Robert Goolrick [2]

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool, and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English country house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn’t and it was just swell.

It was like being in an episode of Masterpiece Theater. All you needed was an under housemaid arranging flowers in cut-glass vases.

This was before. A lifetime away from the life I live now. This was more than a decade ago, just as the great tailgate party was coming to an end, and I had an almost infinite amount of money. Or so it seemed.
This was the summer I told the same funny story over and over until people started calling me Billy Champagne, which was the punch line of the story.

I worked on The Street, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy bilking little old ladies in Cleveland out of their life savings, I had a conscience and it bothered me to think of those little old ladies in their little houses in front of their little TV sets with their little cats thinking they were about to strike it rich or at least be able to get maybe a bigger TV and feed the cat when in fact they were about to strike out, most of them, not all, but most, still, the money was fantastic and the roll, the flow of it was like mainlining every day. The roll smelled like money. You could feel the poison boiling through your veins.

I worked in a big room that was basically like a casino; there were no windows, no clocks, nothing but the relentless flicker of financial news on dozens of TV sets. It was both timeless and relentless. It was basically like playing one-on-one basketball for ten hours a day, followed by fat stogies in the cigar room at Frank’s and big steaks and then on to clubs where we swaggered in our monogrammed Sea Island cotton shirts and $200 scarf ties from Hermès and sat in the VIP section and ran up $2,000 bar bills and took town cars home at three in the morning when we had to be back at the office at seven-thirty. We did things like write our phone numbers on girls’ tits with Mont Blanc pens, and they always called us back. Always.

You could smoke then, that’s how long ago it was.

This was life. This was everyday life, and we didn’t understand people who didn’t live like this. We were the curl of the zeitgeist and we were all young and mostly good looking and we all found time to work out like dogs, weird times like six in the morning, so we had these fantastic bodies, well, not all of us had fantastic bodies, some had the spindly hollow-eyed stares of junkies and some topped three hundred pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day; but I’m thinking about the guys who came to the house that summer, we were all in perfect shape and had the kind of women you get when you have a fantastic body and a wad of cash and the utter arrogance that comes with having the big dog on the leash.

We were the people people wrote about when they wrote about the evils of contemporary society. We made too much money. We spent too much money. We didn’t do a single thing to help the less fortunate, which included most of the people on the planet. We drank too much. We did too many drugs. We had eighteen-year-old kids with rasta braids coming to drop shit off in the middle of the day. We went to Alphabet City the minute we turned our computers off for the night. We felt not one ounce of remorse. We only felt pity for the rest of the gray masses. All of these things were true. But, man, did we have fun. It was like a giant testosterone flambé.

Bonuses were a big thing. Bonuses were given out in yards, a yard being a million dollars. People would say, sucking on a big fat Cubano, that they got a yard or a yard and a half. Everybody lied, of course, but everybody got a lot and it was a big deal.

I wasn’t the brightest nickel in the bag, but I had the best education, and I was as aggressive as a pit bull, I could trade shit for silk, and so I was good for half a yard. I was thirty-one.

After I paid off the taxes and my enormous bills—I owed Bergdorf’s $12,000, which was basically three suits, two cashmere sweaters and a bottle of Aqua di Parma, the same cologne Cary Grant wore—I still had quite a pile, and I decided to get my own house in the Hamptons. Not just any house, the house.

I had shared before. Little bungalows on Gin Lane. I had gone through the ritual of being a houseguest—my mother once said when you’re a houseguest, don’t ring the doorbell with anything but your elbow, so I took cases of champagne and new badminton sets from Hammacher Schlemmer—so I knew what I wanted was a palace of my own, where I could invite people every weekend, and have them bring me lavish and largely unusable stuff.

I looked at six houses. I took the sixth one. It was chintzed and striped and leopard printed, stuff that would charm women, and it had a grand piano and a deck from which you could smell the sea, and the pool and the garden and service for thirty. It was English aristocracy without the dog shit and the cigarette burns in the upholstery.

Someone witty once said to me that living in a castle wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Darling,” she said, “you still have to wash your hair in the bathtub.”

