George writes, harem costume—massproduction logo/tattered spandex/primarycolors/logologo, nodding as the waiter refills his glass. He draws a costume on the editorials page but it comes out as two blobs and a line, and he runs out of space before he can get to the legs. The wine is gone. He waves away dessert. He doesn’t want to go back to work. Not today. He calls Iris and leaves her a message:
“Bunny, let’s spend the afternoon together. Have the car service bring you. Or hop on the train, it might be quicker. Call me when you’re close.”
He hangs up, pays, and fast as that he’s pushing his way across the street. He enters the purple and silver spaceship of a boutique hotel, reserves a room, slides the key card into the disapproving slash below the knob, plunks down on the white bed, turns on the television, orders more wine and something called lobster three ways. His phone rings.
“You’re on your way! When you get into town tell the driver—”
“I’m hosting an open house, dummy.”
“Today?”
“The Weils’s weekend place. Uptick in people selling their weekend places, you know that.”
“You can’t reschedule?”
“Are you kidding? I’m here already.”
“What time are you done?”
“After this I’ve got a block of apartments we’re doing rent-to-own. Nellie rolled it out last month. Remember? The one we got five signatures in an hour? I told you all about it.”
“You sound like Audrey. That thing they called her in the beginning. What was that?”
“Temp-to-perm.”
“Which apartments?”
“Condos in town behind the supermarket. And a few units at Kingsgate.”
“Didn’t I read a local-crime something happened there?”
“Evergreen Terrace? I’m in the middle of town. The condos start at two-fifty. You’re thinking of when those kids stole the shopping carts from the parking lot and threw them in the woods.” She sighs. “I have to go or I won’t get this place straightened up.”
“But, no one’s having lunch with me. My second lunch.”
“Are you for real?”
“Come on, we’ll have fun.”
“George, this is my job. A job means you have things to do that affect other people, so you show up and do those things the best you can. And you assume your partner will understand that.”
“All I mean is—this is fun,” he says with a weird force. “Fun, fun, fun!”
“You’re being a jerk.” She hangs up.
He falls back into the bed. It feels good. He pulls the sheet over himself without taking off his shoes. His shoes are wet from stepping in the gush of rainwater and runoff, sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts streaming into a grate in the curb in front of the hotel. He watches two sloppy ellipses appear, gray ghosts of his feet. This slight rebellion, he decides, is the point of hotel rooms.
She has changed, in the last year, he thinks, with a rolling, blacking self-pity. Bolder every day, because of him. Good! Fine! But shouldn’t he get a little credit? The happier he makes her, the freer she seems of him. Doesn’t seem fair. Used to be he could do no wrong. She’d sounded—impatient.
There is a knock at the door.
“Yes!” he calls out. A bellman wheels a sumptuously arranged table to the center of the room. “Three! Someone’s made a mistake. I ordered lobster five ways. Don’t bother, it’s too late.”
The bellman thanks him and leaves. George drinks and picks at the chilled pink jelly he assumes is the premiero of the trio and watches the news on mute over the wet lump of his feet. The headline—a singer’s helicopter missing in the Grand Canyon, the camera panning the banded crater, rain streaking the lens. An international story next—what country, he doesn’t catch—fire, the black and wicked skeleton of a car, ash in the air. Next, Manhattan, a camera following a plump, silk-suited man and his lawyers through the press and up the courthouse steps, their jaws set.
If his helicopter went missing in the Grand Canyon, it would not be on the news. He considers the hotel porn but declines. It would force him to admit to himself that his plan—vital, spontaneous—has slipped into failure like a coat loosened from its peg.
He wants dessert, maybe a stiffer drink, something with lime. He puts his jacket back on and heads down to the cavernous dining room, lit by a series of crystal chandeliers like drooping onyx earrings. The carpet hushes the room. He sinks into a plush chair. In Manhattan it’s only in a hotel, a place for people from other places, that you sit among so much fabric while you eat. The room is mostly empty: one table with what can only be a mother and daughter, waiting for lunch in silence, another with two men he guesses are finance, women, maybe escorts, on either side of them. A group of tourists, pointing at each other’s menu.
