The Fall of Princes (18 page)

“What’s that?”

“It’s French. Means ‘dazzling.’ ”

She got out of bed and began to collect her things. In the dim light, her body was lovely, ghostlike, sturdy but not thick, the body of an Eakins schoolboy, except for the breasts, which were firm and full, and hung from her chest with the kind of loft that vanishes before twenty-five.

“Why do you do it?”

Her clothes were bunched in front of her breasts, making me want to see them again, wishing the scenario had played out in other ways. Still, I’d spent five hundred dollars on more stupid things than Casey, and I didn’t feel cheated. There is such an abundance of loveliness in the world. Too much, actually.

“To pay for my lessons. Singing lessons.”

“You sing?”

“Oui.”
Jean Seberg, that was it. Jean Seberg in
Breathless.

“Sing for me.”

“I will, if that’s what you want. It’s my best thing. Maybe you won’t feel so . . . so disappointed.”

“Trust me. I have plenty of sex. I’m not disappointed. Not at all.”

We moved to the sitting room. In the darkened room, the sky from the thirty-seventh floor glowed with an interminable and ineffable beauty. The moving flakes. So many lives so far below us. People hurrying. People fucking or fighting in the next room.

She sat at the piano. Naked, she felt the keys, she moved her fingers gently in the air as though trying to catch a moth without causing it harm.

Playing softly, she sang. “When this old world gets tired and mean . . .” She sang “Up on the Roof” and, had he been there, Fanelli would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

They say Nina Simone had it. Callas. Marvin Gaye and James Taylor. Mandy Patinkin. They have something in their voices that is beyond music, that transcends notes and cadence and melody and has the power to kill you and bring you back to life all in the same breath.

Maybe it was an illusion, maybe she was just a pretty girl with an average voice in the night. Maybe it was the warm, naked flesh and the swirling snow and the lives and dreams of all the people of New York in 1987 who were not here at this moment. Maybe it wasn’t her voice, which was undeniably beautiful. It was the whole secret history of her life and what had brought her from there to here. Or it was the fact that she was producing this magic just for me, a man looking surely at the end of the rope, but I wept to hear it. All I had wanted was a quick fuck from a talented hooker. I hadn’t thought. I hadn’t thought that this could happen. This transient beauty, these tears in the snowstorm. I don’t cry. I hadn’t cried since I got fired, not when I left The Firm, not when Carmela took everything. Casey looked up, saw the tears and heard the sobs, but she said nothing. She somehow knew that I was crying for myself, not for her, and that it was a private thing, too deep and dark to touch.

She finished and began to dress. “Well,” she said. “That’s me, then.”

This really happened, too. It happened to
me.
It’s mine, and you cannot take it away from me. It was the apex of my youth. You think it’s some cheesy scene out of a movie? Well, fuck you. A boyish young girl sat naked in room 3710 of the Pierre Hotel on a night in February in 1987 and sang just to me, and, when I am dying, it is this scene that I will remember with the most gratitude.

As Casey dressed, I got out my checkbook and wrote her a check for $25,000. I gave it to her as she left, made out to cash. I didn’t even know her last name. I gave her my gloves, too, from Bottega Veneta, miles too big for her, and told her to stay warm. As she left, I asked her if she could come back the next night and she agreed.

We met every night, and every night the scene played out in exactly the same way. She would play and sing, and I would cry.

And she would never say a word to comfort me; her voice was all the comfort she had to give. Life existed in intervals for me: between the time I was with her and the time I wasn’t. We never made another attempt at sex.

I gave a party and she came. She came and sang and enchanted a roomful of heartless, mercenary traders and their girls. They were enchanted with her, of course, every single one of them fell in love with her during that party, but with whatever shred of decency they had left, they never came on to her, assuming she was my girlfriend. Which, in a way, she was.

