The Insiders

by J. Minter

  Now he was blissed out. Kelli was here. He had a simple plan. He was going to blow her away with the scene at the opening, and then he was going to take her back to his house and sleep with her. He didn’t know what girls like her did back in St. Louis, but she certainly seemed willing.

  “Let’s go in the back,” Arno said. He grabbed her hand and led her through the crowd, which was made up of hundreds of his mom and dad’s friends and acquaintances.

  “Arno, baby!” someone called out. Arno looked around. A tightly knit circle of young men and women opened up and a frenetically handsome young man in a black silk suit and a black T-shirt that said Freaky in yellow letters climbed through his admirers and made his way over to Arno and Kelli.

  “Randall,” Arno said. “Hot show. Very hot.”

  Arno swept his hands around and gestured at the walls. There were eight paintings of single eyes of very beautiful women caught in mid-wink, so that all the muscles were bulged out and terrifying. They were massive pictures and it took a second to realize what they were. Randall’s last show had been of straining genitals, but he’d grown up a little since then, which was a relief to everyone who worked with him.

  “Who’s this?” Randall Oddy asked. He was staring at Kelli, who was staring back. Her lipstick was smeared from kissing Arno.

  “Ooh,” Kelli said. And Arno frowned.

  “You two headed to the back room? Me, too—you two!” Randall said, and laughed. “Let me find a bottle of Cristal somewhere, and I’ll join you.”

  “Great,” Kelli said. “I dig your art.”

  “Maybe you can pose for me sometime,” Randall said.

  “I definitely want to do that.” Kelli gave Randall a big wink. And as she did, her tongue came out of her mouth, and she used it to adjust her lipstick.

  Arno sighed again, and in that moment, he felt something that he knew was far more familiar to guys like David Grobart, which was jealousy of Randall Oddy, a guy who might just be a hair cooler than he was.

  As they walked back toward the sale room, Arno’s Blackberry went off again. He took it out of his pocket and dropped it on the floor, and a model wearing heels that came to a point as sharp as a ballpoint pen stepped on it and killed it before suddenly falling down herself, like a capsizing sailboat. And Arno knew inside that right then poor Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, who was probably home all alone, getting ready to go out with her girlfriends, was sitting on her bed and crying, loud.

  “Ooh,” Kelli said. “This is even more fun than last night.”

  “Yeah,” Arno said.

  “I really like your artist friend. He’s like the coolest guy I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Kelli …”

  “What?” She was looking around at the crowd. People stood in groups, with their backs to the paintings, telling stories and exchanging information on where to go later. Some were invited to the post-opening dinner for Randall Oddy, which would take place at La Luncheonette, over on Tenth Avenue. The rest would have to make do with smaller dinners of their own, where everyone would do nothing but talk about what was going on at the La Luncheonette dinner, which actually wouldn’t be much fun, but they’d never know that because they weren’t invited.

  “What?” Kelli asked again, simply. Arno could see that Kelli was eyeing the outfits on some of the women and glancing down at her tight jeans and cheap black rayon blouse.

  “You’re so …” Arno trailed off. He’d been about to tell her that he really liked her, but then he caught himself. He guided her into the private sale room. A white bearskin rug was the only object in the room besides a couple of black chairs and a particularly pornographic Randall Oddy painting Arno’s parents had hung on the wall.

  He looked at Kelli. She was hot, sure, but that didn’t mean he’d have to go caring about her or anything. Just ’cause she wasn’t like anyone else he knew—so what? Wasn’t nobody like anybody else? Hadn’t he learned that in school? He closed the door and crossed his fingers, hoping that Randall Oddy had forgotten them and he could have Kelli all to himself.

  “What a beautiful rug,” Kelli said. She squatted down and stroked the fur and Arno stood behind her, looking at the foot-long jaguar tattoo that appeared when her shirt rode up.

  “Cool tattoo.”

