Thus sated, the four made their way home in a good mood, much skipping about among the crowded, scented streets of Chinatown, capped by a breathless run up the five short flights to the loft. Karp thought he knew what he would find there: Marlene soaking in the hot tub, a couple of empties scattered around, the smell of wine and rose petals. He would hold her, she would cling to him and wail. He had done it all before, and while it was not his favorite part of the relationship, it was one he knew pretty well and accepted.
But this was not what he found. Marlene was dressed in pajamas made of heavy black-figured silk and a soft-looking tan robe, neither of which he recalled seeing before. She was watching television and sipping cognac. Lucy took one look at her mother and retreated to her room. The twins did their usual scramble and competition to tell her the news of the day, but she seemed impatient with them, snappish. She indicated by a number of signs that she did not wish to play just now, and Karp took the hint and diverted the boys to their own room, where, God knew, there was enough stuff to keep them busy for a decade.
He changed and came back to the living room. A commercial for a car company was on, but Marlene seemed to be watching it raptly, as if it were a complex metaphor for the ultimate secrets of existence. Karp observed his wife for a while as he sat next to her. Except that she took a sip of cognac at regular intervals, she could have been a waxwork.
“How are you?” he said tentatively. His eye went, against his will, to the cognac bottle, which was about a third gone.
“Fine.”
“How did it go with the . . .”
“The shooting. That went fine. Lou was very understanding and complimentary. He said to take off as much time as I needed.”
“That’s good. You could use a break.”
“We closed at sixty-one and one-quarter today,” she said in the same dull voice.
“That’s good.”
“Yes, it’s good for business when we save a client with lots of bloodshed all around. Did you know that Oleg killed twelve people getting Richard Perry out in Kosovo? I only killed four. Still, a six-point rise on the day isn’t bad.”
“You didn’t kill anyone. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, that’s what Lou said. He said it about fifty times. He kept watching the stock tape on the TV screen while he was telling me it wasn’t my fault.” She took a gulp of her drink and splashed some more into the snifter. She fingered the material of her robe.
“I picked this up on the way home. I was thinking about getting someone to drive me back to the Volvo, and then I thought, hey, I don’t need to do that. So I called a limo service and came home in a white Caddy with smoked windows. Did you know people stare at you when you’re in a car like that, trying to see who’s in it? And I had him stop off at Bendel’s and I bought this outfit. This is pashmina. It cost twenty-five hundred. The pj’s were seven-fifty.”
Karp didn’t know what to say. A strange, tight feeling was in his chest.
She said, “I want to go away, take a trip. Paris, we’ll rent an apartment, or we could get a place in Tuscany.” She turned to face him for the first time, a weird light in her eye, and grabbed his arm. “Let’s go, Butch! Let’s shitcan the whole mess and go!”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I was never more serious.”
“Marlene, what’re you talking—I have a job, you have a job, we have kids, they’re in school. We can’t just take off.”
She dropped his arm and turned back to the television, which was playing a generic sitcom. The canned laughter was like some insect burrowing into his brain.
“Fine. I’ll go myself.”
“Marlene? What’s wrong? Why are you acting like someone you’re not?”
She shrugged. “I’m rich. Very rich. Very rich and very drunk, and the very rich and very drunk are very different from you and me.”
“Oh, horseshit, Marlene! You’re not rich. You have a bunch of stock options that you can’t sell for six months.”
“Untrue. I have a bank account with five and a half million in it, plus a credit card that they never send you a bill on, you buy what you want and Ms. Lipopo takes care of it. Five and a half million, less what I spent on what I’m wearing, less the five hundred bucks I jammed into Wayne’s sucking chest wound, but I’ll probably get that back.”
“You borrowed against the stock?” said Karp, horrified.
“Yep. That’s how it’s done, buster.”
“Oh, Christ! What if the stock goes down? What do you do then?”
“It doesn’t go down. It only goes up.” She made a little swoop with the glass in her hand to demonstrate the difference in the two directions. Cognac splashed on the pashmina robe, but she didn’t seem to notice.
