High White Sound

  One. The Friends

  When you find yourself at a fancy party where you know no one and feel like a fool, sometimes the only way to make sense of the sea of waistcoats is to imagine that you are at the circus. Ringmasters in top hats sit at the bar with ballerinas in diamonds. A trained bear in a white tie and tails balances atop a stool, his fat paws gripping the bar for support. In the corner a midget strokes his spiral mustache and puffs on a dated Cuban. The figures glide through golden liquid and bend in champagne bubbles. I had been admiring the glittering little world between my fingers for God knows how long when a voice broke into my reverie.

  “Any chance you might actually drink that, Addison? Or are you just going to stare at it all night?” The images slid off the glass. Behind the flute a girl in crushed velvet arched an eyebrow.

  “Of course I’m going to drink it,” I replied, tipping the glass into a potted fern.

  “You are a waste of alcohol, young lady.”

  “Then I should fit in around here.”

  A dark green Dom Perignon bottle wandered by in limp hands. In one deft move Katrina acquired it and procured two refills.

  “Besides, it was running low on bubbles.” I raised the flute and peered back into my carbonated world. “It’s like a carnival in here through this thing.”

  “Mark my words, it’s quite a scene outside it as well.” Girls spun in ball gowns under rusting chandeliers. Boys with ruffled hair and loosened ties roamed the halls clutching bottle necks and tattered books. A pair of legs buckled underneath a growing tower of coats.

  “Another year,” Katrina declared, “another crop of baby-faced masochists, lined up to get a piece of their own self-worth handed back to them.”

  Fraternities as most of America knows them are an uncommon sight in New York. But this was not your average fraternity. The fabled little brownstone had a corner address on Riverside, near the tenured professors at Columbia and the brown park where Kerouac was once said to have buried a body.

  Past the ornate wooden doors there are three criteria for admission: You have to be smart. You have to be beautiful. You have to be filthy rich.

  But given enough of the third, the first two don’t matter. Dumb kids fly into the Ivy League on the wings of legacy all the time, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but money talks. The society required funds to sponsor their fabled parties, which were held on birthdays, holidays and always on Thursdays, where acquaintances and hangers-on from the college populace could glide through in elegant attire and supply window dressing in exchange for liquors and mixers of their choosing.

  Tonight was such a gathering. Our second year had ended under torrents of rain and the Katrina and I felt like a last hurrah. So we pinned ourselves up, pulled on some basic black and stumbled on stilettos down the cobblestone path that cut through the wrought iron campus, leading lost souls back into the jaws of the outside world.

  “The ability to make money is a gift from God,” I read on the wall. "And here I was, thinking he was dead."

  In spite of all the glitz I was haunted by visions of the one person I would rather forget. He was under the low light at the end of the bar. In a dark blazer brooding in front of the fire. Slumped in a blue velvet armchair.

  The aftermath of love is a curious thing. Once you’ve got it, so it is believed, the hard part is over – even The Beatles thought so. He called me a princess. And treated me like one, as far as fairy tales go. But fairy tales never tell the whole story, and fulfillment in the arms of another is a Victorian myth that burns virgin hearts.

  I loved him. Or so I thought. But what was once a quiet and stable affection had over time matured into boredom. I saw my life pan out as a series of long nights deflecting dim, well-meaning questions from his family – when are you going to get married, then when are you going to have a baby, and another, and so forever on.

  Like a relic of my past in the Midwest, he was snipped out of the picture with one long and sad final phone call that spring. And the fabled glowing-ember sunset we always saw ourselves walking towards burst into flames. That night I lay down and cried for the loss of my white knight. A childhood of Christian dreams and fairy tales left me unprepared for this feeling. Of loving someone, but not wanting them.

  “He wasn’t good for you anyway,” Katrina remarked, watching my fallen face. “That boy was always a bit simple for my liking. Which probably means he was too simple for yours too, had you been willing to admit it.”

  My eyes softened. “He was sweet.”

