversized book lying on the floor with the words
Designing with Tiles
on its cover. There was an aquarium filled with cumbersome black fish that struck me as essential. And everyone had just gotten back from L.A. and people were heading to Reykjavík for the weekend and some people seemed concerned about the fate of the ozone layer while others definitely did not. In a bathroom I tranced out on a bar of monogrammed soap that sat in a black dish while I stood on a shaggy wool carpet, unable to urinate. And then I was biting off what was left of my fingernails while Sophie Dahl introduced me to
Bruce and Tammy before they drifted off to dance beneath the hedges and there were giant banana fronds situated everywhere and I just kept wincing but Sophie didn’t notice.

Almost always in my line of vision, Jamie Fields somehow managed to completely avoid me that night. She was either laughing over a private joke with Amber Valletta or shaking her head slightly whenever a tray of hors d’oeuvres—almojabanas specially flown in from a restaurant in San Juan—was offered and she was saying “I do” to just about anything that was asked of her. Bentley stared as an awkward but wellbred teenage boy drinking pinot noir from a medium-sized jug developed a crush on me in a matter of seconds and I just smiled wanly at him as he brushed stray bits of confetti off the Armani jacket I was wearing and said “cool” as if it had twelve os in it. It wasn’t until much later that I noticed the film crew was there too, including Felix the cinematographer, though none of them seemed fazed, and then a small patch of fog started parting and I realized that maybe none of them knew about Sam Ho and what happened to him, the freakish way he died, how his hand twitched miserably, the tattoo of the word slave blurring because of how hard his body vibrated. Bobby, looking airbrushed, handed me a napkin and asked me to stop drooling.

“Mingle,” Bobby whispered. “Mingle.”

Someone handed me another glass of champagne and someone else lit a cigarette that had been dangling from my lips for the past half hour and what I found myself thinking less and less was “But maybe I’m right and they’re wrong” because I was yielding, yielding.

4

38

The film crew follows Tammy into the dining area, where she has a tense breakfast with Bruce. She sips lukewarm hot chocolate, pretending to read
Le Monde
, and Bruce hostilely butters a piece of almond bread until he breaks the silence by telling Tammy he knows horrible things about her past, keeps mentioning a stint in Saudi Arabia without elaborating. Bruce’s hair is wet and his narrow face is flushed pink from a recent shower and he’s wearing a pistachio-colored Paul Smith T-shirt and later he will be attending a prestigious rooftop luncheon somewhere in the 16th arrondissement that Versace is throwing to which only good-looking people have been invited and Bruce has decided to wear a black body shirt and gray Prada shoes to the rooftop luncheon and he’s really going only because of a canceled booking last month.

“So you’ll be appreciated,” Tammy says, lighting a thin cigarette.

“You don’t appreciate me.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she mutters.

“I know who you’re seeing this afternoon.”

“What else are you doing today?” she asks tonelessly.

“I’ll go to the Versace luncheon. I’ll have a club sandwich. I’ll nod when it’s appropriate.” Pause. “I’ll stick to the script.”

The camera keeps circling the table they’re sitting at and nothing’s registering on Tammy’s face and Bruce’s hand shakes slightly as he lifts an Hermès coffee cup and then without sipping any café au lait puts it back on its saucer and closes his green eyes, lacking the energy to argue. The actor playing Bruce had a promising career as a basketball player at Duke and then followed Danny Ferry to Italy where Bruce immediately got modeling jobs and in Milan he met Bobby who was dating Tammy Devol at the time and things just flew from there. A vase—a prop—filled with oversized white tulips sits nonsensically between them.

“Don’t be jealous,” Tammy whispers.

A cell phone sitting on the table starts ringing and neither one of them moves to pick it up but it might be Bobby so Bruce finally answers. It’s actually Lisa-Marie Presley, looking for Bentley—whom she calls “Big Sistah”—but Bentley’s sleeping because he got in at dawn accompanied by an NYU film student he picked up at La Luna last night because the NYU film student had a tinted-blond chevron that accentuated already enormous lips and a penchant for nonblood-letting bondage that Bentley couldn’t resist.

“Don’t be jealous,” Tammy says once more, before leaving.

“Just stick to the script,” Bruce warns her.

As Tammy casually picks up a Vuitton box sitting on a chrome table in the hallway, the opening piano strains from ABBA’s “S.O.S.” begin playing and the song continues over the rest of Tammy’s day, even though on the Walkman she wears throughout the city is a tape Bruce made for her—songs by the Rolling Stones, Bettie Serveert, DJ Shadow, Prince, Luscious Jackson, Robert Miles, an Elvis Costello song that used to mean something to both of them.

