The telephone woke him at noon. Jack Rhinehart, the phone-smasher, invited Professor Solanka over to watch the Holland-Yugoslavia Euro 2000 quarterfinal on Pay-Per-View. Malik accepted, surprising them both. “Glad to get you out of that mole hole,” Rhinehart said. “But if you plan to root for the Serbs, stay home.” Solanka felt refreshed today: less burdened, and, yes, in need of a friend. Even in these days of his retreat, he still had such needs. A holy man up a Himalaya could do without soccer on TV. Solanka was not so pure of heart. He shed the slept-in suit, showered, dressed quickly, and rode downtown. When he climbed out of the cab at Rhinehart’s building, a woman in shades rushed into it, jostling him, and he had, for the second time in as many days, the unsettling feeling that the stranger was someone he knew. In the elevator he identified her: the squeeze-me-and-l-talk doll-woman whose name was the contemporary byword for tacky infidelity, Our Lady of the Thong. “Oh Jesus, Monica,” Rhinehart said. “I run into her all the time. Around here it used to be Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie. Now it’s Minnie Mouth. There goes the neighborhood, right?”

Rhinehart had been trying to get divorced for years, but his wife had made it her life’s work to deny him. They had been a beautiful, perfectly contrasted ebony-and-ivory couple, she long, languid, pale, he equally long, but a pitch-black African-American, and a hyperactive one at that, a hunter, fisherman, weekend driver of very fast cars, marathon runner, gym rat, tennis player, and, lately, thanks to the rise of Tiger Woods, an obsessive golfer too. From the earliest days of their marriage Solanka had wondered how a man with so much energy would handle a woman with so little. They had married splashily in London - Rhinehart had for most of his war years preferred to base himself outside America - and, in a ceramic-and-mosaic palazzo rented for the occasion from a charity that ran it as a halfway house for the mentally troubled, Malik Solanka had made a best-man’s speech whose tone was spectacularly misjudged-at one point, doing his then-celebrated W. C. Fields impression, he compared the risks of the union to those of “jumping out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet and trying to land on a bale of hay” - but prophetically apt. Like most of their circle, however, he had underestimated Bronislawa Rhinehart in one essential respect: she had the sticking power of a leech.

(At least there were no children, Solanka thought when his, everybody’s, misgivings about the union proved justified. He thought of Asmaan on the telephone. “Where’ve you gone, Daddy, are you here?” He thought of himself long ago. At least Rhinehart didn’t have to deal with that, the slow deep pain of a child.)

Rhinehart had done her wrong, no denying that. His response to marriage had been to begin an affair, and his response to the difficulty of maintaining a clandestine relationship had been to initiate another one, and when both his mistresses insisted that he regularize his life, when they both insisted on occupying pole position on the grid of his personal auto rally, he at once managed to find room for yet another woman in his noisy, overcrowded bed. Minnie Mouth was perhaps not such an inappropriate local icon. After a few years of this, and a move from Holland Park to the West Village, Bronislawa-what was it with all these Poles who kept cropping up in various positions?-moved out of the apartment on Hudson Street and used the courts to force Rhinehart to maintain her in high style in a junior suite at a tony Upper East Side hotel, with major credit card spending power. Instead of divorcing him, she told him sweetly, she intended to make the rest of his life a misery, and bleed him slowly dry. “And don’t run out of money, honey,” she advised. “Because then I’ll have to come after what you really like.”

What Rhinehart really liked was food and drink. He owned a little saltbox cottage in the Springs with, at the back of the garden, a shed that he’d equipped as a wine-storage facility and insured for consider ably more money than the cottage, in which the most valuable object was the six-burner Viking range. Rhinehart these days was a turbocharged gastronome, his freezer full of the carcasses of dead birds awaiting their reduction-their elevation!-to jus. In his refrigerator the delicacies of the earth jostled for space: larks’ tongues, emus’ testicles, dinosaurs’ eggs. Yet when, at his friend’s wedding, Solanka had spoken to Rhinehart’s mother and sister of the exquisite pleasures of dining at Jack’s table, he had bewildered and amazed them both. “Jack, cook? This Jack?” asked his mother, disbelievingly pointing at her son. “Jack I know couldn’t open a can of beans less’n I showed him how to hold the can opener.” “Jack 1 know,” his sister added, “couldn’t boil a pan of water without burnin’ it up.” “Jack I know,” his mother concluded, definitively, “couldn’t find the kitcben without a seein’-eye dog leadin’ the way.”

