The Fall of Princes Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  We both stare at the cards, laid out so neatly, four straight rows of thirteen, on Napoleon’s desk. Suddenly, it comes to me. I wait, brow furrowed, then tentatively reach out, withdraw, and finally pick. I want to show uncertainty, although I know already I’ve won the bet. In less than a minute, I’ll be one of them. Is it even what I want? I don’t know. In that moment, I feel the music lessons, the life-drawing classes, the college theatricals. The self I had meant to be. I had wanted to be an artist, to express something that was inside me that needed to be said. The fact that I hadn’t a clue as to what that thing was didn’t deter me at all in the beginning. I worked hard and was terrible at everything. I wrote a bad novel, painted bad pictures, plodded through plays, parts I could speak but never inhabit, until I had had enough and I decided, if I couldn’t be eloquent, at least I could be rich. Beauty was too ephemeral and elusive. Money, that year, was the most tangible avatar of the zeitgeist, and not to grab it would be to miss the common experience of your generation. I thought it would protect me from the disappointment I felt in my own many and varied failures. I couldn’t be what I wanted to be, a maker of beauty, and so I took my father’s advice and went to business school, and caught it like a fever, the pulse of the money that was being made in my country, and I wanted in, because no place else would have me. I could, I thought, work among them and not become one of them. I was sensitive, poetic, and vulnerable to life’s beauty, and now I sat on the other side of a desk that once belonged to Napoleon, one draw of the cards away from the devil. I hated abandoning the dreams of my youth, but in that second, the one thing I want is to win. I draw four tens and the three of hearts. I would learn to play the cello when I was old and finished with all of this. Paint watercolors of seascapes out of season. Act in local theater companies, playing the small parts, the butler, the next-door neighbor, grease paint and footlight bows.

  The Man looks at me across the desk. He smiles, and draws a nine high straight flush, spades in a row, ostensibly beating my four of a kind. But I know and he knows he can’t get a straight flush higher than nine, because I have all the tens. I’ve blocked him by drawing them all. Nine is as high as he can go. He knows it, too, not that anything, anything, shows in his face. He’s done this hundreds of times.

  I discard everything but the ten of hearts, and draw the jack, queen, king, and ace of hearts for a royal flush.

  We stare at each other for a long time. The game is done. The cards are laid on the desk without a word from either of us.

  “That concludes the interview. Thank you for coming.”

  We stand, shake hands. He is either my new boss or just someone I met once in an ostentatious office in my youth.

  The secretary hands me a box wrapped in white paper with a white satin ribbon making a bow. She also hands me a notebook of blank pages, bound in leather, with the firm’s name embossed at the top and my name embossed in smaller letters in the lower right-hand corner. My name is spelled correctly.

  “Good luck,” she says, as she has said a thousand times before.

  I wait until I’m on the train before I open the box. I take out the black-and-gold pen with the familiar logo on the cap and open the notebook and sign my name in royal blue ink.

  Pay attention. You can hear the match strike. You can smell the sulfur, and I allow myself the slightest smile as the train pulls out of the station through the dark tunnels and into the brilliance of the future.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Belated

  Forgive me.

  I try not to think about the past very much. The way it was and isn’t anymore. I try to, you know, go with the flow and live my life as it’s handed to me. But sometimes I wake from a dream and I can’t help it. The past washes over me like the tides and along with the tides comes a sense of mortification so profound I feel it in my scrotum, like when you’re thinking about the likelihood of having your teeth drilled.

  Forgive me for thinking that I was better than you will ever be. Forgive me for thinking that money equaled a kind of moral superiority. Forgive me for not thinking enough about the plight of the poor, the terrible lassitude that overtakes them the moment their feet hit the floor. The poor only bet on losing horses. They only give up things, they never get, until there’s nothing left to part with, nothing of any value except for a faded photograph of their mother and father’s wedding, a small figurine given to them on the boardwalk on one happy day in a lifetime of unending sameness.

