"Something bad? Like what?" I asked, trying to concentrate on the numbers sliding across my monitor while simultaneously waving Jean away, even though she was holding a sheaf of papers I was supposed to sign. "That all Michelob breweries in the Northeast are closing? That 976-BIMBO has stopped making house calls?"
"No," Charles said, then quietly mentioned, "Tell him your mother is... worse."
I mulled over this tactic, then said, "He might not care."
"Tell him..." Nicholas paused, then cleared his throat and rather delicately proposed, "it has to do with her estate."
I looked up from the monitor, lowering my Wayfarer aviator sunglasses, and stared at Jean, then lightly fingered the Zagat guide that sat next to the monitor. Pastels would be impossible. Ditto Dorsia. Last time I called Dorsia someone had actually hung up on me even before I asked, "Well, if not next month, how about January?" and though I have vowed to get a reservation at Dorsia one day (if not during this calendar year, then at least before I'm thirty), the energy I would spend attempting this feat isn't worth wasting on Sean. Besides, Dorsia's far too chic for him. I want to make him endure this dinner; to not be allowed the pleasure of being distracted by hardbodies on their way to Nell's; somewhere with a men's room attendant so he would have to be painfully subtle about what is now, I'm sure, his chronic cocaine usage. I handed the Zagat to Jean and asked her to find the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan. She made a nine o'clock reservation at the Quilted Giraffe.
"Things are worse at Sandstone," I tell Sean later this afternoon, around four o'clock. He's staying in our father's suite at the Carlyle. MTV is blasting in the background, other voices shout over its din. I can hear a shower running.
"Like what? Mom ate her pillow? What?"
"I think we should have dinner," I say.
"Dominique, cool it," he says, then places his hand over the phone and mutters something, muffled.
"Hello, Sean? What's going on?" I'm asking.
"I'll call back," he says, hanging up.
I happen to like the tie I bought Sean at Paul Smith last week and I've decided not to give it to him (though the idea of the ass**le, say; hanging himself with it pleases me greatly). In fact I decide to wear it to the Quilted Giraffe tonight. Instead of the tie, I'm going to bring him a Casio QD-150 Quick-Dialer combination wristwatch, calculator and data bank. It dials touch-tone phones sonically when held up to a mouthpiece and it stores up to fifty names and numbers. I start laughing while putting this useless gift back into its box, thinking to myself that Sean doesn't even have fifty acquaintances. He couldn't even name fifty people. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Salad Bars.
Sean calls at five from the Racquet Club and tells me to meet him at Dorsia tonight. He just talked to Brin, the owner, and reserved a table at nine. My mind is a mess. I don't know what to think or how to feel. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Salad Bars.
Later. Dorsia, nine-thirty: Sean is half an hour late. The maitre d' refuses to seat me until my brother arrives. My worst fear - a reality. A prime booth across from the bar sits there, empty, waiting for Sean to grace it with his presence. My rage is controlled, barely, by a Xanax and an Absolut on the rocks. While taking a piss in the men's room, I stare into a thin, weblike crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here. In fact one of them, my brother, Sean, is sitting in the booth he reserved when I come out of the men's room after I've phoned the apartment and checked for messages (Evelyn's suicidal, Courtney wants to buy a chow, Luis suggests dinner on Thursday). Sean is already chain-smoking, and I'm thinking to myself.Damn, why didn't I request a table in the nonsmoking section? He's shaking hands with the maitre d' as I walk over but doesn't even bother to introduce us. I sit down and nod. Sean nods too, having already ordered a bottle of Cristal, knowing that I'm paying; also knowing, I'm sure, that I know he doesn't drink champagne.
Sean, who is now twenty-three, went to Europe last fall, or at least this is what Charles Conroy said Sean told him, and though Charles did receive a substantial bill from the Plaza Athenee, the signature on the receipts didn't match Sean's and no one really seemed to know how long Sean was actually in France or even if he had spent real time there. Afterwards he bummed around, then reenrolled at Camden for about three weeks. Now he's in Manhattan before flying to either Palm Beach or New Orleans. Predictably, tonight he's alternately moody and insistently arrogant. He has also, I've just noticed, started to pluck his eyebrows. He no longer has only one. The overwhelming urge I have to mention this to him is quelled only by squeezing my hand into a fist so tightly that I break the skin on the palm of my hand and the biceps of my left arm bulges then rips through the cloth of the linen Armani shirt I have on.