He orders a Scotch and regrets it. He doesn’t want Scotch, he wants company. He pulls out his phone and asks to be put through to Bob Barrow-Woods. It was Bob who looped his arm over George’s shoulder and took him out for drinks when he got engaged, and it was George who took Bob out when after all that time he and Martha announced they were having twins.
“Bob, hey, I’m in town and I’ve—I’m supposed to be meeting with some guy from the Preservation Society … Yeah, no. I’ve been waiting for an hour. Guess they don’t want that grant so much after all. Unbelievable. At a hotel. I’m jammed in by tourists … No, the one across from the church, on Fifth. Come and have a round. What are you on today, pharma?”
Bob’s voice is so loud George holds the phone away from his ear. “Today? Fucking forevery. I’m looking at that IPO you said you didn’t want to bite on. Guess what? None for you. That’s what you get for pretending to know shit. Next time, listen to Bob! Hey, whatever. Watch it tank tomorrow. Then all these shits I work with—that’s you, Big Frank, you heard me—will be out on the ledge, jackets flapping in the wind, counting the little people on the street below through the void between their shiny shoes. I mean, what the fuck, right? Hey, weren’t you going somewhere? A little vacation? Shit, I remember. The old mama—not vacation. Sorry. I’m a jerk.”
“My wife just called me a jerk.”
“I love your wife. I mean it. No, I’m trying to tell you, man, I really love your wife. Hold on a second. Gretchen, shut it down out there. Pretty don’t give you the green light to talk over my call, does it?… Seriously? We’re out of—not even a Tylenol? George, as my friend, it hurts me that you don’t consider how hard I’m working, like I can drop it all to drink the day away with you.”
A woman’s laughter, and the line disconnects.
14
After staring at the periwinkle ultrasuede wall beside his table for an hour, George is ready to settle his check when Bob appears, slicking his wet hair off his big forehead, waving for a drink.
“Earnest George,” Bob says, “you thought I wasn’t coming? Don’t know when a man’s joking. Fucking pouring out there too. Asshole.”
And before he’s removed his coat he’s on some art he wants to buy—a Warhol lithograph nobody knows about—shit, a shit-fucking, genuine, one-run Black Marilyn that’s been languishing in a demented old lady’s Brighton Beach rent-a-cube—and another piece at a gallery in Chinatown that took eight years to make and is thick as barbecue sauce, the artist painted thousands of coats, some real OCD shit, built up three dimensions, built up a house out of house paint for the love of God, it makes him cry, and why isn’t George getting it, he can tell George is not getting the breathtaking poignancy, whatever, you’re the music guy, I guess, and they know how to make a martini here, you should see the face you’re making, like the goat that ate the poison toad and what, are you loaded? Oh, no, what are you, sad? No, no, no, we’re going to fix you right up, you’ll see.
When they were reintroduced a decade back, George recognized Bob with a vivid and tongue-tying flash of hero worship. At boarding school, Bob was two classes ahead, a hard shoulder and an unlaced rugby cleat, a poet and a captain, and at the parties where Geo
rge dourly slinked the perimeter, there would be Robert, bending over the table with this girl, that girl, making nice tight lines, expertly helping a tremulous young one get the stuff up her nose, tipping her chin with his hand. A house abandoned by someone’s parents for the weekend—there was a polar-bear rug, its fierce head thrust under a glass table and Robert saying to the girl whose face he held, a math-mouth George had thought he might have a chance with, “Nobody owns you but you, Barbara.” And while there was no crisis anyone got wind of—no flashing red lights, no flashing blue lights—one day he was gone, and George heard nothing of him for years.
