"According to his datebook, and this was verified by his secretary, he had dinner with... Marcus Halberstam," he says.

"And?" I ask.

"I've questioned him."

"Marcus?"

"Yes. And he denies it," Kimball says. "Though at first he couldn't be sure."

"But Marcus denied it?"

"Yes."

"Well, does Marcus have an alibi?" I have a heightened receptivity to his answers now.

"Yes."

Pause.

"He does does?" I ask. "You're sure?"

"I checked it out; " he says with an odd smile. "It's clean."

Pause.

"Now where were you you?" He laughs.

I laugh too, though I'm not sure why. "Where was Marcus?" I'm almost giggling.

Kimball keeps smiling as he looks me over. "He wasn't with Paul Owen," he says enigmatically.

"So who was he with?" I'm laughing still, but I'm also very dizzy.

Kimball opens his book and for the first time gives me a slightly hostile look. "He was at Atlantis with Craig McDermott, Frederick Dibble, Harry Newman, George Butner and" Kimball pauses, then looks up "you."

In this office right now I am thinking about how long it would take a corpse to disintegrate right in this office. In this office these are the things I fantasize about while dreaming: Eating ribs at Red, Hot and Blue in Washington, D.C. If I should switch shampoos. What really is the best dry beer? Is Bill Robinson an overrated designer? What's wrong with IBM? Ultimate luxury. Is the term "playing hardball" an adverb? The fragile peace of Assisi. Electric light. The epitome of luxury. Of ultimate luxury. The bastard's wearing the same damn Armani linen suit I've got on. How easy it would be to scare the living wits out of this fucking guy. Kimball is utterly unaware of how truly vacant I am. There is no evidence of animate life in this office, yet still he takes notes. By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world. I would like a Pilsner Urquell.

"Oh right," I say. "Of course... We had wanted Paul Owen to come," I say, nodding my head as if just realizing something. "But he said he had plans..." Then, lamely, "I guess I had dinner with Victoria the... following night."

"Listen, like I said, I was just hired by Meredith." He sighs, closing his book.

Tentatively, I ask, "Did you know that Meredith Powell is dating Brock Thompson?"

He shrugs, sighs. "I don't know about that. All I know is that Paul Owen owes her supposedly a lot of money."

"Oh?" I say, nodding. "Really?"

"Personally," he says, confiding, "I think the guy went a little nutso. Split town for a while. Maybe he did did go to London. Sightseeing. Drinking. Whatever. Anyway, I'm pretty sure he'll turn up sooner or later." go to London. Sightseeing. Drinking. Whatever. Anyway, I'm pretty sure he'll turn up sooner or later."

I nod slowly, hoping to look suitably bewildered.

"Was he involved at all, do you think, in, say, occultism or Satan worship?" Kimball asks seriously.

"Er, what?"

"I know it sounds like a lame question but an New Jersey last month I don't, know if you've heard about this, but a young stockbroker was recently arrested and charged with murdering a young Chicano girl and performing voodoo rituals with, well, various body parts"

"Yikes!" I exclaim.

"And I mean..." He smiles sheepishly again. "Have you heard anything about this?"

"Did the guy deny doing it?" I ask, tingling.

"Right." Kimball nods.

"That was an interesting case," I manage to say.

"Even though the guy says he's innocent he still thinks he's Inca, the bird god, or something," Kimball says, scrunching his features up.

We both laugh out loud about this.

"No," I finally say. "Paul wasn't into that. He followed a a balanced diet and" balanced diet and"

"Yeah, I know, and was into that whole Yale thing," Kimball finishes tiredly.

There is a long pause that, I think, might be the longest one so far.

"Have you consulted a psychic?" I ask.

"No." He shakes his head in a way that suggests he's considered it. Oh who cares? cares?

"Had his apartment been burglarized?" I ask.

"No, it actually hadn't," he says. "Toiletries were missing. A suit was gone. So was some luggage. That's it."

"Do you suspect foul play?"

"Can't say," he says. "But like I told you, I wouldn't be surprised if he's just hiding out someplace."

"I mean no one's dealing with the homicide squad yet or anything, right?" I ask.

"No, not yet. As I said, we're not sure. But..." He stops, looks dejected. "Basically no one has seen or heard anything."

"That's so typical, isn't it?" I ask.

"It's just strange," he agrees, staring out the window, lost. "One day someone's walking around, going to work, alive alive, and then..." Kimball stops, fails to complete the sentence.

