Floating City (2 page)

Turning her attention to some pink puffballs by the same artist, Analise laughed. “She hasn't gotten laid in a while.”

“I think she's just unhappy,” Shine said.

I felt compelled to object. What supported their instant mutual conclusion that the artist was a woman? As far as I could see, nothing beyond clichéd assumptions about the color pink. “How do you know it's a girl?” I demanded.

“Of course it's a girl,” Analise said.

“It's no dude,” Shine agreed.

Their confidence defeated me. How had they formed such a rapid alliance? Were they performing for me?

Before they could move to the next masterpiece, Evalina appeared. “You guys made it!” She reached out and gave Shine a big kiss and squeezed my hand, then turned to Analise. “Oh, hi. We saw each other in the hallway.”

Analise nodded a routine hello and then caught herself, doing a big double take. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You're Taylor's friend.”

As their eyes met, a look passed between them and Evalina nodded silent confirmation to the question in Analise's eyes: yes, she was
that
friend. A connection had been made.

But Analise would want to go to the source. Now the only question was, how long would it take her to figure out who was supplying Evalina?

•   •   •

I
made an excuse and headed for the bar, letting the three of them wander off together. I was feeling more and more uneasy. I wasn't actively facilitating Shine's drug trafficking, and God knows I had no ability to control Analise. But as I watched them drift from sculpture to sculpture, chatting away with sudden intimacy, I scoured my memory. Had I ever said anything to Analise that would make Shine feel I had betrayed his trust? Had there been anything that would make Analise feel she'd been an unwitting object of study? Worse, had I put my thumb on the scale and distorted reality? Or was this chance meeting the reality I should document? After all, we were standing in an art gallery bought with trust fund dollars by Upper East Side blue bloods (with the help of thousands of dollars from the city's burgeoning art development fund), displaying creative works by black and white hipsters with varying degrees of art education and social background, attended by a mix of Wall Street tyros and nightclub kids and trustafarians and even a few aspiring buppies from Harlem who had just
come in, a place that just happened to serve as the perfect new market for a pair of crack dealers trying to reinvent themselves by heading south of Ninety-sixth Street. What more did I need?

Half an hour later, Shine came over to the bar. We were invited to Analise's party tomorrow night, he said.

“Got some new business? A new client perhaps?” I asked.

I'd meant it to come out like a detached sociological inquiry, but even I heard the tone of judgment in my voice.

Shine just looked at me, then shook his head slowly to display his lack of concern for whatever qualms or jealousy I might be feeling. He was a businessman and that was that. He never apologized for it. “Got to, man. You know that.”

We shook hands good-bye. He patted my back absentmindedly and crossed to the door. Though he was a large man, something stoic and contained gave him a compact look.

Just before he reached for the door, he found Evalina in the crowd and gave her a nod. In a decade of studying the drug trade, I had seen the exact same gesture at least two hundred times. Shine never carried drugs himself. Soon, the nod said, he would send a courier to drop off a package.

I scanned the room myself and found Analise in the crowd. She was watching Shine too.

•   •   •

I
spent the next day back at the university. Though I would usually spend my time at my desk reading journals or preparing for a class, I sometimes ventured to an editing room to pursue my latest experiment, documentary filmmaking. I was finishing up a film about the last days of a Chicago housing project before the city tore it down.

But even as I worked in my office and the editing suite, I was distracted by the previous evening's events. I didn't know how to feel about the whole thing. On one level, I should be happy that
Shine and Analise had crossed paths. What a documentary that would make! Or I could start collecting data for an unusually provocative study. But I hadn't met Analise as a sociologist meets interview subjects. I'd met her at a wine tasting at Harvard when I felt completely out of my element and she reached out to me and helped me feel at home. I was hesitant to put her under the microscope. I felt more as if I should protect her. If I went to her party with Shine, at least I could monitor his interactions with Analise and add a whiff of normative expectations. She was unlikely to ask him if he could provide her with cocaine in my presence.

But Shine called at the last minute to tell me he was going to be late, so I should just meet him there.

