Manhattan Nocturne Page 3

  A minute later, I stood inside an opulent apartment building, handing my coat to an elderly hatcheck man, who was being careful with the ladies’ furs. An elevator man with a green vest took me upstairs.

  “Big party?” I asked.

  But he didn’t need to answer; I could hear the music and the murmurous roar even before the elevator doors opened. Then there I was, amid a warm mass of people, among the lipsticked lips and crinkling eyes, the teeth and the cigarettes and the expensive eyeglasses and newly cut hair and jabbering pink tongues, bright with conversation, all talking loudly, animated with great conspiratorial appetite for life’s possibilities. When you enter a big Manhattan party, you know instantly whether you are of the crowd or not, whether you are one of the smiling gents holding a drink and skipping his gaze loosely about the room. I was not. But then I’ve never felt much at ease with any crowd—always I am outside, watching, still the kid from upstate New York who spent hours in a cold shack out in the middle of the frozen lake, staring at a hole in the ice. (The sudden brutal tug, the handover-hand hauling of the writhing form out of the dark, cold depth.)

  It was one of the spectacular apartments owned by Hobbs. Or maybe his holding company owned it—such distinctions didn’t matter; the place was a cavern of silk walls with a gilded forty-foot ceiling and about five dozen pieces of stuffed period furniture and many English paintings on the walls (selected by a consultant, bought by the truckload), with four open bars staffed by three bartenders each—and not merely unemployed actors eager to make contacts but disdainful professionals who nonetheless remembered your drink from an hour ago. A balcony overlooked the main room, and there a sextet with a piano kept the background music moving along briskly. Nearly a dozen photographers were at work, several of whom considered themselves celebrities in their own right. More rooms opened, one with tables of meats and cheeses and fruits and vegetables and mountains of little chocolates, and others where the sofas were deeper and the lights lower, places of intimate potential.

  Hobbs was in town. This was the purpose of the party, to remind everyone that he was alive, that he was not just one man but a concept, an empire, a world unto himself. Every winter he swooped through Manhattan to inspect his various properties, including his tabloid newspaper, and he arrived with the predictable entourage. But this was not what people remembered after he’d gone—they remembered precisely what he wanted them to remember, which was that he threw an absolute goddamn riot of a party. He churned things up. Stuff happened. People made deals, they met celebrities, they sailed off into the night with someone unexpected. They got drunk and said the wrong thing to the right person. Happy insult and happier slander. Or they loudly uttered many shocking or brilliant things and hoped someone might hear them. All of this was very exciting, and if it was apparent in the next day’s gossip columns that the bash had been vulgar, then so much the better.

  Hobbs was in his sixties, but that did not mean that he decorated the setting only with well-dressed wormwood (the old but minor millionaires with their optimistic winter tans, the women with bony wrists and lifelike teeth who had ceased believing in much of anything other than the necessity of servants and daily estrogen pills); no, his Manhattan office invited a genuinely volatile selection of people—there, looking smaller through the shoulders than might be expected, was Joe Montana, and there, too, was Gregory Hines, a bit gray now, and some of the local TV news personalities, and there was the financier Felix Rohatyn of all people, in his fatly beaverish mien, talking with one of the new sorcerers of cy-, berspace, and Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, and the man who had just been indicted for a $400 million securities scam, and the plastic surgeon who reinflated Dolly Parton’s breasts with such flawless expertise, and not far away was the famous figure skater, whose name I couldn’t remember, standing with the young black male model whose face was on all the bus stops now. Many of the women were lovely and seemed vaguely familiar, actresses on television perhaps. Then, just coming in from the elevator, was a sizable contingent from Time Warner, the newest regime of killers, looking grim and ambitious with their important neckties, and there was George Plimpton, unrecognized by a trio of very long legged women who could only be dancers in a Broadway show, and they were being eyed appreciatively by Senator Moynihan, I noticed. It went on and on. The fat little guy from the Times, who carried his wit like a talking parrot. The famous Italian photojournalist, who got all those horrific pictures out of Sarajevo. He had a scar on his forehead that the women found terribly attractive. They were discussing one of the great oil sheiks, who was said to keep a carefully selected young man with him at all times to donate whatever organ—heart, lung, kidney—the sheik might suddenly require. And there, in a suit but no tie, indifferent to the long ash of his cigarette, stood the famous and formerly promising novelist, a one-book wonder who had made his name ten years earlier with his clever mastery of the Zeitgeist and who now mostly played softball in the Hamptons with other faded literary lights. He seemed to be coloring his hair, and the women ignored him. I did spot James Earl Jones, looking better than anyone in a beautiful blue suit, and he was listening to Mario Cuomo, who is shorter than you expect, who was listening to himself, and there were many other people there as well, maybe four hundred in all, not counting the publicists darting about, directing the photographers, arranging group shots, smiling, smiling, smi-hi!-ling till there was water in the corners of their eyes, working the buzz, surfing it, smiling and nodding and saying, Yes, yes! Everyone is talking about it! with the it itself brightly indefinable.

