“Tell me about it.”

“You want to hear something? You want to hear the saddest story in the world?”

“Not really,” I said. “I got my own problems.”

“Shut up and buy me a drink and I’ll tell you something that will make your skin crawl.”

I turned to look at him and he was staring at me with a ferocity that was frightening. I shrugged and waved for the bartender and ordered two scotch on the rocks for him and two beers for me. Then I let Grimes tell me his story.

HE FIRST SAW HER AT A PLACE on Sixteenth Street, a dark, aggressively hip bar with a depressed jukebox and serious drinkers. She was sitting alone, dressed in black, not like an artiste, more like a mourner. She was sort of pretty, but not really thin enough, not really young enough, and he wouldn’t have given her a second look except that there was about this woman in black an aura of sadness that bespoke need. Need was about right, he figured, since he was looking for an effortless piece and need often translated into willing cession. He sat down beside her and bought her a drink. Her name, she said, was Jacqueline Shaw.

“She was drinking Martinis,” said Grimes, “which I thought was sexy in a dissolute sort of way.”

“Is this going to be just another lost girl story?” I asked. “Because if that’s all…”

“Shut up and listen,” said Grimes. “You might just learn something.”

After the second drink she started talking about her spiritual quest, how she was seeking a wider understanding of life than that allowed by the five basic senses. He smiled at her revelations, not out of any true interest, but only because he knew that spiritual yearning and sexual freedom were often deliciously entwined. She talked about the voices of the soul and the spirits that speak within each of us and how we need to learn to hear like a child once again to discern what the voices are whispering to us about the ineffable. She spoke of the connectedness of all things and how each of us, in our myriad of guises, was merely a manifestation of the whole. She said she had found her spiritual guide, a woman named Oleanna. Two more drinks and she and Grimes were walking side by side west, toward Rittenhouse Square. She had a place in one of those old apartment buildings on the south side of the park and was taking him there to show him her collection of spiritual artifacts, in which he had feigned interest.

“Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing,” I said.

“And it was something, too,” said Grimes, “but that’s not what really grabbed my interest.”

“No?”

“It was that place, man, that place.”

Her apartment was unbelievably spacious, baronial in size and furnishings, with everything outsized and thick, huge couches, huge wing chairs, a grand piano. There were tapestries everywhere, on the walls, draped over tables, and chandeliers dripping glass, and carpets thick as fairway rough piled one atop the other. Plants in sculpted pots were everywhere, plants with wide veined leaves and plants with bright tiny flowers and hairy phallic plants thick with thorns. It was otherworldly, that place. She put on this music which drifted out from behind the furnishings, a magical white mix of wind harps and fish flutes, drone tubes and moon lutes and water bells. And then in the center of the main room, atop hand-woven Persian rugs in deep blue, beside a fire, she showed him her crystals and sacred beads and fetishes imported from Africa, a man with a lion’s head, a pregnant woman with hooves and beard, a child with a hyena’s grin. She lit a stick of incense and a candle and then another candle and then twenty candles more and with the fire and totems surrounding them they made love and it was as though the power of those tiny statues and the beads and the crystals were funneled by the music, the incense, the flame, right through her body and she collapsed again and again beneath him on the carpet. And he felt the power too, but the power he felt was not of the fire or of the stones or of the fetishes, it was the power of all the wealth in that magical room, the utter power of money.

“Suddenly,” said Grimes, “I developed a deep belief in the healing power of crystals.”

He went with her the next week to a meeting of her spiritual group. They met in what they called the Haven, which was really the basement of some rat trap in Mount Airy. Everybody was dressed in robes, orange or green, and sat on the floor. There was enough potpourri scattered to make Martha Stewart choke and they chanted and meditated and told each other of painful moments in their lives and their efforts to transcend their physical selves. He noticed that the church members bustled about Jackie like she was a source of some sort. Extra time was devoted to her, extra efforts taken to make her comfortable. “Do you need a pad, Jackie?” “Can we get you something to drink, Jackie?” “Would you like an extra dose of aroma therapy, Jackie?” A woman came out at the end of the meeting and sat on a high-backed regal chair, a beautiful woman in flowing white robes. Jacqueline was taken to sit directly at her feet. This woman was Oleanna, and as she sat on that chair she fell into a trance and strange noises emerged from her throat, noises which bent Jackie double with rapture. Grimes didn’t understand it, thought it part con, part insane, but he couldn’t help noticing how the members all buzzed about Jacqueline like bees about the queen. The next morning he hired an investigator to check her out discreetly.

Three months later, in a private ceremony in her apartment, with the music and the fetishes and the candles, with a pile of crystals between their kneeling, naked bodies, he asked her to marry him and she said yes. By that time the investigator had told him who her great-grandfather was and the approximate amount of the fortune she was scheduled to inherit.

“I’m not going to tell you what corporation they started or anything,” said Grimes.

“Would I know it?” I asked.

“Of course you would, everyone does. You’ve been eating its stuff forever. And her share of the fortune alone was over a hundred million. Do you know how many zeros that is? Eight zeros. That’s enough to buy a baseball team, that’s enough to buy the Eagles. And she said yes.”

“Jesus, you hit the big time.”

“Bigger than you’ll ever see, Mack, that’s for sure.”

With their future settled, Jackie took him one afternoon to meet her family in the ancestral mansion deep in the Main Line, a place they called Veritas. The house was a strange gothic castle, high on a grassy hill, surrounded by acres of woods and strange, desolate gardens. Inside it was a dank mausoleum, cold and humid, decorated much like Jacqueline’s apartment only on a larger, more decrepit scale. One brother never rose from his chair, wearing a creepy smoking jacket, almost too drunk to talk. His wife flitted about him like a hyperactive moth, refreshing his drink, fluffing his pillow. Another brother, thin and nervous, was in a den glued to his computer screen, watching the prices of the family’s vast holdings rise and fall and rise again on the nation’s stock exchanges. The sister was a sarcastic little bitch in black leather who laughed in his face when he told her he was a dentist and who cut Grimes with a series of scathing comments. The mother was overseas somewhere, vacationing alone, and the father stayed in his private upstairs chamber, never stepping down to meet his daughter’s fiancé.

“It felt like I was visiting the Munsters,” said Grimes. “And that was before Jacqueline took me to meet her Grammy, the daughter of the man who had founded the family fortune.”

Grandmother Shaw was hunched over in a chair, her wrinkled face tilted as if one half were made of wax and had been pressed too close to a flame. Her hands were bony and long, the rasp of her breathing sliced the silence in the room. The eye on the melted half of her face was closed; from the other a pale, cataractal blue peered out. She stared at him like he was a disease as Jacqueline made the introductions. Then, with a withering smile, the grandmother insisted on taking Grimes for a little walk around the gardens.