The Fall of Princes (5 page)

The sound of his voice is comforting, and I feel cheerful and ask all the right questions.

I take care to step lightly on the sidewalk. Another thing my mother used to teach us was that a light footfall was a sign of good breeding. I’ve learned it pretty well, pacing much of the time around my apartment, so the downstairs neighbors won’t feel they’re living in an Edgar Allan Poe story. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or something. I expend a great deal of energy trying not to look or seem peculiar.

I’ve been to Phuket, I want to tell sweating Chris, and China. I’ve been to Cuba. Stayed at Hotel Nacional. Stayed at the Ritz, in Paris, which makes me the kind of man who stays at the Ritz. I’ve had more money in my pocket than you have in your bank account most days.

His girlfriend works at the Chanel counter at Saks. She’s a makeup artist. I tell him we’ve never met.

Chris keeps walking toward the first apartment. He’s done this yesterday. He did it the day before. As far as Chris is concerned, he’s been doing it forever.

We look at seven apartments, except that three are in the same building and two of those are identical, just on different floors. A long time ago, I went to a party in one of these apartments, or one in the same line, as they say.

There is something fatally wrong with every one of them. Well, naturally, there has to be. Like, for instance, one has this peculiar fifties miniature oven, so small you could barely fit a chicken into it. Chris asks me if I cook a lot. Oh yes, I say, I entertain pretty often.

The technique is to make some generally favorable remark when you first walk into at least some of the apartments so that Chris doesn’t get too discouraged. And, of course, with the first or second apartment, you have to say, Chris, this is exactly the apartment I don’t want. Just so he knows.

Seeing apartments is essentially a sordid business. Looking at an apartment that the tenant hasn’t moved out of yet makes me really squeamish.

One time, I looked at this nice apartment, prewar, doorman, nice, and the tenant hadn’t moved out and when I opened the bedroom closets there were all his clothes hanging there and I realized the tenant was a midget. Boy, that was weird, and I imagined myself living this kind of miniature life, never forgetting the deformed little suits, the tiny shoes, always feeling like Alice after she’s gotten really big.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and it was rent-stabilized and had a working fireplace.

You spend about ten minutes in each apartment, each redolent with lives lived totally unaware of your own, each filled with the promise of an imaginary life you might live there, where your clothes would go in the closets, where you would put the sofa and the television, and how loud it would be from the street.

I always imagine, right off, where I would put the Christmas tree. I know it’s trivial; it’s two weeks of the year and, besides, I haven’t had a tree for years, not a full-sized one, just a little table-topper, as tacky people say, but I don’t know what else you call it when it sits on a table and isn’t even a tree, really.

But I try to find a spot and picture a majestic eight-footer, covered with all the extravagant ornaments I’ve saved from my old life, the days when everything glittered too brightly.

Somewhere in these lonely rooms there is the ghost of the life I might have there. Somewhere there is room for a wife and two or three children and a Sussex spaniel and Barbour jackets and travel tickets lying on the kitchen table.

In that lovely room I see her. Her hair is colored once a month by the best colorist in the city, tawny blonde with highlights. She’s a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton and she never cooks so we eat out all the time, or order in, and the three children are in private school, the youngest girl at Spence, the boy at Collegiate, the elder girl at Foxcroft where we let her go because of her equestrian passions, and, face it, she’s not ever going to be a Rhodes scholar. Every morning, I kiss them and go off to McCann-Erickson where I am a global creative director, working on some of their biggest accounts. I am pivotal. I am rewarded beyond the common imagination.

I see her in another apartment, I see her. She looks sort of like Barbra Streisand at the end of
The Way We Were,
and she works as head of one of the departments at the library and I work at a small publishing house and we are very leftist and the children go to the Little Red Schoolhouse and then on to Horace Mann when they get older. We only have two children. Our hearts would hold a dozen, but that’s all we could afford. We use our MetroCards all the time, and we take a subscription in the Family Circle at the Met and the children will grow up to lead lives intense with intelligent ideas and passionate views and commitments.

