Any Place I Hang My Hat (3 page)

Well, he caught the attention of everyone in that endless living room. Forty or fifty people in four-hundred-dollar shoes swiveled in a single direction: toward the door. They then spread out, opening up like a line of chorus cuties, with Thom Bowles having the star tapper’s center spot. He stood still. Although I was too far away to really be sure, it seemed to me I could read something out of the ordinary in the movement of his eyelids. Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker, fast as a strobe. CCNY, though unsmiling, had the pleasant expression of someone selling Boy Scout cookies. So what was the senator’s blinking business? Fear? I couldn’t stop thinking: Wow! Could this be my dream? A sensational story?

Sure, I worked for In Depth. Yet now and then I’d sensed in myself the instincts of a tabloid reporter. Any sign of Crash! Clash! Conflict! was music to my ears. Unfortunately, the magazine’s unofficial motto was Shhhh! Anyhow, my gut began screaming out to myself: Shit! Why can’t you keep a disposable camera in that abyss of a backpack? My intellect then reminded me that in this era of almost incessant visual excitation, only In Depth deliberately stayed away from the cutting edge.

Now all eyes were riveted on the kid except mine, which were on Thom Bowles. From where I was, near the front door in the vast entrance gallery, the senator’s sun-dried face was growing redder. Cut the crap, I told myself. He’s not afraid, he’s perfectly … And if he seems afraid, well, what candidate these days can endure even the pop of a champagne cork without a shudder?

Suddenly, Bowles’s stick of an index finger began stabbing the air in a forward direction. Out! A vicious stab. Get that kid out of here! Except CCNY and I were probably the only ones who saw it, as everyone else’s eyes were fixed on the kid. Out! Out! OUT! the finger shouted. I turned back to the kid. No twirling eyeballs. No threatening gestures. Certainly no weapon. Just another college guy who chose that moment to cry: “I am Senator Thomas Bowles’s son!”

Which was interesting because Senator Bowles and his wife only had two daughters.

DAMN IT, YOU’RE not from one of those square states, are you?” my best friend demanded.

“You know I’m not.”

“So?”

“So,” I repeated, “what do you want to hear?”

“Meaningful New York gossip might be nice. Or something street-smart.” Charlotte’s Yums, the Upper East Side haven for foodies, had the peachy illumination generally found in the ladies’ rooms of restaurants catering to dames who were not only grande, but riche. Tatiana Damaris Collier Brandt stood in a terra-cotta-tiled aisle and looked back at a small flask of viscous golden liquid. It sparkled in her hand and resembled an extraterrestrial elixir from one of the old Star Treks—tranya or something, though Tatty had explained it was an essence of lemon and blood orange she was contemplating using in her work.

Having flunked out of three colleges and two marriages, she had turned a pastime, baking, into a career. She made and decorated cakes for her fellow bluebloods and in-the-know social climbers and charged anywhere from two thousand to eighteen thousand dollars. A single hundred would buy you one breathtaking cupcake, a minuscule Eden, although she insisted on hiding Adam’s schlong behind a buttercream calla lily.

“That boy who broke into the fundraiser,” she went on. “What was his con or scam or whatever you call it?”

“His scam?” I asked. Tatty was excited, which in her case meant blinking twice in ten seconds and clearing her throat.

“Everybody’s talking about it. You were near the door when he came in. Right?”

“Right.”

“And you had no thought of impending danger?” she demanded.

“Danger from what? A surface-to-air missile?”

Tatty and I had been best friends from the evening of our second day at Ivey-Rush. She was seated down from me at the same long table in the refectory. In conversation with another girl, though looking right in my direction, she referred to me, not at all sotto voce, as the “poor little poor girl.” Somehow I executed a Jackie Chan-type leap over the table and punched her in the mouth, knocking out her left lateral incisor and splitting her lip. This soon got the headmistress’s attention. She handled the situation by promptly making us roommates.

“This boy could have been a danger,” Tatty remarked. She was fond of drama performed by others.

“Give me a break.”

When she thought she was being misunderstood or ignored, Tatty spoke with irritating slowness, each consonant distinct. Her next sentence emerged as if she were dictating to substandard voice-recognition software: “Didn’t you get the impression something was wrong?”

