Turn of the Century (34 page)

As they step out onto the sixteenth floor, Ben’s floor, they encounter two Secret Service agents, both with their hands clasped at crotch level, staring at the elevator. One of the men acknowledges Ben. George raises his glass slightly in their direction as he and Ben walk by, a winky soused-guy toast, as if driven by some atavistic need. He is suddenly reminded of … what? He can’t quite make it out. How pathetically middle-aged, he thinks—intense but foggy memories, memories both stirred up and then unrecognizably muddied by booze.

“Those guys are part of Bucky Lopez’s detail,” Ben says. “I guess he’s been held up at a rally in L.A.” Buckingham Lopez, the former Houston Astro and second-generation Mexican-American businessman, is this election cycle’s quixotic, self-financed, ultra-long-shot candidate for president. The pundits call him “the Hispanic Ross Perot” and “a
Forbes
400 Jesse Ventura.” He talks a lot about “wealth creation,” and calls himself both “a pro-gun-control conservative” and “the no-bullshit
spic,” an epithet that
The New York Times
for the first few weeks of the campaign rendered as “the trademark vulgarism Mr. Lopez employs to depict himself as a no-nonsense Hispanic.” One of his privatization ideas, auctioning off the right to name individual tropical storms each year, has already been adopted by the current administration; the TV producer Aaron Spelling was the high bidder, at $1.7 million and $1.6 million respectively, for hurricanes beginning with the letters
A
and
C
.

“Bucky Lopez is a pal of yours?” George asks.

“I was the biggest investor in his IPO. And I’m on his finance committee. I love Bucky. Bucky’s an honest guy.”

At the door of the party suite, the blonde and the redhead George saw at Swank City are thinking about leaving. Tuesday Weld—Tuesday Weld from around 1972, not girlish but still thin, just starting to wrinkle and thicken—smiles at George.

Now
, after stifling heat plus liquor plus hotel plus Secret Service plus presidential politics plus high-strung blonde, George recollects the fogged-over memory. The summer of 1988, New Orleans, the sweaty last night of the Republican convention, after Lizzie got on the plane back to New York, after Bush the Elder’s read-my-lips acceptance speech, a huge table at the Napoleon House with a dozen people from New York and Washington, journalists and campaign workers, including a brazen young, skinny, blond, right-wing woman. This was a full decade before cable news channels turned brazen young, skinny, blond, right-wing women into a recognizable pundit commodity. She was not
pretty
, really, but she did have many of the standard signifiers of pretty (young, skinny, blond, brazen), which in the course of a night of Pimms cups become
attractive enough
and then became, after everyone else left, sometime after four-thirty, since he was not married or even formally engaged to be married, inevitable. And which, of course, he regretted the next morning—but sincerely regretted, in the bathroom, in the hallway, in the elevator, and in the lobby, even before he was spotted by his mother, who was with her delegation checking out of the Napoleon House at that very gruesome moment. “George!” Edith Hope had said, “you look absolutely overworked, honey. Aren’t you
finished?
Haven’t you—what do you call it?—put everything to bed?”

Earlier tonight at the hotel 1960, Ben sympathetically mentioned his mother’s death and his fourth Jack Daniel’s. George, taking a sip,
conceded the possibility of a connection. If nothing else, it was a comfortable one-night pretext.

“I thought I recognized you at the casino,” the blonde tells George. “It’s Sandra. You helped me out when you were here in January?”

George stares stupidly.

“No, I’ve never been to the Venetian before.”

The woman turns up her smile, which now seems potentially insane. “No! At NATPE!” she says. “Sandra Bemis? Sandi. Timmy introduced us.”

Featherstone’s backup girlfriend, the dog aromatherapist to the stars. His disappointment (
She isn’t coming on to me
) is transient, entirely washed away by his surge of relief (She
isn’t a stalker, or an actress
). “Of course. You have a new look. I didn’t recognize you.”

“That’s cool. No prob whatsoever!” Another adult who talks like a teenager. But maybe doxies always have.

“You’re here on … vacation?” he says.

She glances at her friend and her smile turns a little wary and wry, as if he’s made some subtle private joke.
“Right,”
she says.