I had never been in an English country house. I thought this was the real thing. I took it immediately. It cost $96,000, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I wrote a check. The house came with a maid, so the owners could feel safe about their fabulous stuff, and she cost another $800 a week which I paid by check, and I leased a car for the summer, a deeply impressive convertible Mercedes, midnight black, with every accoutrement you could wish for and the smell of brand-new leather and a top which slid back with the touch of a button, slid back as silently as a snake through the grass. This was a very nice car. I gave them my platinum card.

I bought sheets in the city for every bedroom, from Frette, since the sheets that were there were the kind of clever pastiche designed to make you think maybe Kmart was a good idea after all. My guests would sleep in 600 thread count cotton, white with scalloped borders, so the cool night air could pass over their bodies like a lover’s kiss.

I still have the sheets. Quality lasts.

I found a huge Moroccan tent in the city and bought it for $25,000 and had it put up on the lawn and filled it with benches and silk pillows and those low kind of Moroccan tables and hung with chandeliers so it was like being in a fantasy seraglio, all about sex. It was hot as hell in there, like being at a rinky-dink circus on a July afternoon in Reno, but it was beautifully embroidered and dotted with thousands of tiny little mirrors and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

From the second story of the house, you looked down at the roof of it, or whatever tents have, and it was like looking down at the stars, with all the mirrors twinkling, and the candles glowing softly through the canvas.

The first weekend, I invited George who was hysterical, and Frank, who was enormous, 6’4”, just to show I wasn’t filled with self-doubt, and Fanelli and Teddy. I took two days off from work to stock the house, bread and desserts from the Barefoot Contessa, $30-a-pound lobster salad from Loaves and Fishes, and all kinds of salads and hors d’oeuvres and candy and cakes from all over and vegetables from the Green Thumb. And liquor, Jesus. Everything you could imagine. I even stopped by the road and bought tall flowers to go in all those vases, and little bunches in every room, and when I was done the whole thing looked like an at-home Vogue shoot showing how some English heiress lived when she was tired of town and longed for the simple life.

Friday night, they all showed up, with the girls, and I picked up my girl Susanne from the Jitney, and we were a household. The girls, frankly, were the least of it. Everybody assumed they would be beautiful and pliable and enviable and basically disposable. So all summer the house was the five guys and whatever the cat dragged in.

And the presents. Like Christmas all over again. George brought a case of 1986 Romanée-Conti Montrachet, God knows where he found it, and Frank brought a picnic hamper from Bergdorf’s with real china plates and Fanelli, who was a thug, brought a Z of really good coke, and Teddy brought ten white beach towels with my initials on them, every monogram a different color.

We drank rum drinks that came out of a blender. Frank claimed he’d never seen a blender before and Teddy said he’d never tasted rum. His mother told him it was the devil’s drink and taught him never to touch it. He got over that pretty fast, and Frank became a whizmaster at making blended drinks because he was mechanically inclined, he said.

The household was perfect. It was a complete universe, all by itself. We ate butterflied leg of lamb on the Weber super grill, and we drank rum and Montrachet until we were silly and did many, many lines of fine white cocaine, but only after we’d eaten the lamb with this ninety-dollar-a-bottle Burgundy I had laid in and we smoked Cuban cigars until the whole angst of the week had worn away and we went to bed at two in the morning to sleep with these beautiful girls and the sex was not quiet and every human sensuality was redolent in the quiet night air.

The next morning, everybody was fresh as a daisy. Juices were poured, omelets got made and eaten out on the sunporch, and then Bloody Marys got made and drunk out by the pool, and then the guys went off to play tennis. We knew this one guy, a yard and a half at least, who had hired a tennis pro for the summer to come every Saturday afternoon, so we got to going over there, knocking balls around while their women looked on and read novels, us quick-footed in our three-hundred-dollar-Prada tennis shorts and our raggedy old T-shirts from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, Florida, and places like that, just to show we weren’t fashion pussies.

We were the kind of people who got their pictures in Hamptons magazine. We were the kind of people who dressed in Nantucket red linen trousers to go to the Hamptons Classic Horse Show. We could get into Nick and Tony’s on thirty minutes’ notice. That kind of people.
The second weekend, we really found the perfect thing to round out the house. We found a pet.

