The Fall of Princes (19 page)

There is such need in the world. It is constant and never changing. It is eternal, and it is worth far more than fifty dollars to find some respite from the hunger and the wanting and the need, so deep it is. We grow engorged and enraged with need, and the relief we find with people like Holly is at best temporary, because the suffocating need is there again in the morning, ravenous and all-consuming. The need was prevalent on Thirty-Fifth Street, sexual desire behind the wheel of every car, real bodies, the flesh, the hairy forearms, the penis, center of gravity for the need that never goes away.

And Holly was there to take it on, the bodies and the pricks and the grasping, hurried hands, the zipper and the smell and the taste, to make the hunger go away for a minute or two, like a snack before dinner, and all she asked was fifty dollars and safe return to her place on the street.

The need died in me when I lost my job, my way, lost my place in the world, and the romance division of my personal enterprise shuttered its doors forever, and no one has ever gotten in again. My life is my fault. I made it. They did the best they could.

Carmela once asked me, “What is it you really want?”

I shouted at her: “I want to be completely loved and completely left alone!”

But life has taught me in the harshest ways that such a thing is not possible, and so I ended up getting the latter, no matter how much I might need or want the former. Poor Carmela. Such a lovely girl. The sweetheart of my youth.

So I let Holly in for a minute, for a time in my life when there was nothing else, and she would show up, always breathless with news of her adventures, and we would sit and drink Scotch and talk into the night, sometimes with only the light from the television to pierce the darkness. We would drink Scotch and watch almost naked men and women dance ineptly on cable television. The hostess of the show, Robin Byrd, would introduce these dancers as though each were the second coming of Christ, and she would actually interview these morons after they had jerked and slithered their way through two minutes of disco dancing, and they would tout their careers in porn films. Once they even had a she-male like Holly, and as Holly watched she drank her Scotch and made derisive comments. “My breasts are not only bigger, they’re masterpieces compared to hers! The best on Park Avenue! Want to see?”

I did not, and Holly seemed to understand and respect this. I was an invalid, in her eyes, and she took care of me like a man dying of cancer, always cleaning, straightening, putting my life back on some kind of recognizably human track. I had lost all bearings.

There was one guy on the TV show, a swarthy Italian guy, Gino or Claudio or something, oiled, massive legs, hairy chest and huge pecs, who was so ripped and built he could barely move, let alone do anything that any sane person would call dancing. He always stopped Holly dead in her tracks, and she would watch his every awkward move with fascination. He was on all the time; apparently he did, like, a porno movie almost every week and always had some product to push. Holly was transfixed, every time.

“He looks exactly like my boyfriend, my one true love!” she said one night. “That’s all. My one true time of happiness before I was just another bereft hooker in the street! I had a place, then! I had somebody! Him! Well, not him, but somebody who looked just like him, sort of, if you squint your eyes and don’t listen to that disgusting voice.”

“We both had somebody, once,” I said. “I haven’t been like this forever.”

“Neither have I. I was somebody with somebody. A couple, I think they call it. His name was George. Giorgos. Greek. He worked on the printing presses at the
New York Times
. I was sixteen, almost seventeen. I was a boy, then. Just a runaway boy from Cleveland, and George was thirty-three, and he took me in and, man, did he love me. And I guess I loved him back. I was on my own since fourteen, what did I know about love? About anything? When my ride let me off in New York after hitchhiking for five days, I slept on a bench behind the New York Public Library! I thought it was Central Park! Then I stood on the street corner, and I got in the first car that stopped for me, and I did that for two years and one night the car that stopped was George. And I was tired of that life and, well, like, I guess he was just the lucky one. Fate! But I felt for him, in my deepest heart I had feelings for him, and I guess that’s love, right?”

“When you feel it, you know it. It’s like stepping off a cliff.” It was all I could think of to say.

“Can you turn off the TV? I can’t watch this and tell the story at the same time. Freaks me out.”

I turned it off, and the apartment went from blue to gold, as the light from the streetlight flooded in. Holly moved, ghostlike and golden, around the room, sipping her Scotch. I had never felt so weird in my life. Holly’s eyes were moist, as though she was about to cry, and they glistened in the golden light of the room.

