American Psycho (43 page)

Most of the summer I spent in a stupor, sitting either in my office or in new restaurants, in my apartment watching videotapes or in the backs of cabs, in nightclubs that just opened or in movie theaters, at the building in Hell’s Kitchen or in new restaurants. There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views of the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workers retrieving body parts. I started using Oscar de la Renta men’s deodorant, which gave me a slight rash. A movie about a small talking bug was released to great fanfare and grossed over two hundred million dollars. The Mets were doing badly. Beggars and homeless seemed to have multiplied in August and the ranks of the unfortunate, weak and aged lined the streets everywhere. I found myself asking too many summer associates at too many dinners in flashy new restaurants before taking them to
Les Misérables
if anyone had seen
The Toolbox Murders
on HBO and silent tables would stare back at me, before I would cough politely and summon the waiter over for the check, or I’d ask for sorbet or, if this was earlier in the dinner, for another bottle of San Pellegrino, and then I’d ask the summer associates, “No?” and assure them, “It was quite good.” My platinum American Express card had gone through so much use that it
snapped in half, self-destructed, at one of those dinners, when I took two summer associates to Restless and Young, the new Pablo Lester restaurant in midtown, but I had enough cash in my gazelleskin wallet to pay for the meal.
The Patty Winters Shows
were all repeats. Life remained a blank canvas, a cliché, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation. I needed to go to the Hamptons.

I suggested this to Evelyn and, like a spider, she accepted.

The house we stayed at was actually Tim Price’s, which Evelyn had the keys to for some reason, but in my stupefied state I refused to ask for specifics.

Tim’s house was on the water in East Hampton and was adorned with many gable roofs and was four stories high, all connected by a galvanized-steel staircase, and had what at first I thought was a Southwestern motif but wasn’t. The kitchen was one thousand square feet of pure minimalist design; one wall held everything: two huge ovens, massive cupboards, a walk-in freezer, a three-door refrigerator. An island of custom-crafted stainless steel divided the kitchen into three separate spaces. Four of the nine bathrooms contained trompe l’oeil paintings and five of them had antique lead ram’s heads that hung over the sink, water spouting from their mouths. All the sinks and bathtubs and showers were antique marble and the floors were composed of tiny marble mosaics. A television was built into a wall alcove above the master bathtub. Every room had a stereo. The house also contained twelve Frank Lloyd Wright standing lamps, fourteen Josef Heffermann club chairs, two walls of floor-to-ceiling videocassette cases and another wall stacked solely with thousands of compact discs encased in glass cabinets. A chandelier by Eric Schmidt hung in the front entranceway, below it stood an Atomic Ironworks steel moose hatrack by a young sculptor I’d never heard of. A round nineteenth-century Russian dining table sat in a room adjacent to the kitchen, but had no chairs. Spooky photographs by Cindy Sherman lined the walls everywhere. There was an exercise room. There were eight walk-in closets, five VCRs, a Noguchi glass and walnut
dining table, a hall table by Marc Schaffer and a fax machine. There was a topiary tree in the master bedroom next to a Louis XVI window bench. An Eric Fischl painting hung over one of the marble fireplaces. There was a tennis court. There were two saunas and an indoor Jacuzzi in a small guesthouse that sat by the pool, which was black-bottomed. There were stone columns in odd places.

I really tried to make things work the weeks we were out there. Evelyn and I rode bicycles and jogged and played tennis. We talked about going to the south of France or to Scotland; we talked about driving through Germany and visiting unspoiled opera houses. We went windsurfing. We talked about only romantic things: the light on eastern Long Island, the moonrise in October over the hills of the Virginia hunt country. We took baths together in the big marble tubs. We had breakfast in bed, snuggling beneath cashmere blankets after I’d poured imported coffee from a Melior pot into Hermès cups. I woke her up with fresh flowers. I put notes in her Louis Vuitton carry bag before she left for her weekly facials in Manhattan. I bought her a puppy, a small black chow, which she named NutraSweet and fed dietetic chocolate truffles to. I read long passages aloud from
Doctor Zhivago
and
A Farewell to Arms
(my favorite Hemingway). I rented movies in town that Price didn’t own, mostly comedies from the 1930s, and played them on one of the many VCRs, our favorite being
Roman Holiday
, which we watched twice. We listened to Frank Sinatra (only his 1950s period) and Nat King Cole’s
After Midnight
, which Tim had on CD. I bought her expensive lingerie, which sometimes she wore.

After skinny-dipping in the ocean late at night, we would come into the house, shivering, draped in huge Ralph Lauren towels, and we’d make omelets and noodles tossed with olive oil and truffles and porcini mushrooms; we’d make soufflés with poached pears and cinnamon fruit salads, grilled polenta with peppered salmon, apple and berry sorbet, mascarpone, red beans with arrozo wrapped in romaine lettuce, bowls of salsa and skate poached in balsamic vinegar, chilled tomato soup and risottos flavored with beets and lime and asparagus and mint, and we drank lemonade or champagne or well-aged bottles of Château Margaux. But soon we stopped lifting weights together
and swimming laps and Evelyn would eat only the dietetic chocolate truffles that NutraSweet hadn’t eaten, complaining about weight she hadn’t gained. Some nights I would find myself roaming the beaches, digging up baby crabs and eating handfuls of sand—this was in the middle of the night when the sky was so clear I could see the entire solar system and the sand, lit by it, seemed almost lunar in scale. I even dragged a beached jellyfish back to the house and microwaved it early one morning, predawn, while Evelyn slept, and what I didn’t eat of it I fed to the chow.