He stood up, glared at her, and turned to walk away, and she said, “And if it starts to go down even a teeny bit, we’ll shoot a few more people. Then it’ll go up up up again until it hits the sky.”
The next morning Marlene awoke to pain and nausea and a gap in her memory where living, breathing neurons used to be. She groaned and opened her eye. In her field of vision was the nightstand on her side of the bed. On the nightstand was a light, a couple of magazines and paperback novels, and an empty bottle of Hennessy. Empty. That was impossible. The bottle was one of those Lou had given out to the troops when the IPO went through, and she had opened it just last night because she needed a drink after. After what? She rolled over, carefully, and checked out the other side of the bed. The pillow was undented, the sheets and blanket and bedspread undisturbed. Butch had not slept here last night. Uh-oh. Now she noticed that she was dressed in an unfamiliar robe and heavy silk pajamas, both smelling unpleasantly of stale cognac, and she noticed also a faint and nauseating odor coming from somewhere below. The dog? She licked her dry lips and managed a weak whistle. Thump thump and a whine at the door. Holding her head so that it would not fall off, she swung her legs out of bed and took a couple of tottering steps, whereupon her bare foot landed in a generous pool of vomit. Uh-oh again. She flung off her clothes and staggered into the bathroom, where she ate four aspirins and got into the shower, first hot and then, for punishment, ice-cold for as long as she could stand it.
The previous day’s and evening’s events now started to arrive at the conscious layers of her brain, like static-ridden communications from a war zone. Coleman; Wayne; Lou Osborne; the $3,000 lounging ensemble; the fight with Butch. That one was hard to remember. Did she throw things? Did she follow him around the house clutching a bottle of booze and shrieking? Impossible; obviously some of those false memories you heard so much about. She should call him and find out what had happened, apologize if required. Or maybe later, after she had cleaned up this mess.
She dressed in painter’s overalls and an old pink T-shirt, scrubbed what needed to be scrubbed, and some things that didn’t, such as the kitchen, including the stove and the refrigerator. Marlene considered herself something of a slob compared to her mother and her married, stay-at-home older sister, but she was actually fairly neat, and she had a husband who cleaned up after himself and a daughter who was practically an obsessive. She now demonstrated where her daughter got it from. Polishing the refrigerator racks with tiny pieces of steel wool. By noon she was done, and dissatisfied. Clean enough, but there was something wrong, displeasing, a little tacky? That couch, for example. The bedroom furniture. Some of it was actual junk from when she had been a struggling single, and the rest was over ten years old.
Suddenly she was restless. She had to get out. She walked the dog, then called the limo service. What to wear? She had nothing to wear. A rampage through her closet. Aiiii! She must have been insane to have gone out in public in these rags. What was she thinking? Living in a crumbling loft in Chinatown? In Chinatown? You couldn’t even say it was SoHo with a straight face. She was shoving clothes into plastic trash bags when the buzzer rang. The dog looked up expectantly and fawned. Marlene ignored this, and the creature slumped away to its l
air under the kitchen table. She threw on her coat, grabbed her bag, and was off.
The driver was a short, tan man named Patel. He seemed glad to see her as he opened the door. She told Patel to take her to Bloomingdale’s.
“So we are going shopping today, madame?” asked Patel.
“Yes, shopping, just a couple of things.”
Marlene ordinarily was not much of a shopper. She had little time for it, and she harbored a secret contempt for women who spent a lot of time buying stuff, or talking about buying stuff. Marlene had been a poor girl at a rich high school, rescued from shame by the school uniform, and after school hours by defiance. She had adopted the garb of the tough-Italian-neighborhood semislut, which had the additional virtue of being cheap. She had gone to college and graduate school during an era when nearly everyone wore boho rags, and afterward there was another kind of uniform: severe suits by day, retro-thrift-shop finds at other times. Marlene did not care much about clothes. Or so she imagined.
