The Fall of Princes (14 page)

Packages arrive. I note happily that they were packed with pride by Jeanette L. or Rhoda D., and I imagine these women, geniuses with tissue paper, getting my box ready for me in Dallas or London. These are elegantly wrapped boxes, the kind that used to litter the floor of my bedroom in the loft on Saturday afternoons. The clothes in these boxes are exquisite, made of materials that are brilliant to the touch, in colors that make the eyes go dim. Silk and cashmere. Sea Island cotton. Wool and angora. The cut of the clothes is masterful, so that the jackets hang softly on my shoulders, almost weightless, the trousers hold to my hips and thighs in an embrace like a kiss.

I put the clothes on, and for a second I am that person all over again. For a moment, I am the best-dressed man in the world. Lanvin and Givenchy and Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, the boutiques that line Madison Avenue and similar streets all over the globe. I order from New York. I order from Paris, Rome, and I step into my new clothes like a king.

I watch Ryan Gosling on the
Tonight
show, wearing a Donegal tweed suit, and it takes some doing, but, over the days, I call the
Tonight
show and find out who made the suit, and it arrives in a box and I put it on less than a week later. However, I do not, in my apartment, look like Ryan Gosling.

I walk around for a while, catching my reflection in every mirror. I am, for those moments, the emperor of my life.

Then I take off the clothes and fold them. I make sure that they are folded exactly as they were sent, as Rhoda or Jeanette would have liked, wrapped in silver tissue as though they had never been touched. I fill out the return slip. I know the code for every reason for these returns. DNF: Did Not Fit. CM: Changed My Mind. The package, when I am done, looks untouched, and chances are it will be on its way to you as soon as it is returned to the inventory in the store.

I lie in bed, in my sleeping costume, between the exquisite sheets that are all that remain of a life I once lived. A life in which somebody once ironed my underclothes. Daniel Storto, the best glove maker in the world, has made me a pair of gloves, fawn-colored kid leather from a tracing of my hand. Riccardo Tisci has made me a tuxedo. John Lobb has sent a pair of monk strap shoes, from measurements they still have on file in London, from the old days. They don’t care that they haven’t heard from me in thirty years. They could make me a pair of shoes tomorrow if I were to ask, which I do not, will not ever again.

In the morning I get up and take my medications, Ativan and Buspar for anxiety. I take the packages to be returned and walk in my ordinary pants past all the shop windows filled with all the things I will never again possess.

I am cold in my windbreaker. The sheet of glass shields your life from mine.

I had dinner with you. You do not remember it.

I gave you christening presents that went lost or into storage. I gave myself to the world at breakneck speed. I gave you the monogram of my life, of my heart, and you never even opened the invitation.

I tell myself that this is all right, but I trudge through the day, eager for the moment when I open the new boxes and become, for five minutes or ten, one of those on your side of the glass, the king of the universe.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Coming Home to Roost

T
he rise of cocaine usage in New York exactly paralleled the widespread proliferation of the cash machine, those blinking seducers. “Going to the Wall,” we called it, and there quickly developed an entire protocol of behavior for how to do it in company. Never look at anybody else’s screen. Never hoot if no cash was forthcoming. This last part did not ever, ever happen to me.

Previously, when dinner was over and all the money was gone, we would just head for home, get in the limo and glide back to our beds. With the advent of the ATM, there was never an end to cash and, instantly, never an end to the list of skinny guys in walkups one could call to pick up a gram or two.

Sometimes, a party would gather. On other, better nights, beautiful women and wonderful boys would follow me home in about equal measure, for lines on the mirror and up the nose and eighteen-year-old single malt down the throat and eventually, bed at dawn, our beautiful, naked bodies sliding softly against one another, powdery and dry. Death hung over us all, and sex was heaven, eros and thanatos in equal measure. There was, in the air, in the plague years, the sense of an ending, a rush to have it all before the dark door closed and the bouncer turned his back on you.

We’ll sleep when we’re old, we used to say, knowing that day would never come, never suspecting that our beautiful, sensual lives would be truncated before we had time to have children. We saved nothing, we spent, every day, all there was, not just the cash. All the freedom and the beauty and the sex and the blood in our veins was hot from the expenditure.

I had moved out of Hovel Hall, leaving every single thing behind in that horrible apartment, and moved into the House of Heaven, a five-thousand-square-foot loft in Soho with a roof garden, where I installed a lap pool, red tape coming out of my ears to get it, but nothing would stop me. Naturally though, like any New Yorker, I held on to the lease for the old apartment I intended never to see again. New Yorkers don’t let go of a cheap piece of real estate until the coroner rips the paper from their cold, intestate fingers. I said I would use it as an office on the weekends, but it was really there for my increasingly frequent meetings, meetings that were never put down in my book, except the time and a name and a phone number, in case I was ever found hacked to death and floating in the Hudson. These meetings were ultimately without meaning, but they engraved themselves on my heart, ineradicable. Where was I going? What was happening? I had neither the time nor the courage to ask, but the key to that apartment stayed shiny as ever from use.

