West 57

by B. N. Freeman

  I didn’t think he was kidding.

  We were two minutes to air. Pierce strolled to his interview table and shook hands with King in a pleasant manner. He settled himself into his chair with the kind of smile that reminded me of Anthony Hopkins wearing that awful mask thing in Silence of the Lambs. I saw him wink at us.

  Bree, beside me, appeared unfazed. “He’s a freaking trip, isn’t he? I love him.”

  No, she did not say “freaking.”

  I waited silently for the cameras to go on, and I told myself: How bad could it be?

  Then the cameras went on, and I found out. Pierce introduced his guest and rolled right on to his first question.

  “So, King,” he began in his honeyed voice, “you were Irving Wolfe’s personal assistant for two years. Now, when you say ‘personal assistant,’ that’s another way of saying ‘man hooker,’ am I right?”

  18

  “Yes!” Bree exclaimed drunkenly. “Can you freaking well believe he said yes?”

  No, she did not say – oh, never mind. You know Bree well enough by now to know what she really said.

  Anyway, hours later, we were still reeling from the interview. Pierce asked his first question, and King calmly replied, “Yes. Yes, that’s true, Pierce. Irving Wolfe wanted a skillful young lover, and he compensated me handsomely for the services I provided him.”

  I don’t think even Pierce knew exactly where to go from there. He was actually speechless for five seconds, which may well be a record for him.

  “This thing is going to be huge,” Bree said to me. “Enormous.”

  “No doubt about it.”

  She added, giggling: “Mind you, we both know how huge it is.”

  “It’s robust,” I agreed. “Engorged.”

  “I wonder if he has to have his trousers custom fitted,” she speculated. “His poor tailor, the man must get a black eye when doing the measurements.”

  “Bree!”

  She giggled again. We were well into our second bottle of wine and both pretty buzzed. I’d forgotten that most of the time I’d spent with Bree during our friendship was in an alcohol-induced stupor. That was what we did. We drank. We gossiped. We complained about our jobs. I told Bree about my boyfriends, and then she slept with them. Nothing much had changed over the years.

  The rooftop patio at the Gansevoort hummed with laughter and the clink of glasses. Bree and I huddled in a corner while King entertained the clubbers. He had returned to the bar at eleven o’clock and been greeted like a knight back from the crusades. People cheered, waved, and whistled. King was a celebrity, and he devoured every moment of it. He sang to them again. He didn’t haul out Assy McHattie, but he regaled everyone with the story of “Kelly John Venus, the Girl With a Penis,” which was much, much worse.

  We didn’t try to stop him tonight. That was like trying to put a cork back in a champagne bottle. King had popped.

  Bree’s phone rang for the eleventh time since we’d started drinking. “Bree Cox,” she said, and then she covered the phone with her hand. “It’s Whoopi. See? Media frenzy.”

  “She spoke into the phone as if the two of them were old friends. “Good to hear your voice again, too, darling! Oh, I know, it’s Pierce, what can you do? Yes, the View, in the morning, King will be there. Well, relatively sober. You don’t have a dog, do you, darling? Barbarba had a dog, and King doesn’t do at all well with dogs. Right, good. Ta!”

  “What is it about King and dogs?” I asked.

  “Best you not know,” she said.

  My own phone buzzed, because someone was texting me. Since the show, I’d been besieged with interview requests, photo ops, tweets, blogs, and journalists looking for quotes and comments. I checked the phone, expecting another query from a reporter. I was wrong.

  This time the text was from Thad.

  Looking forward to our dinner tomorrow.

  I pictured him in his hotel, his fingers on the keys of his phone. It was a simple message, but if truth be told, it shot straight between my legs. I felt flushed. I tasted our kiss again and wanted more of them.

  Yes, okay, it had been way too long.

  I texted back:

  Me too.

  Bree eyed me as she put down her phone and picked up her glass of pinot noir. “So, darling, if I hadn’t dragged you away, would you have slept with Thad?”

