The Ask

Four

There is art to the ask. There is craft. There is lunch. There is also research, but Purdy did not require much. I had been following my old college friend's career for years.

Purdy had made his own money, or so he told the reporters from those magazines about fellating rich whites, those rags with names like Wealth, or Capital, or Fellating Rich Whites. This was true to a point. Purdy made his own money out of some of his father's money.

Still, he had been ahead of his time with his online music outfit. It might sound ridiculous now, but he had been one of the first to predict that people really only wanted to be alone and scratching themselves and smelling their fingers and staring at screens and firing off sequences of virulent gibberish at other deliquescing life-forms. So for us he provided new music and photographs of fabulous people making and listening to the new music, as well as little comment boxes for the lonely, finger-smelling people to comment on the looks and clothing of the fabulous people who had managed to achieve some sweaty, sparkly proximity to each other and to life as it was lived in more glamorous eras.

Purdy even had a loft packed with stoned designers. He'd offered me a spot in his posse, doing God knows what, maybe just fetching lattes and shooting hoops on the office half-court. But I turned him down. My painting, I believed, was poised on the precipice of genius, though I never would have phrased it like that. "Thanks, but I'm cool" is how I probably put it, sealed myself in my schmucky dome. Purdy sold his company for a few hundred million.

I missed out on a nice little nest egg. A nest latte.

Since then Purdy had become a venture capitalist, a philanthropist, an occasional gossip-site item. He dated models, married one. That was no surprise. I recalled a conversation we had in college, after he'd fallen for the beautiful, plumpish Constance, realized he had to dump her.

"I'm not attracted to her," he told me.

He'd come out of his room in the sagging off-campus Victorian we shared with some others, joined me in the kitchen for a late evening bowl. Through the slit in the door I could see Constance asleep in his bed.

"If the chemistry's not there…" I said through smoke, as though I knew anything about sex and love other than the hard-won certainty that if I ignored the sore on my penis, it would probably go away.

"Oh, the chemistry's there," said Purdy. "The fucking is fantastic. I'm just not attracted to her."

"Huh?" I said. "Is it the teeth? I like the teeth."

"It's societal."

He said it had something to do with fashion magazines, cultural conditioning. We were big on this kind of thing.

"But, Purdy," I said, "the point is you subvert the codes, not adhere to them."

"I'm trapped, man," he said.

Purdy stood, wandered out into the garden. I sneaked into his room, slipped my head between Constance's knees. I was big on that kind of thing. Constance and I were together for a while after that. I was crazy about her, her fierce horsey mouth and chipped teeth and black braids and high shelf of an ass, but I don't think she ever got over Purdy.

Many didn't, though he never acquired the cad tag he might have deserved. Maybe his attachments were too diffuse. He lived with us, the faux-bohemian alcoholics, but he also had ins with engineers and future hedge fund managers, or political science types who believed in the American exception, that there was something dirty about a dirty martini.

He'd disappear with the children of the super-rich-his tax bracket, if not exactly his people-make weekend visits to the family compounds of ambassadors or early software titans or progressive oil sheikhs, which he'd later describe to us in rather cryptic and astonished terms, so that we might come to know the features and dimensions of a Saudi squash court but still not understand how petrochemical influence was wielded in Washington, or we might snicker at the gestures a major political family made toward the folkways of ordinary Americans-the cheapest sort of beach equipment, off-brand knockwurst on the grill-but still not comprehend how dynastic service shaped electoral outcomes. We were just glad that he ended his nights with us, the pretentious wastrels. He had insomnia. We stayed up the latest. I think that's mostly what it was.

He had mystery, this boy. He didn't need a persona. I might have been the painter, the way our friend Maurice was the drug dealer, or Constance was the Marxist feminist who fucked, or Charles Goldfarb was the larkish Frankfurtian who desperately wanted to fuck, but Purdy was simply Purdy.

There was nothing striking about him. His clothes weren't spattered with paint. His teeth weren't nicked. He didn't, like Maurice, have a tattoo on his arm of a man inking a tattoo on his arm. He didn't, like Billy Raskov, my rival, the artist who didn't paint because painting was dead, have a possibly affected case of Parkinson's, nor was he, like Sarah Molloy, timber heir and environmental feminist who did not fuck, a hater of his kind.

He was just Purdy, and though he was loaded-ruling class, in the parlance of our insufferable set-his father a knight-errant of a CEO, dashing from one corporate damsel to the next, slaying those dread dragons Health Plan and Pension wherever they preyed upon the margin, Purdy himself lived modestly, much more modestly than his family stipend allowed. He lived then pretty much how Maura and I lived now.

I suppose there was a certain glory in it, this slumming with the middle and upper-middle classes. Maybe not the glory of rushing a Nazi mortar position, or braving municipal billy bats to stop a war in Indochina, but the privileged of our generation did what they could, like the rest of us. We were stuck between meanings. Or we were the last dribbles of something. It was hard to figure. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.

True, there was nearly no glory in my paintings of that time. They featured some dribbles themselves, some drips, some glued-on porcelain and politically meaningful popsicle sticks, though I could not now recall what they looked like, not really. I doubted anyone could, even Lena, the professor who anointed me our liberal arts boutique's aesthetic hope, took me to bed. Purdy wouldn't remember, either, but I certainly recalled his kindness to me, and not just the money he'd loan without that whiff of vassalage, of fealty, most rich kids required, but then maybe he feigned belief in all of us, in some ultimate utility to our mannered flailings. Somehow he helped us pretend we were all anointed, could become the icons wearing sunglasses in the dorm hall posters of the future, pioneers of jackass phenomena, ancestor gods of cool.

A sad dream, but it sustained us.

Purdy and I, we'd smoke those late-evening bowls while I bitched about Billy Raskov suddenly getting attention, or a student prize, for shitting on a Rand McNally atlas to interrogate hegemony.

Once Purdy just chuckled his trademark chuckle, which was really just the trace of one.

"He's a charlatan," said Purdy.

"Fucking Raskov," I said.

"A shitterton," said Purdy.

"That's it."

What he might have said to Billy Raskov about me I didn't want to know, though in a sense it hardly mattered.

He was somehow both of us and beyond us. He did not need to be anointed, ordained. He had powers of cajolement, a gentle, quasi-Christ-y authority. Maybe he just knew how we'd all turn out. He would guard our spasms of shame, of ego, from the others, wait with patience, forgiveness, for us to slip free of our charades, embrace our destinies, as bond lawyers, dental surgeons, new media consultants, housewives, househusbands, or unemployed development officers. Then he would stand there in his beautiful truth, the truth of money.