It takes longer than I want for her to realize what I’m referring to and she says “No, Victor” but she flinches when she says this so I’m not too relieved.
The phone keeps ringing and Chloe keeps lifting sweaters out of her armoire and placing them in the suitcases on the bed and she’s moving slowly, deliberately, nodding to herself, every move seemingly mapped out, only slightly distracted by my presence, but then she sighs and stops moving. She looks over at where I’m shivering, slumped in a giant white chair. In a mirror across the room I can make out my reflection and my face isn’t as bruised as I feared. Chloe’s asking “Why?” and the phone keeps ringing, a reminder.
“Why … what?”
“Just why, Victor.”
“Baby,” I say, holding my hands up, about to offer an explanation. “You’re a, um, great source of … inspiration to, um, me.”
“I want some kind of answer from you,” she says calmly. “Don’t free-associate. Just tell me why.”
I take this in. “I can dig that, baby.”
“If there was just some speck of feeling in you, Victor,” she sighs, padding over to the closet.
“Oh please, baby—”
“Why, Victor?” she asks again.
“Baby, I—”
“I’m not going to cry. I cried all night,” she says. “I’m not going to cry while you’re here so just be straight with me.”
“Baby, I need … I need …” I sigh, then start again. “Baby, see, this thing—”
“You never really answer a question directly if you can help it, do you?”
“Um …” I look up at her, confused. “What was the question?”
She’s carefully placing T-shirts and panties on one side of the largest suitcase. She wraps the cord of a hair dryer around its handle, then places it in a smaller bag. “It’s taken me a long time to like myself, Victor,” she says, gliding by me. “I’m not going to let you change that.”
“But you don’t like yourself,” I mutter wearily, shaking my head. “Not really,” and then, “Baby, please stop moving around.”
Baxter’s cell phone rings. She picks it up off the bed and listens to whoever’s calling, studying me until she finally turns away and says, “Yeah, okay .… I’ll be ready .… I just need to meet with someone .… Okay, thanks .… Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley? … Okay, great .… No, I’ll be fine .… Yeah, he’s here right now .… No, no, no—it’s okay, don’t. I’m fine, really .… I’ll see you then.”
She clicks off, moves directly into the bathroom and closes the door. The toilet flushes twice and then she walks back into the bedroom. I want to ask her who was on the phone so she’ll have to say his name but I already know who it was and in the end I don’t really want to hear her say his name.
“So can you tell me why, Victor?” she asks. “Why did all this happen?”
“Because, baby …” I swallow. “This is hard .… Come on, baby .… This is … all I know? … It’s all … I am?” I say, hoping it’s the right way of explaining.
“Everything you know is wrong,” she says. “Everything you know is wrong.”
“Oh man,” I sigh.
“Just look at your life, Victor. You’re going nowhere. You know girls named Vagina—”
“Hey, her name was Yanni, baby. It just means vagina.”
“How many thousands of nightclub booths can you hang out in?” she’s asking. “You just sit around Bowery Bar or Pravda or Indochine complaining about how much it sucks.” She pauses, waiting. “And you do this four times a week?”
“I’m … pretty much exhausted, baby.”
“No, you’re sick,” she says, staring deeply into the luggage, contemplating the arrangement of clothes, hands on hips. “You’re soul sick, Victor.”
“Baby, it’s just”—I raise my head to look at her, confused—“Some bad coke, but whatever.” I sigh, giving up. “It’s irrelevant.”
“Everything is irrelevant with you.”
“I’m … baffled. Why is everyone dissing me?”
“You spend your life trying to impress people you’re impressed with, that’s why.”
“Why should I try to impress people who don’t impress me, baby?”
“Because the people you want to impress aren’t worth it?”
After taking this in, I clear my throat. “My … emotions at the moment are a little, um, mixed up,” I whimper.
“You cater to people who don’t really give a damn.”