  And they never look at the fiber content of the clothes they buy at Walmart. And they have a fear of running out of things, out of butter, out of sugar, out of laundry detergent. And they suffer nothing but one humiliation after another and they buy scratchers with their welfare money at the gas station and they never win a dime.

  For poor people, it’s always Christmas Eve. Alone. Christmas never comes.

  And then there’s AIDS, or the homeless who wait for volunteers to come and dish out a bland Thanksgiving dinner, or food stamps, or bad teeth or being ugly. Forgive me for thinking that these were things that happened to other people on another planet.

  Forgive me, Blonde Girl, for going to the men’s room between dinner and dessert, stopping to pay the check with the maitre d’, grabbing my coat and walking out of the restaurant on a snowy February night to hail a cab and go to a loud, hot room where the people were more attractive.

  How long did you sit there? How long did you endure the pitying condescension of the waiters? How did it feel to leave the restaurant and stand with the snow falling and nowhere to go, the careful makeup, the sequined dress all for nothing in the night, for this insult, and barely enough money in your purse to get home to your flat crowded with girls just like you?

  You had perfect legs. The curve of your breasts beneath the gauzy dress was sublime. You paid three hundred dollars to have your hair colored. And for what? To be left alone in the middle of the restaurant of the week, by a man who doesn’t even remember your name? By a man who never gave it a second thought until the lonely nights descended without expiation.

  Who told the story later over and over as though it were some joke and you were the punch line.

  Forgive me for thinking that sitting courtside at the Knicks at four hundred a pop, three seats away from Spike Lee, was a useful way of spending money. Forgive me for thinking that meeting a movie star was the same as knowing movie stars, perhaps the most unknowable people on earth.

  The truth is, I had no deep respect and took no pride in what I did, I just did it for fun and the high, the restless high roll of it all, and so the money I made meant nothing to me. There was no time, no future. There were only piles of cash. I felt no particular compunction about manipulating the hopes of people less fortunate than myself, people who would never hold the reins of a Derby winner in their hands, as I did every day, all day long.

  It’s three a.m. and sleep will not come. There are too many ghosts in the room. I don’t dwell in the past, as I said, but tonight I’m there again, right there, with the roll and the flow and the vulgar indiscretions and the unbridled narcissism of it all. I’m buried in guilt and remorse. I am overcome with rage that the past is over, irrevocably, that I have my laundry done at the wash and fold, that I know exactly how much it costs to buy a pint of half-and-half for my coffee, that the men and women I spent so many years with are lost to me forever. The darlings of my youth. They speak a different language. I have forgotten the way, the argot, the inflection. I am sad that the places I used to drink and dance and eat and whore are now just numbers in somebody else’s Filofax.

  I see the past, I feel its addictions, but the faces are indistinct and the voices are mute. The past is only the place you came home to one day to find the locks changed, the rooms stripped of furniture, of every object from which you had derived such ridiculous amounts of self-esteem.

  Do they ever think of me? I doubt they do. There are, after all, more interesting topics. Success has a million musical
nuances. Failure is only the monotonous banging of a brass gong.

  Forgive me, French girl I met while she was bathing topless on the beach at the Delano Hotel. Frank bet me I couldn’t fuck her by ten o’clock, bet me a hundred dollars I couldn’t have sex with her by the time we met for dinner, and I showed up at ten with the girl on my arm and said, “You lose,” and Frank gave me a hundred right in front

  of her.

  She was staying at a cheesy motel, and she’d only come to the Delano to meet nice rich men. Men like me. When I put her on the plane, she looked at me with fear.

  Forgive me for thinking I was good-hearted. I wasn’t. For thinking even now that nevertheless God has a special place in his heart for me, that there is a reason for all this suffering.

  Forgive me for thinking that black limousines were public transportation.

  This night will last forever. I am locked in the darkness until the end of time. I have reached the age of regret, and forgive me my hour of lamentation and self-pity.

