The Fall of Princes (13 page)

But, in New York, there are no secrets except terminal cancer, and word of the affair was bound to get out.

Young Susanne Leiber, in the checkout line at Ralph’s in Los Angeles, glanced down at the tabloids, and there was Louie, on the cover, wrapped like a python around the almost naked Diva, at Xenon. She left her groceries in the cart, took the redeye that night, and packed up Louie Trotmeier
like last night’s dinner and threw him out with the trash and she never spoke to him or saw him ever again. So much for the long walk. She was, as I said, a brightness on her way to a greater brightness, and, in her world, there was no room for peccadillo or passion uncontrolled.

The Diva went out on tour. She gave Louie eight cashmere sweaters and a gold Rolex that said simply on the back,
Semper Paratus.
He never heard from her again.

Susanne went in to work and sobbed over her rubies and emeralds. Trotmeier sobered up and soldiered on, trying to act as if it never happened, knowing at the same time that his life had been changed irrevocably and that, should he outlive the Diva, the first thing he would think about when she died was a small gold cross glittering in the darkness at the Sherry-Netherland, and a girl, a bonfire of celebrity, saying “Hiya, baby,” just to him and him alone.

One day, Susanne’s boss, the man whose father’s name was on the marquee of the iconic jewelry store, looked into the office and saw her in tears and asked what was the matter, and she told him the story, which he already knew, of course, and he asked her to come spend the weekend with him in Easthampton. Eight months later they were married, and that certainly raised some eyebrows around town. He was decades her senior; he was widely thought to be seriously gay, and here she was, just this nice, ordinary girl with pretty eyes and a somewhat weak chin from Los Angel
eees
.

“What does this
mean
?” Fanelli asked me over a cigar at Frank’s, after hearing of the marriage.

“They love each other,” I said.

“But what does that mean? He’s gay.”

“We know what it means, Fanelli. We just don’t know what form it takes.”

“Well, fuck me,” said Fanelli. “This beats the hell out of everything.”

They were the couple of the year, of the decade. They went everywhere arm in arm, with a kind of tenderness one rarely sees in any couple. They meant, for a time, the world to each other, which is the long way of explaining how little Susanne Leiber came, at an early age, to appear on the arm of an aging homosexual jeweler wearing a twenty-eight-carat diamond pendant that had once belonged to Queen Victoria.
The stone had a name, the Star of something-or-other, and to that name was added Susanne’s. Girls scrambled for imitations of it at Bloomingdale’s.

They were married for almost exactly ten years, and the diamond went up at auction the year following the divorce. Everything was done with perfect grace and taste. Susanne said of the diamond, “It is my hope it will be given to a lucky woman, as it was in the past, as a gesture of love and worn often and proudly.”

Why is it that, as we lose our loveliness, the sheen of youth, we lose possibility as well? We acquire, but more is vanished than is given, and nothing makes up for the loss of the swallows at the Sherry, or the Victoria diamond, or the nights at Area when your booted feet ground the glass phials of amyl nitrate into the dance floor. Too much is lost. Too much is gone, every day, and it never comes back. You cannot get there anymore, or you get there to find the house empty of furniture, the baby grand covered with a dust cloth, shrouded silence in empty rooms where you no longer live.

Trotmeier married a beautiful but dumb model and bought an enormous apartment at the San Remo, but, after two children, he found her one drunken night in bed in his own house with some handsome trainer from the gym, so there was no more of that, no caroling parties during the season at the San Remo. And then he married a nice, ordinary woman who made up for her lack of spark with almost nothing.

He was almost the last to go after I got fired and everything changed. He still called, losing luster every time we met, showing pictures of his children but never a picture of the wife. His kindness was genuine, but our friendship had to do with a certain time, a certain place, and that place was no longer available to either of us. He always paid for the drinks.

Maybe that era was like an ecosystem that cannot sustain itself, and watching it die is sad. It is a sad thing. A deadly virus was so deeply embedded in its DNA that the death of the decade was occurring even as it was at its most verdant, its most resplendently dazzlingly alive.

