The Fall of Princes (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

The Place I Really Live

I
wake up in the dark.
Au bout de la nuit,
4:06 on the LED. Take a leak. Cigarette. I know I shouldn’t; I mean, in general, generally speaking, nobody should, not after everything we know, not after we’ve watched loved ones die, not to mention movie stars, but I do. I’m an addict. But I especially shouldn’t smoke at 4:06 when I have a hope of getting back to sleep. It makes my heart race.

It makes the heavy covers feel like prison garb. It makes you feel like you live in a cheap bungalow in Los Angeles, California, in a noir decade.

If I did live in Los Angeles, I would never call it L.A. But if I lived in Las Vegas, I would always call it Vegas. These are the games your mind plays when it’s 4:07 and your heart is racing from the nicotine intake.

I turn on the radio and listen to alternative rock from the University of Pennsylvania for a while. My Morning Jacket. Placebo. Ray LaMontagne, who used to work in a shoe factory. Pink Martini, a twelve-member West Coast band that sold 650,000 copies of their self-made CD from their basement.

I keep the volume low, and I feel completely free of anxiety, even though my heart is racing and I’m excited about tomorrow.

Tomorrow, or today, actually, is the first Tuesday of December. On the first Tuesday of every month, I go look at apartments.

I work at Barnes and Noble, and I have Monday and Tuesday off, since I work on Saturdays, and I work the late shift on Sundays, after I go to church. I go to church every week, and put money in the plate, even though I have long ago lost my faith. I guess it’s a kind of hope I feel, a hope that faith and a sense of the miraculousness of life will return to me. It hasn’t, and the priests’ voices drone on in that way that is supposed to be comforting but is actually kind of irritating, but I still go. I sit, in one of my decades-old suits, in a sea of mink and the finest tailored wool, and then I go to work, still in my suit.

I am the only clerk in the store who wears hard-soled shoes. Even though it makes my feet hurt, and even though nobody ever looks at my feet, I wear leather-soled shoes every day I work there. It makes me feel more like a member of the professional class, and less like somebody who just swipes your card. I’m very fastidious, and the kids in their Barnes and Noble T-shirts think it’s weird, but I banter with them, banter is the word, and I know everything they know about alternative rock, and I’m good at helping them out with the inevitable glitches in their computer cash registers, and so we get along fine.

Let’s not talk about what I do with my days off the other three weeks of the month. Let’s not even get into that. I turn the phone off, for one thing, even though hardly anybody ever calls me, my sister from upstate once in a while, but let’s not go into that.

I go to the grocery store and buy a whole week’s worth of groceries, even though I mostly eat in the diner around the corner. I just like the way a full refrigerator looks, the endless possibilities. I pay for the groceries with my debit card. At the end of the week, I throw out stuff that’s gone bad and go get other stuff.

I take the laundry to the wash and fold, the sheets to the Chinese lady who does them for me. I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the same twelve paintings. I have a membership.

But it’s all just normal. You probably do the same things, on your day off. Take your shirts to the laundry. Run an errand. Take a nap. Work in your woodworking shop, whatever your hobby is.

My hobby is looking at apartments I will never move into.

On Monday, I go in and make the appointment. I always dress well, not too well, not a suit or anything, but a nice blazer and a pair of trousers with double pleats, fresh from the dry cleaners so the pleats are razor-sharp.

They make you fill out an application; how much you make, what you’re looking for, how much you’re willing to spend. I always lie. I say that I’m a fashion retail executive. If they ask, I’ll say I work at Saks. I put down that I make $375,000 a year. I put down an address where I do not live, and a phone number that is one digit off my real phone number. It’s not like you have to show proof or anything. You could be anybody. Everybody does it, so you don’t get the follow-up calls.

