But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just “dolled up” on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity. Sky, Bindy, and Ren thus represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural history of the doll. Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up as mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire, the Pax Americana, itself… A dead body on a street, thought Malik Solanka, coming down to earth, looks a lot like a broken doll.
… Oh, who even thought like this anymore, other than himself? Was there anyone else left in America with such ugly, misconceived notions in his head? If you’d asked these young women, these tall confident beauties on their way to summa cum laude college degrees and glamorous yachting weekends, these Princesses of the Now, with their limo services and charity work and mile-a-minute lives and tame, adoring superheroes striving to win their favor, they would have told you they were free, freer than any women in any country in any time, and they belonged to no man, whether father or lover or boss. They were nobody’s dolls, but their own women, playing with their own appearance, their own sexuality, their own stories: the first generation of young women to be truly in control, in thrall neither to the old patriarchy nor to the man-hating hard-line feminism that had battered at Bluebeard’s gate. They could be businesswomen and flirts, profound and superficial, serious and light, and they would make those decisions for themselves. They had it all-emancipation, sex appeal, cash—and they loved it. And then somebody came and took it away from them by hitting them hard on the back of their heads, the first blow to knock them out and the rest to finish them off. So, who killed them? If it was dehumanization you were interested in, the murderer was your man. Not they themselves but he, the Concrete Killer, had dehumanized them. Professor Malik Solanka, tears running down his face as he sat hunched over his tequila on a bar stool, buried his head in his hands.
Saskia Schuyler had lived in a many-roomed but low-ceilinged apartment in what she called “the ugliest building on Madison Avenue,” a blue brick monstrosity opposite the Armani store, whose “only good point,” in Sky’s opinion, was that she could call the store and have them hold dresses up to the window so that she could check them out through binoculars. She hated the apartment, her parents’ former Manhattan pied-a-terre. The Schuylers lived mostly out of town, on a gated estate set in rolling landscape near Chappaqua, New York, and spent much time complaining about the Clintons’ purchase of a house in their hometown. Sky, said Bradley Marsalis, liked to reassure her parents that Hillary wouldn’t be there long. “If she wins, she’ll be off to D.C. and the Senate, and if she loses, she’ll leave even faster.” Meanwhile, Sky wanted to sell up on Madison and move to Tribeca, but the co-op board had three times turned down the purchasers she had found. On the subject of the board, Sky was vociferous. “It’s full of lacquered old dames covered in tight shiny fabric, like overstuffed sofas, and I guess if you want to get in, you have to look like furniture too.” The building did have a twenty-four-hour doorman service, however, and the night-duty doorman, old Abe Green, reported that on the date in question Miss Schuyler, “lookin’ like a million dollars” after a big night out at a music-awards gala (“Horse” had industry connections), got home around one-thirty. She parted at the door from a plainly reluctant Mr. Marsalis—“Boy, did he look pissed,” Green noted—and walked unhappily to the elevator. Green rode up with her. “To make her smile, I told her, Too bad you only live on the fifth, miss, otherwise I could enjoy lookin’ at you a little longer.” Fifteen minutes later she buzzed for the elevator again. “Everything okay, miss?” Abe asked her. “Oh, I guess so. Yeah, sure, Abe,” she said. “Sure.” Then she walked out by herself, still in her party finery, and never came back. Her body was found a long way downtown, near the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. A study of the last hours of Lauren Klein and Bindy Candell showed that they, too, had come home late, refused entry to their boyfriends, and gone out again shortly afterward. As if these girls had turned Life away, then set out to keep their assignations with Death.
Saskia, Lauren, and Belinda had not been robbed. Their finger rings, earrings, chokers, and upper-arm bracelets were all found to be in place. Nor had they been sexually assaulted. No motive for the murders had emerged, but all three boyfriends raised the possibility of a stalker. In the days before their deaths, all the dead women had mentioned seeing a Panama-hatted stranger “lurking oddly.” “It’s like Sky was executed,” a somber, cigar-smoking Brad Marsalis told the press at a photo-op and Qand-A at a hotel suite in Vineyard Haven. “It’s like somebody sentenced her to death and carried out that sentence in, like, cold blood.”
7
The news of Solanka’s split from Eleanor had sent shock waves through their circle. Each marriage that breaks interrogates those that continue to hold. Malik Solanka was conscious of having initiated a chain reaction of spoken and unspoken questions at breakfast tables across the city, and in bedrooms, and in other cities too: Are we still good? Okay, how good? Are there things you’re not telling me? Am I going to wake up one day and you’ll say something that makes me realize I’ve been sharing my bed with a stranger? How will tomorrow rewrite yesterday, how will next week unmake the past five, ten, fifteen years? Are you bored? Is it my fault? Are you weaker than I thought? Is it him? Is it her? Is it the sex? The children? Do you want to fix it? Is there anything to fix? Do you love me? Do you still love me? Do I still, oh Jesus Jesus, love you?
These agonies, for which his friends inevitably held him responsible to some unspecified degree, returned to him as echoes. In spite of his emphatic embargo, Eleanor was handing out his Manhattan phone number to anyone who wanted it. Men, more than women, seemed moved to call up and reprove. Morgen Franz, the post-hippie Buddhist publisher whose telephone Eleanor had answered all those years ago, was first in line. Morgen was Californian and had taken refuge from that fact in Bloomsbury but never shaken off his slow Haight-Ashbury drawl. “I’m not happy about this, man,” he’d called Malik to reveal, his vowels even more elongated than usual to emphasize his pain. “And what’s more, I don’t know anyone who is. I don’t know why you did this, man, and because you’re neither a dope nor a shit, I’m sure you’ll have your reasons, I’m sure you will, you know?, and they’ll be good reasons, too, man, I have no doubt of it, I mean what can I tell you, I love you, you know?, I love you both, but right now I have to say I feel a lot of anger toward you.” Solanka could visualize his friend’s reddened, short-bearded face, his small deep-set eyes blinking fiercely for emphasis. Franz was legendarily laid-back—“nobody’s cooler than the Morg,” that was his catchphrase—so this heated climax came as a jolt. Solanka, however, stayed cold, and allowed himself to express his own feelings truthfully and irrevocably.