Glamorama (21 page)

“Don’t mock me, JD,” I warn. “I will not be mocked.”

“Now wait—before you go in,” JD says. “It’s pretty much a catastrophe, so just, y’know, give your usual winning spiel and get the fuck out of there. They just want to know that you, er, exist.” JD thinks about it. “On second thought—” He’s about to hold me back.

“You’ve got to be sensitive to their needs, JD,” I tell him. “They’re not just DJs. They’re
music designers.”

“Before you go in, Jackie Christie and Kris Spirit are also available.”

“Lesbian DJs, man? I don’t know. Is it happening? Is it cool?” I slap on a pair of wraparound green-tinted sunglasses before I slip into the VIP room, where a mix of seven guys and girls hang out in two booths, Beau sitting on a chair in front of them with a clipboard. The loony
Details
girl reporter, hovering dangerously nearby, waves and JD says “Hey, Beau” in a very professional way and then glumly introduces me. “Hey everybody—here’s Victor Ward.”

“My nom de guerre in clubland,” I faux-gush.

“Victor,” Beau says, standing. “This is Dollfish, Boomerang, Joopy, CC Fenton, Na Na and, um”—he checks his clipboard—“Senator Claiborne Pell.”

“So-o-o,” I ask, pointing at the guy with blond dreadlocks. “What do
you
play?”

“I play Ninjaman but also a lot of Chic and Thompson Twins, and man, this is all kind of borderline bogus.”

“Beau, take note of that,” I instruct. “How about you?” I ask, pointing at a girl wearing a harlequin outfit and dozens of love beads.

“Anita Sarko taught me everything I know and I also lived with Jonathan Peters,” she says.

“You’re warming this place up, bay-bee,” I say.

“Victor,” JD says, pointing at another DJ, hanging back in the dark. “This is Funkmeister Flex.”

“Hey Funky.” I lower my sunglasses for a wink. “Okay, guys, you got three turntables, a tape deck, a DAT player, two CD players and a reel-to-reel for delay effects to spin your respective magic. How does that sound?”

Muffled cool noises, mindless looks, more cigarettes lit.

“While you’re spinning,” I continue, pacing, “I want you all to sulk. I don’t want to see anyone enjoying themselves. Got it?” I pause to light a cigarette. “There is techno, there is house, there is hard house, there’s Belgian house, there’s gabba house.” I pause again, unsure of where I’m going with this, then decide to segue into “I don’t want to be sweating in an actual warehouse. I want that sweating-in-a-warehouse feeling in a three-million-dollar nightclub with two VIP rooms and four full bars.”

“It should be very chill,” JD adds. “And don’t forget ambient dub—we should have that too.”

“I want instantaneous buzz,” I say, pacing. “It’s not a lot to ask. I just want you to make these people dance.” I pause before adding, “And abortion-clinic violence does not interest me.”

“Um …” Dollfish tentatively raises a hand.

“Dollfish,” I say. “Please speak.”

“Um, Victor, it’s already four-fifteen,” Dollfish says.

“Your point, sistah?” I ask.

“What time do you need one of us?” she asks.

“Beau—please take care of these questions,” I say, bowing, before sweeping out of the room.

JD follows me as I head back up toward Damien’s office.

“Really nice, Victor,” JD says. “You inspired people, as usual.”

“That’s my job,” I say. “Where’s Damien?”

“Damien has instructed me not to have anyone interrupt him right now,” JD says.

“I have got to complain to him about inviting Martin Davis,” I say, heading back up the stairs. “Things are getting horrific.”

“That’s not a good idea, Victor.” JD runs ahead of me. “He was very insistent that there be no interruptions.”

“Turn the beat around, JD.”

“Um … why?”

“Because I love to hear percussion.”

“Don’t do this now, Victor,” JD pleads. “Damien wants to be left alone.”

“But that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh uh-huh.”

“Okay, okay,” JD pants. “Just get that fabulous ass over to Fashion Café, nab DJ X and do not sing ‘Muskrat Love.’”

“‘Muskrat Suzy, Muskrat Sa-a-am … ’”

“Victor, I’ll do whatever you want.”

“London, Paris, New York, Munich, everybody talk about—pop music.” I tweak his nose and march toward Damien’s chamber.

“Please, Victor, let’s go the other way,” JD says. “The
better
way.”

“But that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it.”

“He doesn’t want to be bothered, Victor.”

“Hey, I don’t either, so get away from me, you little mo.”

