9.

At 11:44 by the blue LCD of the dashboard clock, Gene’s low sporty car turned left onto the block of that club Matt had suggested and Jason had concurred upon: Cinema.²⁶

Matt leaned over Sophie’s lap in the backseat to peer out her window. Again the pavement was littered with people. They were walking toward the river, in their studded belts, Mohawk hair, shiny rubber vests, the nakedness of somewhat hairy chests, biker caps, glittering silver platform shoes. In their leopard coats and Gucci six-inch heels, expensive Versace-style suits, a black cocktail dress with a triple strand of pearls. In mirror-paned sunglasses, blocking the phosphorescent streetlights that cast rays on the pockmarked and shattered-glass-covered sidewalk, turning it to the surface of the moon.

And there near the end of the block, on a dais with stairs to either side, seven huge black men in dark jackets watched over two women with clipboards standing at ground level by the head of a velvet rope: against which the hundreds pressed, impossibly dense.

“Whoa,” said Gene, “I think we found it.”

“No kidding,” murmured Brenda, Gene’s girl, from the passenger seat; Sophie, to Matt’s right, merely gave his hand a cold squeeze.

Suits, ravers, preppies, trendies, goths, homeboys: every single type he knew from life was surging here against the rope, while a brace of beautiful tall models stepped out of a cab and scissored on their ridiculously long legs through the silver doors, first nodding to one of the clipboard girls. These two girls looked fierce, both on stilettos, screaming something Matt couldn’t hear through the window. As he watched, one of the clipboard girls waved in five suits, while the other girl pointed two homeboys away.

Did it just depend on which of these girls you got? Or pure arithmetic, a matter of the club’s numerical capacity? What was the idea behind the clipboard? At the river, the car veered left and circled back toward a pay lot. They all unfolded out of the low seats. Brenda, pretty and towering but unexpectedly blah of dress—black mock-turtleneck sweater, jeans, and clumsy mauve boots—paused to ooh over Sophie’s jacket, a stiff white high-necked vintage thing that went down to her calves, tailored to fit even her tiny shoulders. Like some sort of Second Empire lieutenant: Sophie had, it was true, outdone herself; when Gene gave her a respectful nod, Matt’s small petty heart brimmed over with pride. Then, in the brisk wind careering off from the Hudson, they managed with difficulty to light four cigarettes and in silence walked back, Gene and Matt with their arms about the freezing girls, to join the rear of the line. Coughing to hide triumphant-smile, he scanned the far side of the street where he had sulked along: could a mere two weeks be all it took? First Jason’s birthday—then to return to stand behind these identical ropes here with Gene Kim!

Now forty minutes of heartless slowness passed. Luckily, through the hydraulics of crowd flow, early on Matt got shoved ahead of Gene, squeezed between a gangly youth in a white chinchilla jacket staring blankly out in space and a ravaged woman with acid-washed jeans and crow’s-feet who kept screeching, “C’mon, man, I wanna dance!” After all, here was no place to employ the conversational topics he’d thought up (Wesleyan, the new Aphex Twin EP, and whatnot, which anyway had to last the night), and one can only wink or grin eagerly for so long: and it took forty whole minutes—of strange smells, leather and cigarettes and sickly perfumes opening and shutting about him like carnivorous plants—before Matt could step up to the plate.

Then it was make or break, do or die.

“Step aside,” spat out the clipboard girl in emerald silk, clicking open the side rope for him. “Over twenty-one.”

“But we are over twenty-one!” Matt rooted madly for his fake ID.

Yawning, the girl put a scarlet-nailed hand on her slender waist, hitching the dress up slightly. She scowled at him. “Are you going to stand there and argue with me?”

One of the bouncers eyed him menacingly. “Step aside, sir.”

“What’s the problem?” came Gene’s affable voice. “Just here to have some fun.”