Sipping bourbon, then champagne, from cactus-etched highball glasses, which Evelyn would set on adobe coasters and into which she would stir raspberry cassis with papier-mâché jalapeño-shaped stirrers, I would lie around, fantasizing about killing someone with an Allsop Racer ski pole, or I would stare at the antique weather vane that hung above one of the fire-places, wondering wild-eyed if I could stab anyone with it, then I’d complain aloud, whether Evelyn was in the room or not, that we should have made reservations at Dick Loudon’s Stratford Inn instead. Evelyn soon started talking only about spas and cosmetic surgery and then she hired a masseur, some scary faggot who lived down the road with a famous book publisher and who flirted openly with me. Evelyn went back to the city three times that last week we were in the Hamptons, once for a manicure and a pedicure and a facial, the second time for a one-on-one training session at Stephanie Herman, and finally to meet with her astrologer.

“Why helicopter in?” I asked in a whisper.

“What do you want me to do?” she shrieked, popping another dietetic truffle into her mouth. “Rent a
Volvo
?”

While she was gone I would vomit—just to do it—into the rustic terra-cotta jars that lined the patio in front or I would drive into town with the scary masseur and collect razor blades. At night I’d place a faux-concrete and aluminum-wire sconce by Jerry Kott over Evelyn’s head and since she’d be so knocked out on Halcion she wouldn’t brush it off, and though I laughed at this, while the sconce rose evenly with her deep breathing, soon it made me sad and I stopped placing the sconce over Evelyn’s head.

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn’t bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why—I couldn’t put my finger on it. The only thing that calmed me was the satisfying sound of ice being dropped into a glass of J&B. Eventually I drowned the chow, which Evelyn didn’t miss; she didn’t even notice its absence, not even when I threw it in the walk-in freezer, wrapped in one of her sweaters from Bergdorf Goodman. We had to leave the Hamptons because I would find myself standing over our bed in the hours before dawn, with an ice pick gripped in my fist, waiting for Evelyn to open her eyes. At my suggestion, one morning over breakfast, she agreed, and on the last Sunday before Labor Day we returned to Manhattan by helicopter.

“I thought the pinto beans with salmon and mint were really, really … you know,” Elizabeth says, walking into the living room of my apartment and in one graceful movement kicking off both satin and suede Maud Frizon pumps and flopping onto the couch, “good, but Pat
rick
, my god it was expen
sive
and,” then, bristling, she bitches, “it was
only
pseudo nouvelle.”

“Was it my imagination or were there goldfish on the tables?”
I ask, undoing my Brooks Brothers suspenders while searching the refrigerator for a bottle of sauvignon blanc. “Anyway,
I
thought it was hip.”

Christie has taken a seat on the long, wide sofa, away from Elizabeth, who stretches out lazily.

“
Hip
, Patrick?” she calls out. “Donald
Trump
eats there.”

I locate the bottle and stand it on the counter and, before finding a wine opener, stare at her blankly from across the room. “Yes? Is this a sarcastic comment?”

“Guess,” she moans and follows it with a “Duh” so loud that Christie flinches.

“Where are you working now, Elizabeth?” I ask, closing drawers. “Polo outlet or something?”

Elizabeth cracks up at this and says blithely, while I uncork the Acacia, “I don’t have to work, Bateman,” and after a beat she adds, bored, “You of all people should know how
that
feels, Mr. Wall Street.” She’s checking her lipstick in a Gucci compact; predictably it looks perfect.

Changing the subject, I ask, “Who chose that place anyway?” I pour the two girls wine and then make myself a J&B on the rocks with a little water. “The restaurant, I mean.”

“Carson did. Or maybe Robert.” Elizabeth shrugs and then after snapping the compact shut, staring intently at Christie, asks, “You look really familiar. Did you go to Dalton?”

Christie shakes her head no. It’s almost three in the morning. I’m grinding up a tab of Ecstasy and watching it dissolve in the wineglass I plan to hand Elizabeth. This morning’s topic on
The Patty Winters Show
was People Who Weigh Over Seven Hundred Pounds—What Can We Do About Them? I switch on the kitchen lights, find two more tabs of the drug in the freezer, then shut the lights off.

Elizabeth is a twenty-year-old hardbody who sometimes models in Georges Marciano ads and who comes from an old Virginia banking family. We had dinner earlier tonight with two friends of hers, Robert Farrell, twenty-seven, a guy who’s had a rather sketchy career as a financier, and Carson Whitall, who was Robert’s date. Robert wore a wool suit by Belvest, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Charvet, an abstract-patterned silk-crepe tie by Hugo Boss and sunglasses by Ray-Ban
that he insisted on wearing during the meal. Carson wore a suit by Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and a pearl necklace with matching pearl and diamond earrings by Harry Winston. We had dinner at Free Spin, the new Albert Lioman restaurant in the Flatiron district, then took the limousine to Nell’s, where I excused myself, assuring an irate Elizabeth I’d be right back, and directed the chauffeur to the meat-packing district, where I picked up Christie. I made her wait in the back of the locked limousine while I reentered Nell’s and had drinks with Elizabeth and Carson and Robert in one of the booths up front, empty since the place had no celebrities in it tonight—a bad sign. Finally, at two-thirty, while Carson bragged drunkenly about her monthly flower bill, Elizabeth and I split. She was so pissed off about something Carson told her was in the latest issue of
W
that she didn’t even question Christie’s presence.