“Victor, he told me to hold all calls and—”

“Hey—” I stop, turning toward him, pulling my arm out of his grasp. “I’m Victor Ward and I’m opening this club and I am sure that I am—what’s the word? oh yeah—
exempt
from Mr. Ross’s rules.”

“Victor—”

I don’t even knock, just stride in and begin bitching.

“Damien, I know you didn’t want to be bothered but have you checked the guest list for this thing? We have people like Martin Davis supposedly stopping in and I just think that we have to be careful about who the paparazzi are going to see and who they’re not .…”

Damien’s standing by the windows of his office, a large expanse of glass that overlooks Union Square Park, and he’s wearing a polka-dot shirt and Havana-style jacket and he’s pressed up against a girl wearing an Azzedine Alaïa wrap coat and a pair of Manolo Blahnik high heels, all covered in pink and turquoise, who immediately disengages from him and flops onto a green hop sofa.

Lauren Hynde has changed since I saw her outside Tower Records earlier this afternoon.

“And, um, I, um …” I trail off, then recover and say, “Damien—I love that moneyed beachcomber look on you, baby.”

Damien looks down at himself, then back at me, smiles tightly as if nothing’s really wrong, and in the overall context of things maybe it isn’t, then he says, “Hey, I like that unconstructed boxy look you got going.”

Stunned, I look down at my hip-hugger pants, the tight satin shirt, the long leather coat, forcing myself not to glance over at the green hop sofa and the girl lounging on it. A long, chilly silence none of us are able to fill floats around, acts cool,
lives
.

JD suddenly sticks his head in, the
Details
girl looking over his
shoulder, both of them still stuck in the doorway, as if there’s a dangerous invisible line existing that they are not allowed to cross. “Damien, I’m sorry about the interruption,” he says.

“It’s cool, JD,” Damien says, moving over to the door and closing it in their faces.

Damien moves past me and I’m concentrating on staring out the window at people in the park, squinting to make some of them come into focus, but they’re too far off and anyway Damien enters my view, dominating it, and picks up a cigar on his desk and a book of matches from the Delano. The new issue of
Vanity Fair
sits by an Hermès lamp, along with various glossy Japanese magazines, CDs, a PowerBook, a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1983 in an ice bucket, two half-empty flutes, a dozen roses, which Lauren will not carry out of this room.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Damien snaps. I flinch. “Why in the fuck is Geena Davis on the cover of goddamn
Vanity Fair?
Does she have a movie out? No. Is she doing anything new? No. Jesus Christ, the world’s falling apart and no one cares. How do these things happen?”

Not looking over at Lauren Hynde, I just shrug amiably. “Oh, you know how it happens: a shoe ad here, a VJ spot there, a bit part in ‘Baywatch,’ a bad indie film, then boom: Val Kilmer.”

“Maybe she has cancer.” Lauren shrugs. “Maybe she went on a big shopping expedition.”

“Do you guys know each other?” Damien asks. “Lauren Hynde, Victor Ward.”

“Hey, Lauren.” I manage a ghastly little wave, which turns into a peace sign, then back into a ghastly little wave.

“Hi.” She tries to smile without looking at me, concentrating on her fingernails.

“You two know each other?” Damien asks again, pressing.

“Oh yeah, sure,” I say. “You’re friends with Chloe.”

“Yes,” she says. “And you’re …”

“I’m her … yeah, well …”

“You two knew each other at college, right?” Damien asks, still staring at us.

“But we haven’t seen each other since then,” Lauren says, and I’m wondering if Damien catches the harshness of her tone, which gratifies me.

“So this is like a little reunion?” Damien jokes. “Right?”

“Sort of,” I say blankly.

Damien has now decided just to continue staring at me.

“Well, Damien, um, you know …” I stop, start again. “The DJ situation is—”

“I called Junior Vasquez today,” Damien says, lighting the cigar. “But he has another party tonight.”

“
Another
party?” I gasp. “Oh man, that is so low.”

Lauren rolls her eyes, continues studying her nails.

Damien breaks the silence by asking, “Don’t you have a meeting soon?”

“Right, right, I gotta get outta here,” I say, moving back toward the door.

“Yeah, and I have a how-to-relax-in-cyberspace seminar in ten minutes,” Damien says. “Ricki Lake told me about it.”

JD buzzes on the intercom. “Sorry, Damien—Alison on line three.”

“In a minute, JD,” Damien says.

“It’s hard to tell her that,” JD says before getting cut off.

“Victor,” Damien says. “You wanna walk Lauren out?”

