The Insiders (6 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“Shut up.”

She kissed me again, and I could just see her looking at herself in the mirror, and it was like
she'd rehearsed this moment at home this morning and that made my heart break a little more for her.

“How's your house?” I asked.

“You want to come back there with me and clean it up?”

“Uh-uh,” I said. I got away from her and went to get our ice cream. I even knew her favorite flavor—cherry vanilla with chocolate chip cookies broken over the top. While I was paying I got a call from Liza.

“We all set for tonight?” I asked.

“Yeah, I got it. Man Ray, after nine. But I'm not sure how many of your boys can make it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I hear that some people have other plans,” Liza said.

“Who?” I asked. But she clicked off without answering, which is exactly the sort of thing she always does. I went back to our booth, juggling cell phone, ice cream, and change. Flan jumped up and took a cone from me.

“Jonathan,” she said, once we'd gotten settled. “Where is this going?”

“What?”

“You and me. Where are we headed? You're
so bashful, but if we're going to go out, I need to tell people. For one thing, I'll need to find Patch and ask him if it's okay.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I'm sure he won't mind, but I just want to tell him. Have you seen him?”

“No, and no. Look, Flan, this is like—I'm taking you out as like an interlude before I go out with my friends and stay out and party and do I don't even know what else yet—probably all night long. This is like my super-hallowed and innocent time before that happens, you know. I mean, I like you but you're young.”

“No!” Flan said. “It's way more than that.”

“No,” I said. “It can't be.”

She stared at me and her eyes got all full.

“Don't cry,” I said.

“Why shouldn't I?” Her inflection was so right and charming. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to do right then that would've been more honest than what I did, which was to feel nervous and say nothing. She licked her cone a couple more times and then very carefully set it on a napkin on the table. Then she started breathing very quickly like she couldn't hold back real tears. Finally, she got up and ran out.

“Flan, wait!” I called. I whipped around and tried to follow her and immediately dripped ice cream all down my APC multistripe button-down. I ran out after her, but she was long gone—headed downtown, toward her house.

“Flan,” I said. “Flan Flood. What am I going to do without you?” I couldn't believe I'd just said that. But there it was, and I had. I licked what was left of my raspberry peanut swirl and felt very sorry for myself, and all alone, and kind of pissed at myself for being completely unable to say how I really felt. And then I went home to change.

“You made it,” Arno said.

Kelli smiled. Arno thought she looked even more Mickey-Mouse-Club-gone-bad than the night before, with her white-blond hair all flat and lanky, too much makeup, and her belly peeking out from above her tight jeans.

“Yeah,” she said. “But I had to tell Jonathan I was going to hear Noam Chomsky speak at NYU about American imperialism before he'd leave me alone.”

“Yeah,” Arno said. “I do that all the time. Give us a kiss.”

Kelli blinked at him.

“We don't really know each other,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You're right,” Kelli said. “So what?” And she grabbed the back of his neck and pushed her body against him and kissed him. They were standing in the middle of Randall Oddy's show at the Wildenburger gallery in Chelsea, which was a huge white room about
four times the size of the gym at Kelli's school.

For a while earlier in the afternoon Arno had thought that his Blackberry was broken, because it was going off so often with the same number, which turned out to be Amanda's. Finally, he turned the thing off. He'd been planning to do nothing all day but watch his bootleg
Matrix 3
DVD and he didn't want to deal with Amanda. Worse, he didn't even want to think about all his best friends being furious at him for doing the thing they'd sworn never to do, which was fool around with each other's girlfriends. But by the time Keanu had died for the third time, he'd gotten over it.

Now he was blissed out. Kelli was here. He had a simple plan. He was going to blow her away with the scene at the opening, and then he was going to take her back to his house and sleep with her. He didn't know what girls like her did back in St. Louis, but she certainly seemed willing.

“Let's go in the back,” Arno said. He grabbed her hand and led her through the crowd, which was made up of hundreds of his mom and dad's friends and acquaintances.

