“And furthermore,” Rhinehart caroled gaily, “remember when you ejected, oh, what’s his name from your house for misquoting Philip Larkin? Man! So you’ve been getting snappy with the neighbors? Whoo-ee. Hold the front page.”
How could Malik Solanka speak to his mirthful friend of the abnegation of the self: how to say, America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured? How could he say, I am a knife in the dark; I endanger those I love?
Solanka’s hands itched. Even his skin was betraying him. He, whose baby-bottom skin had always caused women to marvel and to tease him for having led a life of cosseted ease, had begun to suffer from uncomfortable raw eruptions along his hairline and, most awkwardly of all, on both hands. The skin reddened, puckered, and broke. So far he had not visited a dermatologist. Before walking out on Eleanor, a lifetime eczema sufferer, he had raided her medicine box and brought away two thick tubes of hydrocortisone ointment. At the local Duane Reade he bought a jumbo-sized bottle of industrial-strength moisturizer and resigned himself to using it several times a day. Professor Solanka did not have a high opinion of doctors. Accordingly, he self-medicated, and itched.
It was the age of science, but medical science was still in the hands of primitives and oafs. The main thing you learned from doctors was how little they knew. In the paper yesterday there had been a story about a doctor who had accidentally removed a woman’s healthy breast. He was “reprimanded.” It was such an everyday story that it only made a deep inside page. This was the sort of thing doctors did: the wrong kidney, the wrong lung, the wrong eye, the wrong baby. Doctors did wrong. It was just barely news.
The news: it was right there in his hand. After getting out of Beloved Ali’s cab he’d picked up a copy of the News and the Post, then had taken an erratic route home, walking fast, as if trying to escape something… Ellen DeGeneres, posters proclaimed, was coming soon to the Beacon Theatre. Solanka grimaced. She’d be singing her theme song, of course: Where the hormones, there moan / And the room would be full of women hollering, “Ellen, we love you,” and in the midst of her set of deeply so-so material the comedienne would pause, lower her head, put her hand on her heart, and say how moved she was to have become a symbol of their pain. Praise me, thank you, thank you, praise me some more, hey, look, Anne, we’re an icon!, wow!, it’s so humbling… . Science was making extraordinary discoveries, Professor Solanka thought. Scientists in London believed they had identified the medial insula, a part of the brain associated with “gut feelings,” and also that part of the anterior cingulate that was linked to euphoria, as the locations of love. Also, British and German scientists now claimed that the frontal lateral cortex was responsible for intelligence. The blood flow in this region increased when tested volunteers were called upon to solve complicated puzzles. Tell me where is fancy bred?/ T the heart or i’ the head? And where in the brain, wild-hearted Solanka only half rhetorically asked himself, is the seat of stupidity? Eh, scientists of the world? In what insula or cortex does the blood flow increase when one shouts “I love you” at a total fucking stranger? And how about hypocrisy? Let’s get to the interesting stuff here…
He shook his head. You’re avoiding the issue, Professor. You’re dancing all around it when what you have to do is stare it down, look it right in the face. Let’s get to anger, okay? Let’s get to the goddamn fury that actually kills. Tell me, where is murder bred? Malik Solanka, clutching his newspaper, hurtled east along Seventy-second Street, scattering pedestrians. On Columbus he made a left and half-ran another dozen distraught blocks or so before coming to a halt. Even the stores hereabouts had Indian names: Bombay, Pondicherry. Everything conspired to remind him of what he was trying to forget—of, that is, home, the idea of home in general and his own home life in particular. In not Pondicherry but, yes, it cannot be denied, Bombay. He went into a Mexican-themed bar with a high Zagat’srating, ordered a shot of tequila, and another, and then, finally, it was time for the dead.
This one, last night’s corpse, and the two before. These were their names. Saskia “Sky” Schuyler, today’s big picture, and her predecessors Lauren “Ren” Muybridge Klein and Belinda “Bindy” Booken Caudell. These were their ages: nineteen, twenty, nineteen. These were their photographs. Look at their smiles: these were the smiles of power. A lump of concrete put out those lights. These were not poor girls, but they’re penniless now.
She was something, Sky was. Five-foot-nine, stacked, spoke six languages, reminded everyone of Christie Brinkley as the Uptown Girl, loved big hats and high fashion, could’ve walked for anyone Jean-Paul, Donatella, Dries had all begged her, Tom Ford had gone down on his knees, but she was just too “naturally shy”—this was code for naturally upper-crust, too much a member of that old-money snobberia that thought of couturiers as tailors and runway models as just one small step better than whores—and, besides, there was her scholarship at Juilliard. Just last weekend she was in a hurry to get out to Southampton, needed something to wear, no time to choose, so she rang her great pal the high-end designer Imelda Poushine, asked her to just send over the whole collection, and messengered back, in return, a personal check for four count ‘em four hundred thousand dollars.
Yes, says Imelda in Rush &Molloy, the check cleared two days ago. She was a great girl, a living doll, but business is business, I guess. We’ll all miss her dreadfully. Yes, it’ll be at the family plot, right there in the best part, right across from Jimmy Stewart. Everybody’s going. Big security operation. I hear they decided to lay her to rest in the wedding gown. So honored. She’ll look beautiful, but that girl would’ve looked beautiful in rags, believe me. Yes, I’ll be dressing her. Are you kidding? My privilege. It’s an open-casket situation. They’ve booked the best: Sally H. for the hair, Rafael for the makeup, Herb for the photographs. Sky’s the limit, I guess, no pun intended. Her mother’s handling it all. That woman is made of iron. Not a tear. Just fifty herself and dropdead got, excuse me, don’t print that, okay. No pun intended.
The inheritors disinherited, the masters made victims: that was the angle. All that wasted training! For Saskia at nineteen was not only a linguist, pianist, and dedicated fashionista; she was also already an expert horsewoman, an archer with hopes of making the Sydney Olympic team, a long-distance swimmer, a fabulous dancer, a great cook, a happy weekend painter, a bel canto singer, a hostess in her mother’s grand manner, and, to judge by the openly worldly sensuality of her newspaper smile, skilled, too, in other arts to which the tabloid press was utterly devoted but whereof it dared not speak freely in such a context. The papers contented themselves with printing photographs of Saskia’s handsome beau, the polo player Bradley Marsalis III, of whom all regular readers knew at least this: that his teammates called him Horse, in honor of the way he was hung.
A stone from a Lost Boy’s slingshot had felled the beautiful Wendy Bird. Make that birds: for what was said of Sky Schuyler applied equally to Bindy Caudell and Ren Klein. All three were beautiful, all three long and blond and formidably accomplished. If the financial future of their great families rested in the hands of their superlatively confident brothers, then these young women had been reared to take charge of the personae of their clans-their style, their class. Their image. Looking at their stunned menfolk now, it was easy to gauge the size of their loss. We boys can take care of business, said the silent grieving faces of the families, but our girls make us who we are. We are the boat and they are the ocean. We are the vehicle, they’re the motion. Who, now, will tell us how to be? And there was fear too: who’ll be next? Of all the ripe girls given to us to pluck from their branches like the golden apples of the sun, who’s next for the fatal worm?