“No.” I was the fast-talking New Yorker. “Nothing was wrong. It was a lousy night, so he’d been rained and sleeted on. As far as I could tell, he seemed like a normal nineteen-or twenty-year-old City College wet person who, for all I know, will graduate, make billions, and become a perpetually dry person with an umbrella-toting chauffeur, thus underscoring the accessibility of the American dream.”

“Your American dream, not mine,” Tatty muttered.

“Your American dream dropped dead in 1929, but you’re all too self-centered to notice.”

The kid who’d crashed the fundraiser had vanished, but his claim about being Senator Bowles’s son was all over town. Country, too. The Today show had an exclusive with Bowles’s wife, Jennifer, who, when pressed, conceded to Katie that she believed it was possible the intruder had been dispatched by certain political interests to tarnish her husband’s reputation and silence his progressive voice. But which interests? Treacherous Democrats who wanted Lefty Bowles out now, more than a year before the Super Tuesday primaries? Unscrupulous Republicans who’d swoop down and attack any Democrat? Jen Bowles didn’t know. And no, she wasn’t making accusations. The intruder could have been a random unbalanced person. The senator’s wife wore a peach-colored twinset, a peach and blue plaid scarf, and crystalline tears in her sky blue eyes.

The other morning shows had featured the senator’s campaign manager, Moira Fitzgerald, a woman around forty built along the lines of a Hummer. In her trademark turtleneck of kelly green, Irish eyes unsmiling, she offered a more scathing version of the conspiracy theory.

“I hate to disappoint you, but the whole incident lacked drama,” I told Tatty. I followed her trench coat past the mustard department and around the olive oils as she moved into the produce section. Amethyst grapes, emerald mangos, and ruby plums were displayed and lit like gems in Cartier’s. Any fruit larger than a strawberry rested on its own fluted, white paper cup.

“How could it be undramatic?” she inquired as she picked up some new, green fruit. A plum? A hairless kiwi? “You were standing in the entrance foyer. That person pushed his way in and made the accusation about Thom Bowles. Didn’t you sense danger? Or at least feel any excitement?” I took the green fruit from her hand and bit into it. Plum-like and somewhere between mealy and mushy. I wanted to spit it out, but I was stuck. Tatty went on: “What I don’t understand is why your nerve endings weren’t twitching, you, who grew up in the bowels of this city.”

I swallowed the plum glob. “Stop with the fecal imagery. I’m eating.”

“The what?”

“Never mind. And trust me. If there was anything to report, I’d tell you.” We heard a clip-clip-clip of rapid footsteps. A guy in a white shirt and narrow, black funeral-director’s tie was galloping toward us. The store manager. “For God’s sake, does he think I’m stealing his fruit? Tatty, you know I would never—”

Tatty turned toward the man and offered a barely discernible bend of her head. People bred like Tatty do not expend energy on broad movements. Still, the manager got her nod, which said This woman is one of us. Us meaning me and my sort, not you and your. She was always rescuing me, even though she surely knew I did not need rescuing. In any case, the man immediately stopped short and practically genuflected before her. He smiled hugely at the green fruit in my hand, then at me, all but saying How fortunate for us that you deigned to taste our produce!

Tatty’s silence caught his attention. She waited a couple of uncomfortable seconds before demanding of him: “Could you possibly have thought—”

“No, no, no, Miss Damaris!” He smiled and turned his head from her to me and back again.

Tatty narrowed her dark blue eyes as he hurried off. “Quel jerk.” A stranger would have difficulty sizing up such a woman: Sure, boots made from a better class of Reptilia, mink-lined trench coat, handbag from primo ostrich. But take away the wardrobe and accessories, and what was left was a tall, angular body, narrow oval face, and shoulder-length dark blond hair teased big. She might be taken for a country singer on a mediocre record label.

However, if the stranger knew his ass from a hole in the ground as far as the city was concerned, Tatty truly looked like what she was—old New York. A flawless ivory complexion, angel-wing eyebrows that had never been plucked, a somewhat long, angular jaw that resembled a shovel. Her ’do? Not 2003 Nashville. Strictly 1962 Manhattan, sprayed until it was no longer hair but a shoulder-length, monsoon-proof structure. While Tatty naturally understood that among Betty Friedan, the Beatles, Black Power, and Vietnam, hair had been liberated, women like her—and her mother and grandmother—turned up their diminutive though slightly beaky noses to such emancipation. They remained true to Mr. Roland, a society hairdresser who had clearly been granted the gift of eternal life. He’d teased Jackie’s mother’s hair and Jackie’s and saw no reason to pay homage to the vulgarity of the late sixties, much less the begooped coarseness of twenty-first-century hair.