Gene Kim stepping up to the head of the ropes—his cheeks lit by the spotlights above the dais beyond, his lower lip pouting coyly, with two strands of hair protruding from the striped cap as if artfully placed there by the same stylist as a pop star like Beck’s—was precisely the same unanimously adored Gene Kim of the jazz-rock concert in tenth grade, plucking a bass, bending toward the microphone to woo-woo along backup on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” There was an ache in Matt’s throat where the words What’s the problem? should have come from, with that honey-and-salt texture, smooth yet gritty, universal and yet selective, directed here at the girl with the clipboard pressed to her brilliant dress.

The clipboard girl gave Gene a wry smile. She turned to half-glance at the bouncer. Then she swayed back to face them, her red hair swinging. “You’re all four together?” And she unhooked the rope.

Burning, inward, down, Matt took the rear as the four of them passed the granite-faced doormen, paid twenty bucks apiece at a row of ticket windows, traversed a corridor with black walls and purplish light, and emptied into a large room. An enormous room. He couldn’t see the end of it, except a shininess far in the darkness that might be wall. Beats from the surrounding speakers pounded into his chest as he scanned the scene: girls in halters waving cigarettes, guidos in black keeping a hand on their pockets while scoping out the ladies, Chelsea boys in wife-beaters hoisting bottles of water, wrinkled women with Texas blond hair sipping white wine out of plastic cups near balding men in crumpled linen jackets. Gene and Brenda decided to wait there by the bar while Matt and Sophie voyaged to the coat-check, the meeting point with Jason et al. Who hopefully would have gotten in? But Jason had been here before, purportedly, and anyway there were enough not-especially-cool sorts here to inspire optimism on that score. So what had we done wrong out there, exactly?

The coat-check turned out to be no closet but an entire room the size of most bars. In the center, a huge apparatus with ten separate circles of coats wheeled round in orbits.

Jason snagged Sophie in a hug. “Hey!” he chirruped. Thanksgiving had evidently agreed with him: his face gleamed a touch oily, and beneath a bold printed maroon shirt his belly seemed to have buttressed itself comfortably. “Glad to see you. You’re late!”

“You’re alone!” gasped Matt. “What the hell happened?”

“Well,” Jason waved a cigarette, “nobody could come. Tom is sick—he wanted to tell you he wished he could come. I think he has a crush on you!” Jason pinched an arm.

“And?!”

“Oy, listen, it’s Thanksgiving, remember? People go home. And they don’t all live in Jer-sey.” But Jason’s warm brown eyes searched his. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

Sophie squeezed Matt’s hand. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Just tell him that your friends, they’re all away for Thanksgiving. You didn’t realize they were going away. It’s o-kay. That’s totally understandable, totally normal.”

So Sophie and Jason had wonderfully intuited. Okay. Wasn’t this plausible? By this point, a couple of extra little deceptions was hardly much to scruple over.

This music was low, nefarious, a current’s undertow. With Sophie leading, he was wafted on its tide from the coatroom through shadows and blinking lights back to the circular bar: where Gene and Brenda were somehow not waiting. Matt circled the spot. Glasses were raised, eyes raked over him; now and then a darting blur of bodies picked up and sped forward like a school of fish he had sent into motion. No Gene, no Brenda, tall and unmistakable. Sophie went to make a pass—she was careful, precise; surely she would find them. But she returned shaking a troubled head.

“Maybe they went to the bathroom?” Jason offered.

Matt led the troupe through a hall lined by plaster arms holding torches where ravers sucked lollipops and fiddled with pastel backpacks, upstairs to a steamy bathroom where skinny wrecks with indigo under-eye bags were laughing, ghastly, leaning half out of the stalls. Were those maybe junkies, real-live addicts? A man clasping a girl tightly by the hand led her toward a stall, beside which three men, one in clown makeup, stood together, giggling.

Negative.