“I tell this woman with the Warhol,” Bob says, wiping the rain from his face, “I’m her cousin. I’m like, I don’t want to take your painting away. We’re family. I just want to bring my friend the appraiser over. Then I want to give you money. And the old girl, she’s practically holding a horn to her ear, she says, ‘Cousin Bobby, mow my lawn.’ Bitch of it is, she doesn’t have a lawn. She has a folding chair on the sidewalk. We’re at a stalemate. How’s Iris? She go up with you to the, what was it, PT?”
“Nope.” George reaches for his glass. He finds it is empty. He finds he is reciting Iris’s work schedule, for reasons that elude him, and concludes, “Sometimes I am the doer when there is a thing.” Adding, “You miss my point.”
“Hey, why the long face? This is a great hotel. I always forget about this place. It’s so close to the office. You’ve ever been up in one of the rooms?”
“Never.”
“They throw some unusually classy bric-a-brac up, the prints on the wall are half-decent—not watercolor sailboats, anyway. And the concierge.” Bob drops his voice and leans farther in. “Great concierge. Want to rent a tiger? Want a toothbrush, and a tiger to brush your teeth? Done. Look at those assholes over there, that one knows the concierge, for sure. Ten bucks. Hey, you all! You know the concierge?”
The suits with the two women look up.
“Bob,” George says, “what the hell.”
“You can’t turn a tanker around with a speedboat.” Bob leans low over a fresh drink, eyeing it with ardor and suspicion as if it might be the unfaithful love of his life.
The women frown and look away. George becomes aware of their plastic sheen and how hard they’ve worked to look that way—shining, straight hair, gleaming sandals, fingernails tipped white. Their eyes, cups and saucers, banded gold and green. One looks to have begun the day olive-skinned and the other palest white, but they’ve met in the middle courtesy of spray tan. Something about this disturbs George. Their essence, despite the bronze, is not out-of-doors but rather of those public indoor spaces that aim to be eternally sufficient—the airport, the mall. They are escorts, looking right only under something electric. The grounds of Oak Park come suddenly to mind—the bordered gardens, the small lake with its precise edge, the cool promise of the surrounding woods.
“The concierge you’re thinking of is Demetri,” the older, stockier man says.
“Right, Demetri! Did he introduce you all?”
“Oh, no,” George says.
“Ah.” The man frowns. “That’s hilarious.”
Ten years back, George and Bob were briefly employed at the same D-list securities firm, George’s last job in the for-profit sector after several humiliatingly unsuccessful placements procured for him by his mother’s friends. By then, Bob was drained and slack jawed and lubberly, telling sad jokes about how the girls at business school liked holding on to his love handles during all the oddly positioned fucking he’d been busy with while blowing off Domestic Markets 202. On weekends, he wore a leather jacket that was wrong-decade tight. His glory was behind him. George and Bob became friends, playing wheezing games of squash or retiring to the Penn Club after work or to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, and over the years they saw each other’s lot improve—Bob was doing well at a hedge, Tryphon Capital, and well by his what-is-she-doing-with-him wife, Martha. Their twin boys, Robert Jr. and Thierry, six this year, his pride and joy. White-blond, pie-faced future captains of industry, their wisping hair parted a deep right, their navy blazers with gold buttons matching, the school insignia on the breast pocket. Bob’s favorite thing about Martha, he said, was that she didn’t give a shit except she did, God bless her.
“I know you,” the second man says, looking at Bob. “Delaware? Media incorporation. Laurus? Friar? No. Corn Refiners Association, Lunch-n-Learn.”
“Shit, yes, those assholes! Lunch-n-Learn!”
“Jim Frame.”
Then they are shaking hands and pushing the tables together. George leaps to his feet and begins shaking everyone’s hand as well. Bob is telling the first man, from Munich it turns out, a Carsten with a C, that they’d bet one hundred bones that Carsten with a C knew the name of the concierge, and now George is in the red.
Something is expected. George takes out his wallet.
