“He was very traditional. He wanted to get married. Which meant I had to have the operation. He saved his money, and he arranged it all with Dr. Money at Johns Hopkins, and eventually he put me on a Greyhound bus for Baltimore with ten thousand dollars in my little purse.
“But I met these divine sailors in the bus station, and we went for a drink, and one thing led to another, and I woke up a month later in a $20-a-night fleabag with nothing left. The fleet had sailed. No money. No operation. Still a boy. I had to work the street to get enough money to get back to Brooklyn, and when I got there, he took one look and he beat the living hell out of me, and threw me back on the street where he found me.”
She downed her Scotch, and put on her clothes, piece by piece. “End of story. I’ll never fall in love again. Don’t get up. I can let myself out.”
“I . . .”
“Not one word. Not one. That was the deal. I don’t need your pity. God! My makeup is a mess! I’ll just be a jiffy, and then I’ll go! Back into the fray!” She went into the bathroom and closed the door. When she emerged, her makeup restored, her face was like a hard mask, and she was ready for the rest of her night. I watched her for a long time, walking in the middle of the street, watched as she got into a car and sped off, and was still watching, anxious as a father on Prom night, as the car returned her to her perch.
I felt something for her. It wasn’t desire and it wasn’t pity. It was affection. Easy and welcomed. And a kind of respect. Whatever it was, it was new, and hard for me to fathom, to sort out, especially since I had seen her naked, ambiguous and sexy in a funny kind of way, so I finished the Scotch and went to bed, troubled. Holly was, well, beautiful. Lovely and nineteen and brave. And she had suffered, and suffered still, and I found a fellowship in that. An odd camaraderie between the two most unlikely souls on the planet. In addition to which, I had a brand-new shirt. Score one for generosity.
We became friends. Who else did we have? We would go to the movies in the afternoons. Holly would show up with a bottle of Cristal, ice cold, and we would drink and laugh until everything else was blanked out and meaningless. We went to a party given by one of Holly’s friends, in a loft downtown, and got drunk and watched a fat man lip-synch the entire Barbra Streisand songbook. Or so it seemed. He wore a red sequined dress and held a flashlight beneath his chin to illuminate his face in the darkness of the room. The effect was both comic and ghoulish.
Holly got out the fabled Chanel suit, from the lockers at Penn Station where she kept her wardrobe, and we went to Bergdorf Goodman. The family that owned the store lived in an apartment on the top floor, and Holly and I agreed that that was pretty close to our idea of heaven. Holly looked like any young Park Avenue wife. We looked, in fact, like a happy, well-to-do couple. Which, for that afternoon, exploring every floor of the store, trying things on, being haughty with the sales people, we were.
We didn’t care if we looked odd on the street. We took care of each other, in the way friends do, and that was good enough for us, for a time.
The bitter cold began to break up into pieces, like ice in a river, and dissolved into clear and sunny days, chilly at night. Easter was coming. Holly continued to visit almost every night, one night even chastely sleeping for two hours beside me in my bed, on top of the covers, before rushing out into the night.
The night before Palm Sunday, Holly showed up breathless at the door and asked me to lunch the next day at a place in the Village I had never heard of, The Ninth Circle. “They have great burgers!” she said. “And a great jukebox! And treats for the eyes and ears! One o’clock. Be sharp. Something has happened! Something wonderful! I have a great piece of news to tell you! Just great!”
The next day was warm, the first really warm day. Easter was late that year, I guess, but Palm Sunday was warm, and I bathed for church and shaved carefully and put on a seersucker suit, and the shirt Holly had given me. It was lavender, with white pinstripes and a white collar and cuffs; I wore with it a rose-colored tie from the tie museum in my closet. I never wore them anymore. No reason.
I looked like an Easter egg.
Church was the one hour in the week to judge my distance from what I considered to be “The Good,” and I wanted to be good. People who have lost everything tend to feel that. I wanted to be a good man and cause no harm. Not anymore. Primum non nocere, like a doctor. The past was littered with bodies, wounded. It was packed with insults and extravagances that suddenly seemed unconscionable. So I went, like a good boy, partly loving it, and partly hating it, being the pauper in a sea of rich people.
That Palm Sunday, church seemed to go on forever, and I kept checking my watch. I was the only person in a seersucker suit, the rest of the men were in banker blue or gray, pinstripes, and I sat off to the side, so that no one would touch or speak to me. When the collection plate came around, I had nothing to give, so I pretended to pray until it had passed me by. As soon as I had taken Communion, the body and blood, I raced from the church and caught the train down to the Village, where I found, after some difficulty, the Ninth Circle. It was exactly one o’clock.
I pulled open the metal door and walked, palm frond in hand, into the middle of an aggressively dark and seedy leather bar. In my seersucker suit. It was like When Worlds Collide, except that I was the only inhabitant on my planet. The rest of them were all dressed in various forms of black leather, all kinds of stuff I’d never seen before, straps and chaps and harnesses and black leather jeans with no backs on them, codpieces, a museum of a particular fetish that didn’t happen to be mine.
