American Psycho

by Bret Easton Ellis

  I can’t restrain myself from snickering.

  “It isn’t funny, Patrick,” she says.

  “You cut the conversation short,” I point out.

  “Did you expect me to be flattered?” she spits out bitterly.

  “Listen, baby, I’m just trying to make that encounter seem as legitimate as possible, so don’t, uh, you know, screw it up for yourself.”

  “Just stop it,” she says, ignoring me. “Oh look, it’s Robert Farrell.” After waving to him, she discreetly points him out to me and sure enough, Bob Farrell, whom everyone likes, is sitting on the north side of the room at a window table, which secretly drives me mad. “He’s very good-looking,” Evelyn confides admiringly, only because she’s noticed me contemplating the twenty-year-old hardbody he’s sitting with, and to make sure I’ve registered this she teasingly chirps, “Hope I’m not making you jealous.”

  “He’s handsome,” I admit. “Stupid-looking but handsome.”

  “Don’t be nasty. He’s very handsome,” she says and then suggests, “Why don’t you get your hair styled that way?”

  Before this comment I was an automaton, only vaguely paying attention to Evelyn, but now I’m panicked, and I ask, “What’s wrong with my hair?” In a matter of seconds my rage quadruples. “What the hell is wrong with my hair?” I touch it lightly.

  “Nothing,” she says, noticing how upset I’ve gotten. “Just a suggestion,” and then, really noticing how flushed I’ve become, “Your hair looks really … really great.” She tries to smile but only succeeds in looking worried.

  A sip—half a glass—of the J&B calms me enough to say, looking over at Farrell, “Actually, I’m horrified by his paunch.”

  Evelyn studies Farrell too. “Oh, he doesn’t have a paunch.”

  “That’s definitely a paunch,” I say. “Look at it.”

  “That’s just the way he’s sitting,” she says, exasperated. “Oh you’re—”

  “It’s a paunch, Evelyn,” I stress.

  “Oh you’re crazy.” She waves me off. “A lunatic.”

  “Evelyn, the man is barely thirty.”

  “So what? Everyone’s not into weight lifting like you,” she says, annoyed, looking back at the menu.

  “I do not ‘weight lift,’” I sigh.

  “Oh go over and sock him in the nose, then, you big bully,” she says, brushing me off. “I really don’t care.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” I warn her, then looking back at Farrell I mutter, “What a creep.”

  “Oh my god, Patrick. You have no right to be so embittered,” Evelyn says angrily, still staring into her menu. “Your animosity is grounded on nothing. There must be something really the matter with you.”

  “Look at his suit,” I point out, unable to help myself. “Look at what he’s wearing.”

  “Oh so what, Patrick.” She turns a page, finds it has nothing on it and turns back to the page she was previously studying.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to him that his suit might inspire loathing?” I ask.

  “Patrick you are being a lunatic,” she says, shaking her head, now looking over the wine list.

  “Goddamnit, Evelyn. What do you mean, being?” I say. “I fucking am one.”

  “Must you be so militant about it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.” I shrug.

  “Anyway, I was going to tell you what happened to Melania and Taylor and …” She notices something and in the same sentence adds, sighing, “… stop looking at my chest, Patrick. Look at me, not my chest. Now anyway, Taylor Grassgreen and Melania were … You know Melania, she went to Sweet Briar. Her father owns all those banks in Dallas? And Taylor went to Cornell. Anyway, they were supposed to meet at the Cornell Club and then they had a reservation at Mondrian at seven and he was wearing …” She stops, retraces. “No. Le Cygne. They were going to Le Cygne and Taylor was …” She stops again. “Oh god, it was Mondrian. Mondrian at seven and he was wearing a Piero Dimitri suit. Melania had been shopping. I think she’d been to Bergdorf s, though I’m not positive—but anyway, oh yes … it was Bergdorf’s because she was wearing the scarf at the office the other day, so anyway, she hadn’t been to her aerobics class for something like two days and they were mugged on one of—”

  “Waiter?” I call to someone passing by. “Another drink? J&B?” I point to the glass, upset that I phrased it as a question rather than a command.