A Mercedes picks Tammy up and a Russian driver named Wyatt takes her to Chanel in Rue Cambon where she breaks down in an
office, crying silently at first and then gasping until Gianfranco arrives and gets a sense that maybe something is “off” and scurries away after calling for an assistant to calm Tammy down. Tammy’s freaked, barely gets through the fittings, and then she meets the son of the French premier at a flea market in Clignancourt and soon they’re sitting in a McDonald’s, both wearing sunglasses, and he’s three years younger than Tammy, sometimes lives in a palace, hates the nouveau riche, fucks only Americans (including his nanny, when he was ten). Tammy “ran into” him on Avenue Montaigne outside Dior four months ago. She dropped something. He helped pick it up. His car was waiting. It was getting dark.

The French premier’s son has just returned from Jamaica and Tammy halfheartedly compliments him on his tan and then immediately inquires about his cocaine problem. Has it resolved itself? Does he care? He just smiles evasively, which he realizes too late is the wrong move because she gets moody. So he orders a Big Mac and Tammy picks at a small bag of fries and his flat is being painted so he’s staying at the Presidential Suite at the Bristol and it’s freezing in the McDonald’s, their breath steaming whenever they talk. She studies her fingertips, wondering if cocaine is bad for your hair. He mumbles something and tries to hold her hand. He touches her face, tells her how sensitive she is. But it’s all hopeless, everything’s a label, he’s late for a haircut. “I’m wary,” she finally admits. He actually—Tammy doesn’t know this—feels broken. They make vague plans about meeting again.

She walks away from the McDonald’s, and outside where the film crew’s waiting it’s warm and raining lightly and the Eiffel Tower is only a shadow in a giant wall of mist that’s slowly breaking up and Tammy concentrates on the cobbled streets, a locust tree, a policeman strolling by with a black German shepherd on a leash, then she finally gets back into the Mercedes the Russian named Wyatt is driving. There’s a lunch at Chez Georges that she’s just going to have to skip—she’s too upset, things keep spiraling away from her, another Klonopin doesn’t help—and she calls Joan Buck to explain. She dismisses the car, takes the Vuitton box and loses the film crew in the Versace boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. No one knows where Tammy is for the next thirty-five minutes.

She hands the Vuitton box to a strikingly handsome Lebanese man slouching behind the wheel of a black BMW parked tightly against a curb somewhere in the 2nd arrondissement, actually not far from Chez Georges so she changes her mind and decides to show up for the lunch where the film crew is waiting and the director and Felix the cinematographer keep apologizing for losing her and she dismisses them by shrugging vacantly, muttering “I got lost” and greeting people sweetly. She’s told good news by her agent: Tammy has the next cover for British
Vogue
. Everyone’s wearing sunglasses. A discussion about “Seinfeld” and ceiling fans commences. Tammy declines a glass of champagne, then reconsiders.

The sky is starting to clear and clouds are dissolving and the temperature rises ten degrees in fifteen minutes so the students eating lunch in the open courtyard at the Institute of Political Studies start sunning themselves as the BMW the Lebanese is driving rolls to a stop on the Boulevard Raspail, where a different film crew is waiting on neighboring rooftops prepared to record the following events with telephoto lenses.

Below them everyone’s sighing with pleasure and students are drinking beer and lying shirtless across benches and reading magazines and sharing sandwiches while plans to skip classes start formulating and someone with a camcorder roams the courtyard, finally focusing in on a twenty-year-old guy who’s sitting on a blanket weeping silently while reading a note from his girlfriend who has just left him and she’s written that they will never get back together again and he’s rocking back and forth telling himself it’s okay, it’s okay, and the camcorder angles away and focuses in on a girl giving another girl a back rub. A German television crew interviews students on the upcoming elections. Joints are shared. Rollerbladers whiz by.

The instructions the Lebanese received were simple: just remove the top of the Vuitton box before leaving the car, but since Bobby Hughes lied about when the bomb will go off—he simply told the driver to park the car and leave it on Boulevard Raspail in front of the institute—the driver will die in the blast. The Lebanese, who was involved in the planning of an attack in January on CIA headquarters in Langley, is eating M&M’s and thinking about a girl named Siggi he met last month in Iceland. A student named Brigid walks by the BMW and notices the Lebanese leaning over the passenger seat and she even
registers the panic on his face as he lifts something up in the seconds before the car explodes.