“Arno, baby!” someone called out. Arno looked around. A tightly knit circle of young men and women opened up and a frenetically handsome young man in a black silk suit and a black T-shirt that said
Freaky
in
yellow letters climbed through his admirers and made his way over to Arno and Kelli.

“Randall,” Arno said. “Hot show. Very hot.”

Arno swept his hands around and gestured at the walls. There were eight paintings of single eyes of very beautiful women caught in mid-wink, so that all the muscles were bulged out and terrifying. They were massive pictures and it took a second to realize what they were. Randall's last show had been of straining genitals, but he'd grown up a little since then, which was a relief to everyone who worked with him.

“Who's this?” Randall Oddy asked. He was staring at Kelli, who was staring back. Her lipstick was smeared from kissing Arno.

“Ooh,” Kelli said. And Arno frowned.

“You two headed to the back room? Me, too—you two!” Randall said, and laughed. “Let me find a bottle of Cristal somewhere, and I'll join you.”

“Great,” Kelli said. “I dig your art.”

“Maybe you can pose for me sometime,” Randall said.

“I definitely want to do that.” Kelli gave Randall a big wink. And as she did, her tongue came out of her mouth, and she used it to adjust her lipstick.

Arno sighed again, and in that moment, he felt something that he knew was far more familiar to guys
like David Grobart, which was jealousy of Randall Oddy, a guy who might just be a hair cooler than he was.

As they walked back toward the sale room, Arno's Blackberry went off again. He took it out of his pocket and dropped it on the floor, and a model wearing heels that came to a point as sharp as a ballpoint pen stepped on it and killed it before suddenly falling down herself, like a capsizing sailboat. And Arno knew inside that right then poor Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, who was probably home all alone, getting ready to go out with her girlfriends, was sitting on her bed and crying, loud.

“Ooh,” Kelli said. “This is even more fun than last night.”

“Yeah,” Arno said.

“I really like your artist friend. He's like the coolest guy I've ever met in my life.”

“Kelli …”

“What?” She was looking around at the crowd. People stood in groups, with their backs to the paintings, telling stories and exchanging information on where to go later. Some were invited to the post-opening dinner for Randall Oddy, which would take place at La Luncheonette, over on Tenth Avenue. The rest would have to make do with smaller dinners of
their own, where everyone would do nothing but talk about what was going on at the La Luncheonette dinner, which actually wouldn't be much fun, but they'd never know that because they weren't invited.

“What?” Kelli asked again, simply. Arno could see that Kelli was eyeing the outfits on some of the women and glancing down at her tight jeans and cheap black rayon blouse.

“You're so …” Arno trailed off. He'd been about to tell her that he really liked her, but then he caught himself. He guided her into the private sale room. A white bearskin rug was the only object in the room besides a couple of black chairs and a particularly pornographic Randall Oddy painting Arno's parents had hung on the wall.

He looked at Kelli. She was hot, sure, but that didn't mean he'd have to go caring about her or anything. Just 'cause she wasn't like anyone else he knew—so what? Wasn't nobody like anybody else? Hadn't he learned that in school? He closed the door and crossed his fingers, hoping that Randall Oddy had forgotten them and he could have Kelli all to himself.

“What a beautiful rug,” Kelli said. She squatted down and stroked the fur and Arno stood behind her, looking at the foot-long jaguar tattoo that appeared when her shirt rode up.

“Cool tattoo.”

“Yeah,” she said, swiveling around to face him. “I got it when I was a freshman. It's our school mascot. Dorky, huh?”

“Maybe you'd like to lie down.”

“On a rug like this, that's a really good idea,” Kelli said.

“Hey, what's up, you two—are you going anywhere interesting after this?” Randall Oddy stood in the doorway, holding two bottles of Cristal and some plastic party cups. Arno and Kelli slowly stood up.

“It's your party, Oddy,” Kelli said, making the two words rhyme.

“It's a party only if a girl like you is along for the ride.”

“Huh,” Arno said, low. He glanced over at Kelli, who had already forgotten all about the rug. Randall handed him a glass of champagne and they all raised their cups.