“I wish . . .” said Louie one night, picking up the check, pausing.

“You wish what, Louie?” One of the kindest men I have ever known.

“I wish it could have gone on. I know it couldn’t, she was way, way too much for me, it would seem ridiculous now, but, still, I wish. It makes my dick hard to think about it.”

Such a sweet man, more than half his life gone now. Children grown. His drab wife always at home. And the ropes up at every club, clubs filled with identical children. The sons and daughters of the Trotmeiers of the world, going out into the night at fourteen, their eyes smeared with mascara.

“It had to end, Louie. It would have killed you.”

“Then . . .” he said, picking up the change and overtipping as he always did. The laughing stopped. “Then I would have died happy. I would like to have died dancing with . . .
I would like to have died. I think I would.”

It was the last time I saw Louie. We left together, and we took off our gloves to shake hands in a falling snow. The flakes landed on his hair, and for a moment, it shone and sparkled again, a trick of the light. For a moment, in the light, and the breeze, Trotmeier was glorious again.

Like an angel.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Touching Strangers

I
’m the man on the other side of the glass. I see you, but you don’t see me. You know I’m there, even as I watch you, but I am invisible to you. This is what it’s become. I mean nothing to you, nothing at all.

If you happen to look into the glass, all you see there is your own reflection. But I want to say that I am there, beyond the reflection, on the other side of the glass where the ordinary people live.

I wear khaki pants and cotton and polyester plaid shirts and a tie. In the summer, I wear shortsleeved shirts. On each sleeve, the maker has cut a little V and put a button at its apex. I guess that’s the decoration, the adornment that makes this shirt special, although the buttons usually fall off after about four trips to the laundry.

I wear nothing you would notice. Nothing that says there was ever a grandeur and a hubris about me. When my clothes get dirty, I take them in a blue nylon bag to the Chinese Wash ’N Fold, and they come back at the end of the day looking almost new. The people at the Wash ’N Fold lead simpler lives than I do, humbler, but they still manage to go home to Taiwan once a year, where for two weeks they live, with their American money, like kings and queens of yore.

I say things like “of yore” a lot. I say them to myself as I am watching you not watching me through the glass that I am forever on the other side of. I hate you, with your bustle and blare. You sit and talk of where to store furs and how to treat the hair, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, of bright, new things, and people often laugh when you have finished speaking. You talk about not liking the latest bright thing as much as the
New York Times
did. You talk about not much caring for the food at the hot new restaurant in which you’re currently having dinner. The noise, the din, of your conversation is appalling.

And, of course, you talk about money. Money is practically all anybody talks about these days. My mother taught me never to discuss money at the dinner table, but obviously we had different mothers.

You never talk about me. You detest the ordinary. You detest me. If thoughts of me somehow get into your brainwaves, they disturb the streaming thoughts of what a witty and wonderful life you’re having.

I’m not having much of a life. It’s not awful, just ordinary. I am trying to accommodate the memories of the life I had with the life I am now living, and I just can’t do it. After being behind the wheel of a Lamborghini going 140 down Sunset Drive at four a.m., it’s hard to get up and put on a polyester shirt and sell books at Barnes and Noble. But I’m not ashamed of it.

I walk with purpose, and leave almost no impression behind me. I sidle. I never rush. I walk four miles to work in the morning and four miles back, but I always allow plenty of time.

I am careful, on the street, not to jostle, not to be brushed against. I don’t like the touch of strangers, not even the brush of a raincoat against my bare hand. I don’t ask for much space in this world, so leave me in peace in the little I have.

I look at them, the other ordinary people, and they are not just meandering. They are like me, on their way to somewhere, and from somewhere, both so colorless that they barely even differentiate themselves in their minds.

I wear a nylon windbreaker most days, even when it’s cold enough for an overcoat. The slick, cold nylon makes me feel like a dolphin cutting through cerulean waters in some place I will never again visit.

