The Fall of Princes Read online

  It was going to be great. Elegant. People would come over and cavort until the small hours. Champagne Brut in the minifridge, long lines of cocaine on the glass-topped cocktail table. Super Bowl parties. Like a clubhouse with room service. The staid pictures on the cream-colored walls would look down nightly on scenes of such debauchery they would blush with shame and turn their faces to the wall.

  I kept $2,000 in cash in my pocket at all times. There’s no money like cash money, Shirts used to say. The other thing he used to advise was that one should never tip a bartender with coins. Coins were trash, to be swept onto the floor for the busboys to clean up.

  The $100 bills in my pocket were like condoms for my self-esteem. The smaller bills were there for the endless tipping involved in living in the Pierre Hotel. It cost me, on average, about sixty bucks to get from my room to the street, more if it was raining and I wanted a cab. This made the staff unbelievably deferential to me, greeting me respectfully by name every time they saw me.

  The hotel even moved a baby grand piano into the vast sitting room of the suite, so that Fanelli could sing when he wanted to, which was any time anybody asked him. He adored Anthea, but she wouldn’t let him smoke in their apartment, so he bought a dog, and every night he’d walk the dog down to the Pierre and join in the fun, smoking a fat cigar while the doorman watched the dog. Every night was a fiesta, music by Fanelli. He couldn’t really have thought he was fooling his wife, but I guess, even early on, there are secret arrangements that are made between married people.

  Just stepping out of the revolving door of the hotel was a thrill, after a dozen sharply worded good-mornings. Outside was Madison Avenue, the street of dreams. I would wander Madison Avenue every day, drooling at the collection of shops and the merchandise therein. I would pretend I had ten thousand dollars, and see how many blocks it would take before the imaginary ten thousand was spent. Some days, I could get all the way to Ninety-Sixth street. Some days I couldn’t even go a block. I bought myself a present every day.

  I sent out a hundred résumés, accompanied by a fine letter with the Pierre’s logo embossed on the eager cover letter. Then I waited. And still I waited. Nothing came back, not a word. I gave out the Pierre’s number, thinking it added a touch of gloss. Nothing. Sometimes I would take a nap in the afternoon, and ask the telephone operator to hold any calls until I let her know. It was a useless thing to do. There was never a call.

  Still, it was going to be great. They even let me smoke in the room, which was a thing that was increasingly hard to come by. Smoking was being stamped out everywhere, one of life’s great pleasures, but in really expensive hotels they still let you smoke. I delighted in every puff. I was riding a river of cash that was without end, or so I told myself, except in the dead of night when the cold sweats came and I calculated exactly how far I was from zero.

  Security at the hotel was almost invisible, making you think you roamed free and safe in a blessed and fragrant meadow, filled with those enormous flower arrangements, although there must have been a thousand eyes following your every move. So you had to be careful who you brought home with you, you didn’t want to sully the splendor and grace of the hallways with the wrong kind of riffraff. I brought somebody home every night, women, men, sometimes both. Fantastic men and women you paid money to have sex with, paid in cash and cocaine. The staff and the elevator operators never said a word. At Christmas, I gave everybody who could walk fifty dollars, and I gave Mr. Papandreou, the manager of the hotel, five hundred. I put a tree in the room, and we all decorated it, and the hotel sent champagne and a cake. It was like being Eloise with six-

  pack abs.

  It was the perfect way to live. I might as well have taken all my money and put it in the middle of Fifth Avenue and poured gasoline on it and set it on fire. I woke up every morning terrified that this time I had caught AIDS from a hooker, but I still brought them home with me almost every night. I didn’t want to sleep alone. I was lonely. And there was such marvelous beauty to be had.

  Then, one night in January—it was snowing, I remember—I met Casey on Lexington Avenue, strolling and trolling with the other hookers. The other women were warm and enticing, dark and lissome and eager. They emanated warmth and comfort.

