The Fall of Princes Page 12

  Overpriced food and bad service were the main virtues of the restaurants we liked, that and room for the limos to wait.

  God, Frank’s was great on bonus day, when we ran up $3,000 wine bills, smoking $400 illegal cigars, rolled by hand on Cuban thighs.

  Trotmeier stayed on in his first apartment on Twenty-Third Street, where the rent was an astonishing $575 a month, not that it didn’t show, an apartment so foul we called it Roach’s Revenge, through the doors of which passed, nightly, the most beautiful, glamorous, completely fucking deliriously luscious girls in New York. He did not give these girls Birkin bags from Hermès or square-cut yellow diamonds at Christmas. He gave nothing but the eloquence of his youth and good looks and his ostensibly gigantic willie. He was a millionaire several times over by the time he was twenty-five.

  Trotmeier would live with each of these girls for some weeks or months, even a year here and there, and the parting was never rancorous. He was not the kind who went around writing his phone number on girls’ tits in nightclubs. He was, as they say, a gentleman. The affairs would always end with the same bittersweet regret, and he truly loved every one of them. He loved the way they smelled, and the glide of their tender skin, and he loved their conversation, always so bright with promise. He left not one of them worse off for wear, and they would always remember that he was not one of the bad ones.

  His great-grandfather had been on The Street before the century turned, and every man in his family had made his living the same way, so they were a kind of royalty, although he was as much a flâneur as anybody, relentlessly social, at the Mudd Club or Area or Reno Sweeney every night, glorious girls on his arm, eating in all the best restaurants, attracting other rich, famous people to him, like Vitas Gerulaitis, who gave him tennis lessons. But he never, not for one minute, took his eye off the meter. He intended to be done with work by the time he was thirty, and he was well on his way. He was also one of the kindest people I have ever known.

  Then Susanne Leiber came into the picture. She was from California, pretty although not the prettiest, but she had something. She was a brightness on her way to a greater brightness. She designed fabulously expensive jewelry for an iconic store on Fifth Avenue, so she worked, and she was wide awake from the minute her lustrous dark eyes opened. Trotmeier fell hard for her, although Trotmeier fell hard for them every time. Sometimes he would watch a girl walk through the door of a bar and say, “Oops, here comes my next mistake.” At any rate, he fell, and it wasn’t long before she had packed her loupe and whatever else and moved into Roach’s Revenge.

  So, for Trotmeier, there was at least the promise of connubial bliss. He went out less. Susanne and Louie gave dinner parties in his wreck of an apartment, four flights up, beef tenderloin and micro greens catered by the best in town. And Mrs. Trotmeier descended, the first time she had ever set foot in Roach’s Revenge, and her general disappointment in Louie’s choice of abode was instant and almost overwhelming. She declared the place unlivable, and proceeded to dismiss and discard all of Louie’s furniture, the ratty futons, the cheap mattress on cinder blocks, the tatty rugs, all of it, replacing it with down sofas and Persian rugs and curtains from Clarence House and real china.

  More important, she brought along Lenny the Exterminator, who took one step inside the door, breathed deeply, and announced, “You have a serious infestation problem here.” And she brought along Loretta—“She’s just like family”—

  whose job was what it always had been, to clean the Trotmeier’s houses, down to running a toothbrush through the cracks between the floorboards.

  In the end, it looked like an English chintz and Chesterfield sofa country house trapped inside a dark, decaying, rat-infested shoebox. Which, I guess, is what most English country houses actually are like.

  So everything was all set. The future clear as crystal. The royal couple, the perfect pair. Mrs. Trotmeier was ready just to call Saint Laurent for the dress, book the Colony Club, and get the damned thing over with, and Susanne and Louie were not averse to this idea. Susanne wanted to walk the vastly long aisle at St. Bartholomew’s, where every Trotmeier had been married since 1897, bridesmaids and flower girls scattered before her like confetti on New Year’s Eve. Susanne wanted a baby. Louie did, too, strangely. Our golden Louie, the first to fall.