  “Don’t you want to find out what happened?” Evelyn asks, displeased.

  “With bated breath,” I sigh, totally uninterested. “I can hardly wait.”

  “Anyway, the most amusing thing happened,” she starts.

  I am absorbing what you are saying to me, I’m thinking. I notice her lack of carnality and for the first time it taunts me. Before, it was what attracted me to Evelyn. Now its absence upsets me, seems sinister, fills me with a nameless dread. At our last session—yesterday, in fact—the psychiatrist I’ve been seeing for the past two months asked, “What method of contraception do you and Evelyn use?” and I sighed before answering, my eyes fixed out the window on a skyscraper, then at the painting above the Turchin glass coffee table, a giant visual reproduction of a graphic equalizer by another artist, not Onica. “Her job.” When he asked about her preferred sexual act, I told him, completely serious, “Foreclosure.” Dimly aware that if it weren’t for the people in the restaurant I would take the jade chopsticks sitting on the table and push them deep into Evelyn’s eyes and snap them in two, I nod, pretending to listen, but I’ve already phased out and I don’t do the chopsticks thing. Instead I order a bottle of the Chassagne Montrachet.

  “Isn’t that amusing?” Evelyn asks.

  Casually laughing along with her, the sounds coming out of my mouth loaded with scorn, I admit, “Riotous.” I say it suddenly, blankly. My gaze traces the line of women at the bar. Are there any I’d like to fuck? Probably. The long-legged hardbody sipping a kir on the last stool? Perhaps. Evelyn is agonizing between the mâché raisin and gumbo salade or the gratinized beet, hazelnut, baby greens and endive salad and I suddenly feel like I’ve been pumped full of clonopin, which is an anticonvulsive, but it wasn’t doing any good.

  “Christ, twenty dollars for a fucking egg roll?” I mutter, studying the menu.

  “It’s a moo shu custard, lightly grilled,” she says.

  “It’s a fucking egg roll,” I protest.

  To which Evelyn replies, “You’re so cultivated, Patrick.”

  “No.” I shrug. “Just reasonable.”

  “I’m desperate for some Beluga,” she says. “Honey?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Why not?” she asks, pouting.

  “Because I don’t want anything out of a can or that’s Iranian,” I sigh.

  She sniffs haughtily and looks back at the menu. “The moo foo jambalaya is really first-rate,” I hear her say.

  The minutes tick by. We order. The meal arrives. Typically, the plate is massive, white porcelain; two pieces of blackened yellowtail sashimi with ginger lie in the middle, surrounded by tiny dots of wasabi, which is circled by a minuscule amount of hijiki, and on top of the plate sits one lone baby prawn; another one, even smaller, lies curled on the bottom, which confuses me since I thought this was primarily a Chinese restaurant. I stare at the plate for a long time and when I ask for some water, our waiter reappears with a pepper shaker instead and insists on hanging around our table, constantly asking us at five-minute intervals if we’d like “some pepper, perhaps?” or “more pepper?” and once the fool moves over to another booth, whose occupants, I can see out of the corner of my eye, both cover their plates with their hands, I wave the maître d’ over and ask him, “Could you please tell the waiter with the pepper shaker to stop hovering over our table? We don’t want pepper. We haven’t ordered anything that needs pepper. No pepper. Tell him to get lost.”

  “Of course. My apologizes.” The maître d’ humbly bows.

  Embarrassed, Evelyn asks, “Must you be so ove
rly polite?”

  I put down my fork and shut my eyes. “Why are you constantly undermining my stability?”

  She breathes in. “Let’s just have a conversation. Not an interrogation. Okay?”

  “About what?” I snarl

  “Listen,” she says. “The Young Republican bash at the Pla …” She stops herself as if remembering something, then continues, “at the Trump Plaza is next Thursday.” I want to tell her I can’t make it, hoping to god she has other plans, even though two weeks ago, drunk and coked up at Mortimer’s or Au Bar, I invited her, for Christ sakes. “Are we going?”

  After a pause, “I guess,” I say glumly.

