The Fall of Princes Read online

  I know we all wondered what she did, lying there in the nights listening to the howling storms of sex all around her, smelling the smells, feeling the vibrations, lying in her virginal bed in her immaculate sheets. She probably just nodded off, nodded out, but she must have been aware. It was what the house was about, all those rutting nights, and she must have been aware.

  But she’d appear at breakfast in time to do all the dishes, and she never complained about the slightest thing, and there was a serenity about her that defied any but pharmaceutical explanations.

  The maid came every day during the week, so the house was immaculate every weekend, but Jools made sure we left it the way we found it. We never broke a single thing that whole summer. Not a glass.

  Even when we had forty people over to grill tenderloins and drink champagne, even when we went to bed as the sun was coming up, Jools kept up her relentless tidying, kind of somewhere between a guest and a caterer, so that if things went bad on either end, she could hop to the other side and stay out of trouble. We adored her.

  She said dishes had to be washed and dried by hand. She said dishwashers left a film of soap on everything and that wasn’t kind to the next guest. She loved doing dishes, and we stood around her like puppies, drying them and putting them away, while the women smoked and glared. Dishwashing time took away from drinking champagne and doing coke, and they tapped their feet impatiently until the last dish was put away.

  And then one weekend she died. Hummingbirds’ hearts beat so fast that, if they stop to rest or sleep, their hearts slow down and sometimes they can’t get them to get up to speed again, so they die without ever waking up.

  I found her.

  She didn’t show up for breakfast, which wasn’t unusual, and she missed the narcissistic hour by the pool and the tennis that she never went to anyway, and when we came home we assumed she’d gone to the beach or for a walk, or just didn’t feel like it that Saturday.

  It wasn’t until the Waring blender had started up that we thought to look in her room. I knocked softly, a little harder, and then turned the handle.

  She was lying in her perfect sheets, and there was blood coming from her nose and her mouth. There was vomit on her ruined silk nightgown.

  By her hand, there were open glassine envelopes of heroin, with powder spilling on to the sheets. By the bed, on the nightstand, there was an empty bottle of Seconal. There was no note.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t cry. I didn’t call out. I just watched her, the soft lids closed over her azure eyes.

  I took a cloth and cleaned the blood from her face. I used warm water, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference to Giulia. Her skin was so cold, and, underneath the blood, she was as sweet and unfazed as ever. Even death hadn’t surprised her.

  I touched her face. I kissed her icy cheek. It was the only time I had ever touched her.

  Then I went into the kitchen and told the others. The blender stopped. We agreed to clean the house of any drugs before we called 911, so each of us went to our rooms and brought down whatever we had.

  We put it all in a big trash bag, and Fanelli drove it down to Sagg Main Beach and buried it in the sand, with an old tire over the spot so we could go back and get it.

  Then we made the call. They came in seconds. The rest is a blur. The rest is just the same details as anybody else’s death.

  There were questions, of course. There was a search of the house. Everything was in order.

  We let the barbecue burn out, while we sat and drank hard liquor. We went out to dinner and ate in silence.

  Then we drove back to the beach at midnight to retrieve the drugs. Funny thing, a lot of people didn’t want to claim what was theirs. We sat there with a counter full of drugs that seemed to have no owners.

  Fanelli sang a quiet, tiny song. It was in Italian. Then I sat up very late and got very drunk and did drugs all by myself until the sky was blue.

  That was the first weekend in August. It happened on my birthday.

  I went to the funeral. We all went. Turned out, her father was a French count who was tiny and ugly. He had a gigantic art collection, one of the most important in the world. Museums were already fighting over it.

  Her mother was dead, but her stepmother was a Spanish knockout who had been an airline stewardess. I didn’t speak to them.

  The coffin was open. She was perfect, calm and lovely, in a simple, embroidered-cotton nightgown. She was a countess, and she was finally the prettiest girl in the room. La Serenissima.

  You say to yourself, she wasn’t the kind, she wasn’t the kind to do that. But there was the empty bottle of Seconal. She knew what she was doing. It was time for her to leave the party where she never really met anybody, for though many asked her to dance, there was no Prince Charming.

