Basket of Deplorables Read online

  Contents

  Basket of Deplorables

  Truth is for Losers

  Leakzilla

  Sad! Wrong! Not Nice!

  How the End Begins

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Matteo

  1

  Basket of Deplorables

  YOU CAN’T SEE ME right now. Then again, I can’t see you either.

  One’s hearing, they say, improves when you go blind. Hasn’t happened in my case. Not that I’m longing to listen to anyone. But it’s the election party tonight, everyone gathering at our Manhattan apartment for the Hillary v. Donald results. Actually, it’s all going on now, right around me, which explains my half-smile and nods, even if my thoughts are elsewhere entirely.

  Roger, my dearly beloved, has always wanted to be remembered for famous parties. And his events are memorable, attended by literary types and pop-culture types – those he’s signed to write books and those he’s wooing. Christopher Hitchens was a regular presence, notoriously clashing with Henry Kissinger above a plate of quail eggs once. On another occasion, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields turned up, squabbling like siblings, while the Saudi and Israeli ambassadors gabbed away like dear old chums. Even Britney Spears made an appearance, sitting on the kitchen counter and slurping from a huge bottle of Diet Coke, terrified by the hothouse intellectuals pinging her with questions.

  But all such chatter halted roughly a year ago; tonight is our first party since my accident. Roger urged me to agree, said he needed this for work, for his reputation, and to mark the special day that America finally elects a female president. ‘Could you try this evening?’ he asked. ‘You can still be charming when you want, Georgie.’

  By contrast, my husband has no option but charming. He’s a font of the right words, the right opinions, the right guest lists, the right seating plans. Only one feature is clangingly wrong nowadays: his wife, me.

  When our guests arrived this evening, how uneasy they were after all these months. They expected my long hair, that luscious Georgina mane, uncut since age five. However, emergency-room medics had taken the liberty of shaving a patch at the back, in order to drill and relieve pressure on my brain. When recovering, I shaved the rest to match, and have kept it short ever since. Our female guests fibbed, saying I’m positively gorgeous with short hair – and their menfolk agreed with alacrity, evidently spooked by the sight of me so crumpled. When I myself had working vision, I categorized women just as mercilessly: a trophy wife, say, or a herbal-tea drinker, or yet another bipolar creative. Never did I belong in any category. But today? The gracelessly aging older woman who still smokes at parties? The kind who thinks she could still have an affair, that she’d have choices. Or did until recently.

  I flinch at the warm breath on my ear. ‘Bathroom break?’ Roger asks, whispering that it’s time for my pills, of which there are dozens daily. He leads me past our jabbering guests, neither my husband nor I speaking a word all the way to the bathroom, where I am freed.

  I close the door after me, fumble for my pills, swallow them dry. I put my hands flat on the cold mirror, fingertips trembling. It’s adrenalin. Because I’m going to do this tonight. In front of everyone. I will.

  But wait. First, I must explain something.

  It’s immensely stupid, which is why I’m prevaricating. But you can’t truly understand my predicament otherwise. It happened little more than a year ago. I was jogging up toward the Central Park reservoir, which I made a habit of lapping five times daily – not too shabby for a woman recently sixty. Just short of the park, I was flagged down by an anxious little old chap who sought directions to the Metropolitan Museum, which I supplied, annoyed to be interrupted while I had a sweat going. In his defense, there was nobody else around in the thunderstorm. So I outlined his route, whereupon he set off in precisely the wrong direction. Must be dementia, I supposed, and called to him, hopping backward as I did so, jabbing my finger north-east to indicate the correct path – upon which my brain shut down.

  What followed, we later pieced together, is that I slipped on the wet pavement and crashed to the ground, the rear of my skull slamming into a steel gutter between two parked cars. There I lay under the pelting rain, unaided for forty minutes. By the time paramedics had me in their grips, the hemorrhage had wreaked irreversible damage: my brain went blind – not my eyes, which remain faultless, if pointless. It’s the gray matter that can’t see gray, or any other color.

  Waking blind, I must tell you, is highly inconvenient. And it keeps happening. Because I see when dreaming. Then I open my eyes, and it’s dark again.

