5.

In the morning, the light dusting of powder had disappeared. But the parked cars, the black streets were gleaming, as if in mirthful signature of yes, just for this, for Matt’s trudging, like a veteran returning from battle, back to Third North with a sackful of dirty, smoke-soaked clothes slung over a shoulder. The suite was empty when he waltzed in. Oh, Saturday—right, Josh in Brooklyn; and Dwight? Singing idiots practice? Perhaps. Well, just as well. Though once his role at Cinema was settled to certainty: what a revelation this was going to be! Matt flitted around, making green tea on the hot ring, and was swallowed up in his wardrobe gutting it for a dry-cleaning bundle, when the phone rang.

“Magic, baby.” The unmistakable Vic Spector. “How ya doin’?”

“Excellent!” Matt practically shouted. “Ah, how you—doin’?”

Vic loosed a hearty, somewhat ill-spirited bolt of laughter. “A guy like me is always doin’ all right.”

Note: never ask that.

“Wasn’t it fabulous last night?” Vic crackled, back in fine spirits. “The club was fab-ulous.” He rattled off a register of last night’s star guests, the famous names of two actresses and a musician, one of whom had even been seen “dancing on tables in the Champagne Lounge. It was un-believable,” Vic decided. He sounded giddy, a little boy. Then he calmed to softer, consoling tones, almost cooing. “I mean, I’ve known her since she was a baby, but Jennifer, she’s really grown up, you know.”

“Yeah?” Not to seem too nonplussed.

“I’ll introduce you next time. If you’re still around! Sashaaa,” Vic purred off-phone. “What are you doing, Sasha, Mila, come to daddy, look what daddy has: yeah. There you go. And your crowd,” Vic snapped, suddenly loud, “you did very well for your first night. Let’s see now…you did forty-three reduced and three comp. Wait, what?—no, three comp.”

“All my friends are out of town!” Matt blurted.

“Oh, I know, it’s the weekend where ev’rybody’s out of town…” He didn’t sound sarcastic: seemed to buy it, though maybe a touch irritated at being told something he would already know. Vic swerved through a conversation like a drunk driver, reeling up to vertiginous cliffs only to veer heart-stoppingly off. “So. What’d I tell you, kid? Did I tell you? I never make a mistake. I’m incapable. Okay, mebbe once, once in twenty-five years,” Matt could hear Vic’s smile, “which isn’t doing too bad, if you ask me. That’s why other clubs are always trying to poach my promoters, they just can’t do what I do.” A compassionate sigh. “I mean, Sonny—you know Sonny Reich from Satellite? A guy like that would’ve said, ‘What are you doing, Vic, you’re going to give this eighteen-year-old nobody with mook boots a list to one of your VIPs?’ I mean, just imagine the ugly fucking disgusting people you could be bringing in off the street!”

“Oh—” Matt rushed to say. “But—”

“The thing is, they look but they don’t see. You have to think creatively. You have to look beneath the surface. You can’t be superficial; it’s death to be superficial in this business, I’m telling you. Because we don’t live in a flat world. The world is always changing, and if you want to be ready for those changes you have to think, future—how was Declan, was Declan all right last night?”

Declan?

“Or was he still spinning records from, like, 1983?” Vic sniggered.

“Oh.” What had the music been? “He was…fine,” Matt murmured cautiously.

“Aha! So, finally: he listens! He’s so dense, you have no idea how dense Declan is, and if he didn’t know, like, every fashion person in this town I would’ve eighty-sixed him months ago. I still might, I mean, his people know Cinema now, they know my ropes girls, they probably’d still use us for parties after the shows…Well. Magic. Come in Monday, we’ll get you paid, Miranda’ll give you the new invites, and that’s it, we’ll see you next week. All right? All right.” Out: the line was dead.

On the bed, in his underwear, Matt actually clapped to himself with brazen glee.

Monday afternoon, as told, he dropped by the club. Miranda doled out his check, new invites (some kind of witches’ sabbath, with a he-witch resembling last week’s marionettist), and two boxes of business cards in a white paper bag. Right outside on the sidewalk he drew one out, with shaking fingers. And here, in inconstantly glittering lettering: MAGIC MATT. There could be no doubt; now and forever! I am that.

Two hundred twenty-one dollars was a spectacular amount of money; not, perhaps, in relation to the debtors’ hospital-style tab he had racked up this week, but the beginning of fortunes to come. And though its potentially transitory strength was not enough for him to march into M&O and quit, he took Sophie and Jason to Nobu, where Jason taught them how to kamikaze with shots of sake in tall glasses of Sapporo beer, shouting, “Banzai!” And a table of bankers—shirtsleeves rolled, Montblanc pens glinting against tight Holland bond—glanced over from time to time, but with no astonishment at all. They think we’re rich kids. Like Carly and Taylor and Allison.