  Susanne flew home to consult with her mother in California. There didn’t seem to be a father. DYK. In this case the “D” meant either Dead or Divorced, but in any case his absence was hardly noted.

  Even with Susanne away, Louie stayed away pretty much from the night scene, eating Japanese takeout at the Duncan Phyfe table his mother had installed.

  One night, a bitterly cold night in the winter, Louie was in bed at 12:30 when the phone beside his bed rang. It was Vitas on the other end.

  “Get up, take a shower, dress nice, and be downstairs in front of your door in half an hour.”

  “I’m asleep.”

  “Wake the hell up. I have a surprise for you. I’m sending the car.”

  “Vitas, you’re evil.”

  “Semper paratus, baby. Semper paratus.”

  This story is true. It really happened. Most of the stories you hear about the eighties in New York really happened, like the woman who took the windows out of her tenth-story apartment so she could get a crane to raise a fifteen-foot Christmas tree up and through them and into her cavernous living room. That really happened, too. I don’t think many things like that happen now. Maybe they do. Not my street anymore, as they say.

  Anyway, one o’clock found Louis standing on the street corner, under the light, in a fine cold mist, his golden mane sparkling. Gray slacks, Oxford button-down and a cashmere blazer with horn buttons, never brass. The Trotmeiers didn’t believe in overcoats, whatever the weather, except for funerals, and then only black Chesterfields from H. Huntsman and Sons in London, some of which were generational, having passed from father to son.

  So the rain, the mist really, of a winter’s night, was backlit and Vitus’s yellow Rolls-Royce pulled around the corner, and the driver, who spent his days stringing rackets for Vitas, got out and smartly opened the door and a long arm shot out into the cold night and the hand at the end of the arm was holding a glass of brandy. Can you see it clearly? Can you see it now? Louie could, and he, drawing a short breath and thinking of Susanne one last time, sitting now with her mother in California talking about tulle and peau de soie, probably, and that long walk down the aisle at St. Bartholomew’s, stretched out his own hand, took the brandy and drank it down in one gulp, and got into the back of the car, the door closing noiselessly. The hand belonged to an arm that was attached to a woman who was the current queen of pop divas, a creature so magnificent she had only one name.

  “Hiya, baby,” she said. She was wearing something in the winter night that was practically nothing, and she pulled Louie forward with her long arm and kissed him and she could taste the brandy on his breath, and then she pulled back and said, “Hiya, baby,” again, which was practically all she said or ever needed to say.

  The Diva’s “Hiya, baby” changed the game forever for Louis Paterson Trotmeier. The panther, the stalking carnivore in him, long caged, was at large and on the prowl, and he looked at the Diva and he said, “Hiya,” back, shyly, and then he devoured her whole, at one gulp, like an oyster shooter in a Mexican bar.

  That night, in her vast suite at the Sherry Netherland, where she was staying at huge cost, in the darkness of a bedroom, in a bed on which the sheets were so fine, so crisp, you might have written your will on them, the Diva was everything to Louie. She was not a woman, she was a world, her white skin like a vast desert over which he swooped, touching down here and there, the dry places and the moist, the oasis where he drank himself into life.

  Trotmeier, his patrician body worked to perfection, learned that, until that night, he had known nothing about women, about how to please them and how they could give pleasure in return. The Diva gave Trotmeier an all-access pass into her l
ife and her body, took Trotmeier into her arms, and it was not just great, it was wonderful, and it changed Louie’s life forever.

  During a pause, he said to her, “Baby. I live with a woman. I love her and we’re probably getting married. So whatever happens between you and me has to stay absolutely secret. Secret to the grave. Promise?” And the Diva promised, crossing her heart where a small gold cross glittered in the night, and then proceeded to fuck the brains out of Trotmeier until the swallows woke on the windowsill with the rising sun, and Louie had to go to work where he promptly told me and several others that he had made love to this tabloid headline, this total creation of sequins and sex, and the Diva, after a long and peaceful nap, got on the phone with her publicist and told her everything.