Every apartment grows other rooms, grows organically into a place where a family could live for years and years.

And, in every apartment, there is always a Christmas tree. It’s all covered with beautiful ornaments, Bavarian glass, that we have collected over the years and put away with care and never broken any of, except that one time the tree fell over, all mixed in with funny kids’ stuff and a tree topper made out of rhinestones and popsicle sticks that Kate made when she was six and which now fills her with both uncertain pride and mortification every time we take it out and put it right at the very tippy-top.

In one life, the Plimpton/McCann life, we give each other extravagant fur and remote-controlled things and bijoux and bibelots, and we leave Christmas afternoon to go skiing in Europe for a week, because the airports are empty on Christmas Day.

In the library life, we share mittens and scarves and
Letters of Leonard Woolf
and baskets made in Third World countries and then we eat a big dinner in the middle of the afternoon and then we go for a walk in the snowy, almost deserted streets.

In one life, we are giddy but anxious. In the other, we are happy. Just a happy family.

In another apartment, I live with a woman. She is tall, with the long, lean body of a swimmer. She is ten years younger than I am, and she wears designer clothes and shoes that cost a month’s salary for most people. She is a graphic designer and the apartment is a monument to good taste. We are wholly happy in ourselves, and we have no children. I am a writer. I write novels that make people feel better about themselves, and they sell quite well. You’d know me if you saw me, from the dust jackets.

We entertain a lot—actresses, publishers, people from the arts—and we discuss Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists and Le Désert de Retz around coq au vin and Muscadet.

She once wrote to me from Paris, “You are to me as water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.”

In any case, every case, we are a tribe, a law unto ourselves, filled with quirks that have come to seem perfectly natural to us. We have the pride of knowing that there is no other group of people in the world with our unique qualities of beauty and intelligence, or kindness or grace or strength. We are only wholly ourselves when we are together. Each completes a part of the whole.

But the apartments I look at today couldn’t hold any of this. They could hold only me, and I feel bereft each time a door closes behind us.

On West Twelfth Street, we meet another broker with her client at a double brownstone. The apartment is composed of the back half of the ground floor and the first floor, what used to be called the parlor floor.

The other client is English, in his early thirties, and we all go in together and look at this peculiar apartment. He is eating a green apple.

We go in to the space, as city dwellers say these days, the space. The ground floor is peculiarly divided into two small rooms, one a kind of office, I guess, and the other the dining room, which looks out into a large, wintry garden filled with Italian terra-cotta urns. Then there is a handsome galley kitchen with its own washer/dryer combination. The ceilings are low and the rooms are dark.

There is a treacherous cantilevered staircase jerryrigged to get up to the second floor, which is perfectly wonderful.

There is a ballroom-size sitting room with fourteen-foot ceilings. You could have a twelve-footer in here, easy. There is simple but elegant plaster molding. The windows look out onto the garden, and would be just at leaf level in the spring and summer.

Behind this there is a large bedroom, which is closed off from the living room by elegant sliding etched-glass doors, and an art deco bathroom with a real deep cast-iron tub. It is all magnificent.

I am trembling with excitement. You can feel the weight of the lives lived in these rooms. It has an upstairs and a downstairs, like a real house. Once the whole brownstone was home to a single family, now it is carved up into separate spaces, disparate lives. You can almost hear the rustle of their skirts as the other agent slides the glass doors back and forth.

The other realtor turns to her young English client. “But where would you put the baby?” She asks, and he says exactly and they leave right away.

I want to stay there, listening to the sounds of my wife and children, watching the tree glisten in the early winter afternoon, but my ten minutes are almost up, and I don’t want Chris to get overstimulated or he’ll never leave me alone.

But I can see them. I can smell them. I can lie down in the bedroom, rich or poor, and sink into the comfort of twenty years of marriage to a woman I love. I can see the posters of the rock stars and the sports heroes on the walls of my children’s bedrooms.

I’m not a fantasist. I know the place where I really live. The one room is comfortable to me, and it isn’t so bad. It is dark and it is small but it’s also pretty much free from memory. There’s a lot you can do with a one-room apartment if you use your imagination.

