The Fall of Princes (20 page)

“I’m telling you this because . . . because, like, to me, to me at least, the greatest sin is to love somebody and not tell them. That’s the greatest sin.”

Then she looked into my eyes, and I saw how deep and gentle was the love she was speaking of.

“Because then, when the person you love walks down the street, or walks into a meeting or a room full of strangers, they don’t know that somebody loves them. And that can make all the difference in, like, a person’s confidence and stuff, you know?

“I know nothing will happen when I tell you I love you. There’s no way. You’re regular. I’m, well, whatever I am, I’m not regular. I’m not telling you because of that. I’m just telling you so that, when you hail a cab or answer the phone, when you walk into a roomful of strangers, you’ll know that there is somebody in the world who loves you and will always love you, wherever you go, whatever happens, until the end of time. Don’t ever forget that. Promise you will never forget that you are loved. ” She crossed her heart, and touched one finger to my lips. And then, as quickly as she had come, she was gone.

And I wept. In the midst of all the swarthy, muscled leather men, with their straps and bristling facial hair, and their collars and their chaps, I sat at the grimy table in the seedy leather bar on West Tenth Street, and I wept until I couldn’t cry anymore. And then, with what little dignity
I had left, I got up to go. I noticed that one of the patrons, I don’t know who, had put a glass of beer in front of me while I was crying my guts out, and I looked around for who to thank, but nobody looked at me, so I took a sip of the beer and then I left the Ninth Circle and walked through the gorgeous spring day, all the way back to Hovel Hall, all the way to Thirty-Fifth Street, all the way to whatever was going to happen for the rest of my life.

Loved. Loved. Loved. Forever. Forever. Forever.

And I never saw Holly again. She never came back to Thirty-Fifth Street to rule the street the way she had every night for years. For months I asked the other girls about her, but they didn’t know where she’d gone, or wouldn’t say. I hung around the lockers at Penn Station where she kept her clothes, but she never showed up. Leaving me alone. Leaving me completely alone but also completely loved, as I had once asked, so many years before. I was also left with no way to thank her. As if thanks were ever enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Fall of Princes

T
he rest is just slow diminution and loss. A waning of the full and effulgent moon of my youth. Not that the bright light of my youth was anything to be proud of. I was a terrible person. I did unkind and sometimes illegal things. I treated women abominably. The remembrance of it causes me to flush with shame and to feel a tightening in my groin.

It was a radiance without warmth, and I thought of nothing but myself in the brightness of the light. Now I try never to think of myself. I try not to think at all, not to dwell, but, sometimes, late at night, it all comes back to me, and I lose myself in the life that might have been, the wife of twenty years, her comforts and distractions. The fractious children, raucous at the holidays, with their tattoos you asked them not to get and their lacrosse sticks they play with in the house, stringing and restringing them, the trips to Paris to stay at the Lutetia.
Photograph albums of a life that never quite came to be.
It doesn’t last long when it comes, but it is vivid, and I am there, not here, not here where I belong. When you lose everything, you don’t die. You just continue in ordinary pants with nothing in your pockets.

I gave up sending out résumés, tossed them in the trash. I no longer called the people I had known for years who placed brokers in jobs. There was no point. They never took my calls. I had blotted my copybook in perpetuity, one night of gracelessness in the Russian Tea Room, and everything was gone from my résumé, the loft and arc of it, the elevation and grandeur. My name was
up,
as my grandmother used to say. What I did at thirty-two, how bright, how aggressively promising, had no relevance at thirty-seven. Washed up at the moment I had barely set sail.

I looked through the paper and applied for jobs from the want ads. There was always something wrong, with the job, with me. Sitting with these smug hiring people and answering their ridiculous questions.

“You’ve been out of work for five years. What were you doing?”

“I was living in Europe.”

“How exciting! What did you do?”

“I tried to write a novel. It wasn’t any good.”

“Do you have retail experience?”

I used to buy and sell the world every day before lunch.