  “Sure he was.” Katrina snapped a lighter at her cigarette. “But was he the man of your dreams?”

  The smoke slithered between the iron spires of the stairwell and curled upwards until it broke around two slender feet wrapped in gold chains. A blue satin dress framed a crystal necklace under a halo of blonde hair. Candlelight danced in her frosted eyes.

  “Addison!” Rose’s feet glided down the stairs with an indelible grace that came from years of ballet.

  “Easy there,” I cautioned as Rose balanced on the last step. “Lose a shoe and you may give some poor guy a Prince Charming complex.”

  Rose was a bowl of sunshine from New Orleans, her muscles lean from years of running free. On most sunny days I could find her on the library steps, basking in the warmth of the afternoon, as if she were still napping with the alligators and drinking forties with policemen outside the funk bars on Broom Street. We lived together before she crossed over to the shadows of the society.

  She wrapped her arms around Katrina. "What do you think of the party?”

  “It’s unusual,” Katrina replied as we watched a boy stumble by in a top hat and a cane swing out to rap his bottom as he passed. An eyebrow twitched slightly as she thought of something brilliant and diplomatically chose to hold it back.

  "Doesn't Rose look like a mermaid?" I purred, stroking her hair. "An absolute mermaid."

  “Have you talked to many people at this party?” Rose plucked an open bottle of red wine off a passing silver tray and tipped it towards Katrina's glass. Her voice sunk a few octaves. “They are a bit intense.”

  “Just observing mostly.” Katrina clinked her glass. “I don't know any of these people, and I don't think I care to either.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “How goes dance?” I asked Rose.

  Rose shook her head. “It was good, but I’m not really bothering with that anymore. My parents said I should major in something more practical.”

  “Practical?” Katrina sputtered. “You go to a liberal arts school, for God’s sake. Impracticality is practically the point.” She lit another cigarette. “I need to figure out what to do with a talent for philosophy. Philosophy! I don’t know if it could be any less useful. Outside of armchairs, that is.”

  “Aren’t you a bit too bleeding-heart liberal to be a smoker?” mused Rose.

  “In theory you’re right,” Katrina conceded, disappearing behind a growing white cloud. “But I find them a modern necessity.”

  Rose turned. “Are you doing anything interesting for the summer?”

  My face lit up. “I’m staying in the city.”

  Rose wrinkled her nose. “With the garbage?”

  "Oh yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I have an internship at a consulting firm downtown. Which is going to be pretty miserable,” I admitted. “I'm only doing it because my mother would kill me otherwise."

  Rose gave me an odd look. "Do you always do what your mother says?"

  "Yes."

  "She's a very scary lady," Katrina agreed.

  “That’s not such a bad trait to have,” Rose admitted. “After all, someone has to keep people in line.” She stretched her arms and cracked her knuckles. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “You’re going to be a bouncer?”

  Rose slitted her eyes. “I’m going to law school.”

  “Why?”

  “Imagine the salary.”

>   I peered into the bottom of my glass. “Imagine the drudgery.”

  Rose cocked her head and rolled a bare shoulder up, like young girls do when they know they are being good for their parents. “I figure I may give it a go. My father has been talking lots about his connections at Yale Law. It seems like the obvious choice.” She sighed. “It's not like I know what I would do otherwise.”

  "What about poetry?"

  "I love poetry," she conceded. “But it's not like I could do anything with it.”

  As my gaze drifted over the faceless sea, I caught sight of a boy with soft cheeks in a white suit, his thumbs tucked into fat black suspenders.

  "Alex!" I cried. Alex was one of my oldest friends from school. Born in Montana, he was a small-town karate champ who skipped three grades. A freshman at fifteen, he wore a robe of a thousand colors to Lit Hum every day. During our all-night study sessions he would break up the tension by beating out rhythms and rapping Kierkegaard on an acoustic guitar that he had found in the tunnels under campus. “What are you doing here?"

  Alex blinked. "I'm in the society."