I got drunk at lunch. It didn’t even start to slow me down.

I did nine grams of coke in an average week.

I got laid about the same number of times.

I bought my loft, my space, at the height of the market, and hired Alan, who was the most brilliant interior designer of the day. He had done Keaton, Barkin—movie stars and rich people, and everybody wanted him and I got him because I never did not get what I wanted. That’s all.

He took my $3-million loft and completely gutted it. I lived in ruins. For two years, I walked through the doors to the sight of dumpsters in every hallway. He took what had been a five-bedroom loft and turned it into a one-bedroom one in which there was not one soft surface. I loved him. He had absolute clarity and a gentle way and tweed jackets, and he had AIDS.

In the loft, I wandered the night, alone or coupled, drunk always, until I began to realize that every single surface had corners that were too sharp. Granite. Formica. Marble. Sharp as razors.

So I went out and got some foam rubber and duct tape and covered every edge with a layer of protection, so that, when I fell—and I was going to fall—I was less likely to end up in the emergency room needing stitches. It was important, of paramount importance, that I look fresh in the mornings, and I did, not one hair out of place.

In the ruins of this unfinished loft, I married Carmela Mickelson Chase, whose mother was the fifth richest woman in America. I did not marry her because I was afraid of finding myself alone on the sere and pustulant desert of AIDS. I did not marry to try to cure some sexual confusion, that confusion producing in me the happiest feelings of euphoria I have ever known. I could have it all, all the touch points, and could juggle and hustle and wrassle and make millions and I would still not burn to the ground. I was, in the arms of those men and those women, indestructible and deathless and beautiful and free.

In a man, there is a spot just at the base of his throat, in the hollow of his neck, and, if you put your thumb there, you can feel the beat of his pulse, and know love ad infinitum. With a woman, that spot is the curve of skin between her rib cage and her hip bone, a slope of beauty unlike anything else in the world. And both were equally compelling and both were absolutely necessary to me.

No. I married Carmela Mickelson Chase because she had come up from Philadelphia for a dinner party I was holding in the loft, served by white-coated waiters from Glorious Foods, each a beauty, passing the canapé that turned New York on its ear that year, a tiny new potato hollowed out to hold a dab of crème fraîche and a dot of caviar. Carmela dressed that night in real Paris couture, ruby and diamond earrings, dark Irish hair and eyes, and she showed up at the party with her present, two Russian saber dancers she had met on the street, old men in Hussar dress who danced for us and bowed and left.

Carmela, which was not by any stretch of the imagination her real name, her real name having died in the chill night air of the sleeping porches at Miss Porter’s, had come to New York to go to the Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and been brought to my ruin by a friend, an astonishingly luminous girl, Berry Berenson, sister of the actress Marisa, and who was later to die in the first plane to hit the World Trade Tower. There are only six people, and sooner or later we are all yesterday’s newspaper.

Carmela had beautiful hands, and the most beautiful skin you can imagine, and there was almost nothing that came out of her mouth that was not filled with a charm I thought had died for me forever. In the middle of dinner, discussing photography, which is what she spent her days doing, she held her hand up in a certain gesture, her small hand raised above the pink rack of lamb as though she were a child candling an egg, and I knew that I loved her, and she looked at me and we both knew that she would be spending the night with me in the loft.

I said to Anne Kennedy, who sat on my right, smoking, so beautifully photographed with her exquisite sister Mame by Robert Mapplethorpe, he soon to die of the thinning disease, famously photographed, two brilliant beauties staring wide-eyed at the camera, two sisters who had come from Connersville, Indiana, to be the kind of girls they had read about in
Vogue
and
The New Yorke
r
—I told this beautiful, thoughtful girl that I admired a mint-green silk blouse she was wearing.

She held her hands aloft, as though framing a window: “It’s my favorite thing.” She gently waved her arms. “I love the cut. I love the color.” And that was the thing about Carmela. I loved the cut. I loved the color.

And I have never, since that moment, despite what happened, have never not loved her, not for one second. I have never said one unkind word about her. Not a single day passes that I don’t think of Carmela, with the most abiding love I have ever had the joy to know. My one true love, my rock of affection that will remind me on the coldest night that love is a real, true thing, that it has a shape and a boundary, that it has a gesture that can win you over and hold you forever in its gentle grasp.