But she had developed the habit, over many years, of buying a little something for herself when blue, a habit certainly as widespread and as unacknowledged as, say, masturbation, and upon which retail battens. Usually it would be a small thing: perfume, cosmetics, a scarf, underwear. Something semisecret at any rate. And so she gravitated to the lingerie department of Bloomie’s and found herself in front of a table displaying La Perla sets. Marlene had, in fact, one of these already and had suffered or enjoyed that mixed pang of guilt and luxurious pleasure that paying a hundred bucks for a bra and panties provides for some usually prudent women. She touched the flimsies, held them up admiringly. They were silk satin in coral, eggplant, aqua, with lacy panels of contrasting colors. She picked up one, two, couldn’t decide between them, or maybe that one . . . that was nice, too. She let out a giggle. Oh, the hell with it, she thought, and bought one of each color, ten in all. The saleswoman took the magic card and gave Marlene a look she did not recall ever receiving from a saleswoman before.
She wandered now through the designer floor. The thought occurred: I can buy anything I want. Anything. Any. Thing. She tested this novel notion by picking up an ivory Ellen Tracy suit ($700), which fit, but which was wearable in no remotely probable social situation in her immediate plans, and then down on the main floor again, where she dropped $200 on Lancôme lipsticks and moisturizers, although her skin felt moist enough, somewhat sweaty, in fact.
Out on the sidewalk she waited until Patel cruised by with his pearl-gray Caddie, one of the numerous chauffeured cars that circled Bloomie’s like schooling fish. Patel stashed the loot in the trunk, and Marlene got a smile from a package-encumbered, knockout blonde in a leopard coat. A knowing smile from one of the Sisterhood of Spend to another. Marlene got into the car and said, “Ralph Lauren on Madison.”
Ralph sold her a fitted patent-leather motorcycle jacket in navy, and she got the same look from the salesclerk when she flashed the card. This purchase marked the first time Marlene had ever bought a garment without looking at the price tag. After that, down the avenue: Chanel for a couple of suits, Manolo’s for half a dozen pairs of handmade stiletto mules and several slingbacks, Celine’s for a pair of caramel glove-leather jeans and a long-sleeved, red silk T-shirt encrusted with tiny Swarovski crystals. Here she did glance at the price tag, out of scientific curiosity, and found it cost an even grand, plus tax. I just paid a thousand dollars for a T-shirt, said a voice in her head. More giggling in front of the mirror. The crystals flashed hypnotically as she posed. She wore the pants and the T-shirt out of the store. They made her old leather trench, until lately the most expensive item she had ever bought for herself, look like a burlap sack. In the car she said out loud, “This is crazy. I am nuts.”
“Madame?” said Patel.
“Nothing,” said the client. “Go to Gucci’s.”
Gucci’s provided loose-fitting faux-snakeskin pants and a dress of the same ($2,300) plus a real crocodile bag with a silver chain, a steal at $8,000 and change. They drove to Dolce & Gabbana. Crystals were apparently the thing at D&G. They had crystal bras. Marlene bought one. Then she bought a black silk, see-through, chiffon shirt with gold cuff links to go over it, and an embroidered silk suit avec gold embroidery and crystals to go over that, and more shoes to round out the outfit, mink-trimmed pumps, the whole bill around $15,000. She had stopped sweating by now. People with the special dull gray card apparently did not need to sweat, and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but for some reason food did not attract her. The sun had sunk low now, people were leaving work. On Madison the cabs were multiplying like guppies, but the lovely stores were still gaping for more nourishment.
