I look at them, the other ordinary people, and they are not just meandering. They are like me, on their way to somewhere, and from somewhere, both so colorless that they barely even differentiate themselves in their minds.
I wear a nylon windbreaker most days, even when it’s cold enough for an overcoat. The slick, cold nylon makes me feel like a dolphin cutting through cerulean waters in some place I will never again visit.
I have not, however, given up on life. I could speak to you. I could join the conversation. I have a 401K and I read all the time, so I know an awful lot about a shitload of things, things that would amuse you, that would make you laugh with delight when I finished talking. I could order with sophistication in any restaurant in the world. I can recite the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. I know more about money than you could dream of.
I have had adventures. My life is not without event. I could tell you anecdotes.
For instance, decades ago, when I lived on my fellowship for a time in Florence, my life was so filled with adventure and event it was hard to tell when one thing ended and another began. I lived there for nine months.
On the afternoon of my last day, as I was packing up the dead remnants of what was meant to be a painting career, throwing them in the coal stove, a woman I knew named Sam dropped by and flatly said she wanted to have sex with me. Not now. Later. She was fortyish, tiny, a jazz musician with hair as red as her music was blue. I didn’t know her very well, hardly at all, really. She wanted to come to my apartment late that night and spend my final night with me. The agreement was that she was to come at two, knock lightly, and I would let her in. The night often started at two a.m.
in those days.
Sam was luscious, married, and twenty years older than I was. I offered to have sex right then, but she said, no, these things, her desires, needed time to blossom and that sex anticipated was far far better than sex on the fly.
That night, the night before I left, some English girls I knew, the unforgettably named Harriet Thistlethwaite, who had a younger brother named Cecil, and her roommates Rosemary and Prunella, gave me a going-away dinner party. It was filled with the kind of people who live on your side of the glass, but much younger. In your twenties, there is no glass, there is a breath of air where the windows would be, and the breath is so warm and welcoming that anybody could come in. There were all kinds of people at this party.
The English girls, all honorables, schoolgirls waiting for the term at Oxford to start, being waitresses in cafés and smoking like fiends, living on no money, were famous in their circle for a dessert they made out of fresh ricotta, instant espresso, and sugar and brandy. It didn’t take much to distinguish yourself in those days. Everybody was young and bright and gifted, or they were beautiful, which trumped any hand on the table.
The food was spaghetti aglio olio, of course, it being the cheapest foodstuff you could throw together, the whole party probably costing about six dollars, helped by the fact that everybody brought two bottles of the cheapest wine. We didn’t know. We reveled in what we had. The world had possibilities, limitless possibilities, and adventures, and food was of no importance and wine was cheap.
Cecil Thistlethwaite, who had been coming to Florence on his own since he was fourteen, to set off fireworks on January 27th, Mozart’s birthday, on the very spot in the Piazza Signoria where Savanarola was burned to death, brought along a boatload of handsome and lissome friends. He introduced me to a guy named Tito, nice-looking, about my age, who, from the oversized calling card he gave me, was not only a count but was really named Parmigianino or Pontormo or something like that. We talked. Tiziano. That’s it.
“Are you single?” Tito asked. I said I was.
“You don’t have to be,” he said in his Swiss boarding-school English. “I have a cousin. Lucia. Beautiful. Nineteen. She’s looking for a boyfriend.”
“I’m leaving in the morning.”
“Stay.”
“I’m sorry. It’s impossible. I’ve run out of money.” The fact that it was also bizarre, being asked to drop everything and live with a woman I’d never laid eyes on, didn’t even occur to me. Remember, forty bottles of wine.
He moved on, but he’d circle back around every ten minutes or so, making the offer more enticing every time.
“She’s very beautiful, Lucia. And she is very, very rich.”
“Then why can’t she get her own boyfriend?”
“She’s very shy.”
And later. “Lucia wants you so much.”
“She’s never even seen me.”
