Madness Under the Royal Palms (28 page)

Amity found everything about the scene exciting. “Sonny says this is the best place,” Amity whispered to Ashley.

“This is the shit box,” Ashley replied dismissively.

“He’s in the scene and I like to be in the scene,” Amity said, rebuking her friend’s negativity.

Ashley had been around a little longer than her newest best friend, and she felt that Amity could be pathetically naive. Ashley had seen too many men like Sonny. She thought him little but a pathetic poseur. “Sonny put himself with these needy people who have to have a crew to go anywhere,” she says. “Palm Beach is full of these trust fund misfits leaning on the Sonnys of the world, who are there only to prey on them.”

When Ashley asked another guest to take a photo of the two couples, Sonny put his arm around Amity in a manner more possessive than protective. His other hand grasped his drink. It was the couple’s first date, and he cast a knowing, mocking look at the camera as if to say, This stunning woman is mine, not yours.

During the afternoon Sonny ran into King, and introduced Amity to the psychoanalyst. She sidled away from Sonny and hugged King in a greeting exaggerated in its friendliness. The psychoanalyst had a penchant for beautiful women, but he could not separate beauty from character, and he felt that Amity was tormenting poor Sonny. She was dazzling, but she was treating the polo match as a singles bar. She was quickly going through the possibilities before making her choice. King had made the short list, but as friendly as Amity appeared, he backed off, sensing that the woman holding him was as dangerous in her own right as Sonny. And just as with Sonny, he was convinced that there was a dark history back somewhere that might rise out to bedevil her and those around her.

That night after midnight Sonny called King. “Look, Heath, I didn’t know if you knew, but Amity is my girlfriend,” he said, quietly persuasive and polite, not telling the psychoanalyst that he was in Amity’s townhouse. “You’re dating several girls. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave her alone.”

There was anxiety hidden in Sonny’s words, and King tried to calm him down. “Don’t worry, Sonny, I’m not interested,” King said. “She’s yours.” The psychoanalyst found it strange since he had made no play for Amity, but he was used to strangeness, and he thought little more of it.

The next morning, Amity called Ashley and whispered to her friend that Sonny was still in her apartment. “He’s had a little incident in Boston,” Amity told her friend. “He’s in litigation and he doesn’t have a driver’s license or a car.”

“Where does he live?” Ashley asked, all of her suspicions justified in one moment.

“He rents his house in El Cid to this family because he’s trying to hide money until the lawsuit and his divorce is done.”

The story made no sense to anyone except Amity. Neither she nor Sonny was anything like the images they projected onto a critical, suspicious world. Their days together were a ritualistic unfolding of that reality. If they had reached out for what was most profound about each other—their anguished insecurities—they might have found some commonality. That is not what they looked for, but the opposite; and Amity found only deeper and deeper levels of disillusion.

T
he next time I saw Eric and Sonny was at Eric’s annual Tropics Party at his ground-floor condominium at Ibis Isle, a small island that protrudes into the Intracoastal Waterway. There was a Caribbean band, tropical drinks, and a prowling crowd spilling out along the lawn.

At the highest social level in Palm Beach, there are almost always as many men as women, perfect symmetry at the dinner table. At gatherings like this, there are usually more women than men. They come over the bridge from West Palm Beach, Delray, or points inland, looking for treasure in the shape of a wealthy man. Amity could not make the party, but all kinds of other single women did.

On my way to the party, I picked up Eddy Louis at his house at the end of Regent Park. Eddy was no longer living in Thailand, but was roaming across Asia. We used Yahoo Messenger to talk to each other every few days. One time I would see him on the screen sitting on his bed in a small hotel room in the Philippines. Another time he would be in a mountainous village somewhere in China after having traveled there on the back of a motorcycle. His daughter was in a Catholic high school in West Palm Beach, and every two months or so, Eddy returned for a few days.

The sixty-four-year-old millionaire was precisely what many of these women were looking for. He was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt, his skin like mahogany. He had lost considerable weight, and he was an imposing specimen.

But Eddy, still emerging from his Kurtz world, reacted almost violently to some of the guests. They might look twenty to the untrained eye in the half-light of the party, but not to Eddy, who figured most of these women were closer to forty. “A bunch of fucking hookers, whores, hoping to score with a rich guy,” he snarled. “All fucking wannabes.”

As Louis continued his diatribe, Purcell came bursting into the circle looking almost boyish, a little plump, and effusive in his welcome. “You’re a god, one of the gods, Eddy,” he said, his voiced tinged with awe. “You’re a legend. And you look fantastic.”

As the three of us talked, Sonny was working the crowd as if he were the maestro of the evening. He had a good word to say to everyone, and moved seamlessly from one guest to another, one of the most desirable bachelors at the party.

