and perpetually suntanned cleavage who want to know where I got those shoes. Cars mean I don’t have to take subways that smell of vomit and urine, or cabs where drivers ask into the rearview mirror, Have you been baptized?
Sex with Mark means I don’t have to wait tables and talk to drunks who say I look like one of the girls in the Robert Palmer video, or go home to my mother’s in the summer where memories of life and of living are everywhere. And sex with him is perverse. In the absence of desire, it’s good to be set upon without expectations of affection. At the end, when I’m overtaken by the same abject longing for things I will never have, I can get up and walk away, clinging to that loss without interference.
I will not leave Mark, because when I wander through the house at daybreak, repelled by the sight of the bed, by the wet circle in the center, by the place on the mattress I leave unoccupied, there is some small consolation in a refrigerator filled with thirty-dollar-per-pound smoked Scottish salmon and organic strawberries and fresh-squeezed orange juice, and the fact that the mess in the sink can be left for someone else to clean. In the garage is a car I can drive to anywhere; in the top dresser drawer is all the cash I could ever need. If being in love is consolation when you are poor, money is consolation when you are not. Life is a trap not because I can’t leave Mark, but because there’s no reason to.
“The workplace is such a scene,” he’s saying. “The politics, the bullshit incompetence. I don’t want you ending up as the subordinate to some asshole who thinks he can coerce you into—situations.”
When the plates are cleared, the waiter brings two glasses of grappa. I don’t like grappa; Mark knows I don’t. He pulls my chair to his, grabbing a leg. He plays with my hair. “You can do anything—photography, painting, drawing. My mother will help. She’ll get your work out there.”
The coke snakes round and round on a framed picture Mark removed from the wall. I cannot say what the picture is; it’s covered with clumps. The caviar, like the cognac and the cocaine, is exceptional—hand-selected Tsar Imperial Beluga. If you want to know about hand-selected caviar, you can inquire, but you’ll be judged by your ignorance—and forced to endure an exhaustive account of the size of sturgeon, the shape of eggs, the cost per gram, the temperature of the Caspian, and the vulgar habits of the Slavs. You don’t inquire; you prefer not to learn.
Ignorance is as good as intelligence in this contradictory world, this dream landscape, where the sun shines at night and creatures mingle wrongly and seasons are without circumference—no beginning, no end. We are voracious, we are clever, we are the victors, which is the same as being victims because everything here is inversion. Like the bored members of a royal court, we are insular and divine. No one told me about this place; I arrived unprepared.
Mark’s friend Dara turns to me, apologizing for shoptalk. He has been discussing credit derivatives.
I don’t mind. It’s better than other things they discuss—the size of bonuses, breasts versus legs, all the Mexicans “crossing over.”
“Don’t apologize,” Mark tells Dara. “It’s about time Eveline learned some of the principles of economics. In fact, let’s give her a little tutorial.”
His friends settle into Eames armchairs with their chilled vodka and smuggled Montecristos and cashmere pullovers with suede elbow patches, and they listen solemnly beyond moribund undertones of the English Beat and the Psychedelic Furs as Mark describes debt-to-equity ratios and supply-side economics in the simplest possible terms, which is sexy. I know that inside he wants very much to be sexy, so I smile, and he smiles back, appreciative that I’ve given him the opportunity.
“Rule of Seventy-two,” he instructs as he licks black-light bubbles off a mother-of-pearl spoon, “is the formula used to calculate how long it will take for an investment to double. So at eight percent, your investment would be doubled in nine years.”
Maybe I’m experiencing a type of dark adaptation; maybe my eyes have grown accustomed to him. Suddenly Mark is attractive to me—at least, tonight he is, as he sits there, twinkling isochronally like a movie of himself or a crystal catching light, losing it, catching it again. His delivery is artfully uninterrupted, gluey smooth as the siphon of a clam. His