I know what I do and where I am in the world, which is pretty far down the
People
magazine Most Beautiful People ladder.

But I want things. The things I had in another life. I’m sorry I threw it all away. I feel terrible about fucking it all up, all the time. I want to tell Chris all this, I always do, but I don’t say anything. I just take another tour through the rooms, remarking mostly on how they cut these brownstones up in such peculiar ways, and then we leave.

I look again at the twinkling tree, so brief, so fragile. I look through the tall windows into the garden where I might barbecue for friends on a summer night, white wine and chevre. Diana Krall. The
New York Review of Books.

I kiss my wife good-bye. I kiss my loving children on their foreheads and Chris and I go back out into the fading sunlight. It’s really cold now.

This apartment costs $6,000 a month, more than three times what I’m paying now.

On the way back to the office, I tell Chris that his job must be very frustrating, showing all these apartments to people who are so hard to satisfy. He says that it’s OK, he likes people. He says he has one client who’s been looking for an apartment for five months. He says he just takes it one day at a time.

That’s the way you ought to take it, pal, I think. One day at a time.

I shake his hand, promise I’ll call him tomorrow. I walk home through the chill afternoon, passing the tree stand again. Maybe this year, I think. Maybe next week.

The windows we look through to glimpse the happiness of families.

All the rooms we might have lived in. All the lives we might have led.

CHAPTER SIX

One Reason I Don’t Go
to the Beach Anymore

M
ore than a decade ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English-country-house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn’t and it was just swell.

It was like being in an episode of
Masterpiece Theater
. All you needed was an under housemaid arranging flowers in cut glass vases.

This was just as the great tailgate party was coming to an end, and I had an almost infinite amount of money. Or so it seemed.

I worked on The Street, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy helping rich people shift money around every minute of every day so that they could get even richer at the expense of people who had no money and never would have—I was wracked with guilt at the same time I was insane with adrenaline and raging testosterone—still, the money was fantastic and the roll, the flow of it, was like mainlining every day. The roll smelled like money. You could feel the poison boiling through your veins. Money was the big news, the lifeblood of the decade, and I was in it up to my elbows.

I worked in a big room that was basically like a casino; there were no windows, no clocks, nothing but the relentless flicker of financial news on dozens of TV sets. It was both timeless and relentless. The days were vicious, but the nights were filled with fat stogies in the cigar room at Frank’s and big steaks and then on to clubs where we swaggered in our monogrammed Sea Island cotton shirts and $200 scarf ties from Hermès and sat in the VIP section and ran up $2,000 bar bills and took town cars home at three in the morning when we had to be back at the office at seven-thirty. We did things like write our phone numbers on girls’ tits with Mont Blanc pens, and they always called us back. Always.

You could smoke then, that’s how long ago it was.

This was life. This was everyday life, and we didn’t understand people who didn’t live like this. We were the pulse, the heartbeat, of the decade and we were all young and mostly good looking and we all found time to work out like dogs, weird times like six in the morning, so we had these fantastic bodies, well, not all of us had fantastic bodies, some had the spindly hollow-eyed stares of junkies and some topped three hundred pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day; but I’m thinking about the guys who came to the house that summer, we were all in perfect shape and had the kind of women you get when you have a fantastic body and a wad of cash and the utter arrogance that comes with having the big dog on the leash.

We were the people people wrote about when they wrote about the evils of contemporary society. We made too much money. We spent too much money. We didn’t do a single thing to help the less fortunate, which included most of the people on the planet. We drank too much. We did too many drugs. We had eighteen-year-old kids with rasta braids coming to drop shit off in the middle of the day. We went to Alphabet City the minute we got into our black town cars at the end of a stressful day. We felt not one ounce of remorse. We only felt pity for the rest of the gray masses. All of these things were true. But, man, did we have fun. It was like a giant testosterone flambé.

Bonuses were a big thing. Bonuses were given out around Christmastime, in yards, a yard being a million dollars. People would say, sucking on a big fat Cubano, that they got a yard or a yard and a half. Everybody lied, of course, but everybody got a lot and it was a big deal.