This same Jack could now hold his own with the great chefs of the world, and Solanka marveled, once again, at the human capacity for automorphosis, the transformation of the self, which Americans claimed as their own special, defining characteristic. It wasn’t. Americans were always labeling things with the America logo: American Dream, American Buffalo, American Graffiti, American Psycho, American Tune. But everyone else had such things too, and in the rest of the world the addition of a nationalist prefix didn’t seem to add much meaning. English Psycho, Indian Graffiti, Australian Buffalo, Egyptian Dream, Chilean Tune. America’s need to make things American, to own them, thought Solanka, was the mark of an odd insecurity. Also, of course, and more prosaically, capitalist.

Bronislawa’s threat to Rhinehart’s booze hoard found its mark. He gave up visiting war zones and began to write, instead, lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich for their weekly and monthly magazines of choice: chronicling their loves, their deals, their wild children, their personal tragedies, their tell-all maids, their murders, their surgeries, their good works, their evil secrets, their games, their feuds, their sexual practices, their meanness, their generosity, their groomers, their walkers, their cars. Then he gave up writing poetry and turned his hand, instead, to novels set in the same world, the unreal world that ruled the real one. He often compared his subject to that of the Roman Suetonius. “These are the lives of today’s Caesars in their Palaces,” he’d taken to telling Malik Solanka and anyone else who was prepared to listen. “They sleep with their sisters, murder their mothers, make their horses into senators. It’s mayhem in there, in the Palaces. But guess what? If you’re outside, if you’re the mob in the street, if, that is, you’re us, all you see is that the Palaces are the Palaces, all the money and power is in there, an’ when dey snaps dey fingers, boy, de planet it start jumpin’.” (It was Rhinehart’s habit from time to time to slip into an Eddie Murphy-meets-Br er Rabbit manner, for emphasis or fun.) “Now that I’m writing about this billionairess in a coma or those moneyed kids who iced their parents, now that I’m on this diamond beat, I’m seeing more of the truth of things than I did in fucking Desert Storm or some Sniper’s Alley doorway in Sarajevo, and believe me it’s just as easy, easier even, to step on a fucking land mine and get yourself blown to bits.”

These days, whenever Professor Solanka heard his friend deliver a version of this not infrequent speech, he detected a strengthening note of insincerity. Jack had gone to war-as a noted young radical journalist of color with a distinguished record of investigating American racism and a consequent string of powerful enemies-nursing many of the same fears expressed a generation earlier by the young Cassius Clay: most afraid, that is, of the bullet in the back, of death by what was not then known as “friendly fire.” In the years that followed, however, Jack witnessed, over and over again, the tragic gift of his species for ignoring the notion of ethnic solidarity: the brutalities of blacks against blacks, Arabs against Arabs, Serbs against Bosnians and Croats. ExYugo, Iran-Iraq, Rwanda, Eritrea, Afghanistan. The exterminations in Timor, the communal massacres in Meerut and Assam, the endless color-blind cataclysm of the earth. Somewhere in those years he became capable of close friendships with his white colleagues from the U.S.A. His label changed. He stopped hyphenating himself and became, simply, an American.

Solanka, who was sensitive to the undertones of such rebrandings, understood that for Jack there was much disappointment involved in this transformation, even much anger directed at what white racists would eagerly have called “his own kind,” and that such anger turns all too easily against the angry party. Jack stayed away from America, married a white woman, and moved in bien peasant circles in which race was “not an issue”: that is, almost everyone was white. Back in New York, separated from Bronislawa, he continued to date what he called “the daughters of Paleface.” The joke couldn’t hide the truth. These days Jack was more or less the only black man Jack knew, and Solanka was probably the only brown one. Rhinehart had crossed a line.

