The Ask (3 page)

“What have I won?” I said.

“Your old job back,” said Vargina. “If you make this work.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You’ll be finished,” said Llewellyn. “Forever. Do we have clarity?”

“Obscene amounts.”

Llewellyn stood, stalked off. It would not be the last I saw of him, I knew. The ogres, they just lurk behind those gnarled oak doors so ubiquitous in fairy-tale carpentry, wait for gentle lads to knock. Trolls, on the other hand, they must have a paging device. Either way, the odious is ever ready.

Vargina and I sat there for a while, a new, electric awkwardness in the room.

“Can you make it happen?” said Vargina.

“When have I ever disappointed you?”

“Nearly every day that we have worked together.”

“Listen,” I said. “I just want to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For the leering.”

“The leering?”

“You know. That stuff Llewellyn said.”

“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to Horace.”

“Horace?”

“He’s the one who reported you. But don’t worry. He wasn’t
vindictive. He just said he didn’t understand why somebody would need to be in the closet in this day and age. At least around here.”

“In the closet,” I said.

“But he’s a kid. He doesn’t know how complicated these things can get.”

“No,” I said. “I guess he doesn’t.”

There is art to the ask. There is craft. There is lunch. There is also research, but Purdy did not require much. I had been following my old college friend’s career for years.

Purdy had made his own money, or so he told the reporters from those magazines about fellating rich whites, those rags with names like
Wealth
, or
Capital
, or
Fellating Rich Whites
. This was true to a point. Purdy made his own money out of some of his father’s money.

Still, he had been ahead of his time with his online music outfit. It might sound ridiculous now, but he had been one of the first to predict that people really only wanted to be alone and scratching themselves and smelling their fingers and staring at screens and firing off sequences of virulent gibberish at other deliquescing life-forms. So for us he provided new music and photographs of fabulous people making and listening to the new music, as well as little comment boxes for the lonely, finger-smelling people to comment on the looks and clothing of the fabulous people who had managed to achieve some sweaty, sparkly proximity to each other and to life as it was lived in more glamorous eras.

Purdy even had a loft packed with stoned designers. He’d offered me a spot in his posse, doing God knows what, maybe just fetching lattes and shooting hoops on the office half-court. But I turned him down. My painting, I believed, was poised on
the precipice of genius, though I never would have phrased it like that. “Thanks, but I’m cool” is how I probably put it, sealed myself in my schmucky dome. Purdy sold his company for a few hundred million.

I missed out on a nice little nest egg. A nest latte.

Since then Purdy had become a venture capitalist, a philanthropist, an occasional gossip-site item. He dated models, married one. That was no surprise. I recalled a conversation we had in college, after he’d fallen for the beautiful, plumpish Constance, realized he had to dump her.

“I’m not attracted to her,” he told me.

He’d come out of his room in the sagging off-campus Victorian we shared with some others, joined me in the kitchen for a late evening bowl. Through the slit in the door I could see Constance asleep in his bed.

“If the chemistry’s not there …” I said through smoke, as though I knew anything about sex and love other than the hard-won certainty that if I ignored the sore on my penis, it would probably go away.

“Oh, the chemistry’s there,” said Purdy. “The fucking is fantastic. I’m just not attracted to her.”

“Huh?” I said. “Is it the teeth? I like the teeth.”

“It’s societal.”

He said it had something to do with fashion magazines, cultural conditioning. We were big on this kind of thing.

“But, Purdy,” I said, “the point is you subvert the codes, not adhere to them.”

“I’m trapped, man,” he said.

Purdy stood, wandered out into the garden. I sneaked into his room, slipped my head between Constance’s knees. I was big on that kind of thing. Constance and I were together for a while after that. I was crazy about her, her fierce horsey mouth and chipped teeth and black braids and high shelf of an ass, but I don’t think she ever got over Purdy.

Many didn’t, though he never acquired the cad tag he might have deserved. Maybe his attachments were too diffuse. He lived with us, the faux-bohemian alcoholics, but he also had ins with engineers and future hedge fund managers, or political science types who believed in the American exception, that there was something dirty about a dirty martini.

He’d disappear with the children of the super-rich—his tax bracket, if not exactly his people—make weekend visits to the family compounds of ambassadors or early software titans or progressive oil sheikhs, which he’d later describe to us in rather cryptic and astonished terms, so that we might come to know the features and dimensions of a Saudi squash court but still not understand how petrochemical influence was wielded in Washington, or we might snicker at the gestures a major political family made toward the folkways of ordinary Americans—the cheapest sort of beach equipment, off-brand knockwurst on the grill—but still not comprehend how dynastic service shaped electoral outcomes. We were just glad that he ended his nights with us, the pretentious wastrels. He had insomnia. We stayed up the latest. I think that’s mostly what it was.