“Oh come on, baby,” I exclaim. “They just pretend not to give a damn—”
She cuts me off with a look of total disbelief. “Do you actually listen to yourself?”
I shrug, miserably.
“I know it’s difficult for you to adjust to reality, but isn’t it time?” She zips one bag up, contemplates another.
“Baby, baby, this has been like the most difficult week, I think, of my life and”—I breathe in—“this has been so scary, so—”
“Oh, this tiny little world of yours,” she says, waving me away.
“No, no, really, I’m sick of it, I’m sick of it all too, baby,” I say, panting, sitting up in the giant white chair. “I’m sick of being friendly with like people who either hate me or or or are planning to kill me or—”
“Did you actually think you’d get away with this?” she asks, cutting me off.
I sigh, then pause for the appropriate amount of time before asking, “Why not?”
She stares at me, expressionless.
“People get away with more,” I mutter.
“That’s because everyone’s smarter than you,” she says. “That’s because everything you know is wrong and everyone is smarter than you.”
“Baby, that picture … I don’t know what it was but that didn’t happen, that never happened—”
“What never happened?” she asks, suddenly interested.
“What that photo showed,” I say.
“You didn’t have sex with or attempt to have sex with or kiss Lauren Hynde?” she asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”
I consider this, reword what she asked me, then blurt out, “I’m saying that—”
She moves away from me. “Maybe you come to life when I’m not around—who knows?”
I’m gesturing with my hands, trying to make some kind of point, attempting to form even a sentence. “Didn’t you like, um, didn’t you talk to Lauren? Didn’t she explain?” I ask hopefully.
“No,” she says. “I like Lauren. I just never want to see her again.” Chloe checks her watch, mumbles an inaudible curse.
I lift myself up from the chair and move toward the bathroom where Chloe’s placing jars filled with creams and oils and powders into another Gucci bag. I notice that the hand mirror I saw by the sink isn’t there anymore. A razor blade and a small transparent straw sit by a bottle of perfume and I am not imagining this.
“What?” she asks suddenly, turning around. “Why are you still here?”
“Because …” I smile sadly. “You’re … my ideal mate?”
“A mirror’s your ideal mate.”
“Maybe … ,” I start, haltingly. “Maybe if you didn’t expect so much from me you might not be so … disappointed,” I finally admit, and then, watching her reflection in the mirror, “Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying,” she says, surprised. “I’m yawning.”
And back down in the lobby, on my way outside, dazed, shuffling across the marble floor, I bump into Tristan, an ex-model who deals drugs, chatting with Ashton, and Tristan’s magnetic in a gorgeous kind of way and though I’m totally absent right now I’m able to instinctively shake his hand, make the prerequisite small talk, avoid the obvious (Buddy Seagull’s column, the stains on my shirt, the bruise above my eyebrow), trade compliments about our hair, recommend one or two cool foreign movies, a new band from Nevada (“a really happening state,” Tristan assures me), and then we move on.
Outside, on the steps leading down to the sidewalk,
I turn around, and through the lobby doors I see Tristan getting into the elevator and I want to ask him who he’s going to see and then maybe buy a couple of grams but instead I start panicking because I make a connection and Tristan spots me staring at him and he gives a little wave just as the elevator doors close and a horrible vision breaks open in front of me of Chloe in an ambulance, another detox center in the desert somewhere, another series of failed suicide attempts followed up with a successful one and I cry out and try to run back into the lobby but crew members are struggling to hold me back and I’m crying out “No but why but why this wasn’t in the script” until I collapse and a technician props me up on the steps where I’m still freaking out and shouting “But you don’t understand you don’t understand” and suddenly the director kneels beside me and gently tells the two crew members to let go, that it’s okay, shhh.
I’m shaking so hard the director has to hold my face in his hands, steadying it, before he can talk to me.
Basically summing things up, he asks, “Do you really want to go back up there?”
I’m shaking so hard I can’t answer him.
“Do you really want to go back up there?” he asks again. “Is this something your character would do?”
