The Palace of Illusions Page 3

  At the Redwood Room I get a Clift Cosmopolitan, and Mona a Manhattan. I don’t know anybody who drinks Manhattans except Mona. I feel like I should have ordered something more classic, like a martini. There’s a purple flower floating in my drink that the waitress identifies as a pansy; she tells us it’s edible.

  Though I’m kind of hungry from not having any dinner, I don’t think a pansy or two will make a difference, so I just pluck it out and set it on my napkin.

  The waitress looks about my age, a slim thing in a sleeveless black dress with a tattoo of Chinese characters running down the back of one bare shoulder. She says they mean, “only the moon.” As in, only the moon will do.

  “It’s all about following your dreams,” she says.

  “Follow your bliss,” I say. “Joseph Campbell said that.”

  “How perfectly lovely,” Mona says, sipping her drink. When the waitress goes, she leans toward me. “Pushing drinks in an overpriced hotel bar,” she says. “Dreams, my ass.”

  “She probably makes ten times more than me.” I look around the room and think that’s probably true of everyone in here.

  “That’s right, you work,” Mona says, like she’s forgotten this distasteful fact. “Please let’s talk about something more scintillating than Starbucks.”

  “Colloquially known as Starfucks,” I say.

  “Star fucking. There’s a promising subject. Would you fuck Brad Pitt?”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  “That qualifies as a no.”

  Mona starts rattling off actors’ names, but my mind is on the waitress and her tattoo. I know I’m not exactly following my bliss. It’s more like the path of least resistance. I went from counter help to shift supervisor, from making lattes and Frappuccinos to making sure people take their breaks on time and the store stays picked up and the right hot sleeves for the cups get ordered. Health benefits and everything, but come on.

  “Leo DiCaprio,” Mona says. “Will Smith. Robert Pattinson.”

  It’s not inconceivable that one of them could walk into the Redwood Room. The Redwood Room is the hip place to go since the trendy hotelier bought the Clift and put his trendy stamp on a San Francisco institution. The walls are paneled from a single two-thousand-year-old redwood, the bar is U-shaped and seventy-five feet long, the chandeliers and wall sconces are deco. He’s added a few touches, like a glass bar and plasma-screen images of Klimt paintings to replace the ones that used to hang there. When we arrived it was busy enough, but now the room’s seething with people. Every seat is taken, except for a row of them at a long low table, another trendy addition. People keep trying to sit there, on glass stools that look like vases, but after an uncomfortable minute they get up and go over to stand by one of the bars.

  We’re at the U-shaped one, people jammed in on both sides. Mona has given up on pimping me to movie stars and has struck up an acquaintance with the guy across from her. Pretty soon he’s offering her shrimp cocktail and french fries off his plate. He’s a salesman staying at a different hotel who just came here for dinner, he says, but I can tell he was secretly hoping to meet some willing young thing he could take back to his room and fuck the life out of. He’s in a nice suit he probably saved for tonight, and the cologne is rolling off him in nauseating waves. I bet there’s a wedding ring sitting on the sink in his hotel room, that he had to soap off his pudgy finger.

  Across from me, there’s a different kind of guy. He’s my age, or maybe a little younger—he has baby skin, not a line on it, and a sparse blond goatee that looks like it’s been trying to grow in since eighth grade. He’s hunched over the bar, wearing a faded T-shirt with a faded Spiderman leaping on it, his shoulder bones sticking out like a famine victim’s. There’s a barely touched glass of beer in front of him. In the middle of the Redwood Room, surrounded by dressed-up people laughing and getting shitfaced, he’s reading The Portable Nietzsche. Right away I figure I know things about him, like that he doesn’t own a car, but feels superior to people who do. He labors at some shit office job, maybe even temp work, and writes bad poetry nobody understands. He’s got poser written all over him, but he’s got nice eyes, pale blue or maybe gray, fringed by the kind of sweeping lashes any girl would kill for. By now I have three damp pansies arranged on my napkin from the drinks I’ve had, and I’m feeling friendly. Also hungry. I can feel the alcohol traveling around my stomach, looking for a scrap of food to connect to, to lose itself in. I take a couple of chilly shrimp from the salesman’s plate without asking, knowing he won’t say anything.