I have not, however, given up on life. I could speak to you. I could join the conversation. I have a 401K and I read all the time, so I know an awful lot about a shitload of things, things that would amuse you, that would make you laugh with delight when I finished talking. I could order with sophistication in any restaurant in the world. I can recite the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. I know more about money than you could dream of.

I have had adventures. My life is not without event. I could tell you anecdotes.

For instance, decades ago, when I lived on my fellowship for a time in Florence, my life was so filled with adventure and event it was hard to tell when one thing ended and another began. I lived there for nine months.

On the afternoon of my last day, as I was packing up the dead remnants of what was meant to be a painting career, throwing them in the coal stove, a woman I knew named Sam dropped by and flatly said she wanted to have sex with me. Not now. Later. She was fortyish, tiny, a jazz musician with hair as red as her music was blue. I didn’t know her very well, hardly at all, really. She wanted to come to my apartment late that night and spend my final night with me. The agreement was that she was to come at two, knock lightly, and I would let her in. The night often started at two a.m.
in those days.

Sam was luscious, married, and twenty years older than I was. I offered to have sex right then, but she said, no, these things, her desires, needed time to blossom and that sex anticipated was far far better than sex on the fly.

That night, the night before I left, some English girls I knew, the unforgettably named Harriet Thistlethwaite, who had a younger brother named Cecil, and her roommates Rosemary and Prunella, gave me a going-away dinner party. It was filled with the kind of people who live on your side of the glass, but much younger. In your twenties, there is no glass, there is a breath of air where the windows would be, and the breath is so warm and welcoming that anybody could come in. There were all kinds of people at this party.

The English girls, all honorables, schoolgirls waiting for the term at Oxford to start, being waitresses in cafés and smoking like fiends, living on no money, were famous in their circle for a dessert they made out of fresh ricotta, instant espresso, and sugar and brandy. It didn’t take much to distinguish yourself in those days. Everybody was young and bright and gifted, or they were beautiful, which trumped any hand on the table.

The food was spaghetti aglio olio, of course, it being the cheapest foodstuff you could throw together, the whole party probably costing about six dollars, helped by the fact that everybody brought two bottles of the cheapest wine. We didn’t know. We reveled in what we had. The world had possibilities, limitless possibilities, and adventures, and food was of no importance and wine was cheap.

Cecil Thistlethwaite, who had been coming to Florence on his own since he was fourteen, to set off fireworks on January 27th, Mozart’s birthday, on the very spot in the Piazza Signoria where Savanarola was burned to death, brought along a boatload of handsome and lissome friends. He introduced me to a guy named Tito, nice-looking, about my age, who, from the oversized calling card he gave me, was not only a count but was really named Parmigianino or Pontormo or something like that. We talked.
Tiziano.
That’s it.

“Are you single?” Tito asked. I said I was.

“You don’t have to be,” he said in his Swiss boarding-school English. “I have a cousin. Lucia. Beautiful. Nineteen. She’s looking for a boyfriend.”

“I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Stay.”

“I’m sorry. It’s impossible. I’ve run out of money.” The fact that it was also bizarre, being asked to drop everything and live with a woman I’d never laid eyes on, didn’t even occur to me. Remember, forty bottles of wine.

He moved on, but he’d circle back around every ten minutes or so, making the offer more enticing every time.

“She’s very beautiful, Lucia. And she is very, very rich.”

“Then why can’t she get her own boyfriend?”

“She’s very shy.”

And later. “Lucia wants you so much.”

“She’s never even seen me.”

“She watches you dance. At Mach Due . . .” which was a discoteque Harriet and I used to go to a lot.

“And she never says hello?”

“She’s very shy, I told you. But she’s in love with you.”

“
Buggiardo,
it can’t be true.”

“Believe me or not. She knows what she wants.”

Much later, almost thirty-eight bottles later and it was getting on and Sam was knocking at two, and I was ready to leave, he circled one more time.

“What’s your favorite car?”

“The Ferrari Dino 246.”

“She’ll buy you one. Restored to perfection. She’ll buy a big apartment with plenty of room for you, and all your clothes and food. And she’ll pay you five thousand a month, just to spend.”