  We used to go to this sports bar all the time where we would eat bad food and drink endless cocktails and dip the tips of our cigars in snifters of Remy and watch sports on TV. We played a game, night after night for a while.

  The game was called To Have and To Have Not. The idea was you had to think of something you had done that nobody else at the table had done, or something you had never done that everybody else had done. You had to tell the truth. It was understood.

  If you could think of something that made you unique, everybody toasted you and took a drink, although, since we were drinking pretty much continuously, the toasts were pretty much pro forma.

  The early nights, the entries were mostly sexual.

  “I’ve had sex on the pitcher’s mound at the University of Denver.” Unremarkably enough, her fiancé blushingly had to admit that he had, too.

  “I’ve been in a threeway.” Practically everybody.

  “I’ve masturbated at a movie.”

  “In the theater or at home watching a porno?”

  “In the theater.”

  It turns out, a lot of people have masturbated at the movies, mostly when they were teenagers. This is something that happens, the huge, glowing image, the sensual mouths, the whispered dialogue. Somehow, it’s all sexual, sitting in the dark.

  But once the usual sexual shenanigans were out of the way, the entries got both more commonplace and more fascinating. It took weeks until people’s real distinguishing peculiarities began to appear, but, when they did, it was pretty riveting.

  We would sit around all day, trying to think of some minor detail of our lives that would make us drinkably unique.

  Dan said, “I’ve never been swimming. Never even been in the water.” Everybody drank.

  June said one night, “I’ve never tasted beer,” and this was a woman who owned a Mexican restaurant and could pack it away with the best of them.

  Teddy said, “I’ve never taken a photograph.” We couldn’t believe it.

  Then, one night, after a long dry spell, I put out a surefire winner. “I’ve had sex with an animal.”

  By this time we were pretty much past the stage of being shocked at the vagaries of human behavior, but this did raise an eyebrow or two and people started to lift their glasses when crisp, fastidious Teddy suddenly said, “So have I.”

  Glasses down and general discussion of where and why and how it worked and so forth, but one of the rules by then was that nothing got discussed very much. You didn’t have to explain yourself, you just had to stand out from the herd.

  It came to be my turn again and I said, “I’ve had a girl kill herself because I dumped her.” And Teddy again said, “So have I,” and all discussion stopped and we hardly ever played the game again. Too many cats were out of too many bags and I had upped the ante beyond most people’s willingness to reveal their secrets in the middle of a musty sports bar.

  Imagine two people having those same identical experiences; it’s outside the realm of possibility or thought.

  Forgive me my callousness with the details of my life, with the intimacies of other people’s.

  The girl who killed herself was tall. She was twenty-four. So was I. We had been sweethearts in college and then we had broken up while I went to business school, and

  then we had gotten together when we were both in the city.

  She got pregnant, and I paid for an abortion, and then I dumped her. I had just gone to work, thrilling in the fact that somebody paid you basically to play one-on-one basketball all day long, and I didn’t want her around anymore. I wanted the world. But I didn’t want her. She was too small. She was too fresh.

  She wrote me a note, which I still have, and then she slit her wrists in the bathtub. Her parents were deeply mournful and couldn’t figure out why she had done it. I guess you never do.

  I never told them about the note or the pregnancy or the many ways in which I had longed to be free of her.

  I can’t even say her name. I remember everything about her, I remember her softness and her light-heartedness and the way she loved me. I remember her in my prayers and there is no amount of forgiveness that will undo what I did.

  She was my last soft girlfriend. And I used her as a showstopper in a bar game.

  The child would be almost thirty by now, a fine young person, I imagine, with a whole clean life, like untracked snow.

  I would be a better person. I wouldn’t be alone. There would be a card and a call on my birthday. In the middle of the night, I hear his voice, it’s always him, never her, I wouldn’t have known what to do with a girl, and he says, “Hi, Dad,” a way of addressing your father my mother would have considered tacky, and I feel the warmth spreading in my heart.