  Casey was chilly. Not little-matchstick-girl cold in any pathetic way, she just looked chilly as the snowflakes swirled around her boyishly short blonde hair, and settled, leaving diamonds of water all over her head, a sparkling tiara under the streetlight.

  I stopped and said hello, in that way you do, letting her know that she was, for the night at least, the chosen one. She pulled her coat more tightly around her and said hello so softly a passing taxi whisked it away.

  Something happened. I took her hand. That is never done, not ever, but she put her small, cold hand in mine as naturally as anything, and we began to walk back up Lexington and toward the hotel. We looked like any affectionate couple anywhere in the world.

  I told her my name. My real name.

  “Casey” was all she said.

  “Well, Casey, here we are.”

  “And here we go.”

  “Again you mean.”

  “No. No. I didn’t mean anything. Just trying to be friendly.” She paused. “You say hello a lot in this business.”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello. But nobody takes your hand. Not ever.”

  “It’s a pretty hand. Warm?”

  “Warmer now. Thanks for asking. Where are we going?”

  I told her and she tried not to be impressed, but you could tell she was. And you felt a loosening, a relaxing of her guard. Nothing bad would happen to her at the Pierre. Nothing bad ever happened to anybody at the Pierre.

  We walked along in the snow. “It’s nice, though,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Holding hands. Nobody wants to touch you except when, you know, when they’re fucking you.”

  “You looked cold.”

  “Most people wouldn’t notice. To them you’re only one thing. A catalog of body parts.”

  We got to the hotel, and went to my room. Casey admired the view, and looking down at all the rooftop gardens, winter now, she said that one day she was going to have a garden like that. Casey looked at the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, hazy in the snow and the mist, and mentioned Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Then we took our clothes off. She liked a dim room, and I did, too, that moment when the shadows disappear into dark and you’re living solely in the land of touch and desire.

  She was terrible in bed. Not for lack of trying, or even pliability and kindness, but this was a girl who wasn’t going to win any awards at the Hooker Ball.

  She tried. Her body drew warmth from mine and her skin became like a dawn rose. But she knew none of the tricks of the trade, the oh baby’s and special posturing and entreaties that made most good hookers worth the five hundred dollars. She didn’t know, as they did, how to make you feel, in that moment, in that slanting light and swirl of snow, to make you feel like the only man on earth.

  Casey was an amateur, and that kind of turned me on, but the more I approached, the more my body sang, the deafer she became.

  I drew away. “I know,” she said. “I’m not very good, am I? Most men don’t care. They just don’t tip me. I don’t do this because I want to. It’s OK. You don’t have to pay me. It’s not your fault. You are . . .” she thought for a minute, “. . . éblouissant.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s French. Means ‘dazzling.’ ”

  She got out of bed and began to collect her things. In the dim light, her body was lovely, ghostlike, sturdy but not thick, the body of an Eakins schoolboy, except for the breasts, which were firm and full, and hung from her chest with the kind of loft that vanishes before twenty-five.

  “Why do you do it?”

  Her clothes were bunched in front of her breasts, making me want to see them again, wishing the scenario had played out in other ways. Still, I’d spent five hundr
ed dollars on more stupid things than Casey, and I didn’t feel cheated. There is such an abundance of loveliness in the world. Too much, actually.

  “To pay for my lessons. Singing lessons.”

  “You sing?”

  “Oui.” Jean Seberg, that was it. Jean Seberg in Breathless.

  “Sing for me.”

  “I will, if that’s what you want. It’s my best thing. Maybe you won’t feel so . . . so disappointed.”

  “Trust me. I have plenty of sex. I’m not disappointed. Not at all.”

  We moved to the sitting room. In the darkened room, the sky from the thirty-seventh floor glowed with an interminable and ineffable beauty. The moving flakes. So many lives so far below us. People hurrying. People fucking or fighting in the next room.

  She sat at the piano. Naked, she felt the keys, she moved her fingers gently in the air as though trying to catch a moth without causing it harm.