  It went on. Every night, they would go out adventuring in the night, her fame giving them instant access to every pleasure dome—straight, gay, rough, sleazy, elegant—that the vast city had to offer. Trotmeier no longer looked like the picture of health he had always been, not like the scion of one of New York’s oldest and richest banking families. He looked, frankly, like a haggard wreck, and he had never been happier.

  But, in New York, there are no secrets except terminal cancer, and word of the affair was bound to get out.

  Young Susanne Leiber, in the checkout line at Ralph’s in Los Angeles, glanced down at the tabloids, and there was Louie, on the cover, wrapped like a python around the almost naked Diva, at Xenon. She left her groceries in the cart, took the redeye that night, and packed up Louie Trotmeier

  like last night’s dinner and threw him out with the trash and she never spoke to him or saw him ever again. So much for the long walk. She was, as I said, a brightness on her way to a greater brightness, and, in her world, there was no room for peccadillo or passion uncontrolled.

  The Diva went out on tour. She gave Louie eight cashmere sweaters and a gold Rolex that said simply on the back, Semper Paratus. He never heard from her again.

  Susanne went in to work and sobbed over her rubies and emeralds. Trotmeier sobered up and soldiered on, trying to act as if it never happened, knowing at the same time that his life had been changed irrevocably and that, should he outlive the Diva, the first thing he would think about when she died was a small gold cross glittering in the darkness at the Sherry-Netherland, and a girl, a bonfire of celebrity, saying “Hiya, baby,” just to him and him alone.

  One day, Susanne’s boss, the man whose father’s name was on the marquee of the iconic jewelry store, looked into the office and saw her in tears and asked what was the matter, and she told him the story, which he already knew, of course, and he asked her to come spend the weekend with him in Easthampton. Eight months later they were married, and that certainly raised some eyebrows around town. He was decades her senior; he was widely thought to be seriously gay, and here she was, just this nice, ordinary girl with pretty eyes and a somewhat weak chin from Los Angeleees.

  “What does this mean?” Fanelli asked me over a cigar at Frank’s, after hearing of the marriage.

  “They love each other,” I said.

  “But what does that mean? He’s gay.”

  “We know what it means, Fanelli. We just don’t know what form it takes.”

  “Well, fuck me,” said Fanelli. “This beats the hell out of everything.”

  They were the couple of the year, of the decade. They went everywhere arm in arm, with a kind of tenderness one rarely sees in any couple. They meant, for a time, the world to each other, which is the long way of explaining how little Susanne Leiber came, at an early age, to appear on the arm of an aging homosexual jeweler wearing a twenty-eight-carat diamond pendant that had once belonged to Queen Victoria.

  The stone had a name, the Star of something-or-other, and to that name was added Susanne’s. Girls scrambled for imitations of it at Bloomingdale’s.

  They were married for almost exactly ten years, and the diamond went up at auction the year following the divorce. Everything was done with perfect grace and taste. Susanne said of the diamond, “It is my hope it will be given to a lucky woman, as it was in the past, as a gesture of love and worn often and proudly.”

  Why is it that, as we lose our loveliness, the sheen of youth, we lose possibility as well? We acquire, but more is vanished than is given, and nothing makes up for the loss of the swallows at the Sherry, or the Victoria diamond, or the nights at Area when your booted feet ground the glass phials of amyl nitrate into the dance floor. Too much is lost. Too much is gone, every day, and it never comes back. You cannot get there anymore, or you get there to find the house empty of furniture, the baby grand covered with a dust cloth, shrouded silence in empty rooms where you no longer live.

  Trotmeier married a beautiful but dumb model and bought an enormous apartment at the San Remo, but, after two children, he found her one drunken night in bed in his own house with some handsome trainer from the gym, so there was no more of that, no caroling parties during the season at the San Remo. And then he married a nice, ordinary woman who made up for her lack of spark with almost nothing.