I wasn’t necessarily the brightest nickel in the bag, but I had the best education, and I was as aggressive as a pit bull, I could trade shit for silk, and so I was good for half a yard at least. I was thirty-one.

After I paid off the taxes and my enormous bills—I owed Bergdorf’s $12,000, which was basically three suits, two cashmere sweaters, and a bottle of Acqua di Parma, the same cologne Cary Grant wore—I still had quite a pile, and I decided to get my own house in the Hamptons. Not just any house,
the
house.

I had shared before. Little bungalows on Gin Lane. I had gone through the ritual of being a houseguest—my mother once said, when you’re a houseguest, don’t ring the doorbell with anything but your elbow, so I took cases of champagne and new badminton sets from Hammacher Schlemmer—so I knew what I wanted was a palace of my own, where I could invite people every weekend, and have them bring me lavish and largely unusable stuff.

I looked at six houses. I took the sixth one. It was chintzed and striped and leopard-printed, stuff that would charm women, and it had a grand piano and a deck from which you could smell the sea, and the pool and the garden and service for thirty. It was English aristocracy without the dog shit and the cigarette burns in the upholstery.

Someone witty once said to me that living in a castle wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Darling,” she said, “you still have to wash your hair in the bathtub.”

I had never been in an English country house. I thought this was the real thing. I rented it immediately. It cost $96,000, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I wrote a check. The house came with a maid, so the owners could feel safe about their fabulous stuff, and she cost another $800 a week, which I also paid by check, and I leased a car for the summer, a deeply impressive convertible Mercedes, midnight black, with every accoutrement you could wish for and the smell of brand-new leather and a top that slid back with the touch of a button, slid back as silently as a snake through the grass. This was a very nice car. I gave them my platinum card.

I bought sheets in the city for every bedroom, from Frette, since the sheets that were there were the kind of clever pastiche designed to make you think maybe Kmart was a good idea after all. My guests would sleep in thousand-thread-count cotton, white with scalloped borders, so the cool night air could pass over their bodies like a lover’s kiss.

I still have the sheets. Quality lasts.

I found a huge Moroccan tent in the city and bought it for $25,000 and had it put up on the lawn and filled with benches and silk pillows and those low kind of Moroccan tables and hung with chandeliers so it was like being in a fantasy seraglio, all about sex. It was hot as hell in there, like being at a rinky-dink circus on a July afternoon in Reno, Nevada, but it was lavishly and painstakingly embroidered and dotted with thousands of tiny little mirrors and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

From the second story of the house, you looked down at the roof of it, or whatever tents have, and it was like looking down at the stars, with all the mirrors twinkling and the candles glowing softly through the canvas.

The first weekend, I invited my main buddies from The Firm—George, who was hysterical, and Frank, who was enormous, 6'4", just to show I wasn’t filled with self-doubt, and Fanelli and Trotmeier. I took two days off from work to stock the house, bread and desserts from the Barefoot
Contessa, $30-a-pound lobster salad from Loaves and Fishes, and all kinds of salads and hors d’oeuvres and candy and cakes from all over and vegetables from the Green Thumb. And liquor, Jesus. Everything you could imagine. I even stopped by the road and bought tall flowers to go in all those vases, and little bunches in every room, and when I was done the whole thing looked like an at-home
Vogue
shoot showing how some English heiress lived when she was tired of town and longed for the simple life.

Friday night, they all showed up, with the girls, and I picked Carmela up from the Jitney and we were a household. The girls, frankly, were the least of it. Everybody assumed they would be beautiful and pliable and enviable and basically disposable. So, all summer, the house was the five guys and whatever the cat dragged in.

And the presents. Like Christmas all over again. George brought a case of 1966 Romanee-Conti Montrachet, God knows where he found it, and Frank brought a picnic hamper from Bergdorf’s with real china plates, and Fanelli, who was a thug, brought a Z of really good coke, and Trotmeier brought ten white beach towels with my initials on them, every monogram a different color.