He had mystery, this boy. He didn’t need a persona. I might have been the painter, the way our friend Maurice was the drug dealer, or Constance was the Marxist feminist who fucked, or Charles Goldfarb was the larkish Frankfurtian who desperately wanted to fuck, but Purdy was simply Purdy.

There was nothing striking about him. His clothes weren’t spattered with paint. His teeth weren’t nicked. He didn’t, like Maurice, have a tattoo on his arm of a man inking a tattoo on his arm. He didn’t, like Billy Raskov, my rival, the artist who didn’t paint because painting was dead, have a possibly affected case of Parkinson’s, nor was he, like Sarah Molloy, timber heir and environmental feminist who did not fuck, a hater of his kind.

He was just Purdy, and though he was loaded—ruling class, in the parlance of our insufferable set—his father a knight-errant
of a CEO, dashing from one corporate damsel to the next, slaying those dread dragons Health Plan and Pension wherever they preyed upon the margin, Purdy himself lived modestly, much more modestly than his family stipend allowed. He lived then pretty much how Maura and I lived now.

I suppose there was a certain glory in it, this slumming with the middle and upper-middle classes. Maybe not the glory of rushing a Nazi mortar position, or braving municipal billy bats to stop a war in Indochina, but the privileged of our generation did what they could, like the rest of us. We were stuck between meanings. Or we were the last dribbles of something. It was hard to figure. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.

True, there was nearly no glory in my paintings of that time. They featured some dribbles themselves, some drips, some glued-on porcelain and politically meaningful popsicle sticks, though I could not now recall what they looked like, not really. I doubted anyone could, even Lena, the professor who anointed me our liberal arts boutique’s aesthetic hope, took me to bed. Purdy wouldn’t remember, either, but I certainly recalled his kindness to me, and not just the money he’d loan without that whiff of vassalage, of fealty, most rich kids required, but then maybe he feigned belief in all of us, in some ultimate utility to our mannered flailings. Somehow he helped us pretend we were all anointed, could become the icons wearing sunglasses in the dorm hall posters of the future, pioneers of jackass phenomena, ancestor gods of cool.

A sad dream, but it sustained us.

Purdy and I, we’d smoke those late-evening bowls while I bitched about Billy Raskov suddenly getting attention, or a student prize, for shitting on a Rand McNally atlas to interrogate hegemony.

Once Purdy just chuckled his trademark chuckle, which was really just the trace of one.

“He’s a charlatan,” said Purdy.

“Fucking Raskov,” I said.

“A shitterton,” said Purdy.

“That’s it.”

What he might have said to Billy Raskov about me I didn’t want to know, though in a sense it hardly mattered.

He was somehow both of us and beyond us. He did not need to be anointed, ordained. He had powers of cajolement, a gentle, quasi-Christ-y authority. Maybe he just knew how we’d all turn out. He would guard our spasms of shame, of ego, from the others, wait with patience, forgiveness, for us to slip free of our charades, embrace our destinies, as bond lawyers, dental surgeons, new media consultants, housewives, househusbands, or unemployed development officers. Then he would stand there in his beautiful truth, the truth of money.

Purdy met me at a steakhouse in Tribeca, a modern joint with futuristic sconces that looked like laser mounts. Here, the waiters sliced your meat because you were the feeb end of the species. The room seemed cozy and cavernous at once, the kind of place I would later describe to Maura as tastefully lit. A few bourbons, and so was I.

Though not particularly hungry, I succumbed to a certain unseemly ferocity with regard to my porterhouse. Sometimes I lost it around food I could not afford. I gnawed bone, tongued gristle, and while my old friend repaired to the men’s, I reached for a bite of his almost untouched cut, popped a few of his rosemary-speckled potatoes into my mouth. I was fairly certain that upon his return he would not notice his plate’s depletions, unless he’d made an earlier, silent spud count. This was possible. Men of his station were bred for such pettiness.

Though I was also pretty sure I had to work tomorrow, or at least report to the office, I ordered a second Calvados. Purdy, who never had to work again, sipped his wine. He pushed his glass an inch or two across the table, the universal sign that the convivial portion of the evening was over, although maybe it wasn’t universal. I hadn’t traveled much beyond Europe, and Canada didn’t count.

“It’s good to see you, Milo, really. You look great.”

“No, you actually look great, Purdy.”

God knew what diets, unguents, procedures, protocols had preserved him, his taut golden skin and plush honeyed hair, the roped muscle beneath his thin, collared shirt. Then again, maybe he’d won both of life’s lotteries, required no protocols.

“I’m so glad to hear about Maura and Bernie,” said Purdy.

“Hear what?”

“Everything you’ve been telling me for the past hour. Damn, a kid. We’ve been trying, you know. Melinda and I. We’ve got half the doctors in New York on the case.”

