The Fall of Princes (7 page)

I turned to Carmela, who had covered her face with her yellow towel. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Don’t tell me. Tell Delia and Buzzy, if they’ll answer the phone.”

I went in to telephone. I watched Steve McQueen stub out a cigarette before going in to be pounded and kneaded by the Finn. He probably smoked during his massage. He was that cool.

Later on, two years later, I had engraved cards made at Tiffany that said:

Mr. _________ deeply regrets

His behavior of last evening

And begs your indulgence.

But that was later, when the incidents became both more frequent and more outlandish.
Egregious
might be the word I’m after. Incidents of mortification became more and more frequent, fueled by money, by a general malaise, a hatred of almost everything and everybody, even the people I loved the best.

I used to say, “I have to . . .” all the time. Not just, “I have to go to California next week,” but, “I have to go to the Callaways for dinner.”

Life had become such a burden. Everything irritated me, and nothing so much as myself.
Chacun à son dégoût
.

Buzzy answered on the second ring, as though he had been waiting for my call. He was completely alert. His head didn’t throb. His house was spotless, the cleaning people having shown up within two hours after the cocaine was all gone and the guests had left.

He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink or do drugs. Said he’d tried them once in college and didn’t like them, so he never did them again. Tried them once. I said to him, “You think it was easy for us? We had to work at this, you know.” He was a doctor, so he knew things. He had given me my last physical and his only advice when it was all over was, “Change lanes.”

“Buzzy. Did anybody die last night?”

“The final count is not in, but it appears the night passed without casualties.”

“Any collateral damage?”

“You know that rug in the hall? The one that was made two hundred years ago in Persia?”

“Pretty thing. I like it.”

“Liked.”

“Gone? Just like that?”

“Well, not exactly just like that. You set fire to it, testing the flammability of Poire Wilhem.”

“I set fire to your rug.”

“Besides telling Laszlo he was an amateur, you had time for other sports.”

“Can it be repaired?”

“I wouldn’t know. Maybe the people at the landfill could tell you.”

“I feel terrible.”

“You’re a piece of shit, did anybody ever tell you that?”

“All the time, Buzzy. All the time. You know why? It’s the truth. Let me buy you dinner.”

“Why don’t you buy me a rug?”

“How big?”

“Three feet eight inches by eight feet six inches. Musso’s?”

“Eight o’clock.”

I spent the afternoon at Aga John’s, on Melrose, where I found a Tabriz, silk, an astonishing six hundred knots per square inch. It was the only one they had that was the right size, so I got it and had it delivered. $42,000. Delivery another $300.

Dinner was delightful. The rug was never mentioned, and we all went home and slept like babies.

Carmela and I caught the noon flight from LAX and arrived at midnight, went home, made love in a mad rush before the sleeping pills kicked in, and I bounced out of bed at six, to meet Bart the trainer.

The weekend had cost a total of $50,000, rug included.

I made the money back by lunchtime. I bit the bullet and bought Carmela a diamond and ruby bracelet at Cartier for $78,000 plus tax. A steel plant in Des Moines went bankrupt, but at least my marriage was temporarily intact.

As I said, in those days we were vampires. Charming, glittering vampires.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Origin of the Species

I
had meant to be an artist. It didn’t much matter what kind of artist, it was just that there was something inside of me that needed to be expressed, some beautiful and true thing that would explain everything, about me, about the world I was making for myself, about my love for my family and my fellows, and I couldn’t find the words or way to get it out, to make it sensible. It was a simple thing. I knew that. Like, “I love you,” but that wasn’t it. It was deeper than love. It was something primal and true and old, yet still fresh as the first slash of alizarin crimson on a newly gessoed canvas. It was near, always near, but always just out of reach. All I had was the requiem for the thing that needed to be said.

I had a recurring nightmare all through my childhood. In the dream, which came to me almost every night, I had something terribly wrong with me, some incurable and painful ailment, but when I opened my mouth, in the dream, to describe the ailment or to cry for help, no words came out. I was mute to my own pain, unable to explain it or make it go away. I would wake up, covered in sweat, gasping for air, making guttural animal sounds in my throat. Sweat would film my face, and I would sit up in my bed and wait for first light, mute and ill and terrified.

