The Fall of Princes Read Free Page A

paper with a white satin ribbon making a bow. She also hands me a notebook of blank pages, bound in leather, with the firm’s name embossed at the top and my name embossed in smaller letters in the lower right-hand corner. My name is spelled correctly.
    “Good luck,” she says, as she has said a thousand times before.
    I wait until I’m on the train before I open the box. I take out the black-and-gold pen with the familiar logo on the cap and open the notebook and sign my name in royal blue ink.
    Pay attention. You can hear the match strike. You can smell the sulfur, and I allow myself the slightest smile as the train pulls out of the station through the dark tunnels and into the brilliance of the future.

CHAPTER TWO
    Belated

    F orgive me.
    I try not to think about the past very much. The way it was and isn’t anymore. I try to, you know, go with the flow and live my life as it’s handed to me. But sometimes I wake from a dream and I can’t help it. The past washes over me like the tides and along with the tides comes a sense of mortification so profound I feel it in my scrotum, like when you’re thinking about the likelihood of having your teeth drilled.
    Forgive me for thinking that I was better than you will ever be. Forgive me for thinking that money equaled a kind of moral superiority. Forgive me for not thinking enough about the plight of the poor, the terrible lassitude that overtakes them the moment their feet hit the floor. The poor only bet on losing horses. They only give up things, they never get, until there’s nothing left to part with, nothing of any value except for a faded photograph of their mother and father’s wedding, a small figurine given to them on the boardwalk on one happy day in a lifetime of unending sameness.
    And they never look at the fiber content of the clothes they buy at Walmart. And they have a fear of running out of things, out of butter, out of sugar, out of laundry detergent. And they suffer nothing but one humiliation after another and they buy scratchers with their welfare money at the gas station and they never win a dime.
    For poor people, it’s always Christmas Eve. Alone. Christmas never comes.
    And then there’s AIDS, or the homeless who wait for volunteers to come and dish out a bland Thanksgiving dinner, or food stamps, or bad teeth or being ugly. Forgive me for thinking that these were things that happened to other people on another planet.
    Forgive me, Blonde Girl, for going to the men’s room between dinner and dessert, stopping to pay the check with the maitre d’, grabbing my coat and walking out of the restaurant on a snowy February night to hail a cab and go to a loud, hot room where the people were more attractive.
    How long did you sit there? How long did you endure the pitying condescension of the waiters? How did it feel to leave the restaurant and stand with the snow falling and nowhere to go, the careful makeup, the sequined dress all for nothing in the night, for this insult, and barely enough money in your purse to get home to your flat crowded with girls just like you?
    You had perfect legs. The curve of your breasts beneath the gauzy dress was sublime. You paid three hundred dollars to have your hair colored. And for what? To be left alone in the middle of the restaurant of the week, by a man who doesn’t even remember your name? By a man who never gave it a second thought until the lonely nights descended without expiation.
    Who told the story later over and over as though it were some joke and you were the punch line.
    Forgive me for thinking that sitting courtside at the Knicks at four hundred a pop, three seats away from Spike Lee, was a useful way of spending money. Forgive me for thinking that meeting a movie star was the same as knowing movie stars, perhaps the most unknowable people on earth.
    The truth is, I had no deep respect and took no pride in what I did, I just did it for fun and the high, the restless high roll of it all, and so