The bag lady's voice, Mrs. Keyes tells her husband, she knows that voice.
She says, “Inky?”
The bag lady slips the little phone back between the bandages around her leg.
“That stinky wino,” Packer says, “that's the president of Global Airlines.”
It's then the bag lady looks up and says, “Muffy? Packer?” The wino's hand still feeling around deep in the front of her stretch pants, she pats the bench beside her and says, “What a nice surprise.”
The bum pulls back his fingers, shiny wet in the streetlight, and he says, “Packer! Come say hello.”
And of course Packer is always right.
Poverty, Inky says, is the new wealth. Anonymity is the new fame.
“Social divers,” Inky says, “are the new social climbers.”
The Jet Set are the original homeless people, Inky says. We may have a dozen homes—each in a different city—but we still live out of a suitcase.
This makes sense, if only because Packer and Evelyn are never on the cutting edge of anything. This whole social season, they've been going to horse shows, gallery openings, and auctions, telling each other all the Old Guard socialites were in detox or having cosmetic surgery.
Inky says, “Whether you do it with a shopping cart or a Gulfstream G550, it's the same instinct. To always be on the move. To not be tied down.”
Anymore, she says, all you need is cash money, and you're sitting on the Opera Steering Committee. You make a hefty donation, and you get a place on the Museum Foundation Board.
You write a check, and that makes you a celebrity.
You get stabbed to death in a hit movie, and you're famous.
In other words: tied down.
Inky says, “Nobodies are the new celebrity.”
The Global Airlines wino, he has a bottle of wine, wrapped in a brown paper bag. The wine, he says, is mixed with equal parts of mouthwash, cough syrup, and Old Spice cologne, and after one drink the four of them go strolling through the dark, through the park, where you'd never go at night.
What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control of the game. It's the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow is a definite first step down some road.
Inky says, “Public is the new private.” She says, if you check into even the most boutique hotel—one of those white-robe places with orchids trembling next to the bidet in a white marble bathroom—even then, chances are a tiny camera is wired to watch you. She says the only place left to have sex is out in the open. The sidewalk. The subway. People only want to watch if they think they can't.
Besides, she says, the entire champagne-and-caviar lifestyle had lost its zap. Taking the Lear jet from here to Rome in six hours, it's made escaping too easy. The world feels so small and played out. Globe-trotting is just the chance to feel bored more places, faster. A boring breakfast in Bali. A predictable lunch in Paris. A tedious dinner in New York, and falling asleep, drunk, during just another blow job in L.A.
Too many peak experiences, too close together. “Like the Getty Museum,” Inky says.
“Lather, rinse, and repeat,” says the Global Airlines wino.
In the boring new world of everyone in the upper-middle class, Inky says nothing helps you enjoy your bidet like peeing in the street for a few hours. Give up bathing until you stink, and just a hot shower feels as good as a trip to Sonoma for a detoxifying mud enema.
“Think of it,” Inky says, “as a kind of poverty sorbet.”
A nice little window of misery that helps you enjoy your real life.
“Join us,” Inky says. The sticky green stain of cough syrup smeared around her mouth, strands of her plastic wig hair sticking to it, she says, “This next Friday night.”
Looking bad, she says, is the new looking good.
She says all the right people will be there. The Old Guard. The best parts of the Social Register. Ten in the evening, under the west-side ramps to the bridge.
They can't, Evelyn says. Packer and her, Wednesday night they're committed to attend the Waltz to End Hunger in Latin America. Thursday is the Aboriginals in Need Banquet. Friday is a silent auction for runaway teen sex workers. These events, with all the polished acrylic awards they hand out, it makes you long for the day when the number-one fear of Americans was public speaking.
“Just go to the midtown Sheraton,” Inky says. “Check into a room.”
Evelyn must make a pug-dog face, because then Inky tells her, “Relax.”
She says, “Of course we don't stay there. Not at a Sheraton. It's only a place to change clothes.”
Anytime after ten on Friday night, she says, under the ramps of the bridge.
Packer and Evelyn Keyes, their first problem is always what to wear. For a man, it looks easy. All he has to do is put on his dinner jacket and his trousers inside out. Put your shoes on the wrong feet. Voilà—you look crippled and crazy.
“Insanity,” Inky would say, “is the new sanity.”
Wednesday, after the hunger waltz, Packer and Evelyn come out of the hotel ballroom and you can hear someone on the street singing “Oh Amherst, Brave Amherst.” In the street, Frances “Frizzi” Dunlop Colgate Nelson is drinking oversized cans of malt liquor with Schuster “Shoe” Frasier and Weaver “Bones” Pullman, the three of them sitting with their dirty pants rolled up and their bare feet in a fountain. Frizzi is wearing her bra on the outside.
Dressing down, Inky says, is the new dressing up.
At home, Evelyn tries on a dozen garbage bags, green and black plastic bags big enough for yard debris, but they all make her look fat. To look good, she settles on