So for a while it was actually great. Drunken nights watching the hoops. Liquored-up orgies with women we met in bars. I paid my way, and took my pleasure in the same way I always had, but the night sweats got colder and more frequent. I realized one day that I was going to lose everything I hadn’t already lost, and I sold the car, getting exactly half what I had paid for it a month before. The car had 746 miles on it.

But, whatever else, I would race home like a junkie to meet with Casey and sit naked and have her sing for me alone. Then Turner, a trader who had been on the floor about six seconds, realizing that our relationship was chaste, stepped into the scene and snatched her away from me. In time, he married her. Then I sat alone at night weeping, and the piano stood silent until I asked them to take it away.

It’s a strange feeling watching the bride walking down the aisle and knowing that you’ve fucked her.

She ended up living in a four-bedroom penthouse on Park Avenue, wearing a heart-shaped diamond ring bigger than Dolly Parton’s. She and Turner are now the other people, the people I see going into their boxes at the opera, glittering, as I walk up the stairs to the family circle, where the cheap seats are. We aren’t friends, and they don’t even notice me in my ordinary pants and windbreaker.

No, there is no acknowledgment. She came to me for the last time on the night before her wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, which was held in the hotel. She came and sang for me one last time, but we both sat, clothed and awkward, and her voice, pretty enough, didn’t have any power over my heart anymore and my crying days were over.

Two years later, she somehow found me again, and sent me a check for $25,000 along with a recording of her voice singing “Up on the Roof.” There was no note.

I maxed out my credit cards. I applied for others, more and more obscure ones, and maxed them out one by one.

Then the phone calls started coming. I had thought I was protected, but evil Carmela gave out my whereabouts, and, every morning, I had to deal with a lot of harsh criticism from men and women in places like Cleveland, who wanted me to give them money.

Then the mother of them all, American Express, turned off the faucet on my platinum card. I owed them $56,000, of which I had three thousand in the bank and the thousand in my pocket.

There were acres of beautiful things, like Charvet shirts and Armani suits I had never even worn, hanging in the overflowing closets, and I realized with regret that clothing was not real estate. It was not a negotiable or fungible item.

Within minutes of the call from Mrs. American Express, there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find an extremely nervous Mr. Papandreou.

“Sir, most regrettable, this visit. It’s about your bill.”

“I know. I just got a call from American Express.”

“Do you have another credit card we might use?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Any other form of compensation?”

“None.”

“We’ve enjoyed your company, but . . .”

“I know. When?”

“By three o’clock. That’s all we can allow for late checkout.”

“Today?”

“Unless you have some other way to pay.”

“I’ll need some help. There’s a lot of stuff.”

“Whatever you need, don’t hesitate to ask. You have been a special friend to the Pierre.”

Within minutes a housemaid and two bellmen were in the suite, helping me to pack. When we were done, I gave each of them fifty dollars and by two fifteen I was on the street with six suitcases and four hanging bags, getting into the complimentary shuttle that the hotel offered to its special guests. Every staff member shook my hand as I passed through the lobby, some even hugged and kissed me. One asked if I needed any money. My face colored with shame and embarrassment. But I took the fifty he offered.

Given midtown traffic, it took a while to get home. Isaac, the driver, who had carried me to clubs nobody had even heard the name of yet, would not shut up the whole way about how better days were just around the corner.

I knew better. If you let life do to you whatever it wants, it can do some terrible things.

Hovel Hall was one of those terrible things that life can do to you: 53 West Thirty-Fifth Street, fifth floor. When I was really drunk, it was impossible to enunciate even my own address.

Isaac offered to help with the luggage, but he had a bad back and wore a brace and I couldn’t do that, so I gave him fifty, and waved good-bye as though I were setting sail for Europe on the
Île de France
. As I was carrying the first two suitcases up the five flights of stairs to the apartment, crackheads stole all the rest. Good-bye, Brioni. Good-bye, Charvet. Good-bye, Armani and all the rest, a fortune’s worth of clothes.

