Читать книгу Windows on the World - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 16

As I finish my cappuccino, I look at the other customers, who do not look at me. A lot of sporty redheads. There’s a table of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other. There’s the adulterous stockbrokers. There are American tourists like me, nouveau riche rednecks and proud of it, WASPs wearing suspenders, yuppies with brilliant-white teeth. Boys in striped shirts. Women with ultra blow-dried hair, their pretty hands sporting long manicured nails. Most of them look like Britney Spears twenty years from now. There are Arabs, Englishmen, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Italians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, all of them fat. What the customers of Windows on the World have in common is their paunches. I wonder whether I wouldn’t have been better off taking the kids to the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-fifth floor of the NBC building. The Rainbow Room: twenty-four windows in the heart of the city. The architects of the Rockefeller Center wanted to call it the Stratosphere. But my kids wouldn’t have appreciated the thirties mirrors, the reflections of Manhattan, the legacy of jazz big bands, the whiff of the roaring twenties. All Jerry and David want is to stuff themselves with sausage and muffins in the highest restaurant in New York. Luckily for my wallet, the Toys Us in the lobby was closed otherwise they’d have cleaned the place out. My kids are tyrants and I have to follow their orders to the letter. As I bolt my breakfast, I look down: from this height it’s impossible to make out people. The only moving things in Lower Manhattan are the cars coming and going across the Brooklyn Bridge, tourist helicopters over the East River, and the boats passing each other under the suspension bridges. I’d copied a quote from Kafka into the guidebook: “The bridge connecting New York with Brooklyn hung delicately over the East River, and if one half-shut one’s eyes it seemed to tremble. It appeared to be quite bare of traffic, and beneath it stretched a smooth empty tongue of water.” Amazing how he can so accurately describe something he never saw. Directly in front of me, I can see the Chase Manhattan building, to the left Manhattan Bridge, and to the right, at the end of Fulton Street, South Street Seaport, but I would be incapable of describing them. And I realize that I love this crazy country of mine, the fucked-up times we live in, my annoying kids. A surge of affection overwhelms me—probably last night’s vodka catching up with me. Candace took me to Pravda, and we kind of overdid it on the cherry vodka. Candace did a photo shoot for Victoria’s Secret, I mention it just to give you an idea of how hot she is. But things aren’t going too well between us: she wants us to get married, have a baby, live together, and these are precisely the three mistakes that I want to avoid making again. To punish me for wanting to stay single, she doesn’t come anymore when we fuck. They say some women say no when they mean yes, Candace is the opposite: when she says yes, she means no.

“Why are you so bullish about the NASDAQ?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“You can’t lose now the Internet bubble’s burst,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren, “pretty much anything’s gonna run up three sticks, the stocks have completely crunched.”

“Yeah, but look at the cash flows, it’s all off-balance-sheet transactions,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “I’d be worried about getting jigged out.”

“I bought some stock in Enron,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “The company’s a scalper’s dream. Have you seen their earnings?”

“I’m with you there, almost worth holding a position on. WorldCom, too. Their EBITDA is sweet as a million-dollar bill,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “Otherwise I don’t fancy being a bottom fisher in that market.”

“Yeah, well, one way or the other, 2001 is gonna be shit, all the bonuses are going to be slashed,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “You can kiss your villa in Hawaii goodbye.”

“I think it’s pretty simple: fuck the Porsche, I’m holding liquid,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “But 2002 has got to be better, we just have to wait and see what Greenspan does on rates.”

“I love you,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“God, I want to launch a hostile takeover bid on you,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Leave your fucking wife,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Okay, okay, I promise I’ll dump her tonight, soon as I get in from the gym,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

And they launch into a pretty hot kiss, all tongues and spit like a good California porn movie or a perfume ad.