“You see, failure is a fucking COMFORT, pal,” Healey says, waving a huge hand at the crowd and gesturing toward poor Madonna and the engulfing photographers. A few people back away from Healey’s bulky loudness. In the excited din, Cormac hears scraps of French and German. “You’re a certified failure, nobody blinds you with those goddamned FLASHBULBS! Nobody asks you to spell your fucking NAME! Nobody asks you whether you like the show, even if you haven’t SEEN IT! They don’t give a shit. You’re a nobody. They don’t care if you LIVE OR DIE.”
More photographers are inside the main hall, and a few reporters scribbling notes, and several hundred people in what used to be called evening wear. There’s another eruption of flashbulbs as Madonna comes into the museum, smiling broadly, dressed modestly, moving past Cormac and Healey in the direction of the galleries, and then behind her comes Lauren Bacall. She looks at them through hooded eyes and smiles.
“Healey, you big ape,” she says with a growl. “Where’s that play you promised me twenty years ago?”
“It’s coming, Betty, it’s ALMOST DONE! I swear to Yahweh!” She laughs and gives him a shove and keeps moving. At these rituals, celebrities have one basic tactic: smile and keep moving. A young woman photographer confronts Healey with a notebook in hand.
“Excuse me, sir,” she says. “Can you tell me your name?”
“I don’t HAVE a name! I’m a nobody.”
“Come on, man—”
Then more white lights explode and the photographer turns away and the rumbling crowd sounds grow louder, with several hundred voices bouncing off glazed marble. Walking in the door are the people Cormac has come to see: William Hancock Warren and his wife, Elizabeth. Warren’s tuxedo is rumpled and he needs a haircut and keeps brushing at his hair while chatting amiably with the reporters. As he listens to a question, the mouth moves into an amused smile. From where Cormac is standing on the fringe of the crowd, he can’t hear a word. But Warren seems relaxed, holding Elizabeth’s hand lightly, and when he says something, the reporters smile too. He is charming them. His wife says nothing to anyone.
“This is hard to BELIEVE,” Healey says. “I mean, this isn’t Vladimir Putin, or Seamus Heaney, or PUFFY FUCKING COMBS! This is a real estate guy that owns a paper!”
“That’s why they like him,” Cormac says. “Especially the free-lancers. He could put them all on the payroll and never miss a meal.”
Then Warren turns toward another shower of flash and sees the mayor come in, police bodyguards behind him wearing dark blue suits and buttons in their ears. The mayor looks hunched and tired. But the mayor’s brain tells the mayor to smile. He smiles. His brain tells him to embrace Warren. He embraces Warren. The embrace is digitally immortalized by the photographers, though only Warren’s newspaper will ever consider running the picture. Elizabeth slips her hand out of her husband’s grip and backs away, a smile fixed on her face. A look of melancholy passes across her face, as if she has long ago grown weary of photographs.
“Shit, look who’s here,” Healey says, gesturing toward a small ruddy man with thinning white hair who has come in with a fat woman, right behind the mayor. “This butterball owes me MONEY!” The fat man is a literary agent named Brookner. Sometimes known as Legs, for the speed of his movements in the William Morris mailroom in the 1950s. He had enriched himself with 10 percent of some fabulous paydays, but now in the years of his wealth and respectability, when he even has a foundation named after himself and the wing of a mediumsized hospital in Sarasota, Legs Brookner insists on being called Irving.
“LEGS!” Healey bellows, and goes off in big-shouldered pursuit. Cormac watches Elizabeth Warren, who is chatting with an elderly woman while her husband and the mayor turn to embrace the arriving governor.
Cormac moves around casually, drawing Elizabeth Warren in his mind. She’s indeed a beauty of a classic English type. Smooth cream-colored skin. Lean, athletic body sheathed in a black Valentino frock. Oval head, with a well-defined jaw. Her dark burnt-sienna hair is pulled back tightly off the clean plane of her brow, and she wears a silver stud in the lobe of each small, slightly protruding ear. There’s a hint of blush on her high cheekbones. She has heavy eyebrows, widely spaced hazel eyes deepened by makeup, and her mouth is wide when she smiles. As Cormac drifts closer, he notices one crooked bicuspid among the otherwise perfect white teeth. All of this rests on a long regal neck, rising off narrow shoulders and emphasized by a silver necklace holding a single lustrous opal. Sargent might have used her as “Madame X.”
Then Warren and the mayor and the governor move forward, the mayor pointing at nothing to give the photographers a bit of fraudulent action, and Elizabeth moves too, smiling and shaking hands with the wife of the governor. Cormac hangs behind; the eyes of two sets of political bodyguards are now scanning him, along with other visitors. He sees the Warrens and the politicians merge with the crowd of several hundred people and tries to move in casually behind them, but they vanish into the blur of black tuxedos.
The glorious high-ceilinged room now smells of perfume, cologne, and money. They all move with practiced ease, shaking hands, embracing, the men smiling, the women offering cheeks to be kissed. Most of them are indifferent to the show-business celebrities among them. They won’t cross the room to meet Madonna. They won’t tell Steve Martin they admire his work. After all, a few of them own the companies that employ the performers. If the mayor says hello and remembers a name, they will chat with him. If he utters a mere hello, they will nod in a restrained way. He is now a lame duck, forced to leave office at the end of the year because of a law on term limits that he supported. His marriage is a public mess. His popularity ratings are dropping like a stone. He is on his way out, to be rewarded with the customary farewell present of all reasonably well known politicians: a Book Deal. The mayor is important but not that important.
The older guests know this event is just another New York ritual. The celebrities are there to draw the media, which in turn will draw paying customers to the museum. But most of them have contempt for the media too. Cormac has heard that contempt expressed for more than a century. In their view, the reporters and photographers know nothing about how things really work in New York. Fame isn’t the goal; power is. And power is forged over Armagnac and cigars. If any of these men employ public relations counsel, the flacks’ primary task is to keep names out of the newspapers.
Cormac sees some people he knows casually but edges away from them, the habit of a long life. Gazing with lust at the mayor, the governor, and Warren is a once-famous sixties hippie, friend of Jerry and Abbie and the Democratic Republic of the Lower East Side. Cormac used to see him at love-ins and beins and fund-raisers for the Weather Underground. Now his face is clean-shaven and pasty and he’s considered a genius at the deals that have driven the NASDAQ over the moon. “Concept,” he told Charlie Rose one night on channel 13. “Concept is everything.” Cormac thought at the time: Okay, give me five thousand dollars’ worth of symbolic logic. The man would almost certainly have answered, “Is that a derivative?” That was two years ago. On this night, as tech stocks keep tanking, the exhippie’s face looks ashen. Cormac wonders if he knows the dotcommer on the second floor at Duane Street, the fast-talking young man who this morning gave a month’s notice, due, he said, to the decline in the market. Cormac has seen the doomed, ashen look of the ex-hippie before, in 1893, in 1929. One morning, as the bad news becomes a flood, the blessed genius of money starts looking at the faces of strangers as if his brain has turned into an abacus. How much can you invest? How much can you loan me? How can you keep me from suicide?