  What you likely fear about blindness is the loss of particular sights: trees swaying, or movies flickering, or your children’s expressions as they age. But worse befalls you. You’re suddenly surrounded by threats: each footstep the risk of another fall or crashing collision, as if thugs encircled you, baseball bats raised to crack your shins, knees, face.

  There are lesser bothers, too. I dread the building elevator now. It’s our neighbors there, each demanding a medical update. I will not hear myself yet again talking of ‘damaged occipital lobes’ and ‘cerebral contusions’. I can’t get better from this. Stop asking.

  To avert such encounters, I favor the emergency stairwell, clutching its metal banister, sliding the back of each shoe down every riser to gauge the height, extending my leg, thigh and calf tensed – the terror of clattering forward twinned with a temptation to fall, as if on a mountainside, scurrying across a patch of ice, the void below. Finally, I reach our ground floor, where I invariably take one too many steps, finding myself in an absurd crouch, praying nobody comes to my aid, that the doorman holds his breath and stalks away.

  Roger, I must say, has been impeccable. He bought me the talking microwave and the screen-reading software and a course on Braille, which I failed to attend. He gathered me up when I howled from our bedroom, unable to find the door out after two hours; he tolerates my mysterious headaches that last weeks; he ignores my hand-clenched rages. Yes, Roger is without fault – one of those men so handsome you assume they’re stupid, though he most certainly is not. Only child of a Swiss banker and a French blue blood, my husband was born here in New York, raised in Singapore and Paris, attended Yale for good measure, and entered publishing thereafter, scraping by then at his dad’s vacant penthouse. Strikingly fit for fifty-six, Roger retains a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and wears a frosting of white stubble, handmade suits cut in Florence, always a perfect white Hugo Boss shirt and a linen scarf around his neck, a different color each day. He speaks six languages with a proficiency ranging from native fluency to irritatingly excellent, knows food and wine and important people, and never overdoes any of them. What’s most seductive is that Roger is always at ease. More than anyone I’ve known, he’s convinced that he should be wherever he is. Including beside me.

  So it was for sixteen years. Then I fell, and I woke, and it occurred to me: I have no connection to this man. When we were successful, that didn’t matter. We were just the perfect match. I recall a scene from years back, when his daughter Scout, still a little girl then, walked into one of our parties in her pajamas, asking loudly, ‘Daddy, who’s smarter between you and Georgina?’ Nervous titters ensued. However, there’s no question anymore. Everyone just admires Roger – for his goodness in sticking with me, paying for the private nurses, tolerating the impairments. I’m a duty. An object here.

  A burst of uproarious laughter in the living room. I reach for the bathroom light switch – it’s been off this whole time; no difference to me. But I want the fan to blot out the noise of them. Gingerly, I touch the back of my head, as if bleeding again. My fingers trace the horizontal scar. How strange
that ‘me’ is inside this skull. ‘Me’ used to be outside, wittily among them. Now I’m stuck in here, urging myself to do as I’ve planned. My mouth goes dry. Because I will wreck myself this evening. I will wreck us both.

  Roger awaits me in the hall, and darts into the bathroom as I leave it, collecting my dark glasses, which I intentionally forgot. He hates it when I appear with exposed eyes, which fix sinisterly on people, dead blue monstrosities glowering at them.

  He directs me to my place on the couch, where I’m engulfed by voices.

  ‘What I don’t get about chiropractors, osteopaths and physios is how they interface, you know?’ Increasingly, our parties sound like a triage tent. The stage of life where people prattle about medical procedures, it seems, is also when they drift rightward politically. Coincidence? Mind you, everyone around here clings to the old leftie values, much as I wear jeans that are too tight, the only sign being that I tend to start arguments after a large meal. Thankfully for us, America has done us a grand favor in recent years, careening so ludicrously to the Right that we may drift from our Left lane and still consider ourselves radicals. Thank you, fly-over states!

  ‘But what actually is the difference?’ asks one of our younger guests, the radio host and activist Vanessa Tejeda.

  ‘If I may mansplain?’ says the comic Andy Rosner. ‘Physios have actual training, while chiros and osteos are essentially frauds with mystic beliefs in “alignment”. They’re found with some combination of scented candles, pictures of Mother Teresa, mandalas, dried-flower arrangements, and whale-noise tapes.’