“She watches you dance. At Mach Due . . .” which was a discoteque Harriet and I used to go to a lot.
“And she never says hello?”
“She’s very shy, I told you. But she’s in love with you.”
“Buggiardo, it can’t be true.”
“Believe me or not. She knows what she wants.”
Much later, almost thirty-eight bottles later and it was getting on and Sam was knocking at two, and I was ready to leave, he circled one more time.
“What’s your favorite car?”
“The Ferrari Dino 246.”
“She’ll buy you one. Restored to perfection. She’ll buy a big apartment with plenty of room for you, and all your clothes and food. And she’ll pay you five thousand a month, just to spend.”
“I have to go now, Tito. Tiziano. Someone is waiting for me. I’m sure your cousin is everything you say she is. I wish her every happiness.”
“Her heart will be broken.”
“I have to go. I have to go now.”
“Do you mind if I walk out with you?”
So I said my many good-nights and farewells and promised lifelong allegiance and friendship to people I knew for certain I would never see again. I would be in classes at Wharton in three weeks and Florence would be very, very far away.
Tito and I left. The doors closed behind us and plunged us into pitch. It was one of those buildings where you had to hit a switch that turned on the lights for no more than twenty seconds, so you had to race down the slick marble steps to get to the street. Halfway down, the lights went out and everything turned to a vast blackness, a vast, slick blackness. We stopped on the landing, in front of an enormous two-story window that looked out, as our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, on the rising Tuscan landscape. Such a beauty.
“May I ask you a question? If you won’t move to Rome with my cousin, would you come home with me and sleep with me tonight in my apartment?”
I was beyond drunk. Tito reached up and touched my cheek with the flat of his left palm. Half of his handsome face was in shadow.
His hand burned my face, and my blood ran suddenly cold and I threw myself into the descending darkness, grasping for the banister, hoping for purchase on the eighteenth- century marble staircase. I ran all the way home, pausing to say farewell to the transsexual hookers outside the grand hotels along the Arno. So sophisticated they were, making their nightly passagiata around Santa Croce.
When I got to my apartment, I let myself in through the street door and locked it, then locked myself in my apartment, closing the shutters so the full moonlight slanted on the terrazzo floor. And I waited. I was sealed inside like Aida in her tomb, inaccessible, but I waited, and at a quarter after two, I could hear through the shutters a timid knock, or what sounded like a knock, on the street door. I didn’t move, sitting alone in my chair in the dark apartment, striated by the slanting moonlight.
She didn’t knock again. I sat until four, but there was no sound. In the morning, I took my bags to the train station and on to London, and then to America and business school and The Firm.
My night of passion, of desire. My anecdotal adventure. Well, not such an adventure after all. An adventure manqué. The sad, almost musical adventure of an ordinary man, held dear almost forty years later. Three people who wanted me in one night. The memory of three people who wanted me at all.
The point is, if I were on your side of the glass
, I would not sit silently. Just the other day, when I was walking to work quite early, passing a bank, I heard a small chirping sound I couldn’t identify. Normally I don’t pause in my walk, but that day, I paused and realized that the beeping was coming from the cash machine on the side of a bank. I stepped closer to investigate.
In the slot, the slot where the money comes out, there were five brand-new $20 bills. There was no one on the street, not a soul in the gray chilly dawn, and I took the money and the beeping stopped. The machine went dark and silent again.
I can understand forgetting your card, leaving it in the slot until the machine devours it for your safety and security, but the money? The whole reason you went to the ATM in the first place? How drunk or stoned do you have to be to leave the money just sitting there?
All day I burned with paranoia. I was on camera taking a hundred bucks that didn’t belong to me, and I was sure that, at any moment, federal agents would walk through the door of the bookstore and cart me away. I considered giving the money to charity, or dropping it in the offering box at a Catholic church, but I did nothing. I kept it in the pocket of my ordinary pants.
