A moment passed before another voice answered, "Yeah, I guess so."
"Oh, so what?" someone else moaned.
Someone walked by with a panting wolf on a leash.
And Sinead O'Connor was singing "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance " and I had spent part of the morning trimming my pubic hair and everyone was checking various gossip columns to see if they had made it but they were basically one-shots and it was never going to happen for any of them and there was a Rauschenberg in the bathroom and a Picasso in the pantry and the guy I had slept with the night before-a boy who looked like Paul Newman at twenty-started talking about a friend who had been murdered in Maui last week and then everyone around the pool joined in and I couldn't follow the conversation. A tiny rift with a drug dealer? An irate exporter/importer? A run-in with a cannibal? Who knew? Was his death bad? He had been lowered into a barrel of hungry insects. A poll was taken. On a scale of 1 to 10- being lowered into a barrel of hungry insects? Opinions were offered. I thought I was going to faint. This conversation was the only indication that anyone here knew anybody else. I lit a cigarette I bummed from River Phoenix. I was just becoming famous and my whole relationship to the world was about to change.
And Sinead O'Connor was singing "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance " and someone tossed Pergola the keys to one of the Mercedes parked in the garage and it was just too hot out and a jet flew overhead and I jealously studied Bruce Rhinebeck's face smirking at me from the cover of a magazine and the guy I'd slept with the night before whispered to me "You're a piece of shit" and there was my "stunned disbelief" and me saying "So what?" and I was so tan my ni**les had changed color and I looked down at my muscled body admiringly but a fly was dozing on my thigh and when I brushed it away it came back, hovering. A Brazilian boy asked me how I got my abs that cubed and I was so flattered I had to concentrate very seriously in order to answer him.
An injured bat had crawled out from beneath a chaise longue and it was chirping and flapping its wings uselessly and a few of the teenage boys stood around it silently. The bat rolled over, upended, and when one of the boys kicked it, the bat screamed. Someone struck it with a branch, and a puff of dust flew off its skin. Light was flickering across the water in the vast pool and I was watching everything through binoculars. A servant brought me a piece of birthday cake and a can of Hawaiian Punch as I had requested. The bat was wriggling on the ground next to a discarded cell phone. Its spine was broken and it tried to bite anyone who got near it. The boys continued torturing it. Someone brought out a fork.
There was no system to any of this. At that point Chloe Byrnes wasn't a real person to me and on that afternoon in the House on Ocean Drive a few decisions had to be made, the priority being: I would never dream of leaving any of this. At first I was confused by what passed for love in this world: people were discarded because they were too old or too fat or too poor or they had too much hair or not enough, they were wrinkled, they had no muscles, no definition, no tone, they weren't hip, they weren't remotely famous. This was how you chose lovers. This was what decided friends. And I had to accept this if I wanted to get anywhere. When I looked over at Chloe, she shrugged. I observed the shrug. She mouthed the words Take... a... hike... On the verge of tears-because I was dealing with the fact that we lived in a world where beauty was considered an accomplishment-I turned away and made a promise to myself: to be harder, to not care, to be cool. The future started mapping itself out and I focused on it. In that moment I felt as if I was disappearing from poolside in the villa on Ocean Drive and I was floating above the palm trees, growing smaller in the wide blank sky until I no longer existed and relief swept over me with such force I sighed.
One of the teenage boys was ready to pounce on me, and the boy splashing in the pool, I realized faintly, could have been drowning and no one would have noticed. I avoided thinking about that and concentrated on the patterns in a bathing suit that Marky Mark was wearing. I might not even remember this afternoon, I was thinking. I was thinking that a part of me might destroy it. A cold voice inside my head begged me to.
But I was being introduced to too many cool people and I was becoming famous and at that point I had no way of understanding one thing: if I didn't erase this afternoon from my memory and just walk out that door and leave Chloe Byrnes behind, sections of this afternoon would come back to me in nightmares. This was what the cold voice assured me. This was what it promised. Someone was praying over the half-smashed bat but the gesture seemed far away and unimportant. People started dancing around the praying boy.