After I graduated from college, I went to Europe for two years, on an extremely prestigious fellowship my parents could never remember the name of. Two years abroad, in England, France, Italy, and Greece. In London, I took figure drawing classes day after day. I took acting classes at night. On Wednesdays, I went to an old Polish crone who pounded the floor with her cane and begged me to play Chopin the way the Master would have wanted. Every Wednesday, I could not, and I could feel her disappointment turning into irritation.

One Wednesday, she whacked my knuckles so hard with her cane that she broke one of my fingers, and, at that moment, I knew that the Master and I would never be friends, so, so long Madame Lutevya, and I moved, splinted, to Florence to be closer to the great painters I aspired to be one of.

It was a joke, spending my mornings at the Uffizi, my afternoons banging away at one canvas after another. Views of the Arno at sunset. Street scenes of Florence. Gypsy children, begging. The kind of paintings you might see for sale on the Ponte Vecchio, but not as good. I had, in my head, images of such beauty and truth and, on my easel, one mess after another. I finally ripped the canvases from the stretchers and threw every one in the coal-burning stove that heated my freezing apartment. I never painted or played the piano again. I couldn’t play “Chopsticks” now, if you paid me a million dollars.

My voice stayed mute, the words I meant to say frozen in my throat and in my heart, unknown even to me.

I finally, in a flash, decided that, if I couldn’t be eloquent, could never be any more than mediocre, I could at least be rich. So, the return to the States and Wharton and the poker game and my entry into the fray, and, within months, I was unrecognizable, even to myself.

I was vicious, venal, self-absorbed, and totally lacking in feeling. Mea culpa. And I couldn’t put my finger on how this had happened, and I couldn’t shake the guilt that accompanied it.

I went to church on Sundays, the only one of my friends to do so, and, every Sunday morning, in my high-gloss shoes and my Armani suit, kneeling in my pew on the side of the church, always alone, always far enough from my nearest neighbor that I couldn’t be touched or engaged, the tears welled up in my eyes as I sat among the righteous and the chosen, knowing that I was forever shut out from their companionship. I would pray that I would somehow find my way out of this gilded hell I was living in, that I was creating day by day, every day more and more incarcerated in a life I never meant to happen.

But The Street was the ultimate seduction, the beautiful woman who slid into bed with you, naked and perfumed and ravenous. Like the woman, The Street crawled under your skin, and never let you go until it had what it wanted, which was everything you had of a heart and a soul, and no amount of church-going was going to stop that tidal wave of mutual greed. Because I, to my shame, I wanted what The Street offered, the ultimate clusterfuck, the big prize, the endless orgasm.

It’s useless to say I didn’t know any better. My skin crawled every day, and my nights were haunted by booze and raucous chicaneries, but there was never enough booze or drugs for me to forget that I was being unfaithful to the man I had meant to be, the man I had hoped to become.

Some nights, the elusive thing that so needed to be said was like a fishbone caught in my throat, and I took a Valium and a Scotch until the feeling passed. I would be forever mute.

It’s almost never done in the Episcopal Church, but I went to confession. It took place in the priest’s office. He put on his stole, we prayed for a while, and then he asked me what my sin was that I had come to confess.

“Despair,” I said. “I have put money before kindness or conscience, and it’s eating me alive.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a trader downtown. I’m not a good person, not anymore. I have done illegal things. Immoral. That’s not even what bothers me. What bothers me is the person it’s made me, the person I am. I don’t belong in your congregation.”

“Despair is the one sin that removes you from God’s love.”

“I’m afraid all the time.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. My face in the mirror.” I could feel the sweat dripping down the back of my neck. I felt sick with vulnerability. Not a feeling I was used to, and not one I liked.

“You must find hope in your heart.”

“What heart?”

