American Subversive (2 page)

She was examining the album in her hands when Touché looked up and saw me. A grin spread across his face, a grin that reached back past our recent months of silence to the luminous years that had come before. He gave the DJ what looked like a kiss on the neck, then turned and came striding toward me. When he put his arms out to greet me, I got that same old feeling—that I was in the glowing center of it all.

“Too long,” he said. We hugged, then he stepped back to take my measure.

“You're the one who disappeared.”

“Ah, Aidan, I'm not so hard to find.”

A new song came on, some nineties Brit-pop number, Pulp or James or Blur—I always got them confused—and Touché turned and gave the DJ a small wave.

“You picked this?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Who sings it?”

“I have no idea. But she has to like it. They're her records, no?” He laughed, then looked at the empty drink in my hand. “That won't do. I'll be right back.” Before I could answer, he disappeared into the crowd in front of the bar.

He was always disappearing. Sometimes it was minutes, often it was months. As it happened, I hadn't seen him since before Memorial Day, when he flew down to Venezuela to spend a few weeks with his family. He did it every year, except this time he didn't come back. Or maybe he did and never told me, which was entirely possible: Julian Touché's life was defined by ambiguity. Part of it was the money, of course; money can make anyone mysterious. But Touché seemed to thrive on vagueness. We could pick right back up where we left off, as if the last three months had never happened, and as long as I didn't ask questions, as long as he was ultimately calling the shots, everything would be fine.

We met in the fall of 2002, a few weeks into our first semester at NYU's graduate school of journalism. It was the night the clocks changed, and I was at a bar on the Bowery with a girl I sat next to in Politics and the Press. When the conversation dried up, she used the extra hour as an excuse to head home to get some work done. This was some years ago, when the Bowery at 2 a.m.—or 3—was still a shadowy obstacle course for a woman dressed like she meant it, and so I said I'd walk her back to campus. On Mercer Street, we fell in with a group of fellow journalism students heading to a party. When my date heard the host's name, she suddenly got her second wind.

Their destination was a stately Washington Square apartment building with a uniformed doorman and a spacious lobby that had us talking under our breath out of respect for the marble. The doorman didn't ask whom we were visiting. He just looked at the girls with a smile, then followed us into the elevator, pulled the crosshatched gate closed, and up we went. All the way to the top. There was no exterior hallway; the doors opened right into the apartment. It was a small detail at the time, but one I still remember these many years later. How real wealth is so often measured by absence. The apartment was a maze of frayed and well-worn rooms filled with cracked-leather armchairs and antique armoires, a collage of old-world styles and colors, the accumulation of generations—generations of Touchés, as it turned out. I walked down a corridor lined with sconces and into a living room the size of a small Broadway stage. Other halls wandered off toward distant bedrooms, but everything happened in that central room. I perched on an armrest and watched pretty people come and go, the party continually refreshing itself like a stylish European airport bar as small waves of new arrivals appeared (after last call at the bars) to replace the not-so-early departures.

I met the man himself in the kitchen. He'd just finished pouring shots for a semifamous actor and his friends, and when he saw me, he simply walked up and introduced himself. He didn't ask who I was or how I'd gotten there; for that matter, no one did. Just finding the place meant I belonged. He looked familiar, and for good reason. We weren't in any classes together, but we knew some of the same people, had noticed the same girls. We talked awhile, and when he was finally called into other conversations, I wandered back to the living room, with its period furniture and peeling wallpaper. A painter's easel near the windows held a half-finished watercolor (Mrs. Touché's sometimes hobby, I later learned). In a nearby corner rested a stand-up globe, its faded sepia surface hinting at the hard-won boundaries of earlier empires. But Touché the younger had made his mark as well, and the room now teetered between generations: nude Nan Goldin photographs beside nude Picasso prints; a flat-screen TV wedged between century-old French windows; and behind the globe a complex stereo system, its
lights and buttons blinking down upon the dusty earth like alien crafts in formation.

When I finally left, around 5 a.m., I did so with the impression that Julian Touché and I had, well, hit it off—a rare thing for two straight men in New York—though I couldn't for the life of me remember what we'd discussed. In the weeks that followed I tried to piece together my new friend's background. Everyone at school claimed to know something about him. His father, Santo, was a successful businessman-turned-politician from one of Venezuela's oldest families. Mary, his exquisite mother, was an American heiress, a descendant of Du Ponts. From here, we moved toward conjecture. It was said that Santo Touché played a large role in the palace coup that had just that year brought down the socialist regime of Hugo Chávez. But in the power vacuum that followed, Chávez was sucked back into office, and Santo and dozens of other aristocratic revolutionaries were forced to flee with their families to the relative safety of distant provinces. Some, citing Julian's extended absences, believed my new friend had played a significant part in these proceedings. Others thought him nothing more than a generous playboy living high off his two noble bloodlines—the New York apartment, a summer house on Fishers Island, a chalet in Courchevel—while his father moved among hidden estates in the foothills of the Orinoco River.

This was my introduction to the legend. And there was so much more. I heard—and would soon become part of—stories that became almost mythical in the retelling, but I'll spare you the specifics. It is enough to say that Julian Touché enjoyed excesses of every kind, traveled in circles I'd only glimpsed, and all the while stage-managed the many facets of his life so carefully that after many years of camaraderie, even close friends never quite knew where they stood within his wide and graceful orbit.

It was late now. Cressida's party was getting sloppy. Touché had returned with our drinks and was nodding toward the dance floor.

“Look,” he said.

The lights were low. The DJ had hit her stride, and the crowd
was responding—a mass of drunken, gyrating bodies trying to ward off impending middle age. And now I saw her, our dear hostess, shimmering in the middle of it all. She was being spun around by a fleshy editor from the
Post
, and as the song ended and their bodies came together, he suddenly dipped her one last time, pausing momentarily as her hair scraped the floor. Cressida came up laughing, grabbed the low-cut front of her top, and gave him a hug. A few nearby couples clapped.