A
T THE END OF
the season in late April, Eric gave a dinner party. My wife was in Europe visiting her family, and once again I drove south alone to Ibis Isle. The three other men were Sonny, the psychoanalyst King, and a local businessman. They were accompanied by their trophy girlfriends, all with the rich glaze of youthfulness that shone among these middle-aged men.

Eric’s girlfriend of the moment was Natalie Kalinka Paavola, a twenty-nine-year-old blond Finnish American real estate agent. With the help of Eric’s maid and her son, Natalie had cooked a gourmet Indian dinner. She was a circumspect, empathetic woman, but she was not wealthy, nor was she sophisticated. Although she was enjoying going out with Eric, it troubled her to be dating a man old enough to be her father.

The psychoanalyst was sitting with a striking twenty-eight-year-old blonde half his age. The woman spent much of the night talking of her fears of going blind while the analyst gently kneaded her back and soothed her model’s body.

All of the men were solicitous of their dates, but no one as much as Sonny. He had worked his way through the parties for months until finally he had gotten what he wanted in twenty-nine-year-old Amity, who stood out, even in this evening’s company. She had a classy quiet manner, and a sensual body that she was not trying to show off by dressing provocatively. She was a woman a man could have happily taken to almost any party.

Across from me, Sonny and Amity were having their own private dinner party. I have either a realistic or a jaundiced attitude toward romance, seeing it as the market economy at its purest, each person trading realistically for the best they can get. My theory faltered here, for I could not understand what Amity was doing with Sonny. I thought that even though, at the time, I knew nothing about his tortured past or impecunious present, and considered Sonny to be just another wealthy man.

Sonny acted with the confidence of wealth, and that was the most seductive thing about him. He and Amity whispered together as if nobody else in the room existed. In the middle of dinner, Amity became angry and ran out onto the patio. Sonny ran after her, shut the door behind them, and had a fervent conversation with her.

When they returned, Eric started to make fun of Amity. It had been a strangely stilted evening. As the host, he had to do something to have at least a few moments of engaging conversation. And this was his favorite form of discourse.

“Don’t you think you two are spending too much time together, Sonny?” Eric asked. Sonny said nothing, and Eric raised the ante. “What do you
really
see in Amity?”

Sonny still said nothing, but Amity had had enough. “Well, look at me,” she said, the trump card in her deck. “Look at me!”

King said little, all through the evening never once speaking to Amity. The psychoanalyst feared that any attention might provoke Sonny and that “anything could set him off, all that pent-up rage originating in his childhood.”

A
MITY HAD GROWN UP
in Lawrenceville, Georgia, a small town thirty miles northeast of Atlanta. She was a church-going cheerleader when, at seventeen, her father announced that he was gay—a devastating, unacceptable admission in a fundamentalist community where homosexuality is considered wanton sin.

After graduating from high school in 1996, Amity left town and moved to Atlanta, where she ended up an exotic dancer at a “gentleman’s club.” Beauty was all Amity had, and although she was making untold amounts of money, she had traded her beauty cheaply. She did not like the work, and needed a drink or two before she got up on the bar, but she was addicted to it.

“Amity said she needed the attention,” says Ashley. “It was a massive driving force. Everything she did was about getting all this attention, she didn’t care who it was from.” There were always men wanting her, watching her. Wherever she was, the cell phone was ringing, the text messages were popping up, men were seeking her, telling her how much they cared.

Amity projected an innocent quality that enhanced her beauty and the fascination that men felt for her. There was nothing innocent in the money and the favors she accepted, not only the twenty-dollar bills stuffed in her G-string, but thousands of dollars given to her by her pursuers.

Amity left the business for a while and lived with a wealthy man twice her age. He was worldly enough to teach her rudiments of sophistication, but beneath there was no culture, no education, no great wit, nothing but a little girl from a little town living in a big world. When she went off to the Caribbean with her older lover, she fell off a balcony under peculiar circumstances and was seriously injured, and the relationship ended.

When this man and others who dated her talk of Amity, it is with fond regret and devotion, but there is a strange lack of specificity in their accounts. As she left them one after another, there was nothing left to hold on to but gossamer and the scent of perfume.

Amity sold real estate for a few months in Belize, and tried to distance herself from her exotic dancer past, but it kept coming back to her. She had come to Florida four years before and worked for a time as a dancer at Rachel’s, an upscale club in West Palm Beach. After that, she had lived with a man in a townhouse in a small town outside Atlanta. He loved her, but she was used to the electric, dangerous excitement of her erotic dancing, and it was deadly dull to sit out there, especially in the evenings when her boyfriend drove into Atlanta, where he managed a gentleman’s club.

And so she returned to Florida, where she had bought her own townhouse. Twice a month she flew to New York City for what she called “a date” with a man who paid her what she told Ashley was ten thousand dollars a month. When she went to work at the title company, she gave that up. And now she decided to take a male roommate to help pay her mortgage. Amity told Sonny that the man was gay, but he was not about to have some guy living in Amity’s townhouse. He immediately wrote a check for the annual rental, and just as immediately, the check bounced.

