The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  Lost everything they didn’t keep hid

  Won’t let the same thing happen to me.

  Oh man, you fakers, get away from my door

  No matter what you heard, I don’t live here no more.

  —“Keep Away,” recorded 1966

  “If you don—t, Luke, I’m serious, I’ll never talk to you again. This ride you’re on, I don’t want to be on it.”

  “Don’t say that to me, Esther. It hurts me.” Luke’s voice wobbled. He was slight to begin with, but getting high day and night and traveling from one concert to the next and now having to be careful of fans—a new kind of fan, nothing at all like he was used to from the old days on the folk circuit, old days that were little more than a year behind him, but felt like decades ago—had whittled him down further. He looked forlorn even when he was having a pretty good time, and when he was unhappy he looked as if he wanted to die.

  He stood close to her, bowed his head. She made damn sure she did not touch him—there had already been five or six reconciliations between them, and each one left her feeling worse than the one before. The pattern was depressingly predictable. He would humble himself before her, as if that was what she wanted, rather than what she truly needed from him: recognition of her. This self-abnegation was just another way of keeping the spotlight on Luke. But nevertheless, this is what he liked to offer her: the bowed head, the teary voice, the declaration that he was nothing without her. Luke, my mother had said, more than once, this isn’t only about what you are and what you are not and how I can make you better. This is about me, too, isn’t it? And now It’s about Billy. But that never stopped him, and often enough it didn’t stop Esther, either. She had ridden a bus all night from New York to Austin when he was in the midst of a three-night stand and the hecklers were making him so frightened he lost his voice. She had let him into her (our) apartment when he showed up high on mescaline and remembering the time his father had held him by the shirt and slapped him twenty times across the face. “If my mother hadn’t died—and I killed her, you know, I did, I killed her when I was coming out of her and the A-bomb was dropping …” He wept, as Esther held him and waited for him to calm down. She wasn’t even sure the story was true, but it didn’t matter. Ben Kramer was already dead. She had never seen a birth certificate, he had no driver’s license, so who really knew when Luke was born? Maybe Hiroshima did explode the moment of Luke’s first breath. Who knew? He was a fiction, like Huckleberry, or Henderson. She made love to Luke anyhow, with me staring at the blistered ceiling from my crib in the next room, and soon after he was his old self again: moody, critical, out for a pack of smokes, gone. No, she would not touch him. Not now. Not today.

  “Hold me, baby,” he murmured. “If you don’t hold me, I think I’m going to fall into a million pieces.”

  “You know this man was going to give me some money before you walked in here?” said Little Joe Washington.

  “Can we have a little privacy, would that be asking too much?” said Luke. He brought what he knew about stage presence to the moment, what he knew about staring down an audience, making a line of lyric give ten thousand people the chills just by the way he said it, the way he cocked his head, sneered. If Luke had learned nothing more in the past year, he had at least learned how to create an effect.

  Joe just looked at him, said nothing in return.

  “Esther,” said Luke, taking her arm.

  She overreacted, yanked back from him. Her eyes flashed, she rubbed the spot where he had touched her.

  Luke was stunned, hurt, appalled, and, because of the way his life was now arranged, disappointment was simply unacceptable. Disappointment was for the people without reservations, for has-beens, freelance journalists, folk singers. Luke had entered the first chamber of that vast haunted house of celebrity in which you got what you wanted—and got it quick. One of the directors of the Museum of Modern Art arranged for Luke to see the Picasso show all by himself, after the museum was closed for the night, so Luke wouldn’t be disturbed. There was always someone around to get him what he wanted, whenever desire struck: runs to Chinatown for shrimp in black bean sauce, to Brentano’s for a Dictionary of Slang, to Gramercy Park for Acapulco Gold, to Spanish Harlem for a papaya juice—not to Eighth Street, mind you, which was just a short walk away, it was too watery there, not even to Seventy- second Street, a friend of his found a cockroach in his cup there; no, it had to be the one particular stand on 112th, run by the skinny one-eyed guy with the gold tooth and a Che Guevara T-shirt, he got the sweetest fruit out of Hunts Point, and that’s what it had to be, and Luke knew the difference so don’t try and give him any of that downtown papaya. There was no longer an intermediary, not so much as a speed bump between his desires and their fulfillment. The world was his. That moment in a thousand movies when someone gestures out toward the twinkling lights of the City and says “Someday all this will be yours,” that immigrant dream, that loner’s wish, that unreasonable, unseemly, absurd desire for wealth and power—it had already happened to Luke, the City was his. He could barely be blamed for thinking that in the end people would be as procurable as fifth-row seats on the aisle, or that young cop’s horse, which he gave over to Luke two o—clock one Tuesday morning so that Luke could gallop wildly through Central Park, singing “Trust Fund Mama” at the top of his lungs.

