my face, lathering and spreading cream and lotions and tonics into it admiringly, whispering, "Oh Mr. Bateman, your face is so clean and smooth, so clean," the fact that I don't live in a trailer park or work in a bowling alley or attend hockey games or eat barbecued ribs, the look of the AT&T building at midnight, only at midnight. Jeannie comes in and starts the manicure, first clipping and filing the nails, then brushing them with a sandpaper disk to smooth out the remaining edges.
"Next time I'd prefer them a bit longer, Jeannie," I warn her.
Silently she soaks them in warm lanolin cream, then dries both hands off and uses a cuticle moisturizer, then removes all the cuticles while cleaning under the nails with a cotton-on-wood stick. A heat vibrator massages the hand and forearm. The nails are buffed first with chamois and then with bung lotion.
Date with Evelyn
Evelyn comes in on the call waiting of my third line and I wasn't going to take it, but since I'm holding on the second line to find out if Bullock, the maitre d' at the new Davis François restaurant on Central Park South, has any cancellations for tonight so Courtney (holding on the first line) and I might have dinner, I pick it up in the hope that it's my dry cleaners. But no, it's Evelyn and though it really isn't fair to Courtney, I take her call. I tell Evelyn I'm on the other line with my private trainer. I then tell Courtney I have to take Paul Owen's call and that I'll see her at Turtles at eight and then I cut myself off from Bullock, the maitre d'. Evelyn's staying at the Carlyle since the woman who lives in the brownstone next to hers was found murdered last night, decapitated, and this is why Evelyn's all shook up. She couldn't deal with the office today so she spent the afternoon calming herself with facials at Elizabeth Arden. She demands that we have dinner tonight, and then says, before I can make up a plausible lie, an acceptable. excuse, "Where were you last night, Patrick?"
I pause. "Why? Where were you?" I ask, while guzzling from a liter of Evian, still slightly sweaty from this afternoon's workout.
"Arguing with the concierge at the Carlyle," she says, sounding rather pissed off. "Now tell me, Patrick, where were you?"
"Why were you arguing with him?" Lask.
"Patrick," she says - a declarative statement.
"I'm here," I say after a minute.
"Patrick. It doesn't matter. The phone in my room didn't have two lines and there was no call waiting," she says. "Where were you?"
"I was... fooling around renting videotapes," I say, pleased, giving myself high-five, the cordless phone cradled in my neck.
"I wanted to come over," she says in a whiny, little-girl tone. "I was scared. I still am. Can't you hear it in my voice?"
"Actually, you sound like anything but."
"No, Patrick, seriously. I'm quite terrified," she says. "I'm shaking. Just like a leaf I'm shaking. Ask Mia, my facialist. She said I was tense."
"Well," I say, "you couldn't have come over anyway."
"Honey, why not?" she whines, and then addresses someone who just entered her suite. "Oh wheel it over there near the window... no, that window... and can you tell me where that damn masseuse is?"
"Because your neighbor's head was in my freezer." I yawn, stretching. "Listen. Dinner? Where? Can you hear me?"
At eight-thirty, the two of us are sitting across from each other in Barcadia. Evelyn's wearing an Anne Klein rayon jacket, a wool-crepe skirt, a silk blouse from Bonwit's, antique gold and agate earrings from James Robinson that cost, roughly, four thousand dollars; and I'm wearing a double-breasted suit, a silk shirt with woven stripes, a patterned silk tie and leather slip-ons, all by Gianni Versace. I neither canceled the reservation at Turtles nor told Courtney not to meet me there, so she'll probably show up around eight-fifteen, completely confused, and if she hasn't taken any Elavil today she'll probably be furious and it's this fact - not the bottle of Cristal that Evelyn insists on ordering and then adds cassis to - that I laugh out loud about.
I spent most of the afternoon buying myself early Christmas presents - a large pair of scissors at a drugstore near City Hall, a letter opener from Hammacher Schlemmer, a cheese knife from Bloomingdale's to go along with the cheese board that Jean, my secretary who's in love with me, left on my desk