“I’m going to tell you this once, and then you’re not going to say anything, and we’re never going to talk about it again. OK? Deal?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Anyway. Well, anyway.” Holly had dropped her usual exclamatory way of talking and spoke from a softer, more vulnerable place. From the heart. From her childish heart, which suddenly seemed, in that odd light and in the deep part of the night, like a lovely thing.

I kept my mouth shut, as I was told.

“He wanted us to live together. He got an apartment in Brooklyn, in a Greek neighborhood, but it was very conservative and he didn’t want his neighbors to know he was living with a boy, so I shaved my legs, and put on a blouse and skirt he bought me—he bought me a lot of clothes—and I was a girl. I grew my hair long, and I was pretty, really pretty. It was like I had been waiting all my life to be somebody’s girl. I even got a job as a fitting model for Oscar, and I started taking hormone shots. God, it’s hot in
here!”

As she talked, she began to remove her clothes, piece by piece, and I didn’t object, until finally she was naked in her heels, and I saw the whole thing, the deal, what it was like to be Holly underneath her clothes. She made no mention of it, I guess whores are used to taking their clothes off. It was both bizarre and beautiful, in its way. Maybe a trick of the light. The other. The entirely other.

“He found the doctor. He arranged everything. I loved having breasts. He liked big ones, so he found a plastic surgeon and bought the finest pair on the East Coast. And things were so nice for a while. So nice. He was the sweetest man, and I loved everything about him. I loved to feel the weight of him on me in the night, his kisses, like garlic and cigarettes, but sweet somehow. He was a real man. He was a fierce kisser. It was like being devoured by some wild beast. Heaven.” Her mascara was starting to run down her face, and she looked, even in the golden light, like she was a million years old.

“He was very traditional. He wanted to get married. Which meant I had to have the operation. He saved his money, and he arranged it all with Dr. Money at Johns Hopkins, and eventually he put me on a Greyhound bus for Baltimore with ten thousand dollars in my little purse.

“But I met these divine sailors in the bus station, and we went for a drink, and one thing led to another, and I woke up a month later in a $20-a-night fleabag with nothing left. The fleet had sailed. No money. No operation. Still a boy. I had to work the street to get enough money to get back to Brooklyn, and when I got there, he took one look and he beat the living hell out of me, and threw me back on the street where he found me.”

She downed her Scotch, and put on her clothes, piece by piece. “End of story. I’ll never fall in love again. Don’t get up. I can let myself out.”

“I . . .”

“Not one word. Not one. That was the deal. I don’t need your pity. God! My makeup is a mess! I’ll just be a jiffy, and then I’ll go! Back into the fray!” She went into the bathroom and closed the door. When she emerged, her makeup restored, her face was like a hard mask, and she was ready for the rest of her night. I watched her for a long time, walking in the middle of the street, watched as she got into a car and sped off, and was still watching, anxious as a father on Prom night, as the car returned her to her perch.

I felt something for her. It wasn’t desire and it wasn’t pity. It was affection. Easy and welcomed. And a kind of respect. Whatever it was, it was new, and hard for me to fathom, to sort out, especially since I had seen her naked, ambiguous and sexy in a funny kind of way, so I finished the Scotch and went to bed, troubled. Holly was, well, beautiful. Lovely and nineteen and brave. And she had suffered, and suffered still, and I found a fellowship in that. An odd camaraderie between the two most unlikely souls on the planet. In addition to which, I had a brand-new shirt. Score one for generosity.

We became friends. Who else did we have? We would go to the movies in the afternoons. Holly would show up with a bottle of Cristal, ice cold, and we would drink and laugh until everything else was blanked out and meaningless. We went to a party given by one of Holly’s friends, in a loft downtown, and got drunk and watched a fat man lip-synch the entire Barbra Streisand songbook. Or so it seemed. He wore a red sequined dress and held a flashlight beneath his chin to illuminate his face in the darkness of the room. The effect was both comic and ghoulish.