“No.”

“Would you think you’d be good at sales?”

“I can sell ice cream to the Eskimos.”

“But you’ve never actually done it.”

“No.”

“Well, very interesting. We’ll be in touch if a position opens up. At the moment there’s nothing.”

“Then why did you advertise? Why did you call me in?”

“We like to keep abreast of who’s out there. Can you use a cash register?”

“A moron could learn to use a cash register in ten minutes.”

“You’d be surprised. Well, we’ll call.”

“No. You won’t.”

Long pause. “Not with that attitude, we won’t. I suggest you take a course in people skills. Or look for a job where you don’t have to deal with the public. Like writing bad novels. Good day.”

Eventually, I learned to smile and lie my way into a series of temporary jobs. You don’t die of embarrassment. Not right away.

I demonstrated food processors, and I was astonishingly good at it after only a few days. I could make perfect bread dough in seconds. I wore a white chef’s apron and a paper toque, and I survived by pretending to be somebody else. I sprayed elegant women with overly strong perfume from vaguely erotically shaped bottles. I showed people who had little chance of ever going anywhere how to pack two suits flawlessly in a suitcase. I survived.

But I kept seeing people I knew. They looked at me as though I were in some sort of Halloween costume, or, perhaps, one of the comic interludes in a Christmas pantomime, and sometimes, purely out of pity, they would buy a Cuisinart or a tiny bottle of ridiculously overpriced fragrance. It was an act of kindness that mortified me to the center of my being.

Things fell away from me. My parents died, first my mother, then my father, in quick succession, cancer, mortified at my circumstances, leaving me just enough to shut up Mr. McDermott and Ms. Willoughby. Our parting was quite cordial, actually. I would miss our daily chats. After they stopped calling, days would pass between phone calls.

I miss the rustle and hustle and bang of the floor, the deals happening every half-second, the high fives, the bonus days and the dinners at Frank’s. I miss the clothes, the deference of salespeople, the winter in Harbour Island before all the people who go there now knew it was there. I miss my cufflinks—lapis lazuli, hematite, ruby, sapphire—all gone to the Orthodox jewelry dealers on Forty-Fifth Street, one pair at a time. And my watches. I miss invitations to parties. Parties of beautiful people who say witty and aggressive things. Everything, everything in that old life is gone. A young man’s life, sold for pennies on the dollar.

But every time I let something go, I felt, yes, a sadness, but I also felt lighter, more free, less tethered to a past I would never get back to. Let them have it.

Life was once only about day and night. Now it’s about the number of seconds it takes to get from one end to another.

I finished Proust. It gave me an overriding sense of superiority over the vast majority of mankind. I couldn’t read anything else for a year after. Compared to the rich broth of Proust, every other book seemed like lukewarm water in my mouth.

I finally found a real job, thanks to Proust. I got a job as a clerk in one of the big chain bookstores, in part, I think, because the woman who was doing the hiring asked me what my favorite book was, and I said, “There’s only one real book ever written, besides the Bible. And that is
Remembrance of Things Past
.”

She smiled. “We call it
In Search of Lost Time
now.”

“I prefer the old title. Less accurate, but more poetic.”

“What are the current top-ten best-sellers in fiction?”

I named them, in order. “You want to know the number of weeks they’ve been on the list?”

“I trust you. Nonfiction?”

I named them, although not in order.

“Have you ever sold anything? Anything at all?”

And I told her the long list of embarrassing jobs I had endured in the last year. I told her how to pack two suits in your suitcase so they emerge wrinkle-free at the end of your journey.

“When can you start?

“This or any other moment.”

“Next Monday?”

“How about tomorrow at nine?”

She smiled the smile I was coming to adore. “We don’t open ’til ten. You’d be locked out and lonely, Monsieur Proust.”

“Then I’ll be here at ten.”