  "You've been kidnapped!"

  Alex beamed. "I went willingly."

  Betrayed! I cast a look about the place. "Why?"

  "Connections.” He pointed a finger across the room. “That kid over there is the son of a senator. He’s the only reason I’m working at the Democratic National Convention over the summer.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “I’m really excited,” he said. “It’s going to set up my career. The man running it does interviews for Morgan Stanley.”

  My face fell. “Setting up interviews two years in advance? That’s getting in the game early.”

  He grinned. “Tell me about it. Come November everyone is going to wish they were me.”

  “I must be ahead of the game – I wish I was you already,” I deadpanned. “Isn’t that like a thousand hours of desk work a week?”

  Alex gave me a quizzical look. “I don’t want to be doing it when I’m fifty.” He held up the bottle. "What’s your poison?"

  "Nothing thank you – I’m not much of a drinker."

  "That’s right. I remember you being a bit of a teetotaler."

  My cheeks flushed hot. "That’s not true!"

  "Oh yeah?" Alex laughed. "Do you still spend all weekend in the library?"

  “No,” I lied.

  "You better get ready. College is going to be over before you know it. You can’t stay in a library forever – though I know you’d try. What's your major?"

  “History and English.” I stifled a cough. There wasn't much real world about it. “And yours?”

  He stared as if I had grown horns. “Economics, of course. We have to start figuring out what we're going to do in the real world.” His pouted lips slid into an easy grin. “And a six figure salary on graduation sounds good to me.”

  “Isn’t that like selling your youth to the devil in a vial?”

  "Perhaps," he agreed. "But in return I get a very pretty yacht when I'm thirty."

  “Wow. Hasn’t anyone heard of social responsibility?”

  “I have a social responsibility," he replied, refilling his glass, "to get as drunk as possible.”

  “I’m getting sick of that major,” Katrina said as Alex swayed his way back into the crowd. “Economics,” she mocked. “Economics, naturally. My uncle has a firm on Wall Street. It’s as if everyone here thinks the world ends at the Hudson River.”

  “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good education must be in want of a fortune.”

  Katrina clicked her tongue in disapproval. "God is dead."

  "History is at its end.”

  Katrina turned to me. "Money is the measure of all things."

  I shook my head. "It can only be the end of the world, ahead."

  It was the end of something. It was the end of life as I knew it. And from where I was standing, it was the end of sanity. Where were we? What was this place of self-indulgence, where the kids put on airs of retired old men at sixty? And wrapped themselves up in tuxedos like dumb penguins and drank bourbon whiskey?

  "The trick is to keep drinking," Katrina advised. "What do you do when faced with wretched excess?" she whooped. "Drink it down!"

  I leaned over for a quick sniff of the champagne and wrinkled my nose. “Dude. This smells repulsive.”

  Katrina nearly choked on the olive she had plucked off a passing tray. “Are you actually considering drinking?”

  I shook my head. “I almost feel like I know too much. Reality is depressing.” I spun the golden carousel in my fingers. “But when I’m holding this, the world is beautiful.” Light glinted off diamonds and shot through the glass, exploding like white spiders across the stained wood paneling. I grinned.

  “I can’t believe it,” Katrina insisted. “The princess of the Ivy League. Drinking!”

  My eyebrows raised. “The princess?”

  Katrina solemnly nodded. “In all my days, you have been the most innocent thing I have ever seen. Nineteen years old and not a drop to drink.”

  One could say I lived my life on the visible side of things. If a stranger were to crawl inside my mind intent on living out hedonistic fantasies, he would be disappointed to find me merely sketching out charcoal dreams. Or working at the roller rink. Twisting to Sam Cooke when I thought no one was looking. Or lost in my guitar with my headphones on. That’s what growing up in the Midwest does. You find your own fun.