He threw himself into the second week, trying to smooth out the kinks into science. Yes, already only the occasional target turned him down, probably more out of shyness than chic—cantering off after at an unnatural speed; but there was something he was beginning to see. Their taking the invite was not his object. They needed to haul their asses up and dress on Friday night, freeze in line with the other plebs, and, last but hardly least, have a good time (how else would he get repeats?). If two hundred invites had fallen from his fingers last week, while only forty-three marks crossed the club’s threshold, he must be pulling a roughly twenty-five percent rate. How to improve? How to clinch the sale?

By trial and error, he learned to accost the wittle pweety ones in SoHo not at two but one o’clock, on their way to lunch, not back, when they were harried. Only then should one circle across to Nolita, where the cool crowd had tumbled out of bed to nurse their morning cappuccinos in retro diners and were under the radiance of the day’s first caffeine. A fabulous girl among the smoke-breakers before an office building didn’t want to be drawn to a corner for a confidential tête-à-tête but, right on the bold stage of the pavement, be told before beholders she had what it takes. For flattery, there was always that; “What a scarf, I love it; ohhh, my girlfriend so wants a coat like that: Marc Jacobs? He’s so the man…I know…” I was there—I’m the one—I saw: I understand you.

         

It was on this second Friday in the Red Room that he met Marshall,³¹ the supposed party host, who collided with a wet kiss onto his cheek where Matt stood waiting for a cosmo. “Darling,” the creature swooned, grotesque, in a cheerleader sweater ripped at the shoulders, thick-flicked eyeliner running down his cheeks, and too-tall stilettos that forced him to totter. Evidently this was the pale-faced figure who on that first party invite had clutched a marionette, on this week’s version played the squint-eyed witch in the center of the sabbath. “I’m Marshall, darling, and soooo glad to meet you.” Lifting up his neck to gaze down, Marshall batted frightening false eyelashes. Something was wrong with his mouth: the two pillows of his scarlet lips, his whole chin, hardly seemed to move when he spoke.

Matt threw his weight to one side, winked. “Enchanté.”

“I told Vickie”—Marshall lurched and clutched at the bar—“I told Vickie I was soooo thrilled about it. It’s been so boring here lately.” A cackle turned into a cough, which flecked Matt’s cheek with tiny gifts of saliva. “You’ll spice things up a bit…” he yowled, sounding like a drowning cat.

“Marshall!” A skinny blonde with dark craters for eyes picked at his arm.

“Let go!” he shrieked.

“Marshall, c’mon! I’m trying to help. Jesus, you know he’s gonna leave with everything if we don’t find him now.”

Marshall visibly wavered, as if calculating his need for whatever everything was, then shrugged, giving Matt a wan you-know-how-it-is smile, and allowed himself to be pulled unsteadily off by her hand on his arm.

Curiouser and curiouser, Alice. So this was the famous Marshall who ran Down Below in the Red Room. Batting 1.000 in the category of roommate, aren’t we, just like Third North. At least this creature was friendly. But how could such a noxious sump possibly promote? In comparison, the job Matt was doing, giving a pinch to this one and a kiss to that, recognizing or doling out a bit of mystery in Yes: right: but where did we meet? as required. No wonder Vic needed him!

And numbers grew; they mushroomed to sixty-three. He was the demiurge tinkering in the large planned garden, the humble hand tending the new life.

“Good night, Magic!” called Peter Boi, flapping a limp hand. “Night, Magic!” said Lacey, the clipboard girl with spiked black hair; “Nice crowd tonight!” Angel, Lacey’s cotton-haired confrère, actually bugged her eyes at the number on his list. They were still standing by the stanchions outside, though there was no one now waiting behind the ropes; three-thirtyish and freezing. “Holy shit,” moaned Angel in her gravelly drone. “Much better than Marshall,” she muttered.

“How did—how did Marshall do?” he couldn’t resist asking, unclasping Sophie’s hand to edge up beside Peter Boi and the girls.

“God only knows,” said Angel, flinging her hair over a shoulder.

“He forgot his list at home,” explained Lacey. She stared into space, bit her lip.

“That isn’t all.” Angel rolled her eyes.

“Please don’t tell that story again.” Lacey shook her head wearily. “I’m sick of it.”

         

The first week he had mostly been holding his breath, and the second was still hazy, a stroboscopic aftereffect—only as the third stretched out new green leaves did it begin to reveal itself in earnest. Hello, my name is Matt Acciaccatura; I’m a club promoter; he could say that, it wouldn’t be a lie.³² He could talk to anyone in the street with all the miraculous ease of some fakir walking a gauntlet of live coals. He could traipse into any club or bar simply by flashing his wee 2×4 business card—hopping lines, skipping through ropes, getting free drinks right under the eyes of real VIPs.