  Chuckles abound.

  But, dear reader, I’ve failed you. I’m used to everyone but me seeing for themselves. However, you need narration, too. So look around: an apartment in Tribeca, open-plan living room, a half-dozen couches draped in Gujarati mirror-linens. Hardwood floors, covered by crimson rugs from Baluchistan. Twin industrial-chic coffee tables of upcycled airplane parts, the surfaces piled with fine-art photography collections and old copies of the New Yorker. Along the walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves, heaving with books. An antique map of the world. A few framed shots of my work, too – which is to say, snaps of pouty stars of yesteryear: impish Liza chewing her green fingernails, Martha Gellhorn looking daggers, Truman Capote glazed after cocktails at Studio 54.

  As for my work, I set out as just another posh girl in London, best known for drinking men under the table, taking my top off at parties, and being intimate friends with Mr. Jagger – a chain of facts that were highly correlated. I overcame this early infamy by way of New York, where I took magazine photographs of actors and singers and socialites. Which is how I met Roger, then a hotshot young publisher still at Taschen when he commissioned my first collection, Vicious People Doing Stupid Things: The Worst of Georgina Peet, 1974‒1991. I can smell that first copy still, its gloss under my hand, each page sliding away as I turned to the next celebrity grimace.

  Funny to think of those early pictures – already so acerbic, as if my Leica sensed what I was going to become before I did. But in the Seventies, a girl did need sharp elbows. Men were gropey then, and nobody much objected, except possibly the groped. Fortunately, I was skilled at bringing the impudent to heel. My mother taught us that anger is the worst tool. It’s scorn you want, the colder the better. And I had a talent for it, honed by dismantling the egos of my older brothers, Hugh and Will, poor fellows. By comparison, pop musicians were a cinch. How they shriveled before my lenses!

  My trademark image became the miffed star. I targeted my subject’s security blanket and tore it away, whether it was a lurking manager, a circling lover or, later, a mobile phone. I’d drag out the shoot, playing on the celebrity’s nerves, shifting lighting, fiddling endlessly with exposures, all the while prodding them, asking questions like: ‘Are you still drinking as much? Or was that only after he left you?’ Oh, how the pampered loathed me! But they had to contain themselves – a high-profile publication had commissioned me for the shoot. Only I could land them the cover.

  ‘Think lava when you taste,’ Roger is telling everyone, explaining tonight’s booze: volcanic wines from Etna, Santorini, Tenerife – a choice esoteric enough to satisfy any terroir bores who might be present. The guests slurp appreciatively, nibbling mixed-seed lavosh with spicy feta dip, tossing back marinated olives and pimientos de Padrón. In the distance, the sound of Blitzer and his wolf pack emits from CNN, which is playing in the den, at the other end of the apartment.

  A rule at our election events is that nobody watches live television – cable news is too excruciatingly IQ-melting. Also, if food spills on Roger’s vintage Danish furniture in the den, he might weep. For the results tonight, we were depending on his now-overgrown daughter, Scout, who is monitoring the TV there. But in an antisocial slap against her father, she is refusing to walk the length of the apartment to deliver them, leaving us reliant on dispatches from her college love and companion, Emma.

  Of our guests, I’ve already mentioned Andy, road comic of late-onset fame. He alone interacts normally with me tonight – flippant as ever, each of us ignoring the other but keenly aware. We’ve always been a little in love. Andy’s a mess: scraggly beard, thick glasses, oversmart and not glad about it. I’m a decade his senior, but we might’ve been an item if we’d met back when Clinton the First was candidate and that name still represented ‘youthful and sexy’, as did I. Andy is two seasons into a Netflix single-cam sitcom, Rosner, in which he plays – hold your breath – a middle-aged schlub comedian. The show has made him what he calls ‘niche huge’. Above all, it makes Andy a winner, which is deeply uncomfortable for him.

