Glamorama (35 page)

“Hey, we were supposed to meet this morning,” she says, clicking off the cell phone.

I don’t say anything, just busy myself looking for my keys.

“They canceled the piece on you anyway,” she says.

“And you came to tell me in person?” I find the keys. “How intimidating.”

“Don’t you care?” she asks.

I sigh, take my sunglasses off. “What did you think of me?”

She cocks her head “meaningfully,” studies the sidewalk, squinting, then looks back up at my face.

“I thought you were well-nigh inscrutable,” she says, mimicking a British accent.

“Well,
I
thought
you
were a hodgepodge of banality,” I say, mimicking a British accent too.

I open the door and step inside. She shrugs, skips away.

An eviction notice is pinned to my door and when I pull it off I glance over at the director and roll my eyes, groaning “Oh
puhleeeze.”
The instant I walk into my apartment the phone starts ringing and I flop down on my beanbag chair, exhausted, and pick it up, yawning. “It’s Victor—whass up?”

“This is Palakon calling,” a voice says crisply.

“Palakon, I really can’t talk now, so—”

“There’s a manila envelope on your kitchen table,” Palakon says, cutting me off. “Open it.”

I stare into the kitchen from where I’m slouching and spot the envelope on the table.

“Okay,” I say, “I’m opening the vanilla envelope, dude.”

“No, Mr. Johnson,” Palakon says, annoyed. “Please get up and go to the kitchen.”

“Whoa,” I say, impressed.

“I want you to take that envelope with you when you go to London to find Jamie Fields,” Palakon says. “You have a reservation in a first-class cabin on the
QE2
. It leaves New York at four o’clock this afternoon. Your tickets are in that manila envelope on your kitchen table, along with—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I say. “Hold on.”

“Yes?” Palakon asks politely.

I pause for a long time, mulling things over before blurting out, “You could’ve at least put me on the fucking Concorde.”

“You have a reservation in a
first-class
cabin on the QE2,” Palakon says again, undeterred. “It leaves New York at four o’clock this afternoon. A car will be by to pick you up at one-thirty. Your tickets are in the manila envelope along with ten thousand dollars in cash for, er, expenses—”

“Need receipts?”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Johnson.”

“Cool.”

“I will contact you on the ship. And don’t forget to take the manila envelope with you. It’s crucial.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because everything you need is in it.”

“It’s a nice manila envelope,” I say finally.

“Thank you.”

“How did you know I’d be able to go today, Palakon?”

“I read the News,” he says. “I figured it out.”

“Palakon—”

“Oh yes,” Palakon says, before hanging up. “Take the hat with you too.”

I pause before asking, “What hat?”

“You know which one.”

He hangs up.

1

“You have potential,” Jamie said.

We were lounging in a Camden flashback in the commons, splitting a Molson, our sunglasses on, our eyes glazed over, a peeled orange sitting untouched between us on a table, and we’d already read our horoscopes and I was wearing a T-shirt that read
IF YOU’RE NOT WASTED THE DAY IS
and waiting for my laundry to dry and she was alternating between playing with a pencil and smelling a Thai orchid a secret admirer had sent her and heavy-metal pop—Whitesnake or Glass Tiger—was playing from somewhere we couldn’t figure out and it was driving us nuts and her dealer wasn’t coming up until next Tuesday so we were fairly unresponsive toward certain events and in the sky things were getting dark.

We were lounging in the commons and we’d been talking about how shallow everyone was, ticking off the affairs we’d had with all these shallow people, and then Jamie saw someone she hated or she’d
fucked (they usually existed in the same realm) and she leaned in and kissed me even before I could say “What’s the story?” The guy, Mitchell, passed by. It wasn’t enough that she and I had been screwing each other for the last two weeks or so; she needed people to know that we had.

“Man, did I get torqued last night,” I yawned, stretching.

“Totally excellent,” she said.

“Get a haircut,” I muttered to someone with a ponytail shuffling by, and Jamie eyed a maintenance worker trimming a rosebush and licked her lips naughtily.

She had long fingernails always painted with white polish and liked starting sentences with the words “Contrary to popular opinion …” She hated baseball caps on men but would wear one if she thought her hair looked bad or if she was too hungover to wash it. Her other pet peeves about men ranged along the predictable lines of: fake rap talk, urine or semen stains on jockey shorts (a type of underwear she abhorred), razor stubble, giving hickeys, carrying books around (“Camden isn’t Yale for god’s sake,” she’d moan). Condoms didn’t necessarily mean anything to her but she knew every guy on campus who had herpes (through some kind of deal with a lesbian nurse in Health Services who was in love with her), so it was all moot. Shakespeare “irritated” her.