I’m inhaling and exhaling so hard I can’t catch my breath and slowly people start moving away from me.
After what seems like hours I finally stand up when the urge to go back up to the apartment recedes (not all that unexpectedly, really) and over the sounds of construction and traffic I’m still hearing sleigh bells and someone from wardrobe is brushing off my jacket as I head down the steps leading to the sidewalk and the black sedan waiting for me at the curb which will take me back to my apartment where my viewpoint of this project will be, if not exactly clarified, then at least placed in some kind of perspective.
2
Outside my apartment building the Details reporter is playing hopscotch, wearing a citrus-colored catsuit, a white leather jacket, platform sneakers, braids held in place by plastic barrettes, and she’s dialing a number on a cell phone, her fingernails half-covered with chipped brown polish. I trudge by her without saying a word, gingerly stepping over the remains of my crushed and mangled Vespa, which lies crumpled by the trash lining the curb, a cigarette dangling from my lips, my sunglasses on.
“Hey, we were supposed to meet this morning,” she says, clicking off the cell phone.
I don’t say anything, just busy myself looking for my keys.
“They canceled the piece on you anyway,” she says.
“And you came to tell me in person?” I find the keys. “How intimidating.”
“Don’t you care?” she asks.
I sigh, take my sunglasses off. “What did you think of me?”
She cocks her head “meaningfully,” studies the sidewalk, squinting, then looks back up at my face.
“I thought you were well-nigh inscrutable,” she says, mimicking a British accent.
“Well, I thought you were a hodgepodge of banality,” I say, mimicking a British accent too.
I open the door and step inside. She shrugs, skips away.
An eviction notice is pinned to my door and when I pull it off I glance over at the director and roll my eyes, groaning “Oh puhleeeze.” The instant I walk into my apartment the phone starts ringing and I flop down on my beanbag chair, exhausted, and pick it up, yawning. “It’s Victor—whass up?”
“This is Palakon calling,” a voice says crisply.
“Palakon, I really can’t talk now, so—”
“There’s a manila envelope on your kitchen table,” Palakon says, cutting me off. “Open it.”
I stare into the kitchen from where I’m slouching and spot the envelope on the table.
“Okay,” I say, “I’m opening the vanilla envelope, dude.”
“No, Mr. Johnson,” Palakon says, annoyed. “Please get up and go to the kitchen.”
“Whoa,” I say, impressed.
“I want you to take that envelope with you when you go to London to find Jamie Fields,” Palakon says. “You have a reservation in a first-class cabin on the QE2. It leaves New York at four o’clock this afternoon. Your tickets are in that manila envelope on your kitchen table, along with—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I say. “Hold on.”
“Yes?” Palakon asks politely.
I pause for a long time, mulling things over before blurting out, “You could’ve at least put me on the fucking Concorde.”
“You have a reservation in a first-class cabin on the QE2,” Palakon says again, undeterred. “It leaves New York at four o’clock this afternoon. A car will be by to pick you up at one-thirty. Your tickets are in the manila envelope along with ten thousand dollars in cash for, er, expenses—”
“Need receipts?”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Johnson.”
“Cool.”
“I will contact you on the ship. And don’t forget to take the manila envelope with you. It’s crucial.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because everything you need is in it.”
“It’s a nice manila envelope,” I say finally.
“Thank you.”
“How did you know I’d be able to go today, Palakon?”
“I read the News,” he says. “I figured it out.”
“Palakon—”
“Oh yes,” Palakon says, before hanging up. “Take the hat with you too.”
I pause before asking, “What hat?”
“You know which one.”
He hangs up.
1
“You have potential,” Jamie said.
