What Binds Us (15 page)

Dondi called a few months after our return to invite us to a cocktail party. He’d been living in New York, with Leonardo. He was feeling much better, had gained weight. Some days he could almost forget illness. The party was to celebrate their new house in West Claw. “I know you don’t like Leonardo, so come for my sake.”

“I don’t dislike Leonardo,” I said. “I think he’s silly and vacuous, but I don’t dislike him. Your
brother
dislikes him.”

Yet despite Matthew’s objections and my own misgivings—in this case, a certain nagging voice that said: “Don’t do this. You’re making a mistake. You’ll be sorry…”—we found ourselves, early the next evening, driving out to Dondi’s house on Long Island.

A twisting gravel drive pulled us up the side of the hill and a series of sharp left turns drew us within sight of the house. It was a sight to behold, lit from basement to roof. The house itself was a huge glass box hoisted into the clouds on stilts. It was massive, swollen with architectural self-importance and self-conscious wealth.

The driveway was littered with dozens of cars. Parking, we stepped onto the drive and looked at the house. Through its glass walls we could see men without jackets, in gaily-colored vests and cummerbunds of Kente cloth, darting through the vast house like exotic tropical fish, while exquisite women in jewel-colored gowns swept across the black marble floors, displaying themselves in the dark night like precious gems in a jeweler’s velvet box.

“C’mon,” I told Matthew, who stood staring at the house in disbelief.

Grim determination bore us across an enameled lawn into a wood—not of trees but of people, overdressed poseurs folding
hors d’oeuvres
down their elegant long throats, their elegiac eyes swimming with martini-induced vagueness.

We spotted the three furies. They stood together, Panther like a queen in a court of commoners. “Hello, fellas,” she said drunkenly. Her eyes danced away as she spotted a woman, an aristocrat’s daughter, moving through the crowd toward her. “Darling! You look
fab
-ulous,” she cried.

The two women lunged at each other, arms open. Stopping fully a foot shy of actual contact, they loudly bussed the air once, twice.

The aristocrat’s daughter regarded Panther’s bosoms. Nestled in her cleavage was a pear-shaped sapphire. The stone was as large as a bar of soap. Looking over her pince-nez and down her nose, the aristocrat’s daughter cooed, “Darling, don’t you think it’s a bit
flashy
?”

The model glanced at her bauble. “Mm, I used to think it was vulgar too,” she said. “Until I owned it.”

Matthew laughed.

The aristocrat’s daughter blushed, waved to someone in the crowd and beat a hasty retreat.

“Bitch!” Panther called after her, rather too loudly.

“Where’s Dondi?”

“In the house,” Clare said, rolling her eyes. “With that trashy boy.”

We continued across the lawn and, making a left at the apron of the drive, found ourselves in front of an alarmingly wide gray metal door.

“Is this the front door? Where’d they get it? First National Bank?” Matthew asked.

Inside, vast open spaces cantilevered over emptiness. Exposed pipes of shiny chrome and black matte snaked through its monstrous square footage, carrying hot water and electric current. Narrow circular staircases with treads of perforated stainless steel like wedges of lime, cartwheels of imminent danger, flimsy, noisy, spiraled up and down leading nowhere.

After wandering around for ten or fifteen minutes, smiling at people we’d never seen before, we discovered Dondi and Leonardo in the living room behind a pair of bronze doors.

“Why are you two in here,” Matthew asked, “when you have guests outside?”

Dondi waved grandly in the air then set about mixing a fresh batch of martinis. “Leonardo has tired of their company.”

“They’re boring,” Leonardo whined.

“See? I do not lie.”

The living room was cavernous. Placed here and there about the vast area were chairs and sofas designed by architects and furniture-makers who had taken the idea of a chair and corrupted it so completely that the resultant product scarcely resembled its original concept and thus served no useful purpose; undulant chaises cozied up to tables with sharply angled glass tops.

Leonardo hung suspended in what appeared to be a black leather slingshot. I glanced at a sliver of distressed leather caught between two pieces of petrified wood that seemed to require a person to squat rather than sit, opting instead for a mustard leather sofa like corrugated butter. When I sat on it, my ass slammed to the floor beneath.