  “Hey, Nietzsche,” I say to the poser, by way of an opener. “Thou shalt.” I remember a little of my Nietzsche—the golden-scaled dragon in Thus Spake Zarathustra who’s like the superego, telling you all the things you’re supposed to do to fit in, promoting the decadent values of Christian civilization. I majored in Philosophy in college. I kept meaning to take the GREs and go to grad school so I could teach, but year after year I lost my nerve. By now there are only a few bits and pieces. The Sophists, for example. I can’t remember which one argued that might is right, which one contrasted law and nature. Dewey’s critique of traditional philosophy is a total blank.

  “Excuse me?” he says, and takes his time looking up.

  The thing is, he’s been watching me for I don’t know how long. I didn’t even notice him when he first sat down, but a while ago I felt him stealing looks over the top of his beer while pretending to be absorbed in his book. He’d started out with it flat on the bar, but little by little he raised it, until I could see the title and know what a brilliant superior intellectual he was.

  “I hope you don’t take him seriously,” I said.

  He gives me a contemptuous look. “Oh, right,” he says. “God forbid we should touch on anything serious.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” I glance at the salesman, who pushes a french fry suggestively into a blob of ketchup. I feel the shrimp sliding down into my stomach, tossing cold and forlorn on a turbulent sea. I’m thinking I should have stayed home after all. I could have rented Dawn of the Dead and watched zombies stagger around the mall.

  “What I meant,” I say, “is that if you take him too seriously, you end up being a menace to society. All that superman and will to power stuff. The idea you can make up your own rules, that conventional standards of good and evil don’t apply.” I’m impressed with how much I suddenly remember. For a minute I see myself in front of a podium in a large auditorium, rows of students taking down every word I say. On everyone’s desk, my book On Moral Life is open, passages highlighted in fluorescent yellow.

  “Ah,” he says, “a fellow philosopher.” He’s turned his book face down on the bar, but in case that’s giving me too much credit, he leans back away from me on his stool.

  “Not really. I majored in it. In a previous life.”

  “And what do you do in this incarnation?” He’s still leaning back, trying to be cool, but I bet anything his hands are sweating. I bet he can’t believe he’s met a woman who actually knows something about his precious Nietzsche. He’s probably, in his mind, already got me naked on his mattress on the floor in the crummy apartment he shares with four other losers.

  “Guess,” I say.

  “Stripper?” he says hopefully.

  “No.”

  “Model,” he says. “Caterer. Lawyer. Dot-Commer. Artist.”

  “No. No, no, no, no. No.” He has no clue who I might be. I give Mona a look, but for some reason she’s amused by the pervy salesman, and she shakes her head.

  “I’m a demon,” I say. “I steal infants from their cribs, drain the life out of men as they sleep. That kind of thing.”

  “Perfect,” he says. “I’m a warlock.”

  More drinks have appeared. I look around at the walls, and where the bright, glittery plasma images of Klimt paintings were, there are now portraits of solemn men and women in dark tailored jackets, who look like they’re presiding over a board meeting. I look at one of the men, and his eyes slowly blink. Mona nudges me.

  “Drink up,” she says, “we’re moving the party.”

  One thing about Mona. She has bad judgment. The night we met, she announced this to a group of people at a party, and I immediately wanted to know her. I went over and struck up a conversation, and we ended up sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, doing shots of Añejo tequila. That night Mona slept on the couch, and I passed out naked in the host’s guest bedroom with his friend from out of town, who later credited my blow job with helping him leave his bad marriage. Tequila, as everyone knows, is a dangerous substance. Just last week, after a night of doing shots of Margaritaville, I woke up bleeding from the wrong part of my anatomy and had to call a friend to take me to the Emergency Room. After waiting an hour to be seen we gave up and went to get some wine. Going to this guy’s room is probably an error in judgment. But that’s where we’re headed—me, Mona, Don the salesman, and Nietzsche the warlock, who has introduced himself as Joseph.

