Still, they were better than the people like Charlotte. At least Tony had an excuse. He really was Important, in objective terms, in the real world. What had Charlotte been, but an aging postdebutante and Main Line matron, the sort of woman there were dozens of at every reunion of Agnes Irwin and the Madeira School. It was amazing the way these women took on their husbands’ auras as if they deserved them. My husband runs a very important international investment bank, therefore I deserve more respect and deference than the president of the United States. Unlike Tony, Charlotte was not always courteous. Ryall would have thought her also less condescending, except that she wasn’t. She was very out-front and straightforward about her condescension, and her contempt. There had been times when he had wanted to take her neck between his hands and snap it off—except, of course, that he couldn’t have done it. He was not strong. He was no danger to anybody without a weapon in his hand, whether it was a pen or a gun. But that didn’t work either. He couldn’t write what he wanted about them. If he did, they would do to him what people very much like them had done to Truman Capote. They’d cut him off, and then where would he be? He wondered if it had been like this for the great social chroniclers of the past, the “powerful” columnists who had played right-hand man to people like Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt. He was willing to bet that it had been exactly the same. They would have been careful when they were required to be careful. They would have flattered and attended and lied to keep their place. Ryall didn’t understand why people like Charlotte and Annie were so surprised at the kind of things they stumbled on in The Harridan Report. He was sure half the country secretly thought the kinds of things that were written there. They might not believe in an alien race of reptilians who only pretended to be human, but they did believe in a conspiracy, because there was one. There was a conspiracy of the already important to make sure the unimportant never forgot their place.
For no reason he understood, he had a vision of Tony lying there on the ground with the bullet in his head, the blood on the sidewalk, the perfect aristocratic face half gone. The result was a sexual desire so immediate and intense, it almost made him stagger. The next thing he saw was the girl, the one he had picked up that night, but only that night. He never liked to have them more than once. Once he had seen them bending over his penis, struggling to stuff it as far down their throats as Linda Lovelace had done and still not gag—once he had seen that, he never wanted them again. He couldn’t take them seriously. Somebody ought to shoot Annie Ross, he thought. She was interfering in things she didn’t understand. None of these women understood. They were too old for any man to be interested in them as anything but broodmares. Ryall wasn’t interested in a broodmare. He couldn’t afford one. When he could afford one, he would get one. Then he would be like all these guys, the ones at the Society parties, the ones who provided the talking heads on television shows. He’d have his broodmare and his eleven-year-old doxy on the side, set up decently in private, so that he didn’t have to run the risk of exposure every time he wanted to get laid. Yes, somebody ought to kill Annie Ross. Somebody ought to blast her head to pieces, just like Tony’s, just like Charlotte’s. He knew exactly how Charlotte’s head had come apart there on the drive in front of her front door, the blood and skin and bone falling over the thick molded cement rim of the planter near the door, the wind blowing cold wet darkness through her hair. He hoped she had lain there writhing in her own blood for many long minutes and only expired when the ambulance arrived. He hoped the same thing happened to Annie Ross, whose only purpose in life was to destroy men for doing what was natural to them.
The phone rang. He straightened up a little and tried to breathe. He was sweating all over now. He could feel wet heavy sweat soaked into the back of his jacket. His hands were so slick, he had to wipe them against the knees of his pants in order to pick up the phone. He was going to have to change all his clothes before he went out. He was going to have to take a shower. What if she had been lying to him? What if she had gone to the papers already, or the police? What if everybody in town knew what he did in his car in the darkness of the early evenings before he had to go to another party or another opening or another wedding? They all did it too. He knew that. They all did it too, but they wouldn’t admit it.
He took one more deep breath and picked up the phone. He was sure he was going to hear Matt Drudge at least, somebody who specialized in real gossip, somebody with the clout to get the news out on an international scale. They all said they didn’t read Matt Drudge, but they did. They read him first. Ryall wondered if he could be Matt Drudge himself. He knew he couldn’t. It was the Porky Pig thing, again. No matter what he did, he still looked like Porky Pig. Sometimes he expected Disney to sue him for copyright infringement.