"Nothing," I sigh, nodding.

"People just... disappear," he says.

"The earth just opens up and swallows people," I say, somewhat sadly, checking my Rolex.

"Eerie." Kimball yawns, stretching. "Really eerie."

"Ominous." I nod my agreement.

"It's just" he sighs, exasperated "futile."

I pause, unsure of what to say, and come up with "Futility is... hard to deal with."

I am thinking about nothing. It's silent in the office. To break it, I point out a book on top of the desk, next to the San Pellegrino bottle. The Art of the Deal The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump.

"Have you read it?" I ask Kimball.

"No," he sighs, but politely asks, "Is it any good?"

"It's very good," I say, nodding.

"Listen." He sighs again. "I've taken up enough of your time." He pockets the Marlboros.

"I have a lunch meeting with Cliff Huxtable at The Four Seasons in twenty minutes anyway," I lie, standing up. "I have to go too."

"Isn't The Four Seasons a little far uptown?" He looks concerned, also getting up. "I mean aren't you going to be late?"

"Uh, no," I stall. "There's one... down here."

"Oh really?" he asks. "I didn't know that."

"Yes," I say, leading him to the door. "It's very good."

"Listen," he says, turning to face me. "If anything occurs to you, any information at all..."

I hold up a hand. "Absolutely. I'm one hundred percent with you," I say solemnly.

"Great," the ineffectual one says, relieved. "And thanks for your, uh, time, Mr. Bateman."

Moving him toward the door, my legs wobbly, astronautlike, leading him out of the office, though I'm empty, devoid of feeling, I still sense without deluding myself that I've accomplished something and then, anticlimactically, we talk for a few minutes more about razorburn balms and tattersall shirts. There was an odd general lack of urgency to the conversation that I found soothing nothing happened at all but when he smiles, hands me his card, leaves, the door closing sounds to me like a billion insects screaming, pounds of bacon sizzling, a vast emptiness. And after he leaves the building (I have Jean buzz Tom at Security to make sure) I call someone recommended by my lawyer, to make sure none of my phones are wiretapped, and after a Xanax I'm able to meet with my nutritionist at an expensive, upscale healthfood restaurant called Cuisine de Soy in Tribeca and while sitting beneath the dolphin, stuffed and shellacked, that hangs over the tofu bar, its body bent into an arc, I'm able to ask the nutritionist questions like "Okay, so give me the muffin lowdown" without cringing. Back at the office two hours later, I find out that none of my phones are tapped.

I also run into Meredith Powell later this week, on Friday night, at Ereze with Brock Thompson, and though we talk for ten minutes, mostly about why neither one of us is in the Hamptons, with Brock glaring at me the entire time, she doesn't mention Paul Owen once. I'm having an excruciatingly slow dinner with my date, Jeannette. The restaurant is flashy and new and the meal inches along, drags by. The portions are meager. I grow increasingly agitated. Afterwards I want to bypass M.K., even though Jeanette complains because she wants to dance. I'm tired and I need to rest. At my apartment I lie in bed, too distracted to have sex with her, so she leaves, and after watching a tape of this morning's Patty Winters Show Patty Winters Show, which is about the best restaurants in the Middle East, I pick up my cordless phone and tentatively, reluctantly, call Evelyn.

Summer

Most of the summer I spent in a stupor, sitting either in my once or in new restaurants, in my apartment watching videotapes or in the backs of cabs, in nightclubs that just opened or in movie theaters, at the building in Hell's Kitchen or in new restaurants. There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views af the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workers retrieving body parts. I started using Oscar de la Renta men's deodorant, which gave me a slight rash. A movie about a small talking bug was released to great fanfare and grossed over two hundred million dollars. The Mets were doing badly. Beggars and homeless seemed to have multiplied in August and the ranks of the unfortunate, weak and aged lined the streets everywhere. I found myself asking too many summer associates at too many dinners in flashy new restaurants before taking them to Les Miserables Les Miserables if anyone had seen if anyone had seen The Toolbox Murders The Toolbox Murders on HBO and silent tables would stare back at me, before I would cough politely and summon the waiter over for the check, or I'd ask for sorbet or, if this was earlier in the dinner, for another bottle of San Pellegrino, and then I'd ask the summer associates, "No?" and assure them, "It was quite good." My platinum American Express card had gone through so much use that it snapped in half, selfdestructed, at one of those dinners, when I took two summer associates to Restless and Young, the new Pablo Lester restaurant in midtown, but I had enough cash in my gazelleskin wallet to pay for the meal. on HBO and silent tables would stare back at me, before I would cough politely and summon the waiter over for the check, or I'd ask for sorbet or, if this was earlier in the dinner, for another bottle of San Pellegrino, and then I'd ask the summer associates, "No?" and assure them, "It was quite good." My platinum American Express card had gone through so much use that it snapped in half, selfdestructed, at one of those dinners, when I took two summer associates to Restless and Young, the new Pablo Lester restaurant in midtown, but I had enough cash in my gazelleskin wallet to pay for the meal. The Patty Winters Show The Patty Winters Shows were all repeats. Life remained a blank canvas, a cliche, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation. I needed to go to the Hamptons.