I showed up around eleven. Analise had rented a Chelsea gallery and decorated it with six-foot mirrors leaning up against the wall, white tablecloths with a faint hint of violet embroidery, a few antique chairs, wine flutes with gold leaf, and art deco champagne coupes from the 1930s. The women were smartly dressed, the men fashionably scruffy. Everyone was shouting; everyone had a drink in hand.

Through the crowd I caught a glimpse of Evalina, her solid little frame vacuum-packed into a black dress. Standing at her side was Brittany, an exceptionally beautiful young woman who had been one of Analise's classmates in college. A glamorous shipwreck, Brittany had recently decided to capitalize on her good looks by letting wealthy men take her out to dinner at New York's most famous restaurants. At least she could eat well, she said. But stepping so close to the invisible line must have set her mind to work. The last time I'd seen her, at a party on the Upper East Side, she amused herself by asking me about men's desires: Do you like perfume? Lingerie? What kind of lingerie? Role playing? What kind of role playing? Should I learn to talk about sports?

Please don't learn to talk about sports, I told her.

Now she was waving a cigarette at me and pointing at the back
door. I made my way through the crowd and down a small metal stairway and found Evalina and Brittany standing with the smokers on a small patio. A small vial of coke appeared and Brittany dropped a few white flakes on her gold shoes. “I'm such a spaz,” she said.

Analise came down the stairs and tottered up to us on alpine heels. “Oh, my God—I've been running around like a crazy person,” she said, pulling a cigarette out of her tiny nightclub purse.

Without a word, Brittany handed her the vial of cocaine.

“Thank you, Lord.”

For me, it was an uncomfortable moment. Although Analise had not been especially secretive about getting high in the past, we had both chosen to pretend that nothing unusual was happening. Either she assumed I was too straight or she wanted to keep our relationship in a zone of normalcy.

Analise handed the vial back to Brittany. “Are we getting together tomorrow?” she asked.

“Can't. Going up to Boston. Don't forget, you have to call the hotel.”

“Damn it. I'm sorry. This party sucked everything else out of my brain.”

Lighting fresh cigarettes, they talked logistics about some kind of social event: trains, taxis, timetables. My mind drifted to Shine. This was supposed to be a working night for me, not a social affair, wasn't it? Where was he? Was he coming? Had he delegated tonight's drug deals to Evalina and forgotten to tell me?

There was also a slim but real possibility that Shine had taken Analise home last night and given
her
the drugs to bring tonight. I could see the headline now: “Upscale Drug Ring Linked to Columbia Professor.”

I didn't want to think about that.

When I returned to the conversation, I had missed too much.

“He's how old?” Brittany asked.

“Not that old,” Analise answered.

“Dinner? Or just—?”

“No, dinner.”

“I'm tired of dinner.”

“So just drink. That should help.”

What were they talking about? It didn't sound good. Analise noticed my curiosity and held forth the vial. “You want some?”

“
No
,” I said, sharply—too sharply.

Analise gave me a curious look and I just shook my head, already turning to walk away. This was out of my hands now. I could call and try to convince him not to sell drugs to Analise, but I was pretty sure I knew what he would say. “She's over twenty-one.” That was his usual answer in situations like that. So I just said good-bye and walked outside. The night air was cold, sharp with the approaching winter. There were no cabs. The nearest subway was fifteen minutes away.

I started walking.

•   •   •

E
ven then, all I could see was an awkward situation. Whatever hopes I might have had about documenting the collision of worlds began to blow away in that cold autumn wind. I'd have to find another way to chart the connections the global city forged among disparate social types.

But the next night, the third night running, Analise called and said she was in trouble and didn't want to go home—her boyfriend had beat her up. Could she come spend the night in my spare room?

I said yes without hesitation. Then I wondered why she'd called me instead of Brittany or another girlfriend.

Half an hour later she was on my doorstep with an overnight bag. This time she wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and no adornments except a few loose bracelets on her arm. Her shoes
squeaked on my floor as she passed through my front door. She looked small and vulnerable, wet from the rain.