  But things no longer added up. My life had turned from a well-mapped out plan featuring engagement, marriage and raising a family into a cloudy white haze. Now here I was, on the eve of twenty and without God or man. I eyed Katrina’s glass. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “The princess is a dying breed,” Katrina mused. “And it’s a wonderful thing.” She slapped my back. “Welcome to the land of illogic. And keep up the drinking.”

  “To the end of the war!” I raised my glass.

  Katrina slammed hers against it. “The war will never end.”

  At nineteen you already know everything and will not let anyone tell you otherwise, but I had never been more certain of that fact than that night, as I slowly got drunk for the first time. Several rounds later I found myself wondering why I was still in this dark and ugly place with wolves in Armani.

  "No one ever laughs here," I mused, staring after a kid swaggering down the hall in an oversized red coat like Vanderbilt after buying up all the railroads. The appeal of the alcohol was sinking along with my spirits. It was more difficult to control than I’d suspected.

  My eyes cast up at the shelves filled with empty jars high above the bar. "An empty bottle for every sold soul." Katrina examined the bottom of her glass.

  "Katrina." I grabbed at her dress. "We're surrounded."

  Katrina whipped her head around. "By what?"

  "Pirates," I said low enough for no one to hear. "They've taken our maidens. They've taken our friends. It is our moral duty to seek vengeance by commandeering their possessions.”

  Katrina pointed to a slender bottle at the end of the shelf. "Look at that one. Is it made of gold?"

  I grabbed it when no one was looking.

  "Crack it open," Katrina whooped.

  "No! This one stays full. ‘How I love thee, Ambrosia,’" I read drunkenly from the label. "’For you speak the truth.’"

  I turned and walked straight into the chest of an acquaintance from class.

  “Dave!” I shouted with too much enthusiasm.

  “ADDISON!” His eyes widened. “I never see you at these things!”

  “Oh, these things, those things." I gestured with my glass, sloshing wine onto his blazer for emphasis. "There are just so many things around these days, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

  “Yeah right. I don't think I've seen you out once in your life.”

  “That’s not true.” I distinctly remembered once taking a trip with him to the Brook
lyn promenade. In fact, I based my decision to never see him again on the memory of him sweeping an arm out over the view of downtown Manhattan and boasting, "One day, it will all be mine." Anyway. “What have you been up to since freshman year?”

  “COCAINE!” he cried with joy.

  “Wow.”

  Dave grabbed me by the neck. "Isn't this place AMAZING?" He began pointing across the room with the arm hooked around my neck. "His dad is the head of General Motors. The one in blue’s grandfather owns ninety percent of Rhode Island. And the one next to him is suing his own family for a billion dollars."

  I nodded to the kid in the red coat. "Is that the son of Captain Hook?"

  "Close. Have you heard of Jack Abramoff?"

  Yes. Anyone who read the New York Times had. One of the biggest players in Congress, despite having never held a political seat. He had seen to it that most of the money allocated towards the war went into the pockets of businessmen who had contributed generously towards the last election.

  "That's his son?" I guessed.

  “Oh yes,” Dave said. "Come on." He pulled me over by the neck. "I'll introduce you."

  We came in at the end of some discussion about stocks.

  "What's going on with your portfolio?" Pentheus asked as we slowed to a halt.

  I shook my head. "Don't have one."

  An odd look crossed his face. "What are you, a Communist?"

  "I'm a History major.”

  Pentheus's lips pursed into a polite smile. "If I didn't get into Economics I'd kill myself."

  This would require another drink. My eyes slitted in happiness at the scarlet liquid cascading into my glass. “Well, that hardly seems rational.”

  “Negatory. It’s absolutely necessary." Pentheus nodded at Dave. "We're going to start the next Enron.”

  Bankrupting America. At least he was dreaming big. I downed the wine and signaled for more. "I admire your ambitions, but is corporate felony really something you should be so open about?”

  Pentheus sighed. “Everyone always focuses on the negatives."

  “No one ever intends to commit grand scale larceny,” Dave insisted, with an oversized laugh that suggested he had already put similar plans into place. "This is just about introducing new kinds of stocks.” His fingers danced in front of glinting eyes.