  There was an article about it in the weekly rag, the death of a countess kind of article, a here’s what happens to careless international trash in the Hamptons kind of article, and that’s how I know that part about the airline stewardess thing. Apparently she was a big deal back in France. She was, according to the article, the kind of girl who knew that tiaras weren’t just pinned on your head, they were woven into your hair. It took hours, and it hurt like hell. She was the kind of girl who was going to marry a king, if one could be found.

  She was just slumming, with us. She was just trying not to be who she was for a little while. Drinking cold Montrachet, dreaming, with Jane Austen open on her lap, in a Moroccan tent, and removing tiny smudges of grime from a Titian that happened to belong to her father.

  I refused to talk to the reporters. I said I didn’t know who she was, and couldn’t tell them a thing about her. I couldn’t tell them about the blood on her face or the vomit on her silk nightgown.

  We had three weeks left in the house, and we drank blender drinks and lay in the seraglio in the cool evenings and drank cold Dom Perignon and did cocaine and laughed and had people over for barbecues, but it was never the same. I was drunk every minute of every day. All weekend, every weekend. Even Fanelli was drunk and sad all the time. It wasn’t creepy, but the bubble had gone out of the champagne.

  We skipped the last weekend, Labor Day. We got there Friday night and left Saturday morning. We just didn’t feel like it.

  I left the tent where it was. Let somebody else deal with it. The summer had cost me almost $200,000.

  Three months later I was in rehab. Again. This time for the last time.

  One day I came back from lunch, three martinis and big slabs of rare beef and raw cocaine under my belt, and I stood and waited for the elevator. The doors opened, and a voice very clearly said to me. “Don’t get on to that elevator. If you do, you will die.” The doors closed, all the happy bees going back to the hive, and I went home.

  They were very understanding. The personnel woman called me, and I hadn’t bathed or shaved in six days and I broke down on the phone, blubbered like a baby about my lost, lost ways, and she offered to have me sent to rehab, and I packed up my sweats and went, leaving twenty-eight days later so clean and sober it hurt, and filled with boredom and self-loathing.

  Then they fired me. I never even went back to get my last check.

  Once you leave The Street, you don’t go back, not even to buy a hot dog from the Sabbrett’s man on the corner. And then the phone rings less and less and eventually Fanelli was the last one to call to say one more time how sorry he was and what a great summer it had been, except for, well, you know, the Thing, and that we really would get together one of these days. My brilliant suits hung in the closets like lost quotations. Like yellowed maps of another world and time.

  And I never went and wrote my phone number on a girl’s tits again. Little by little you lose it all, until you’re left with the pure electric shock of the sober life. A life without friends, without money, without trainers at the gym, without countesses who die while under your watch. And nobody ever called me Billy Champagne again.

  Six months later, I was brok
e. Nine months later, I was selling running shoes at Paragon.

  I worked a series of jobs. I started drinking again. But never in public. The trouble with drinking in public is (1) the glasses aren’t big enough; (2) somebody uglier and drunker than you is always hitting on you; and (3) there’s no place to lie down.

  The other night, I was coming back from the bookstore where I eventually ended up working. Now I’m the supervisor of the ordinary clerks, and the two girls at the checkout counter were talking and one was showing off her new bracelet to the other girl, and she said, “Girl, I mean, ain’t this bracelet bad? Like ain’t it just soooo bad!”

  And the other girl, bagging my pork chops and broccoli, said, “Girl, it’s so bad it’s fatal.”

  Well, it’s all fatal, isn’t it, in the end?

  I look at my Christmas tree. It’s kind of short and scrawny, the way my life is lived now. It suits me. But the ornaments are miraculous, collected over the years when I got a yard and a half two weeks before Christmas, boats, and tigers and Buddhas and Santas and Satin and ruby slippers. Mouth-blown in Czechoslovakia, when there was one. Dozens of them, thousand of dollars. The ornaments are all the girls who came that summer, the mirrors on the tent, the grams of coke.