They stared at me, facial hair bristling. They stared hard for a long time. Seersucker. Jesus.
The crowded bar seemed to stretch endlessly into a dark back room, where there were tables covered in red checkered linoleum, and a few lost leather souls downing their Budweisers and eating the much-advertised burgers. I made my way through the long gauntlet of black leather, and sat at one of the tables. No Holly. She didn’t show up for another forty-five excruciating minutes, and, when she did, she looked like hell.
Today, she was a boy. Hair tied back, wearing jeans and loafers and a T-shirt that had a line that went from nipple to nipple, underneath which it said, “You must be this tall to ride this ride.” No makeup, at least only the ghostlike smear of last night’s face. Holly needed a shave.
“Sorry!” she said. “Quel night. I rushed out of the house like a madwoman! I didn’t want to keep you waiting.” I didn’t point out that she had, in fact, already kept me waiting for almost an hour.
“Oh! You look so handsome! There was a real man under all that self-pity! Bravo! . . . The greatest thing has happened! The greatest thing ever.”
“Holly, tell me.”
“I’m in love! I’ve fallen in love with a real man.”
“Holly, that’s great! I’m so happy for you. Who’s the guy?”
There was an awkward pause while Holly let me think it over just long enough that I knew the answer before she spoke.
“You.”
The color must have drained from my face, because Holly took my hands, just for a second, then quickly withdrew and put her hands back in her lap. She spoke quietly, without affectation, and with a great tenderness of feeling. She looked down at the table as she spoke, never looking at me, until the end.
“I’m telling you this because . . . because, like, to me, to me at least, the greatest sin is to love somebody and not tell them. That’s the greatest sin.”
Then she looked into my eyes, and I saw how deep and gentle was the love she was speaking of.
“Because then, when the person you love walks down the street, or walks into a meeting or a room full of strangers, they don’t know that somebody loves them. And that can make all the difference in, like, a person’s confidence and stuff, you know?
“I know nothing will happen when I tell you I love you. There’s no way. You’re regular. I’m, well, whatever I am, I’m not regular. I’m not telling you because of that. I’m ju
st telling you so that, when you hail a cab or answer the phone, when you walk into a roomful of strangers, you’ll know that there is somebody in the world who loves you and will always love you, wherever you go, whatever happens, until the end of time. Don’t ever forget that. Promise you will never forget that you are loved. ” She crossed her heart, and touched one finger to my lips. And then, as quickly as she had come, she was gone.
And I wept. In the midst of all the swarthy, muscled leather men, with their straps and bristling facial hair, and their collars and their chaps, I sat at the grimy table in the seedy leather bar on West Tenth Street, and I wept until I couldn’t cry anymore. And then, with what little dignity
I had left, I got up to go. I noticed that one of the patrons, I don’t know who, had put a glass of beer in front of me while I was crying my guts out, and I looked around for who to thank, but nobody looked at me, so I took a sip of the beer and then I left the Ninth Circle and walked through the gorgeous spring day, all the way back to Hovel Hall, all the way to Thirty-Fifth Street, all the way to whatever was going to happen for the rest of my life.
Loved. Loved. Loved. Forever. Forever. Forever.
And I never saw Holly again. She never came back to Thirty-Fifth Street to rule the street the way she had every night for years. For months I asked the other girls about her, but they didn’t know where she’d gone, or wouldn’t say. I hung around the lockers at Penn Station where she kept her clothes, but she never showed up. Leaving me alone. Leaving me completely alone but also completely loved, as I had once asked, so many years before. I was also left with no way to thank her. As if thanks were ever enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Fall of Princes
The rest is just slow diminution and loss. A waning of the full and effulgent moon of my youth. Not that the bright light of my youth was anything to be proud of. I was a terrible person. I did unkind and sometimes illegal things. I treated women abominably. The remembrance of it causes me to flush with shame and to feel a tightening in my groin.
It was a radiance without warmth, and I thought of nothing but myself in the brightness of the light. Now I try never to think of myself. I try not to think at all, not to dwell, but, sometimes, late at night, it all comes back to me, and I lose myself in the life that might have been, the wife of twenty years, her comforts and distractions. The fractious children, raucous at the holidays, with their tattoos you asked them not to get and their lacrosse sticks they play with in the house, stringing and restringing them, the trips to Paris to stay at the Lutetia. Photograph albums of a life that never quite came to be. It doesn’t last long when it comes, but it is vivid, and I am there, not here, not here where I belong. When you lose everything, you don’t die. You just continue in ordinary pants with nothing in your pockets.
I gave up sending out résumés, tossed them in the trash. I no longer called the people I had known for years who placed brokers in jobs. There was no point. They never took my calls. I had blotted my copybook in perpetuity, one night of gracelessness in the Russian Tea Room, and everything was gone from my résumé, the loft and arc of it, the elevation and grandeur. My name was up, as my grandmother used to say. What I did at thirty-two, how bright, how aggressively promising, had no relevance at thirty-seven. Washed up at the moment I had barely set sail.