We might have laughed over this at dinner, you and I, as I paid for a round of drinks. We might have. In a long-ago day, a hundred bucks would have bought a gram of cocaine to get us through the night. For the second between the time I took the money and the time it went into my pocket, I was you, I was on your side of the glass, admiring a diamond brooch you inherited from your grandmother. I was there. I was there and now I’m not.
Here’s where I am. This is my adventure. I sit in front of my laptop late at night and I buy things. I buy clothes. I buy shoes. I buy crystal wine decanters. There are many online boutiques where you can do this. There is no salesman to be disdainful, there is no glass curtain. There is only the best of everything and the clack of your fingers on the keys. I buy these things with my credit cards, which are stored securely in my profile on these sites. Nobody sees me sitting in my old bathrobe, fresh from the shower, eyes alight with wanting and remembrance.
Packages arrive. I note happily that they were packed with pride by Jeanette L. or Rhoda D., and I imagine these women, geniuses with tissue paper, getting my box ready for me in Dallas or London. These are elegantly wrapped boxes, the kind that used to litter the floor of my bedroom in the loft on Saturday afternoons. The clothes in these boxes are exquisite, made of materials that are brilliant to the touch, in colors that make the eyes go dim. Silk and cashmere. Sea Island cotton. Wool and angora. The cut of the clothes is masterful, so that the jackets hang softly on my shoulders, almost weightless, the trousers hold to my hips and thighs in an embrace like a kiss.
I put the clothes on, and for a second I am that person all over again. For a moment, I am the best-dressed man in the world. Lanvin and Givenchy and Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, the boutiques that line Madison Avenue and similar streets all over the globe. I order from New York. I order from Paris, Rome, and I step into my new clothes like a king.
I watch Ryan Gosling on the Tonight show, wearing a Donegal tweed suit, and it takes some doing, but, over the days, I call the Tonight show and find out who made the suit, and it arrives in a box and I put it on less than a week later. However, I do not, in my apartment, look like Ryan Gosling.
I walk around for a while, catching my reflection in every mirror. I am, for those moments, the emperor of my life.
Then I take off the clothes and fold them. I make sure that they are folded exactly as they were sent, as Rhoda or Jeanette would have liked, wrapped in silver tissue as though they had never been touched. I fill out the return slip. I know the code for every reason for these returns. DNF: Did Not Fit. CM: Changed My Mind. The package, when I am done, looks untouched, and chances are it will be on its way to you as soon as it is returned to the inventory in the store.
I lie in bed, in my sleeping costume, between the exquisite sheets that are all that remain of a life I once lived. A life in which somebody once ironed my underclothes. Daniel Storto, the best glove maker in the world, has made me a pair of gloves, fawn-colored kid leather from a tracing of my hand. Riccardo Tisci has made me a tuxedo. John Lobb has sent a pair of monk strap shoes, from measurements they still have on file in London, from the old days. They don’t care that they haven’t heard from me in thirty years. They could make me a pair of shoes tomorrow if I were to ask, which I do not, will not ever again.
In the morning I get up and take my medications, Ativan and Buspar for anxiety. I take the packages to be returned and walk in my ordinary pants past all the shop windows filled with all the things I will never again possess.
I am cold in my windbreaker. The sheet of glass shields your life from mine.
I had dinner with you. You do not remember it.
I gave you christening presents that went lost or into storage. I gave myself to the world at breakneck speed. I gave you the monogram of my life, of my heart, and you never even opened the invitation.
I tell myself that this is all right, but I trudge through the day, eager for the moment when I open the new boxes and become, for five minutes or ten, one of those on your side of the glass, the king of the universe.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Coming Home to Roost
The rise of cocaine usage in New York exactly paralleled the widespread proliferation of the cash machine, those blinking seducers. “Going to the Wall,” we called it, and there quickly developed an entire protocol of behavior for how to do it in company. Never look at anybody else’s screen. Never hoot if no cash was forthcoming. This last part did not ever, ever happen to me.
