The Fall of Princes Read Online Free PDF Page B

her stepfather’s bank. Then to the lawyer’s (stopping on the way for a manicure and pedicure), where she was coached about what to do to ensure that there was nothing left in my name. She ran her perfectly manicured hands through her perfectly disarranged hair and signed document after document until there was nothing left to get.
    I loved her with every cell of my being. She was in my brain and in my blood, and the loss of her was infinitely worse than the slap in the face. And I know she loved me. Or at least she loved me when I was on the come. And still. And still. She knew it, and I knew it. The ink in my pen had turned from blue to black, and whatever contracts had been signed, even promises made from the heart, whispered pillow to pillow in the night, were null and void.
    I resented nothing. Didn’t have the strength.
    Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
    Was there a second Troy for her to burn?
    Irreconcilable differences. The two saddest words in the English language.
    I called the movers, and watched as my beautiful things went onto racks and into boxes, suits and shirts and shoes that were worth the price of a house. I took the sheets, so beautiful they might have comprised a museum exhibit. I took the towels, monogrammed with my initials. I took the toothpaste.
    All these things went to Hovel Hall, my rat-infested starter apartment, and as they entered the doors of that apartment, after climbing five flights of steps, you could see the disappointment and sympathy on the faces of the movers, and I tipped them overly generously so they could forget that they had ever been in those shabby rooms, seen the failure inherent in that sad move.
    I looked around the apartment. Hopeless. I began to put my things away in the inadequate closets. A bad wind was rising, all of the world’s seven malevolent winds were blowing in my heart, flattening and desiccating the landscape, once verdant, into a desert.
    I had never loved anybody more than I loved Carmela at that moment. And I knew it was permanent. Romance, Inc., had shut its doors forever.
    Forever.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Place I Really Live

    I wake up in the dark.
Au bout de la nuit,
4:06 on the LED. Take a leak. Cigarette. I know I shouldn’t; I mean, in general, generally speaking, nobody should, not after everything we know, not after we’ve watched loved ones die, not to mention movie stars, but I do. I’m an addict. But I especially shouldn’t smoke at 4:06 when I have a hope of getting back to sleep. It makes my heart race.
    It makes the heavy covers feel like prison garb. It makes you feel like you live in a cheap bungalow in Los Angeles, California, in a noir decade.
    If I did live in Los Angeles, I would never call it L.A. But if I lived in Las Vegas, I would always call it Vegas. These are the games your mind plays when it’s 4:07 and your heart is racing from the nicotine intake.
    I turn on the radio and listen to alternative rock from the University of Pennsylvania for a while. My Morning Jacket. Placebo. Ray LaMontagne, who used to work in a shoe factory. Pink Martini, a twelve-member West Coast band that sold 650,000 copies of their self-made CD from their basement.
    I keep the volume low, and I feel completely free of anxiety, even though my heart is racing and I’m excited about tomorrow.
    Tomorrow, or today, actually, is the first Tuesday of December. On the first Tuesday of every month, I go look at apartments.
    I work at Barnes and Noble, and I have Monday and Tuesday off, since I work on Saturdays, and I work the late shift on Sundays, after I go to church. I go to church every week, and put money in the plate, even though I have long ago lost my faith. I guess it’s a kind of hope I feel, a hope that faith and a sense of the miraculousness of life will return to me. It hasn’t, and the priests’ voices drone on in that way that is supposed to be comforting but is actually kind of irritating, but I still go. I sit, in one of my