  And there, dropped into the middle of a huge sofa, was the great man himself, Hobbs, conveying a herring with his swollen fingers through the air into his ever-spittled, never-sated lips. As the oily dead fish approached, the thick eyebrows lifted first, as if part of a complex mechanism that subsequently opened his gaping maw to reveal yellow, crowded teeth that seemed too long, like a horse’s, yet stumpy and worn down from decades of chewing, and then, a further horror: his thick gray tongue—illicitly large, swollen with toxins, lying heavily upon the lower lip.

  He was known as a man of immoral shrewdness, but this meant only that he bought low and sold high. Any city newspaper is dependent on its retail advertising, and it was said that Hobbs had not been planning to buy the newspaper but had been in New York on other business and noticed that its biggest tabloid was in deep trouble. Not coincidentally, he’d seen the empty hotels and dropping prices of skyscrapers. He was a man of many cities (London, Melbourne, Frankfurt) and having witnessed recurrent boom and bust in metropolises around the globe, he had developed a shorthand method for deciding when to buy a newspaper—he listened for the sound of rich people screaming. The owner of the paper at the time, a real-estate man, was getting killed as the tide of Japanese dollars receded from New York. He wanted out and had started to turn off the money; it got so bad that every night a clerk went around collecting spare pencils off reporters’ desks to reuse the next day. With no warning, Hobbs had presented himself like a phantasm; the offer was very, very low, but it was in cash—not a convolution of debt instruments and stock transfers. The real-estate man huffed that he was concerned about the public good; never would he sell out a great New York institution to such a scoundrel—everyone knew what kind of shocking trash Hobbs printed in his London papers. By contrast, the real-estate man was a statue in the park, and for a time he enjoyed this new version of himself and was seen on television and at symposia at the Columbia University School of Journalism describing the size and beauty of his ethical convictions. Three weeks later he took Hobbs’s deal and was gone. Hobbs came in, clashed brutally with the unions, and threatened to close the paper. This seemed impossible, considering he had just bought the paper, but then observers pointed out that the newspaper building was prime East Side real estate; in an up market, the building might be worth nearly the entire price of the paper. This scared the unions. The mayor made entreaties, but Hobbs seemed disinterested. He stayed in London while his deputie
s negotiated, and in the end, the unions caved. Hobbs cut costs, bought the drivers a new fleet of trucks, and then hit the next upturn in the economy.

  Now the paper was fattening Hobbs’s holding company, providing cash for him to add other properties; or maybe it wasn’t, and he was just carrying it in order to bludgeon the politicians as necessary. Either way his genius had again been confirmed. I watched him with a kind of zoological curiosity as he muttered something wetly at a slender young thing who could not have been wearing underpants under her dress as she passed fetchingly in front of him; then the great soft wattle beneath the immense chin—a cow udder of flesh, really—shook in merriment at his own witticism, and above his bright green eyes the thick eyebrows went up and down a second time, as if connected to a string, while pieces of masticated herring frothed momentarily on the ledge of his lip before being wiped away by the same swollen tongue. The mouth then reflexively opened again, just in time to receive another shiny herring being pressed home.

  A fiftyish woman with a perfect helmet of hair smiled at me. “Porter Wren, is it?” she said in a fake British accent as the piano sounded dreamily from the balcony above us.

  “Yes.”

  She took my arm. “You must come have a word with—he’s quite eager to meet—”

  She conveyed me toward the clot of executives surrounding the Australian’s sofa. He was so heavy that he couldn’t stand for long periods. One could only imagine tailored undershirts, the twenty-eight-inch neck. Expanses of soft flesh rubbing against themselves. Ankles wide as coffee cans. I was handed off to a young man with a lemon-sucking expression, and he said, “Yes, yes, of course, yes …” and he stitched me through the people around the man and pressed me forward so that I found myself looking down at the monstrosity of silk, the immense fingers.

  “Sir, Mr. Porter Wren, sir, who writes the column …”

  His eyes rolled upward in my direction obligatorily, and he opened the large wetted mouth in something close to an aah-hmm, nodded twice vaguely, as if exhausted by his own disinterest, then flicked his view back toward some other entertainment. Here was a man rich and powerful enough that he no longer needed to speak. I beat my brains out working for him. But no matter—my labor was lint in his pocket. If I didn’t want to do it, there were a thousand men and women standing in line behind me. Instantly I felt a polite pressure at my elbow, and the lemon-sucker pivoted me away from the couch, There. I was done.

  Now I was ready to sit, to let the party flow past me, put in the required number of minutes. There was also the question that needed to be pondered: to drink or not to drink, and gin or vodka or rum, and to what degree, and for what purpose exactly, and why the hell not? Behind me, sitting on a huge Empire sofa that faced the other way, were two women bent close in conversation, smoking cigarettes and enjoying a bottle of wine pilfered from the bar. I was able to twist my head around and get a good look at them; they were the kind of pretty, unmarried women who, around age thirty-eight, hardened by the scarcity of prospective husbands, decide to spend the foreseeable future in offices, health clubs, department stores, cocktail parties, and the beds of married men. Such women patrol the perimeter of their careers with ceaseless energy. I suspect that they are lonely and will admit it under the right circumstances. On Sunday mornings, they generally are not seen in church (and neither am I) but out walking a big dog on a thick leash—some large and beautiful purebred that cost several thousand dollars as a puppy and who always, invariably, is a male, panting and nosing his way along the street, pissing, smiling a dog’s smile. I was about to go talk with the Italian photojournalist when I heard one of the women say, “There’s no one here, really.”

