also to Rourke. I understand that by agreeing to honor forgoing loyalties, I betray Mark, and in turn condemn myself for my movable allegiance.
I say okay.
“Okay,” he repeats, okay. He is surprised and also relieved, not exactly happy, but lighter. “Let’s do this fast. What do you have downstairs, a pocketbook?”
“A sweater.”
He nods, calculating. “Fine. A sweater. I’ll wait by the elevator. I won’t leave alone unless you walk out and tell me you’re okay. But I’m warning you, you’re gonna have to be pretty fucking convincing.” He takes my hand. “Let’s go.”
Going down the roof stairs and back into that party sickens me. Everyone in the loft is dancing, or rather, staggering like zombies. It’s like their knees won’t hold them. I recall the roof. If not for Rob, I think in fact I would try to fly.
Rob points over the tops of heads to the entrance. “I’ll be right there.”
The door to the bedroom where I left Mark and everyone is open about eighteen inches. Through the opening I see Mark, reclining on a chaise in the center of an encampment of people, king of a wax tribe. He shifts when I come. As I look around for my sweater, he says, “C’mon people. Let’s dance.”
Two of the girls flanking him lend him their arms and aid him to his feet, and he laughs, at himself, I suppose, at the way he imagines himself to be. He uses them like canes to right himself across the path to me, where he stops, shaking them off with a burst of manly animation. The girls saunter insolently past as if to imply that he slept with them while I was gone. Obviously they know nothing of his revulsion to disease, or of his obsessive fear of being cheated on by me in return. Or how Mark figures himself to be a man of ideals; he would not want a woman whose attraction to him is defiled by a lust for assets. Anyway, I feel no jealousy where Mark is concerned. There is simply an emptiness in the place where such emotions might reside.
The room has cleared; his friends have gone to the dance floor. He and I are alone. Mark comes closer. He smiles a false smile. His eyes are wild and unable to focus; they look off slightly to the side. The veneer of his skin is white as birch. His upper lip is a band of sweat, his nose is running, and his breath smells like steel getting cut, like when Dad and Tony cut steel with a chop saw for some sign they’re making. I wonder what he’s been doing, snorting coke or snorting heroin, or both. I’ve seen him do it before. The last time Miles and Paige were here. It’s not a big deal, Mark told me—strictly business, purely recreational. Probably I should have seen this coming. That’s my job, I think, to see things coming.
“I think we should go,” I say.
He pulls my sweater from my hands. “I think we should stay.”
I reach for the sweater. “I think I’m going.”
“I think you’re staying,” Mark snaps, and he flings my sweater across the bedroom. His body plows into mine and he pins me against the opened door. He yanks the fabric of my skirt toward my waist with his left hand, and he grabs my ass with his right, taking up the flesh and groping it, driving me back, writhing, worming.
“Mark!” I am able to lean far enough left to see across the dance floor. Rob is not in the appointed spot, which can mean just one thing: he’s on his way over. Within seconds, I see him; he is about ten feet away. Through the leather of his jacket, I can make out fists in the pockets. Mark casts a lethal gaze in Rob’s direction, then he turns me completely outward, exposing my bare back to the crowd. Mark pulls me into the bedroom and kicks the door shut. Rob’s foot and shoulder jam it. There is powerful shoving.
“Mark!” I shout again, thinking, Rob is going to end up in jail. Shit, Rob is going to end up in jail.
Immediately, people come out of the bathroom behind us, taking Mark and me by surprise. Dara and Brett emerge with two of the models, one of whom is swaying feverishly to the blaring music—“The Age of Aquarius.” It’s at the horn part, at its most hallucinatory and cultish.
Let the sun shine! Let the sun shine