And now, perhaps, was crossing another one. Jack’s new line of work gave him an all-access pass to the Palaces, and he loved it. He wrote about this gilded milieu with waspish venom, he tore it apart for its crassness, its blindness, its mindlessness, its depthless surfaceness, but the invitations from the Warren Redstones and Ross Buffetts, from the Schuylers and Muybridges and Van Burens and Kleins, from Ivana Opalberg-Speedvogel and Marlalee Booken Caudell, just kept on coming, because the guy was hooked and they knew it. He was their house nigger and it suited them to keep him around, as, Solanka suspected, a sort of pet. “Jack Rhinehart” was a usefully non-black specific name, carrying none of the ghetto connotations of a Tupac, Vondie, Anfernee, or Rah’schied (these were days of innovative naming and creative orthography in the African-American community). In the Palaces, people were not named in this way. Men were not called Biggie or Hammer or Shaquille or Snoop or Dre, nor were women named Pepa or LeftEye or D:Neece. No Kunta Kintes or Shaznays in America’s golden halls; where, however, a man might be nicknamed Stash or Club by way of a sexual compliment, and the women might be Blaine or Brooke or Horne, and anything you wanted was probably simmering between satin sheets just behind the door of that bedroom suite over there, the one with the door standing ever so slightly ajar.

Yes, women, of course. Women were Rhinehart’s addiction and Achilles’ heel, and this was the Valley of the Dollybirds. No: it was the mountain, the Everest of the Dollybirds, the fabled Dollybird Horn of Plenty. Send these women his way, the Christies and Christys and Kristens and Chrysteles, the giantesses about whom most of the planet was busy fantasizing, with whom even Castro and Mandela were happy to pose, and Rhinehart would lie down (or sit up) and beg. Behind the infinite layers of Rhinehart’s cool was this ignoble fact: he had been seduced, and his desire to be accepted into this white man’s club was the dark secret he could not confess to anyone, perhaps not even to himself. And these are the secrets from which the anger comes. In this dark bed the seeds of fury grow. And although Jack’s act was armor-plated, although his mask never slipped, Solanka was sure he could see, in his friend’s blazing eyes, the self-loathing fire of his rage. It took him a long while to concede that Jack’s suppressed fury was the mirror of his own.

Rhinehart’s annual income was currently in the median-to-upper range of the six-figure bracket, but he claimed, only half jokingly, to be frequently pressed for cash. Bronislawa had exhausted three judges and four lawyers, discovering on her journey a Jarndyce-like gift-even, Solanka thought, an Indian genius-for legal obstruction and delay. Of this she had become (perhaps literally) insanely proud. She had learned how to twist and thicken the plot. As a practicing Catholic, she initially announced that she wouldn’t sue Rhinehart for divorce even though he was the devil in disguise. The devil, she explained to her attorneys, was short, white, wore a green frock coat, a pigtail, and high-heeled slippers, and strongly resembled the philosopher Immanuel Kant. But he was capable of taking any form, a column of smoke, a reflection in a mirror, or a long, black, frenziedly energetic husband. “My revenge on Satan,” she told the bemused lawyers, “will be to keep him the prisoner of my ring.” In New York, where the legal grounds for divorce were few and rigorously defined and the no-fault split didn’t exist, Rhinehart’s case against his wife was weak. He tried persuasion, bribery, threats. She stood firm and brought no suit. Eventually he did begin a court action, against which she brilliantly and determinedly offered a stupendous, almost mystical inaction. The ferocity of her passive resistance would have impressed, probably, Gandhi. She got away with a decade-long sequence of psychological and physical “breakdowns” that the cheesiest daytime soap would have found excessive, and had been in contempt of court forty-seven times, without ever going to jail, because of Rhinehart’s unwillingness to ask the court to act against her. So in his middle forties he was still paying for the sins of his middle thirties. Meanwhile he continued to be promiscuous, and to praise the city for its bounty. “For a single man with a few bucks in the bank and an inclination to party, this little piece of real estate stolen from those Mannahattoes is the happy hunting grounds, no less.”

