“Why are we always talking about him, Angie? Last Thursday, I saw a young boy, a young young young blond, who was even more beautiful. Why Robert?”

This time, she looked startled.

“You’re not suggesting we be de-programmed and leave the cult, are you, dickbreath? It’s too late for both of us. Some matron at that Lincoln Center party said Robert looked like a park statue come to life. If you call such a statue ‘Honor,’ that seems true. You name him ‘To All Fallen Soldiers,’ who’d argue? That’s our whip-wielder all over. He’s whatever anybody needs perfection to be. Once at a disco, I saw him by accident. He was with those idiotic fashion anorexics he used to fuck because they look more like eleven-year-old boys than eleven-year-old boys and a lot easier to get into without a can opener. He was with that coked-out watercress and cocaine coven. He was making them laugh tough. How? by doing the ‘funky chicken’ and his James Brown imitation, with a tablecloth as his cape. And not one of them looked stupider just then. And they loved him for it. I fell for Robbie because I thought he was as ruthless as I, chile. Turns out, I was wrong. About me. Hartley, the way you see him, he’s a face like a jonquil and his pedestal says ‘Virtue.’ You make Robert good because you can’t think of anything else you qualify to be. I’d follow him to hell and back. You, too. I know how much you love him. Well, so do others; it’s Titanic-sized with others. Fifteen hundred people have loved him as much as we do. And instead of turning us off …”

“I don’t think I want to hear this …”

Okay then. She told me I would probably be inspired by the new Francis Bacon pictures at Marlborough; Robbie loved the work; she’d stopped by the opening last night, had actually met Bacon. “He’s like some little shrunken-head cherub from hell. Like his paintings, a face the color of groundround. Very funny, caustic, bad to drink. We wound up giving grades—one to ten—for every waiter serving.” She herself had to rush off now to what she blithely called “a shoot” and, after … (I saw her hesitate to tell, but our habit of candor still proved too hard to break)… In a rushy urbane way, she complained that, vulgar as it sounded, her four o’clock might be fun: A famous woman clothing designer, always wearing black, erotically obsessed with her lookalike teenaged daughter, had asked Angie about her Alabama beaded top and when Ang admitted to making it up herself, this commercial wiz saw a possible “new line.”

“She imagines I am going to do, either under my name or no, but better, yes, forty-nine others. You ready for this? ‘Tops of the States’! I ask you. She goes, ‘Bama, if I may call you that: It’s personal, it’s vernacular, it’s zappy mappy JasperJohnsish—and like you, I’m sorry, but it’s just so fucking NOW!’