To be honest, I can’t remember anything about the rest of that dinner party. I was too lost in my thoughts, debating whether I had done the right thing, blocking Femke from entering Hank’s home and keeping Ella from the hug and kiss she wanted so desperately from her biological Dutch mother. A few times my friends asked me if anything was wrong. I kept blaming it on the meds, until finally I said good night to everyone and went to bed.
The next thing I knew it was three a.m., and I was awake again, feeling like I had done something wrong. I went into Hank’s bedroom and poked him. He didn’t wake up so I poked him harder. That made him sit up and say, “Ella? Are you okay?”
When he turned on the light and saw it was me, he started to get a little pissed off, which made telling him about Femke even harder. Finally I just spilled the beans, letting him know that Femke was at the Four Seasons, and that she had tried to invade our dinner party, but I had told her she wasn’t welcome.
Hank closed his eyes and gritted his teeth for a good minute. Finally I asked if he was okay, and that’s when he started to say he couldn’t “do this anymore,” over and over again, like he was having a breakdown himself. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there.
When Hank started to cry, I got agitated, especially when he asked if any of my friends would mind looking after me for a few days. I said I could just go home for a while if he needed his space, but Hank said NO in a forceful way that made me jump.
I could tell he was really struggling here, and that he thought I might start World War III if I was left home alone with all of my guns. Just to ease his mind, I told him I could probably spend a few days with my old Vietnam buddy Frank, the multimillionaire I told you about before. Hank said that would be great, so I got on it right away.
In the guest room I called Frank’s home number, but I got his wife instead. “Goddamn it, Geneva,” she said. “I told you never to call here again!”
Geneva was Frank’s younger mistress, who he kept in a fancy skyscraper apartment downtown at Two Liberty Place.
I told Frank’s wife, Lynn, that it was David Granger calling, and that I was in the middle of an emergency. Because that bitch Lynn hates me, she hung up immediately.
I hesitated before I called back. When Frank came to visit me in the hospital, he didn’t like the way I was treating the stupid nurses and doctors, and we got into a little fight about that. We hadn’t spoken since. So I was a little surprised when my phone started buzzing, and it was Frank.
He asked if I was okay, and so I told him all about Femke’s surprise return and how the windmilling, wooden-clog-wearing motherfucker had forced me out of my current living arrangement with my son.
“Why don’t you just go home?” Frank asked, so I told him that my son thought I was “a danger to myself and others,” and even though that was bullshit, Hank was under a lot of stress and I didn’t want him to worry about me.
Frank asked me what I wanted from him, and I asked if we could just spend some time together maybe and could we use his mistress’s apartment, being that she was probably in the Caribbean doing a photo shoot anyway, because she was a model who spent most of the winter half naked in the tropics.
When he didn’t answer, I told him that I wouldn’t be calling if I wasn’t in a really fucked-up place, and then I told him about how I sort of blanked out during dinner too, and maybe it would be good to be around another veteran for a few days. I had done the same for him many times whenever his bitch wife kicked him out of his mansion on the Main Line. He knew he owed me for that and more, so I just waited for him to man up, which he eventually did.
“Jesus Christ,” Frank said, and then he told me to meet him in the Two Liberty Place lobby in an hour.
I could hear Hank crying in his room, talking to Femke on the phone. I didn’t want to wake up Ella. I left my son a note on the dinner table saying I’d be with Frank, so there was nothing to worry about, and then I called a cab.
The driver was a white guy, but he smelled pretty bad anyway. Kept farting and stinking up the whole car, which was just my luck. I didn’t tip him shit when we arrived at the shiny skyscraper.
I lit up a cigarette on the sidewalk. The cabdriver hung around staring at me, trying to shame me for being cheap, so I walked back over to him and motioned for him to roll down the window. When he did, I said, “No one tips a farting cabdriver, so do yourself a favor and go get yourself some TUMS.”
He drove away, and I was left alone with my Marlboro Light.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to smoke a cigarette on a city sidewalk just as the sun is coming up, but it is truly a magnificent experience. Hardly any cars on the streets. No pedestrians. A heavy quiet fills all of the spaces between the buildings, like one of Jessica’s blank canvases before she filled it up with all of the demons in her mind. I love smoking a cigarette in predawn Philadelphia. You don’t even need a gun to feel safe. One of the few great joys of my life, and so I had five or six smokes, switching hands, so that one could get warm in a pocket while the other allowed me to keep puffing, until Frank’s limo rolled up and he popped out in a suit and tie covered by a cashmere overcoat, all of which probably cost more than you make in a year.
“I see you came dressed up,” he said. I was in full camouflage, and he knew that meant things weren’t good in my mind.
I just nodded, and then we got some takeout coffee and went on up to his mistress’s apartment, which is better than any suite in any top hotel in the world. All leather furniture. Persian rugs, which, like I said, are classy. Sophisticated art that Frank buys off Hank, just to support his friend’s son.
I should probably say that Frank claims to merely mentor Geneva. He says he has never fucked her and is fond of bringing attention to the fact that he is forty years her senior. But I think everyone—including Frank’s wife—knows that you don’t buy a one-point-five-million-dollar apartment for a woman you only mentor. No, you buy that sort of apartment for a model who has agreed to bump uglies with you on a regular basis, but that remains none of my business, so I don’t really discuss it with Frank.
Even though it was early in the morning and neither of us had eaten, Frank broke out two Cohiba Esplendidos, which meant we were going to have a proper man talk. We did that out on the balcony, where there are heat lamps and these real bearskin blankets made from bears that Frank had actually shot and killed himself.
Once we had the sticks going and the air was full of Cuban smoke, I let loose with some of my theories on the government and its connection to my brain surgery, outlining how the doctors were on the take and how the VA was no fucking help whatsoever, and Frank just sat there puffing away, looking out over Philadelphia from under his bearskin blanket and nodding every now and then. When our cigars were almost kicked, I realized that I had been talking for almost an hour and Frank hadn’t said a single word, so I asked him what he thought.