…vases and felt fedoras with feather headbands and alligator toiletry cases with gilt-silver bottles and brushes and shoehorns that cost two hundred dollars and candlesticks and pillow covers and gloves and slippers and powder puffs and handknitted cotton snowflake sweaters and leather skates and Porsche-design ski goggles and antique apothecary bottles and diamond earrings and silk ties and boots and perfume bottles and diamond earrings and boots and vodka glasses and card cases and cameras and mahogany servers and scarves and aftershaves and photo albums and salt and pepper shakers and ceramic-toaster cookie jars and two-hundred-dollar shoehorns and backpacks and aluminum lunch pails and pillow covers…

Some kind of existential chasm opens before me while I’m browsing in Bloomingdale’s and causes me to first locate a phone and check my messages, then, near tears, after taking three Halcion (since my body has mutated and adapted to the drug it no longer causes sleep—it just seems to ward off total madness), I head toward the Clinique counter where with my platinum American Express card I buy six tubes of shaving cream while flirting nervously with the girls who work there and I decide this emptiness has, at least in part, some connection with the way I treated Evelyn at Barcadia the other night, though there is always the possibility it could just as easily have somexhing to do with the tracking device on my VCR, and while I make a mental note to put in an appearance at Evelyn’s Christmas party—I’m even tempted to ask one of the Clinique girls to escort me—I also remind myself to look through my VCR handbook and deal with the tracking device problem. I see a ten-year-old girl standing by her mother, who is buying a scarf, some jewelry, and I’m thinking: Not bad. I’m wearing a cashmere topcoat, a double-breasted plaid wool and alpaca sport coat, pleated wool trousers, patterned silk tie, all by Valentino Couture, and leather lace-ups by Allen-Edmonds.

I’m having drinks with Charles Murphy at Rusty’s to fortify myself before making an appearance at Evelyn’s Christmas party. I’m wearing a four-button double-breasted wool and silk suit, a cotton shirt with a button-down collar by Valentino Couture, a patterned silk tie by Armani and cap-toed leather slipons by Allen-Edmonds. Murphy is wearing a six-button double-breasted wool gabardine suit by Courrèges, a striped cotton shirt with a tab collar and a foulard-patterned silk-crepe tie, both by Hugo Boss. He’s on a tirade about the Japanese—“They’ve bought the Empire State Building and Nell’s. Nell’s, can you believe it, Bateman?” he exclaims over his second Absolut on the rocks—and it moves something in me, it sets something off, and after leaving Rusty’s, while wandering around the Upper West Side, I find myself crouched in the doorway of what used to be Carly Simon’s, a very hot J. Akail restaurant that closed last fall, and leaping out at a passing Japanese delivery boy, I knock him off his bicycle and drag him into the doorway, his legs tangled somehow in the Schwinn he was riding which works to my advantage since when I slit his throat—easily, effortlessly—the spasmodic kicking that usually accompanies this routine is blocked by the bike, which he still manages to lift five, six times while he’s choking on his own hot blood. I open the cartons of Japanese food and dump their contents over him, but to my surprise instead of sushi and teriyaki and hand rolls and soba noodles, chicken with cashew nuts falls all over his gasping bloodied face and beef chow mein and shrimp fried rice and moo shu pork splatter onto his heaving chest, and this irritating setback—accidentally killing the wrong type of Asian—moves me to check where this order was going—Sally Rubinstein—and with my Mont Blanc pen to write I’m gonna get you too… bitch on the back of it, then place the order over the dead kid’s face and shrug apologetically, mumbling “Uh, sorry” and recall that The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Teenage Girls Who Trade Sex for Crack I spent two hours at the gym today and can now complete two hundred abdominal crunches in less than three minutes. Near Evelyn’s brownstone I hand a freezing bum one of the fortune cookies I took from the delivery boy and he stuffs it, fortune and all, into his mouth, nodding thanks. “Fucking slob,” I mutter loud enough for him to hear. As I turn the corner and head for Evelyn’s, I notice the police lines are still up around the brownstone where her neighbor Victoria Bell was decapitated. Four limousines are parked in front, one still running.

I’m late. The living room and dining room are already crowded with people I don’t really want to talk to. Tall, full blue spruces covered with white twinkling lights stand on either side of the fireplace. Old Christmas songs from the sixties sung by the Ronettes are on the CD player. A bartender in a tuxedo pours champagne and eggnog, mixes Manhattans and martinis, opens bottles of Calera Jensen pinot noir and a Chappellet chardonnay. Twenty-year-old ports line a makeshift bar between vases of poinsettias. A long folding table has been covered with a red tablecloth and is jammed with pans and plates and bowls of roasted hazelnuts and lobster and oyster bisques and celery root soup with apples and Beluga caviar on toast points and creamed onions and roast goose with chestnut stung and caviar in puff pastry and vegetable tarts with tapenade, roast duck and roast rack of veal with shallots and gnocchi gratin and vegetable strudel and Waldorf salad and scallops and bruschetta with mascarpone and white truffles and green chili soufflé and roast partridge with sage, potatoes and onion and cranberry sauce, mincemeat pies and chocolate truffles and lemon soufflé tarts and pecan tarte Tatin. Candles have been lit everywhere, all of them in sterling silver Tiffany candleholders. And though I cannot be positive that I’m not hallucinating, there seem to be midgets dressed in green and red elf suits and felt hats walking around with trays of appetizers. I pretend not to have noticed and head straight for the bar where I gulp down a glass of not-bad champagne then move over to Donald Petersen, and as with most of the men here, someone has tied paper antlers to his head. On the other side of the room Maria and Darwin Hutton’s five-year-old daughter, Cassandra, is wearing a seven-hundred-dollar velvet dress and petticoat by Nancy Halser. After finishing a second glass of champagne I move to martinis—Absolut doubles—and after I’ve calmed down sufficiently I take a closer look around the room, but the midgets are still there.

“Too much red,” I mutter to myself, trancing out. “It’s makin’ me nervous.”

“Hey McCloy,” Petersen says. “What do you say?”

I snap out of it and automatically ask, “Is this the British cast recording of Les Misérables or not?”

“Hey, have a holly jolly Christmas.” He points a finger at me, drunk.

“So what is this music?” I ask, thoroughly annoyed. “And by the way, sir, deck the halls with boughs of holly.”

“Bill Septor,” he says, shrugging. “I think Septor or Skeptor.”

“Why doesn’t she put on some Talking Heads for Christ sakes,” I complain bitterly.

Courtney is standing on the other side of the room, holding a champagne glass and ignoring me completely.

“Or Les Miz,” he suggests.

“American or British cast recording?” My eyes narrowing, I’m testing him.

“Er, British,” he says as a dwarf hands us each a plate of Waldorf salad.

“Definitely,” I murmur, staring at the dwarf as he waddles away.

Suddenly Evelyn rushes up to us wearing a sable jacket and velvet pants by Ralph Lauren and in one hand she’s holding a piece of mistletoe, which she places above my head, and in the other a candy cane.