  We head down Geary Street two by two—me and Mona in front, arm in arm, the men following. That’s how it is in nature: stallions nickering after mares, boring-colored male birds having to sing just to attract a mate. I’m savoring the moment, because usually I’m alienated from nature, sitting by the phone. My last date was with a loser named George who made me pay for dinner, and then demanded BART fare when I refused to drive him home across the Bay Bridge. The one before him—Jack? Zack?—was overmedicated, and about to be evicted by his roommates for not paying his share of the rent. For our date, we sat in his living room sharing cheap chianti and takeout pizza, while his roommates walked in and out muttering “Asshole” under their breath. His hands never stopped shaking the whole evening. I woke up beside him at four a.m., watched him twitch
for a while, then went to find some Ibuprofen to kill my wine headache.

  The streets are full of people, but no one’s in costume. Women in short dresses and shimmery jackets, men in suits, homeless people saying “trick or treat” from doorways. Right now, in the Castro, men are mincing down the street in sequined gowns and tutus and leather chaps. In the Mission and Noe Valley, little gypsies and devils and ballerinas and hobbits are going door to door. Here on Geary Street it hardly feels like Halloween at all, but then we turn a corner and I see there’s a full moon, huge and orange in the sky above the Bay Bridge. I’m beginning to feel like maybe the night’s not as lost as I thought. Maybe Joseph will surprise me and turn out to have a real job and a live-work loft. He’ll let me move in, and he’ll selflessly support me through graduate school, disproving Nietzche’s belief that all altruistic sentiment is cowardice. We’ll tell our children how we met on Halloween under a full moon and they’ll roll their eyes and say, Mom. Dad. Not that one again.

  “Look at that moon,” Mona says.

  I wonder how she can sound so sober, when she’s had as many drinks as me; sometimes Mona seems impervious to alcohol. I wonder if she has ever woken up hung over and depressed, and had to drag herself to a job she hates, and offer friendly, polite service to people who are stupider, shallower, and more successful than she is. I think not. She points to the moon with one elegant finger, her hair blazing in its light.

  “Mona, you are a goddess,” I say.

  “We are in the company of goddesses,” Joseph says, and I want to lick his face.

  Here’s what Hume thought: he thought that morality was basically utilitarian. We do things because they’re useful, not because they’re right. According to Hume, the rules get suspended when you don’t need them. In war, for example, the rules go out the window. Rape, torture, indiscriminate murder—that’s pretty much what happens in a war. Hume had other depressing things to say, too, like that our universe might be the fucked-up experiment of some retarded minor god. The god was probably blind drunk and messing around; he probably set our little planet spinning, slapped the first man on top of the woman like they were Ken and Barbie, and passed out. The next day his head was killing him and he’d completely forgotten what he’d done.

  “Hume turned Plato on his head,” I tell Joseph and pour myself more of the champagne Don ordered from room service. But then I can’t remember how Hume turned Plato on his head, only that my former professor said it, years ago. I was in love with him, the kind of love that leads to standing in the street screaming someone’s name at their dark apartment building. When it stopped being useful to him to fuck me, he just changed his phone number and forgot I was alive.

  “Here’s my philosophy,” Mona says. “Drink, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we disappear like smoke.” She’s sitting in a striped chair, legs crossed, idly dangling one expensive high heel and exhaling perfect smoke rings. Mona smokes almost as much as she drinks.

  “Carpe vino.” I lift my glass and look through it at the hotel room, the walls and furniture wavering inside a tiny lake of champagne, and then I drain the lake. “How come you don’t date, Mona?”

  “Oh, men are such swine,” she says.