Lauren gives Damien an almost imperceptible glare and gets up too quickly from the sofa. In front of me she kisses Damien lightly on the lips and he touches the side of her face, each of them silently acknowledging the other, and I can’t look away until Damien glances over at me.

I can’t say anything until we’re outside the club. I picked up my Vespa from the coat-check room and am now wheeling it across Union Square, Lauren listlessly moving next to me, the sound of the vacuums inside the club fading behind us. Klieg lights are being rolled across patches of lawn and a film crew is shooting something and extras seem to be wandering aimlessly all around the park. Guillaume Griffin and Jean Paul Gaultier and Patrick Robinson stroll past us. Hordes of Japanese schoolchildren Rollerblade toward the new Gap on Park Avenue and beautiful girls drift by wearing suede hats and ribbed cardigans and Irish jockey caps and there’s confetti strewn all over the benches and I’m still looking down as my feet move slowly along the concrete, walking across large patches of ice so thick that the wheels on the Vespa can’t even crack them and the bike still smells of the
patchouli oil I rubbed into it last week, an impulsive move that seemed hip at the moment. I keep my eyes on the guys who pass Lauren by and a couple even seem to recognize her and squirrels skate over the patches of ice in the dim light and it’s almost dark out but not yet.

“What’s the story?” I finally ask.

“Where are you going?” Lauren hugs her wrap coat tighter around herself.

“Todd Oldham show,” I sigh. “I’m in it.”

“Modeling,” she says. “A man’s job.”

“It’s not as easy as it may look.”

“Yeah, modeling’s tough, Victor,” she says. “The only thing you need to be is on time. Hard work.”

“It
is,”
I whine.

“It’s a job where you need to know how to wear clothes?” she’s asking. “It’s a job where you need to know how to—now let me get this straight—
walk
?”

“Hey, all I did was learn how to make the most of my looks.”

“What about your mind?”

“Right,” I snicker. “Like in this world”—I’m gesturing—“my mind matters more than my abs. Oh boy, raise your hand if you believe that.” Pause. “And I don’t remember you majoring in Brain Surgery at Camden.”

“You don’t even remember me at Camden,” she says. “I’d be surprised if you even remember what happened Monday.”

Stuck, trying to catch her eyes, I say, “I modeled … and had a … sandwich.” I sigh.

Silently we keep moving through the park.

“He looks like a goddamn schmuck,” I finally mutter. “He gets his shorts tailored. Jesus, baby.” I keep wheeling the Vespa along.

“Chloe deserves better than you, Victor,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

“When’s the last time it was just you and her?” she asks.

“Oh man—”

“No, seriously, Victor,” she says. “Just you and her for a day without any of this bullshit around you?”

“We went to the MTV Movie Awards,” I sigh. “Together.”

“Oh god,” she moans. “Why?”

“Hey, it’s the twentysomething Oscars.”

“Exactly.”

A giant billboard of Chloe that went up last week above the Toys ‘Я’ Us on Park suddenly comes into sharp focus through the dead trees, her eyes glaring down at us, and Lauren sees it too and then I’m looking back at the building the club is in and the windows appear blackened in the cold light of late afternoon.

“I hate this angle,” I mutter, pulling us out of the shot and steering Lauren across Park so we have some privacy on a street behind the Zeckendorf Towers. She lights a cigarette. I light one too.

“He was probably watching us,” I say.

“So act natural,” she says. “You don’t know me anyway.”

“I want to know you,” I tell her. “Can we see each other tomorrow?”

“Aren’t you going to be too busy basking in the glow of your success?”

“Yeah, but I want to share it with you,” I say. “Lunch?”

“I can’t,” she says, taking another drag. “I have a luncheon at Chanel.”

“What do you want, Lauren?” I’m asking. “Some yuppie guy to take you out to Le Cirque every night?”

“What’s better?” she asks back. “Unable to pay your rent and depressed and trembling in the local Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

“Oh please. That’s the only alternative?”

“
You’d
marry him if you could, Victor.”

“Damien’s totally not my type, baby.”

“That’s probably not true,” she says softly.

“You want him to give you—what?
Things?
You want to discover the true meaning of suburban life? You think that goombah’s even in the Social Register?”

“Damien
is
in the Social Register.”

“Well, yeah, right, sure.”

“There was a time, Victor, when I wanted you,” she says, taking a drag on the cigarette. “There was actually a moment, Victor, when all I ever wanted was you.” Pause. “I find it hard to believe myself, but well, there it is.”