the senator put his arm on my shoulder and said, “I want you to take Amanda to her hotel suite and wait for me there. Don't let her out of your sight. And wait for me.” Looking around the small, smoky room, I spotted her gliding toward us, a cigarette in one hand and a Champagne glass in the other, the eyes of the crowd tracking her as if attached by wires. Even in her cups she maintained a kind of dignity, her liquidity contained in a graceful vessel. “If it isn't my old friend Benjamin Brad-dock. My young friend. My new true-blue baby boy.”
“Cal's going to take you home,” the senator said.
“Home is where the hat is,” she said, “and I don't wear hats. I don't wear hearts, either, except on my sleeve. Home is where you can't go again. It's in foreclosure.” She kissed him on the cheek, then held her hand to her mouth in mock chagrin, looking around to see if the gesture had been noted. Then she took my arm and marched me out of the room, down the stairs and across the dance floor. If she had seemed tipsy, her stride was now quick and purposeful, a practiced gait that blurred her passage and left bystanders doing double takes, a just-short-of-running gait—like the rack of a Tennessee walking horse—which is unique to famous people who want to move between two points without getting dragged into contact with the spectating class. The senator resorts to it on occasion, when rushing for planes, though usually he's a glutton for handshaking, chats and photo ops.
She raced me out the side door, around the crowd. Her driver, spotting her, jumped out to open the door as a photographer snapped her picture. Suddenly she put her arm around me and posed, laying her head on my shoulder, then kissing my neck. Two other photographers materialized and someone shouted, “What's his name?” My vision was bleached out by the flashbulbs, and then we were in the limo, pulling away.
Laughing, she said, “I like to think about the photo editors and gossip columnists scurrying around tomorrow while I'm still asleep, trying to figure out who you are so they can run the picture. And the funny thing is, they'll never be able to figure it out.”
My exhilaration vanished as I realized what she was saying—that in her world I didn't exist. She must have seen this, because the next moment she took my hand and said, “I didn't mean it like that. It's just so awful if you take it too seriously. Sometimes I want to drop my skirt and moon the silly bastards. But you are awfully cute.” She leaned forward and kissed me, caressing my lips with her tongue. I had never been kissed like that. When she drew away and reached for a glass, I wondered what to tell the senator. She poured herself another drink. I saw myself rescuing Amanda Greer from this life of liquor and limousines and nightclubs and false adulation. I would take this fallen angel back home and plant her in the rich black soil of the heartland, buy a farm and raise children. I would run for Congress, and she'd campaign for me. I didn't see the contradiction between this vision and all the glamour that had dazzled me in the first place.
“The thing about fame,” she said, “is you think everyone will love you, that it's a way to become close to people.” She stopped and took a sip of her drink, and just when I'd decided she'd lost her thread of thought, she continued. “And then, when you are famous, it drives a wedge between you and the rest of the world. A wall of glass.” She tapped the smoked glass of the window with her fingers. “I don't think your senator knows that yet.” I wanted to tell her that I understood, but she reached overhead and punched a button that flooded the rear compartment with loud music, then laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, nodding lightly in time to the music, her lipstick, I noted happily, smeared from our kiss.
At the hotel, she carried her drink in with her, and the doorman greeted her reverently. She hadn't spoken another word to me. In the elevator, I asked how long she was staying there and she looked at me as if she didn't understand the question. Then she said, “I live here.”
The suite was,