“Give it,” Bob says. And to the men: “You guys do a next-level drill down with those corn pricks?”
“Menus,” Carsten says.
“Do the trick,” pale-to-dark says to Carsten, looking at George’s money, with a low, practiced kind of baby-brightness in her voice. She has an accent too, but too faint to identify. George raises his empty glass, a salute and a plea; he’s both dejected by whatever is coming next and beginning to enjoy himself. Good old Bob.
“Corn refiners, not easy,” Jim Frame says. “We were almost on the wrong side of that demographic. Dropped out right before the FDA sent a corpse down the sales-and-delivery pipeline, yeah?”
“Christmas bonus,” Bob says, by way of praise.
“Cash,” Carsten says, “is what we need for the trick. Funny Face here doesn’t trust me with hers.”
“We don’t have any cash, I told you.”
They all laugh at this. George is still looking at his wallet when he sees Bob handing a bill to Carsten. He’s missed a cue. He finds the glass in front of him is full again, this time of cold vodka. He swallows and shudders. The woman who is dark-to-pale claps her hands tightly over her mouth. She is laughing, but isn’t making any sound. Is she deaf? He decides he is enjoying himself.
Carsten gets serious. He folds and unfolds the bill; he holds it up to the light as if to inspect it; he shows it to the bronze women and the tourists, now watching over their menus. He holds it up to George and Bob, who says, “Another round,” to a passing waiter.
“Love the city!” one of the tourists says.
“No,” Carsten rejoins, “I learned this trick in a village. From a villager.” His hands clasped midair.
“A round of drinks for that table too,” calls Bob.
Carsten clasps his palms together. He whisks them around his ears. He separates them and the bill is gone. “I stole your money.”
“Lame!” George shouts.
The tourists clap. “Great job!” one says, but they look a little nervous. George claps too. He takes a sip—was it always vodka? He’s lost track of what they’re saying. Food arrives. At some point they turn back to the topic of Bob’s pending art acquisition. George forgets to listen, until he hears one of the women say, “We’ll miss you.” The man named Carsten is shaking George’s hand. Next he looks, Carsten is gone and the women are eating in silence. Bob and Jim are talking stocks. Dull gibberish. Something—“That’s your sector now? Interim clinical? Phase three? Suicide. What are you going to try to turn me on to next, fucking commercial printing?”
George drinks and picks at a shrimp cocktail he’s discovered on the table. He has no idea what Bob is going on about. George looks down and finds the silent woman’s hand is resting on his forearm. Why, it isn’t Bob who’s speaking. It’s he himself! He’s complaining about Peterson and Fielding. He’s saying something that must be clever, because everyone’s laughing, and now Bob is shouting, directly at him—something about a piano, or someone named Pianot, maybe Bob is back on art, Pianot could be an artist, or a town, sounds like a town, or maybe Bob is saying IPO, and George feels h
e’s responding well, but then Bob says, “Why so silent, Georgie boy? You look like a moose. My man started early, I think.”
George would like to share that he hasn’t been sleeping much. Instead, he answers, “Goor tired.”
“Want this?” Bob asks, and with a plink! a pill lands on George’s plate.
“Dernt take that shut since college.”
“Suit yourself.”
“What’s it?” George asks, recovering a little. “Do I get cranked?”
“No, what? Where have you been hanging out? It’s that shit all the kids use to stay focused in school. A little-kid dose. Jesus.”
“Over here,” Jim Frame says.
“Eh.” George shrugs and takes it. “I’m why so quiet because I have nothing to talk about.”
“Want my dad’s advice on that?” Bob says. “If you have nothing to add, ask a question. It’s flattering. Everyone’s a narcissist. Everyone’s an expert. How about asking these gals to explain something of the world to you? How about opening your mind, Georgie? It doesn’t even matter what you ask. Right?”
“That’s the way it’s done,” the woman with the accent agrees. “Timeless advice.”
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 13