  “No.” Yes.

  Bree grinned, as if she could hear the voice in my head telling her the truth. “How about tomorrow?”

  “No.” Yes. Damn it, stop that!

  “I’m not trying to pry,” Bree said. “Well, I am, but that’s just me. I’m actually without a reliable male partner myself right now. Too busy for sex. Hard to believe, I realize. Anyway, I’m living through your clitoris.”

  Yes, she really said that.

  “You won’t find much excitement down there,” I said, which at that particular moment was a big old lie.

  “Hmm,” she said skeptically. She reached in her purse and extracted a cigarette and lit it. I hate smoking as much as profanity, but when you work in publishing, you become accustomed to both. “How do you feel having Thad back in your life?” she asked.

  “He’s not back in my life. It’s dinner. That’s all.”

  “Yes, but obviously it could be more than that if you wanted. Personally, professionally, or both.”

  “I’m not thinking about any of that. There are too many other things going on in my life right now.”

  “Not thinking about it? Darling, he’s gorgeous, and he’s rich.”

  “So?”

  That was an admittedly lame comeback. Bree shook her head, as if I were beyond help, and maybe I was. We kept drinking. The second bottle of wine disappeared and was replaced by a third. The patio became fuzzy and out of focus in my brain, but gorgeous, like a Renoir painting. King held court near the hotel wall in the shadows, surrounded by empty martini glasses. The gay twins who’d hoisted him to his room last night were there, along with a dozen other partiers, and no one had their hands on the table. I didn’t want to think about what their hands were doing.

  Bree and I were both mellow, by which I mean completely wasted. Bree kept texting and phoning her contacts around the city, sounding no worse for all the wine. She’d built up her tolerance, whereas I’d gotten rusty. I heard her talking to someone at HuffPo. It may have been Huff. I heard her talking to Viggo Mortensen, or at least I assumed it was him, because I didn’t want to think that she knew two people named Viggo. Actually, I’m not sure if she really knows any of these people. Half the time I think she just dials her own number and makes this shit up.

  Oh, my God, did I just say that word? I’m so sorry! I was beyond drunk now. I put down my wine glass, but it was too late to save me.

  “I have to pee,” I announced with more gravity than it probably deserved.

  Bree smiled benignly at me. “You go do that, darling. I’m going to call someone for you.”

  “Clall summin,” I said. Well, that’s what it sounded like.

  “Yes, I want someone to take you home and put you to bed.”

  “Zhus clall cab,” I said. I believe I meant to say, “That is unnecessary, Bree. I will locate a taxi to return to my place of residence.”

  “Cab, yes, alone, no. Go pee.”

  I leaned into her face, close enough that we were in danger of a Katy Perry moment. Bree was very amused at me. She has extremely red lips. I retrieved enough of my remaining brain cells to tell her, “Do not do not do not do not do not do not do not call Thad.”

  “Shall I call Thad?”

  “Freak!” I said, and yes, that is what I said.

  “Go pee.”

  I kicked off my high heels. There was no way I was going to walk in those. I noticed that King was gone, and so were the gay twins. I didn’t care where they were or what they were doing. I found my way to the ladies room, with a couple errant stops at the kitchen and what might have been the Warhol room at MOMA. The bathroom was empty. I fo
und a stall, did my business, flushed, stood up, turned around, and threw up.

  I flushed again. I threw up again. I flushed again.

  I felt much better.

  I came out of the stall. Sonny was leaning against the bathroom door. Smoking. Smiling. Shaking his head at me.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “This is the ladies room, Sonny.”

  “Nothing I heard sounded too ladylike in there, darling girl.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

  “You’re being petulant.”

  “Go away.”

  “You miss me.”

  “No. No. No. No. Not anymore.”

  “Oh, come, Julie, don’t be like this.”

  “No. I don’t even know who you are anymore. You’re not the man I thought you were.”

  “That’s not true at all.”

  “It is. I’m serious. Go away.”