Now they tried a small blue-tiled bar, coiling between bodies, shaken by the strange stuttered sounds of the mechanized music. A man in shades and five stunning models, a new set from the ones before, cheered champagne flutes. Nope. They powered through the whole floor, sweeping the observation deck above the lower hall; into a Turkish pavilion with gauze curtains, where people at marble tables reclined on round oversize bolsters; through a fin de siècle cabaret where a drag queen slowly danced atop a red-lit stage; on and on, a Chinese opium den; a savanna, Astroturfed, with couches shaped like zebras and giraffes; last, a room made of glass. Here were glass cube tables, glass benches, go-go dancers in glass cylinders, and, at the center, a fountain spouting what looked like liquid glass. Past this, they hit a set of stairs going down.

“That has to be everything.” Jason lit a cigarette, rested his hand on the railing. “Maybe we should go back to the bar? I bet we just missed them; maybe they went and came back.”

Matt blinked, long. We have to find them had turned into Where are they? which had turned finally into silence. You’re being foolish: he could feel this, like the time he’d cried in the car, fifth grade, when his mother refused to drive him for a slice of pizza. Sheer frustration. Sheer withholding of the world. “Fine,” he said, hoarse. But in the opium den he had spotted something, a recess, a shadowy niche. “You both go down. I’ll just be super quick.”

Back in the den, he slipped into that space he’d seen. Leading from it was a corridor spectrally lit by blue fluorescent panels. Past homeboys blowing cannabis in his face, past a girl crying into her glass while her boyfriend murmured insistent words at her, he broke out into a vacant section. After another hundred yards, the hall ended at brick wall.

To his left, a black drag queen in a white wig and silver leather dress towered above him behind a red velvet rope. “List only,” she snapped when he made a motion.

“What?”

“Guest list only.” Sighing, she leaned a bare shoulder against the wall.

“Oh, I see. Well, I just need to see if my friends are in there. I’ll just be a sec—”

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you in here! This room is VIP, Guest List Only!” She glowered down at him.

Bitch! They had to be in there. The only place left in the club! And a special place—naturally, Gene Kim would have been drawn here. And now what if we don’t show up? How would that look? I couldn’t get in? For the second time tonight? Matt stared blandly at the drag queen, biding his time, the hounds of his mind loosed and racing out toward fleeting ideas. Just insisting was obviously making her very angry. He would have to perform his approach in a subtler, more flattering fashion. That was the way, really, Gene had handled the clipboard chick. Not to argue: not a matter of pressing one’s rights. But to establish a rapport. He backed respectfully away when two trim men approached and she—see, something about their knowingness, conspiratorial as they pecked her cheek giving rise, yes, there, to her gregarious, shy almost-blush—undid the rope, clicking it shut after them seamlessly. Then Matt stepped up to the spot.

He pursed his lips coyly. He coughed. And he reached into the voice-box for that noise Gene Kim had made out at the ropes. “What’s the problem?” He looked straight in her brown eyes. “Just here to have some fun.” Oh, it was good: it was almost husky!

She raised one coffee-colored eyebrow. Cocked her head, bewildered. “What?”

“I said.” Languorous, he laid his upper torso against the threshold frame, holding out a just-between-us smile on the tips of his teeth toward her. “What’s the problem?”

Before she could reply: “Coco!” a voice rapped out from behind.

The drag queen whipped around to a fortyish man in an elegant black suit. For a long moment it seemed as if something was wrong with one of his eyes, as if he had a glass eye or an involuntary ocular seizure, but when the twitch was over Matt could tell the man had simply winked. His mammoth eyes were hazel-green and vaguely horrifying, almost protruding from the curve of his tanned, leathered face, and his body was wise-guy square. The most appealing thing about him was the suit, narrow-lapeled, all floaty panels, as though by one of those Japanese designers whom Sophie admired. “’Sall right.” The man nodded at him. “Kid’s a friend of mine.”²⁷

As if the world had said, I’ll see your buck and raise you a hundred. As if the man had remarked, This boy is my long-lost son. So 2 + 2 = 5 totally absurd, Matt found himself saying “Exactly!” and admitting a knowing laugh. How long had that man been standing there?

Coco unclicked the rope and shook her head softly. “Why didn’t you just say so?” she whined.

