LITMIR.BIZ

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complimentary amuse-bouches that William had sent over.

      The lights came back on.

      Freddie and Jasper turned up at the restaurant at ten to ten, fucked. Samuel lagged behind. He was wearing a onesie with the words “Please Snort Me” emblazoned across it. The letters looked appliquéd on. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his thin, ginger arms were trembling. Freddie and Jasper were bundled up.

      “Go away,” I told them. “I’m busy.”

      “No,” said Jasper. His hair was slicked back Lost Generation style, and he wore a white silk scarf around his throat that added to the impression that he was Count Dracula and had come to drink my blood. “We want a table for two.”

      “Three,” said Samuel, glumly. “Freddie, I really don’t have any money.”

      “Nonsense,” said Freddie. “We don’t need money.”

      “You do,” I said.

      Jasper glided into the dining room. He pounced on table fourteen, which had yet to be reset. The tablecloth was a mess of rabbit juice and bread crumbs.

      They sat down.

      I was returning to reception, when the toad gentleman at table twenty-two said: “Miss. Miss. If you please.”

      I went over and smiled my door-bitch smile, explaining that only the waiters took orders, but he shook his head. He was looking very intently into my eyes. He held aloft a white wire which trailed somewhere under the table. I saw that he’d gone for the salmon: good choice. At least the salmon hadn’t been raped. I put the earbud in and waited. Rising voices of some kind of choral music competed with the din in the restaurant.

      “Spem in Alium,” said the man. “Thomas Tallis.”

      I pulled the earbud out. “That’s lovely. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the salmon.”

      He looked disappointed.

      I overheard Jasper ordering the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. “And a cloudy lemonade for the child,” he said, nodding to Samuel.

      Jasper and Freddie laughed.

      A woman was waiting at reception with a girl about thirteen.

      “Marge Perez,” she said. She was American. Her hair was red and spiraled in massive whorls around her head.

      The girl looked like a ballerina. Her hair was done up in a chignon. She yawned: “Mommy, but I’m not hungry.”

      “Quiet, honey,” said Marge. “I’m sorry the sitter got sick, but you know Auntie Steph will be so pleased to see you.”

      I led them to table eight.

      Auntie Steph appeared. Auntie Steph was in fact Stephanie Haight.

      I was speechless.

      She was wearing a long duffel coat and, beneath that, gray tracksuit bottoms. I led her to table eight. I couldn’t walk away. I wanted to tell her all about my botched sex with Vic the war criminal. I wanted to ask her how I could put that in a social and political context. But instead I said: “Why are men such fucking bastards?”

      The ballerina looked at me with contempt. So did her mother.

      Stephanie didn’t seem abashed at all. After a moment she smiled. Her eyes remained sad. Her face seemed burdened with wisdom. She was undeniably beautiful.

      Stephanie and I continued to stare at each other.

      I felt an acute sense of recognition. Maybe this was the coup de foudre?

      Finally she said: “It’s not the men’s fault. It’s the Symbolic.”

      “Capital S,” said Marge, with bitterness.

      The scent of Madeline’s perfume engulfed me from behind and I had to leave.

      “Kill the pig! Kill the pig!”

      Freddie and Jasper were banging their forks on the table. Russian linen napkins were tucked into their collars. The restaurant’s signature dish sat at the center. It was plagiarized from St. John: a whole pig’s head, sawed in half and braised, the brain transformed into beige glue. The pig grinned.

      Samuel was trying to talk: “Yeah ’cause there are five ways of saying ‘getting money from your parents’ in Williamsburg because it’s like an informal economy. Because it’s based on love not money.”

      “Do you mean privilege?” said Freddie.

      “It’s a privilege to be loved,” said Samuel, confused.

      “I’m not sure you know what your value system is,” said Jasper, slurping up the head cheese. A gland spilled down his shirt. “I know what mine is. Do you know what yours is, Fred?”

      “Naturally,” said Freddie. “It’s zero. Zero degree. Start from nothing. Nihilism.”

      “You know,” said Jasper, his mouth full. “Baudrillard said dandyism is an aesthetic form of nihilism. That must be why you’re such an effortless dandy, Fred.”

      Freddie put down his knife and fork. “Jasp. Dandies are painful.”

      Samuel was ticking the terms off on his fingers. He wasn’t eating the pig. “Getting the kush, picking the berries, waxing Oedipal, getting the patrimony, changing the diaper.” He paused. “I’m not sure about the last one because surely it’s like your parents are changing your diaper if you’re getting their money?”

      The pop star was still crying when I was called on to get her out of the restaurant via the kitchen slave exit. She wanted to avoid the cameras.

      “They are monsters,” said her boyfriend’s mother.

      I was reminded of one of the pop star’s early videos, in which she had cried nonstop for the duration of the song. In a twist on the miracle of the saint crying milk, her neo-goth eye makeup had made her look as though she were crying black crude oil. She had been done up in a saint’s outfit, sitting on an oil rig. The North Sea had raged in the background.

      The kitchen slaves sodomized the pop star with their eyes when we went downstairs. The pile of skinned rabbits had diminished almost to nothing.

      The reception was quiet.

      Stephanie Haight was eating a lemon posset. The ballerina was eating a chocolate fondant. The Marge woman was saying: “I’m not getting mad. I’m not getting mad. I just don’t know how you can defend that woman.”

      Madeline was eating rabbit scraps off guests’ plates in the cloakroom.

      I moved closer to Stephanie.

      “Oh, but I do,” Marge went on. “I do know how you can defend her. You defend Gabriella because you created Gabriella. How many times, Stephanie, are you going to root out a fine young thing and turn her into a whatever you want and then cry yourself to sleep at night when she takes what you taught her and turns her back on you?”

      “She hasn’t turned her back.” Stephanie halted. “She always picks up the phone when I call her. Sometimes. Her work is very demanding.”

      “Yes, I imagine that ritualistic self-harming is quite demanding.”

      “And Gabriella was not fine,” said Stephanie. “She had a natural body, sure. She had a supple, Rabelaisian body. A body of excess. Oh, the monstrous feminine excess!” She laughed. “But she was just a nude model. She would have been a nude model all her life if I hadn’t pulled her out of that phallocentric head space and turned her into an artist in her own right.”

      “Yeah,” said Marge. “I remember. You were writing that piece on nude models—right?”

      “Right.” Stephanie ate another spoonful of posset. “For the LRB. Or was it Spare Rib?”

      Marge shrugged.

      “Gabriella

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