Holly got out the fabled Chanel suit, from the lockers at Penn Station where she kept her wardrobe, and we went to Bergdorf Goodman. The family that owned the store lived in an apartment on the top floor, and Holly and I agreed that that was pretty close to our idea of heaven. Holly looked like any young Park Avenue wife. We looked, in fact, like a happy, well-to-do couple. Which, for that afternoon, exploring every floor of the store, trying things on, being haughty with the sales people, we were.

We didn’t care if we looked odd on the street. We took care of each other, in the way friends do, and that was good enough for us, for a time.

The bitter cold began to break up into pieces, like ice in a river, and dissolved into clear and sunny days, chilly at night. Easter was coming. Holly continued to visit almost every night, one night even chastely sleeping for two hours beside me in my bed, on top of the covers, before rushing out into the night.

The night before Palm Sunday, Holly showed up breathless at the door and asked me to lunch the next day at a place in the Village I had never heard of, The Ninth Circle. “They have great burgers!” she said. “And a great jukebox! And treats for the eyes and ears! One o’clock. Be sharp. Something has happened! Something wonderful! I have a great piece of news to tell you! Just great!”

The next day was warm, the first really warm day. Easter was late that year, I guess, but Palm Sunday was warm, and I bathed for church and shaved carefully and put on a seersucker suit, and the shirt Holly had given me. It was lavender, with white pinstripes and a white collar and cuffs; I wore with it a rose-colored tie from the tie museum in my closet. I never wore them anymore. No reason.

I looked like an Easter egg.

Church was the one hour in the week to judge my distance from what I considered to be “The Good,” and I wanted to be good. People who have lost everything tend to feel that. I wanted to be a good man and cause no harm. Not anymore.
Primum non nocere,
like a doctor. The past was littered with bodies, wounded. It was packed with insults and extravagances that suddenly seemed unconscionable. So I went, like a good boy, partly loving it, and partly hating it, being the pauper in a sea of rich people.

That Palm Sunday, church seemed to go on forever, and I kept checking my watch. I was the only person in a seersucker suit, the rest of the men were in banker blue or gray, pinstripes, and I sat off to the side, so that no one would touch or speak to me. When the collection plate came around, I had nothing to give, so I pretended to pray until it had passed me by. As soon as I had taken Communion, the body and blood, I raced from the church and caught the train down to the Village, where I found, after some difficulty, the Ninth Circle. It was exactly one o’clock.

I pulled open the metal door and walked, palm frond in hand, into the middle of an aggressively dark and seedy leather bar. In my seersucker suit. It was like When Worlds Collide, except that I was the only inhabitant on my planet. The rest of them were all dressed in various forms of black leather, all kinds of stuff I’d never seen before, straps and chaps and harnesses and black leather jeans with no backs on them, codpieces, a museum of a particular fetish that didn’t happen to be mine.

They stared at me, facial hair bristling. They stared hard for a long time. Seersucker. Jesus.

The crowded bar seemed to stretch endlessly into a dark back room, where there were tables covered in red checkered linoleum, and a few lost leather souls downing their Budweisers and eating the much-advertised burgers. I made my way through the long gauntlet of black leather, and sat at one of the tables. No Holly. She didn’t show up for another forty-five excruciating minutes, and, when she did, she looked like hell.

Today, she was a boy. Hair tied back, wearing jeans and loafers and a T-shirt that had a line that went from nipple to nipple, underneath which it said, “You must be this tall to ride this ride.” No makeup, at least only the ghostlike smear of last night’s face. Holly needed a shave.

“Sorry!” she said. “
Quel
night. I rushed out of the house like a madwoman! I didn’t want to keep you waiting.” I didn’t point out that she had, in fact, already kept me waiting for almost an hour.

“Oh! You look so handsome! There was a real man under all that self-pity! Bravo! . . . The greatest thing has happened! The greatest thing ever.”

“Holly, tell me.”

“I’m in love! I’ve fallen in love with a real man.”

“Holly, that’s great! I’m so happy for you. Who’s the guy?”

There was an awkward pause while Holly let me think it over just long enough that I knew the answer before she spoke.

“You.”

The color must have drained from my face, because Holly took my hands, just for a second, then quickly withdrew and put her hands back in her lap. She spoke quietly, without affectation, and with a great tenderness of feeling. She looked down at the table as she spoke, never looking at me, until the end.