  And, let’s face it, people were procurable. They were moths drawn to his flame, and if that wasn’t enough, Luke had gained authority: he could actually achieve his ferocious horny teenage dream and go into a bar, find the most appealing woman, and just point at her and she’d be his, at least for the night.

  Girls on the road, what are their numbers

  I don’t know, I won’t even guess

  They see by my spurs that I am a cowboy

  They ask me Are you lonely and I tell them: Yes.

  They offered me diamonds, they offered me gold

  A trip to Kyoto and Viennese shortcake

  In a world of illusion they showed me their dreams

  They stole my spirit but left me the heartbreak …

  —“Girls on the Road,” recorded 1977, 1992

  Yet all the personal power Luke had gained over the past year had no effect on Esther. In fact, his wealth and fame and the beginnings of his deification only distanced her further. If she had been concocting a way of making herself distinctive to him, or of increasing his obsession with her, she could not have chosen better: he was so used to leaning back when people approached, it had changed his center of gravity. Yet with Esther he had to lean forward, and that made him lose his balance time after time. Yes, it might have been some sexual tai chi she had devised, or it might have been how she really felt. Most likely, it was a lucky combination: a true feeling she could summon and emphasize, a personal reality that also had considerable usefulness.

  “Esther,” he said. “Don’t do like that.” “Forget it, Luke. I came here for one reason.” “And I think I know what that reason is.” He smiled and started to reach for her again.

  “Don’t force yourself on me,” she said. “Don’t grab me, don’t pet me, don’t even touch me, okay, don’t even fucking touch me!”

  Ah: but that was her mistake. The repeat at the end, the expletive undeleted. Luke knew her well, and desire makes certain people clever. Her voice might have been flat as a floor, but he suddenly sensed where the trapdoor was, the shortcut to the depths of her.

  I think of them standing in there, the windows the color of an onion’s inmost heart, the smell of marijuana in the air, my parents’ eyes flashing across the foggy harbor of the foyer, and unfortunate Little Joe Washington stuck in their force field. He’s already told me how much he wanted to leave, the embarrassment and irritation he felt—but he was transfixed by fascination, and of course there was the money. (He was right to worry that maybe his best chance to get a cash settlement from Luke had already passed—he was closer to getting that quick fifty grand the moment before Esther knocked on the door than h
e would be for several years.)

  And—where was I? Home on Sullivan Street, but with whom? Grandma? That runty little pothead babysitter Esther used only because she lived in our building? (Sorry, Carol, but really, you were the worst.) Was I even on Esther’s mind? Did she think: I better cut this short and get back to Billy? Believe me, I’m not insisting. What do I know of the Sisyphian task of raising a child? I’m sure she longed for breaks from me, longed for privacy and a life of her own—and how many million times more engrossing was this life as Luke’s ex, the muse and obsession of the man of the American hour; how much more riveting it was to relive their passionate past, the memories of daybreak hotels with the sounds of the street cleaners shush- shush-shushing the cobblestones beyond the shuttered windows; there were lights in their past, cheers, screams, limos nosing through the throngs like the prow of a ship through heavy water, the water in some flipped-out painting, in which every wave is full of human faces. Fame had just begun for Luke, though at the time it didn’t seem to anyone that it could get much bigger, much crazier. How could this, the memory of it, the hatred of it, the proximity to it, how could it help eclipsing her difficult, somewhat lonely life? Luke was so much more exciting than her real life, or real life in general.

