Champagne would be lovely, Nelofar said.
I’ll accompany you, Shahin said. Mrs. Walker? Anything for you?
Daisy held up her glass of white to decline. She tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.
The two men lurched through the crowd to the bar.
Cagey old girl. Before you arrived, she was trying to suss out my bloodline, Shahin said.
She’s a scourge, Bo said.
Insultingly direct. Something about talking to a brown person does seem to give these people the idea the boundaries of good taste are porous, Shahin said. And the look on your face! Charging over like a mother elephant to protect her calves. I was touched.
Jesus. No way I’d leave you alone with that one.
You have such little faith in us? Look at Nelofar. Like Talleyrand. She’ll take that woman apart and leave her in pieces on the floor, Shahin said.
It was true that already Nelofar had Daisy on her back foot, flashing those porcelain dentures like fangs, and Bo felt another hot surge of lust.
No ill can befall me so long as she is by my side, Shahin said. But you know that. She’s not the one you’re worried about. You’re worried what I might slip and offer up without so much as a finger’s pressure?
Nonsense. Only trying to protect the investment, Bo said.
Ah well. In any case, misplaced concern, though I admire the energy you expend guarding your investment. I am sober as a judge, I promise. And when in this unfortunate state, I do know how to keep my mouth shut. Didn’t I tell you about my exit interview? SAVAK had me in a chair for three days before they’d grant us visas and I can assure you they were slightly less civilized than dear old Daisy over there. I’m not a complete moron, you know, Shahin said, turning back to the bar to collect the scotch and champagne. And, Bo? If you want to shag my wife, just come out and ask. I know you Americans are pathologically afraid of voicing your urges, but it’s just pitiful to watch you try to keep your tongue in your mouth.
With that, Bo’s twenty-five-million-dollar long position in the West Texas Intermediate crude market walked back to his wife to present her with the champagne flute he so elegantly cradled in his fingers. Shahin leaned in and spoke into her ear. She smiled broadly and raised her glass to Bo, diamond bracelet flickering at him like a thousand tongues. Goodness gracious, he thought. There’s something to file away for a rainy day.
Dirty business, this, and gee, he felt terrific. Except the soul-sucking Beatles were still killing his party, hacking at its shins with their ice-cream sundae spoons, and he made haste for the hi-fi cabinet. The Idiot or Lust for Life? Lust for Life, of course. Ozone and hot aluminum when he opened the door. The needles tipping to George Harrison’s guitar, barely even touching 100 watts. Pathetic. Bo hadn’t paid some kid with bad skin in a Zeppelin T-shirt to build a system for him. He had sourced every item himself. Teac X-300 reel-to-reel direct from Tokyo. Two Audio Research EC-5 crossovers; Sansui amps and preamp; a TU-717 tuner; Bang & Olufsen Beogram turntable. He had two pairs of KLH Double Nine speakers, but those were for private listening. A party was a waste of their reproductive qualities. Arguably, a party was a bigger waste of the beasts from White Bear Lake he had running now, and which he’d taken delivery of only months earlier, Magneplanar Tympani IIIAs and a IIIA-W bass panel, speakers the size of room dividers, and that were, without question, the best money could buy, the Hope Diamond of speakers, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the fucking Covenant right there blowing divine wind into your ears. Too much for these cretins. But to hell with it, he was letting everyone listen to them because that’s the type of guy he was. And George Harrison quim-toeing around the mulberry bush was no fucking test of the engineering behind a system like this.
A quick transition would be key. Silence, even silence signaling the death of the loathsome Beatles, would give the party time to think. You might as well turn the lights up and open all the windows. Like an empty glass or no one to talk to, silence stirred you from the shared dream, clapped a damper on the rhythm that propelled you from one conversation to the next, the upward flow of vibes, the expansiveness that overtook you after the third drink and a bump of coke. Look upon your kingdom, behold your subjects, how they move, their hair bouncing, their bodies like leaves on a swift river. You cannot deny them sound, even the wretched Beatles. God, now it’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” though he could let it play through and spiral out, end of side A, switch to Iggy then, everyone knows the album’s all downhill after the first side, it would be natural, a seamless shift, but he’s got Lust for Life out of its sleeve and Iggy’s smiling out at him with those big goo-goo eyes like Pat Boone, and god whatever became of Pat Boone, on the radio in some hot moldy place by a lake where the moths laid themselves flat against the screens at night like hieroglyphs and the frogs sang so loud the air had texture. They’d been down South somewhere, the walls and ceiling of the place knotty pine coaxing pareidolian visions as he and his brothers lay in bed summoning animals, old hags, battleships, long-limbed ball players, boobs, rockets, genitalia, and they’d lie there in that hotbox of a house after lunch, imposed rest to keep them out of the water so they wouldn’t cramp up and drown, until set free to swim and lie on the hot boards of the dock and watch the honey-colored boats pull skiers back and forth in endless, lazy loops of the cove where there was no chop because the smoothly sloping banks absorbed their wakes with susurrous little splashes. Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame” on the transistor radio all summer long, and the Fats Domino version on the Negro stations, and they would switch back and forth and never not be listening to it. Domino’s was better—his really swung, and it was he who converted them so that by the end of that July all they listened to was WNKO. All night, jazz and gospel, the Soul Stirrers and Swan Silvertones, and R&B in the daytime, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats.
“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” faded out and Bo hesitated, his hand over the shelf of LPs, his finger seeking out Fats. Hell, why not, it was his party. The needle tracked through the deep groove, the desert land of dead wax, reached the end of its journey, died, and floated away. Bo’s fingertip bumped across the top of the albums. There. Tip, pinch, pull. He heard the shush of the sleeve sliding out, a sound he couldn’t possibly have heard over the crowd but that he did, all the same, hear, and there he held it, a temporal artifact—a record, ha!—encoded with his past, a time-travel machine. All he had to do was place it on the spindle and he would be transported to that summer, the one without his father, where he and his brothers and mother lived a light, gentle existence in a cabin by the water.
But not tonight. A more urgent need worked at his heart. He put Fats back on the shelf, laid on its side atop the rank and file. A voice shouted, Sounds, Vornado! and he responded with a middle finger directed at the heathen who might put demands on him in his time of reflection.
Because Bo knew that not one soul at his party had heard Lust for Life yet, and he desperately wanted to make sure that every time they ever heard the album again, they’d think of this night and his party. He knew the music was that good, and at the time, it was rare. Released September 1977, failed to chart in the U.S., buried under the re-release of Elvis’s backlog so RCA could capitalize on the King’s death, you couldn’t pick up a copy at King Karol, couldn’t find it at Bleecker Bob’s. No one even knew Lust for Life existed until Bo played it for them, and therein lay the nucleus around which he had molded his entire life: the Sutor Mantellassis, the Joan Mitchell, the Magneplanars, the Iran oil deal, the R107 SL he kept on the island, his desire for any woman he’d never seen before, young, old, goddess, or goblin, the Patek Philippes, the Montblancs, the trips to Mustique, the standing army of acquaintances that filled seven Rolodexes. This party, this intimate gathering for five hundred. Displays of wealth and power? Sure, man. But wealth and power served a greater master: novelty.