And now, perhaps, was crossing another one. Jack’s new line of work gave him an all-access pass to the Palaces, and he loved it. He wrote about this gilded milieu with waspish venom, he tore it apart for its crassness, its blindness, its mindlessness, its depthless surfaceness, but the invitations from the Warren Redstones and Ross Buffetts, from the Schuylers and Muybridges and Van Burens and Kleins, from Ivana Opalberg-Speedvogel and Marlalee Booken Caudell, just kept on coming, because the guy was hooked and they knew it. He was their house nigger and it suited them to keep him around, as, Solanka suspected, a sort of pet. “Jack Rhinehart” was a usefully non-black specific name, carrying none of the ghetto connotations of a Tupac, Vondie, Anfernee, or Rah’schied (these were days of innovative naming and creative orthography in the African-American community). In the Palaces, people were not named in this way. Men were not called Biggie or Hammer or Shaquille or Snoop or Dre, nor were women named Pepa or LeftEye or D:Neece. No Kunta Kintes or Shaznays in America’s golden halls; where, however, a man might be nicknamed Stash or Club by way of a sexual compliment, and the women might be Blaine or Brooke or Horne, and anything you wanted was probably simmering between satin sheets just behind the door of that bedroom suite over there, the one with the door standing ever so slightly ajar.
Yes, women, of course. Women were Rhinehart’s addiction and Achilles’ heel, and this was the Valley of the Dollybirds. No: it was the mountain, the Everest of the Dollybirds, the fabled Dollybird Horn of Plenty. Send these women his way, the Christies and Christys and Kristens and Chrysteles, the giantesses about whom most of the planet was busy fantasizing, with whom even Castro and Mandela were happy to pose, and Rhinehart would lie down (or sit up) and beg. Behind the infinite layers of Rhinehart’s cool was this ignoble fact: he had been seduced, and his desire to be accepted into this white man’s club was the dark secret he could not confess to anyone, perhaps not even to himself. And these are the secrets from which the anger comes. In this dark bed the seeds of fury grow. And although Jack’s act was armor-plated, although his mask never slipped, Solanka was sure he could see, in his friend’s blazing eyes, the self-loathing fire of his rage. It took him a long while to concede that Jack’s suppressed fury was the mirror of his own.
Rhinehart’s annual income was currently in the median-to-upper range of the six-figure bracket, but he claimed, only half jokingly, to be frequently pressed for cash. Bronislawa had exhausted three judges and four lawyers, discovering on her journey a Jarndyce-like gift—even, Solanka thought, an Indian genius—for legal obstruction and delay. Of this she had become (perhaps literally) insanely proud. She had learned how to twist and thicken the plot. As a practicing Catholic, she initially announced that she wouldn’t sue Rhinehart for divorce even though he was the devil in disguise. The devil, she explained to her attorneys, was short, white, wore a green frock coat, a pigtail, and high-heeled slippers, and strongly resembled the philosopher Immanuel Kant. But he was capable of taking any form, a column of smoke, a reflection in a mirror, or a long, black, frenziedly energetic husband. “My revenge on Satan,” she told the bemused lawyers, “will be to keep him the prisoner of my ring.” In New York, where the legal grounds for divorce were few and rigorously defined and the no-fault split didn’t exist, Rhinehart’s case against his wife was weak. He tried persuasion, bribery, threats. She stood firm and brought no suit. Eventually he did begin a court action, against which she brilliantly and determinedly offered a stupendous, almost mystical inaction. The ferocity of her passive resistance would have impressed, probably, Gandhi. She got away with a decade-long sequence of psychological and physical “breakdowns” that the cheesiest daytime soap would have found excessive, and had been in contempt of court forty-seven times, without ever going to jail, because of Rhinehart’s unwillingness to ask the court to act against her. So in his middle forties he was still paying for the sins of his middle thirties. Meanwhile he continued to be promiscuous, and to praise the city for its bounty. “For a single man with a few bucks in the bank and an inclination to party, this little piece of real estate stolen from those Mannahattoes is the happy hunting grounds, no less.”
But he wasn’t single. And in eleven years he could surely have, for example, moved across the state border to Connecticut, where no-fault divorce did exist, or found the six or so weeks required to establish legal residence in Nevada and cut this Gordian knot. This he had not done. Once, in his cups, he had confided to Solanka that for all the city’s generosity in providing the grateful male with multiple-choice options in dating, there was a snag. “They all want the big words,” he protested. “They want forever, serious, heavy, long-term. If it’s not grand passion, it’s not happening. This is why they’re so lonely. There aren’t enough men to go around, but they won’t shop if they can’t buy. They aren’t open to the concept of the rental, the time share. They’re fucked-up, man. They’re looking for real estate in a market that’s crazily high, but they know it’ll be going even higher soon.” In this version of the truth, Rhinehart’s incomplete divorce bought him breathing space, lebensraum. Women would try him out, for he was beautiful and charming, and, until they got sick of the endlessness of it, would wait.
There was also, however, another possible reading of the situation. Up where Rhinehart now mostly lived, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Diamond as Big as the Ritz, he was literally outclassed and, the moment he fell into the trap of wanting what was on offer up there on Olympus, also out of his depth. He was, remember, their toy, and while girls will play with toys, they don’t marry them. So maybe being half-married, stuck in this endlessly divorcing condition, was also a way for Rhinehart to kid himself. In reality there probably wasn’t much of a line forming to wait for him. Single, and aging—he had turned forty—now he was almost out of time. Almost—the killer word for any ambitious lady-killer—ineligible.
Malik Solanka, a decade and a half older than Jack Rhinehart and a dozen dozen times more inhibited, had often watched and listened with envious wonder as Rhinehart went about his life’s business in so unshamedly male a manner. The combat zones, the women, the dangerous sports, the life of a man of deeds. Even the now-abandoned poetry had been of the virile Ted Hughes school. Often Solanka had felt that in spite of his seniority in years, it was Rhinehart who was the master and he the student. A mere maker of dolls must bow his head before a wind surfer, a sky diver, a bungee jumper, a rock climber, a man whose idea of fun it was to go to Hunter College twice a week and run up and down forty flights of stairs. Being a boy—but this was getting too close to his forbidden, obliterated back-story—was a skill Malik Solanka had not been allowed to acquire in full.
Patrick Kluivert scored for the Dutch, and both Solanka and Rhinehart jumped to their feet, waving bottles of Mexican beer and shouting. Then the doorbell rang and Rhinehart said, without preamble, “Oh, by the way, I think I’m in love. I invited her to join us. Hope that’s okay.” This was not an original line. Traditionally it signaled the arrival of what Rhinehart would very privately call the new waitress. What followed, however, was new. “She’s one of yours,” Rhinehart said over his shoulder as he got up to open the door. “Indian diaspora. One hundred years of servitude. In the eighteen nineties her ancestors went as indentured laborers to work in what’s-its-name. Lilliput-Blefuscu. Now they run the sugarcane production and the economy would fall apart without them, but you know how it is wherever Indians go. People don’t like them. Dey works too hard and dey keeps to deyself and dey acts so clang uppity. Ask anyone. Ask Idi Amin.”