  I put my head in one of the sinks and turned on the faucet. I rinsed out my mouth. I splashed water on my face, and it soaked my hair and my dress. My makeup ran. I was a sight.

  When I looked up, Sonny was gone.

  I started to cry.

  Bree had to come find me. I don’t know how long I stayed in there. Ten minutes. An hour. I was still sitting on the floor in the bathroom, hoping Sonny would come back to me. He didn’t. I couldn’t tell Bree what was going on, but it didn’t matter. She was very kind. She lifted me up and held me by the waist. She told me everything was fine as she guided me back to the bar.

  “I love you, Bree,” I told her, because I was still very drunk. “Even when I hate you, I love you. You know that, right?”

  “Of course, darling, you can’t help it.”

  “You’re a great friend.”

  “Off and on, but thank you.”

  “I love you,” I repeated.

  Yes, I loved her, and then I saw who was waiting for me at the elevators, and I hated her, I hated her, I hated her. I wanted to run back to the bathroom and hide. I wanted to throw myself off the rooftop patio. Bree, how could you?

  I think I even said it aloud.

  “Bree, how could you?”

  She hadn’t called Thad. She’d called Garrett.

  He stood there by the elevators, looking all sexy and handsome in his torn jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt, with his midnight hair rumpled and his hands in his pockets, and his mouth bent into this tiny teasing little smile, and me, looking like…oh, God, what on earth did I look like? I remembered my reflection in the bathroom mirror, but that couldn’t be me. That was a villainess in a Disney cartoon. That was someone who jumps out at you in a haunted house.

  “She’s all yours,” Bree said to Garrett. She handed him my shoes, which he dangled from his fingers.

  He gathered me up in his arms, making sure I didn’t fall.

  “Come along, princess,” he said, laughing quietly. He took me into the elevator, where the buzz of the machinery was white noise, drowning out my other thoughts. I crumpled into him as we went down. My face was scrunched against his chest.

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Were you sleeping?” I asked.

  “No, I was reading Woodham Road.”

  “I drove him away,” I moaned.

  He tilted up my face. “Who?”

  “Sonny.”

  Garrett opened his mouth as if to say something, but he caught himself. Maybe he was going to say, “He’ll be back,” but he knew he couldn’t tell me that. Instead, he eased my head into his chest again, and I felt his breath going in and out.

  The elevator doors opened. We were in the lobby. Bless him, he had a cab waiting, door open, engine grumbling. One of the Farouks stood beside it, big grin on his face. The idea of sitting in the smelly backseat of a New York cab and going home to my cramped apartment sounded absolutely wonderful right now.

  Garrett helped me through the lobby into the cool night air. I shivered. I was still damp from the bathroom. He poured me into the cab and got in next to me.

  Through my semi-conscious state, I saw a man on the sidewalk just outside the glowing hotel lights. He was impossible to miss. It was King Royal, and he wasn’t alone. He wasn’t with the gay twins, either. No, no, no. I wanted to believe I was having visions in my drunken state, but I saw the other man in profile, and I knew exactly who it was.

  King Royal was with Nick Duggan.

  19

  I’m pretty sure I slept in the cab. You know how sometimes you wake up, and you know you’ve been snoring like a fat man after nine beers? That was me. I was still in the cab, leaning against Garrett’s shoulder. Right in his ear, very sexy. There was a damp spot on his sweatshirt, too, where I’d drooled.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  How was I feeling? My mouth was the dust bowl in The Grapes of Wrath. My head was a hip-hop dance club at four in the morning.

  “Beep,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Julie’s not available right now, because Julie is dead. Please leave a message after the beep.” To emphasize my point, I repeated, “Beep.”

  He whispered, “Hi, Julie, it’s Garrett. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’re not really dead.”

  “Then do the right thing and kill me.”

