The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio

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      “Here’s my philosophy,” Mona says. “Drink, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we disappear like smoke.” She’s sitting in a striped chair, legs crossed, idly dangling one expensive high heel and exhaling perfect smoke rings. Mona smokes almost as much as she drinks.

      “Carpe vino.” I lift my glass and look through it at the hotel room, the walls and furniture wavering inside a tiny lake of champagne, and then I drain the lake. “How come you don’t date, Mona?”

      “Oh, men are such swine,” she says.

      “Not all of them,” Don says from the queen bed. He’s lying there like he’s waiting for one of us to join him, stretched out with his feet in their thin black socks pointed at the ceiling.

      “No,” Mona says, “some of them are dogs.”

      “Arf!” Don says. “Arf arf arf!”

      Joseph is reading his Nietzsche, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Or is it this,” he says, reading aloud. “To go into foul water when it is the water of truth.”

      “I need to be petted,” Don says. “I’m a lonely puppy. Pet me, pet me,” he says. He raises his arms like paws. He lets his tongue loll out and starts panting, fast and shallow.

      “Women,” Joseph says. “You always think you’re better than us.” He puts down his book and upends his glass, chugging his champagne, then looks around for more. I’ve set the last bottle with anything in it—there were three—on the nightstand next to Don. Joseph looks at me, like I’m supposed to get it for him.

      “We are better than you,” I say. “Look who starts all the wars. Who most of the serial killers are. The terrorists. The rapists.”

      “The dentists,” Mona adds.

      “You’re all the same,” Joseph says. He gets up and goes for the bottle. My glass is empty, too, but instead of filling it he takes the bottle and goes and sits back down on the floor with it.

      “No, we’re not.” I go and sit next to him. “That’s a mean thing to say. And it’s also inaccurate.”

      “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said it. I’m an asshole. I say stupid things sometimes. Especially when I like somebody.”

      I take the bottle and pour myself some more. It takes some concentration to perform this act, as the rim of the champagne flute seems to have shrunk in diameter. “What do you like about me?”

      “You’re cool,” Joseph says.

      I lean in to kiss him. I move toward him like a bee aiming for a flower, an insect driven by instinct, not caring that the pollen dusting its feet will aid in the process of plant reproduction. Selfishness and intoxication propel me toward his slightly parted lips. Our tongues wrestle in the dark cave our mouths make, mashed together.

      “Somebody get a hose,” Mona says.

      We kiss some more and then I pull away and look at him. His whole face is soft and open, like a flower that’s just gorged itself on sunlight.

      “Way cool,” he says. “Definitely way cool.”

      “Do you know any other words?”

      Mona says. “Mona, have you ever been married?” I ask her.

      “I can’t imagine anything more tedious,” Mona says, “than marriage.”

      She finishes her cigarette and goes over to the window, where she’s left her glass on the ledge. There are two Monas now, one in the room and another reflected in the window. Ideal Mona and Real Mona. Plato’s world of forms—the phrase drifts through my head, a little boat headed for the horizon without anything like knowledge to anchor it. Now the world of forms is starting to double, too; Mona lifts her glass and there are two of her in the room, resolving into one when I blink, then doubling again. I close my eyes.

      “To freedom,” she says, “from giving a shit.”

      I try on Mona’s idea, like I’m winding one of her expensive silk scarves around me. Marriage is tedious. I imagine growing old alone, forever raising a glass of champagne to not giving a shit.

      “Pet me, pet me, pet me,” Don says.

      Don is snoring, if that’s what you’d call the sounds he’s making. He breathes out through his closed mouth, and a little air escapes, making a soft pop-pop-pop sound. I almost expect champagne bubbles to float out of him.

      Joseph is gone. What happened to Joseph? We were arguing about something, I remember. You think you’re so superior, he said. Fuck off, then, I said. I think I passed out for a while after that. I’m sprawled in a striped wing chair and I feel too high to move. I imagine Joseph riding home in the ghastly light of a Muni streetcar. All around him, partygoers in brightly colored costumes talk and laugh, heading for another party or for the festivities on Castro Street. He sits there lonely and bitter, his shoulders slumped, and I wish I’d given him my phone number.

      Mona is leaning over Don, her back to me. It looks like she’s taking off his pants. But then she stands up, and I see she’s got his wallet. She pulls out the bills, and a silver credit card, then flips the wallet closed and sets it on the nightstand.

      “Mona,” I say.

      She wiggles her hand behind her back, waving me away.

      “You took his money.”

      “No shit,” she says, straightening. She picks up her beaded clutch, clicks it open, and drops the money and credit card inside.

      “You’re stealing his money.”

      “I’m liberating it. Let’s go. He looks dead to the world, but you never know.”

      “You’re a thief,” I say. Mona is a thief. I wonder how I could not have known before. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.

      She comes over and pulls me up by one arm. I stagger and fall into her. Her perfume’s too strong and she smells like all the cigarettes she’s had, and I gag and taste the fries I ate earlier, rising on a tide of champagne.

      “Wait.” I go into the bathroom, squat down and crouch over the toilet, but nothing happens. I pull a hand towel off the rack, wet it under the faucet, and wipe my face. Don’s ring is on the counter, just like I thought. It’s there next to his electric toothbrush and a tube of mint Colgate he’s been squeezing from the top instead of the bottom. I pick up the ring; it’s a plain gold circle, and inside, in cursive, the name Debbie is engraved. I close it in my hand, and when I come out I slip it into my purse so fast Mona doesn’t even notice.

      We head out of the room and along the hall to the elevator. It’s one of those mirrored ones. The walls below the mirrored part are dark wood, and the floor is thickly carpeted, and a brass railing runs all the way around. I look at us in the mirror as we descend, and Mona watches the numbers light as we go from 5 to L. We look like shit. The skin СКАЧАТЬ