  Reportedly, he came tonight wearing a T-shirt of Donald Trump with a circling American eagle, which was intended sarcastically, of course. That’s the upside of Trump: he unites the sane. Sure, everyone has a deranged uncle in Kalamazoo or some such place blogging about how the Clintons molest baby pandas. But, hey, who didn’t know that already? Anyone moderately coherent – including all those people you fell out with over the Iraq War – they’re back on board now.

  Our self-appointed therapist tonight is the aforementioned Vanessa, host of a hip WNYC show on politics. ‘It’s happening, folks!’ she says, explaining Hillary’s many routes to electoral-college victory. Vanessa has credibility, too, the only person here who has worked in politics, once a senior aide to Fernando Ferrer when he ran for mayor of New York City and lost to Bloomberg. Discreetly/indiscreetly, Vanessa is planning her house move to DC come January – Huma is a close friend. ‘When the Republicans go down tonight, they’ll hit hard on the voter-fraud baloney. Wait for it. It’s the new Jim Crow. Seriously.’

  Her approving chorus is led by David Ephraim, professor of cultural theory at Bard and one of Roger’s long-time authors. His most recent volume argued that Americans ought to judge each other based on decency, not by capitalist metrics of success. This set off a shitstorm by mistake, when the blogosphere called elements of his book prejudiced, noting that David had cited a much-debunked study on race and intelligence. ‘But not approvingly!’ he insisted. The controversy was fantastic for sales, Roger told me, yet it nearly drove poor David to a breakdown since bigotry so contradicted his self-image. He kept apologizing on Facebook, but nothing stopped the blizzard of hate. Finally, it was Roger who saved the man, hiring an outside PR firm, and earning lifelong gratitude from his author. Seated next along is David’s wife, Kiara Blonstein-Ephraim, producer of reality television, the socially responsible kind, most recently a series about trans teenagers in backward rural communities of the South, a show watched entirely by rich liberals in urban communities of the coasts.

  To David and Kiara’s left sits the Williamsburg fashion designer Sindy Pereira, who came tonight with her boyfriend, the novelist, playwright and n+1 co-editor Enson Carthy. To readers, Enson remains the pretty boy of twenty-nine years old on the back of his 2002 debut, Sugar Daddy, a novel written from the perspective of a young bimbo trying to lasso a craggy old business magnate – a story
line that returned the book to bestseller lists this past year. Any similarity to Melania, he assures interviewers, is pure coincidence. Enson – closer to fifty now than to the waif in his still-unchanged author photo – hasn’t written a novel since, too aflush with Brooklyn literary bling and magazine meetings.

  Our biggest star tonight, as measured by Instagram followers, is Sweet J Vincent, front man of The Late Jud Fry, an indie band of which he’s the sole member. Roger just published a book of J’s lyrics called Poor Jud is Dead, presented as poetry. He refers to J as ‘the next great American singer-songwriter who’ll be turning down an invitation from Stockholm’. A self-described OCD pescatarian, J is soft-spoken, tall and gaunt, with that fake shyness of the megafamous.

  ‘Hey, you guys?’ peeps a sniffly adolescent voice from the doorway ‒ Emma in her role as second-hand CNN. ‘So, Clinton just won Vermont.’ Wiping her nose, she adds, ‘But Trump got Indiana and Kentucky.’

  Vanessa assures us that this is fine; as expected. ‘Oh, you know Kentucky. It’s red, through and through. We knew it was a write-off.’

  Somebody touches my hand. A shiver passes through me.

  ‘Just me,’ Kiara says, squeezing my fingers as if I were Grandma. ‘You’re so quiet tonight, George.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I swallow hard. Not like me to be a coward. I take my hand back, telling her: ‘I was praying to Jesus for the right result.’ This is irony, since nobody here believes in God, except possibly Vanessa, and she in a soggy, we’re-all-one way.

  Before Kiara can patronize me further, the caterers intervene, delivering appetizers to widespread oohs: harissa lamb kofta bites with tahini and sumac; saffron rice with barberries, pistachios and mixed herbs; pan-fried mackerel yums with golden beetroot and orange hazelnut salsa. We always use this catering company, run by a Salvadoran whom we’ve grown close to. Lucio can reproduce from any cookbook – tonight, we have him raiding the pages of Ottolenghi.