The Fall of Princes Read online

  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.

  The sound of his voice is comforting, and I feel cheerful and ask all the right questions.

  I take care to step lightly on the sidewalk. Another thing my mother used to teach us was that a light footfall was a sign of good breeding. I’ve learned it pretty well, pacing much of the time around my apartment, so the downstairs neighbors won’t feel they’re living in an Edgar Allan Poe story. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or something. I expend a great deal of energy trying not to look or seem peculiar.

  I’ve been to Phuket, I want to tell sweating Chris, and China. I’ve been to Cuba. Stayed at Hotel Nacional. Stayed at the Ritz, in Paris, which makes me the kind of man who stays at the Ritz. I’ve had more money in my pocket than you have in your bank account most days.

  His girlfriend works at the Chanel counter at Saks. She’s a makeup artist. I tell him we’ve never met.

  Chris keeps walking toward the first apartment. He’s done this yesterday. He did it the day before. As far as Chris is concerned, he’s been doing it forever.

  We look at seven apartments, except that three are in the same building and two of those are identical, just on different floors. A long time ago, I went to a party in one of these apartments, or one in the same line, as they say.

  There is something fatally wrong with every one of them. Well, naturally, there has to be. Like, for instance, one has this peculiar fifties miniature oven, so small you could barely fit a chicken into it. Chris asks me if I cook a lot. Oh yes, I say, I entertain pretty often.

  The technique is to make some generally favorable remark when you first walk into at least some of the apartments so that Chris doesn’t get too discouraged. And, of course, with the first or second apartment, you have to say, Chris, this is exactly the apartment I don’t want. Just so he knows.

  Seeing apartments is essentially a sordid business. Looking at an apartment that the tenant hasn’t moved out of yet makes me really squeamish.

  One time, I looked at this nice apartment, prewar, doorman, nice, and the tenant hadn’t moved out and when I opened the bedroom closets there were all his clothes hanging there and I realized the tenant was a midget. Boy, that was weird, and I imagined myself living this kind of miniature life, never forgetting the deformed little suits, the tiny shoes, always feeling like Alice after she’s gotten really big.

  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and it was rent-stabilized and had a working fireplace.

  You spend about ten minutes in each apartment, each redolent with lives lived totally unaware of your own, each filled with the promise of an imaginary life you might live there, where your clothes would go in the closets, where you would put the sofa and the television, and how loud it would be from the street.

  I always imagine, right off, where I would put the Christmas tree. I know it’s trivial; it’s two weeks of the year and, besides, I haven’t had a tree for years, not a full-sized one, just a little table-topper, as tacky people say, but I don’t know what else you call it when it sits on a table and isn’t even a tree, really.

  But I try to find a spot and picture a majestic eight-footer, covered with all the extravagant ornaments I’ve saved from my old life, the days when everything glittered too brightly.

  Somewhere in these lonely rooms there is the ghost of the life I might have there. Somewhere there is room for a wife and two or three children and a Sussex spaniel and Barbour jackets and travel tickets lying on the kitchen table.

  In that lovely room I see her. Her hair is colored once a month by the best colorist in the city, tawny blonde with highlights. She’s a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton and she never cooks so we eat out all the time, or order in, and the three children are in private school, the youngest girl at Spence, the boy at Collegiate, the elder girl at Foxcroft where we let her go because of her equestrian passions, and, face it, she’s not ever going to be a Rhodes scholar. Every morning, I kiss them and go off to McCann-Erickson where I am a global creative director, working on some of their biggest accounts. I am pivotal. I am rewarded beyond the common imagination.

  I see her in another apartment, I see her. She looks sort of like Barbra Streisand at the end of The Way We Were, and she works as head of one of the departments at the library and I work at a small publishing house and we are very leftist and the children go to the Little Red Schoolhouse and then on to Horace Mann when they get older. We only have two children. Our hearts would hold a dozen, but that’s all we could afford. We use our MetroCards all the time, and we take a subscription in the Family Circle at the Met and the children will grow up to lead lives intense with intelligent ideas and passionate views and commitments.

  Every apartment grows other rooms, grows organically into a place where a family could live for years and years.

  And, in every apartment, there is always a Christmas tree. It’s all covered with beautiful ornaments, Bavarian glass, that we have collected over the years and put away with care and never broken any of, except that one time the tree fell over, all mixed in with funny kids’ stuff and a tree topper made out of rhinestones and popsicle sticks that Kate made when she was six and which now fills her with both uncertain pride and mortification every time we take it out and put it right at the very tippy-top.

  In one life, the Plimpton/McCann life, we give each other extravagant fur and remote-controlled things and bijoux and bibelots, and we leave Christmas afternoon to go skiing in Europe for a week, because the airports are empty on Christmas Day.

  In the library life, we share mittens and scarves and Letters of Leonard Woolf and baskets made in Third World countries and then we eat a big dinner in the middle of the afternoon and then we go for a walk in the snowy, almost deserted streets.

  In one life, we are giddy but anxious. In the other, we are happy. Just a happy family.

  In another apartment, I live with a woman. She is tall, with the long, lean body of a swimmer. She is ten years younger than I am, and she wears designer clothes and shoes that cost a month’s salary for most people. She is a graphic designer and the apartment is a monument to good taste. We are wholly happy in ourselves, and we have no children. I am a writer. I write novels that make people feel better about themselves, and they sell quite well. You’d know me if you saw me, from the dust jackets.

  We entertain a lot—actresses, publishers, people from the arts—and we discuss Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists and Le Désert de Retz around coq au vin and Muscadet.

  She once wrote to me from Paris, “You are to me as water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.”

  In any case, every case, we are a tribe, a law unto ourselves, filled with quirks that have come to seem perfectly natural to us. We have the pride of knowing that there is no other group of people in the world with our unique qualities of beauty and intelligence, or kindness or grace or strength. We are only wholly ourselves when we are together. Each completes a part of the whole.

  But the apartments I look at today couldn’t hold any of this. They could hold only me, and I feel bereft each time a door closes behind us.

  On West
Twelfth Street, we meet another broker with her client at a double brownstone. The apartment is composed of the back half of the ground floor and the first floor, what used to be called the parlor floor.

  The other client is English, in his early thirties, and we all go in together and look at this peculiar apartment. He is eating a green apple.

  We go in to the space, as city dwellers say these days, the space. The ground floor is peculiarly divided into two small rooms, one a kind of office, I guess, and the other the dining room, which looks out into a large, wintry garden filled with Italian terra-cotta urns. Then there is a handsome galley kitchen with its own washer/dryer combination. The ceilings are low and the rooms are dark.

  There is a treacherous cantilevered staircase jerryrigged to get up to the second floor, which is perfectly wonderful.

  There is a ballroom-size sitting room with fourteen-foot ceilings. You could have a twelve-footer in here, easy. There is simple but elegant plaster molding. The windows look out onto the garden, and would be just at leaf level in the spring and summer.

  Behind this there is a large bedroom, which is closed off from the living room by elegant sliding etched-glass doors, and an art deco bathroom with a real deep cast-iron tub. It is all magnificent.

  I am trembling with excitement. You can feel the weight of the lives lived in these rooms. It has an upstairs and a downstairs, like a real house. Once the whole brownstone was home to a single family, now it is carved up into separate spaces, disparate lives. You can almost hear the rustle of their skirts as the other agent slides the glass doors back and forth.

  The other realtor turns to her young English client. “But where would you put the baby?” She asks, and he says exactly and they leave right away.