I would tell her “I’m not looking for a serious relationship” and she would stare back at me like I was insane, as if I wasn’t capable of one in the first place. I would tell her “Your roommate’s really pretty,” before moving on to long monologues about ex-girlfriends, every cheerleader I ever fucked, a cousin I fingerbanged at a party in Virginia Beach, or I’d brag about how much money my family had and I always inflated the amount because sometimes this was the only way to get her attention, even though she knew who my dad was, having seen him on CNN. She forgave me for a lot of flaws because I was “simply too good-looking.”

At first she was so inexpressive and indifferent that I wanted to know more about her. I envied that blankness—it was the opposite of helplessness or damage or craving or suffering or shame. But she was never really happy and already, in a matter of days, she had reached a stage in our relationship when she no longer really cared about me or any
thoughts or ideas I might have had. I’d try and fuck her into some kind of conciousness, desperate to make her come, and I’d fuck her so hard that she’d be drenched with sweat and red-faced and yelling out, the two of us on the mattress on the floor next to piles of books she’d stolen from the library and a couple of porno magazines I bought that we both whacked off over and her accountant was always calling or her therapist was always calling or her cousin lost in Ibiza was always calling and we’d have sad conversations about how much she hated her mother and wished she was dead like my mother was but I listened “intently” and took it easy on Jamie since I knew her first boyfriend died in a car accident coming back from cheating on her at a ski lodge in Brattleboro. “But he was so weird I really don’t even want to talk about it,” she’d finally say after an hour, after seventy minutes, sometimes eighty.

A limousine rolled up next to one of the dorms and a group of freshmen were sunning themselves beneath a darkening sky on a mattress pulled out from Booth House, which bordered the commons. A keg was being tapped and people drifted toward it and the wind tossing leaves around the lawn made Jamie and me look at how leafless the trees were. MTV was on the large-screen television set that hung above the fireplace and a VJ introduced a video but the sound was off and then there was static and people were really just hanging out, waiting for lunch, for another class to begin. Someone sat down next to us and started taping our conversation and someone else was explaining to someone behind me how a camcorder worked. Jamie was gazing at the giant no photography poster pinned on an unnecessary column in the middle of the room and I had just noticed a naked mannequin lying on its side that someone had discarded on the stairs leading up to the dining halls.

“Do you have any cash?” I asked her.

“Don’t overdo it, baby,” she warned, lowering her sunglasses, scanning the room.

I took my sunglasses off and checked my reflection in the lenses.

She snapped her fingers at me. “Hey, why don’t you just start chewing with your mouth open. Why don’t you just start licking your fingers after meals.”

“I don’t intend to take you anywhere nice,” I told her.

“Nice butt,” she murmured, ogling a Brazilian guy she hadn’t fucked yet but would a week later as he passed by, bouncing a soccer ball on his knee as he crossed the length of the room while eating a bagel, his jeans perfectly ripped, wearing a tank top with a gym logo on it.

I agreed, teasingly.

“You fag,” she yawned, taking the last swallow of Molson.

“He wears socks with sandals,” I pointed out. “He still wears his high-school graduation ring.”

“You, too, are in dire need of a maturity alert, my friend,” she said.

“I don’t wear Members Only jackets.”

“Contrary to popular opinion this is not enough to not make you evil,” she said.

“Evil?” I faux-gasped. “Black light posters are in. Bongos are in.”

“Pervert,” she said gleefully. “You have potential.”

Sean Bateman, whom she had fucked, joined us, offered a distracted smile, nodding even though no one had said anything that required a nod. He wondered aloud if any of us had pot, mentioned something about Rupert getting arrested in Albany late last night or early this morning. Sean pulled a beer out of the jacket he had just taken off and handed it to Jamie, who opened it with her teeth. I noticed how nice Bateman’s forearms were and someone was sadly strumming Led Zeppelin—I think it was “Thank You”—on a guitar and any light that had been streaming through the window we were all sitting next to disappeared and Sean whispered in my ear, “All the boys think she’s a spy .…”

I nodded and managed to smile.

Jamie was eyeing me carefully.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“You’re easy to unfold,” she said to me in front of Sean.

“What’s the story, baby?” I was asking, worried, blank-faced.

“You have potential,” Jamie said, grinning. “You definitely have potential.”

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