Matt followed the man into a dark room. A deep pinkish-red crystal bloom in the middle of the ceiling emitted a low glow over a little dance floor, and there were dim fixtures on the walls above banquettes behind the ten or so black tables around which small groups were quietly gathered.

Small, clubhouse-small, and extremely calm in comparison to the rest of the club. A tiny, rather tame bar stood against a wall, where just a couple of people were standing by while a bartender in a white button-down shirt poured drinks from a metal shaker.

The man was studying Matt, his protuberant hazel eyes groping like octopus suckers. “So how ya been?”

“Fine,” croaked Matt. “About the same. You know.”

“C’mon.” Now the man was moving smoothly toward the bar, skirting the dance floor. “What are you drinking?” He eased his elbows onto the black mica counter.

What does one drink? Well, it certainly was the most popular option at Jason’s birthday party. “Cosmo,” Matt coughed, “please.” While the man ordered, Matt turned aside, scanning. Too dark in here to tell for certain, but there seemed no girl tall enough for Brenda acccompanied by a slim black-shirted guy.

People say that in those watersheds, the Marc Antony meeting Cleopatra in the streets of Ephesus moments in a life, you feel something strange, a hackle of hair rising up from the nape, someone walking over your grave. But when this man swiveled back from the bar, passing Matt a V-shaped glass through the reddish light and taking a healthy swig from his own fresh bottle of water, even when he winked again and said, “Looking for your friends?” Matt felt nothing, except a nagging fear of being discovered. “Gowan! Take a good long look, I don’t mind,” he announced.

Matt peered at the bodies flickering in and out of the strobish atmosphere.

“Satisfied?” Now a grotesque girlish smile played over the man’s lips. “Listen, kid, between Coco and me we’ve probably heard every line a million times.” Leaning back on the counter, he screwed up his eyes toward a spot on the ceiling. “I’m just looking for my friends. Ah, ah,” he commanded, holding up a hand to shut Matt up, “I don’t need your apologies.” Suddenly: “What’s your name, kid?” Tilting his head back, he peered down at Matt with a pompous, evaluative air.

“Matthew Acciaccatura,” he managed to say. “Thank you for the drink.”

“Pleasure to meet you.” The man lifted his water bottle as if in cheers. “I’m Vic Spector.” He looked at Matt for any sign of effect. “And this is my club.”

Matt sucked in his breath so fast he lost a bit of cosmo; dabbed with a bar napkin.

But Vic Spector was gazing impassively into the crowd. “Do you know why I asked you to come in here tonight?” he mused thoughtfully. He spun on Matt. “Do you know why I’m even talking to you right now?” His shoulders fluttered disgustedly.

Matt shook his head.

Vic stared back into the crowd as if toward a sunset, a grand sentimental moment. “Because you got something, kid. You’ve got a very, very rare quality.” Vic took a meditative sip. “Man, every time I find one, it gives me chills.” Capping the bottle, he shivered showily, his blazer’s ends shaking like a marionette’s limbs. He shot Matt a canny glance, then made a discarding gesture with one hand, where a prominent, square silver ring glinted. “I love it. As many years as I’ve been in this business…’cause that’s why I’m here. To see what I see. What you don’t even—” Now he drew himself up to gaze at Matt proudly. “All right, kid, you wanna know? You wanna know what you got?” Wary, Vic checked over his shoulders before leaning in to half-whisper, “The fire in the belly. You’re hungry!” Vic glared at Matt rather voraciously himself.

Righto. Matt could feel his mouth idling in a dazed deer-in-headlight smile.

“You see all these people?” Vic waved a magician’s hand toward the crowd. “They’re out here having fun. They’re drinking, sitting with friends, flirting, showing off, networking, whatever. Their desires are lateral.” Vic made a flattening, horizontal gesture with his free hand. “While your desires are vertical.” He pumped the hand up and down, a little elevator. Then he screwed his eyes onto Matt, hard. “Why did you really come here tonight?” he asked accusingly.

“I was looking for my friends,” Matt murmured, chastened. Was this the part where everything turned nasty? A signal from Vic—then Coco, the bouncers…

“No, you weren’t.” Vic slammed the water bottle down on the bar. “Why did you come to my club?”