Dondi, admitting defeat, leaned against a glass block mantel and sipped disinterestedly from a Murano martini glass so enormous, the Queen Mary could well have made its maiden voyage across its breadth.

Surveying the stylish debris, Matthew took up a position on the other side of the mantel.

I looked at them, Matthew and Dondi, standing on opposite sides of that mantel. They were so dissimilar in looks and temperament that I could scarcely believe what I knew to be true: that they were brothers and I had loved them both. When I had met him, Dondi had been a chunky beauty: all ass and shoulders and great big hair. He was still sexy but thinner, his face wan. His voluptuous flesh no longer erupted out of scant tank tops and too-tight jeans. He wore loose slacks and a big shirt. He seemed feverish. Matthew, tall, thin, was always so cool, his skin so pale it seemed translucent as if he were an ice sculpture lit miraculously from within.

“You should go back to our guests,” Dondi told Leonardo.

“What about you? They’re your guests too,” Leonardo argued.

“No, they’re not,” Dondi replied, bringing a cigarette to his lips. “Now be a good boy and run along. You two go with him.”

Dondi was tired. I could see it in the tightness about his eyes, in his careful movements.

Outside, Leonardo hung at the edge of the lawn as if afraid to approach, as if this was not his party. “You see that tall man?” Leonardo began. “Over there? He’s the publisher of
Backbeat
magazine. I think he has that tall man’s disease.”

“What tall man’s disease?” Matthew asked impatiently.

“You know—the one that killed Abraham Lincoln.”

“A bullet killed Abraham Lincoln.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, he had that disease. And it
would
have killed him. Anyway, it’s a pretty famous disease. Lots of basketball players have it. I think Fred Gwynn—you know, Herman Munster?—I think he has it too. Shhh. He’s coming this way.”

“Thomas? Thomas, is that you?”

I looked up into the placid blue eyes of Calvin. His nose had been successfully bobbed. He’d grown a beard, turning the white desert of his face into a black forest. The hair on his head was still mottled, but more white showed through.

“Calvin? Calvin! What are you doing here?” Forgetting I disliked him, I hugged him.

“We were invited. We live on the adjoining property,” he answered and, stepping out of my embrace, pointed to an enormous white structure. Diamond shaped with a ribbon of black windows, it looked like a landlocked yacht. “What are
you
doing here?”

“It’s Dondi’s house.”

“Dondi. My God, are you two still together?”

“No. His brother and I are lovers.” I introduced him to Matthew.

“Wait, I’m confused. The invitation said Leonardo Winklevoss.”

“That’s me,” Leonardo said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I read your magazine all the time.”

Calvin’s predatory glance fell on Leonardo. His blue eyes lapped him up hungrily.

A woman stepped up to him, took his arm. “Darling, we have to go.”

“Matthew, Thomas, Leonardo, let me introduce my wife, Bitsy.”

Bitsy tossed her hair. She was a type, one I knew well enough from school. As a child her hair had been pale blond, I was willing to bet. With puberty, it had turned sandy. Now, thanks to the most expensive colorist in New York, it was tawny gold. “A pleasure,” she said. “And now, we really must go. I’m sure we’ll see you at the club. You do belong, don’t you?”

Calvin cast one last hungry glance in Leonardo’s direction then hurried after his wife.

“That bleached bitch!” Leonardo spat. “How do you know him?”

“Calvin? We were at school together. Dondi knows him better than I do. His lover was a friend of ours.”

“So, he
is
gay. There were always rumors, although he has a wife and two daughters. What’s he like?”

I shrugged. “He’s not one of my favorite people.”

“They say one day he’s going to be one of the most powerful people in music. Even now, he can probably make or break a star,” Leonardo said with reverence.

The party ended just before dark. Leonardo bullied us out to the terrace to watch the first stars. The terrace was populated with black wrought iron garden furniture. Black metal had been heated and twisted into fantastic and grotesque shapes. Had the iron been flesh, the screams of the tortured would have rent the heavens.

At the far end of the terrace, a pair of limestone doors stood—attached to nothing, locking out nothing.

“It’s symbolic,” Leonardo explained.

“Yeah,” Matthew whispered in my ear. “It symbolizes his idiocy.”