“What's the toast?” Kelli asked. She linked arms with Oddy and stared up at him.

“To us,” Randall said. “Let's all hang out only with each other all night long!”

“I was just thinking how much fun that would be,” Arno said, but he didn't smile.

“Come on, Davey, get your coat,” Sam Grobart, David's father, said. “It's nearly seven and we want to see warm-ups, don't we?”

David slowly got off the couch in his apartment. He'd been pretending to play a game on his Blackberry—in fact he was trying to reach Amanda, which he'd been doing all day, so often that he'd had to lie about it to his parents, who tended to keep an eye out for addictive or destructive behavior.

“Why are warm-ups enjoyable to watch?” Hilary Grobart asked. In addition to being a therapist, she wrote her own line of self-help books, called
Always Ask First
, and so she was always asking first. David and her father sighed. It was like living with a paranoid parrot.

“We don't have to,” Sam said, raising his voice. “But we
want
to.”

“I see,” Hilary said. “Come on, Davey.”

The three of them stood up and David half-glared at his parents. They were immensely tall people, and handsome
in a way, if they hadn't been so shy and awkward-looking, with their glasses and thick tweedy coats and responsible brown shoes. Every wall of their living room was lined with books, and everyone read all of the books all the time, so books were always teetering on the edges of the shelves, and they fell fairly often, so bunches of them lay on the floor with their spines broken.

In the elevator, Sam said, “We know you've been down in the dumps, but these seats are certainly going to cheer you up. I got them from Frederick Flood and they're right behind the bench.”

“That's nice.”

“He's a good man, but he ought to see his children more often.”

“Isn't that confidential?” David asked.

“Because I'm his therapist?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It is confidential, isn't it? Did you ask first?” Hilary Grobart said. David and his father sighed again.

Even though the Grobarts lived downtown in a big old apartment in the Rembrandt Building, on the corner of West Fourth and Jane, they walked briskly up to Madison Square Garden on Thirty-fourth Street. They walked everywhere briskly.

Along the way, David and his father talked about how incredibly lousy the Rangers were, and how it seemed as
if they'd always be that way.

“But I don't understand, why are they so bad?” Hilary asked.

“Because Eric Lindros knows the inside of an MRI machine better than he knows his own ice skates,” Sam Grobart said, and laughed at his own joke. His wife only shook her head and stared in complete confusion at some drunks who were fighting in front of the Wild Pony Bar on Twenty-eighth Street.

David thought of Amanda. They'd been dating for ten months straight, except for the summer, when she'd gone away to Turks and Caicos for diving school. She'd smoked so much pot down there that she'd e-mailed a warning to him that she might have irretrievably changed her personality and wasn't suited for him anymore. She'd sworn, though, that she hadn't fooled around with anyone, and that the only reason she hadn't called was that they didn't have phones. And then, when she'd gotten back in September, just a month ago, they'd had sex. It was the first time for both of them. Or so she'd said.

On that day, Labor Day, David had gone to Amanda's house in Tribeca, a gigantic loft that had been done up to look like an Upper East Side town house. He'd brought flowers and condoms and a bag of M&M's and shampoo. He'd read in a book that it's a sensual act if you
wash a girl's hair. But when he got into Amanda's room, which faced the only airshaft in the loft and was decorated with the mid-century modern furniture her parents had been throwing away in favor of a more traditional look and a lot of horse ribbons that she'd won during summers out at their place in Sagaponack, Amanda just wanted to do it. He never even got the Infusium 23 with end enhancers out of the bag. Thus began what seemed like endless Tuesday and Thursday afternoons of sex (the days of no basketball practice).

He'd arrive with flowers or candy or nothing, and they'd dive under the yellow handmade Deke Fraternity quilt Amanda had been given by a group of admirers during a trip to visit her cousin at Duke, take off all their clothes, and work each other into a frenzy. Then when it was eight, David would go home and do his homework and Amanda would go out and meet her parents for dinner at Da Silvano.