So the Quaaludes helped with the pain—sort of. And even if they didn’t, it still served as an excellent excuse to keep taking them.
And I wasn’t the only one who hated that little shit of a dog. Everyone did, with the exception of the Duchess, who was his sole protector and who still let the mutt sleep at the foot of the bed and chew on her panties, which for some inexplicable reason made me jealous. Still, Rocky would be sticking around for the foreseeable future—until I could figure out a way to eliminate him that the Duchess wouldn’t pin on me.
Anyway, I told Gwynne thanks but no thanks for the Quaaludes, and, once more, she seemed a bit sadder for the fact. After all, she had failed to anticipate my every need. But all she said was, “ Ohhhhkaii,well, I already set the timer on your sauna so it’s ready for you right now”— raghite nahow—“and I laid out your clothes for you late last night. Is your gray pinstripe suit and that blue tie with the little fishees on it ohhhhkaii?”
Christ, talk about service! Why couldn’t the Duchess be more like that? True, I was paying Gwynne $70,000 a year, which was more than double the going rate, but, still…Look what I got in return: service with a smile! Yet my wife was spending $70,000 a month—on the low side! In fact, with all those fucking aspirations of hers, she was probably spending double that. And that was fine with me, but there had to be a certain trade-off here. I mean, if I needed to go out once in a while and swing the schlong here or dang the gong there, then she oughta cut me just a little bit of slack, shouldn’t she? Yes, certainly so—in fact, so much so that I started nodding my head in agreement with my own thoughts.
Apparently, Gwynne took my nodding as an affirmative answer to her question, and she said, “ Ohhhhkaii,well, I’ll just go on out and get Chandler ready so she’s nice and clean for you. Have a nice shower!” Cheery, cheery, cheery!
With that, Gwynne left the room. Well, I thought, at least she killed my hard-on, so I was better off for the encounter. As far as the Duchess was concerned, I’d worry about her later. She was a mutt, after all, and mutts were well-known for their forgiving nature.
Having worked things out in my mind, I downed my iced coffee, took six aspirin, swung my feet off the bed, and headed for the sauna. There I would sweat out the five Quaaludes, two grams of coke, and three milligrams of Xanax that I had consumed the night before—a relatively modest amount of drugs, considering what I was truly capable of.
Unlike the master bedroom, which was a testament to white Chinese silk, the master bathroom was a testament to gray Italian marble. It was laid out in an exquisite parquetlike pattern, the way only those Italian bastards know how to do it. And they sure as hell hadn’t been scared to bill me! Nonetheless, I paid the thieving Italians in stride. After all, it was the nature of twentieth-century capitalism that everyone should scam everyone, and he who scammed the most ultimately won the game. On that basis, I was the undefeated world champ.
I looked in the mirror and took a moment to regard myself. Christ, what a skinny little bastard I was! I was very muscular, but, still…I had to run around in the shower to get wet! Was it the drugs? I wondered. Well, perhaps; but it was a good look for me, anyway. I was only five-seven, and a very smart person had once said you could never be too rich or too thin. I opened the medicine cabinet and took out a bottle of extra-strength Visine. I craned back my neck and put six drops in each eye, triple the recommended dose.
In that very instant, an odd thought came bubbling up into my brain, namely: What kind of man abuses Visine? And, for that matter, why had I taken six Bayer aspirin? It made no sense. After all, unlike Ludes, coke, and Xanax, where the benefits of increasing the dose are plain as day, there was absolutely no valid reason to exceed the recommended doses of Visine and aspirin.
Yet, ironically, that was exactly what my very life had come to represent. It was all about excess: about crossing over forbidden lines, about doing things you thought you’d never do and associating with people who were even wilder than yourself, so you’d feel that much more normal about your own life.
All at once I found myself becoming depressed. What was I going to do about my wife? Christ—had I really done it this time?She seemed pretty angry this morning! What was she doing right now? I wondered. If I had to guess, she was probably yapping on the phone to one of her friends or disciples or whatever the fuck they were. She was somewhere downstairs, spewing out perfect pearls of wisdom to her less-than-perfect friends, in the genuine hope that with a little bit of coaching she could make them as perfect as she was. Ahhh, that was my wife, all right—the Duchess of Bay fucking Ridge! The Duchess and all her loyal subjects, those young Stratton wives, who sucked up to her as if she were Queen Elizabeth or something. It was totally fucking nauseating.
Yet, in her defense, the Duchess had a role to play and she played it well. She understood the twisted sense of loyalty that everyone involved with Stratton Oakmont felt for it, and she had forged ties with the wives of key employees, which had made things that much more solid. Yes, the Duchess was a sharp cookie.
Usually she would come into the bathroom in the morning while I was getting ready for work. She was a good conversationalist, when she wasn’t busy telling me to go fuck myself. But usually I had brought that on myself, so I really couldn’t blame her for it. Actually, I really couldn’t blame her for anything, could I? She happened to be a damn good wife, in spite of all that Martha Stewart crap. She must’ve said “I love you” a hundred times a day. And as the day progressed she would add on these wonderful little intensifiers: I love you desperately! I love you unconditionally!…and, of course, my favorite: I love you to the point of madness!…which I considered the most appropriate of all.
Yet, in spite of all her kind words, I still wasn’t sure I could trust her. She was my second wife, after all, and words are cheap. Would she really be there with me for better or worse? Outwardly, she gave every indication that she genuinely loved me—constantly showering me with kisses—and whenever we were out in public, she held my hand or put her arm around me or ran her fingers through my hair.
It was all very confusing. When I was married to Denise I never worried about these things. She had married me when I had nothing, so her loyalty was unquestioned. But after I made my first million dollars, she must have had a dark premonition, and she asked me why I couldn’t get a normal job making a million dollars a year? It seemed like a ridiculous question at the time, but back then, on that particular day, neither of us knew that in less than a year I’d be making a million dollars a week. And neither of us knew that in less than two years, Nadine Caridi, the Miller Lite girl, would pull up to my Westhampton beach house on July Fourth weekend and step out of that banana-yellow Ferrari wearing a ridiculously short skirt and a pair of white go-to-hell pumps.
I had never meant to hurt Denise. In fact, it was the furthest thing from my mind. But Nadine swept me off my feet, and I swept her off hers. You don’t choose who you fall in love with, do you? And once you do fall in love—that obsessive sort of love, that all-consuming love, where two people can’t stand to be apart from each other for even a moment—how are you supposed to let a love like that pass you by?
I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, trying to push all this Denise business back down below the surface. After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t, but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back. And as far as my wife went—well, I would right things with her too.