We were lounging in a Camden flashback in the commons, splitting a Molson, our sunglasses on, our eyes glazed over, a peeled orange sitting untouched between us on a table, and we’d already read our horoscopes and I was wearing a T-shirt that read IF YOU’RE NOT WASTED THE DAY IS and waiting for my laundry to dry and she was alternating between playing with a pencil and smelling a Thai orchid a secret admirer had sent her and heavy-metal pop—Whitesnake or Glass Tiger—was playing from somewhere we couldn’t figure out and it was driving us nuts and her dealer wasn’t coming up until next Tuesday so we were fairly unresponsive toward certain events and in the sky things were getting dark.
We were lounging in the commons and we’d been talking about how shallow everyone was, ticking off the affairs we’d had with all these shallow people, and then Jamie saw someone she hated or she’d fucked (they usually existed in the same realm) and she leaned in and kissed me even before I could say “What’s the story?” The guy, Mitchell, passed by. It wasn’t enough that she and I had been screwing each other for the last two weeks or so; she needed people to know that we had.
“Man, did I get torqued last night,” I yawned, stretching.
“Totally excellent,” she said.
“Get a haircut,” I muttered to someone with a ponytail shuffling by, and Jamie eyed a maintenance worker trimming a rosebush and licked her lips naughtily.
She had long fingernails always painted with white polish and liked starting sentences with the words “Contrary to popular opinion …” She hated baseball caps on men but would wear one if she thought her hair looked bad or if she was too hungover to wash it. Her other pet peeves about men ranged along the predictable lines of: fake rap talk, urine or semen stains on jockey shorts (a type of underwear she abhorred), razor stubble, giving hickeys, carrying books around (“Camden isn’t Yale for god’s sake,” she’d moan). Condoms didn’t necessarily mean anything to her but she knew every guy on campus who had herpes (through some kind of deal with a lesbian nurse in Health Services who was in love with her), so it was all moot. Shakespeare “irritated” her.
I would tell her “I’m not looking for a serious relationship” and she would stare back at me like I was insane, as if I wasn’t capable of one in the first place. I would tell her “Your roommate’s really pretty,” before moving on to long monologues about ex-girlfrien
ds, every cheerleader I ever fucked, a cousin I fingerbanged at a party in Virginia Beach, or I’d brag about how much money my family had and I always inflated the amount because sometimes this was the only way to get her attention, even though she knew who my dad was, having seen him on CNN. She forgave me for a lot of flaws because I was “simply too good-looking.”
At first she was so inexpressive and indifferent that I wanted to know more about her. I envied that blankness—it was the opposite of helplessness or damage or craving or suffering or shame. But she was never really happy and already, in a matter of days, she had reached a stage in our relationship when she no longer really cared about me or any thoughts or ideas I might have had. I’d try and fuck her into some kind of conciousness, desperate to make her come, and I’d fuck her so hard that she’d be drenched with sweat and red-faced and yelling out, the two of us on the mattress on the floor next to piles of books she’d stolen from the library and a couple of porno magazines I bought that we both whacked off over and her accountant was always calling or her therapist was always calling or her cousin lost in Ibiza was always calling and we’d have sad conversations about how much she hated her mother and wished she was dead like my mother was but I listened “intently” and took it easy on Jamie since I knew her first boyfriend died in a car accident coming back from cheating on her at a ski lodge in Brattleboro. “But he was so weird I really don’t even want to talk about it,” she’d finally say after an hour, after seventy minutes, sometimes eighty.
A limousine rolled up next to one of the dorms and a group of freshmen were sunning themselves beneath a darkening sky on a mattress pulled out from Booth House, which bordered the commons. A keg was being tapped and people drifted toward it and the wind tossing leaves around the lawn made Jamie and me look at how leafless the trees were. MTV was on the large-screen television set that hung above the fireplace and a VJ introduced a video but the sound was off and then there was static and people were really just hanging out, waiting for lunch, for another class to begin. Someone sat down next to us and started taping our conversation and someone else was explaining to someone behind me how a camcorder worked. Jamie was gazing at the giant no photography poster pinned on an unnecessary column in the middle of the room and I had just noticed a naked mannequin lying on its side that someone had discarded on the stairs leading up to the dining halls.