Bret Ellis - American psycho - a novel

"What is this? You can't eat at Smith and Wollensky without ordering the hash browns," he complains.

I avoid his eyes and touch the cigar I'm saving in my jacket pocket.

"Jesus, Bateman, you're a raving maniac. Been at P & P too long," he mutters. "No fucking hash browns."

I don't say anything. How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow. Frank Sinatra is somewhere, singing "Witchcraft." I'm staring at the walls, listening to the words, suddenly thirsty, but our waiter is taking orders from a very large table of exclusively Japanese businessmen, and someone who I think is either George MacGowan or Taylor Preston, in the booth behind this one, wearing something by Polo, is eyeing me suspiciously and McDermott is still staring at my steak with this stunned look on his face and one of the Japanese businessmen is holding an abacus, another one is trying to pronounce the word "teriyaki," another is mouthing, then singing, the words to the song, and the table laughs, an odd, not completely foreign sound, as he lifts up a pair of chopsticks, shaking his head confidently, imitating Sinatra. His mouth opens, what comes out of it is: " that sry comehitle stale… that clazy witchclaft… "

Something on Television

While getting dressed to meet Jeanette for a new British musical that opened on Broadway last week and then dinner at Progress, the new Malcolm Forbes restaurant on the Upper East Side, I watch a tape of this morning's Patty Winters Show, which is split into two parts. The first section is a feature on the lead singer of the rock band Guns n' Roses, Axl Rose, whom Patty quoted as telling an interviewer, "When I get stressed I get violent and take it out on myself. I've pulled razor blades on myself but then realized that having a scar is more detrimental than not having a stereo… I'd rather kick my stereo in than go punch somebody in the face. When I get mad or upset or emotional, sometimes I'll walk over and play my piano." Part two consists of Patty reading letters that Ted Bundy, the mass murderer, had written to his fiancée during one of his many trials. " 'Dear Carole,' " she reads, while an unfairly bloated head shot of Bundy, just weeks away from execution, Hashes across the screen, " 'please do not sit in the same row in court with Janet. When I look over toward you there she sits contemplating me with her mad eyes like a deranged seagull studying a clam… I can feel her spreading hot sauce on me already…' "

I wait for something to happen. I sit in my bedroom for close to an hour. Nothing does. I get up, do the rest of the coke – a minuscule amount that's in my closet left over from a late Saturday at M.K. or Au Bar, stop at Orso for a drink before meeting Jeanette, who I called earlier, mentioning that I had two tickets to this particular musical and she didn't say anything except "I'll go" and I told her to meet me in front of the theater at ten to eight and she hung up. I tell myself while I'm sitting alone at the bar in Orso that I was going to call one of the numbers that flashed on the bottom of the screen, but then I realize that I didn't know what to say and I remember ten of the words Patty read: " I can feel her spreading hot sauce on me already ."

I remember these words again for some reason while Jeanette and I are sitting in Progress after the musical and it's late, the restaurant is crowded. We order something called eagle carpaccio, mesquite-grilled mahi-mahi, endive with chèvre and chocolate-covered almonds, this weird kind of gazpacho with raw chicken in it, dry beer. Right now there really is nothing edible on my plate, what there is tastes like plaster. Jeanette is wearing a wool smoking jacket, a silk chiffon shawl with one sleeve, wool tuxedo pants, all Armani, antique gold and diamond earrings, stockings from Givenchy, grosgrain flats. She keeps sighing and threatens to light a cigarette even though we're seated in the nonsmoking section of the restaurant. Jeanette's behavior deeply unsettles me, causes black thoughts to form and expand in my head. She's been drinking champagne kirs but has already had too many and when she orders her sixth I suggest that maybe she's had enough. She looks at me and says, "I am cold and thirsty and I will order what I fucking want."

I say, "Then have an Evian or San Pellegrino for Christ sakes."

Sandstone

My mother and I are sitting in her private room at Sandstone, where she is now a permanent resident. Heavily sedated, she has her sunglasses on and keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they're shaking. She tries to smile when she asks what I want for Christmas. I'm not surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her. I'm wearing a two-button wool gabardine suit with notched lapels by Gian Marco Venturi, cap-toed leather laceups by Armani, tie by Polo, socks I'm not sure where from. It's nearing the middle of April.

"Nothing," I say, smiling reassuringly.

There's a pause. I break it by asking, "What do you want?"

She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands, at dried blood, probably from a girl named Suki, beneath the thumbnail. My mother licks her lips tiredly and says, "I don't know. I just want to have a nice Christmas."

I don't say anything. I've spent the last hour studying my hair in the mirror I've insisted the hospital keep in my mother's room.

"You look unhappy," she says suddenly.

"I'm not," I tell her with a brief sigh.

"You look unhappy," she says, more quietly this time. She touches her hair, stark blinding white, again.

"Well, you do too," I say slowly, hoping that she won't say anything else.

She doesn't say anything else. I'm sitting in a chair by the window, and through the bars the lawn outside darkens, a cloud passes over the sun, soon the lawn turns green again. She sits on her bed in a nightgown from Bergdorf's and slippers by Norma Kamali that I bought her for Christmas last year.

"How was the party?" she asks.

"Okay," I say, guessing.

"How many people were there?"

"Forty. Five hundred." I shrug. "I'm not sure."

She licks her lips again, touches her hair once more. "What time did you leave?"

"I don't remember," I answer after a long time.

"One? Two?" she asks.

"It must have been one," I say, almost cutting her off.

"Oh." She pauses again, straightens her sunglasses, black Ray-Bans I bought her from Bloomingdale's that cost two hundred dollars.

"It wasn't very good," I say uselessly, looking at her.

"Why?" she asks, curious.

"It just wasn't," I say, looking back at my hand, the specks of blood under the nail on my thumb, the photograph of my father, when he was a much younger man, on my mother's bedside table, next to a photograph of Sean and me when we were both teenagers, wearing tuxedos, neither one of us smiling. In the photograph of my father he's wearing a six-button double-breasted black sport coat, a white spread-collar cotton shirt, a tie, pocket square, shoes, all by Brooks Brothers. He's standing next to one of the topiary animals a long time ago at his father's estate in Connecticut and there's something the matter with his eyes.

The Best City for Business

And on a rainy Tuesday morning, after working out at Xclusive, I stop by Paul Owen's apartment on the Upper East Side. One hundred and sixty-one days have passed since I spent the night in it with the two escort girls. There has been no word of bodies discovered in any of the city's four newspapers or on the local news; no hints of even a rumor floating around. I've gone so far as to ask people – dates, business acquaintances – over dinners, in the halls of Pierce & Pierce, if anyone has heard about two mutilated prostitutes found in Paul Owen's apartment. But like in some movie, no one has heard anything, has any idea of what I'm talking about. There are other things to worry over: the shocking amount of laxative and speed that the cocaine in Manhattan is now being cut with, Asia in the 1990s, the virtual impossibility of landing an eight o'clock reservation at PR, the new Tony McManus restaurant on Liberty Island, crack. So what I'm assuming is that, essentially, like, no bodies have been found. For all I know, Kimball has moved to London too.