I looked through the paper and applied for jobs from the want ads. There was always something wrong, with the job, with me. Sitting with these smug hiring people and answering their ridiculous questions.
“You’ve been out of work for five years. What were you doing?”
“I was living in Europe.”
“How exciting! What did you do?”
“I tried to write a novel. It wasn’t any good.”
“Do you have retail experience?”
I used to buy and sell the world every day before lunch.
“No.”
“Would you think you’d be good at sales?”
“I can sell ice cream to the Eskimos.”
“But you’ve never actually done it.”
“No.”
“Well, very interesting. We’ll be in touch if a position opens up. At the moment there’s nothing.”
“Then why did you advertise? Why did you call me in?”
“We like to keep abreast of who’s out there. Can you use a cash register?”
“A moron could learn to use a cash register in ten minutes.”
“You’d be surprised. Well, we’ll call.”
“No. You won’t.”
Long pause. “Not with that attitude, we won’t. I suggest you take a course in people skills. Or look for a job where you don’t have to deal with the public. Like writing bad novels. Good day.”
Eventually, I learned to smile and lie my way into a series of temporary jobs. You don’t die of embarrassment. Not right away.
I demonstrated food processors, and I was astonishingly good at it after only a few days. I could make perfect bread dough in seconds. I wore a white chef’s apron and a paper toque, and I survived by pretending to be somebody else. I sprayed elegant women with overly strong perfume from vaguely erotically shaped bottles. I showed people who had little chance of ever going anywhere how to pack two suits flawlessly in a suitcase. I survived.
But I kept seeing people I knew. They looked at me as though I were in some sort of Halloween costume, or, perhaps, one of the comic interludes in a Christmas pantomime, and sometimes, purely out of pity, they would buy a Cuisinart or a tiny bottle of ridiculously overpriced fragrance. It was an act of kindness that mortified me to the center of my being.
Things fell away from me. My parents died, first my mother, then my father, in quick succession, cancer, mortified at my circumstances, leaving me just enough to shut up Mr. McDermott and Ms. Willoughby. Our parting was quite cordial, actually. I would miss our daily chats. After they stopped calling, days would pass between phone calls.
I miss the rustle and hustle and bang of the floor, the deals happening every half-second, the high fives, the bonus days and the dinners at Frank’s. I miss the clothes, the deference of salespeople, the winter in Harbour Island before all the people who go there now knew it was there. I miss my cufflinks—lapis lazuli, hematite, ruby, sapphire—all gone to the Orthodox jewelry dealers on Forty-Fifth Street, one pair at a time. And my watches. I miss invitations to parties. Parties of beautiful people who say witty and aggressive things. Everything, everything in that old life is gone. A young man’s life, sold for pennies on the dollar.
But every time I let something go, I felt, yes, a sadness, but I also felt lighter, more free, less tethered to a past I would never get back to. Let them have it.
Life was once only about day and night. Now it’s about the number of seconds it takes to get from one end to another.
I finished Proust. It gave me an overriding sense of superiority over the vast majority of mankind. I couldn’t read anything else for a year after. Compared to the rich broth of Proust, every other book seemed like lukewarm water in my mouth.
I finally found a real job, thanks to Proust. I got a job as a clerk in one of the big chain bookstores, in part, I think, because the woman who was doing the hiring asked me what my favorite book was, and I said, “There’s only one real book ever written, besides the Bible. And that is Remembrance of Things Past.”
She smiled. “We call it In Search of Lost Time now.”
“I prefer the old title. Less accurate, but more poetic.”
“What are the current top-ten best-sellers in fiction?”
I named them, in order. “You want to know the number of weeks they’ve been on the list?”
“I trust you. Nonfiction?”
I named them, although not in order.
“Have you ever sold anything? Anything at all?”
And I told her the long list of embarrassing jobs I had endured in the last year. I told her how to pack two suits in your suitcase so they emerge wrinkle-free at the end of your journey
.
“When can you start?
“This or any other moment.”
“Next Monday?”
“How about tomorrow at nine?”
She smiled the smile I was coming to adore. “We don’t open ’til ten. You’d be locked out and lonely, Monsieur Proust.”
“Then I’ll be here at ten.”
And I have been there ever since. At first, I was just a clerk, ringing up books. It was like being in hiding. I was relatively safe from running into people I used to work with, since none of them read anything but the Wall Street Journal. You could spot me in the T-shirted masses of other clerks because I always wore a tie. I considered being a bookseller not just a job. I looked on it as an honorable profession.
Now I’m the fiction manager, in charge of picking and choosing, all the ordering, and deciding which books get featured spots in the department. It’s a job that requires both caution and bravado, and I like doing it. And I’m good at it.
Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it’s my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o’clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.
I recommend books to people, and they read them, and then they come back and tell me what they thought. Most people in the neighborhood know me by name by now, so it’s a personal thing. Even with the onslaught of digital books, and all the threats to the book-selling business, there are people who still like the heft and feel of a real book, who like having a stack of books by their bedside tables, waiting to be read. Our store is under siege, now, but I think we’ll be OK, at least for long enough for me to finish out my working life.