I GIVE THEM A
fake name. Billy Champagne, a name I heard once in a locker room at a gym I used to belong to. This guy, Billy Champagne, was saying to a friend of his that the only reason he worked out so hard was he needed something to do with all his energy since he stopped drinking. He said that he used to drink a quart of Scotch every day before lunch, down there on Wall Street, and everybody, I swear everybody in the locker room said “Jesus” under his breath at the same time, with a kind of hushed awe. Billy Champagne was this guy’s name, he was built like a linebacker, he had a beautiful, powerful body, and the irony of it never left me, so I use his name. I like the name. I’d gladly
be
Billy Champagne, drunk or sober.

I tell them I’m willing to spend $4,500 a month on a one- or two-bedroom apartment. I say this, knowing they’ll show me much more expensive apartments anyway. Or I say I’ll also consider looking at lofts, live in a more open, abstract kind of way. I’d like to see as many apartments as possible on Tuesday, starting at ten a.m.

I don’t go to the same realtor more than once every six months. Not that they care. Talk about hope. They live on hope. Hope and greed, those guys.

I lie awake in the dark for a long time. I smoke another Marlboro Red. You should see me smoke a cigarette. I do it with a voluptuous finesse. Then I put it out in my mother’s silver ashtray and turn off the radio right after the U of P goes off the air when the Blue Nile has finished their incredibly moving “Because of Toledo.” In the song, which pierces my heart every time, people talk about how lonely and misplaced they are. Like a girl in the song, just a girl, that’s all we know about her, in this diner, I guess, who’s leaning on a jukebox in some old blue jeans she wears. Saying wherever it is she lives she doesn’t really live anywhere.

I could weep for that girl, a fictional desolation living her one spark of life in a diner in a city I’ve never been to. Then I hear the line from Shakespeare: “And I could sing, Would weeping do me good, / And never borrow any tear of thee.”

At five thirty in the morning, the mind caroms around like a squash ball, hitting just above the line and then careening off in some totally unpredictable direction. You go from certain brilliance to absolute drudgery in a second. And, of course, it’s Advent now, and after that comes Christmas, so there’s that, too. I’d lean on that jukebox with that girl and tell her to cheer the hell up. She has no special claim to desolation, in my view.

I go back to sleep until seven thirty. I’ve been awake for an hour and a half.

When I wake up, I’m groggy and I’m still tired, but I’m also excited, the way I always am. It’s a new day. This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I say that as I get into the shower.

I shave carefully. My hair looks brisk. I dress in clothes that are nice but not too nice, an investment banker or a lawyer on his day off, just a blazer and loafers, and then I have coffee. I make a whole pot, even though I just have a cup and a half. It just looks better. Cozier. Then I wash the cup and the pot and pretty much pace the apartment until ten o’clock. I like to be just a hair late.

The real estate office is a new one, very fancy. They have branches all over the city, but they’ve just opened a branch here because the neighborhood has gotten hot all over again. It’s just gone wild, rents shooting through the roof.

I wait, and then the shower comes out. That’s what they call them, the people who show apartments. My shower’s name is Chris Mallone. He wears a name plate on his shirt pocket. I almost slip, then tell him my name is Billy Champagne.

He’s maybe twenty-nine, not good-looking, just a pasty-faced Irish boy, already going soft around the middle. It’s sad to see a person that age look so uncertain in his body. He looks like maybe he drinks too much on a regular basis. He looks like he maybe drank too much just the night before, and stayed out too late. He was probably still out when I woke up to smoke, but he’s all smiles, and he’s got a good firm handshake, even if his palms are a little sweaty.

Six months from now, Chris Mallone won’t be working here anymore. He’ll be selling sporting goods at Paragon. Six months after that, he’ll be bartending in the East Village, selling double shots at happy hour. He’ll move down the food chain so fast and so low he’ll be sucking mud off the bottom of the river. And he’ll stay there bottom-feeding forever.