  “What’s the product?”

  “I can tell you in three years”—his lips slid into a confident grin—”when it’s the biggest commodity in the world.”

  The Ivy League was the first of many rungs of achievement that scaled up well into adulthood for the ambitious and unbridled. These included, but were not limited to, law school, Wall Street, a corner office, a trophy wife, a 30-foot yacht, an Upper East Side address, the occasional stab at politics, and a large string of donations to the beloved alma mater, handed with a firm handshake and flashing bulbs to a grinning President. And after that – one hell of a party for their thirtieth.

  “That’s very impressive,” I conceded. “Thanks to people like you maybe we’ll someday pay back China.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Pentheus said good-naturedly. “Our company is established in Zug.”

  “So that’s the latest tax haven.” I stroked my chin and contemplated world domination. It sounded boring. The world wasn’t in such great shape to steal these days. “If only I cared about money.” If only I cared about anything.

  I craned my liberated neck around the room. Where had Katrina gone?

  Dave grinned and stroked his glass of bourbon with a loving finger. He closed his eyes and inhaled strongly. As his eyelids flashed upwards he breathed, “How can you not care about money?"

  “You obviously haven't met my mother,” I offered, glancing over his shoulder. “She is the epitome of everything wealth can do to a person.”

  Pentheus’s eyes glowed with lime sincerity. “If you earn enough to put her in a nursing home,” he soothed, “you’ll never have to see her again.”

  At last I spotted Katrina in the corner with the philosophy drunks bombing Grey Goose. I spotted someone I had met once and waved frantically.

  “Yegad – that is NOT what Kant said!” I heard Katrina’s voice cry over the crowd. “Whoever gave you that idea was doing some lousy exegesis.”

  Pentheus raised his glass. “Are you enjoying our little party?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” I said slowly. “But you know what this place is missing?” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Horses.”

  Dave arched an eyebrow. “Come again?”

  “White ones. They’re so majestic.” A gleam appeared in Pentheus’s left eye.

  Katrina swayed her way back to my side. “Who’s with the what now?”

  “The ball gown girls could have them on reins and lead them from room to room.”

  Pentheus rapped his cane on the floor. “Say, now that’s my kind of scale!”

  Dave frowned at Katrina. "Is Addison drunk?"

  "Addison's like this normally," Katrina admitted. "But to answer your question, yes.”

  There was no stopping me now. I was on a roll. “Imagine it. It’s the kind of extravagance this place deserves. Wild stallions galloping through the hallways. Just missing the trays of caviar.”

  “Don’t mind Addison.” Katrina fanned a hand in my face. It was time for a quick exit. “She’s doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’s past her bedtime. She’s on her way to the Sandman. And death. Good night.”

  “Why do you have to go around insulting people?” Katrina scolded as she dragged me away under her arm.

  “There goes a girl with a vision!” Pentheus could be heard declaring from the abandoned room.

  “Just as in a moment you rose,” I hollered as we slithered down the brownstone steps in the rain, “so too will you be brought low!” Katrina supported my sinking weight with precariously angled stilettos. “I don’t feel good,” I groaned.

  “Alcohol is far less fun when you’re vomiting it back up,” she agreed. “But don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. I would hold your hair all summer if I weren’t going to be in Rochester.”

  The world began to spin. “Katrina,” I moaned, sinking down to the sidewalk. “How did I get here?”

  Katrina looked confused. “We walked.”

  back

  Two. The Visit

  It didn’t surprise me that the kids were mad. After all, it takes a certain kind of madness to want to be in New York – and mine centered on that quintessentially American itch for perfection that had dominated my upbringing since birth. When I was eight, my father told me something that had stuck with me ever since. “Out of all my children,” he confessed, “if any are going to be successful, it will be you. But it doesn’t come easy,” he warned. “First, you find something you love. Second, do it better than anyone else. Last – and this is what everyone forgets,” he groaned, “spend less money than you earn. If you follow these three steps – and stay disciplined – the rest will fall into place.”