Oblivion is the goal of all addiction: the boozer’s blackout, the junkie’s nod, the speed freak’s mindless motion. Marlene had not known that shopping could cause the same effect, but then she had never shopped for eight and a half straight hours. She was dead to the world as she stood in front of a full-length mirror at D&G, looking at a stranger wearing a white, floor-length silk jacket completely covered with tiny crystals and weighing ten pounds. She definitely remembered buying that, for $78,000. Somewhat later, after a vague interval, they kicked her out of Barneys because they wished to close the store. She could see that they were reluctant to do so because she was clearly buying out the place. A few moments later, she sat in the backseat of the limo, surrounded by charcoal gray Barneys shopping bags and boxes, and recalled that she had a husband and family. She directed Patel to head home and rummaged in her bag. Her cell phone was off, she found, which was a shocker because she never turned her cell phone off. She had a little bag from Cartier’s in her hand. Another shocker because she could not exactly recall stopping by that famous store. A number of gift-wrapped items were in it. Apparently she had bought gifts for her husband and her entire family. Watches? Probably. She had a gold Baume et Mercier on her wrist that had not been there when she’d started out that morning. She looked through the Barneys bags with some curiosity. She found a brown leather fleece-lined coat; a couple of de la Renta dresses, a multicolored Fendi lizard bag, yet another crocodile purse, this one by Bulgari, and a white Valentino couture suit. She felt numb, as if the great dentist of capitalism had shot her whole body full of novocaine. She was starving, too. No wonder; eight o’clock and she hadn’t eaten for twelve hours. At the corner of Third and Thirtieth she directed Patel to a cancer wagon, where she bought a kielbasa with mustard and a can of Coke. They drove on, she munching ravenously, and at the first pothole she squirted mustard all over her $1,000 T-shirt and Coke on her $1,800 faux-snake slacks. Somehow it didn’t matter. She could go out again tomorrow and get more. But the accident made her less numb, which was no good. She spotted a liquor store, dashed out, and came back with a quart bottle of Hennessy. Just a taste to wash that sticky, greasy film out of her mouth. There was a little bar in the limo, so she was able to make herself a civilized drinkee. And another around Eighteenth Street. And a third at Broome and Lafayette. She drank slowly, like a lady, and arranged all the charge slips in a neat bundle. Just for fun, she added up the totals with the tiny flat calculator stuck to her new checkbook: it came to $150,921.35. She looked at the number, which for some reason was expressed in a numerical system she did not understand, and put the device away and gulped down the rest of her drink, not like a lady at all.
Numb returned, and so she felt pretty good when she burst into her loft with Patel burdened like a brown burro under her purchases, confronting her startled family, reeling slightly, glittering with crystal, dabbed with grease, stinko.
Karp looked at her and thought, who are you, and what have you done with my wife?
11
THE CHOIR MEMBERS AT ZION BAPTIST WERE DRESSED IN BLOOD-RED ROBES with white collars, and they were singing “I’m Glad Salvation Is Free.” Karp sat in a rear pew, not sharing the gladness at all, about as moved by the music and fervor as one of the square pillars that held up the vault of the roof. Karp had a tin ear and no faith in anything but
the law and, on good days, love. For most of his life he had placed religious leaders in the same class as people who sold damp lots in Florida over the phone. This opinion had been modified somewhat by his daughter, whom he loved dearly, and who was devout and no fool, so there might be something in it after all, although not for him personally. His daughter said that there was a God gene—some people had it and others did not. His wife, according to his daughter, did not, although she went to church regularly. Or had.
Karp had not had much to do with his wife since she got rich. Marlene had always had, he supposed, a few loose toys in the attic, and at times in their twenty-year relationship she’d done things that had made him angry, such as risking her life and risking the lives of the kids; shooting people; skirting the law; breaking the law; grabbing the law, throwing it to the ground, and stomping all over it while laughing . . . but these had all been Marlenesque excesses, arising from the woman’s peculiar sense of justice. He could understand it, even where he did not approve. This business with the money though . . .
He checked his watch discreetly. McBright had probably wanted to make a point by dragging him through this, but, if so, Karp had gotten it in the first half hour. He looked around at the flock. Everyone was beautifully dressed, the men in suits, the women in bright dresses that seemed to include more than the usual amount of cloth, the children brightly decorated like Easter eggs. Capes and shawls were fashionable here, and nearly every woman was wearing a hat. The only people not so attired were a small group of European and Japanese tourists crammed into one section of the balcony, observing the primitive but fascinating religious rites of the Americans. Time passed; now a soloist, backed by organ and choir, was well into “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Karp sighed and shifted in his seat and looked at his watch again. It was still the old, beat-up gold Hamilton he had worn since law school. The Rolex Oyster with diamonds she had bought him—the kind of thing only a dope dealer or his father would wear—remained in the drawer. Lucy didn’t wear hers either, and Karp rather suspected she had hocked it to fund some charitable enterprise.
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