And I have been there ever since. At first, I was just a clerk, ringing up books. It was like being in hiding. I was relatively safe from running into people I used to work with, since none of them read anything but the
Wall Street Journal
. You could spot me in the T-shirted masses of other clerks because I always wore a tie. I considered being a bookseller not just a job. I looked on it as an honorable profession.

Now I’m the fiction manager, in charge of picking and choosing, all the ordering, and deciding which books get featured spots in the department. It’s a job that requires both caution and bravado, and I like doing it. And I’m good at it.

Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it’s my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o’clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.

I recommend books to people, and they read them, and then they come back and tell me what they thought. Most people in the neighborhood know me by name by now, so it’s a personal thing. Even with the onslaught of digital books, and all the threats to the book-selling business, there are people who still like the heft and feel of a real book, who like having a stack of books by their bedside tables, waiting to be read. Our store is under siege, now, but I think we’ll be OK, at least for long enough for me to finish out my working life.

I finally moved out of Hovel Hall and into a small apartment in the Village. I was lucky to get it. My rent is stable, even though prices in the Village have gone through the roof. Every week, when I change the sheets, I look at the half of the bed that has not been slept in, as pristine as the day the sheets were changed, and I wonder what happened to the possibilities of my youth. No one has ever slept in that bed but me, and I have only slept on one side of it. In the same chaste, deathlike position every night. All those years. All those years that have passed, in the utter silence of that apartment—silent except for the clink of a knife against a fork, the shutting of a cabinet door, the opening of an envelope.

My one extravagance is sheets. They are fine percale cotton, simple but exquisite, and I have them washed and pressed by a Chinese lady in the neighborhood. It doesn’t cost that much, and it is a dying art, pressing a sheet perfectly. Jackie Onassis, they say, had her sheets changed twice a day; once when she got up in the morning, and again after her nap. Imagine.

I am not that extravagant, but ironed sheets is one thing I insist on. My last, my only extravagance. At night, on Mondays when I change the sheets, when I get into my freshly made bed, when I feel and smell the crisp percale, I think of it all, and I am perfectly happy.

And I am still loved. I always will be loved. On the street. In a roomful of strangers. Walking up the stairs at the opera, which I attend twice a year, unnoticeable in the jeweled crowd. When I go on a cruise every five years, a single face in that happy crowd of couples, I know something they don’t know. I am loved. Holly gave me that, and it cannot be taken away. I have never forgotten. I amloved.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She Walks in Beauty

W
e were short-handed. We often are, in the summer when it’s a good beach day. Come August, a beautiful day, half the clerks call in sick. So I was filling in at the registers. It’s so easy now. It hardly takes any thought or skill at all. Everything is done for you. Scan. Swipe. Sign. Transaction over. I can’t remember the last time I saw cash.

The hands were lovely, and wore no jewelry at all. Perfect nails. She had two books, popular novels. On top of them was a $50 bill. I looked up, and it was as though no time had elapsed at all since I had last seen her. Not the twenty years it had been. Not a nanosecond. Time, or an assembled team of the world’s finest surgeons, had been good to her.

Carmela had always been lovely, and there she stood, unambiguously and unimaginably more lovely than ever. She always said that the secret to growing old gracefully lay in wearing a little less makeup every day, and that morning she had no makeup on at all, her hair tied back in one of those things, tendrils still damp against her neck. I stared at her eyes, glittering like sun reflected on an azure sea. Her hair, once dark, was now streaked with highlights. Women do that as they age, they lighten, become air, their souls ephemeral with memory and experience. Men become more ponderous with the passing of the years, heavy with regret.

“I . . . I just came from Pilates. I never thought . . .”

“You look astonishing. As always.”

“I look like a sweaty rat on a barge.”

“Queen of the barge rats, then. As ever. I’ve . . . well I’ve been thinking—”

“You were never very thoughtful.”

“—of you a lot lately. Of those days, and all that happened, all that passed between us, and, well . . . I’ve just been thinking, is all.”

“It went by so quickly. The flare of a match.”