Amity generally preferred jewelry to money. Her favorites were her “girls,” the diamond earrings that she kept in the safe in her townhouse. She loved her girls, and wore them only for the most special of occasions. One evening Sonny gave her a fistful of jewelry, secondhand stuff unworthy to be worn with the girls. Even then, most of it was so dirty that she would have to have it cleaned before wearing the pieces.

Amity considered Palm Beach an exalted kingdom. Her dream was one day to be accepted there, and not as an attractive outsider. She needed the proper man, and she thought that she had found him in Sonny. Men were consumed with her, pressing forward, trying to touch her both physically and emotionally, and she danced away from them and their everlasting needs. There were scores of them, with their endless entreaties and gifts, and promises and bouquets of praise.

Sonny pressed forward even more insistently than the others. She so desperately wanted him to be what he said he was, and he was such a consummate performer that she did not push back away from him.

The couple had only known each other a few days when they drove up to Lawrenceville to attend a birthday party for Amity’s younger brother, John. Her siblings knew nothing of the glittery world to which their sister aspired, but they did not like Sonny. He drank too much, and said little. Amity’s mother, Pat, thought he “looked like a mobster.” Amity did not care, and the couple left as quickly as they had arrived.

Their romance was like a film that had been sped up. Sonny insisted that Amity fly to Boston to meet his family. He had no money, so he borrowed five hundred dollars from Eric, the first time his friend loaned him anything, and four hundred dollars from another friend, and off the couple flew.

Sonny was telling Eric these baroque tales of sex with Amity; awesome, mindboggling epics. Amity told her friend Ashley a very different tale that had the sad specificity of truth. Amity did not see sex as pleasure but as the final payoff in the game between women and men. It was the dazzling prize that enhanced its value the more rarely it was offered. Amity had expected that this bull of a man with his wild sexual bantering and his endless avowals of love would devour her sexually. She had put it off as long as she could, but in the middle of one drunken night in their hotel room in Boston, she woke up from sleep and realized that he was on top of her. “She said he made no noises, and when he came he pulled out and he was finished and it was so weird,” Ashley says. “She was expecting the opposite of this; he was going to be awesome, this animal. But he just rolled over and went to sleep.”

Amity had had sex with Lotharios who lay next to her impotent, and runts who came all night, and one mattered to her no more than the other. Sex was so unimportant to her that she could easily have lived with Sonny’s quick, tortured sexuality. That weekend she learned something else that was far more devastating. Sonny’s sister took Amity aside and warned her about her brother in the most detailed, frightening terms, talking about his violent potential. Ashley had already been imploring Amity to end this crazed affair with this dangerous, duplicitous man, and as the plane flew south, she knew that she would have to move on.

Sonny projected an image of a party guy, a good-time, goodhearted guy, but he was a man of preternatural sensitivity. King, the Boca psychoanalyst, had gotten to know Sonny as well as anyone, other than Eric. The psychoanalyst sometimes stood back and observed Sonny at parties. He realized that Sonny was doing the same thing, playing the gregarious party animal when he was studiously observing everyone and everything.

Sonny understood how marginal his place was in Palm Beach. People were using him more than he was using them. They were amusing themselves while he was paying an emotional price, always playing the supplicant, the court jester, the tour guide. As long as he had Amity, he was no longer this pitiable hanger-on. As long as he had Amity, he had a possession that trumped them all. As long as he had Amity, he had something they all wanted, no matter how big their homes, how expensive their cars. He knew it and they knew it. He was so attuned to Amity that he realized she was going to try to leave him even before she realized it herself.

Everything was going wrong. He was negotiating a deal to buy a popular sandwich shop in West Palm Beach. He was about to close on that, and had no money. Sonny could talk his way almost anywhere and to anyone, and he had cosponsored a fund-raiser for West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel. But that had recently led to an article in the
Palm Beach Post
about his past. “In 2004, he pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in the death of a seventy-nine-year-old motorist while speeding on duty,” the paper said. “He also was accused—but later cleared—of police brutality in the beatings of a suspect and a love rival. A colleague once called him ‘dangerous’ in a published report.” The story was potentially devastating to his social life.

None of that mattered if he could hold on to Amity, and the more she tried to loosen his grip, the tighter he held on to her. Amity was used to men obsessed with her, but this was different. She had only been dating him six weeks, but it was overwhelming as nothing she had ever experienced. She had to get away from him; that was the only way to loosen his grip. She decided that she would fly to New York and once again be with the “date” she had given up. She had no idea how long she would stay away, but she would not return until Sonny had accepted that it was all over between them.

Amity always took care of herself, and since her plane was not until 4:30, she drove over to the Ultima Gym in West Palm Beach to work out. As she rode a stationary bike, her cell phone kept going off every few minutes, as time and again Sonny kept calling.