I suggested this to Evelyn and, like a spider, she accepted.

The house we stayed at was actually Tim Price's, which Evelyn had the keys to for some reason, but in my stupefied state I refused to ask for specifics.

Tim's house was on the water in East Hampton and was adorned with many gable roofs and was four stories high, all connected by a galvanizedsteel staircase, and had what at first I thought was a Southwestern motif but wasn't. The kitchen was one thousand square feet of pure minimalist design; one wall held everything: two huge ovens, massive cupboards, a walkin freezer, a threedoor refrigerator. An island of customcrafted stainless steel divided the kitchen into three separate spaces. Four of the nine bathrooms contained trompe l'oeil paintings and five of them had antique lead ram's heads that hung over the sink, water spouting from their mouths. All the sinks and bathtubs and showers were antique marble and the floors were composed of tiny marble mosaics. A television was built into a wall alcove above the master bathtub. Every room had a stereo. The house also contained twelve Frank Lloyd Wright standing lamps, fourteen Josef Heffermann club chairs, two walls of floortoceiling videocassette cases and another wall stacked solely with thousands of compact discs encased in glass cabinets. A chandelier by Eric Schmidt hung in the front entranceway, below it stood an Atomic Ironworks steel moose hatrack by a Young sculptor I'd never heard of. A round nineteenthcentury Russian dining table sat in a room adjacent to the kitchen, but had no chairs. Spooky photographs by Cindy Sherman lined the walls everywhere. There was an exercise room. There were eight walkin closets, five VCRs, a Noguchi glass and walnut dining table, a hall table by Marc Schaffer and a fax machine. There was a topiary tree in the master bedroom next to a Louis XVI window bench. An Eric Fischl painting hung over one of the marble fireplaces. There was a tennis court. There were two saunas and an indoor Jacuzzi in a small guesthouse that sat by the pool, which was blackbottomed. There were stone columns in odd places.

I really tried to make things work the weeks we were out there. Evelyn and I rode bicycles and jogged and played tennis. We talked about going to the south of France or to Scotland; we talked about driving through Germany and visiting unspoiled opera houses. We went windsurfing. We talked about only romantic things: the light on eastern Long Island, the moonrise in October over the hills of the Virginia hunt country. We took baths together in the big marble tubs. We had breakfast in bed, snuggling beneath cashmere blankets after I'd poured imported coffee from a Melior pot into Hermes cups. I woke her up with fresh flowers. I put notes in her Louis Vuitton carry bag before she left for her weekly facials in Manhattan. I bought her a puppy, a small black chow, which she named NutraSweet and fed dietetic chocolate trues to. I read long passages aloud from Doctor Zhivago Doctor Zhivago and and A Farewell to Arms A Farewell to Arms (my favorite Hemingway). I rented movies in town that Price didn't own, mostly comedies from the 1930s, and played them on one of the many VCRs, our favorite being (my favorite Hemingway). I rented movies in town that Price didn't own, mostly comedies from the 1930s, and played them on one of the many VCRs, our favorite being Roman Holiday, Roman Holiday, which we watched twice. We listened to Frank Sinatra (only his 1950s period) and Nat King Cole's which we watched twice. We listened to Frank Sinatra (only his 1950s period) and Nat King Cole's After Midnight, After Midnight, which Tim had on CD. I bought her expensive lingerie, which sometimes she wore. which Tim had on CD. I bought her expensive lingerie, which sometimes she wore.