“I remember every second of it.”

“Was I horrid?” She glanced over her shoulder. “We’re holding up the line. They’ll riot soon.”

“I’ll throw them crusts of bread. Have lunch with me. Not horrid. Ever.”

“I don’t . . .”

“Not for old times sake. I have something I want to say to you. I’ve been thinking about it for, well, for years, and it has to be said. I never thought the chance would come, but here it is, one in a million. Have lunch with me. I promise, no damage will happen to either one of us.”

“Let me just pay for the books . . . Please, Rooney, I . . .”

Nobody had called me that for years. I took her money, our hands touched briefly, and once again, when I put the change in her palm. “I can’t . . . let me . . .” she turned to go. The next person stepped forward, but Carmela turned back.

“What time? Where?”

I named one of our favorite restaurants.

“It’s been closed for years. Heartrending. Tragic, really.”

“Name your favorite.”

“Marea. The kind of place we always liked.” She spelled it. “Do you know it?”

“No. I’ll look it up.”

“Central Park South. One o’clock.”

I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early. It was very fancy, in an austere, cream-colored sort of way. Beautiful people at lovely tables, the room bristling with servers intent on doing one thing at a time exactly correctly. The summer glare from the street softened by curtains of silk gauze, saffron colored.

They put me at an obscure table for two near the kitchen, and I knew Carmela wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t have the heart or the clout to ask for another. Why would they give it to me? They probably wondered how I had come to wander into their restaurant in the first place, The table was next to the silverware station, and the calm of the room was constantly disturbed by the busboys hurling clean silverware into the drawers, or the waiters more gently taking out what they needed, piece by piece.

She walked in from the torrid day at one fifteen, carrying a shopping bag, and she looked as though she moved in a cloud of air-conditioning. Red shoes, and nobody ever wore red shoes better, a pale, rose-flowered silk dress, carrying a red, wide-brimmed straw hat in her right hand. She looked expensive. Also fresh, perfectly at home in the world, in that way some New Yorkers of means have. Lovely from toe to head, her eyes concealed by dark glasses that she took off with a grace that defies description. A lowering of the head. A lifting of the glasses, revealing the eyes. A slight smoothing of her hair. Stunning.

She spoke graciously to the maître d’, who actually kissed her on both cheeks, and he then led her to me, but decided instantly to change our table to one for four in the center of the restaurant, like the crown jewel. She gracefully laid her red hat on one of the empty place settings, and took no notice of the fuss that was being made of her. A kind of all-encompassing and gracious gratitude pervaded her every gesture. The busboy might have been her long-lost son.

“Hello, Giovanni. How is your mother?”

“Very well, signora. She comes home soon.”

“You must miss her.”

“I miss her cooking. Flat or sparkling?”

“Sparkling, I think. It’s so hot out.” He turned to go. “And a glass of champagne. The usual.”

She turned to me. “I gather you don’t drink anymore.”

“Why would you say that? I don’t, but how did you know?”

“Because, my sweet, once-upon-a-time husband, that is the arc of your life. Wretched excess followed by pious sobriety.”

“I’m hardly pious.”

“You’d be the first, in my experience.”

“Trust me.”

“Sober libertine, then? Did you become a homosexual, as I always thought you would?”

“I did. Not that I march in parades or anything.”

“Not Out Loud and Proud?”

“Just not out loud.”

“And is it fun, being a homosexual?” Her smile was not in the least sarcastic.

“I’m not very good at it, to tell the truth. I was better with the other. I was a killer with women. How about you?”

“Children, yes. Nicholas, Jack, and Carmela. I couldn’t help myself. Husband, not at the moment.”

Before I could speak—and I didn’t want to speak because we were too quickly falling into the old ways, the thin, heartless badinage—the water appeared and was poured, not a single drop on the pristine tablecloth, and then the waiter came to take our order.

“You’ll have the skate?” I asked Carmela.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve never known you not to order the skate whenever it was on the menu.”