And into the party they go. All the Barbies and Kens seem to be here, and each smiling Ken has unbuttoned his tuxedo shirt and loosened his black bow tie. An E!
²
video crew helps power up the ambient snap and crackle of collective party vainglory, a fever of self-importance that spikes twice, once when Phil Spector arrives accompanied by Nicole Kidman and a pair of seven-foot-tall bodyguards, and then when Bucky Lopez arrives with his full Secret Service detail. Penn and Teller arrive. George sees smiling John McLaughlin stride in and head for Bucky Lopez. Even the celebrities in Las Vegas seem arbitrary.

Ben has personally taken control of the music, George realizes: a Frank Zappa song is playing over the din, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” Again:
weasels
. Pattern amid the random, signal buried within the noise. Meaningless pattern, pointless signal, but you take what you can get. He should remember to tell Lizzie.

He’s suddenly surrounded, and as he whips around to see who’s grabbing his arm, he spills a fresh drink on Ben.

“George Mactier, I’d like you to meet Buckingham Lopez.”

Are the Secret Service men eyeing George because he’s drunk, or
because they’re Secret Service agents? In fact, every time George is in the presence of a presidential candidate, he imagines assassinating him. It first happened when he was making a home movie of Nixon campaigning in Minneapolis, in 1967, before candidates had Secret Service protection, and he stuck his Super-8 camera right in Nixon’s face, inches away. It happened again in 1972 when he was president of Twin Cities Teens for McGovern and met the candidate. It happened again and again at
Newsweek
and ABC. It always occurs, automatically, compulsively—Mondale, Hart, Dukakis, Dole, Jesse Jackson, Steve Forbes, even Lamar Alexander—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, a dozen or more times by now. He wonders again, hearing the Zappa, if this is a generational neurosis, Mid-Sixties Tourette’s Syndrome, Virtual—John Hinckley Disorder—or just his own strange, laughing-in-church tic.

“George used to be a journalist,” Ben says, as Lopez, simultaneously shaking George’s hand and sticking a little
BUCKY? YES, BUCKY!
flag in George’s jacket pocket. “But now he does real work. The TV show
NARCS
, about the war on drugs? That’s his.”

“The entertainment business, huh?” Lopez says. “Well, that is one
hell
of a wealth-creation engine. Congratulations!” And then he is off, presumably to tell Sandi Bemis that pet aromatherapy has the potential to become one hell of a wealth-creation engine, and to assure the frenzied busboy in the gondolier costume that stacking greasy, empty wineglasses and half-eaten hors d’oeuvres is also one hell of a wealth-creation engine.

Whenever George becomes fully drunk, he stops drinking. He has stopped drinking. He’s sitting on the longest freestanding couch he has ever seen. People are leaving. A woman sits down next to him, right next to him. She’s hot—sexy, but also palpably radiating heat. Ah: Sandi Bemis.

“Hi,” she says. “Can I make a weird request?”

“About your dog thing? I know, I’ve been away from New York for a week; I haven’t talked to Angela. But I will, Sandi, I promise.”

He looks her in the face for the first time since she sat down, and realizes that the woman next to him is wearing pigtails, has brown hair, not blond, and is ten years younger than Sandi Bemis. Her silky synthetic top is loose and low-cut.

“Ah! Oh! Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“I’m not Sandi, I’m Shawna.” She holds out her hand, which George shakes. “I noticed you over at the BarbieWorld? I play one of the Staceys on the hair-play mezzanine. I’m a model.” In one of his Manhattan street censuses, she would be an easy
yes
, in all neighborhoods and moods. “I’ve done a lot of catalogue in L.A. But I’m also an actress.”

She wants a job. “Right.”

“So, if this freaks you out just tell me, but—can I … I’d like to feel your hand, where your hand was? The residual limb? It’s really weird, I know, but, I think it’s really kind of … sexy? You think I’m a pervert, don’t you?”

Yes. All the more so since she used the PC phrase for stump. He bends his left arm and holds the forearm straight up. “Feel away.”

She puts her hand over his wrist as if it’s a stick shift she’s gently polishing. This is going nowhere. This is just a gothic Las Vegas moment. He’ll tell Lizzie about it in the morning. He suddenly does, however, have a full-bore erection.

