There was no system to any of this. At that point Chloe Byrnes wasn’t a real person to me and on that afternoon in the house on Ocean Drive a few decisions had to be made, the priority being: I would never dream of leaving any of this. At first I was confused by what passed for love in this world: people were discarded because they were too old or too fat or too poor or they had too much hair or not enough, they were wrinkled, they had no muscles, no definition, no tone, they weren’t hip, they weren’t remotely famous. This was how you chose lovers. This was what decided friends. And I had to accept this if I wanted to get anywhere. When I looked over at Chloe, she shrugged. I observed the shrug. She mouthed the words Take … a … hike … . On the verge of tears—because I was dealing with the fact that we lived in a world where beauty was considered an accomplishment—I turned away and made a promise to myself: to be harder, to not care, to be cool. The future started mapping itself out and I focused on it. In that moment I felt as if I was disappearing from pool-side in the villa on Ocean Drive and I was floating above the palm trees, growing smaller in the wide blank sky until I no longer existed and relief swept over me with such force I sighed.
One of the teenage boys was ready to pounce on me, and the boy splashing in the pool, I realized faintly, could have been drowning and no one would have noticed. I avoided thinking about that and concentrated on the patterns in a bathing suit that Marky Mark was wearing. I might not even remember this afternoon, I was thinking. I was thinking that a part of me might destroy it. A cold voice inside my head begged me to. But I was being introduced to too many cool people and I was becoming famous and at that point I had no way of understanding one thing: if I didn’t erase this afternoon from my memory and just walk out that door and leave Chloe Byrnes behind, sections of this afternoon would come back to me in nightmares. This was what the cold voice assured me. This was what it promised. Someone was praying over the half-smashed bat but the gesture seemed far away and unimportant. People started dancing around the praying boy.
“You want to know how this all ends?” Chloe asked, eyes closed.
I nodded.
“Buy the rights,” she whispered.
I turned away so she couldn’t see the expression on my face.
And as the final crashing verse of “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” boomed out, I faded away and my image overlapped and dissolved into an image of myself years later sitting in a hotel bar in Milan where I was staring at a mural.
15
I’m drinking a glass of water in the empty hotel bar at the Principe di Savoia and staring at the mural behind the bar and in the mural there is a giant mountain, a vast field spread out below it where villagers are celebrating in a field of long grass that blankets the mountain dotted with tall white flowers, and in the sky above the mountain it’s morning and the sun is spreading itself across the mural’s frame, burning over the small cliffs and the low-hanging clouds that encircle the mountain’s peak, and a bridge strung across a pass through the mountain will take you to any point beyond that you need to arrive at, because behind that mountain is a highway and along that highway are billboards with answers on them—who, what, where, when, why—and I’m falling forward but also moving up toward the mountain, my shadow looming against its jagged peaks, and I’m surging forward, ascending, sailing through dark clouds, rising up, a fiery wind propelling me, and soon it’s night and stars hang in the sky above the mountain, revolving as they burn.
The stars are real.
The future is that mountain.
ALSO BY BRET EASTON ELLIS
AMERICAN PSYCHO
American Psycho is set in a world (Manhattan) and an era (the eighties) recognizably our own. The wealthy elite grows wealthier, the poor are turned out onto the streets in droves, and anything seems possible. Even so, Bateman—the handsome, well-educated, wealthy young man who expresses his true self through torture and murder—prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
Fiction/0-679-73577-1
THE INFORMERS
Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, but saves their shared joint before the ambulance arrives. Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, cares more for appearances than for her future stepdaughter. As rendered by Ellis, their interactions compose a chilling descent into the abyss beneath L.A.’s pretty surfaces.
Fiction/0-679-74324-3
LESS THAN ZERO
Set in L.A. in the early 1980s, this mesmerizing novel is a powerful portrait of a lost generation. Clay comes home on break from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of absolute moral entropy, where the natives drive Porches, and snort mountains of cocaine. When Clay finds his childhood friend Julian careering into hustling and heroin, his holiday turns into a spiral of desperation.
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THE RULES OF ATTRACTION
Set in a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan eighties, The Rules of Attraction is about three students with no plans for the future, or even the present, who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle. Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at Camden College and treats their sexual posturings and agonies with hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives.
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VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2000
Copyright © 1998 by Bret Easton Ellis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ellis, Bret Easton.
Glamorama : a novel / Bret Easton Ellis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-75642-8
I. Title.
PS3555.L5937G58 1999
813’54—dc21 98-14215
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.0
Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama
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