The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio
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she says.
“Follow your bliss,” I say. “Joseph Campbell said that.”
“How perfectly lovely,” Mona says, sipping her drink. When the waitress goes, she leans toward me. “Pushing drinks in an overpriced hotel bar,” she says. “Dreams, my ass.”
“She probably makes ten times more than me.” I look around the room and think that’s probably true of everyone in here.
“That’s right, you work,” Mona says, like she’s forgotten this distasteful fact. “Please let’s talk about something more scintillating than Starbucks.”
“Colloquially known as Starfucks,” I say.
“Star fucking. There’s a promising subject. Would you fuck Brad Pitt?”
“Under what circumstances?”
“That qualifies as a no.”
Mona starts rattling off actors’ names, but my mind is on the waitress and her tattoo. I know I’m not exactly following my bliss. It’s more like the path of least resistance. I went from counter help to shift supervisor, from making lattes and Frappuccinos to making sure people take their breaks on time and the store stays picked up and the right hot sleeves for the cups get ordered. Health benefits and everything, but come on.
“Leo DiCaprio,” Mona says. “Will Smith. Robert Pattinson.”
It’s not inconceivable that one of them could walk into the Redwood Room. The Redwood Room is the hip place to go since the trendy hotelier bought the Clift and put his trendy stamp on a San Francisco institution. The walls are paneled from a single two-thousand-year-old redwood, the bar is U-shaped and seventy-five feet long, the chandeliers and wall sconces are deco. He’s added a few touches, like a glass bar and plasma-screen images of Klimt paintings to replace the ones that used to hang there. When we arrived it was busy enough, but now the room’s seething with people. Every seat is taken, except for a row of them at a long low table, another trendy addition. People keep trying to sit there, on glass stools that look like vases, but after an uncomfortable minute they get up and go over to stand by one of the bars.
We’re at the U-shaped one, people jammed in on both sides. Mona has given up on pimping me to movie stars and has struck up an acquaintance with the guy across from her. Pretty soon he’s offering her shrimp cocktail and french fries off his plate. He’s a salesman staying at a different hotel who just came here for dinner, he says, but I can tell he was secretly hoping to meet some willing young thing he could take back to his room and fuck the life out of. He’s in a nice suit he probably saved for tonight, and the cologne is rolling off him in nauseating waves. I bet there’s a wedding ring sitting on the sink in his hotel room, that he had to soap off his pudgy finger.
Across from me, there’s a different kind of guy. He’s my age, or maybe a little younger—he has baby skin, not a line on it, and a sparse blond goatee that looks like it’s been trying to grow in since eighth grade. He’s hunched over the bar, wearing a faded T-shirt with a faded Spiderman leaping on it, his shoulder bones sticking out like a famine victim’s. There’s a barely touched glass of beer in front of him. In the middle of the Redwood Room, surrounded by dressed-up people laughing and getting shitfaced, he’s reading The Portable Nietzsche. Right away I figure I know things about him, like that he doesn’t own a car, but feels superior to people who do. He labors at some shit office job, maybe even temp work, and writes bad poetry nobody understands. He’s got poser written all over him, but he’s got nice eyes, pale blue or maybe gray, fringed by the kind of sweeping lashes any girl would kill for. By now I have three damp pansies arranged on my napkin from the drinks I’ve had, and I’m feeling friendly. Also hungry. I can feel the alcohol traveling around my stomach, looking for a scrap of food to connect to, to lose itself in. I take a couple of chilly shrimp from the salesman’s plate without asking, knowing he won’t say anything.
“Hey, Nietzsche,” I say to the poser, by way of an opener. “Thou shalt.” I remember a little of my Nietzsche—the golden-scaled dragon in Thus Spake Zarathustra who’s like the superego, telling you all the things you’re supposed to do to fit in, promoting the decadent values of Christian civilization. I majored in Philosophy in college. I kept meaning to take the GREs and go to grad school so I could teach, but year after year I lost my nerve. By now there are only a few bits and pieces. The Sophists, for example. I can’t remember which one argued that might is right, which one contrasted law and nature. Dewey’s critique of traditional philosophy is a total blank.
“Excuse me?” he says, and takes his time looking up.
The thing is, he’s been watching me for I don’t know how long. I didn’t even notice him when he first sat down, but a while ago I felt him stealing looks over the top of his beer while pretending to be absorbed in his book. He’d started out with it flat on the bar, but little by little he raised it, until I could see the title and know what a brilliant superior intellectual he was.
“I hope you don’t take him seriously,” I said.
He gives me a contemptuous look. “Oh, right,” he says. “God forbid we should touch on anything serious.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I glance at the salesman, who pushes a french fry suggestively into a blob of ketchup. I feel the shrimp sliding down into my stomach, tossing cold and forlorn on a turbulent sea. I’m thinking I should have stayed home after all. I could have rented Dawn of the Dead and watched zombies stagger around the mall.
“What I meant,” I say, “is that if you take him too seriously, you end up being a menace to society. All that superman and will to power stuff. The idea you can make up your own rules, that conventional standards of good and evil don’t apply.” I’m impressed with how much I suddenly remember. For a minute I see myself in front of a podium in a large auditorium, rows of students taking down every word I say. On everyone’s desk, my book On Moral Life is open, passages highlighted in fluorescent yellow.
“Ah,” he says, “a fellow philosopher.” He’s turned his book face down on the bar, but in case that’s giving me too much credit, he leans back away from me on his stool.
“Not really. I majored in it. In a previous life.”
“And what do you do in this incarnation?” He’s still leaning back, trying to be cool, but I bet anything his hands are sweating. I bet he can’t believe he’s met a woman who actually knows something about his precious Nietzsche. He’s probably, in his mind, already got me naked on his mattress on the floor in the crummy apartment he shares with four other losers.
“Guess,” I say.
“Stripper?” he says hopefully.
“No.”
“Model,” he says. “Caterer. Lawyer. Dot-Commer. Artist.”
“No. No, no, no, no. No.” He has no clue who I might be. I give Mona a look, but for some reason she’s amused by the pervy salesman, and she shakes her head.
“I’m a demon,” I say. “I steal infants from their cribs, drain the life out of men as they sleep. That kind of thing.”
“Perfect,” he says. “I’m a warlock.”
More drinks have appeared. I look around at the walls, and where the bright, glittery plasma images of Klimt paintings were, there are now portraits of solemn men and women in dark tailored jackets, who look like they’re presiding over a board meeting. I look at one of the men, and his eyes slowly blink. Mona nudges me.
“Drink up,” she says, “we’re moving the party.”
One thing about Mona. She has bad judgment. The night we met, she announced this to a group of people at a party, and I immediately wanted to know her. I went over and struck up a conversation, and we ended up sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, doing shots of Añejo tequila. That night Mona