A City Dreaming (4 page)

“Least you could do,” M said, making sure the purse of diamonds was still firmly in his pocket.

M had been back about two weeks when he started to get the urge to look in on Celise, but since it wasn't really his urge at all, he managed to avoid obeying it. Still, it had the tendency to pop up unexpectedly, and sometimes it would be a few minutes of thinking,
Gosh, that Celise, what a sweetheart, I ought to go over and see how she's doing
, before he would remember,
Wait, I don't even like Celise
, and he would scowl and go back to chopping carrots or record shopping, or once, in what he freely admitted was not his best outing, performing cunnilingus.

After a month back in the city, however, Celise had begun to slip into his existence in aggressive and unsubtle ways. Stray tangles of overlapping graffiti arranged themselves into the letters of her name. He kept running into random mutual acquaintances who would, without any prompting, bring her up in conversation. There were also troublesome bouts of surprising ill luck: keys lost in the trunks of cars, taxis failing to appear, subway cards being cleared suddenly of value, even though M put a fresh twenty on it last night, goddamn it. Goddamn it.

Still, most of November passed without M giving in, though he knew he was only delaying the inevitable. Initially he had hoped that Celise might just lose interest in him, a passing fancy to be forgotten as soon as the next shiny thing caught her attention, but this appeared not to be the case. And when M began to have recurring dreams in which Celise chased him naked through
an old growth forest, saddled on a black charger and leading a pack of hounds, and when he got popped three times in one week for jaywalking—a transgression that one would not expect to be a law-enforcement priority in so fractious a metropolis as New York—he decided it was better just to get it over with.

So on a foggy Thursday evening, M put on a pair of pressed jeans and a dress shirt and went to pay homage to the Queen of New York. One of them, anyway. She had the top two floors of a turn-of-the-century building some ways up Fifth Avenue. M had not been inside for years, but he had memories of brass and glass and art that M either did not like at all or liked desperately, as well as a view of the park, which was, by any standard short of avian, spectacular.

The doorman was doing a poor imitation of humanity—with a moment's glance you could see the real him peek through the facade. But of course the superwealthy do not look at doormen, any more than they do waiters or valets, so the deception went generally unnoticed. M had to give his name twice, and even then the thing that was not a doorman scowled and called up, and between all that, it was almost ten minutes before he found himself in the elevator.

Celise's apartment reminded him of the inside of a Fabergé egg, three of which were in fact on display atop one of the mantels. The partygoers were too pretty to converse with; it was like trying to trade pleasantries with the Venus de Milo, if the Venus de Milo were a twenty-year-old Eastern European girl who couldn't quite speak English and wouldn't have much to say even if she could. Waiter-actor-models carried silver trays of food, the appearance of which gave no indication of the taste: little puff pastries dotted with cream that looked like caramel but turned out to be liver, faintly fried slivers of something that M was disappointed to discover were not beef. The bar only served champagne. M found it impossible to get drunk on champagne, but he made a manly effort at it, fortifying himself for the conversation ahead.

Of course he had noticed her as soon as he'd walked in. Celise—it had to be said—was quite possibly the greatest hostess in the history of hospitality, made Madame de Staël seem like Procrustes. She was standing near the windows, the center of a crowd of perfect-looking humans, each captivated,
entranced, positively enthralled by whatever it was she was saying, or at least doing their very best to look like it. Celise was a very good person to know, which was why there were so many people trying to get to know her. Having already had the pleasure, M spent most of the next half hour examining the various objets d'art and shuffling his feet awkwardly.

Finally, in a rare convergence of happenstance, there was a brief interlude when Celise found herself alone, and M moved swiftly to take advantage of it. “Celise,” he began, bending down to give her an air kiss, “what a pleasure.”

M had come to recognize that Celise was beautiful inverse to the length of time that you spent with her; so that, if you were for instance to catch a glimpse of her just before getting on a bus (in the instant before
you
got on a bus, of course, Celise would no more ride a bus than she would shop at Walmart or put her hand in the garbage disposal), you would have carried that image to the end of your life, imagined her in every whore you ever bought, in the face of your wife in the morning. During a brief conversation you would have been astonished by her physiognomy but capable of maintaining a reasonable grip on the normative. But as the clock hand rolled round, she seemed to run like grease paint, and her eyes became savage little dots in her head. After forty-five uninterrupted minutes—and you would never get forty-five uninterrupted minutes with Celise, not even if you were lovers, since she was far too busy and important a person to give forty-five uninterrupted minutes to anyone not a Rothschild—but if you were to have gotten forty-five uninterrupted minutes with her, you'd begin to feel a growing sense of nausea as the mask went completely.

Not having seen her for something between five and ten years, M struggled not to become enthralled entirely by her otherworldly beauty. “Darling,” Celise answered, “how wonderful it is that you've returned.” Celise spoke with a sterling patrician drawl, and wore a dress that seemed to be formed of spider silk. She smelled of something ineffable but pleasant. She was, in short, more than the epitome, she was the very author, of taste, manners and etiquette.

This was not why M disliked her, though it did not help. “Celise,” he said, smiling falsely. “A lovely party,” and it was, so long as you went by the decor and ignored the attendees completely.

“Oh, I don't know, I don't know.” Though M thought she very much did. “New York is so terribly dull this time of year. Everyone who is anyone is in Milan.”

M had to admit that Celise knew everyone who is anyone, and thus could make this statement with a high degree of confidence. But then Celise said everything with a high degree of confidence. In moments of kindness, M wished she might one day turn out to be wrong about something, just as a happy novelty.

“And where have your wanderings taken you?” she asked, continuing on before M could answer. “When you left, had people already started going to Williamsburg? Or had they already stopped?”

“The former, I think.”