Her name was Giulia de Bosset. I found her at a party.

She came up to me at the bar while I was getting more drinks for everybody and she looked straight at me and said, “I know you.” As though we were in the middle of some conversation already.

“I’m sorry. I don’t…what?”

“I know you. I met you when you were still at Hopkins. I was just a little girl.”

It turned out she was the baby sister of the college roommate of this extremely thin girl I used to date, and so we rehashed old times, and I asked her where she was staying and she said she was staying at the God-forsaken Maidstone Club, of all places, with all those old farts, so I told her to come stay with us, where at least she could get some peace and quiet without somebody whacking golf balls all over the places.

Things were different then. We spit at golf.

So she came. We picked up her things at two in the morning, and she came and slept in the little maid’s room off the kitchen which she said was just fine with her, anywhere but that mausoleum.

She was a waif. She was like Audrey Hepburn, not that I knew who Audrey Hepburn was at the time. That was just one piece of information that hadn’t been downloaded yet.

Later, I kept hearing her name, especially when she died, so I went and rented all these old movies and boy, she was something and boy, was she ever like Giulia de Bosset. I bet neither one of them ever went to a dance where they had to get their hands stamped if they wanted to get back in.

Giulia was naïve and quiet and had chopped-off hair and lived in the East Village where nobody lived in those days, and she would tell funny stories about finding guys shooting up on her stairs, and she talked about getting mugged by those same guys and she obviously had money and we were all intrigued and we just adored her and so we asked her back. And she came.

She came every weekend, and slept in the little maid’s room off the kitchen. I went back to Frette and got sheets for her, too, so she wouldn’t feel bad about staying in the single bed in the little room that barely had a bathroom. Her sheets were very fancy, embroidered with vines in periwinkle blue, so her room would seem special in some way.
She wasn’t as pretty as the other girls. She wasn’t athletic. She didn’t like to lie in the sun. But she was slim as a reed and had flawless skin and boy, could she make a great Greek salad. Give her a lemon, some really good olive oil, some mustard, some garlic and some kosher sea salt, and she could really make a salad into a whole new thing. It took her a long time to do it, but it was worth every second.

She had no interest in sex, and, believe me, we tried. Even Teddy tried, and he was very fastidious.

She said she was a virgin and she had a kind of quietude as though she weren’t even waiting for something and anything that happened was just fine with her.

She’d show up every weekend. We offered to drive her but she said she liked the Jitney, she liked getting the free water, and looking at all the faces not looking at one another, and she’d show up at sunset with an overstuffed Bottega satchel, and out of that bag would come the most fantastic clothes, some all spangled and beaded, some the kind you’d wear to the queen’s garden party, not that we knew what you’d actually wear to such an event, but you get the picture. She had the right outfit for anything we went to, and she looked just fantastic lying in the seraglio in the afternoon in jeans and a T-shirt reading Jane Austen.

She apparently disdained water sports. We never saw her in a bathing suit.

She was a smackhead, of course. You could tell that right away. All those European kids were, then. But she never did it in public. She never shared. She would just get all winsome and content and you could tell. We never asked her. She never did cocaine with us after dinner, just sipped her white wine and looked far, far into the future. She was probably twenty-three, so there was a lot of future to look into.
The women liked her because she posed no threat whatsoever to anybody, and the men liked her because she was like a little parakeet with beautiful plumage you could have sit on the tip of your index finger and just stare at it, just for the pleasure of the colors and the loveliness of life beating in her little chest.

We called her Jools and, like any good pet, she came when she was called and, like some pets, you could possess her for awhile, but she let you know you could never really own her, not really. Like a cat. Like a fish. Like a bird on your finger.

She had a sweetly vague Continental accent, unlike most of the girls who hung around that summer, and she actually had a job. Not that she got paid. In fact, she paid to do it.

She was in New York for the summer studying art restoration with this tiny little man on Greene Street, the ogre, she called him, and together they were working on restoring the largest Titian in the world still in private hands. She seemed to know a lot about art. The rest of us, in general, knew nothing about art, Art History 101 kind of stuff, although we went to Castelli and Mary Boone and spent enormous sums on the latest and coolest decorations, now mostly in warehouses, I assume. Mine are long gone, I know that. Ten cents on the dollar.