  Playing softly, she sang. “When this old world gets tired and mean . . .” She sang “Up on the Roof” and, had he been there, Fanelli would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

  They say Nina Simone had it. Callas. Marvin Gaye and James Taylor. Mandy Patinkin. They have something in their voices that is beyond music, that transcends notes and cadence and melody and has the power to kill you and bring you back to life all in the same breath.

  Maybe it was an illusion, maybe she was just a pretty girl with an average voice in the night. Maybe it was the warm, naked flesh and the swirling snow and the lives and dreams of all the people of New York in 1987 who were not here at this moment. Maybe it wasn’t her voice, which was undeniably beautiful. It was the whole secret history of her life and what had brought her from there to here. Or it was the fact that she was producing this magic just for me, a man looking surely at the end of the rope, but I wept to hear it. All I had wanted was a quick fuck from a talented hooker. I hadn’t thought. I hadn’t thought that this could happen. This transient beauty, these tears in the snowstorm. I don’t cry. I hadn’t cried since I got fired, not when I left The Firm, not when Carmela took everything. Casey looked up, saw the tears and heard the sobs, but she said nothing. She somehow knew that I was crying for myself, not for her, and that it was a private thing, too deep and dark to touch.

  She finished and began to dress. “Well,” she said. “That’s me, then.”

  This really happened, too. It happened to me. It’s mine, and you cannot take it away from me. It was the apex of my youth. You think it’s some cheesy scene out of a movie? Well, fuck you. A boyish young girl sat naked in room 3710 of the Pierre Hotel on a night in February in 1987 and sang just to me, and, when I am dying, it is this scene that I will remember with the most gratitude.

  As Casey dressed, I got out my checkbook and wrote her a check for $25,000. I gave it to her as she left, made out to cash. I didn’t even know her last name. I gave her my gloves, too, from Bottega Veneta, miles too big for her, and told her to stay warm. As she left, I asked her if she could come back the next night and she agreed.

  We met every night, and every night the scene played out in exactly the same way. She would play and sing, and I would cry.

  And she would never say a word to comfort me; her voice was all the comfort she had to give. Life existed in intervals for me: between the time I was with her and the time I wasn’t. We never made another attempt at sex.

  I gave a party and she came. She came and sang and enchanted a roomful of heartless, mercenary traders and their girls. They were enchanted with her, of course, every single one of them fell in love with her during that party, but with whatever shred of decency they had left, they never came on to her, assuming she was my girlfriend. Which, in a way, she was.

  So for a while it was actually great. Drunken nights watching the hoops. Liquored-up orgies with women we met in bars. I paid my way, and took my pleasure in the same way I always had, but the night sweats got colder and more frequent. I realized one day that I was going to lose everything I hadn’t already lost, and I sold the car, getting exactly half what I had paid for it a month before. The car had 746 miles on it.

  But, whatever else, I would race home like a junkie to meet with Casey and sit naked and have her sing for me alone. Then Turner, a trader who had been on the floor about six seconds, realizing that our relationship was chaste, stepped into the scene and snatched her away from me. In time, he married her. Then I sat alone at night weeping, and the piano stood silent until I asked them to take it away.

  It’s a strange feeling watching the bride walking down the aisle and knowing that you’ve fucked her.

  She ended up living in a four-bedroom penthouse on Park Avenue, wearing a heart-shaped diamond ring bigger than Dolly Parton’s. She and Turner are now the other people, the people I see going into their boxes at the opera, glittering, as I walk up the stairs to the family circle, where the cheap seats are. We aren’t friends, and they don’t even notice me in my ordinary pants and windbreaker.

  No, there is no acknowledgment. She came to me for the last time on the night before her wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, which was held in the hotel. She came and sang for me one last time, but we both sat, clothed and awkward, and her voice, pretty enough, didn’t have any power over my heart anymore and my crying days were over.

  Two years later, she somehow found me again, and sent me a check for $25,000 along with a recording of her voice singing “Up on the Roof.” There was no note.