“You have to look for it.” He smiled. “It’s there. Trust me.”

“I’ve become everything I despise. Where would I look for hope?”

“God does not abandon you. Ever. You abandon God, and you must look for him. In the eyes of the poor. In the lost, the less fortunate. Even in the eyes of people who are happy, content with their lot.”

He put his hands on my head, a feeling I have loved since childhood, and prayed over me for a long time. He said, reading from the sweet old
Book of Common Prayer,
“ ‘
O Lord,
we beseech thee, mercifully hear our prayers, and spare all those who confess their sins unto thee; that they, whose consciences by sin are accused, by thy merciful pardon may be absolved; through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

“ ‘
O most
mighty God, and merciful Father, who hast compassion upon all men, and who wouldest not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from his sin, and be saved; Mercifully forgive us our trespasses; receive and comfort us, who are grieved and wearied with the burden of our sins. Thy property is always to have mercy; to thee only it appertaineth to forgive sins. Spare us therefore, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed; enter not into judgment with thy servants; but so turn thine anger from us, who meekly acknowledge our transgressions, and truly repent us of our faults, and so make haste to help us in this world, that we may ever live with thee in the world to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
.’ ”

And then this: “ ‘
The Lord
bless us, and keep us. The
Lord
make his face to shine upon us, and be gracious unto us. The
Lord
lift up his countenance upon us, and give us peace, both now and evermore.
Amen.
’ ”

The priest took his soft hands from my head, and sat back down again.

“Your penance is very simple, and yet you will find it hard. Pay attention. Pay attention to the beauty of God’s world around you. Pay attention to the striving life in every eye. Your salvation is not in yourself. It’s in other people, and the glory of the world.
Pay
.
Attention
. You’ve slumbered too long.”

I waited, tears in my eyes. “That’s all,” he said. “Go now, back into the world, into your life. Never forget this moment.”

On the way out, I stuffed all the cash I had into the poor box, hundreds, and, for the whole rest of the day, I felt better, as though I belonged in the human race again.

It didn’t last. Does it ever? You pay attention, but the mind wanders.

Salvation is not an easy thing, when the sex is so available, and the lines are chopped out on the table, and you know in your heart that whatever happens, you are lost beyond any penance, any redemption.

My fault, you say? Say what you will. I no longer care. I have done my penance. I have paid attention. Believe me, I have paid.

CHAPTER NINE

The Wages of Sin

T
he truth is, we all hated every single thing we had to do to make the ridiculous amounts of money we made. Stupid money, Fanelli called it. Selling long. Selling short. Betting on the come. Advising people to put all their money into a stock we knew would bounce high like a basketball and then plummet like a sinker on the end of a baited line. As long as The Firm made money on the bounce.

Screaming. The perfect metaphor for what was happening inside our souls. Screaming on the floor all day long, hungry to turn the deal that would cheat a fellow worker and a friend out of a lousy thousand bucks.

We had come, by and large, from modest backgrounds. Houses composed of less square footage than the lofts we now occupied. Our parents would have been ashamed of us if they knew what we did all day long. They would have been mortified if they knew what we paid for some genius to come to our lofts and cut our hair once a week. They would have been terrified to see us wake up at six, lying next to somebody whose name we couldn’t quite recall, those we hadn’t managed to scoot out the door in the cold light of dawn, used and discarded like opened soup cans. We didn’t even walk them down to help them get a cab in the rain.

They were anonymous, already gone from my life, facing the long ride back uptown. Walking into their apartments and slinking by their roommates—also just home from evenings just like theirs—realizing, for the first time perhaps, or the thousandth, that this night just past and the others like it were who they had become. These nights they would try hard to forget, the scrawled numbers they would throw away, knowing that if they called, we wouldn’t even remember who they were. And they would sleep for an hour, and then go off to their jobs in publishing houses, at Sotheby’s, at
Vogue,
where they spent all day choosing bracelets for their bosses to review.