  “Yeah,” she said, swiveling around to face him. “I got it when I was a freshman. It’s our school mascot. Dorky, huh?”

  “Maybe you’d like to lie down.”

  “On a rug like this, that’s a really good idea,” Kelli said.

  “Hey, what’s up, you two—are you going anywhere interesting after this?” Randall Oddy stood in the doorway, holding two bottles of Cristal and some plastic party cups. Arno and Kelli slowly stood up.

  “It’s your party, Oddy,” Kelli said, making the two words rhyme.

  “It’s a party only if a girl like you is along for the ride.”

  “Huh,” Arno said, low. He glanced over at Kelli, who had already forgotten all about the rug. Randall handed him a glass of champagne and they all raised their cups.

  “What’s the toast?” Kelli asked. She linked arms with Oddy and stared up at him.

  “To us,” Randall said. “Let’s all hang out only with each other all night long!”

  “I was just thinking how much fun that would be,” Arno said, but he didn’t smile.

  david plays at the garden

  “Come on, Davey, get your coat,” Sam Grobart, David’s father, said. “It’s nearly seven and we want to see warm-ups, don’t we?”

  David slowly got off the couch in his apartment. He’d been pretending to play a game on his Blackberry—in fact he was trying to reach Amanda, which he’d been doing all day, so often that he’d had to lie about it to his parents, who tended to keep an eye out for addictive or destructive behavior.

  “Why are warm-ups enjoyable to watch?” Hilary Grobart asked. In addition to being a therapist, she wrote her own line of self-help books, called Always Ask First, and so she was always asking first. David and her father sighed. It was like living with a paranoid parrot.

  “We don’t have to,” Sam said, raising his voice. “But we want to.”

  “I see,” Hilary said. “Come on, Davey.”

  The three of them stood up and David half-glared at his parents. They were immensely tall people, and handsome in a way, if they hadn’t been so shy and awkward-looking, with their glasses and thick tweedy coats and responsible brown shoes. Every wall of their living room was lined with books, and everyone read all of the books all the time, so books were always teetering on the edges of the shelves, and they fell fairly often, so bunches of them lay on the floor with their spines broken.

  In the elevator, Sam said, “We know you’ve been down in the dumps, but these seats are certainly going to cheer you up. I got them from Frederick Flood and they’re right behind the bench.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “He’s a good man, but he ought to see his children more often.”

  “Isn’t that confidential?” David asked.

  “Because I’m his therapist?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “It is confidential, isn’t it? Did you ask first?” Hilary Grobart said. David and his father sighed again.

  Even though the Grobarts lived downtown in a big old apartment in the Rembrandt Building, on the corner of West Fourth and Jane, they walked briskly up to Madison Square Garden on Thirty-fourth Street. They walked everywhere briskly.

  Along the way, David and his father talked about how incredibly lousy the Rangers were, and how it seemed as if they’d always be that way.

  “But I don’t understand, why are they so bad?” Hilary asked.

  “Because Eric Lindros knows the inside of an MRI machine better than he knows his own ice skates,” Sam Grobart said, and laughed at his own joke. His wife only shook her head and stared in complete confusion at some drunks who were fighting in front of the Wild Pony Bar on Twenty-eighth Street.

  David th
ought of Amanda. They’d been dating for ten months straight, except for the summer, when she’d gone away to Turks and Caicos for diving school. She’d smoked so much pot down there that she’d e-mailed a warning to him that she might have irretrievably changed her personality and wasn’t suited for him anymore. She’d sworn, though, that she hadn’t fooled around with anyone, and that the only reason she hadn’t called was that they didn’t have phones. And then, when she’d gotten back in September, just a month ago, they’d had sex. It was the first time for both of them. Or so she’d said.