I elbowed him in the stomach, swallowed a laugh and smiled sweetly at the idiot, who sat in a metal chair with the seat pitched forward at an angle so sharp, he had to brace his feet hard against the slate floor to keep from sliding to the ground. Behind him, its fanciful back bowed and swirled into the night. The sky was chartreuse and silver.

“How would you describe our house?” Leonardo asked suddenly.

“Lighting by El Greco, furnishings by Hieronymous Borsch,” Matthew said malevolently.

Dondi’s laughter exploded into the air like a cannonball. Leonardo’s perfect features seemed to collapse. The stately pleasure boat of his beauty ran aground and sank in the harbor. I caught a glimpse of what he would look like as an old man once time, that old pirate, had plundered Leonardo’s ship’s precious cargo, his youth. I turned quickly away.

In the dark the garden furniture seemed grotesquely human; the deformed shapes appeared to stalk us. Dondi had invited us to spend the night. Now, Matthew suggested we go to bed.

“In a few minutes,” Dondi said. “I want a nightcap. Anyone else want one?”

He took our requests and then said to me, “Come give me a hand.”

We made a left out the living room and walked down a sky lighted hall painted periwinkle blue, then left into the kitchen, a stainless steel and glass block horror in which every available surface—cabinets, countertops, walls, the Gaggenau appliances, the Sub-Zero refrigerator—was sheathed in stainless steel. Dondi busied himself gathering the ingredients for a martini; he was very drunk and more than a little unsteady on his feet.

“How are you feeling?” I asked him.

He shrugged and almost lost his footing. “My balance seems a little off.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a little drunk.”

“No,” he corrected, “I’m a lot drunk. But I meant my balance was off in general—in sobriety.”

“First of all, you ought not to be drinking. Alcohol is a toxin.”

“I miss that,” he said.

“What?”

“Someone worrying about me.”

“Doesn’t Leonardo worry?”

“Not much. Hell, he doesn’t even talk to me.”

“Don’t be silly, of course he talks to you. He never shuts up.”

“Well, mostly he talks
at
me. He prattles on and on about the latest Hollywood gossip or designer fashions. He is so ‘of the moment.’ And then there’s his career in music.”

I shrugged. “He’s young,” I defended. Dondi looked at me, cocked his head, raised an eyebrow. Instantly I knew what he was thinking: Leonardo wasn’t that much younger than I. Still, I
felt
older. Much older. “He does seem rather a slave to popular culture though,” I added, not entirely sure that I wanted to defend him.

“All he does is present me with a list of his needs and wants. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we do this or go there or buy that?’” Dondi mimicked his lover’s voice and pattern of speech with startling accuracy; I had forgotten his gift for imitation. He leaned against the counter and winced.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s cold. This
house
is cold.”

I realized then that the icy surface of the refrigerator had been biting into my back. That I, too, was chilled. “Why did you buy this house?”

“Because Leonardo wanted it.” He poured a martini into a glass and handed it to me. “Although,” he continued, drunkenly topping off his own glass, “I don’t think he wanted to live in this place as much as he wanted to live in a million-dollar house.”

“You paid a million dollars for this house?” I asked curiously, looking around the kitchen. I was no longer shocked by the way they spent money.

“He doesn’t know,” he said suddenly, as softly as a moth’s wings beating against a screen door.

“He doesn’t know what? How much it cost?”

“That I’m sick.”

“Dondi! Tell me you’re joking.” My heart was beating wildly and my head began to pound.

“I’m not.”

“Are you
crazy?
How could you not tell him?”

“Are
you
crazy? How could I tell him? Do you think he’d actually stay if I did?”

He stared out the kitchen’s massive picture window. At the end of a pier, across the bay, a green light flashed seductively: Aurora. I wondered then if he missed his mother, if he’d agreed to buy this terrible house so he would be just across the bay from her. Looking out that window, she seemed so close I could almost smell her perfume. It must have seemed so to Dondi too.

“She used to call me Quarterflash,” Dondi said.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Whyte.”

“Why?”

“It’s an Australian saying: ‘a quarter flash and three parts fool.’ That about sums me up, don’t you think?”

He did live his life with an enviable amount of flash. And he had surely arrived in my life with more pomp and circumstance than I’d ever seen before or since. “You’re nobody’s fool, Dondi.”