Manhattan Nocturne Read Online Free PDF Page A

pipes and ceiling plaster, eight feet above the street, there they did it. The woman, who had hoisted her heavy layers of coats and dresses, struck the man on his bare ass with her fist, and for a moment I worried that she was being raped. But she cried aloud hoarsely in pleasure and struck him again and again, such that I understood that her heavy blows fell on the back-stroke to urge the man’s rapid reentry of her, to encourage him to use a measure of force. Happy pervert that I am, I lingered a few feet away. They didn’t notice. I watched for a moment, then for another, then moved on through the shadows of the street
    A minute later, I stood inside an opulent apartment building, handing my coat to an elderly hatcheck man, who was being careful with the ladies’ furs. An elevator man with a green vest took me upstairs.
    â€œBig party?” I asked.
    But he didn’t need to answer; I could hear the music and the murmurous roar even before the elevator doors opened. Then there I was, amid a warm mass of people, among the lipsticked lips and crinkling eyes, the teeth and the cigarettes and the expensive eyeglasses and newly cut hair and jabbering pink tongues, bright with conversation, all talking loudly, animated with great conspiratorial appetite for life’s possibilities. When you enter a big Manhattan party, you know instantly whether you are of the crowd or not, whether you are one of the smiling gents holding a drink and skipping his gaze loosely about the room. I was not. But then I’ve never felt much at ease with any crowd—always I am outside, watching, still the kid from upstate New York who spent hours in a cold shack out in the middle of the frozen lake,
staring at a hole in the ice. (The sudden brutal tug, the handover-hand hauling of the writhing form out of the dark, cold depth.)
    It was one of the spectacular apartments owned by Hobbs. Or maybe his holding company owned it—such distinctions didn’t matter; the place was a cavern of silk walls with a gilded forty-foot ceiling and about five dozen pieces of stuffed period furniture and many English paintings on the walls (selected by a consultant, bought by the truckload), with four open bars staffed by three bartenders each—and not merely unemployed actors eager to make contacts but disdainful professionals who nonetheless remembered your drink from an hour ago. A balcony overlooked the main room, and there a sextet with a piano kept the background music moving along briskly. Nearly a dozen photographers were at work, several of whom considered themselves celebrities in their own right. More rooms opened, one with tables of meats and cheeses and fruits and vegetables and mountains of little chocolates, and others where the sofas were deeper and the lights lower, places of intimate potential.
    Hobbs was in town. This was the purpose of the party, to remind everyone that he was alive, that he was not just one man but a concept, an empire, a world unto himself. Every winter he swooped through Manhattan to inspect his various properties, including his tabloid newspaper, and he arrived with the predictable entourage. But this was not what people remembered after he’d gone—they remembered precisely what he wanted them to remember, which was that he threw an absolute goddamn riot of a party. He churned things up. Stuff happened. People made deals, they met celebrities, they sailed off into the night with someone unexpected. They got drunk and said the wrong thing to the right person. Happy insult and happier slander. Or they loudly uttered many shocking or brilliant things and hoped someone might hear them. All of this was very exciting, and if it was apparent in the next day’s gossip columns that the bash had been vulgar, then so much the better.
    Hobbs was in his sixties, but that did not mean that he
decorated the setting only with well-dressed wormwood (the old but minor millionaires with their optimistic