The funny thing is, I can’t remember one clever thing she said all summer. She wasn’t funny or clever in that way. Not one remark. She never even tried, just stared at you with her calm and tender expressions and smiled like La Giaconda at something only she knew about. She didn’t fit in, of course. Maybe that was part of the charm.
She could play the piano, anything from Bach to Hey Jude, and some nights when we weren’t too wrecked, or came home early from a boring party, she’d play for us and we’d stand around the piano singing. Most of us were terrible, except for Fanelli, who had a real sweetness in his voice, a clarity and kindness that embarrassed even him, but, if you could get him to sing, you went to bed feeling life was a pretty good thing, after all.

I know we all wondered what she did, lying there in the nights listening to the howling storms of sex all around her, smelling the smells, feeling the vibrations, lying in her virginal bed in her immaculate sheets. She probably just nodded off, nodded out, but she must have been aware. It was what the house was about, all those rutting nights, and she must have been aware.

But she’d appear at breakfast in time to do all the dishes, and she never complained about the slightest thing and there was a serenity about her that defied any but pharmaceutical explanations.

The maid came every day during the week, so the house was immaculate every weekend, but Jools made sure we left it the way we found it. We never broke a single thing that whole summer. Not a glass.
Even when we had forty people over to grill tenderloins and drink champagne, even when we went to bed as the sun was coming up, Jools kept up her relentless tidying, kind of somewhere between a guest and a caterer, so that if things went bad on either end, she could hop to the other side and stay out of trouble. We adored her.

She said dishes had to be washed and dried by hand. She said dishwashers left a film of soap on everything and that wasn’t kind to the next guest. She loved doing dishes, and we stood around her like puppies, drying them and putting them away, while the women smoked and glared.

And then one weekend she died. Hummingbirds’ hearts beat so fast that if they stop to rest or sleep, their hearts slow down and sometimes they can’t get them to get up to speed again, so they die without ever waking up.

I found her.

She didn’t show up for breakfast which wasn’t unusual, and she missed the narcissistic hour by the pool and the tennis which she never went to anyway, and when we came home we assumed she’d gone to the beach or for a walk, or just didn’t feel like it that Saturday. We’d been up late, the little birds were twittering as we fucked our women, and she just didn’t feel like it.

It wasn’t until the Waring blender had started up that we thought to look in her room. I knocked softly, a little harder, and then turned the handle.
She was lying in her perfect sheets, and there was blood coming from her nose and her mouth. There was vomit on her ruined silk nightgown.
By her hand, there was an open vial of heroin, with powder spilling on to the sheets. By the bed, on the nightstand, there was an empty bottle of Seconal. There was no note.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t cry. I didn’t call out. I just watched her, the soft lids closed over her azure eyes.

I took a cloth and cleaned the blood from her face. I used warm water, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference to Giulia. Her skin was so cold, and, underneath the blood she was as sweet and unfazed as ever. Even death hadn’t surprised her.

I touched her face. I kissed her icy cheek. It was the only time I had ever touched her.

Then I went into the kitchen and told the others. The blender stopped. We agreed to clean the house of any drugs before we called 911, so each of us went to our rooms and brought down whatever we had.
We put it all in a big trash bag, and Fanelli drove it down to Sag Main Beach and buried it in the sand, with an old tire over the spot so we could go back and get it.

Then we made the call. They came in seconds. The rest is a blur. The rest is just the same details as anybody else’s death.

There were questions, of course. There was a search of the house. Everything was in order.

We let the barbecue burn out, while we sat and drank hard liquor. We went out to dinner and ate in silence.

Then we drove back to the beach at midnight to retrieve the drugs. Funny thing, a lot of people didn’t want to claim what was theirs. We sat there with a counter full of drugs that seemed to have no owners.
Fanelli sang a quiet, tiny song. It was in Italian. Then I sat up very late and got very drunk and did drugs all by myself until the sky was blue.
That was the first weekend in August. It happened on my birthday.
I went to the funeral. We all went. Her father was a French count who was tiny and ugly. He had a gigantic art collection, one of the most important in the world. Museums were already fighting over it.