“I’m sure it’ll happen for you guys.”

“I’m sure it will, too. Probably have to fertilize Melinda’s eggs on the surface of Mars, but it will happen. Our happiness depends upon it.”

“You’ll be happy either way, Purdy.”

“Happiness is tricky. It sounds like you’ve figured it out.”

“Sure.”

“Sure, he says,” said Purdy.

“Sure, I say,” I said.

“Don’t be bitter, Milo. It doesn’t become you.”

“I’m not bitter,” I said.

Purdy leaned back, as though to better assemble an exceptionally nuanced expression on his face, maybe some amalgam of pity and revelation.

“You’re pissed because I’m so rich,” he said. “You’ve always been pissed. You think I didn’t earn it.”

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I did. The trust fund made me comfortable. My own hard work made me rich. I knew when to cash out during all that interweb crap. Not many did.”

Interweb, webnet, interpipe—the joke had begun to grate. If they flubbed it and winked, what? I was tired of the semantic evasions, mine included. I was tired of many things. I had been keeping a list, got tired of the list.

“I guess not,” I said.

“Don’t be a hater,” said Purdy.

“I’m not just any old hater,” I said. “I’m a hater’s hater.”

It was as though Purdy hadn’t heard me, or perhaps it was precisely that he had.

“You’re doing better than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people in this world,” he said. “Capitalism might have shit the bed, but it’s been very good to you, buddy, whether you know it or not.”

“Hooray!” I said. “Let’s drink to me. I’m not rich, and I’m not famous, but I am fat and white, or white-ish, and my debt load is at least testament to the fact that over the years various institutions have considered me a worthy mark.”

“Good for you,” said Purdy.

He sounded sincere and it scared me.

“You want another drink?” I said. “Maybe I’ll get another drink.”

“I’m fine,” said Purdy.

“I’m not fine. I’m not fine at all. Let’s have some drinks! Some fucking mojitos or something. Don’t they have that fifty-dollar mojito here? With that rum from the island where they make one case a year, and the hydroponic mint they fly in weekly? I want one! It’s all on the Whig, okay?”

“The who?” said Purdy.

“The Whig. Our founding daddy.”

“Maybe you should slow down, Milo.”

“Why the hell would I want to do that?”

“Because I don’t think they fly that mint in anymore, for one thing. Look, Milo, I know we’re old friends. I’ve held you over the toilet a few times, back in the day, but come on. The age of the expense account is over. I read it in the paper two years ago. And two months ago. And today.”

“Sure,” I said. “Yes. Of course.”

“Excellent,” said Purdy. “Now, do you have any questions for me?”

“Yes, I do. Why give to us? Why not give to the truly needy? The bombed-out, the starved-down, the families running from butchers on horseback. Or folks whose fate depends on whether they can score a fucking shovel and a bag of seeds.”

“You mean genocides? Microfinancing?”

“Yeah, or even all the devastated people here.”

“We give to those causes. Less and less, of course. We’ve all gotten murdered.”

“How about giving to just a random assortment of middle-class families? Or not so random? How about mine?”

“Funny,” said Purdy, in the way of a man who did not find it funny. “Any more questions? Wait, hold on.”

Purdy took out a weird phone, the device we’d all be using next year, punched some keys.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Forgot about something I needed to send. Where were we? Oh, yeah. Questions?”

“Just the canned ones. Like maybe you can tell me how you first got interested in the Mediocre University at New York’s arts program.”

“The Mediocre what?”

“Sorry. What I mean is—”

“Melinda had a wonderful experience at your university.

Especially in the film and theater classes she took. It was the best investment I ever made, sending her there after we met. Sure, it was the only place she had any chance in hell of getting into, but it enriched her. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. It helped her become the woman she wanted to be, and needed to be, to be with me. Actually, Melinda handles a lot of our giving these days. Museums, orchestras, film societies. My area of interest is more narrow. I enjoy finding younger female artists and helping them at that crucial stage when their asses are firm and unblemished.”

“You’re joking,” I said, clenched my jaw to squeeze the booze from my skull.

“Of course I’m joking. But of course I’m not really joking. Ultimately it’s nothing like a joke. You know, now that you’re trying to act sober, I can see how drunk you are. How many of my potatoes did you eat, freak? And what about my steak? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Do you always grope other people’s meat? It’s cute when you’re twenty, Milo, but come on. Get a grip.”

“I will.”

“Will what?”

“Grip it.”

“Grip it now, kid.”

“Okay. I’ll try. Really.”

“Good. Now. Let’s talk our talk. Your beloved institution seems like it wants to step up to the next level. Be a culture player. Crank out all those smug nullities who can make the stylish, insipid, top-notch crap. Stuff we can jerk off to but that will also make us sorry, but not too sorry. Sexy sorry. Am I right?”