  “You never really cared about me, did you?” And do you know who said this? Not my mother, not Esther the Abandoned, not the one living in a rent-controlled walk-up on Sullivan Street, not the one who slept alone while the other went from lover to lover. No. “You never cared about me” was what Luke said: Luke.

  “Not this again,” said Esther. She turned, went for the door.

  But he spun her around, forcefully.

  “How many people did you sleep with when we were together?”

  “This is the great Luke Fairchild? Mr. Hip?”

  “I know you slept with Peter Baumgarten. Who else?”

  “I’m not doing this with you, Luke. I came here—”

  “You know he appears in fuck films. You do know that, don’t you? Porn musicals. Breast Side Story—he was in that. Eat Me in St. Louis.”

  “Look, Luke, Peter—”

  “Oh, It’s ‘Peter’ now, is it? Peter.”

  “Would you prefer it if I called him Mr. Baumgarten?”

  “I would prefer it if you never slept with him. If you didn’t make a fool of me up and down the street. The downtown boys were laughing, the uptown girls were rolling their eyes.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Esther.

  “Who else were you balling, besides Peter?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh, sweet. How like a lady.”

  “Is this because you want me to say Billy isn’t yours?”

  “He isn—t. He couldn’t be. I’m sterile and you know it. Radiation sickness. And you know what else? I don’t want you to say whose he is. I don’t even think you could say.”

  “Because I’m such a whore? Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m being sucked into this conversation. By you, of all people. I must be out of my mind. You. The most unfaithful person.”

  “I never gave my heart to anyone but you.”

  “Your heart? Since when did the human heart have anything to do with your life?”

  “I’m never going to get my money, am I?” said Joe. He had just about made up his mind to call it a day, give it back to the lawyers to solve, when Luke fell to his knees.

  “Why don’t you just kill me, okay?” Luke cried, throwing his arms out wide. “Why don’t you just fucking kill me?”

  “Do you think I haven’t thought about killing you?” Esther said, her voice going up like fireworks. Most likely, Luke expected remorse, or even some mongrelized whimper of sentimentality; he hoped at least that his histrionics might awaken a feeling of love in Mom. But she knew him too well, and she had been hurt too deeply. Suddenly, she was a shark, incited by even stage blood. “You’ve got the loyalty of a flea,” she said. (See “Flea Circus Lament,” recorded 1970.) “If I live a hundred years, I’m never going to be treated as badly as you’ve treated me. Never! Look what you’ve done to me! Do you ever even think about it?”

  “I think about you all the time. What do you think I think about?”

  “That’s not about me. It’s about you. Everything’s about you now, Luke. You don’t care about Negroes and civil rights—”

  “I don’t believe I’m listening to two white children talking about Neee-groes,” said Little Joe, throwing up his hands.

  “You don’t care about the bomb,” Esther was saying, “or even freedom. Except freedom for you. And then you do this thing, pretending you care so much that you can act like you don’t give a shit. But It’s not an act. You really and truly do not care. You’re a sellout and you know it. Look, there’s nothing wrong with getting high. I like to, too. But you’re high all the time. You’re high right now. It’s just another way of cutting off from the world. It’s masturbating.”

  “I assume you mean that to be a bad thing,” said Luke.

  “When was the last time you talked to Sandy Golden? Or put your name on a petition? Or spoke out about what’s happening in this country?”

  “What’d you do—swallow your father? Is he down there, shouting the words out through your throat?”

  “All you care about is getting high and getting your dick wet.”

  “Which reminds me,” Luke said. He got up, took a step toward her. She raked her fingernails across his face.

