The young couple—the doorman will remember them when police question him.
Yeah, Officer, he’ll say. I opened the door to their cab. They were laughing, but they sorta seemed like they didn’t wannu go in there. Into the building. She was, how can I say, rough around the edges. She thanked me—she was just a little street. Outta her league. But not for hire or nothing. Just not on his level, you know? He looked all prep-school and high-dollar. Maybe a little run down, but the real deal. I remember thinking that, even.
He tips his cap. Arms linked, the couple enters the smoked glass doors.
No, Officer, I didn’t see ’em after that. My shift last night ended at ten o’clock, so I was out of there. I guess they were just getting started.
The gold sign outside makes Jamey and Elise feel they’re entering a chocolate box. Inside, the apocalyptic waterfall roars.
Valentina is on 57, right under the Trump family. They take the penthouse elevator, and a Taiwanese tenant gets out on 46, into a minimal space with a poppy-red couch.
“Here you are,” says the elevator man when they surge to a stop and the doors open.
Valentina is barefoot in a long gray Versace dress, cigarette in her mouth as she hugs them, squealing like a pig. “You found-a me! We can start to party. I’ve been waiting all day.”
Matt grins. “Welcome to the penthouse, kids.”
They walk around this aerie of glass and clouds, dreams and money. Darkwood chairs with arms gnarled into swirls and flowers. Threads of gold that shine in the Persian rugs. Oil paintings hang—a still life with a radish and a fish, a portrait of a noblewoman with a grungy face and satin gown.
“We’ve been doing I Ching all day,” Matt (the jet-set outlaw) says to Jamey, showing off. “Smoking weed and reading the future.”
Elise forces a smile. “Cool place.”
“It’s radical, right?” Matt says, and it’s the first time he really speaks to her since New Haven.
In the corner, a Pac-Man makes noise.
“I ordered dinner, okay? Arcadia bring to me. You have to be hungry and eat like crazy!” Valentina twists out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray.
“Jamey, come here,” Matt says, beckoning into a hall. “I got to show you something.”
Jamey lets go of Elise’s hand, looks back as he walks away.
He’s strange tonight, she thinks.
Matt shows him a Picasso in the guest bedroom. “Can you believe this shit? Know what her dad paid for this?”
Valentina drags Elise into the kitchen for a drink, but Elise wants soda.
The phone bring-brings. Porters haul in a silver cart.
Valentina claps. She’s seventeen, indulged and entitled to the point of being mentally ill, with Krug Clos du Mesnil bottles filling the refrigerator, and—in her bedroom—acid tabs between the pages of a Marilyn Monroe biography. (Her childhood was a gold kernel. It was a germ of love. Her family built a wall around her but she scrambled over it, lost her virginity at twelve to her best friend’s uncle in a Mexico City nightclub. Her father was the king of sex and romance in Milan. She has jewels in safe-deposit boxes in countries she’s never visited. She thinks of her toys and silk gowns, the little Ferrari waiting for her in Ibiza, as her “children”; she’ll raise them when she’s ready to be maternal.) “Let’s eat!” Matt says.
Elise sits down with dread.
Champagne is poured for everyone but Elise. They make small talk—about Whitney Houston, MoMA, old friends of Matt and Jamey’s, Yale gossip, Valentina’s name, rack of lamb—which they’re eating. Elise pushes around her food.
“You like it?” Valentina asks with a face of demented concern.
“Yeah,” Elise says without looking up. “Just not that hungry.”
After dessert—melted ?les flottantes—Valentina dramatically pushes plates away to put a mirror on the table where a lazy Susan usually goes. She taps cocaine out of a sterling-silver vial.
“Now it’s time for the really fun,” she says, hitching up her gown and kneeling on her chair to cut lines.
Elise looks at Jamey, then flicks her hooded eyes at the bitch, shakes her head slowly.
Matt watches.
“None for you?” he asks.
“Oh!” Valentina looks up from her work with childish hospitality. “I want you to enjoy.”
“None for me either,” Jamey says.
Valentina laughs with strange intonations. “Welllll-lllll-ll, Jamey, you’re taking acid.”
“I’m sorry?” Jamey says.
“In your Champagne! I put a surprise!”
Jamey looks at his empty flute.
Matt laughs now too. “You did it? I thought you were joking,” he says to Valentina, then looks at Jamey. “Might as well go with it, right? I totally tripped last weekend out in Montauk, and my mind was officially blown.”
“I like what he say!” Valentina says, cutting lines. “Go with it!”
Jamey doesn’t want to trip—or does he?—but he feels the lights go down and the curtain rising.
“I guess you’re right,” Jamey says.
Elise maintains a neutral face, knowing bad energy leads to bad times. “Yeah.”
Valentina makes an exalted ohmygod face and claps. “Yes! Jamey, you’re my hero!”
“What’s to fear but fear itself?” Jamey asks, like an actor in a western.
The first hour is spent giggling at the table, the three of them shy as if flirting with the drug, courting it. Elise watches with forced benevolence.
Then Jamey notices that everything—furniture, faces—are coated in Plexiglas. Everything gleams, protected.
“You feel it.” Matt grins.
“You feel it first,” Valentina says to Jamey, “I given you Elise’s tab, bonus!”
Jamey nods, laughing. “Great!” he says.
He hears offshoots of noise, like a purring, after words.
Latin translations appear above Elise’s head when she talks.
“What?” she asks, smiling back, keeping her commitment.
“Latin,” he says. A long silken trail of glitter follows words out of his mouth.
Valentina and Matt sneak away, made innocent by their high, and curiously investigate objects in the bathroom, turning over a toothbrush and tittering, hunched down.
Elise is left with Jamey, who is extremely occupied.
“My God on Earth,” he says, burdened by awareness.
There’s a movie happening on the black windows. The images shuffle so fast and he realizes they’re memories, and moments from the future. His brain is transmitting these pictures to be felt more than seen. There’s a leg with black stitches, then wild roses in Rhode Island, and a white Jaguar. But he just feels the air displaced by them, or he almost tastes them—they’re not visible.
He watches lights change in the chandelier, the glass tubes like ice pops in cherry and lime and orange flavors. He tries to stand on the dining table to make the chandelier move, but Elise holds his hand and says something to him.
Her face morphs into an albino doe’s head. She blinks the big eyes.