  “You saw Peter Jennings, though. I heard they paint his temples brown every night.”

  “Yes, he’s a lot balder in person.”

  “I saw JFK Jr. last week, did I tell you?”

  “No!” the woman shrieked.

  “Right there in front of me.”

  “How’d he look?”

  “Gets too much sun. Sort of like that guy I told you about, the guy I met—”

  “The guy with the big wart?”

  “No, the other guy, who couldn’t—”

  “Mr. Floppy?”

  “Yeah. Only thirty-three years old.” She sighed. “I guess it was the Prozac.”

  At that moment I noticed a blonde woman in a white evening gown. I stared liberally. (My wife is an attractive woman, a lovely woman. But I look at other women, I look at them hard and carefully and with little guilt; my lust is a cheap and ready thing, passing closely over women like a hand, pressing toward each moist possibility, and the more I squander that lust upon whomever happens to be walking by, the more, mysteriously, there is of it.) The woman in white was sipping wine and holding the fingers of a tall man in a suit who was no more than thirty; I made him out to be an executive on the way up; he had that look about him—he was handsome and trim and big-shouldered and he enjoyed the company of several other corporate men, some of them older. There were, I knew, a lot of finance people at the party whose jobs were to move the big sums around. The woman had the look of a corporate wife, and she greeted the other men with charm and deference, laughing in just the right way, the light catching the rope of pearls about her neck, the glint of something at her wrist. Her man, I noticed, seemed not to appreciate the skill with which she did this. Instead, he joked and smiled and nodded with the others. She may well have been the most beautiful woman in the room—no small feat, that—and yet I saw that she was but an addendum to his presence. Instantly I knew him, knew his soul: There is an age in men when they understand that they have crossed, irrevocably, into manhood. This is not a matter of masculinity; it has more to do with an awareness of time—that it is passing, brutally. (An interest in gardens and children often follows.) A corollary to this awareness is that one sees men who are somehow still boys, men who have not been disappointed or deeply scared yet, although their moment will come. Such was the case with the man next to the woman in the white gown.

  Again, through the music and noise of a hundred conversations, came the voices behind me, and I tilted my head backward, eyes toward the ceiling, to hear more clearly: “ … and she said she was just sitting there at the light, at the corner of Broadway and Houston, and this black squeegee man was just all over her windshield and it was last August, you know, he didn’t have on a shirt—”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” the voice squealed. “And his chest and nipples were pressed against the wet windshield.”

  “I can’t believe it,” the other breathed excitedly. “I just can’t!”

  “And she was watching—I mean, thinking about—”

  “No! Don’t tell me that!”

  “She just opened the door and told him to get in!”

  “That is shocking!”

  “I said, ‘Alice, how could you do that? He could—’”

  “She just took him in?”

  “She’s desperate. I mean, okay, she’s not exactly beautiful, but …”

  I tipped my head forward again, rolling my eyes back to the horizon of the room, and there, I saw, was the woman in the white gown, looking in my direction. She smiled at her date or husband and uttered a word excusing herself, and then, strangely enough, walked directly toward me, carrying her wineglass. Her face was no less beautiful as it approached, but I could see a certain determination in her features. Dark brows, blonde hair lifted off her neck. The rope of pearls. Her breasts moved heavily against the silky material of her gown, which, I now saw, was not white but, more alluringly, the color of the flesh of a peach. It seemed impossible that she was coming to talk to me, but she gave a little smile of recognition as she approached, then sat down closely, crossed her legs, and turned toward me.

  “Your picture, Mr. Wren,” she said in a full, throaty voice, “is lousy, you know that?”

  I looked into her face. “The one that goes with my column?”

  She nodded. Her eye
s were blue. “It makes your neck look too skinny.”

  “Well, it was taken a few years ago, in the waning moments of my youth.”

  “They should take it again.” She smiled.

  I nodded a silent thanks.

  “I read your column from time to time,” she said.

  “I see.” She was sitting close enough that I thought I might know where she’d dabbed her perfume.

  “But I have to tell you”—she frowned—“I don’t much like it. I mean it’s always very well written and everything”—she gave a dismissive little flourish with her fingers—“but I’d think you’d rather be anywhere than in one of these places where something terrible happens. You must see many terrible things, no?”

  I’ve been asked this question before, and usually there is an air of frivolity to it, as if I am to enumerate urban horrors for the listener in the same way the polar bears at the Central Park Zoo have been taught to frolic with huge plastic toys. But then we live in a time in which all horror has been commodified into entertainment. Eat dinner and watch the bombs fall, the fugitive hunted down on live television, the genuine murderer cackling genuinely.