  He grabbed her by the wrist. She tried to pull away, kicked him in the shin. His shins were almost like his balls, wildly sensitive. He lunged at her, tackled her from around the shoulders, sent her reeling back into the wall. Her head hit the mirror; a spooky spiderweb crunched into the glass. She touched the back of her head, checked her palm for blood. Her thick raven hair had cushioned the blow

  “You fucking bastard!” she screamed, and rushed him, flailing her arms. Luke did his best to cover himself; his aggression was already spent, and now all he wanted was to survive.

  She pummeled him. But a left-wing Brooklyn girlhood hadn’t been much of a preparation for the real dirtiness and violence of life. Her blows were weak, poorly aimed, and ambivalent. As a mother she was incapable of administering a spanking. All she knew how to do was what had been done to her: she could make you feel guilty, or a little corrupt; in a pinch, she could pinch you. She was mild, she lacked force, perhaps she even lacked some element of passion. She lacked that quality that you need to be savagely on your own side, that desire to prevail, to win, to have the greater share. She had a temper, true, but it came from grief, frustration, not anything truly vital. She slapped at him, punched him, but did no damage, caused him no pain.

  Just then, three of Luke’s crowd appeared on the doorstep, dressed in Afghan jackets—raw sheepskin painted purple and white, tufts of coarse, spotty fur around the collar and the sleeves. They were holding bags of groceries.

  “It’s the Party People,” one of them called out.

  “We are the Party People, we are the Party People,” the other two sang.

  A gangling girl with curly red hair was the first one in. She wore knee-high lace-up boots; despite the winter, her coat was open. She was a model, flat-chested, dreamy, sexy, and amused, with the confident air of someone who always gets invited to the party. “Oh!” she said, seeing Luke and Esther in the foyer. “We bought meat on Little West Twelfth Street, from a real butcher, right off the hook.”

  Behind her stood Winston Scattergood and Alan Silver- man. Winston was a fleshy, flaxen-haired kid, stoned and sweaty, who was then a driver/gofer/companion/court jester for Luke, and who ten years later would be a hot-shot movie executive, and who twenty years after that would be dead of AIDS. Alan Silverman was wiry, dark, always cranked up on speed. He functioned as a kind of cultural commissar. His job with Luke was to know where the best parties were, the best drugs, the newest bands, the best clothes, and he did it well. “Comrade Silverfish,” Luke liked to ask, “what’s new and how do I get
to be a part of it?” (Alan’s flash forward is medical school, marriage to a beautiful, deaf Kenyan, heroic good works in Africa.)

  Luke took Esther’s hand and they walked up the staircase to the second floor. Esther did nothing to resist; they would have a momentary truce, based on their common interest, which was to get away from the trio of La Bohème revelers.

  “Hello, Esther,” said the red-haired girl. “Are you around now?” She said this to my mother’s back, and my mother to this day doesn’t know that girl’s name. Of course, that was part of being around Luke. There were always so many more people than you could ever hope to keep track of. People who thought about you and wanted to take your place.

  What happened when Luke took my mother upstairs? I can’t say with any certainty. My knowledge of this moment comes primarily from Little Joe, who was downstairs looking at the ceiling, which throbbed like a plaster heart beneath their footsteps. “Leave me alone!” my mother shrieked. And then, a minute later, she was heard to say, “Take your love and shove it up your ass.”

  Years later, after Joe had retired from the music business, moved upstate, and opened up his restaurant in High Falls with the money he got when his plagiarism suit against Luke was finally settled. “About half an hour after your mother left, Luke came down,” he told me. “His eyes were all red. He wasn’t talking. He just sat down at the piano and wrote three songs in an hour. Real bitter shit, meaner than hell. And then he started singing this really sad song, but it was in French. French! Man, I gotta say I was impressed.”

  “I should have taken her keys away from her that first night,” Joe said to me as we stood by Esther’s bed, watching her oh-so-slowly breathe.

  “The keys to her car? How would she get around?”

  “I don’t know, Billy. I’ve got time on my hands. I could have driven her.”

  “Very nice. Driving Miss Esther.”