  “Not all of them,” Don says from the queen bed. He’s lying there like he’s waiting for one of us to join him, stretched out with his feet in their thin black socks pointed at the ceiling.

  “No,” Mona says, “some of them are dogs.”

  “Arf!” Don says. “Arf arf arf!”

  Joseph is reading his Nietzsche, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Or is it this,” he says, reading aloud. “To go into foul water when it is the water of truth.”

  “I need to be petted,” Don says. “I’m a lonely puppy. Pet me, pet me,” he says. He raises his arms like paws. He lets his tongue loll out and starts panting, fast and shallow.

  “Women,” Joseph says. “You always think you’re better than us.” He puts down his book and upends his glass, chugging his champagne, then looks around for more. I’ve set the last bottle with anything in it—there were three—on the nightstand next to Don. Joseph looks at me, like I’m supposed to get it for him.

  “We are better than you,” I say. “Look who starts all the wars. Who most of the serial killers are. The terrorists. The rapists.”

  “The dentists,” Mona adds.

  “You’re all the same,” Joseph says. He gets up and goes for the bottle. My glass is empty, too, but instead of filling it he takes the bottle and goes and sits back down on the floor with it.

  “No, we’re not.” I go and sit next to him. “That’s a mean thing to say. And it’s also inaccurate.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said it. I’m an asshole. I say stupid things sometimes. Especially when I like somebody.”

  I take the bottle and pour myself some more. It takes some concentration to perform this act, as the rim of the champagne flute seems to have shrunk in diameter. “What do you like about me?”

  “You’re cool,” Joseph says.

  I lean in to kiss him. I move toward him like a bee aiming for a flower, an insect driven by instinct, not caring that the pollen dusting its feet will aid in the process of plant reproduction. Selfishness and intoxication propel me toward his slightly parted lips. Our tongues wrestle in the dark cave our mouths make, mashed together.

  “Somebody get a hose,” Mona says.

  We kiss some more and then I pull away and look at him. His whole face is soft and open, like a flower that’s just gorged itself on sunlight.

  “Way cool,” he says. “Definitely way cool.”

  “Do you know any other words?”

  Mona says. “Mona, have you ever been married?” I ask her.

  “I can’t imagine anything more tedious,” Mona says, “than marriage.”

  She finishes her cigarette and goes over to the window, where she’s left her glass on the ledge. There are two Monas now, one in the room and another reflected in the window. Ideal Mona and Real Mona. Plato’s world of forms—the phrase drifts through my head, a little boat headed for the horizon without anything like knowledge to anchor it. Now the world of forms is starting to double, too; Mona lifts her glass and there are two of her in the room, resolving into one when I blink, then doubling again. I close my eyes.

  “To freedom,” she says, “from giving a shit.”

  I try on Mona’s idea, like I’m winding one of her expensive silk scarves around me. Marriage is tedious. I imagine growing old alone, forever raising a glass of champagne to not giving a shit.

  “Pet me, pet me, pet me,” Don says.

  Don is snoring, if that’s what you’d call the sounds he’s making. He breathes out through his closed mouth, and a little air escapes, making a soft pop-pop-pop sound. I almost expect champagne bubbles to float out of him.

  Joseph is gone. What happened to Joseph? We were arguing about something, I remember. You think you’re so superior, he said. Fuck off, then, I said. I think I passed out for a while after that. I’m sprawled in a striped wing chair and I feel too high to move. I imagine Joseph riding home in the ghastly light of a Muni streetcar. All around him, partygoers in brightly colored costumes talk and laugh, heading for another party or for the festivities on Castro Street. He sits there lonely and bitter, his shoulders slumped, and I wish I’d given him my phone number.

  Mona is leaning over Don, her back to me. It looks like she’s taking off his pants. But then she stands up, and I see she’s got his wallet. She pulls out the bills, and a silver credit card, then flips the wallet closed and sets it on the nightstand.

  “Mona,” I say.

  She wiggles her hand behind her back, waving me away.