Clothes-a simple black Armani suit, a white Comme des Garcons shirt, a red Prada vest-lie across an ash-gray divan in the corner of the room. Bobby Hughes is wearing slippers and pouring mint tea from a black ceramic pot that he sets back down on a chrome table. Now he's choosing which Versace tie I should wear tonight from a rack hanging in a walk-in closet.

When we hug again, he whispers insistently into my ear.

"What if one day, Victor"-Bobby breathes in, holding me tighter-"what if one day you became whatever you're not?"

0

First we sipped Stolis at Quo Vadis in Soho for some European MTV benefit, then we arrived at the party in Holland Park in two Jaguar XK8s, both of them red and gleaming, parked at conspicuous angles in front of the house. People definitely noticed and started whispering to each other as the six of us walked in together and at that precise moment Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'Aime" started playing continuously for the rest of the evening. There was no discernible center at the party, its hosts were invisible, guests had to come up with strained explanations as to why they were there and some had completely forgotten who had invited them, no one really knew. Emporio Armani underwear models moved through a crowd consisting of Tim Roth, Seal, members of Supergrass, Pippa Brooks, Fairuza Balk, Paul Weller, Tyson, someone passing around large trays of osso buco. Outside there was a garden filled with roses and below tall hedges children dressed in Tommy Hilfiger safari shirts were drinking candy-colored punch made with grenadine and playing a game with an empty bottle of Stolichnaya, kicking it along the expanse of plush green lawn, and beyond them, just night. Smells floating around inside the house included tarragon, tobacco flowers, bergamot, oak moss. "Possibly," I muttered to someone.

I was slouching in a black leather armchair while Bobby, in a suit he found on Savile Row, kept feeding me Xanax, whispering the sentence "You'd better get used to it" each time he departed. I kept petting a ceramic cat that was perched next to the armchair I was frozen in, occasionally noticing an oversized book lying on the floor with the words Designing with Tiles on its cover. There was an aquarium filled with cumbersome black fish that struck me as essential. And everyone had just gotten back from L.A. and people were heading to Reykjavik for the weekend and some people seemed concerned about the fate of the ozone layer while others definitely did not. In a bathroom I tranced out on a bar of monogrammed soap that sat in a black dish while I stood on a shaggy wool carpet, unable to urinate. And then I was biting off what was left of my fingernails while Sophie Dahl introduced me to Bruce and Tammy before they drifted off to dance beneath the hedges and there were giant banana fronds situated everywhere and I just kept wincing but Sophie didn't notice.

Almost always in my line of vision, Jamie Fields somehow managed to completely avoid me that night. She was either laughing over a private joke with Amber Valletta or shaking her head slightly whenever a tray of hors d'oeuvres-almojabanas specially flown in from a restaurant in San Juan-was offered and she was saying "I do" to just about anything that was asked of her. Bentley stared as an awkward but well-bred teenage boy drinking pinot noir from a medium-sized jug developed a crush on me in a matter of seconds and I just smiled wanly at him as he brushed stray bits of confetti off the Armani jacket I was wearing and said "cool" as if it had twelve os in it. It wasn't until much later that I noticed the film crew was there too, including Felix the cinematographer, though none of them seemed fazed, and then a small patch of fog started parting and I realized that maybe none of them knew about Sam Ho and what happened to him, the freakish way he died, how his hand twitched miserably, the tattoo of the word SLAVE blurring because of how hard his body vibrated. Bobby, looking airbrushed, handed me a napkin and asked me to stop drooling.

"Mingle," Bobby whispered. "Mingle."

Someone handed me another glass of champagne and someone else lit a cigarette that had been dangling from my lips for the past half hour and what I found myself thinking less and less was "But maybe I'm right and they're wrong" because I was yielding, yielding.

4

38

The film crew follows Tammy into the dining area, where she has a tense breakfast with Bruce. She sips lukewarm hot chocolate, pretending to read Le Monde, and Bruce hostilely butters a piece of almond bread until he breaks the silence by telling Tammy he knows horrible things about her past, keeps mentioning a stint in Saudi Arabia without elaborating. Bruce's hair is wet and his narrow face is flushed pink from a recent shower and he's wearing a pistachio-colored Paul Smith T-shirt and later he will be attending a prestigious rooftop luncheon somewhere in the 16th arrondissement that Versace is throwing to which only good-looking people have been invited and Bruce has decided to wear a black body shirt and gray Prada shoes to the rooftop luncheon and he's really going only because of a canceled booking last month.