  He was almost the last to go after I got fired and everything changed. He still called, losing luster every time we met, showing pictures of his children but never a picture of the wife. His kindness was genuine, but our friendship had to do with a certain time, a certain place, and that place was no longer available to either of us. He always paid for the drinks.

  Maybe that era was like an ecosystem that cannot sustain itself, and watching it die is sad. It is a sad thing. A deadly virus was so deeply embedded in its DNA that the death of the decade was occurring even as it was at its most verdant, its most resplendently dazzlingly alive.

  “I wish . . .” said Louie one night, picking up the check, pausing.

  “You wish what, Louie?” One of the kindest men I have ever known.

  “I wish it could have gone on. I know it couldn’t, she was way, way too much for me, it would seem ridiculous now, but, still, I wish. It makes my dick hard to think about it.”

  Such a sweet man, more than half his life gone now. Children grown. His drab wife always at home. And the ropes up at every club, clubs filled with identical children. The sons and daughters of the Trotmeiers of the world, going out into the night at fourteen, their eyes smeared with mascara.

  “It had to end, Louie. It would have killed you.”

  “Then . . .” he said, picking up the change and overtipping as he always did. The laughing stopped. “Then I would have died happy. I would like to have died dancing with . . .

  I would like to have died. I think I would.”

  It was the last time I saw Louie. We left together, and we took off our gloves to shake hands in a falling snow. The flakes landed on his hair, and for a moment, it shone and sparkled again, a trick of the light. For a moment, in the light, and the breeze, Trotmeier was glorious again.

  Like an angel.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Touching Strangers

  I’m the man on the other side of the glass. I see you, but you don’t see me. You know I’m there, even as I watch you, but I am invisible to you. This is what it’s become. I mean nothing to you, nothing at all.

  If you happen to look into the glass, all you see there is your own reflection. But I want to say that I am there, beyond the reflection, on the other side of the glass where the ordinary people live.

  I wear khaki pants and cotton and polyester plaid shirts and a tie. In the summer, I wear shortsleeved shirts. On each sleeve, the maker has cut a little V and put a button at its apex. I guess that’s the decoration, the adornment that makes this shirt special, although the buttons usually fall off after about four trips to the laundry.

  I wear nothing you would notice. Nothing that says there was ever a grandeur and a hubris about me. When my clothes get dirty, I take them in a blue nylon bag to the Chinese Wash ’N Fold, and they come back at the end of the day looking almost new. The people at the Wash ’N Fold lead simpler lives than I do, humbler, but the
y still manage to go home to Taiwan once a year, where for two weeks they live, with their American money, like kings and queens of yore.

  I say things like “of yore” a lot. I say them to myself as I am watching you not watching me through the glass that I am forever on the other side of. I hate you, with your bustle and blare. You sit and talk of where to store furs and how to treat the hair, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, of bright, new things, and people often laugh when you have finished speaking. You talk about not liking the latest bright thing as much as the New York Times did. You talk about not much caring for the food at the hot new restaurant in which you’re currently having dinner. The noise, the din, of your conversation is appalling.

  And, of course, you talk about money. Money is practically all anybody talks about these days. My mother taught me never to discuss money at the dinner table, but obviously we had different mothers.

  You never talk about me. You detest the ordinary. You detest me. If thoughts of me somehow get into your brainwaves, they disturb the streaming thoughts of what a witty and wonderful life you’re having.

  I’m not having much of a life. It’s not awful, just ordinary. I am trying to accommodate the memories of the life I had with the life I am now living, and I just can’t do it. After being behind the wheel of a Lamborghini going 140 down Sunset Drive at four a.m., it’s hard to get up and put on a polyester shirt and sell books at Barnes and Noble. But I’m not ashamed of it.

  I walk with purpose, and leave almost no impression behind me. I sidle. I never rush. I walk four miles to work in the morning and four miles back, but I always allow plenty of time.

  I am careful, on the street, not to jostle, not to be brushed against. I don’t like the touch of strangers, not even the brush of a raincoat against my bare hand. I don’t ask for much space in this world, so leave me in peace in the little I have.