  For dessert I’ve arranged something special. At a power breakfast at the ’21′ Club this morning with Craig McDermott, Alex Baxter and Charles Kennedy, I stole a urinal cake from the men’s room when the attendant wasn’t looking. At home I covered it with a cheap chocolate syrup, froze it, then placed it in an empty Godiva box, tying a silk bow around it, and now, in Luke, when I excuse myself to the rest room, I make my way instead to the kitchen, after I’ve stopped at the coatcheck to retrieve the package, and I ask our waiter to present this to the table “in the box” and to tell the lady seated there that Mr. Bateman called up earlier to order this especially for her. I even tell him, while opening the box, to put a flower on it, whatever, hand him a fifty. He brings it over once a suitable amount of time has elapsed, after our plates have been removed, and I’m impressed by what a big deal he makes over it; he’s even placed a silver dome over the box and Evelyn coos with delight when he lifts it off, saying “Voi-ra,” and she makes a move for the spoon he’s laid next to her water glass (that I make sure is empty) and, turning to me, Evelyn says, “Patrick, that’s so sweet,” and I nod to the waiter, smiling, and wave him away when he tries to place a spoon on my side of the table.

  “Aren’t you having any?” Evelyn asks, concerned. She hovers over the chocolate-dipped urinal cake anxiously, poised. “I adore Godiva.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I say. “Dinner was … filling.”

  She leans down, smelling the brown oval, and, catching a scent of something (probably disinfectant), asks me, now dismayed, “Are you … sure?”

  “No, darling,” I say. “I want you to eat it. There’s not a lot there.”

  She takes the first bite, chewing dutifully, immediately and obviously disgusted, then swallows. She shudders, then makes a grimace but tries to smile as she takes another tentative bite.

  “How is it?” I ask, then, urging, “Eat it. It’s not poisoned or anything.”

  Her face, twisted with displeasure, manages to blanch again as if she were gagging.

  “What?” I ask, grinning. “What is it?”

  “It’s so …” Her face is now one long agonized grimace mask and, shuddering, she coughs. “… minty.” But she tries to smile appreciatively, which becomes an impossibility. She reaches for my glass of water and gulps it down, desperate to rid her mouth of the taste. Then, noticing how worried I look, she tries to smile, this time apologetically. “It’s just”—she shudders again—“it’s just … so minty.”

  To me she looks like a big black ant—a big black ant in an original Christian Lacroix—eating a urinal cake and I almost start laughing, but I also want to keep her at ease. I don’t want her to get second thoughts about finishing the urinal cake. But she can’t eat any more and with only two bites taken, pretending to be full, she pushes the tainted plate away, and at this moment I start feeling strange. Even though I marveled at her eating that thing, it also makes me sad and suddenly I’m reminded that no matter how satisfying it was to see Evelyn eating something I, and countless others, had pissed on, in the end the displeasure it caused her was at my expense—it’s an anticlimax, a futile excuse to put up with her for three hours. My jaw begins to clench, relax, clench, relax, involuntarily. There is music playing somewhere but I can’t hear it. Evelyn asks the waiter, hoarsely, if perhaps he could get her some Life Savers from the Korean deli around the block.

  Then, very simply, dinner reaches its crisis point, when Evelyn says, “I want a firm commitment.”

  The evening has already deteriorated considerably so this comment doesn’t ruin anything or leave me unprepared, but the unreasonableness of our situation is choking me and I push my water glass back toward Evelyn and ask the waiter to remove the half-eaten urinal cake. My endurance for tonight is shot the second the melting dessert is taken away. For the first time I notice that she has been eyeing me for the last two years not with adoration but with something closer to greed. Someone finally brings her a water glass along with a bottle of Evian I didn’t hear her order.

  “I think, Evelyn, that …” I start, stall, start again. “… that we’ve lost touch.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?” She’s waving to a couple—Lawrence Montgomery and Geena Webster, I think—and from across the room Geena (?) holds up her hand, which has a bracelet on it. Evelyn nods approvingly.

  “My … my need to engage in … homicidal behavior on a massive scale cannot be, um, corrected,” I tell her, measuring each word carefully. “But I … have no other way to express my blocked … needs.” I’m surprised at how emotional this admission makes me, and it wears me down; I feel light-headed. As usual, Evelyn misses the essence of what I’m saying, and I wonder how long it will take to finally rid myself of her.