After every other guest had gone, Carmela and I were lying in bed, having made love for the first time as fondly and efficiently as a couple married for half a century, and she raised herself up on her elbow as my hand slid down the slope of her hip, and she said, “Look. I have something to say. Either this ends in two years with me having a baby or I walk out of the door right now.”

I kissed her, tears springing to my eyes, hearing the last of the waiters still clearing the tables, and I promised her. I promised her she would have a baby, ten babies, that she would be mother of the year. And she would have been, would have mothered a child as she held the imagined egg, if I had kept that promise, which I did not, to my eternal shame.

Which I did not.

A week later, she had left her lover and her loft in Philadelphia, and was hanging her clothes in my closets.

Three days after this, she stood in the bathroom,
my
bathroom, brushing her teeth as I left for work, and said, “Honey, we’re out of toothpaste, would you get some on the way home?” We. In a week we were “we.”

That night, she threw my Knicks tickets into a handy dumpster and took me to Lincoln Center to see Balanchine’s
Serenade,
her favorite of her many favorite ballets, all by Balanchine.

At the theater, the house hushed, the gorgeous Sputnik lights rose into the heavens, and that red curtain opened with the sibillance I was to come to know as the breath of my life, and there, on a twilight stage, in costumes by Jean Lurçat of such a color and cut, pale gray sapphire, ethereal, so beautiful they caused a crater to be named after Balanchine on Mercury, there stood ten women, reaching for the heights, in identical positions, and, at the end of each slender left arm, there was Carmela’s delicate tiny hand candling her egg.

How do we bear it, the beauty that memory holds for us? How does it not just carry us away into oblivion? How can we hold such beauty in our hearts, knowing all we ourselves have done to lessen that beauty, our sins of omission and commission, our inexactitudes, our false starts and false intentions, the promises made in cocaine and the dark, never to be fulfilled?

We go on, frenching the beans, letting one dog out the door as the other wants to come in, trying, trying so hard to find in our abject lives the sanctity of memory, that place where we live always in beauty and terror until we think our hearts can’t stand it but they do. They do. They can. They can forever.

Carmela didn’t really have to work at anything, what with the moneybags ma whose generous checks came every two weeks, but she did, and she was genuinely brilliant at it. She took pictures. She dressed her girlfriends in dresses from her mother’s vast collection of couture, sparkly, ethereal constructions of cloth that would float rather than fall to the floor, a history of the brilliance of fashion in the decades after the war, and she photographed them, and then she locked herself in her darkroom with a pack of cigarettes, a darkroom Alan had squeezed in where one of our imaginary children was eventually to sleep, and she made pictures that were lustrously graceful and elegant. She did this all day every day, with the most ordinary girls, girls she met at lunch counters, waitresses and secretaries, aspiring rock singers, not a beauty among them. Then I would come home from work around nine, the girls gone, the darkroom locked for the night with her secret key, and sit down with friends to an exquisite dinner, made by Carmela, served on Tiffany china with Chrysanthemum knives and forks, on permanent loan from Carmela’s mother, part of Carmela’s allowance.

We didn’t break things. We didn’t look on our lives as frangible. We had energy and youth and money. We ingested our lives as smoothly as a line of cocaine.

Work on the loft continued, and Alan slowed and weakened. He sat next to me in the fading sun in the English bankers’ chairs that were one of his hallmarks, watching as a $63,000 Lalique crystal chandelier we had dipped into bloodred automobile paint was wired and hung over the granite table.

“Can I hold your hand?” he asked.

I gave it to him, and he held it softly in his, his hand so thin, so light.

“I’m cold all the time,” he said. “All the time.”

This was the last conversation we ever had.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

“I know, Alan. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“I didn’t catch it from who everybody thinks it is. It wasn’t him. Tell everybody that.”

“I promise.”

“And don’t sing anything from
A Chorus Line
at my memorial.”

“Promise.”

The next time I saw Alan, he was in a glass room at New York Hospital and I was wearing a surgical mask and a hazmat suit. That’s how scared everybody was back then. Nobody knew anything.

He was gaunt, unrecognizable. He was so intubated, his only means of communication was to write on a pad of paper by his bed. In a shaky hand, he wrote a note and handed it to me. “It wasn’t him.”

I folded the note and put it in my pocket.

I wasn’t there when he died. He had built for me a space that was the envy of everyone I knew, and then he died and stayed dead. The loft was a gleaming engine for entertaining and it was only as I got used to it, came to be at home in it, that I realized, with the bankers’ chairs and the banquettes and the grand piano, there was no private space in the whole of the entire loft. There was no place to sit and read a magazine. It was designed to hold large numbers of people, bright, happy people who were not wearing hazmat suits.