But still through the ill-fitting bedroom window the stories came pouring in. What would Saul and Gayfryd—“she became the Stanley Cup of trophy wives when trophy wives were as common as Porsches”—do now that they were down to their last $40 or $50 million?… And hurray, Muffie Potter Ashton’s pregnant!… And wasn’t that Paloma Huffington de Woody getting friendly with S. J. “Yitzhak” Perelman on Gibson’s Beach, Sagaponack?… And did you hear about Griffin and his great big beautiful Dahl?… What, Nina’s planning to launch a perfume? But, my dear, she’s so over, she’s starting to smell like roadkill… And Meg and Dennis, just moved to Splitsville, are squabbling over who gets not just the CD collection but the guru… Which big-name Hollywood actress has been whispering that a new young star’s elevation has Sapphic origins involving a major studio boss?… And have you read Karen’s latest, Thin Thighs for Life?… And Lotus, coolest of niteries, nixed O. J. Simpson’s birthday bash! Only in America, kids, only in America!

With his hands over his ears, and still wearing his ruined linen suit, Professor Solanka slept.

5

The telephone woke him at noon. Jack Rhinehart, the phone-smasher, invited Professor Solanka over to watch the Holland-Yugoslavia Euro 2000 quarterfinal on Pay-Per-View. Malik accepted, surprising them both. “Glad to get you out of that mole hole,” Rhinehart said. “But if you plan to root for the Serbs, stay home.” Solanka felt refreshed today: less burdened, and, yes, in need of a friend. Even in these days of his retreat, he still had such needs. A holy man up a Himalaya could do without soccer on TV. Solanka was not so pure of heart. He shed the slept-in suit, showered, dressed quickly, and rode downtown. When he climbed out of the cab at Rhinehart’s building, a woman in shades rushed into it, jostling him, and he had, for the second time in as many days, the unsettling feeling that the stranger was someone he knew. In the elevator he identified her: the squeeze-me-and-I-talk doll-woman whose name was the contemporary byword for tacky infidelity, Our Lady of the Thong. “Oh Jesus, Monica,” Rhinehart said. “I run into her all the time. Around here it used to be Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie. Now it’s Minnie Mouth. There goes the neighborhood, right?”

Rhinehart had been trying to get divorced for years, but his wife had made it her life’s work to deny him. They had been a beautiful, perfectly contrasted ebony-and-ivory couple, she long, languid, pale, he equally long, but a pitch-black African-American, and a hyperactive one at that, a hunter, fisherman, weekend driver of very fast cars, marathon runner, gym rat, tennis player, and, lately, thanks to the rise of Tiger Woods, an obsessive golfer too. From the earliest days of their marriage Solanka had wondered how a man with so much energy would handle a woman with so little. They had married splashily in London—Rhinehart had for most of his war years preferred to base himself outside America—and, in a ceramic-and-mosaic palazzo rented for the occasion from a charity that ran it as a halfway house for the mentally troubled, Malik Solanka had made a best-man’s speech whose tone was spectacularly misjudged—at one point, doing his then-celebrated W. C. Fields impression, he compared the risks of the union to those of “jumping out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet and trying to land on a bale of hay”—but prophetically apt. Like most of their circle, however, he had underestimated Bronislawa Rhinehart in one essential respect: she had the sticking power of a leech.

(At least there were no children, Solanka thought when his, everybody’s, misgivings about the union proved justified. He thought of Asmaan on the telephone. “Where’ve you gone, Daddy, are you here?” He thought of himself long ago. At least Rhinehart didn’t have to deal with that, the slow deep pain of a child.)

Rhinehart had done her wrong, no denying that. His response to marriage had been to begin an affair, and his response to the difficulty of maintaining a clandestine relationship had been to initiate another one, and when both his mistresses insisted that he regularize his life, when they both insisted on occupying pole position on the grid of his personal auto rally, he at once managed to find room for yet another woman in his noisy, overcrowded bed. Minnie Mouth was perhaps not such an inappropriate local icon. After a few years of this, and a move from Holland Park to the West Village, Bronislawa—what was it with all these Poles who kept cropping up in various positions?—moved out of the apartment on Hudson Street and used the courts to force Rhinehart to maintain her in high style in a junior suite at a tony Upper East Side hotel, with major credit card spending power. Instead of divorcing him, she told him sweetly, she intended to make the rest of his life a misery, and bleed him slowly dry. “And don’t run out of money, honey,” she advised. “Because then I’ll have to come after what you really like.”

What Rhinehart really liked was food and drink. He owned a little saltbox cottage in the Springs with, at the back of the garden, a shed that he’d equipped as a wine-storage facility and insured for consider ably more money than the cottage, in which the most valuable object was the six-burner Viking range. Rhinehart these days was a turbocharged gastronome, his freezer full of the carcasses of dead birds awaiting their reduction—their elevation!—to jus. In his refrigerator the delicacies of the earth jostled for space: larks’ tongues, emus’ testicles, dinosaurs’ eggs. Yet when, at his friend’s wedding, Solanka had spoken to Rhinehart’s mother and sister of the exquisite pleasures of dining at Jack’s table, he had bewildered and amazed them both. “Jack, cook? This Jack?” asked his mother, disbelievingly pointing at her son. “Jack I know couldn’t open a can of beans less’n I showed him how to hold the can opener.” “Jack 1 know,” his sister added, “couldn’t boil a pan of water without burnin’ it up.” “Jack I know,” his mother concluded, definitively, “couldn’t find the kitcben without a seein’-eye dog leadin’ the way.”

This same Jack could now hold his own with the great chefs of the world, and Solanka marveled, once again, at the human capacity for automorphosis, the transformation of the self, which Americans claimed as their own special, defining characteristic. It wasn’t. Americans were always labeling things with the America logo: American Dream, American Buffalo, American Graffiti, American Psycho, American Tune. But everyone else had such things too, and in the rest of the world the addition of a nationalist prefix didn’t seem to add much meaning. English Psycho, Indian Graffiti, Australian Buffalo, Egyptian Dream, Chilean Tune. America’s need to make things American, to own them, thought Solanka, was the mark of an odd insecurity. Also, of course, and more prosaically, capitalist.

Bronislawa’s threat to Rhinehart’s booze hoard found its mark. He gave up visiting war zones and began to write, instead, lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich for their weekly and monthly magazines of choice: chronicling their loves, their deals, their wild children, their personal tragedies, their tell-all maids, their murders, their surgeries, their good works, their evil secrets, their games, their feuds, their sexual practices, their meanness, their generosity, their groomers, their walkers, their cars. Then he gave up writing poetry and turned his hand, instead, to novels set in the same world, the unreal world that ruled the real one. He often compared his subject to that of the Roman Suetonius. “These are the lives of today’s Caesars in their Palaces,” he’d taken to telling Malik Solanka and anyone else who was prepared to listen. “They sleep with their sisters, murder their mothers, make their horses into senators. It’s mayhem in there, in the Palaces. But guess what? If you’re outside, if you’re the mob in the street, if, that is, you’re us, all you see is that the Palaces are the Palaces, all the money and power is in there, an’ when dey snaps dey fingers, boy, de planet it start jumpin’.” (It was Rhinehart’s habit from time to time to slip into an Eddie Murphy-meets-Br er Rabbit manner, for emphasis or fun.) “Now that I’m writing about this billionairess in a coma or those moneyed kids who iced their parents, now that I’m on this diamond beat, I’m seeing more of the truth of things than I did in fucking Desert Storm or some Sniper’s Alley doorway in Sarajevo, and believe me it’s just as easy, easier even, to step on a fucking land mine and get yourself blown to bits.”