“That was years ago, darling. Years and years.” She turned to the waiter, “I’ll have the skate.” She turned back to me with a radiant smile full of perfect teeth with which she had not been born.

“I have a present for you.” She handed me the shopping bag. Inside was a mink lap robe, lined with chamois. Exquisite. Vastly expensive. At the height of summer. Something told me that somebody else had once given it to Carmela, perhaps as recently as last Christmas.

“I know you were always mad for exquisite bedclothes.”

“It’s magnificent. Thank you.”

“You were saying?”

I put the bag on the floor by my seat. “I wanted to say something. I’ve been waiting for years to say it, and, when it’s said, we can talk about anything you want. Anything but that.”

“Your lunch. Your rules.” The smile was gone from her face, but not the radiance.

I paused a minute, took a sip of water. I wanted to, had to get this right. This moment would only come once. “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.
Totalement, completment, tragiquement.
It was at that dinner at my loft. You brought the saber dancers. You had on red shoes, like today, and a red suit, and ruby and diamond earrings. The minute I saw you, I was lost in love. And then things happened as they did, and, for a time, you were mine. You were my world. And then the world fell apart, my fault entirely. But I have never stopped loving you. Not for a minute, not for a second. Never. I love you still.”

She sat for a long minute, looking, not at me, but at the chic diners in the exquisite room. Then she turned to me, and the full force of her eyes burned for the last time into my heart. She reached out a hand as though she were about to touch me, on the arm, on the and, and then she withdrew and put her hands in her lap.

She looked at me, then, not with love or passion, but with her whole heart’s worth of sympathy and compassion. “I know” was all she said, with a tenderness and a sweetness that would be enough to last a lifetime.

I thought of Holly. I said, “I’m telling you this because the greatest sin is to love somebody and not to tell your love. If you stay silent, they don’t know, when they walk down the street or into a room full of strangers, that they are loved. You are loved, and that can never be taken from you. It’s not much. It’s all I have. Maybe it’s enough.”

“I’ll hold it in my heart for as long as I live. Thank you.” I could tell she meant it genuinely.

The food arrived, and we ate in silence, the way couples who have been married for twenty-five years do. Occasionally one of us would mention the weather, or the baseball season, but never the past, and never the present. We were no longer a part of the conversation we were having. It was just generic talk. We might have been strangers thrown together at a table on a train or a cruise. But it felt nice. Comfortable. I was going to be late getting back to work, but I didn’t care.

Carmela had sorbet and an espresso. She didn’t rush, and I was grateful for that. I would never see her again, at least not to speak to, and I wanted it all, the flowered silk dress, the carmine hat and shoes, to burn themselves into my mind so I could hold on to every detail forever. And she knew that, she who would pick up the hat and gather her bag and go back to her life, her children, to whatever awaited her that afternoon. Hair appointment. A meeting with a decorator to pick new curtains for the library.

But it couldn’t last. It was now after two, and she gathered up her bag and the red hat, and shook my hand in leaving.

I said in parting, “Carmela? It was nice, though, wasn’t it? For a while?”

She paused. “It was . . . amusing,” she said. “There’s a difference.”

I watched until she disappeared, Carmela speaking to the maître d’, and then walking out the revolving doors and into the sunshine, where she put on her sunglasses and turned toward Fifth Avenue, walking without haste.

When I called for the check, I was told the lady had taken care of everything. Somewhat embarrassed, but also touched, I left forty dollars on the table and went out into the stifling heat and walked back to my job, to the bookstore, to the whole of my ordinary life.

The next day, I went to a jeweler and bought a wedding ring. On the inside, I had engraved “Love Always—Carmela.” I wear it because when I do, people on the street can look at me and see that there is some woman in this world who loves me enough to marry me. It gives me comfort, and a certain sense of pride.

And, on some days, certain good days, or some nights when I slip into my crisp and perfect sheets, I almost believe it.

Love always.

Carmela.