“It’s
so
smooth,” she says. “Gosh! The tip is really hard.”
Could
this be more squalid? A girl who plays Barbie’s pal Stacey phallicizing his stump in public in an ersatz palazzo in Las Vegas—maybe it wouldn’t really be adultery at all, more like a parody of adultery, some kind of permissible performance-art pastiche of adulterous fantasies. He’s not serious; he doesn’t think he’s serious. She makes a little circle around his wrist with her index finger, and stops. Then, looking straight at him very intently, she lifts his arm with one hand and with the other flicks at its tip with one of her pigtails. He smiles. She smiles back, then looks at him hard again, no longer smiling. She leans her head and shoulders toward him a little awkwardly, and with both hands brings the tip of his arm to the tops of her breasts, and slides it slowly all the way down between them. She smiles, and then rearranges herself, twisting her back toward him. Now she is slouching on him like a girlfriend against a boyfriend, holding his arm inside her shirt between her warm breasts, stroking it through her shirt.

“My daddy’s was all kind of bony and rough and bumpylike.”

Sick? Very sick. “Your father lost a hand?”

“His whole arm, his right one, up almost to the shoulder. And his right leg to the knee. It happened in Vietnam. In Tay Ninh. During
the Vietnam War? The country of Vietnam? That’s why my middle name is Cindy.”

“I know about the war in Vietnam. But I don’t get the name.”

“Because Daddy’s fire-support base was called Cindy. FSB Cindy. He named me after it. He used to say if I’d been a boy he would have named me First Cav.” She softly rubs the tip of George’s arm through her shirt with two fingers. “Where were you in Nam?”

Exceptionally
sick. “I wasn’t. I’m a little too young. I lost the hand in Nicaragua.”

“Nicaragua? That’s in Florida, right?”

Exceptionally sick and exceptionally stupid. “Around there.” George’s erection surrenders. He feels fortunate. Time to go.

“Is Angela your wife?”

“No. Angela Janeway, the actress on TV?” No sign of recognition. “I produce a television show called
NARCS?
”

“
Oh
, you mean Jennie
O’Donnell!
I love Jennie!” She scoots even closer to George, so close her buttocks rise onto his thigh. “You’re a producer? Can I be on
NARCS?
” Her tone is matter-of-fact. “I’d love to be on
NARCS
. Then I could get my SAG card. Which would be so fantastic.” George is speechless. Her manner is friendly and forthright but nothing special, as if she’s asked to borrow a pen, and it doesn’t change as she adds, “I could like come back to your room with you tonight. I know it’s bad to brag, but Donny, my manager, says I give the best head in Vegas. Seriously.”

“No …”

“Or
whatever
.”

“No,” George says.

Only now does she lower her voice a little. “You could do me with, you know, your hand. Your arm, I mean. Up my ass, or wherever, I’d be cool with.” She’s still being disconcertingly casual, no more salacious than a waitress reciting dessert specials.

“Sorry,” he says, and with some effort stands. “Bye.” To create the illusion of purpose, he walks briskly and starts looking from room to room.

If she hadn’t mentioned the father? If she hadn’t mentioned “Donny”? If she wasn’t such a moron? If she was a nine instead of a seven and a half? If she wasn’t
so
transparent, so weird, so Planet of the
Zombie Whores? No, please, God, he hopes not. He has too much invested in his sense of personal virtue. He has too much invested in fidelity—twelve unblemished years but for the asterisk of New Orleans. For New Orleans he forgives himself now as an oafish error, end-of-the-eighties acting-out, premarital cold feet, treacherous learning experience. But this, tonight,
Shawna
, would have reversed Marx—history repeating itself, the first time as farce and the second time as tragedy. Farcical tragedy.

“
George
, you dog! You okay? You want to come back to my private lair for a nightcap?”

“Where’d Bucky boy go? Down to create some wealth at the blackjack table?”

“You’re still pissed over the real-marble bet, aren’t you?”

“What is this wealth-creation-engine bullshit? I thought he was supposed to be smart.”

“Hey!
Honest
is what I said he is. Come on. Let’s go. Unless you and your little friend on the couch aren’t through.”

When they finally get to Ben’s personal suite at the opposite corner of the floor, the quiet and perfect hotel tidiness is a relief, like slipping into a clean, cool pool. The light is dim. Three open laptops sit on a desk, one of them on, the screen full of numbers. A breeze flicks at the flimsy pages of a stock prospectus. As Ben goes to get drinks, George steps out onto the terrace. Sixteen floors down in the dark, the Grand Canal and its gondolas sparkle, hallucinatory and spectacular, transcending their own kitsch absurdity.
Like the real Venice
, George thinks.

“This is the business we have chosen, Michael.”