  I maxed out my credit cards. I applied for others, more and more obscure ones, and maxed them out one by one.

  Then the phone calls started coming. I had thought I was protected, but evil Carmela gave out my whereabouts, and, every morning, I had to deal with a lot of harsh criticism from men and women in places like Cleveland, who wanted me to give them money.

  Then the mother of them all, American Express, turned off the faucet on my platinum card. I owed them $56,000, of which I had three thousand in the bank and the thousand in my pocket.

  There were acres of beautiful things, like Charvet shirts and Armani suits I had never even worn, hanging in the overflowing closets, and I realized with regret that clothing was not real estate. It was not a negotiable or fungible item.

  Within minutes of the call from Mrs. American Express, there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find an extremely nervous Mr. Papandreou.

  “Sir, most regrettable, this visit. It’s about your bill.”

  “I know. I just got a call from American Express.”

  “Do you have another credit card we might use?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Any other form of compensation?”

  “None.”

  “We’ve enjoyed your company, but . . .”

  “I know. When?”

  “By three o’clock. That’s all we can allow for late checkout.”

  “Today?”

  “Unless you have some other way to pay.”

  “I’ll need some help. There’s a lot of stuff.”

  “Whatever you need, don’t hesitate to ask. You have been a special friend to the Pierre.”

  Within minutes a housemaid and two bellmen were in the suite, helping me to pack. When we were done, I gave each of them fifty dollars and by two fifteen I was on the street with six suitcases and four hanging bags, getting into the complimentary shuttle that the hotel offered to its special guests. Every staff member shook my hand as I passed through the lobby, some even hugged and kissed me. One asked if I needed any money. My face colored with shame and embarrassment. But I took the fifty he offered.

  Given midtown traffic, it took a while to get home. Isaac, the driver, who had carried me to clubs nobody had even heard the name of yet, would not shut up the whole way about how better days were just around the corner.

  I knew better. If you let life do to you whatever it wants, it can do some terrible things.

  Hovel Hall was one of those terrible things that life can do to you: 53 West Thirty-Fifth Street,
fifth floor. When I was really drunk, it was impossible to enunciate even my own address.

  Isaac offered to help with the luggage, but he had a bad back and wore a brace and I couldn’t do that, so I gave him fifty, and waved good-bye as though I were setting sail for Europe on the Île de France. As I was carrying the first two suitcases up the five flights of stairs to the apartment, crackheads stole all the rest. Good-bye, Brioni. Good-bye, Charvet. Good-bye, Armani and all the rest, a fortune’s worth of clothes.

  My grandfather’s gold watch was in one of those suitcases. It meant the world to me, that watch.

  Hello, Honey! Hello, I’m home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Eleven-Foot Hooker

  Walks the Walk

  The street was not a solid thing. It was fluid as a river, an undulation of asphalt and cement, swarming with rats and crackheads and hookers. You could feel the waves in your body. Nothing was stable or solid, all was moving, hawking, fighting, stealing. The first year back in the Hovel, I was mugged five times on my own block. Twice in broad daylight, once with a knife at my throat. I learned to carry enough cash on me that the average crackhead would be satisfied with his take, but not so much money that my thin bank account would be drained in a single snatch, a late-night grab.

  One mugging, in broad daylight, was so cleverly done I was stupefied. A man bumped into me, nudged my shoulder. Not an unusual thing on a busy street. At that exact instant, two other guys grabbed my arms, one apiece and pulled them behind me, while a fourth shot his hands in my pockets and pulled out the cash that was there. Over in ten seconds. Brilliant.

  Now that credit cards are everything and nobody ever carries cash anymore, the mugging profession must be in decline.

  There were two hotels on the street where I lived, and four parking garages, so the din was unbearable at any hour. In the day, there was an incessant honking of horns, since, because of the parking garages, traffic crept along, often not moving a foot from light to light, and at night the monster garbage trucks roared their omnivorous way down the block at a creeping pace, stopping every ten yards to hoist mountains of garbage into their yawning, straining maws.