Her mother was dead, but her stepmother was a Spanish airline stewardess. I didn’t speak to them.

The coffin was open. She was perfect, calm and finally beautiful. She was a countess, and she was finally the prettiest girl in the room. La Serenissima.

You say to yourself, she wasn’t the kind, she wasn’t the kind to do that. But there was the empty bottle of Seconal. She knew what she was doing. It was time for her to leave the party where she never really met anybody, where Prince Charming never asked her to dance.

There was an article about it in the weekly rag, the death of a countess kind of article, a here’s what happens to careless international trash in the Hamptons kind of article, and that’s how I know that part about the airline stewardess thing. Apparently she was a big deal back in France. She was, according to the article, the kind of girl who knew that tiaras weren’t just pinned on your head, they were woven into your hair. It took hours, and it hurt like hell. She was the kind of girl who was going to marry a king, if one could be found.

She was just slumming, with us. She was just trying not to be who she was for a little while. Drinking cold Montrachet with Jane Austen in a Moroccan tent and removing tiny smudges of grime from a Titian that happened to belong to her father.

I refused to talk to the reporters. I said I didn’t know who she was, and couldn’t tell them a thing about her. I couldn’t tell them about the blood on her face or the vomit on her Pratesi nightgown.

We had three weeks left in the house, and we drank blender drinks and lay in the seraglio in the cool evenings and drank cold Dom Perignon and did cocaine and laughed and had people over for barbecues, but it was never the same. I was drunk every minute of every day. Even Fanelli was drunk and sad all the time. It wasn’t creepy, but the bubble had gone out of the champagne.

We skipped the last weekend, Labor Day. We got there Friday night and left Saturday morning. We just didn’t feel like it.

I left the tent where it was. Let somebody else deal with it. The summer had cost me almost $200,000.

Three months later I was in rehab.

One day I came back from lunch, three martinis and big slabs of rare beef and raw cocaine under my belt and I stood and waited for the elevator. The doors opened, and a voice very clearly said to me. “Don’t get on to that elevator. If you do, you will die.” The doors closed, all the happy bees going back to the hive, and I went home.

They were very understanding. The personnel woman called me, and I hadn’t bathed or shaved in six days and I broke down on the phone, blubbered like a baby about my lost, lost ways, and she offered to have me sent to rehab, and I packed up my sweats and went, leaving twenty-eight days later so clean and sober it hurt, and filled with boredom and self-loathing.

Then they fired me. I never even went back to get my last check.
Once you leave The Street, you don’t go back, not even to buy a hot dog from the Sabrett’s man on the corner. And then the phone rings less and less and eventually Fanelli was the last one to call to say one more time how sorry he was and what a great summer it had been, except for, well, you know, the Thing, and that we really would get together one of these days. My brilliant suits hung in the closets like lost quotations. Like yellowed maps to another world and time.

And I never went and wrote my phone number on a girl’s tits again. Little by little you lose it all, until you’re left with the pure electric shock of the sober life. A life without friends, without money, without trainers at the gym, without countesses who die in your bed. And nobody ever called me Billy Champagne again.

Six months later, I was broke. Nine months later, I was selling running shoes at Paragon.

I worked a series of jobs. I started drinking again. But never in public. The trouble with drinking in public is 1) The glasses aren’t big enough, 2) somebody uglier and drunker than you is always hitting on you, and 3) there’s no place to lie down.

A funny thing happened the other night. I was coming back from the bookstore where I eventually ended up working—now I’m the supervisor of the ordinary clerks—and the two girls at the checkout counter at the bodega were talking and one was showing off her new bracelet to the other girl, and she said, “Girl, I mean, ain’t this bracelet bad? Like ain’t it just soooo bad!”

And the other girl, bagging my pork chops and broccoli, said, “Girl, it’s so bad it’s fatal.”

Well, it’s all fatal, isn’t it, in the end?

 

Robert Goolrick’s acclaimed memoir, The End of the World as We Know It, was published last March by Algonquin and selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” list. His first novel, Bitter Cold, is forthcoming. Goolrick lives in New York City and is working on a screenplay about the life of Nikola Tesla.