“She knows you're watching,” Touché said, taking a sip of his drink. “So much fun, relationships.”

“If that's what you'd call it.”

“Let me guess. You're fighting about her latest column.”

“Have you read it?”

“I read them all,” my friend said, trying, and failing, to stifle a smile. “Dissecting the details of your hapless love life is one of my life's great pleasures.”

“So you'd be pissed off, too.”

“I wouldn't be involved with a dating columnist in the first place. Even the lovely Cressida. What did you expect?”

“She swore she'd never write about us.”

“Aidan, come on. I think deep down you like what she does, the power of her pen, so to speak. Of course, the power of
your
pen seems more the issue these days.”

“Fuck off.”

“Ah, yes . . .”

We'd gravitated to the two large, south-facing windows, open wide to the breezy night, and were looking out across the balconies and rooftops of downtown Manhattan. Below us the bruised and cobbled streets of the old West Side sagged uncomfortably under the weight of discovery. Once a host to blood-spattered union men and long-limbed transvestites, the Meatpacking District was now a vulgar orgy of development, the titivated epicenter of New York's grotesque and tragically hip. Even Touché, who was unbothered by things that drove most people to distraction, muttered as he gazed down on the midnight hordes stampeding past in denim and heels and highlights. Had these people been impacted by the
bombing four nights before? Or had the news already been forgotten, brushed aside in favor of the more digestible, the more personally affecting, the more assuredly insignificant? I'm sorry if I seem bitter. You see, I know the answer.

The bomb went off on the deserted fifteenth floor of 660 Madison Avenue at 3:45 a.m., on Sunday, August 22 (almost three months ago exactly). The building, as you know, houses Barneys, and as New York awoke that rainy morning to the searing image of a burning office tower, it was easy to believe the worst. Television: I remember so clearly that shaky helicopter camera panning in on the blast site. The hole was two stories high and almost as wide, and through the smoke I could just make out the hollow offices inside. It was all so familiar: the dead cell phones, the buzzing fear, the desperate need for information, and something else . . . an odd sort of pride. We were a city again, united through tragedy despite our countless divisions. But New York—or at least Manhattan—also presented a unique problem of geography. I was making coffee in my West Village studio, a short block from the Hudson, when I turned on the TV and saw the news. Instinctively, I went to the window and looked out at the sliver of visible river, wondering, if it came to that, how the hell I'd get across. It was something all of us on that overcrowded island had secretly pondered, because there was always the chance that more might come.

But more didn't come. The morning progressed apace. The mayor delivered a few steely-eyed assurances, then left the airwaves to the talking heads, the experts of our age, already spilling over with speculation. It was the beginning of a new battle; it was the end of an old war. It was us; it was them. For a while it was even spontaneous combustion—a kind of manhole explosion in the air. At some point a broader target was identified: consumerism. Could there be a better symbol of flawed Western values than Barneys, that most famous of high-end department stores? The war of civilizations had reached America's upper classes—our preening, clucking socialites—and there'd be no ignoring it now. This, then, became the story, until late morning, when a fellow blogger, a guy I vaguely knew, wrote in a post
that he'd recently been to Barneys with his girlfriend, and from what he remembered, the store didn't go up fifteen floors.

In the days that followed, the hole in the building became a voyeuristic extravaganza. I took the E-train uptown to see for myself, and there it was, a giant black cavity, taunting the city with the expanding mystery of its origins. Yet Touché and I had yet to mention the event. That's what friendship with him was like. A bomb, quite literally, goes off, shakes the foundation of our urban lives, and he's making eyes at a DJ across a hazy room.

“She's good,” he said, as some synthesized Joy Division knock-off crescendoed through the loft. Or maybe it
was
Joy Division.

“So what have you been up to?” I asked.

“Taking flying lessons.”

“Really? You're becoming a pilot?”

“I already am. I got my license last month.”

“Why?”

“Ah, Aidan, it's what we do. We children of the wealthy are doomed by the long shadows of our forefathers to lives of insignificance. And so we learn to pass the time with material pleasures, embrace the hobbies of our birthright—boats and planes, horses and golf. How else to forget the failures of our class?”

“Oh.”

“I'm kidding,”
Touché said, laughing. “A joke, you know? Maybe not so funny. My father flew when he was younger. And my uncles. And I thought if I learned, it might . . . it might help back home.”

I didn't push him further; Touché was always guarded about the situation in Venezuela. But even the silence worked in his favor, fueling rumors of his secret second life. Legends grow from a lack of information.

He sipped his drink and looked at me.

“What?” I said.

“Why don't you ever ask me about it?”

“Venezuela? Because you'd never answer.”

“You know what I think?” said Touché. “I think sometimes you . . . how do I put this . . . you buy too fully into the American narrative. And when opposing ideas are introduced, foreign ideas, you can't accept them as potentially valid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, forget it. We don't have to get into this.”

“Into what?” I said.

“A real conversation.”

“Do you think I'm not capable?”

“I think you're not willing,” he replied. “And why should you be? You've found a place for yourself, a certain niche, even if it's . . . again let me say this right . . . not
undeserved
but perhaps a bit
inconsequential
.”

“Are you talking about my life or yours?”

“Ah, yes. Maybe both. Maybe everyone's.” He looked out over the party again. “The busy lives of the eternally hip.”

“Sounds like a book title.”

“Except the eternally hip never get around to writing books.”

“Just blogs?”

“That's not what I meant,” Touché said.

“It is what you meant.”

“I'm talking about me. What my life's been like for too long. But you. You have, what, thirty thousand people who read what you write every day?”