“Regardless, they've started going back, there's an underground cocktail bar that does the most
amazing
things with mescal. Promenade Theater has replaced urban art, and no one likes NoMad anymore.”

“I'll remember that.”

“Of course, if you want to eat there, I could give the maître d' a call . . .”

“No, no, you've convinced me.”

“Of course I have,” she said, grabbing a flute off a tray and handing him another. “Quite the time to be back in the city, quite the time. The real estate market, you just wouldn't believe. You didn't happen to think of holding on to a bit of property the last time you were here, did you?”

“I own Baltic Avenue,” he said. “If I get my mitts on Mediterranean, I can start putting up some houses.”

Celise had this way of laughing at things that made it impossible to tell if she had gotten the joke. “Planning to set down roots finally?”

“Like kudzu,” M said, “so I'm sure we'll be doing lots of this. Bridge parties, evenings in your box at the theater. Though as it happens I have a terribly early morning tomorrow, so perhaps I'd best just . . .”

“Oh, M, you can't leave until you've met Cassandra,” Celise said, pointing seemingly at random toward one of the sea-foamed Aphrodites who graced her gathering. “She's just inked a deal to be the face of Chanel's new line.”

“Make no trouble on my account. Cassandra seems quite busy with her bulimia, virtually a full-time occupation—”

“But I've already made so much trouble on your account,” Celise interrupted. “An account, I might add, that's been accruing interest in the long years since last you graced the city with your presence.”

“Why am I here, Celise?”

Five minutes in and her face was not so lovely as it had been, a feigned expression of injury that would have gotten her laughed off the boards of a community playhouse. “Because I've missed you, of course. Because it's been too long, far, far too long since I've gotten to have a look at you. Because I wanted to hear all about what you've been doing, your adventures and experiences.”

“You're too kind.”

“And also because I wanted to remind myself of why I've liked you enough to warrant doing you so many favors in the past. And for you to be able to remind me that these kindnesses have not yet been forgotten.”

“Have we done that yet?”

Celise set aside her drink. “I don't know, M, have we?”

M looked down at his shoes. “We have.”

It began with an argument as to what was the quickest way to get from Greenpoint to SoHo. Stockdale maintained that if you grabbed the Z train from Nassau Street, you could be sipping a gin and tonic on Houston within ten minutes. D8mon, who had never had much luck with the Z, spoke rather passionately for the % train—true, sometimes it did not come for hours, and sometimes it came twice within two minutes, but once you got on, it was a straight shot across the Abandando Bridge, twenty minutes at the very most, and there was a dining car that sold the loveliest little bits of finger food. Admittedly, they only accepted payment in guineas, but one never knew what was in one's pockets, and sometimes you could trade with one of the other passengers.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever ridden the New York subway system, that vast esophageal labyrinth, that there is more to it than the MTA will admit. Indeed, there are few places in which the world that M inhabited and the world known to the rest of us parallel each other so closely. Who, standing on a trash-strewn platform in a far corner of Brooklyn after midnight, has not had the sensation that if they let the 3 pass them by, the next train would offer passage to some strange and foreign existence? Who hasn't waited until right before the door closed, only to see their conviction dissipate in the face of reality's cold waters, and the certainty that the next train won't roll past for another half hour?

Well, I tell you—if you had held to your fantasy for five minutes longer, if you had let that 3 slip by, you might have been privileged to watch while the Ø train rolls into the station, plopped down on a crushed velvet seat, put your boots up on the sterling silver railings, and let it whisk you home in style. Or perhaps that evening the Alkally Special would deign to make its appearance, universally regarded as having the most comfortable private rooms since the decommissioning of the Orient Express.

On the other hand, you might also have been unlucky enough to take the last spot on the Kafka Limited, which takes a whopping two and a half hours to go from Union Square to Van Cortland Park, is always packed, and smells worse than the urinals at a professional football game. Or stepped unthinkingly onto a southbound Herbert Express, which is said to lead into the maw of the sort of creature large enough to swallow a subway train, though of course no one has ever ridden it and come back to say for certain. So maybe you did all right, sticking with your reality.

“My watch stops working any time I get on the %,” Stockdale said. “And by the time I get off, I can't remember where I was going or when I was supposed to get there.”

Stockdale and M had been friends for longer than he could remember. This was a literal fact, not an exaggerated piece of sentimentality. He was a decent enough chap, apart from being ramrod straight, rather bigoted, long-winded, overly enamored of his own person, and, above all, utterly, determinedly, deliberately British. He dressed like a country squire and carried himself like the hero of a Kipling story, an affectation made all the more curious by his being an ethnic Pakistani and thus on the wrong side of the White Man's Burden.

“My kind of trip,” M said.

“Oh, it's a pleasant enough interval, no doubt about it—but try telling some bird that you're two days late for drinks because you got caught up playing whist in the dining car of a train that—so far as she's concerned—never existed.”

D8mon laughed. D8mon had the best pompadour that M had ever seen on a man of East Asian descent—one of the best pompadours he had ever seen period. D8mon sometimes seemed very clever and other times only
seemed sort of clever, which to M's mind was a very dangerous medium. D8mon was rather new to the game, and M had heard that he could do some things with technology that other people did not seem able to do.

D8mon pulled a package of clove cigarettes from inside the pocket of his jeans, no easy task as they seemed to be painted over his legs. “Zenegal of Bombast would be the person to ask about this,” he said. Zenegal of Bombast, the Graffiti Prince and High Priest of the Cult of Funk, had been the acknowledged expert on the intricacies of the subway system since it had been opened—and, rather curiously, for some time before that as well. “But I've heard he's in Sao Paulo.”

“I heard an invisible wind picked him up from the ground one day, carried him screaming off into the clouds,” Stockdale corrected.

“So either way, he's not here to break the tie,” M said.