  “We need to talk,” I say quietly.

  She puts her empty water glass down and stares at me. “Patrick,” she begins. “If you’re going to start in again on why I should have breast implants, I’m leaving,” she warns.

  I consider this, then, “It’s over, Evelyn. It’s all over.”

  “Touchy, touchy,” she says, motioning to the waiter for more water.

  “I’m serious,” I say quietly. “It is fucking over. Us. This is no joke.”

  She looks back at me and I think that maybe someone is actually comprehending what I’m trying to get through to them, but then she says, “Let’s just avoid the issue, all right? I’m sorry I said anything. Now, are we having coffee?” Again she waves the waiter over.

  “I’ll have a decaf espresso,” Evelyn says. “Patrick?”

  “Port,” I sigh. “Any kind of port.”

  “Would you like to see—” the waiter begins.

  “Just the most expensive port,” I cut him off. “And oh yeah, a dry beer.”

  “My my,” Evelyn murmurs after the waiter leaves.

  “Are you still seeing your shrink?” I ask.

  “Patrick,” she warns. “Who?”

  “Sorry,” I sigh. “Your doctor.”

  “No.” She opens her handbag, looking for something.

  “Why not?” I ask, concerned.

  “I told you why,” she says dismissively.

  “But I don’t remember,” I say, mimicking her.

  “At the end of a session he asked me if I could get him plus three into Nell’s that night.” She checks her mouth, the lips, in the mirror of the compact. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I think you need to see someone,” I begin, hesitantly, honestly. “I think you are emotionally unstable.”

  “You have a poster of Oliver North in your apartment and you’re calling me unstable?” she asks, searching for something else in the handbag.

  “No. You are, Evelyn,” I say.

  “Exaggerating. You’re exaggerating,” she says, rifling through the bag, not looking at me.

  I sigh, but then begin gravely, “I’m not going to push the issue, but—”

  “How uncharacteristic of you, Patrick,” she says.

  “Evelyn. This has got to end,” I sigh, talking to my napkin. “I’m twenty-seven. I don’t want to be weighed down with a commitment.”

  “Honey?” she asks.

  “Don’t call me that,” I snap.

  “What? Honey?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I snap again.

  “What do you want me to call you?” she asks, indig
nantly. “CEO?” She stifles a giggle.

  “Oh Christ.”

  “No, really Patrick. What do you want me to call you?”

  King, I’m thinking. King, Evelyn. I want you to call me King. But I don’t say this. “Evelyn. I don’t want you to call me anything. I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

  “But your friends are my friends. My friends are your friends. I don’t think it would work,” she says, and then, staring at a spot above my mouth, “You have a tiny fleck on the top of your lip. Use your napkin.”

  Exasperated, I brush the fleck away. “Listen, I know that your friends are my friends and vice versa. I’ve thought about that.” After a pause I say, breathing in, “You can have them.”

  Finally she looks at me, confused, and murmurs, “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I am.”

  “But … what about us? What about the past?” she asks blankly.

  “The past isn’t real. It’s just a dream,” I say. “Don’t mention the past.”

  She narrows her eyes with suspicion. “Do you have something against me, Patrick?” And then the hardness in her face changes instantaneously to expectation, maybe hope.

  “Evelyn,” I sigh. “I’m sorry. You’re just … not terribly important … to me.”

  Without missing a beat she demands, “Well, who is? Who do you think is, Patrick? Who do you want?” After an angry pause she asks, “Cher?”

  “Cher?” I ask back, confused. “Cher? What are you talking about? Oh forget it. I want it over. I need sex on a regular basis. I need to be distracted.”

  In a matter of seconds she becomes frantic, barely able to contain the rising hysteria that’s surging through her body. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. “But what about the past? Our past?” she asks again, uselessly.

  “Don’t mention it,” I tell her, leaning in.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we never really shared one,” I say, keeping my voice from rising.

  She calms herself down and, ignoring me, opening her handbag again, mutters, “Pathological. Your behavior is pathological.”