  Almost every night, when I’m lying in bed, I hear an ornament fall and break. They break because there are no presents under the tree to cushion the fall, only bare wood floor. I come home from work, and there is shattered glass everywhere, every day. My ornamented life is fading, and I don’t really miss it.

  Until the swan. This morning, Christmas morning, a beautiful pearl-white swan had fallen and was shattered on the floor. I hadn’t even heard it fall in the night, and I knew it was Giulia. The image of her, so swanlike, came back to me as clear as crystal. The sound of her voice. The sweet smell of her nightgown in the morning. The Titian and her stewardess wicked stepmother, also dead now, the shining Titian, now in the Prado in Madrid.

  Like the swan, Jools was an ornament in a life I no longer have and don’t miss. But, as I swept up the pieces, she cried out to me not to go, not to be thrown away. Not to lie in pieces in the garbage with the rest of the detritus of my life. And, one more time, I couldn’t help her.

  I just couldn’t help her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Carmela in the Flats at Thirty-One

  In those days, we were vampires for parties. We would search out the Scene, whatever the Scene of the moment happened to be, and we would suck it dry and leave it for suburbanites and out-of-towners. We would go anywhere for a party. We were bicoastal, transcontinental. Especially for Carmela’s birthday, which was an event equivalent to the Easter Octave in the Holy City.

  Did I tell you we got married? We did. It was sort of an accident. It actually wasn’t so much like a marriage as it was like a long, drunken date. Her great-great-grandfather, Alexandre, had started a French, now international, banking house in 1848 with $9,000 in his pocket, and she was set, baby, and a killer on The Street and a total whore in bed. She was one of the boys. We got married at their place in East Hampton one June afternoon, in a tent that seated four hundred with a dinner catered by Glorious Foods. She had only peonies for decoration, these huge arrangements. She actually bought the entire crop of peonies that came into New York that year, drove the price through the roof, and our wedding present was our own house on West End Road in East Hampton. Best present I ever got, I have to admit. Five bedrooms.

  Valentino made her dress. It involved three trips to Europe on the Concorde, Carmela and her mother, a suite at the Hassler, and then the thing came in a box you could barely have squeezed a suit into. He made an extra skirt, in black, so that, if things went south, she could wear it again. She was an hour late for the wedding.

  She told me, years later, just before the slamming door, that, as she sat there in her hair and makeup and dress, her mother at the bottom of the landing calling out, the guests in the church itching for a cocktail, she looked at her face in the mirror and she suddenly knew. She was making the worst mistake of her life. And she was paralyzed with nausea at the thought of marrying me. Me.

  That was yet to come, that part. Along with all the rest.

  At the moment, we had chased Carmela’s birthday to Beverly Hills, where her dear friends Delia and Buzzy gave her a party that was sort of like a second wedding reception. We were poolside at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. We had picked the Wilshire because Dino, the indomitable maître d’ at the Beverly Hills Hotel had died, presumably now handing out the best tables in Heaven to those lucky few with the fame or the grease to get one. “Always go for a banquette,” Carmela said. “I grew up on banquettes.”

  I had personally attended Dino’s funeral a few years before and had watched as the bleary-eyed mourners dropped centuries into the grave as the coffin was lowered. They did this to secure, with one final pourboire, a corner banquette with a telephone in Heaven’s Polo Lounge, assuming traffic wasn’t overly heavy that week.

  So, Dino dead, we had moved on to the Wilshire, because the Bel Air was dull as toast points, and because Carmela longed to walk the carpeted halls where Barbara Hutton had hobbled out her final days and others, many others, had merely played and moved on. She also liked the idea that, somewhere in the hotel, on some high floor, somebody’s ceiling was Warren Beatty’s floor. She had enormous empathy for his room-service kind of life. At the pool at the Beverly Wilshire, they paged him by number, not by name. He was number three.

  In hotels, every night, Carmela dreamt always and only of the people who had stayed in the room the night before. Once, she dreamt a woman had lost a diamond bracelet from Van Cleef & Arpels beneath the bed and in the morning she looked under the bed and there it was. And she kept it. Once, it was a fur coat in a closet, but the closet was empty that time. Mostly it was sexual couplings I would never have imagined without pictures of naked people from India.