Why was he here? Gene Kim? Was that an answer? Once in my life, just once to impress—you have no idea the stress I’m under here! Not playtime for me. Yet maybe the man did in some shape understand. I mean, was that part of what he’d meant? With his lateral, vertical business? “Wh-why does anybody come to a club?”

Vic bellowed, “See, see, you can’t even say it.” Tilting his head to the side, he leveled a tender gaze at Matt. “I been in this business a long time,” sadly, he examined his hands, “I know what I’m talking about.” Then Vic stood up tall. He began jabbing his finger toward Matt. “You’re going to have to admit what it is you really want if you’re gonna rise to the top here. Because it’s not about just having fun. You gotta keep your eye on the ball.” Vic pointed meaningfully to his own temples. Above, all around, the song shifted to a spectacularly apposite “Hungry Like the Wolf.” “What is this piece of shit music—” Vic muttered under his breath. Lunging over, he snarled at the bartender, I told him already and Duran Duran and other words Matt couldn’t catch. The bartender nodded politely, wiped his hands on a towel, and walked off. At the far edge of the counter he beckoned to a woman with a round silver tray, said something in her ear. She nodded too before scooting off into the crowd. When Matt turned back, Vic had a generous, lordly smile ready for him. “When it’s your club…” explained Vic, sniffing. “Declan is a terrible DJ. Anyway, listen.” He was rocking back and forth on his feet, heel-toe, heel-toe. “I see something in you you don’t even see yet. There’s so much raw potential. And I can take all that and shape you into a promoter. I am the one who can make you a star. Here.” He shot Matt a shy, vulnerable glance as he plucked something from his breast pocket and thrust it out. “What you do is you take this home, you call me on Monday, we’ll set up a meeting…. Do you even know what a promoteris?” He cackled, incredulous. “Ohhhh,” he bit his lip, “it’s a real pleasure to meet you, Matthew. A real, real pleasure. We’re really going to make this work. Kid, I’m gonna teach you everything! I am gonna Make You Fabulous.” He winked. “Trust me.”

Matt accepted the glossy black card. VIC SPECTOR, DIRECTOR shone out in glowing white capitals. There was a strange crackling sound. Vic ripped a black box off his belt, shoving it up to his mouth. “Go for Vic,” he shouted into the walkie-talkie, then pressed it vehemently against his ear. “No, no, don’t you do anything—I’m on my way.” And he dashed from the room without another glance.

Matt brushed the black sheen of the card with his thumb. The print didn’t disappear, like reflections in a stream. White lines…going through my mind… sang the music, above, behind. White lines: these stamped-out capitals on the obsidian black, running left to right, into the future. Lazily he opened his wallet, tucked the card behind his driver’s license. Over his shoulder, the bartender was clearing away Vic’s bottle. “I’m all done,” Matt said, nodding at his glass. There are witnesses, you see: a real scene: a real bottle, card, and you’re not crazy in the least.

He walked to the ropes, nodding absently at Coco, down the narrow corridor, into the opium den.

“Matt!” Sophie was tugging at his arm. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you forever. Listen: we found Gene!”

What was it that pulsed in him then, as a sportive roil of fake smoke absorbed his torso, momentarily blocking out Sophie from clear view—was it merely an effect of the music, which suddenly sped up its beats from wild, virtual drums? Was it the hot-pink fingers of that cosmo just finished, starting to play scales with his veins, tightening those strings toward impossible heights? Or could it be no such admixed thing but purely the first mad flush of happiness, a happiness beyond reason, the happiness of the insane? For all the drawbridges of his mind were down now, letting thoughts in-out over the dangerous moats of normal logic…oh, there were birdsongs, banners, egrets flapping through the brain’s dark. And when the veil of smoke between them was rent: “That’s wonderful,” he breathed, drawing Sophie into a squeeze that whirled her through air to set her laughing, smoothing her hair back, on those little booted feet.