  On that day, Labor Day, David had gone to Amanda’s house in Tribeca, a gigantic loft that had been done up to look like an Upper East Side town house. He’d brought flowers and condoms and a bag of M&M’s and shampoo. He’d read in a book that it’s a sensual act if you wash a girl’s hair. But when he got into Amanda’s room, which faced the only airshaft in the loft and was decorated with the mid-century modern furniture her parents had been throwing away in favor of a more traditional look and a lot of horse ribbons that she’d won during summers out at their place in Sagaponack, Amanda just wanted to do it. He never even got the Infusium 23 with end enhancers out of the bag. Thus began what seemed like endless Tuesday and Thursday afternoons of sex (the days of no basketball practice).

  He’d arrive with flowers or candy or nothing, and they’d dive under the yellow handmade Deke Fraternity quilt Amanda had been given by a group of admirers during a trip to visit her cousin at Duke, take off all their clothes, and work each other into a frenzy. Then when it was eight, David would go home and do his homework and Amanda would go out and meet her parents for dinner at Da Silvano.

  “Let’s call it love,” David had said, on their third afternoon together. “I know I feel it, I’m in love with you.”

  Amanda had been lying on her side, faced away from him, flipping channels on the little flat-screen TV that was on her bedside table.

  “Okay?” David asked. She turned over and glanced at him. She had the same placid look on her face that she had when waiters came to the table and announced the evening specials. Amanda’s family were forever going out to dinner. It was the only thing they all really liked to do.

  “Sure,” she said. “I love you, too.”

  And David’s world, which was already really good, got about a thousand times better.

  “You want popcorn?” Sam asked, and prodded David in the ribs. David shook his head and let out a yelp. His dad’s fingers were like gun muzzles.

  “Come on, come on,” Sam said as they got into the Garden. The Grobarts had used the Floods’ Rangers tickets a few times before, so they knew their way to the face-on-the-glass seats, just a bit up and to the left of the visitor’s bench. Tonight it was the Rangers against their archenemy, the Flyers.

  They settled into their seats, with David on one side, then his dad, then his mom.

  “Why is offsides called icing, and when does it occur?” David’s mother asked. Sam leaned in to explain it.

  David immediately began to text-message Amanda on his Blackberry. He wrote in long bursts, soliloquies, sonnets, great chunks of prose. He told her he’d do anything if she would just call, or send him back a note, or meet him later, or just somehow let him know that she still loved him.

  even strangers love mickey

  “Jonathan, what the hell are those?” Mickey asked. He’d drifted into Man Ray on a dense cloud of painkillers. He looked down at Jonathan, who was slumped on the dark leather bench across from the bar, his feet up on a chair. Mickey grabbed Jonathan’s ankle and pulled his foot up so he could better see what Jonathan was wearing in the dim light of the bar.

  “They’re from the new Saint Laurent line—something new that Tom Ford’s trying out, imitation crocodile.”

  “They’re orange loafers.”

  “Burnt sienna, actually,” Jonathan said. “You’re alone.”

  “And feeling no pain,” Mickey said. He sat down and showed Jonathan his bottle of prescription Vicodin. “Want one?”

  “No,” Jonathan said. “You remember what happened last time.”

  Mickey nodded. Last time he’d let Jonathan use drugs, they had been at a party on the Floods’ old sailboat out in Greenwich. Jonathan had taken the same thing as everyone else, but then instead of lying back and listening to music, he’d spent the next six hours running around counting the life preservers, and then counting the people on the boat, and then checking in with the coast guard to make sure no storms were coming even though the sky was the color of a baby boy’s blanket … So, Mickey slowly withdrew the offer.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Mickey asked. He looked around the bar, as if Arno, David, and Patch might be hiding and were going to leap out and surprise him.

  “They all said they’d be here,” Jonathan said. Mickey grabbed the drink Jonathan was sipping and gulped it.

  “Ah—what the hell is this?”

  “Club soda with a splash of cranberry,” Jonathan said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mickey said. “I’m getting a beer.”

  He went up to the bar. Although it was Saturday night and just past eight, the place was quiet, even tomblike. The bartender was an extremely tall young woman in a black T-shirt and jeans.