  I separated myself from his shoulder, and my head flopped back against the seat. The world went around a few times before stabilizing. I saw the Park on our right. We weren’t far from my apartment. I had a vision of my bed, with me sinking into the pillow-top mattress. I had a vision of Garrett in bed with me, with my legs wrapped tightly around his backside.

  Interrupting that very pleasant vision, I was nearly lifted off my seat by a loud and lethal burst of gas exploding from underneath me into the cab. It was nasty. Even Farouk in the front seat whiffed the air with displeasure, and I was sure he grew up sleeping with goats.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  Garrett laughed as he rolled down the window to rescue us. Or maybe he was weeping from the smell. He didn’t appreciate the horror of my situation. I was going to have to move to Alaska and live under an assumed name. My humiliation in New York was complete.

  “Why are you laughing?” I demanded.

  He tried to stop choking. I’m sure he was breathing through his mouth. “Because you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met in my entire life,” he said.

  That was not exactly the moment I wanted to hear those words.

  I sat and pouted for the last few blocks and kept my butt cheeks tightly clenched. Farouk looked happy to drop us off. I was sure he would go home and tell his family about the stinky lady in his cab. At the outer door to my building, I fumbled with the key fob and kept missing the magnetic plate. Garrett had to help me. I insisted that he leave when he opened the door, but he walked beside me to the elevator, apparently oblivious to the dangers of being in closed spaces with me.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  No, I wasn’t.

  I closed my eyes in the elevator and hoped I was dreaming, but I wasn’t. At my apartment door, I had no better luck than I’d had downstairs. I dropped my keys, picked them up, dropped them, picked them up, dropped them, picked them up, and began crying again like a complete idiot. Garrett gently peeled the key ring from my fingers and opened the door on the first try. I stumbled inside.

  It occurred to me that Garrett had never been here before. All these years, and this was the first time he had been in my apartment. I really didn’t want it to be like this.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You can go now.”

  “You look like you could use some coffee.”

  “I can make it myself.”

  “I don’t think you should be operating electrical appliances,” he said with a smile.

  I didn’t protest further. I staggered toward my sofa and watched Gar
rett in my kitchen, opening my cabinets, filling my coffee maker with water, scooping coffee from my mason jar, and clinking my china as he put a cup on a saucer. He found my stash of Pepperidge Farm Milanos on a top shelf. He put one cookie on the plate; it was the last one in the bag. When enough coffee had dripped into the pot, he filled the cup and brought it to me and set it on the table and sat down next to me.

  “May I have eighty-six Advil, please?” I asked.

  He disappeared into my bathroom. I had no idea what he would find in there, but I knew there were no embarrassing birth control devices, which is one advantage of celibacy. When he returned, he offered me two pink tablets, but I opened my mouth and pointed, and he dropped them on my tongue. I washed them down with hot coffee.

  “You’re being very sweet,” I said.

  “I am a sweet person.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  I drank the coffee. I nibbled the cookie. The chocolate melted on my fingers, and I sucked them. Garrett looked uncomfortable, staring at me. I wondered if I was sucking my own fingers, or if I’d started sucking his. Crumbs fell on my chest, and I plucked them off my cleavage and ate them. Very dainty, but these are Milanos, and you don’t want to miss a bite. Plus, I was still drunk as a skunk.

  “You saw the interview?” I murmured.

  “Of course.”

  “I guess we got what we wanted.”

  “Controversy means sales. I told you, you have the gift.”

  “I feel like Frankenstein creating a monster.”

  “You didn’t create King Royal,” Garrett reminded me. “Sonny did.”

  “Yeah.” I stared into my coffee. I wished I had another cookie, but it was gone. “The whole thing with the book was Sonny’s idea. Not Bree. Sonny’s. He was the one who signed up King.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing.”

  Nothing except Sonny lied to me about it. What else was he hiding? I thought about Pierce talking to King on television.

  There are rumors, you know. Did Irving Wolfe hide a fortune? Are there millions to be found somewhere? Secret bank accounts?

  I wouldn’t know anything about that, Pierce.