I hold up a hand. "Absolutely. I'm one hundred percent with you," I say solemnly.
"Great," the ineffectual one says, relieved. "And thanks for your, uh, time, Mr. Bateman."
Moving him toward the door, my legs wobbly, astronautlike, leading him out of the office, though I'm empty, devoid of feeling, I still sense - without deluding myself - that I've accomplished something and then, anticlimactically, we talk for a few minutes more about razor-burn balms and tattersall shirts. There was an odd general lack of urgency to the conversation that I found soothing - nothing happened at all - but when he smiles, hands me his card, leaves, the door closing sounds to me like a billion insects screaming, pounds of bacon sizzling, a vast emptiness. And after he leaves the building (I have Jean buzz Tom at Security to make sure) I call someone recommended by my lawyer, to make sure none of my phones are wiretapped, and after a Xanax I'm able to meet with my nutritionist at an expensive, upscale health-food restaurant called Cuisine de Soy in Tribeca and while sitting beneath the dolphin, stuffed and shellacked, that hangs over the tofu bar, its body bent into an arc, I'm able to ask the nutritionist questions like "Okay, so give me the muffin lowdown" without cringing. Back at the office two hours later, I find out that none of my phones are tapped.
I also run into Meredith Powell later this week, on Friday night, at Ereze with Brock Thompson, and though we talk for ten minutes, mostly about why neither one of us is in the Hamptons, with Brock glaring at me the entire time, she doesn't mention Paul Owen once. I'm having an excruciatingly slow dinner with my date, Jeannette. The restaurant is flashy and new and the meal inches along, drags by. The portions are meager. I grow increasingly agitated. Afterwards I want to bypass M.K., even though Jeanette complains because she wants to dance. I'm tired and I need to rest. At my apartment I lie in bed, too distracted to have sex with her, so she leaves, and after watching a tape of this morning's Patty Winters Show, which is about the best restaurants in the Middle East, I pick up my cordless phone and tentatively, reluctantly, call Evelyn.
Chapter Sixteen
Summer
Most of the summer I spent in a stupor, sitting either in my once or in new restaurants, in my apartment watching videotapes or in the backs of cabs, in nightclubs that just opened or in movie theaters, at the building in Hell's Kitchen or in new restaurants. There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views af the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workers retrieving body parts. I started using Oscar de la Renta men's deodorant, which gave me a slight rash. A movie about a small talking bug was released to great fanfare and grossed over two hundred million dollars. The Mets were doing badly. Beggars and homeless seemed to have multiplied in August and the ranks of the unfortunate, weak and aged lined the streets everywhere. I found myself asking too many summer associates at too many dinners in flashy new restaurants before taking them to Les Miserables if anyone had seen The Toolbox Murders on HBO and silent tables would stare back at me, before I would cough politely and summon the waiter over for the check, or I'd ask for sorbet or, if this was earlier in the dinner, for another bottle of San Pellegrino, and then I'd ask the summer associates, "No?" and assure them, "It was quite good." My platinum American Express card had gone through so much use that it snapped in half, self-destructed, at one of those dinners, when I took two summer associates to Restless and Young, the new Pablo Lester restaurant in midtown, but I had enough cash in my gazelleskin wallet to pay for the meal. The Patty Winters Show s were all repeats. Life remained a blank canvas, a cliche, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation. I needed to go to the Hamptons.
I suggested this to Evelyn and, like a spider, she accepted.
The house we stayed at was actually Tim Price's, which Evelyn had the keys to for some reason, but in my stupefied state I refused to ask for specifics.
Tim's house was on the water in East Hampton and was adorned with many gable roofs and was four stories high, all connected by a galvanized-steel staircase, and had what at first I thought was a Southwestern motif but wasn't. The kitchen was one thousand square feet of pure minimalist design; one wall held everything: two huge ovens, massive cupboards, a walk-in freezer, a three-door refrigerator. An island of custom-crafted stainless steel divided the kitchen into three separate spaces. Four of the nine bathrooms contained trompe l'oeil paintings and five of them had antique lead ram's heads that hung over the sink, water spouting from their mouths. All the sinks and bathtubs and showers were antique marble and the floors were composed of tiny marble mosaics. A television was built into a wall alcove above the master bathtub. Every room had a stereo. The house also contained twelve Frank Lloyd Wright standing lamps, fourteen Josef Heffermann club chairs, two walls of floor-to-ceiling videocassette cases and another wall stacked solely with thousands of compact discs encased in glass cabinets. A chandelier by Eric Schmidt hung in the front entranceway, below it stood an Atomic Ironworks steel moose hatrack by a Young sculptor I'd never heard of. A round nineteenth-century Russian dining table sat in a room adjacent to the kitchen, but had no chairs. Spooky photographs by Cindy Sherman lined the walls everywhere. There was an exercise room. There were eight walk-in closets, five VCRs, a Noguchi glass and walnut dining table, a hall table by Marc Schaffer and a fax machine. There was a topiary tree in the master bedroom next to a Louis XVI window bench. An Eric Fischl painting hung over one of the marble fireplaces. There was a tennis court. There were two saunas and an indoor Jacuzzi in a small guesthouse that sat by the pool, which was black-bottomed. There were stone columns in odd places.