But he wasn’t single. And in eleven years he could surely have, for example, moved across the state border to Connecticut, where no-fault divorce did exist, or found the six or so weeks required to establish legal residence in Nevada and cut this Gordian knot. This he had not done. Once, in his cups, he had confided to Solanka that for all the city’s generosity in providing the grateful male with multiple-choice options in dating, there was a snag. “They all want the big words,” he protested. “They want forever, serious, heavy, long-term. If it’s not grand passion, it’s not happening. This is why they’re so lonely. There aren’t enough men to go around, but they won’t shop if they can’t buy. They aren’t open to the concept of the rental, the time share. They’re fucked-up, man. They’re looking for real estate in a market that’s crazily high, but they know it’ll be going even higher soon.” In this version of the truth, Rhinehart’s incomplete divorce bought him breathing space, lebensraum. Women would try him out, for he was beautiful and charming, and, until they got sick of the endlessness of it, would wait.

There was also, however, another possible reading of the situation. Up where Rhinehart now mostly lived, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Diamond as Big as the Ritz, he was literally outclassed and, the moment he fell into the trap of wanting what was on offer up there on Olympus, also out of his depth. He was, remember, their toy, and while girls will play with toys, they don’t marry them. So maybe being half-married, stuck in this endlessly divorcing condition, was also a way for Rhinehart to kid himself. In reality there probably wasn’t much of a line forming to wait for him. Single, and aging - he had turned forty - now he was almost out of time. Almost-the killer word for any ambitious lady-killer--ineligible.

Malik Solanka, a decade and a half older than Jack Rhinehart and a dozen dozen times more inhibited, had often watched and listened with envious wonder as Rhinehart went about his life’s business in so unshamedly male a manner. The combat zones, the women, the dangerous sports, the life of a man of deeds. Even the now-abandoned poetry had been of the virile Ted Hughes school. Often Solanka had felt that in spite of his seniority in years, it was Rhinehart who was the master and he the student. A mere maker of dolls must bow his head before a wind surfer, a sky diver, a bungee jumper, a rock climber, a man whose idea of fun it was to go to Hunter College twice a week and run up and down forty flights of stairs. Being a boy-but this was getting too close to his forbidden, obliterated back-story-was a skill Malik Solanka had not been allowed to acquire in full.

Patrick Kluivert scored for the Dutch, and both Solanka and Rhinehart jumped to their feet, waving bottles of Mexican beer and shouting. Then the doorbell rang and Rhinehart said, without preamble, “Oh, by the way, I think I’m in love. I invited her to join us. Hope that’s okay.” This was not an original line. Traditionally it signaled the arrival of what Rhinehart would very privately call the new waitress. What followed, however, was new. “She’s one of yours,” Rhinehart said over his shoulder as he got up to open the door. “Indian diaspora. One hundred years of servitude. In the eighteen nineties her ancestors went as indentured laborers to work in what’s-its-name. Lilliput-Blefuscu. Now they run the sugarcane production and the economy would fall apart without them, but you know how it is wherever Indians go. People don’t like them. Dey works too hard and dey keeps to deyself and dey acts so clang uppity. Ask anyone. Ask Idi Amin.”

On the television the Dutch were playing sublime soccer, but the match had suddenly become an irrelevance. Malik Solanka was thinking that the woman who had just entered Rhinehart’s living room was by some distance the most beautiful Indian woman-the most beautiful woman-he had ever seen. Compared to the intoxicating effect of her presence, the bottle of Dos Equis in his left hand was wholly alcohol free. Other women in the world were just under six feet tall, with waist-length black hair, he supposed; and no doubt such smoky eyes were also to be found elsewhere, as also other lips as richly cushioned, other necks as slender, other legs as interminably long. On other women, too, there might be breasts like these. So what? In the words of an idiotic song from the fifties, “Bernardine,” sung in one of his raunchier moments by his mother’s favorite recording artist, the Christian conservative Pat Boone: “Your separate parts are not unknown / but the way you assemble ‘em’s all your own.” Exactly, thought Professor Solanka, drowning. Just exactly so.

Down the upper part of the woman’s right arm there was an eight-inch-long herringbone-pattern scar. When she saw him looking at it, she at once crossed her arms and put her left hand over the injury, not understanding that it made her more beautiful, that it perfected her beauty by adding an essential imperfection. By showing that she could be injured, that such astonishing loveliness could be broken in an instant, the cicatrice only emphasized what was there, and made one cherish it-my goodness, Solanka thought, what a word to use about a stranger!-all the more.