  Poolside, she turned to me. “I wish you were dead.”

  She meant it, too. The night before, in the flats, at Delia and Buzzy’s on Rexford Drive, I had wrecked Carmela’s

  thirty-first birthday. I had not been, I was informed on the way home, sufficiently festive. Memory poolside is vague, but I seemed to recall having made a spectacle, having insulted a roomful of nearly beautiful people. Perhaps it wasn’t quite a full room by the time I got to the spectacle part but I had put on quite a show.

  “Oh, God. Now I remember it all.”

  “Damn, you, Rooney, how could you have done it? And where the hell is my Bloody Mary?” She whistled through her fingers like she was hailing a cab on Park at five thirty, in the rain, and a pool boy approached, silent in his Tretorns, his golden thighs slick with oil and youth, swishing as though he were wearing real silk stockings.

  Drinks orders were apparently not his station, he folded the towels, but he snapped his fingers for a charming but seemingly alingual Argentinian whose language skills extended only so far as the names of cocktails, but who only had to look in Carmela’s eyes to know what was on her mind.

  “I mean, my dearest, my darling, how could you have done it?”

  “ ‘The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing,’ ” I said.

  “Leave Keats out of this,” she snapped.

  “I don’t know. Because I hate flying Flight Number One F class to Los Angeles to take meetings. Because I hated myself for running up and down Rodeo like a lunatic looking for the perfect something and finding nothing except this one thing that matters a lot to me, a lot a lot, only to have you toss my present on the table and say, ‘How nice.’ I hate eating at Mr Chow’s with Helen Reddy at the next table. I hate sitting in the El Padrino room in this hotel, having, no, buying drinks for people who think they’re so cool because they have composed the masterpieces of our age, all of which can be seen and heard in thirty seconds on the Superbowl. Their complete works can be viewed in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette.

  “But most of a
ll, my darling Carmela, it’s because I hate your birthday.”

  Luckily, the Argentinian appeared with our drinks, doubles, for both, and we both leapt forward like rats in an alley. From the first sip, as I lay back into a blessed forever of vodka, it was clear to me that somebody had put epoxy on my eyelids. They would never open again.

  Carmela, with that infinite and luminous sadness that was one of her finest tropes, said to me, her voicing barely piercing the infinite darkness in which I would happily lie forever, “Let’s start this again. You’re overwrought. The meetings you took did not go well. The cocaine was cut with angel dust or French bread crumbs for all I know. You lost fifteen thousand dollars at Santa Anita. The Santa Ana is blowing. Some malevolent something.”

  “With the deepest regrets, and profound apologies, I’ll stick. I hate your birthday.”

  “It was a sweet present. A book, wasn’t it? Thoughtful. If I read, I would probably read it.” Carmela said. “You have nothing to regret. In that department.”

  From the weight, I could tell someone had sat down on the end of my chaise. I didn’t even have to open my eyes. “Margot, you incorrigible lesbian,” I said. “I’ve been drunk in Los Angeleeees for four days. Give a dying man your hand.”

  “Poor baby,” she said. “You poor little dollycakes. Why is Carmela crying? And how does she do it? Jesus, her tears are actually tear-shaped. Perfectly formed little crystal tears.”

  “Thanks for the silk blouse, Margot. It’s divine,” said Carmela.

  “Oh, just a little something.”

  “That little something cost $285 at Saint-Germaine,” I said. “I happen to know. I ran into Margot there with some ravishing truck-stop worker, or so she appeared.”

  “Well, we can’t walk around nekkid,” said Margot. “Anyway, I’ll put it on my expense report.” Margot had one of those professions that caused people frequently to ask her what she really did once she told them what she actually did do. This work did give her the benefit of a seemingly endless expense account that could keep her in the Beverly Wilshire for months at a time. She did not stay in the old wing, second floor, lanai side, possibly because she preferred the clinical anonymity of the moderne fifth floor of the new wing, where the rooms somehow resembled a bathysphere Jacques Cousteau might have used to explore marine life at depths to which I was quickly becoming acquainted. Square bathtubs. Foil wallpaper. Ghastly.