My grandfather’s gold watch was in one of those suitcases. It meant the world to me, that watch.

Hello, Honey! Hello, I’m home.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Eleven-Foot Hooker
Walks the Walk

T
he street was not a solid thing. It was fluid as a river, an undulation of asphalt and cement, swarming with rats and crackheads and hookers. You could feel the waves in your body. Nothing was stable or solid, all was moving, hawking, fighting, stealing. The first year back in the Hovel, I was mugged five times on my own block. Twice in broad daylight, once with a knife at my throat. I learned to carry enough cash on me that the average crackhead would be satisfied with his take, but not so much money that my thin bank account would be drained in a single snatch, a late-night grab.

One mugging, in broad daylight, was so cleverly done I was stupefied. A man bumped into me, nudged my shoulder. Not an unusual thing on a busy street. At that exact instant, two other guys grabbed my arms, one apiece and pulled them behind me, while a fourth shot his hands in my pockets and pulled out the cash that was there. Over in ten seconds. Brilliant.

Now that credit cards are everything and nobody ever carries cash anymore, the mugging profession must be in decline.

There were two hotels on the street where I lived, and four parking garages, so the din was unbearable at any hour. In the day, there was an incessant honking of horns, since, because of the parking garages, traffic crept along, often not moving a foot from light to light, and at night the monster garbage trucks roared their omnivorous way down the block at a creeping pace, stopping every ten yards to hoist mountains of garbage into their yawning, straining maws.

I read Proust and waited for the phone to ring, or a letter to come in response to my résumé. It took six months to read all of Proust, during which time not one phone call or letter came. It is my unshakeable conviction that
À La Recherche du Temps Perdu
is the greatest single work of art of the twentieth century. It is also my unshakeable conviction that all debt collectors, of whom I got to know many, were bullied in grade school.

So I read Proust and got mugged. Those were my principal activities that year. Both were deep and lasting learning experiences.

I also learned that it was safer, when walking home drunk from the bars, to walk in the middle of the street. At two in the morning, there was little traffic and, in the street, it was more of an effort to pull you into a doorway and put a knife to your throat.

Which is how I got to know the hookers.

Thirty-Fifth Street was a United Nations of hookers. Women of every ethnic and cultural and sexual variety walked the streets, usually down the center, scattering when a car raced past, then returning to their languid stroll on the asphalt. They carried tiny purses. They sucked on lollipops. There was one year when they all, strangely, sucked on baby pacifiers. They would yell at the passing cars, show lewd body parts, make irresistible offers to taillights racing home to New Jersey.

Some cars crept down the street, on the prowl, and the hookers would walk alongside the creeping cars making deals with the skill of a Wall Street trader selling junk bonds, and, often, the car would stop and the girl would get in, twitching her behind in victory for the other girls to see, and the car would speed off into the dark, only to deliver the hooker back to the flock half an hour later.

One girl stood head and shoulders above the rest. Literally. She must have been six four. In addition to which she wore cork platform shoes with the highest heels I’ve ever seen. And she was not petite. She was gargantuan. Vast. Enormous.

She was probably nineteen and still had the loveliness of a child.

I would walk past her and she would call out in a soft voice, “Don’t you want to have a really good time? Let Holly show you a really, really good time.” I didn’t acknowledge her entreaties, although every now and then it would occur to me that, hell, yes, I actually would like to have a really good time. I would like to have a good time if I had the money to have a really, really good time.

Holly was magnificent in every way. On chilly nights, she wore a short coat of fake fur, pink, which did nothing to keep her long legs warm, and you could tell she was cold, must have been, but, in the face of this or any other vicissitude, Holly didn’t show discomfort. She walked like she was strolling on a summer’s night on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. She was the tree topper on the Christmas tree of Thirty-Fifth Street hookers. When cars approached, Holly just kept on languidly strolling down the center of the street, forcing the cars to slow down, to take life at Holly’s pace, until, finally, with utter insouciance, she veered slightly to the right or left to let the vehicle pass her by. Sometimes the drivers would reach out to grab her ass, but she would just swat their hands away like gnats on a summer sandwich, saying, “Oh, child,” with a breathy sigh.

