Marty Azamanian had made his money in parking garages but then started buying movie theaters in the eighties, then got into cable TV and radio stations, rolling them up, thanks to deregulation—until he crushed the regional networks and locked down half of North America. And was credited with helping polarize news, and finally succeeded in killing FM radio—he perfected the formula, whittling down the playlist of every Top 40 station to the same five pop tunes, cutting what was left of local coverage, turning a handful of right-wing talk-radio assholes into national icons. Then he went west to conglomerate Hollywood with a pure business plan designed to hedge against failures and helped birth hideous blockbuster sequels like Karate Kid III and the RoboCop franchise.
Over the years I’d met his tennis buddies and monied pals, who liked to pretend the house was no big deal. Marty’s ex-wife was an actress, and there were two kids from his first marriage. He also had a younger boy and girl with Bruce, his partner, through a surrogate, after he came out of the closet. Books had been written about him. He was small and ruthless and had grown up in a housing project in the Bronx, exactly where my dad grew up, on Fordham Road. I figured that out the first time we met.
Then he got into the music business, bought a football team and a two-million-acre game park in Africa, synergizing with his media monolith, diluting the brand, triggering a shareholder revolt, sucking out a billion dollars in dividends before bankrupting or flipping whatever was left. A lawyer of Marty’s was found in a parking garage with a shotgun between his knees and his teeth blown out the back of his head, and there were years spent fighting the FBI and the SEC, and he was also sometimes mentioned by name as the reason you can’t find any rhinos alive in Zimbabwe.
Anyway, it was Marty’s partner, Bruce, who really cared about the arts, a patron of the arts who, along with the wife of the local congressman, had thought up the conference fifteen years ago. Bruce was a short, thin, painfully shy man, a lawyer and aspiring memoirist who, thanks to Carl, was given a slot every year to read from his work in progress. I attended those readings whenever possible. His descriptions of fruit and nature and sailing the Aegean were dry and stiff—they put me in a coma—but the stories of his childhood in Kentucky, the scenes of his grandma’s edema and the guy who beat his mother with a fan belt, the child abuse, alcoholism, and violence of the rest of his wacky family really grabbed me.
At the edge of the gravel I waited in line at a card table. A kid checked me off on his clipboard and handed me a name tag. Behind the table, neatly shorn, in a slim gray suit, Bruce greeted each guest by name. Propped on a chair next to the kid was a metal-framed poster that I recognized, because the drawing on it was mine, of a girl under an umbrella, typing on her laptop on the sand; I’d donated it some years ago, said they could use it, then just forgot. The poster advertised a fundraiser for the conference—this fundraiser—the girl bent over the keyboard, adorably lost in thought, water bottle, beach umbrella, bag of chips, different shady-looking men’s faces rising in thought bubbles from her screen.
I thought the drawing was not so bad after all. The line work was cold and clean. The skin on the girl’s face was immaculate, but beneath a superficial beauty bubbled a percolation of lust. It seemed now not so much that somebody in the office had run out of ideas and found my doodle that had been lying in a drawer for three years and stuck it on a poster but that I still had talent, it wasn’t over yet for me, things would turn around. If I put my mind to it, I could do anything. I could write my way out of this mess. I’ll wake up every day at four A.M., I told myself, and do the new comic while I’m fresh and full of energy, do my magazine assignments at night, although God knows I’d tried that before and it never worked. I was too tired. Anyway, somehow I’d pull it off. The new piece would demonstrate a maturity and depth and reservoirs of fury. I’d make something so heinous and explosive that my wife would cut my nuts off, my children would pretend I was dead, society would shun me, and I’d move to Croatia and live in a kind of fantastic isolation, burning with remorse and indignation.
When it was my turn, I stepped forward and bent at the waist to receive Bruce’s hug. He thanked me for coming, so sincerely, “and for this,” the poster, practically weeping with gratitude, and remembered my kids, with a smile that was his usual sad, suffering face, a mix of real pain and boredom. I asked about his kids, the younger boy and girl, who sometimes played in the pool during the party, and the two older ones from Marty’s first marriage, the teenage daughter who sometimes passed through the crowd, fresh from some orgy on Nantucket, looking drunk and windburned, sometimes arguing loudly with Bruce over lost privileges or demanding the whereabouts of her father. And the son, who transferred to a new college every year, and wrecked his car last winter and spent a month in a body cast.
Seeing Bruce again, knowing him as I did, as the sane one, hearing the gossip about his struggle to protect the kids from Marty and the mother, gave me a sense of unstoppable organic parental hell. Over the winter I’d heard from Carl that the older son was doing better, taking a break from school. When I asked Bruce how he was—the kid’s name was Max—he smiled so that a tooth hooked on his lower lip, and hung his head and thanked me, and I thought that now he really would cry. He said Max was spending the summer at the house but had gone out to meet friends. Bruce was nice. That made it worse.
Despite their billions, he was a small, stooped, fragile-looking person, and for that reason easier to relate to, and according to his memoir had been molested as a child by the old lady who lived upstairs, although when his mom died he moved back home to protect his younger siblings. See? He was a good person. He was the one looking out for those kids, and tried his best, although he was failing miserably, publicly, the outcome somehow inevitable. He went to all the plays and slide talks and openings over at the conference, and was genuinely admiring of everyone on the faculty, envious of any artistic gift, and supposedly bankrolled most of our salaries, and greased the more famous people to come teach. I got twenty-five hundred bucks a year plus travel expenses. I needed a raise.
On the dimly lit path to the pool I passed a waiter and took a drink from his tray. It tasted like cough drops and lighter fluid. When you came here you had to be careful not to guzzle. You had to fight the urge. You felt drawn to the scene, to the need to blend in, to become what it asked of you. The patio was lit with flickering hurricane lamps, and I stood in front of the bar overlooking the pool, next to Dennis Fleigel, beside a table of cheeses and prosciutto, and a real wooden rowboat filled with ice, with oysters spread on the ice, and a man behind the boat, in a yellow fisherman’s bib, shucking the oysters with a knife.