  “Could I get a Stella?” Mickey asked. He knew that even if he didn’t know a staff member, they probably knew him. This was largely because he’d been coming to the restaurant for brunch with his parents since he was a little kid. The bar he was leaning against had been designed by his father before he’d gotten really famous.

  The bartender looked in his eyes, which were as cloudy as his thoughts, and lined with red. She cocked her head to one side, then the other. Then she said, “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “You keep nodding, but I’m not asking you a question. It’s scary. So, no.”

  “Are you saying no because I’m sixteen, or because I’m on enough painkillers to knock out an elephant?”

  “Yes,” the bartender said. She pulled out a glass and the soda gun, poured Mickey a Coke, and handed it across to him. While this was going on, Mickey’s attention drifted to the groups of people who were beginning to come through the door, all waiting for their parties to arrive so they could get seated in the back. He looked back at Jonathan, who was on the phone.

  In all the darkness, Mickey realized he couldn’t see the floor. There were just swirling mists down there. Part of him was grateful to the bartender for not letting him drink. The TV behind the bar was tuned to New York One, which was showing an interview with a woman who designed handbags shaped like dogs.

  “Can we watch the Rangers game?” Mickey asked.

  “If I say yes will you stay here so I can keep an eye on you?”

  “Yes,” Mickey said back. “I want to keep my eyes on you, too.” He was slurring. Then he frowned, and it was a clown’s frown, big and sad and helpless. In about three seconds, the bartender melted for him.

  “Gimme a kiss on the cheek and go sit with your friend with the funny shoes,” she said. So Mickey reached over and kissed her and she smelled like whiskey and daisies. She reached out and tousled his thicket of matchstick hair.

  “Do you think my girlfriend will be angry at me for being such a mess?” Mickey asked.

  “Only if she finds out you kissed me,” the bartender said. “Now get back to your friend. He looks upset.”

  “Can you believe it? I don’t think anybody’s coming but Liza,” Jonathan said when Mickey sat down next to him. “And I don’t even remember inviting her.”

  “Whatever,” Mickey said. His arm felt like it weighed as much as one of his Dad’s Cadillac sculptures.

  “Where’s my drink?” Jonathan asked.

  By then Mickey was so zoned out that all he could focus on was the whizzing puck on the TV screen.

  david gets the call

  David smiled when he realized that he’d totally forgotten about dinner with everybody at Man Ray. That was cool. He felt his che
eks glow. He never, never forgot things, and always envied Patch Flood for being so mellow that he could never be counted on to show up for anything. And now here David was, casually at a Rangers game with his parents, which was pretty cool if you looked at it from a certain laid-back perspective that David knew he didn’t have himself but that some of his friends did.

  “They scored!” Sam Grobart yelled. He grabbed David and they stood up and threw their hands in the air.

  “What led up to that?” David’s mom asked. Sam sat down to explain.

  So now the Rangers were one goal ahead and David felt happy. It was the beginning of the third period and all they needed to do was hold on. The smell of sweat and beer hung heavy in the cold Madison Square Garden air. And always, always he had Amanda in his head. And he thought, maybe she’s just busy with her parents, at one of those five-hour, seven-course dinners.

  Then his phone rang and he grabbed it so hard that for a moment he flashed on a fear that it would squeeze out of his hand and fly onto the ice and be sliced in neat halves by one of the player’s skates. But he got ahold of it. Saw it was Amanda.

  “Hey, where’ve you been?” David asked.

  “David, where are you?”

  “That doesn’t matter, at the Rangers game. What’s going on? I’ve been trying—”

  “I know you have,” Amanda said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What?” David asked. He scooted his head down between his legs so he could concentrate. The concrete steps were close to his face, and the air was dank.

  “I don’t know if we should be together anymore.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t want to tell you. It’ll make things terrible for everyone.”

  “What will? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t push me, David.”

  “Push you?” David looked around—something was going wrong on the ice, too.