One night, after massive numbers of cocktails at P. J.
Clark’s with Fanelli, who still called, he and I stood in a drunken embrace on the street, weeping over my ill-fortune, and then we parted, him in a cab uptown, me downtown on foot since I was completely broke. When I put my hand in my jacket pocket, I felt and then pulled out five $100 bills that Fanelli had slipped in while we were weeping over the injustice of life in general and our deep and abiding affection for each other in particular. I felt like the Emperor of Ethiopia. I hadn’t had that much cash on me in months. I wept at his kindness and subtlety, and hailed a taxi, an actual yellow cab. I was too drunk to say my full address, so I had him let me off on the corner of Fifth, and walked down Thirty-Fifth, the street of muggings and broken dreams, although it wasn’t walking in the normal sense by any means.

Holly called out and something struck. I had five hundred dollars and I did want to have a really, really good time. I staggered toward her, and realized, up close, that Holly was a man in drag. A boy, actually. A tall boy. Well, I thought, so what.

Before I could speak, however, I fell flat on my face. Flat. In the middle of the street. Felt the crunch as blood gushed from my broken nose.

“Oh, baby,” said Holly, towering over me. At least eleven feet tall. “Baby’s had one too many.” She hoisted me from the street like a rag doll, 185 pounds of dead weight, and held me upright. “Holly’s going to take you home, baby, and fix you up. Don’t worry about one little thing.”

Blood gushed ruinously down my shirtfront, one of the last six good shirts I had, worn especially so Fanelli wouldn’t think I was totally pathetic. Now I only had five. A Sea Island cotton shirt and blood are not friends.

For a fleeting moment I thought of the squalor of my apartment—the dishes in the sink from last week’s attempt at cooking, the dirty shirts and socks, the rats—and then I thought, oh, what the hell. She’s a $50 hooker. She’s seen it all. I let her drag me to my apartment building’s street door, on which the lock was broken, and somehow we made it up the five flights of stairs to my apartment.

After three inept tries with my key, I had to let Holly open the door. She took one look inside and said, “Baby! What explosion happened here!?” Everything Holly said had an exclamation point after it, as though she had just discovered a new planet or a new law of thermodynamics. Baby! The kitchen! Where’s the bathroom! Do you have any cotton balls! The idea that I would have cotton balls is kind of like the idea of Marie Antoinette having blue jeans. Not likely.

“What a dump! A nice young man like you! Why do you live here amidst this ruination!?” Holly’s way of speaking, like Holly herself, was wholly manufactured, out of old movies and romance magazines.

Meanwhile she was rushing around, stuffing toilet paper up my nose to stanch the bleeding, wiping my face with a clean washrag she miraculously found, getting me out of my shirt. “My God, what a stomach!” she exclaimed. I did three hundred and fifty sit-ups a day to maintain a vestige of what the trainer had worked so hard to create. My body, once a work of art, was collapsing, atrophying, but I did what I could. Push-ups, one fifty. It passed the time, of which there was an infinite amount, even given the amount of time I spent reading Proust, and it made me feel that, when the call came, this soldier would be ready to answer. Not that any calls came, except from Mr. McDermott and Ms. Willoughby, of their respective collection agencies, and others of their ilk, but I kept up the habit. Sometimes, I put them on speakerphone, and did sit-ups while they told me of all the dire things that were about to happen to me. I didn’t mind talking to them. They were sort of pleasant, actually. It passed for conversation in the Proustian silence.

Holly was the first real person who had been in my apartment in months. Not that Holly was a real person, as I had heretofore understood the term. Holly was an imagined creation, from the ground up, not real in any way, in the strictest sense. The whole point of being Holly, I suppose, was to outsmart reality, to become something wholly other.