Extreme physical beauty draws all available light toward itself, becomes a shining beacon in an otherwise darkened world. Why would one peer into the encircling gloom when one could look at this kindly flame? Why talk, eat, sleep, work when such effulgence was on display? Why do anything but look, for the rest of one’s paltry life? Lumen de lumine. Staring into the sidereal unreality of her beauty, which wheeled in the room like a galaxy on fire, he was thinking that if he had been able to wish his ideal woman into being, if he’d had a magic lamp to rub, this would have been what he’d have wished for. And, at the same time, while he was mentally congratulating Rhinehart for breaking away at last from the many daughters of Paleface, he was also imagining himself with this dark Venus, he was allowing his own, closed heart to open, and so remembering once again what he spent much of his life trying to forget: the size of the crater within him, the hole left by his break with his recent and remote past, which, just perhaps, the love of such a woman could fill. Ancient, secret pain welled up in him, pleading to be healed.

“Yeah, sorry bout that, buddy” came Rhinehart’s tickled drawl from the far side of the universe. “She hits most people that way. Can’t help it. Doesn’t know how to switch it off. Neela, meet my celibate pal Malik. He’s given up women forever, as you can plainly see.” Jack was enjoying himself, Solanka noted. He forced himself back into the real world. “Lucky for all of us that I have,” he finally said, pushing his mouth into some sort of smile. “Otherwise, I’d have to fight you for her.” Here’s that old euphony again, he thought: Neela, Mila. Desire is coming after me, and giving me warnings in rhyme.

She worked as a producer with one of the better independents, and specialized in documentary programming for television. Right now she was planning a project that would take her back to her roots. Things back home in Lilliput-Blefuscu were not good, Neela explained. People in the West thought of it as a South Sea paradise, a place for honeymoons and other trysts, but there was trouble brewing. Relations between the Indo-Lilliputians and the indigenous, ethnic “Elbee” community-which still made up a majority o£ the population, but only just-were deteriorating fast. To highlight the issues, New York representatives of the opposing factions had both arranged to hold parades on the same upcoming Sunday. These manifestations would be small but fervent. The two march routes were to be widely separated, but it was still a good bet that there would be some angry clashes. Neela herself was determined to march. As she talked about the worsening political turbulence in her tiny patch of the antipodes, Professor Solanka saw the hot blood rising in her. This conflict was not a small matter for beautiful Neela. She was still connected to her origins, and Solanka almost envied her for it. Jack Rhinehart was saying, boyishly, “Great! We’ll all go! Sure we will! You’ll march for your people, Malik, right? Well, you’ll march for Neela, anyhow.” Rhinehart’s tone was light: a miscalculation. Solanka saw Neela stiffen and frown. This wasn’t to be treated as a game. “Yes,” Solanka said, looking her in the eyes. “I’ll march.”

They settled down to watch the game. More goals came: six in all for the Netherlands, a late, irrelevant consolation strike for Yugoslavia. Neela, too, was glad the Dutch had done well. She saw their black players, uncompetitively but also without false modesty, as her near equals in gorgeousness. “The Surinamese,” she said, unknowingly echoing the thoughts of the young Malik Solanka in Amsterdam all those years ago, “are the living proof of the value of mixing up the races. Look at them. Edgar Davids, Kluivert, Rijkaard in the dugout, and, in the good old days, Ruud. The great Gullit. All of them, metegues. Stir all the races together and you get the most beautiful people in the world. I want to go,” she added, to nobody in particular, “soon, to Surinam.” She sprawled across the settee, throwing one long, leather-clad leg over the arm, and dislodged the day’s Post. It fell to the floor at Solanka’s feet, and his eye was caught by the headline: CONCRETE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. And below, in smaller type: Who Was the Man in the Panama Hat? Everything changed at once; darkness rushed in through the open window, blinding him. His little rush of excitement, good humor, and lust drained away. He felt himself trembling, and rose quickly to his feet. “I have to leave,” he said. “What, the final whistle blows and you’re out of here? Malik, friend, that just plain ain’t polite.” But Solanka only shook his head at Rhinehart and headed out through the door, fast. Behind him he heard Neela talking about the Post headline; she’d picked up the paper as he left. “Bastard. This stuff is supposed to have stopped, it’s supposed to be safe now, right,” she was saying. “But, shit, it’s never over. Here we go again.”