After skinnydipping in the ocean late at night, we would come into the house, shivering, draped in huge Ralph Lauren towels, and we'd make omelets and noodles tossed with olive oil and truffles and porcini mushrooms; we'd make souffles with poached pears and cinnamon fruit salads, grilled polenta with peppered salmon, apple and berry sorbet, mascarpone, red beans with arrozo wrapped in romaine lettuce, bowls of salsa and skate poached in balsamic vinegar, chilled tomato soup and risottos flavored with beets and lime and asparagus and mint, and we drank lemonade or champagne or wellaged bottles of Chateau Margaux. But soon we stopped lifting weights together and wing laps and Evelyn would eat only the dietetic chocolate trues that NutraSweet hadn't eaten, complaining about weight she hadn't gained. Some nights I would find my self roaming the beaches, digging up baby crabs and eating handfuls of sand this was in the middle of the night when the sky was so clear I could see the entire solar system and the sand, lit by it, seemed almost lunar in scale. I even dragged a beached jellyfish back to the house and microwaved it early one morning, predawn, while Evelyn slept, and what I didn't eat of it I fed to the chow.

Sipping bourbon, then champagne, from cactusetched highball glasses, which Evelyn would set on adobe coasters and into which she would stir raspberry cassis with papiermache jalapenoshaped stirrers, I would lie around, fantasizing about killing someone with an Allsop Racer ski pole, or I would stare at the antique weather vane that hung above one of the fireplaces, wondering wildeyed if I could stab anyone with it, then I'd complain aloud, whether Evelyn was in the room or not, that we should have made reservations at Dick Loudon's Stratford Inn instead. Evelyn soon started talking only about spas and cosmetic surgery and then she hired a masseur, some scary faggot who lived down the road with a famous book publisher and who flirted openly with me. Evelyn went back to the city three times that last week we were in the Hamptons, once for a manicure and a pedicure and a facial, the second time for a oneonone training session at Stephanie Herman, and finally to meet with her astrologer.

"Why helicopter in?" I asked in a whisper.

"What do you want me to do?" she shrieked, popping another dietetic true into her mouth. "Rent a Volvo Volvo?"

While she was gone I would vomit just to do it into the rustic terracotta jars that lined the patio in front or I would drive into town with the scary masseur and collect razor blades. At night I'd place a fauxconcrete and aluminumwire sconce by Jerry Kott over Evelyn's head and since she'd be so knocked out on Halcion she wouldn't brush it off, and though I laughed at this, while the sconce rose evenly with her deep breathing, soon it made me sad and I stopped placing the sconce over Evelyn's head.

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being flesh, blood, skin, hair but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why I couldn't put my finger on it. The only thing that calmed me was the satisfying sound of ice being dropped into a glass of J&B. Eventually I drowned the chow, which Evelyn didn't miss; she didn't even notice its absence, not even when I threw it in the walkin freezer, wrapped in one of her sweaters from Bergdorf Goodman. We had to leave the Hamptons because I would find myself standing over our bed in the hours before dawn, with an ice pick gripped in my fist, waiting for Evelyn to open her eyes. At my suggestion, one morning over breakfast, she agreed, and on the last Sunday before Labor Day we returned to Manhattan by helicopter.

Girls

"I thought the pinto beans with salmon and mint were really, really... you know," Elizabeth says, walking into the living room of my apartment and in one graceful movement kicking off both satin and suede Maud Frizon pumps and flopping onto the couch, "good, but Patrick, my god it was expensive and," then, bristling, she bitches, "it was and," then, bristling, she bitches, "it was only only pseudo nouvelle." pseudo nouvelle."

"Was it my imagination or were there goldfish on the tables?" I ask, undoing my Brooks Brothers suspenders while searching the refrigerator for a bottle of sauvignon blanc. "Anyway, I I thought it was hip." thought it was hip."

Christie has taken a seat on the long, wide sofa, away from Elizabeth, who stretches out lazily.

"Hip, Patrick?" she calls out. "Donald Trump Trump eats there." eats there."

I locate the bottle and stand it on the counter and, before finding a wine opener, stare at her blankly from across the room. "Yes? Is this a sarcastic comment?"

"Guess," she moans and follows it with a "Duh" so loud that Christie flinches.

"Where are you working now, Elizabeth?" I ask, closing drawers. "Polo outlet or something?"

Elizabeth cracks up at this and says blithely, while I uncork the Acacia, "I don't have to work, Bateman," and after a beat she adds, bored, "You of all people should know how that that feels, Mr. Wall Street." She's checking her lipstick in a Gucci compact; predictably it looks perfect. feels, Mr. Wall Street." She's checking her lipstick in a Gucci compact; predictably it looks perfect.