Previously, when dinner was over and all the money was gone, we would just head for home, get in the limo and glide back to our beds. With the advent of the ATM, there was never an end to cash and, instantly, never an end to the list of skinny guys in walkups one could call to pick up a gram or two.
Sometimes, a party would gather. On other, better nights, beautiful women and wonderful boys would follow me home in about equal measure, for lines on the mirror and up the nose and eighteen-year-old single malt down the throat and eventually, bed at dawn, our beautiful, naked bodies sliding softly against one another, powdery and dry. Death hung over us all, and sex was heaven, eros and thanatos in equal measure. There was, in the air, in the plague years, the sense of an ending, a rush to have it all before the dark door closed and the bouncer turned his back on you.
We’ll sleep when we’re old, we used to say, knowing that day would never come, never suspecting that our beautiful, sensual lives would be truncated before we had time to have children. We saved nothing, we spent, every day, all there was, not just the cash. All the freedom and the beauty and the sex and the blood in our veins was hot from the expenditure.
I had moved out of Hovel Hall, leaving every single thing behind in that horrible apartment, and moved into the House of Heaven, a five-thousand-square-foot loft in Soho with a roof garden, where I installed a lap pool, red tape coming out of my ears to get it, but nothing would stop me. Naturally though, like any New Yorker, I held on to the lease for the old apartment I intended never to see again. New Yorkers don’t let go of a cheap piece of real estate until the coroner rips the paper from their cold, intestate fingers. I said I would use it as an office on the weekends, but it was really there for my increasingly frequent meetings, meetings that were never put down in my book, except the time and a name and a phone number, in case I was ever found hacked to death and floating in the Hudson. These meetings were ultimately without meaning, but they engraved themselves on my heart, ineradicable. Where was I going? What was happening? I had neither the time nor the courage to ask, but the key to that apartment stayed shiny as ever from use.
I got drunk at lunch. It didn’t even start to slow me down.
I did nine grams of coke in an average week.
I got laid about the same number of times.
I bought my loft, my space, at the height of the market, and hired Al
an, who was the most brilliant interior designer of the day. He had done Keaton, Barkin—movie stars and rich people, and everybody wanted him and I got him because I never did not get what I wanted. That’s all.
He took my $3-million loft and completely gutted it. I lived in ruins. For two years, I walked through the doors to the sight of dumpsters in every hallway. He took what had been a five-bedroom loft and turned it into a one-bedroom one in which there was not one soft surface. I loved him. He had absolute clarity and a gentle way and tweed jackets, and he had AIDS.
In the loft, I wandered the night, alone or coupled, drunk always, until I began to realize that every single surface had corners that were too sharp. Granite. Formica. Marble. Sharp as razors.
So I went out and got some foam rubber and duct tape and covered every edge with a layer of protection, so that, when I fell—and I was going to fall—I was less likely to end up in the emergency room needing stitches. It was important, of paramount importance, that I look fresh in the mornings, and I did, not one hair out of place.
In the ruins of this unfinished loft, I married Carmela Mickelson Chase, whose mother was the fifth richest woman in America. I did not marry her because I was afraid of finding myself alone on the sere and pustulant desert of AIDS. I did not marry to try to cure some sexual confusion, that confusion producing in me the happiest feelings of euphoria I have ever known. I could have it all, all the touch points, and could juggle and hustle and wrassle and make millions and I would still not burn to the ground. I was, in the arms of those men and those women, indestructible and deathless and beautiful and free.
In a man, there is a spot just at the base of his throat, in the hollow of his neck, and, if you put your thumb there, you can feel the beat of his pulse, and know love ad infinitum. With a woman, that spot is the curve of skin between her rib cage and her hip bone, a slope of beauty unlike anything else in the world. And both were equally compelling and both were absolutely necessary to me.