And we, standing under the scalding shower, realizing that we had gone to all the trouble to seduce these beauties, only to wash their smells off our skin as soon as the door closed behind them, the memory of them vanishing in lather and running down the drain.

The nights when it was just easier to order Chinese and the dealer and a hooker, who at least knew the score, who didn’t have to have it explained to them, who at least gave value for the money.

This was us, this was who we were.

Viciousness. Mendacity. Manipulation. Promiscuity. Pour on a little milk, and that is what we ate for breakfast. The trainer at six, who ran his finger across our brow and tasted the sweat, then told us what and how much we had to drink the night before.

And, because we so hated the way we made the money we made, we did our best to get rid of it as fast as we could. If you made $1.5 million a year, you spent $1.7, which, as any Dickensian will tell you, is a formula for misery and degradation.

Forty or forty. Our theme song. Our banner. Our indictment. We didn’t care how we got there, we didn’t care about collateral damage.

My parents in Virginia would not have recognized me, even though Wharton had been my father’s idea in the first place. They lived on in the house where my mother was born, where she had polished the banister for forty years. I hired a housekeeper for them, and of course the housekeeper did nothing right, didn’t do anything the way my mother liked, and she was gone after six weeks.

They kept my bedroom for me, thinking I would come to stay with them for Christmas, a room that was filled with my track and field trophies, my letter jacket hanging in the closet, a picture of me and a girl named Ashleigh Conaway, head of the cheerleading squad, on the desk, she in a strapless gown, her hair done up in a French twist, a corsage of crimson and white carnations on her wrist, our school colors, off to the prom, which meant nothing to me except that I might get the chance, if I got her drunk enough, to fuck her in my father’s car. In the picture, I am wearing a tuxedo in which there are condoms in the pocket, but you can’t see that, you see only two young people, arms around each other’s waists, off to a prom maybe or maybe not to get lucky.

My mother forwarded to me a letter she got addressed to me, and it was from a girl in my class who wrote movingly of a clear memory she had of a homecoming dance she went to alone, because she was obese, and thanking me because I was the only boy there who asked her to dance, shaming me with the heated realization that there was once in me a kindness that I had effectively killed on the trading floor. She told me she had lost a hundred pounds. That she was happy now, married with three, and with a view of the Rockies out her kitchen window. I never answered. The person to whom the letter was written no longer existed.

I told my parents there was a room for them in my loft, knowing that they would never come. New York frightened them. When it came down to it,
I
frightened them, even more than the filthy, teeming city.

They didn’t understand a life in which home was simply the place to which you went to change your shirt and phone for the limo. In the entire five thousand square feet, there was not one comfortable chair. It wasn’t to be lived in, it was to be photographed, to open its doors only to lonely girls or crowds of a hundred, who came to watch the Super Bowl.

And I can’t express how thrilling it all was. Watching white-coated waiters, any one of whom could have been in a contest to choose the most beautiful waiter in the world, serving mojitos to men and women, any one of whom might have graced the cover of
Vogue
or
Men’s Health
. My mother imagined me with a girl who would have been on the cover of
Good Housekeeping,
and here I was with women whose IQ often was equal to twice their weight, brilliant, slender girls on their way up, girls who were like racehorses in their beauty, if not their lineage. So sleekly groomed. Such silky hair.

Here I was, knowing that deep in the bowels of my building was parked a Lamborghini of which there were only twelve in the world. Knowing that in London there were shoemakers and tailors who had my measurements on file, my tables at Christmas littered with cards, most of them from shopkeepers.

It couldn’t last. We were bright enough to know that. We accepted that. The pace was too fast. The fire was too hot not to burn out. But, God, who, in our position, wouldn’t walk around with an erection twenty-four hours a day? We were in our late twenties and early thirties.

Forty or forty. It was our curse. It was our blessing. It was our mantra. We were simply the people we were described as being. Big Swinging Dicks. And we hated ourselves and we loved ourselves and the world would survive our shenanigans no matter how much destruction we sowed.

And the thing, the thing I had meant to say, got forgotten, leaving me mute as a stone in the gilded desert.