We drank rum drinks that came out of a blender. Frank claimed he’d never seen a blender before and Trotmeier said he’d never tasted rum. His mother told him it was the devil’s drink and taught him never to touch it. He got over that pretty fast, and Frank became a whizmaster at making blended drinks because he was mechanically inclined, he said.

The household was perfect. It was a complete universe, all by itself. We ate butterflied leg of lamb on the Weber grill, and we drank rum and Montrachet until we were silly and did many, many lines of fine white cocaine, but only after we’d eaten the lamb with this $90-a-bottle Burgundy I had laid in, and we smoked Cuban cigars until the whole angst of the week had worn away, and we went to bed at two in the morning to sleep with these beautiful girls and the sex was not quiet and every form of human sensuality was redolent in the quiet night air.

The next morning by eleven, everybody was fresh as a daisy. Juices were poured, omelets got made and eaten out on the sunporch, and then Bloody Marys got made and drunk out by the pool, and then the guys went off to play tennis. We knew this one guy, a yard and a half at least, who had hired a tennis pro for the summer to come every Saturday afternoon, so we got to going over there, knocking balls around while the women looked on and read novels, us quick-footed in our $300 Prada tennis shorts and our raggedy old T-shirts from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, Florida, and places like that, just to show we weren’t fashion pussies.

We were the kind of people who got their pictures in
Hamptons
magazine. We were the kind of people who dressed in Nantucket-red linen trousers to go to the Hampton Classic Horse Show. We could get into Nick and Toni’s—impossible to get into—on thirty minutes’ notice. That kind of people.

The second weekend, we really found the perfect thing to round out the house. We found a pet.

Her name was Giulia de Bosset. She was European. I found her at a party.

She came up to me at the bar while I was getting more drinks for everybody and she looked straight at me and said, “I know
you.
” As though we were in the middle of some conversation already.

“I’m sorry. I don’t . . . what?”

“I know
you.
I met you when you were still at Hopkins. I was just a little girl.”

It turned out she was the baby sister of the college roommate of this extremely thin girl I used to date—we called her the Pencil—and so we rehashed old times, and I asked her where she was staying and she said she was staying at the God-forsaken Maidstone Club, of all places, her father was a member, as was his father and grandfather, with all those old farts, so I told her to come stay with us, where at least she could get some peace and quiet without somebody whacking golf balls all over the place. Things were different then. We spit at golf.

So she came. We picked up her things at two in the morning, and she came and slept in the little maid’s room off the kitchen, which she said was just fine with her, anywhere but that mausoleum.

She was a waif. She was like Audrey Hepburn, not that I knew who Audrey Hepburn was at the time. That was just one piece of information that hadn’t been downloaded yet.

Later, I kept hearing her name, especially when she died, so I went and rented all these old movies and boy, she was something, and boy, was she ever like Giulia de Bosset. I bet neither one of them ever went to a dance where they had to get their hands stamped if they wanted to get back in.

Giulia was naïve and quiet and had chopped-off hair and lived in the East Village where nobody lived in those days, and she would tell funny stories about finding guys shooting up on her stairs, and she talked about getting mugged by those same guys and she obviously had money and we were all intrigued and we just adored her and so we asked her back. And she came.

She came every weekend, and slept in the little maid’s room off the kitchen. I went back to Frette and got sheets for her, too, so she wouldn’t feel bad about staying in the single bed in the little room that barely had a bathroom. Her sheets were very fancy, embroidered with vines in periwinkle blue, so her room would seem special in some way.

She wasn’t as pretty as the other girls. She wasn’t athletic. She didn’t like to lie in the sun. But she was slim as a reed and had flawless skin and boy, could she make a great Greek salad. Give her a lemon, some really good olive oil, some mustard, some garlic, and some kosher sea salt, and she could really make a salad into a whole new thing. It took her a long time to do it, but it was worth every second.

She had no interest in sex, and believe me, we tried. Even Trotmeier tried, and he was very fastidious.

She said she was a virgin and she had a kind of quietude as though she weren’t even waiting for something and anything that happened was just fine with her.