“I forgot where I was,” I told her.

“The City College psychotic.”

“Right. Anyway, he came into the apartment and hardly got past the door. Before the I-am-his-son stuff, and before Bowles’s bodyguard grabbed him and frisked him and dragged him back into the elevator, all he did was try to speak to the senator. He is not a psychotic. The End.” She looked skeptical. “Okay, so his voice was a little loud.”

“Where were Bowles’s Secret Service agents?”

“Secret Service doesn’t kick in until a hundred twenty days before the general election.”

This legality displeased Tatty. A single tsk emerged. After a moment of silence, she said, “About this boy, man, whatever. Was he believed?”

“Hard to tell. The party broke up with what is known as unseemly haste. Before I could get to Thom Bowles, he came over to me and muttered, off the record, that the kid had been stalking him whenever he came to New York. I asked if he’d gotten a restraining order. He wasn’t sure. Said I should ask his campaign manager. Lovely Moira said the kid was a radical right dirty-tricks person, but they hadn’t gotten an order because then the paternity charge would have inevitably become public. She also said she was relying on my sense of decency not to blow this out of proportion, which was her way of warning she would rip the flesh from my bones if I made it the focal point of my coverage.”

“Did the boy look like a Bowles?” Tatty asked. Her intelligence was keen, but almost entirely visual. She could remember a painting forever, but even if she’d read War and Peace five times, to her it would only be an Audrey Hepburn film. Add that visual ability to the fact that she was related to, or a former schoolmate of, the New York affiliate of Everyone Who Matters—a self-designated group of patricians, i.e., families who managed to slog through the entire twentieth century without completely exhausting their inherited wealth—she might have actually known what features or mannerisms were peculiar to Bowleses.

“I have no idea what Bowleses are supposed to look like and, frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Having unburdened myself, I pictured the half-frozen kid in his sodden gray sweatshirt and the senator in his gray pinstriped suit tailored slightly on the baggy side so as not to look custom-made. “Well,” I conceded, “if there’s a petit size for guys, they’d both wear it. You know, they’ve both got butts the size of …” I held up my two fists side by side.

“You’re still as cultivated as you were on your first day of school.”

“My first day of school was at P.S. 97.”

“You know I meant your first day of boarding school.” Tatty’s voice was pitched low. Dictionwise, she was fond of vowels, though not enamored. For a score or more years, alumnae and alumni of New England boarding schools hadn’t sounded like the preppies of old who articulated as if auditioning for Lady Windermere’s Fan. Still, her diction was different enough from mine that a non–New Yorker might find it hard to believe we’d both been born and bred on the same twenty-two-square-mile island. “Besides their butts,” Tatty asked, “was there a resemblance?”

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “I mean, Thom Bowles looks like the Marlboro Man, except photocopied to three-quarter size. The kid could have been Italian, Latino, Jewish—your basic Mediterranean model. Or some other mix that results in beige. Listen, I may be semi-street-smart, but I can’t look at a guy and say, ‘Oh, yeah, Sri Lankan and Belgian.’”

“Did he have an accent?”

“No. Well, he didn’t start reciting Leaves of Grass, so I can’t vouch for his every word, but he sounded like a regular guy in a sweatshirt.” I thought back to I am Senator Thomas Bowles’s son! “Probably a guy in a sweatshirt from one of the five boroughs. Anyhow, the moment was sensational only in the tabloid sense. Honestly, I didn’t think of him being a psycho or a drama queen.” True, it had been a night of rain and sleet, with a bitter wind. It may have been mildly weird for the kid just to be wearing a sweatshirt. But he might have been wearing layers underneath. He could have been too poor to buy a jacket. Or maybe February 2003 was like my second winter at Ivey-Rush, when Tatty and I and all the girls ran around coatless with lips blue and fingertips fading from red to white as they went numb from frost-nip. We were all convinced we were so incredibly cool not to be wearing coats. “Tell me what you know about Thom Bowles,” I said.

“Let me think.” For some reason, she put her index finger to her lips rather than to her head. “Okay, I forget Thom’s father’s first name,” she said slowly, “but I know he was big in banking.”