Then, out of the blue: "Have you ever cheated on me?"

Not too much silence before "Oh baby." I lean over her, squeezing the fingers lying on top of the CAA logo. "Why are you asking me this?" And then I ask, but also know, "Have you?"

"I just want to know if you've always been... faithful to me." She looks back at the script and then at the TV, showcasing a lovely pink fog, whole minutes of it. "I care about that, Victor."

"Oh baby, always, always. Don't underestimate me."

"Make love to me, Victor," she whispers. I kiss her gently on the lips. She responds by pushing into me too hard and I have to pull back and whisper, "Oh baby, I'm so wiped out." I lift my head because the new Soul Asylum video is on MTV and I want Chloe to watch it too but she has already turned over, away from me. A photo of myself, a pretty good one, taken by Herb Ritts, sits on Chloe's nightstand, the only one I let her frame.

"Is Herb coming tomorrow?" I ask softly.

"I don't think so," she says, her voice muffled.

"Do you know where he is?" I ask her hair, her neck.

"Maybe it doesn't matter."

Arousal for Chloe: Sinead O'Connor CD, beeswax candles, my cologne, a lie. Beneath the scent of coconut her hair smells like juniper, even willow. Chloe sleeps across from me, dreaming of photographers flashing light meters inches from her face, of running naked down a freezing beach pretending it's summer, of sitting under a palm tree full of spiders in Borneo, of getting off an overnight flight, gliding across another red carpet, paparazzi waiting, Miramax keeps calling, a dream within the dream of six hundred interview sessions melding into nightmares involving white-sand beaches in the South Pacific, a sunset over the Mediterranean, the French Alps, Milan, Paris, Tokyo, the icy waves, the pink newspapers from foreign countries, stacks of magazines with her unblemished face airbrushed to death and cropped close on the covers, and it's hard to sleep when a sentence from a Vanity Fair profile of Chloe by Kevin Sessums refuses to leave me: "Even though we've never met she looks eerily familiar, as if we've known her forever."

27

Vespa toward the club to have breakfast with Damien at 7:30, with stops at three newsstands to check the papers (nothing, no photo, small-time relief, maybe something more), and in the main dining room, which this morning looks stark and nondescript, all white walls and black velvet banquettes, my line of vision is interrupted frequently by flashes from a photographer sent by Vanity Fair wearing a Thai-rice-field-worker hat, a video of Casino Royale on some of the monitors, Downhill Racer on others, while upstairs Beau and Peyton (ahem) man the phones. At our table Damien and me and JD (sitting by my side taking notes) and the two goons from the black Jeep, both wearing black Polo shirts, finish up breakfast, today's papers spread out everywhere with major items about tonight's opening: Richard Johnson in the Post, George Rush in the News (a big photo of me, with the caption "It Boy of the Moment"), Michael Fleming in Variety, Michael Musto plugging it in the Voice, notices in Cindy Adams, Liz Smith, Buddy Seagull, Billy Norwich, Jeanne Williams and A. J. Benza. I finish leaving a message under the name Dagby on my agent Bill's voice mail. Damien's sipping a vanilla hazelnut decaf iced latte, holding a Monte Cristo cigar he keeps threatening to light but doesn't, looking very studly in a Comme des Garcons black T-shirt under a black double- breasted jacket, a Cartier Panthere watch wrapped around a semi-hairy wrist, Giorgio Armani prescription sunglasses locked on a pretty decent head, a Motorola Stortac cell phone next to the semi-hairy wrist. Damien bought a 600SEL last week, and he and the goons just dropped Linda Evangelista off at the Cynthia Rowley show and it's cold in the room and we're all eating muesli and have sideburns and everything would be flat and bright and pop if it wasn't so early.

"So Dolph and I walk backstage at the Calvin Klein show yesterday-just two guys passing a bottle of Dewar's between them-and Kate Moss is there, no shirt on, arms folded across her tits, and I'm thinking, Why bother? Then I drank one too many lethal martinis at Match Uptown last night. Dolph has a master's in chemical engineering, he's married and we're talking wife in italics, baby, so there wasn't a bimbo in sight even though the VIP room was filled with eurowolves but no heroin, no lesbians, no Japanese influences, no British Esquire. We hung out with Irina, the emerging Siberian-Eskimo supermodel. After my fifth lethal martini I asked Irina what it was like growing up in an igloo." A pause. "The evening, er, ended sometime after that." Damien lifts off the sunglasses, rubs his eyes, adjusts them for the first time this morning to light, and glances at the headlines splashed over the various papers. "Helena Christensen splitting up with Michael Hutchence? Prince dating Veronica Webb? God, the world's a mess."