  She was tall, as I said, the girl whose name I won’t say, even to myself, even at three in the morning, in the dark, in my apartment where everything speaks of loss, where everything I have reminds me of everything I used to have, as though there were still a gold Rolex on the night table, the key to a Mercedes CLK still on my bureau on its silver keychain from Tiffany’s, the Schnabel on the wall, whereas in actuality none of these things exist, or exist in places to which I have no access, the vintage-watch-store window, the storage bins at Christie’s waiting for the market for Schnabel to come back.

  “Hi, Dad.” How much that would have meant to me, now. My birthday goes unmarked. I buy myself a birthday cake, even have it decorated with my name on top, and I have a slice after I eat my takeout sushi at the kitchen table. You still do these little things for yourself because not to do them would mean that you had simply ceased to exist. You have to pretend, when speaking to the ladies in the cake store, that the cake is for a friend, pretend that you’re giving a big party so you need the cake that serves twenty, and you sit at the kitchen table with this enormous and elaborate cake for twenty with your name written in fondant on the top, and you feel worse about yourself than you ever have in your life, but, after the sushi box has been thrown out and the stray drops of soy sauce have been wiped from the Formica table top and the dishes, what few there are, have been washed and put away because you have to hold on to some kind of order or you are lost altogether, you sit down and put a single candle on the cake you bought for yourself and light it and make a wish before blowing it out, and then you cut a big piece of the immense cake and you eat it and you sob as the too-sweet dessert goes into your mouth. I buy myself a tie for my birthday, and have it wrapped, and I open my present and mime surprise, all the while waiting for the phone to ring and the voice on the other end to say, “Hi, Dad.”

  I am so sorry. My sorrow is immense, bigger than the cake, gaudier than the paper wrapping the drab tie.

  I wash the plate and the fork, and put them away, and then I put the rest of the cake back into the box and drop it down the garbage chute for the rats. Happy birthday, rats.

  Hi Dad’s tall mother, an inch taller than I am, and as beautiful as the Blue Ridge Mountains in April, and she had come to N
ew York to be a ballerina, but her height had proved to be a problem. While dancing, she appeared to be not graceful but merely astonishing, and nobody could figure out what to do with her. Even the great Balanchine was baffled. He tried. Her form, he said, was exquisite, but she towered over the boys, and the lifts always ended in some comic disaster, so he turned her away with his usual coldness. She was useless to him, and therefore of no interest, except possibly in bed, where he was already overbooked for the season.

  So she turned to modeling. She trudged the streets of the city with her portfolio, listening again and again to the list of her flaws. She shaved off her eyebrows, in an attempt to separate herself from the other girls who, like her, were almost there but not quite. This did not make her more beautiful; it just gave her a look of continual surprise so that it seemed that everything that came out of your mouth was the most fascinating thing she had ever heard.

  The most beautiful feature of a beautiful woman is her skin. After all, that’s what you touch. Her skin had a kind of clammy, plastic quality to it, so my desire for her was mixed with a kind of simultaneous repulsion. Sometimes, or at least sometimes in those days, I would find myself crazy with desire for a woman who also repelled me, and that would drive me to heights of lust unknown with ordinary women. Not that I slept with many ordinary women. I remember them all, every one, and I think of each of them every day, and always with love and gratitude in my heart. So grateful that they would let me take off my clothes and lie next to them, actually to enter them and become one with their bodies.

  We squabbled all the time, and every time we had a fight, we would go and have our hair cut, so, in our few moments of uneasy truce, between her look of shocked beauty and mine of profligate prosperity, we could pretty much stop traffic on any street corner, just for our gorgeous heads of hair alone, get past any velvet rope because we adorned any room we were in. I was crazy about her. I couldn’t stand her most of the time, but I was crazy about her. As for her, she was “high-strung,” as my mother used to say and almost impossible to live with.