“I have to go now, Tito. Tiziano. Someone is waiting for me. I’m sure your cousin is everything you say she is. I wish her every happiness.”

“Her heart will be broken.”

“I have to go. I have to go now.”

“Do you mind if I walk out with you?”

So I said my many good-nights and farewells and promised lifelong allegiance and friendship to people I knew for certain I would never see again. I would be in classes at Wharton in three weeks and Florence would be very, very far away.

Tito and I left. The doors closed behind us and plunged us into pitch. It was one of those buildings where you had to hit a switch that turned on the lights for no more than twenty seconds, so you had to race down the slick marble steps to get to the street. Halfway down, the lights went out and everything turned to a vast blackness, a vast, slick blackness. We stopped on the landing, in front of an enormous two-story window that looked out, as our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, on the rising Tuscan landscape. Such a beauty.

“May I ask you a question? If you won’t move to Rome with my cousin, would you come home with me and sleep with me tonight in my apartment?”

I was beyond drunk. Tito reached up and touched my cheek with the flat of his left palm. Half of his handsome face was in shadow.

His hand burned my face, and my blood ran suddenly cold and I threw myself into the descending darkness, grasping for the banister, hoping for purchase on the eighteenth- century marble staircase. I ran all the way home, pausing to say farewell to the transsexual hookers outside the grand hotels along the Arno. So sophisticated they were, making their nightly
passagiata
around Santa Croce.

When I got to my apartment, I let myself in through the street door and locked it, then locked myself in my apartment, closing the shutters so the full moonlight slanted on the terrazzo floor. And I waited. I was sealed inside like Aida in her tomb, inaccessible, but I waited, and at a quarter after two, I could hear through the shutters a timid knock, or what sounded like a knock, on the street door. I didn’t move, sitting alone in my chair in the dark apartment, striated by the slanting moonlight.

She didn’t knock again. I sat until four, but there was no sound. In the morning, I took my bags to the train station and on to London, and then to America and business school and The Firm.

My night of passion, of desire. My anecdotal adventure. Well, not such an adventure after all. An adventure manqué. The sad, almost musical adventure of an ordinary man, held dear almost forty years later. Three people who wanted me in one night. The memory of three people who wanted me at all.

The point is, if I were on your side of the glass, I would not sit silently. Just the other day, when I was walking to work quite early, passing a bank, I heard a small chirping sound I couldn’t identify. Normally I don’t pause in my walk, but that day, I paused and realized that the beeping was coming from the cash machine on the side of a bank. I stepped closer to investigate.

In the slot, the slot where the money comes out, there were five brand-new $20 bills. There was no one on the street, not a soul in the gray chilly dawn, and I took the money and the beeping stopped. The machine went dark and silent again.

I can understand forgetting your card, leaving it in the slot until the machine devours it for your safety and security, but the money? The whole reason you went to the ATM in the first place? How drunk or stoned do you have to be to leave the money just sitting there?

All day I burned with paranoia. I was on camera taking a hundred bucks that didn’t belong to me, and I was sure that, at any moment, federal agents would walk through the door of the bookstore and cart me away. I considered giving the money to charity, or dropping it in the offering box at a Catholic church, but I did nothing. I kept it in the pocket of my ordinary pants.

We might have laughed over this at dinner, you and I, as I paid for a round of drinks. We might have. In a long-ago day, a hundred bucks would have bought a gram of cocaine to get us through the night. For the second between the time I took the money and the time it went into my pocket, I was you, I was on your side of the glass, admiring a diamond brooch you inherited from your grandmother. I was there. I was there and now I’m not.

Here’s where I am. This is my adventure. I sit in front of my laptop late at night and I buy things. I buy clothes. I buy shoes. I buy crystal wine decanters. There are many online boutiques where you can do this. There is no salesman to be disdainful, there is no glass curtain. There is only the best of everything and the clack of your fingers on the keys. I buy these things with my credit cards, which are stored securely in my profile on these sites. Nobody sees me sitting in my old bathrobe, fresh from the shower, eyes alight with wanting and remembrance.