I finally stopped bleeding. Holly helped me to the bed, first straightening the sheets and plumping the pillows. I offered her one of Fanelli’s crisp hundreds, 20 percent of my entire worldly goods, and she said, “What do I look like? A nurse! Keep your money, baby! What’s your name anyway?”

I mumbled a response.

“That your real name?”

“It’s what people call me . . .”

“You really need a cleaning woman or something! A mammy!” she said. “Man was not meant to live like this.” I passed out, and when I woke up in the dead of night, bleeding again all over my pillow, Holly was gone, and the apartment was as clean as my apartment was ever going to get. Dirty shirts in the hamper. Shoes put away. Dishes done. A big lipstick kiss on the bathroom mirror. The bloodied shirt was gone.

I looked out the window, and there she was, strolling under the sputtering streetlights in the middle of the street, swinging her baby-doll purse. Also pink, with rhinestones. A nurse. A hooker. A Good Samaritan. A drag queen.

I didn’t see Holly for several nights, but when I did, I walked up to her to thank her for her ministrations. She shrieked as though she had just seen her long-lost father. “Baby! Hold on a sec! I have something for you!” She ran off to some secret cubbyhole she kept somewhere on the street, and returned with a bag from Bergdorf’s, and a box with the familiar ribbon around it, in which there was a pristine, brand-new Sea Island shirt exactly my size.

“I couldn’t get the blood out from the old one. I scrubbed and scrubbed! Look at these hands! So I bought you one I thought you would like. You can always take it back for another one. If you don’t, like, like it, I mean.”

“Holly,” I said, “it’s too much. You shouldn’t . . .”

“You don’t understand a thing, do you! Money means nothing to us girls. To me at least. I’m like a walking bank! They stick it in, and out comes money, and it never stops!” She opened her purse to show me the wads of balled-up cash. “It’s virtually endless! I’m a human ATM machine! Open twenty-four hours a day!”

It was a beautiful shirt, and it had been so long since I had a new anything I almost wept. I thanked her, the thanks seeming paltry and inadequate beside her generous gesture, and then the thought of Holly in Bergdorf’s hit me, the unlikelihood of it all, of any mercantile exchange happening between Holly and one of the sad, splendid salesmen.

“Honey, when I die just lay me out at Bergdorf’s! Everything is so beautiful there! I just put on my Chanel suit, and yes, I have a Chanel suit, I used to have this, like, boyfriend, well . . .” and a wistful look crossed her face, and she said with dignity, “. . . well, I used to have a boyfriend, and he was so sweet to me, so sweet, and then . . . well, there’s always a then, isn’t there? Nothing bad could ever happen to you at Bergdorf’s! Well, actually, my friend Larice had something bad happen to her but that was only because she had a Halston dress under her coat at the time, and that was bad, but I would never do a thing like that. I bought this shirt with money I earned with my . . . charm and beauty. And now it’s yours.”

“That’s so kind.”

“Could we be friends? I don’t have any gentlemen friends, and maybe I could come up to your apartment every now and then and warm up. It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here, and the nights are long and my feet start hurting and . . .”

“Of course. Any time. Although I have to say it makes me a little nervous.”

“Of course it does! You’re a regular person. I’m like, I’m like a freak of nature! But you’ll get used to it. I’m smart. I know a lot of stuff. I’m just not educated. You’ll like it, and I won’t bother you if you don’t want to be bothered. But I will come.”

And she did. She did come up to my apartment, not often at first, but within a month she made an almost nightly visit to see how I was, to describe her lewd and peculiar adventures. I never realized you could do so many extraordinary things in the front seat of a car parked on a dark out-of-the-way street. Sometimes the men would take her to the Hotel Carter, but not often. Usually the encounter was over in fifteen minutes or less, and the men would drop her where they found her and she would follow their taillights as they raced home to safety in New Jersey.