  In the Midwest, these words got me whatever I wanted. Honors, awards, scholarships – I saw the American Dream as a speeding bullet all around me. It was about being bigger, better, stronger, smarter, and quicker – and I was able and willing to play the game harder than anyone else. Discipline came easily – living in the middle of nowhere creates a hell of a work ethic. It was a fairly easy system to play – keep your head down, work hard, get out of here.

  And so, at the end of high school, with the whole world in front of me, I found myself drawn to the siren call of New York. I imagined it to be a place where all that I had read about only in books came alive, where excitement and opportunity awaited around every corner, where everything was so full of promise it seemed plausible that people would break out into song on street corners and crowds sashay down Broadway in spontaneous choreography. How could they not? You could do anything in New York.

  I was seventeen when the proud towers fell and I came to New York anyway. A certain kind of kid show
ed up in the city that year – one with a harder edge. No one in my family wanted me to leave, but once I had my heart set on the East no one could talk me out of it – it was where I would seek out my destiny. I had only visited once, and briefly at that, but with a few quick looks about the place – the infinite gaze down Amsterdam Avenue, the sun glistening off the lake near the weeping willows in the park, the vast manicured grounds at Columbia – I knew that I had found a home. It was as if the rising landscape of glistening silver stallions were a physical promise that I too one day could rise to such greatness. So I applied to the best school in the city and I got in. It was the ticket to my liberation. I had a plan. I was going to triple major in history and economics and political science. I was to tear the greatest city in the world apart. I was going straight to the top through hard work and sweat just like I had back in the Midwest.

  But when I got there New York wasn’t what I expected. The people on top weren’t there because they earned it. Instead it was all connections, all locked up tight like an impassable ship. My summer job on Wall Street was no different. I was only there because a neighbor had gone to school with the head of the firm. No resume, no interview, nothing – I was in.

  The office was full of classmates of mine whose dreams of designing great buildings or digging in Africa I had heard many times, but they had since given all of that up to rise in this world instead. Now, instead of the sense of promise and exuberance I used to feel while strolling downtown amongst the buildings, I thought only of my classmates, a bothersome look frozen in their eyes, fastening their thousand dollar suits one button at a time.

  This wasn’t hard work. This was appalling. Hobbes set his state on four legs: reason, the awe of authority, selfishness and the fear of death – and this place had only one left. It was bizarre to see the white-collar hustlers at eighteen, their eyes old and steely beneath soft teenage flesh, on a race after power that ceased only in death. And I saw businessmen too in the subway, with a lost boy’s eyes, leather briefcase gripped in one hand, hair clipped, jaw firm staring dead ahead, as if saying to himself over and over again, “This is who I am.” And I thought that he could be any businessman anywhere though it wasn’t hard to look into his eyes and see the boy inside of five and ten.

  And I had seen the heartbreak of those who moved with their dreams to the city. For there are two kinds of people in New York. There are those who hustled without rest or mercy and would eat each other alive in their bloodthirsty rise, and there are those who get stepped on and left behind. I saw them along 125th, cluttered on the city edge, shuffling out of step, heads down, gaze out – a throbbing mass of forgotten atoms, each unique in their solace. And the Apollo heavy in the distance, its neon sign dead. It was as if its energy had drained out along with the night, leaving the bleak sprawl of Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard the only lasting image in the afternoon sun. They had grown up and got on.

  My thousands of dreams of the city, and faith that it led to a place where everything was important and I could work my way towards something that mattered were falling. The image I had built for myself was crumbling. I simply wanted to forget about everything. In the throes of my malaise I went from hardly touching alcohol to drinking almost every night. It quieted my head. For the first time in my life I wanted nothing but silence.

  There was little practical about any of this – and my parents were rather practical people – so I decided to keep the news as far away from them as possible. It would have worked too, had it not been for Grace.