Therefore the nature of his situation at NYU began to redden at the edges like a ribald joke. His doppelgänger, Matt the Bland, could exit his suite, meander through a corridor packed with his entire hall group, zip down the crowded stairs, find a seat in the dining hall, eat a plateworth of miserable mash, and bus his tray—all without engendering a single look or “hey.” Every time a stray glance passed through his face as if it were nothing other than empty space, Matt had half an inclination to tap one twitching finger on the offender’s shoulder and say: “Pardon me, sir. Yes, you. Do you know that in the eyes of the objective world, I am vastly cooler than you? Indeed, you are a mere single-celled organism in comparison with my highly evolved, semidivine state.” Ah, at any instant he could reveal his higher incarnation—like a comic-book hero, Bruce Wayne and Batman, with just a quick-change in the bathroom, super-powers on! and…look, world, there’s Magic Matt! Oh, you could dig your toes in the moist earth of that identity, it was solid—you could trust in it now!

But as if the lares had heard his crowing, one malevolent djinn decided to ram a stick into his axle’s spinning: on Monday afternoon Miranda floated into the lobby with a frown; handing off his goody bag, she declared: “Vic wants to see you in the office.”

Matt nearly fell down the felted steps behind her, heading through the room with stacked tables and chairs, the tunnel, up the dim-lit stair, and through the mirror door—

“I’ve had it with him!” Vic was yelling at a blonde with a tired face. “Are you telling me he’s not back yet? That’s it. Tell him to stay in Paris! I don’t have to take this bullshit! Where’re my dogs?!” The same elegant Adrian, again in liquid slacks and newspaper-boy cap, passed Vic two powerful leashes attached to a pair of large spectral white dogs with yellow eyes, panting silently, queerly identical and regal but for their big mouths hanging open to reveal pulsing coral-red tongues. “And you can tell him Vic said so. Tell him, ‘Vic Spector hates your guts, never show your face in the club again, he’ll see you in hell.’ All right? All right? All right. C’mon, Matt,” Vic ordered between clenched teeth, careening past him to a rear door, “we’re taking a walk.”

“Nothing to do with you,” Vic spat when they were halfway down the block. He was racewalking, but the ghostly dogs were floating ahead without difficulty—noticeably less than Matt. “Just this asshole who works for us. Who used to work for us. Until I fired him this morning.” He jerked his head violently in at least five directions, then steamed across the street. “It’s a tough business. You know? It’s really, it’s not cut out for everyone.” He grunted. “Well. Magic, I’m proud of you, you’re doing very well, very well, you know. You did, what wassit, sixty, sixty-three reduced this past weekend. So you seem to be, you know you’re maintaining your numbers, which is fabulous. Fact, it’s a twenty-five percent—do I have my figures right?—it’s a twenty-five percent increase, week over week. Which is, you know, it’s not incredible, but you should feel all right. All right?” The traffic light shot green; observing a decorous silence they crossed the wide avenue. “You know, the thing I’m concerned about, Matt,” Vic picked up again on the far side, “it’s not so much your numbers per se, it’s the quality of your crowd. You follow me? See, your crowd is—it’s not that your crowd is bad, it’s not that you have a bad crowd at all, not at all. No no no no no no.” Vic had halted while the dogs surrounded an abandoned couch whose stuffing was seeping out through a gash in green chintz; now they turned away, disgusted, and loped on. “Listen, kid, it’s like this. I’ll tell you a story from my stock-broking days.”

“You were a stockbroker?” slipped out, accidentally.

Vic did a double take, looked over his shoulders as if embarrassed for Matt before unseen bystanders. “You didn’t know that? Oh, I was huge, I was fantastic, I was featured in Time magazine. Look it up, Time, February what was it, 1977. I’ve done everything, kid. I was an army brat, moved around so much I lived on every continent by, like, the age of eight. I worked on an oil rig in Alaska, I’ve been a hippie”—Vic held up his free hand in a stubby peace sign—“I marched on Washington…. You know the Chinese believe, the Chinese believe we each have nine lives. Well, I’ve been through about seven of those already, in this one. I dunno what’s next for me—nirvana!” Vic fluttered his eyelashes, miming a coy befuddlement before such celestial mysteries, then let loose a raucous, utterly unmystical guffaw so the whole suit shook. “Someday I’ll tell you, I have more stories than anyone you’ll ever know. So when I was a stockbroker, one time this guy in the next office comes over and he says, ‘Vic, how do you do it? You’re always making money, and here I am, I did business school and college—but you…’ I mean, I went to college too, for a year though, baseball scholarship, dropped out, uh, that’s another story, but I mean, here this guy was asking me,” Vic stood up cock-proudly, “how to deal with his stocks! I didn’t need business school! I didn’t need any textbooks! You know what I told him?” He stopped abruptly on the sidewalk to glare at Matt, which caused the dogs to fix him with their own threatening yellow eyes.

