room, across great expanses of poured black rubber flooring and funky furniture, Stephen could see Nora Harper, lying on a distressed leather sofa, leafing through a magazine, a bottle of beer in her hand, which she raised and tipped toward him, giving him a little wave with her fingers, and a smile. At least he thought she was smiling; at these kinds of distances it was hard to tell.
“Fasten Your Seat Belts. It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Night”
A nd half an hour later, the cool people started to arrive.
They were actors, mainly, mostly in their mid-twenties to early thirties, faces Stephen recognized off the telly, from high-end, top-of-the-range period dramas or edgy New Wave sitcoms and sketch shows, or the smarter commercials; the Cute, Feisty Girl who is Britain’s Biggest Hollywood Hope, a couple of sharply dressed violent-but-lovable Brit-Flick Gangsters, the Unconventional Campaigning Lawyer with the Complicated Love Life and enough Charismatic-But-Troubled Surgeons, Hunky Doctors and Perky Nurses to staff a small rural hospital, ideally in the 1950s. The Twenty-eighth and Sixty-fourth Sexiest Women in the World were there, along with the Fifteenth Most Talented Man Under Thirty and the Eighth and Fourteenth Most Powerful People in Comedy, while over on the low Italian sofa, the latest Heathcliff was flirting with the most recent Jane Eyre as Nicholas Nickleby looked on.
There were the TV and theater producers too, the directors and casting agents, people that Stephen had been regularly sending the same letter to for eleven years now: “Dear X, I understand that you will soon be casting a production of Y, and I believe I would be ideal for the role of Z, please find enclosed my CV, an eight-by-ten photograph and a self-addressed envelope. I look forward to meeting you, etc, etc.” And here Stephen was, actually meeting them at last, or if not
meeting
them as such, at least offering them nibbles and a napkin to catch the crumbs. Initially he had worried that he might be recognized—“Weren’t you the young man who wrote to me in 1996, asking to be considered for the role of Peer Gynt?”—but realized soon enough that nothing rendered a person invisible quite so effectively as a large white china plate of chicken satay.
Elsewhere, keeping themselves to themselves, were a sprinkling of young aristocrats, heirs and heiresses, entrepreneurs, the militantly trendy: trim, shiny, young men and women with familiar surnames and honey-colored October tans whom he recognized from the diary pages, those flash-lit party-roundup photos that Stephen sometimes found himself scrutinizing with a kind of masochistic curiosity—people who seemed to have a champagne flute fused permanently to the tips of their fingers. They wore vintage silk dresses, beautifully cut suit jackets and artfully faded low-slung jeans that threatened to fall down around their ankles, and were only pegged up by finely sculpted hip bones, prominent from a diet of canapés. Unfailingly polite, they smiled and thanked Stephen for their champagne refills in strange, slurred, absent voices, cultivated somewhere between Shropshire and a Shoreditch market stall. There were a handful of models too, recognizable from controversially explicit billboard campaigns and men’s style mag photo shoots, outlandishly attractive women whose names escaped him but whose breasts and buttocks he was disconcertingly familiar with; women in thrift-shop dresses and Top Shop jewelry, hair greased and slicked down in all different directions, as if they’d felt an obligation to look as downbeat as possible, because otherwise it just wouldn’t be fair.
And there were children too: actor/model/child children, funkily dressed little moppets in tailored dungarees, cheekily asking for sips of champagne, and sprawling on all fours over the buffet table, their elbows in the organic smoked salmon. Stephen found himself serving champagne to a decorously pregnant woman, an elegant
“Fasten Your Seat Belts. It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Night”
A nd half an hour later, the cool people started to arrive.
They were actors, mainly, mostly in their mid-twenties to early thirties, faces Stephen recognized off the telly, from high-end, top-of-the-range period dramas or edgy New Wave sitcoms and sketch shows, or the smarter commercials; the Cute, Feisty Girl who is Britain’s Biggest Hollywood Hope, a couple of sharply dressed violent-but-lovable Brit-Flick Gangsters, the Unconventional Campaigning Lawyer with the Complicated Love Life and enough Charismatic-But-Troubled Surgeons, Hunky Doctors and Perky Nurses to staff a small rural hospital, ideally in the 1950s. The Twenty-eighth and Sixty-fourth Sexiest Women in the World were there, along with the Fifteenth Most Talented Man Under Thirty and the Eighth and Fourteenth Most Powerful People in Comedy, while over on the low Italian sofa, the latest Heathcliff was flirting with the most recent Jane Eyre as Nicholas Nickleby looked on.
There were the TV and theater producers too, the directors and casting agents, people that Stephen had been regularly sending the same letter to for eleven years now: “Dear X, I understand that you will soon be casting a production of Y, and I believe I would be ideal for the role of Z, please find enclosed my CV, an eight-by-ten photograph and a self-addressed envelope. I look forward to meeting you, etc, etc.” And here Stephen was, actually meeting them at last, or if not
meeting
them as such, at least offering them nibbles and a napkin to catch the crumbs. Initially he had worried that he might be recognized—“Weren’t you the young man who wrote to me in 1996, asking to be considered for the role of Peer Gynt?”—but realized soon enough that nothing rendered a person invisible quite so effectively as a large white china plate of chicken satay.
Elsewhere, keeping themselves to themselves, were a sprinkling of young aristocrats, heirs and heiresses, entrepreneurs, the militantly trendy: trim, shiny, young men and women with familiar surnames and honey-colored October tans whom he recognized from the diary pages, those flash-lit party-roundup photos that Stephen sometimes found himself scrutinizing with a kind of masochistic curiosity—people who seemed to have a champagne flute fused permanently to the tips of their fingers. They wore vintage silk dresses, beautifully cut suit jackets and artfully faded low-slung jeans that threatened to fall down around their ankles, and were only pegged up by finely sculpted hip bones, prominent from a diet of canapés. Unfailingly polite, they smiled and thanked Stephen for their champagne refills in strange, slurred, absent voices, cultivated somewhere between Shropshire and a Shoreditch market stall. There were a handful of models too, recognizable from controversially explicit billboard campaigns and men’s style mag photo shoots, outlandishly attractive women whose names escaped him but whose breasts and buttocks he was disconcertingly familiar with; women in thrift-shop dresses and Top Shop jewelry, hair greased and slicked down in all different directions, as if they’d felt an obligation to look as downbeat as possible, because otherwise it just wouldn’t be fair.
And there were children too: actor/model/child children, funkily dressed little moppets in tailored dungarees, cheekily asking for sips of champagne, and sprawling on all fours over the buffet table, their elbows in the organic smoked salmon. Stephen found himself serving champagne to a decorously pregnant woman, an elegant