We stood a few feet apart. This was the first time we'd seen each other outside of a public social gathering, I realized. We usually managed to sneak to a quiet corner for a private conversation, but we had never been
alone
before. Neither of us knew exactly how to greet each other.

Without thinking about it, I moved forward and gave her a hug. I could hear her struggling to hold back tears.

“Thank you,” she said.

I suggested we get her to a hospital.

“I'm fine. He just grabbed me a lot.”

What about going to the police?

“
Definitely
not.”

What she wanted, she said, was a drink. She didn't drink, but right now she wanted a drink.

Maybe that's not such a good idea,
I thought. But I held my tongue. I mixed two vodka tonics and put one in her hand. As soon as she took the first sip, she began talking.

“J.B. stole my money! I never, ever thought he would do
that
. I mean, almost anything else I would believe, but not
that.
”

J.B. was short for “Junebug,” her nickname for the wealthy young blue blood, heir to a family fortune, she had been dating since college. As far as I was able to see, he was an amiable young man with a single distinction: he absolutely loved flaunting his wad, throwing it at bartenders in thick sandwiches and slipping folds of twenties through the windows of taxis. Once he rented an art gallery for a party and pasted hundreds of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills on the walls. I remember thinking this seemed rather gauche behavior for someone from the hereditary elite, but then I was born into an ethnic caste of Indian Brahmans (the “Alladi”) that had its own distinct dialect. They tended to think everything was gauche.

“But the guy is a millionaire!” I said. “A
multi
millionaire. How much did he take?”

“About thirty thousand dollars—this time. I think he stole fifty thousand before that. Maybe more, I'm not sure.”

She had been hiding the money in her apartment and didn't notice it missing until now, she said. When she confronted him, he said she was stupid for leaving so much money lying around, so he was going to invest it in something with a higher rate of return.

This raised a number of immediate questions in my mind:

a) Where did she get all that money?

b) Why didn't she put it in a bank?

c) Why didn't she
count
it?

d) Where was it now?

I was afraid to ask. The vodka now seemed like a very good idea.

Six months earlier, Analise had confided to me that she'd angered her parents by refusing to be a good socialite and get married and pursue a life of fashion and charity. She preferred traveling in India and looking at art. She'd even told them she was thinking of starting some kind of business of her own, which was most assuredly not proper behavior for a young woman of leisure. They'd threatened to cut her out of the family estate. That night, by the third vodka tonic, she revealed her deepest fear about this possibly impending disinheritance, which was that it might destroy her relationship with Junebug. Or, as she put it: “Who the fuck wants to marry a poor piece of shit!”

At the time, it was hard to imagine a mind-set that equated failure to collect a hereditary fortune with being unmarriageable. But that night in my apartment, the more she cried, the less I felt I had any standard to judge.

I ventured a technical question. “What kind of investment?”

“He said he needed to get some work done on some new projects.”

This was J.B.'s weakness. He took pride in discovering new talent. He would find directors fresh out of NYU and tell them he'd finance their genius movie idea. They'd spend weeks drawing up elaborate plans for cast and crew and platform media releases. Alas, his trust fund never quite matched his needs. When his parents refused to offset the difference, J.B. concocted a scheme with his parents' chauffeur to fake an injury and collect on the payment. When that fell through, he stole from Analise.

As Analise told this story, all I could think was that Junebug the heir was really just another black marketer scamming away in the underground economy, no different from the West African hotel clerks who touted illegal fun to tourists or the Latina prostitutes standing on Midtown street corners. His entire filmmaking operation was off the books and financed with money he'd siphoned from his trust funds using shady methods right at the edge of the law. How funny would it be if I did a study comparing J.B.'s film business to Shine's drug business? My mind drifted to a conversation I'd had with a faculty member at the University of Chicago right at the beginning of my academic career. “I want to study the suburbs,” I'd said. He looked at me as if he'd seen a bug. “They're white and middle class,” he'd said. “What's there to study?”