Well, now. Matt shrugged his shoulders. Buy low, sell high?

“Always keep a diversified portfolio,” Vic declared meaningfully. Then, arms out at his sides, gazing up at the blue sky, he marched on in the halo of giftedness that evidently surrounded him. “You get it? And that’s—it’s exactly the same for a nightclub, at least a club of this caliber. All the parts have to fit together. Everything’s in balance. It’s like a food chain, an ecosystem. I’ve got everybody, I’ve got the models, I’ve got the gay crowd—I’ve got the homeboys—we went over this, ’member? See, what I do is I bring all of these different worlds together in one place, where they can feed off one another. Now, if there’s one thing I don’t have, or not enough of, not as much as I’d like, it’s the college kids. Unbelievable, I know. I mean, this town is fulla them, how many colleges we got here, and I know they go out every night, they got their parents’ money, they just don’t come to Cinema.” He shrugged. “Prob’ly they think they can’t get in, because our door is so tight. And I mean, that’s true,” he cackled, “we run a tight door, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But there’s, you know, there’s gotta be beautiful people at NYU like anywhere else. Right? I mean, let’s face it: I have Wall Street guys looking to pick up hot young coeds. I have cutting-edge DJs from Sweden, from England, from Tel Aviv—they want to spin their music for a crowd who can dance to it! I need fresh faces, kids with a little class, to mix with all those freaky-dinks Marshall brings in. And everybody wins. That’s the thing. Am I right? So that’s,” he punched Matt’s arm for emphasis, “where I want you to come in. Course, I still want you to draw from everywhere, but just, you know, focus on that pool, all the circles you know at NYU. That’s what I want you to start bringing me. You got me?”

All the circles I know. Of course, all my wide net of friends. So. Was this going to be snatched away too? Matt nodded fiercely.

Vic had halted at the window display of an expensive-looking menswear store. “Oh, I love this place, I adore it, isn’t that adorable?” His finger jabbed at two stuffed dalmatians lounging in a quilted nest. Then his gaze flicked down. “Do you like that, girls? You like that?” The dogs bobbed their heads in friendly unison, twitching their eager paws. “Should we go in? Sasha, Mila? All ri-ight, if you say so…” A peculiarly kindly note thrummed in his voice, like Santa Claus. He threw open the glass door and stalked in after his dogs. It slammed in front of Matt’s face—luckily he was able to get it open before Vic might see. “I want that. That thing in the window. Two of ’em. For my dogs,” Vic barked at a salesman. “For my little girls,” he cooed, looking down. Matt lingered back and fingered a button-down shirt, flipping the price tag over in a covert flash. Ye gods. Six hundred for a plain white shirt.

The salesman returned from a whispered congress by the register. “I’m so sorry, sir, I’m afraid we’re out of that item…” he whined, clasping his hands in penitence. “It’s so close to the holidaaaays. But what I can do for you is I can order them, I can gift-wrap them, and they’re guaranteed to be here by the end of the week.”

“What?” snarled Vic, jerking back as if the man had bitten him. “You’re out of it? No, that’s fine, that’s fine, I’m not gonna order it.” Vic brushed past as if Matt were a stranger, the dogs swooping along companionably. Matt glanced stunned and sympathetic at the salesman, but the man was already cheerily tidying up a pile of cashmere scarves.

Matt ran after Vic and fell into step. It wasn’t clear if he was noticed, but after a minute Vic opened his mouth again. “So,” he said, “see where I’m coming from? I mean, your crowd is great, your numbers are getting there, but what we reeeeally need from you right now is to draw,” he paused, methodical as Churchill, “from the NYU scene, from that population. Okay? You got it? Now, course you can’t do that by Friday, that’s all right. And next week, next week is right before Christmas, why don’t you take the night off—college kids are gonna be gone anyway. But the week after that—the week after that I want you to be on just for New Year’s. It’s a Sunday, I know, but New Year’s, in this business New Year’s is all hands on deck. That’s the big push, so forget Friday. All right? You got that? Good. You’re a good kid.” He looked Matt dead in the eyes, so serious, intense, he seemed to be about to declare his paternity—

Vic spun around on his dress heel and disappeared west, guarded on both sides by the alert and noble white dogs galloping fluently along.