“Sorry about what?”

“I don’t know. Imperialist wars, torture, poverty, disease.

How we’ve gotten past slavery except that we will never get past slavery, no matter who’s the CEO. How the immigrants are good hardworking people, except for the lazy border-violating ones, except that it was their land to begin with and they work even harder than the hardworking ones. That kind of stuff. And also how we are such third-raters at this point, but what does that really mean? And what happened to being Rome? Seems like we didn’t get much of a chance to be Rome. Seems pretty fucking unfair.”

“Bitches of the First World,” I said.

“Nicely put.”

“That’s Horace.”

“Is it? I don’t quite remember that. But I think you know what I’m saying.”

“I know that you’re saying something,” I said.

“And by the way, FYI, I share all of these thoughts with you as somebody descended from both slave-owners and struggling immigrants. In some cases, they were the same people. It might sound cynical but I’m not cynical at all. I believe in the sensitive jerk-off stuff. I get off on the jerk-off stuff. But am I right? About your school? About wanting to ratchet things up, bring on the brand consciousness? Piss with the big art fairies? That’s what that slick Southern kid intimated. What’s his name?”

“Llewellyn.”

“That’s the one. He’s impressive. What my dad used to call a comer. You must hate his guts.”

“He’s okay.”

“Sure he is. Anyway, that’s what he gave me to believe, when I met him at this sort of art happening. An historical reenactment of the dotcom bubble. Some guy rented a loft and hired actors to pretend to be designing websites. Have to say he nailed the details, the clothes, the snacks, the drugs, the toys. Thought I was in a time machine. But the point is he said you guys wanted to go big. Stop pussyfooting, as he put it. Here’s your mojito.”

The waiter laid a tumbler at my elbow. I stared into the crushed ice, the muddled mint, and thought, oddly, of Scandinavia, of hissing, mist-sheathed fjords. It must have been the crushed ice.

“Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.”

“You texted the drink order?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I should have ordered an aquavit. You texted the drink order. Just before.”

“Maybe.”

“But to whom was the text addressed? The waiter? The bartender?”

“We’ll cover that next time. This is a process. What I want to
make clear tonight is that despite the hits my portfolio has taken, I am committed to exploring the possibility of a serious give. Now might be an appropriate time for one last question.”

I was halfway to the morning’s hangover. Boozewise, fatherhood had bounced me to the bantam ranks. But I wanted to keep going. I wanted to know things, like what Purdy really thought of our former friendship, whether he sensed how much he’d changed, or if he believed this was what he’d always been. Also, did he happen to know the whereabouts of the vintage Spanish dueling knife I lost in college?

“Why did you insist on me?” I said.

“Sure,” said Purdy. “That’s a suitable closing question. And here’s the answer: because you’re my pal. Because, like I said, I held you over the toilet a few times. Was it liquor or smack? I can’t remember. Did you call it smack?”

“But you don’t need me for this.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I trust you. Because you’re not the only one with an ask. I’m going to ask you to do a few things for me. And you won’t betray me.”

“I won’t?”

“You’re the opposite of Judas.”

“You’re the opposite of Jesus.”

“So, we’ll be fine. You okay?”

I’ve never been much for drunken wakefulness, always admired those blackout artists who seemed perfectly alert while entirely unconscious, who rode trains and conducted real estate deals and pleasured lovers in a technical sleep state, who woke up in the Cleveland Hilton with inexplicable amounts of river silt in their pants cuffs. My overhooched evenings tended to expire with a lone ax stroke to the motherboard. Lucky nights I’d get one last surge of consciousness, like those precious seconds of life savored, if certain movies are to be believed, by severed heads.

“Anybody there?” said Purdy. “Let’s get your ass home.”

“Hell, no,” I said. “Let’s drink! Let’s get some coke! Text it to me! Text me some fucking coke!”

I remember saying this, anyway, and I remember Purdy’s laugh, his trademark trace chuckle. I remember digging in my pockets to see if I’d be able to cover the dinner, the imaginary blow, expense it later. Of course, I didn’t even have carfare, which was rather unprofessional. This was my party, my check, my ask. Purdy pushed some buttons on his handheld again and I wondered if he might be ordering an eight ball, or dumping shares in Singapore, or calling Melinda, or calling a call girl, or calling a car, or checking a West Coast baseball score.

Next thing, I awoke alone in a cab rocketing over the Queensboro Bridge with fifty bucks in my fist like it had been wedged there with great fuss, which I figure it must have been, because even a piker like me knows you don’t cadge cab money from the ask. It’s a central tenet of development.

You don’t even have to research that one. You just feel it in your asking bones.

Of course, there was a credit swipe in the back of the cab, but we both must have known my card would be denied.