It’s a shame. He should find his youth a pleasure. He should work out and see a dermatologist. He shouldn’t drink so much. There’s plenty of time for that later. And if he hates his job, and obviously he hates his job, who wouldn’t, he should find something he likes better before the inevitable something worse finds him. It’s not too late.

When I was his age, I had a job I loved. It made me feel rich and powerful. Then I just got eaten alive. It was bad at the time, but it’s not so bad now.

If you go swimming in a river, and you know there are piranhas in the river, and you get your leg chewed off or something, you can get mad, but you can’t get mad at the piranhas. That’s what they do.

So, it all changed. I work in a bookshop now. I wear a name plate, like Chris Mallone. But I’m an American and I have health benefits and a 401K and every five years I save up money and go on a vacation to a country where I don’t know anybody and don’t speak the language. And I go first class. The best of everything, cocktails on the veranda at sunset, a view of the local monument. It reminds me of how it all used to be before it got all fucked up. Without the girls or the drugs or the phone calls.

The apartment I had then was beautiful. This wasn’t so long ago, either. It had chic low furniture and the telephone rang all the time and friends dropped over to drink Heineken and leaf through copies of
Details
and
Wallpaper
and talk about whatever it was that was just about to catch the attention of everybody else. Girls with silken skin and sloe eyes spent the night there, and wore my shirts in the morning when they made espresso, in little cups they would bring to me where I lay naked in bed. The girls, who all had great educations and foreign-language skills and mostly trust funds, had fantastic hair and the kind of bodies you see in
Vogue
magazine.

Then the clock stopped ticking. The spring just snapped one day, and the getting stopped and the shocking process of losing began. Not that I have nothing now. I do. I have a lot. You can learn to live with anything. You can do without so much. It’s just irredeemably different and I go out looking for some vestige of my old life on the first Tuesday of every month, although I’ve learned to get along without it, like an amputee who is a marvel because he’s adjusted so well.

As Chris goes through the various checkpoints on the form I fill out, I notice that the cuffs of my white shirt are unbuttoned. My mother once said you could always tell a crazy person because they didn’t button their cuffs, but I disagree. I think it makes me look like a rock star from the sixties. Like David Bowie in the Thin White Duke days. I’ve seen pictures.

I think you can tell a crazy person because they always wear too many clothes in the summer and not enough clothes in the winter.

Chris looks eager to help, like he smells blood, although I’m betting he wishes he had a shot of vodka and an Altoid to get him through the next couple of hours.

I tell him exactly what I want. I want a prewar building. I don’t need a doorman. I need rooms with architectural details. I’d love a fireplace. I want to move because I’ve gotten bored with my apartment, it’s too bland, although it’s nice for what it is. Chris takes notes, then opens a book and begins to shuffle through the listings.

He says he’s not sure I can get what I’m looking for at that price. I tell him I’m flexible, that the space is more important than the price, within reason. I’ll go to $5,500, if that’s what it takes. I tell him I want a place where I can live for a long time.

The thing is, when I’m telling him all these lies, I don’t feel fraudulent. I got over that a long time ago.

I feel an almost erotic thrill, deep in my body. I’m wearing hard-soled shoes and a Chesterfield coat with a green velvet collar from Turnbull and Asser that still looks almost as immaculate as it did the day I bought it, before the clock stopped. To Chris, there’s no reason to believe I’m not all the things I say I am. This is America, and you can be whoever you want.

The streets are full, the Christmas tree people are already out, have been since Thanksgiving, but mostly they’re just standing around in those gloves that don’t have any fingers on them, drinking coffee and talking with the Korean flower people. Nobody in town is going to buy a tree the first week of December, but hope is just bleeding through everybody’s pores, it would seem.

Chris has a fine film of sweat at his hairline even though the day is brisk despite the bright white sunlight, and he talks on and on about the Knicks and about his girlfriend and about how fast the neighborhood is changing. Meaning getting more expensive, filled with fathers in Barbour coats and horn-rimmed glasses leading their children around to private schools.