“Expect road closures, hurricane force gales, coastal flooding,” the weatherman was saying. I dug the remote out from between the sofa cushions and turned the TV off.
One photo had fallen under the coffee table. I picked it up and flipped it over. A small Asian man stood still and apart from the crowd at the bar. He wore blue coveralls splattered in paint. I looked closely. He had a round face and ruddy acne scars. His eyes were closed. He seemed familiar. Then I recognized him. It was Ping Xi. There was a streak of pink glitter across his cheeks. I put the photo down.
* * *
? ? ?
IT HAD BEEN MONTHS since I’d even thought of Ping Xi. Whenever Ducat had popped into my mind, I’d tried to winnow my focus down to the simple memory of the long walk to the Eighty-sixth Street subway station, the express train to Union Square, the L train across town, the walk up Eighth Avenue and left on Twenty-third Street, the hobble over the old cobblestones in my high heels. Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I’d met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.
I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos, but I’d seen it from afar: young and beautiful and fascinating people hailing cabs and flicking cigarettes, cocaine, mascara, the diamond grit of a night out on the town, random sex a simple gesture in a bathroom stall, wading once onto the dance floor then back out again, screaming drink orders at the bar, everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people. I’d always preferred a septic hotel bar, maybe because that’s where Trevor liked to take me. He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.”
The interns at the gallery had told me about their weekends out at Tunnel and Life and Sound Factory and Spa and Lotus and Centro-Fly and Luke + Leroy. So I had some sense of what went on in the city at night. And as Natasha’s assistant, I’d been responsible for keeping a list of some of the most socially valuable people at an art party—specifically the young impresarios and their attendants. She invited them to openings and told me to study their bios. Maggie Kahpour’s father had owned the largest private collection of Picasso doodles in the world, and when he died, she donated them to an abbey in the south of France. The monks named a cheese after her. Gwen Elbaz-Burke was the grandniece of Ken Burke, the performance artist who was eaten by the shark he kept in his swimming pool, and the daughter of Zara Ali Elbaz, a Syrian princess who was exiled for making a pornographic art film with her German boyfriend, a descendant of Heinrich Himmler. Stacey Bloom had started a magazine called Kun（s）t about “women in the arts,” mostly profiles of rich art-party girls who were starting their own fashion lines or opening galleries or nightclubs or starring in indie movies. Her father was the president of Citibank. Zaza Nakazawa was a nineteen-year-old heiress who had written a book about being in a sexual relationship with her aunt, the painter Elaine Meeks. Eugenie Pratt was the half sister of the documentary filmmaker and architect Emilio Wolford who famously made her eat a raw lamb’s heart on camera when she was twelve. There was Claudia Martini-Richards. Jane Swarovski-Kahn. Pepper Jacobin-Sills. Kylie Jensen. Nell “Nikita” Patrick. Patsy Weinberger. Maybe these were the girls in the photos. I wouldn’t have recognized them outside the gallery. Imogene Behrman. Odette Quincy Adams. Kitty Cavalli. I remembered their names. Dawn’s Early must have been some new after-hours club for the next generation of rich kids and art hags if Ping Xi was hanging out there, presumably among his devotees. I vaguely remembered Natasha saying he’d gone to boarding school with a set of gay royal twins from Prussia. But how had I found him? Or had he found me?
I collected the photos and stuffed them under the sofa cushion, then got up to peek into my bedroom to make sure nobody was there. All my bedding was in a heap on the floor, the mattress bare. I stepped closer to make sure there was no human-sized bloodstain, nobody wrapped up in the sheets, no corpse tucked under the bed. I opened the closet and found nobody bound and gagged. Just the little plastic Baggies of Victoria’s Secret lingerie spilled out. Nothing was amiss. I was alone.