Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 53
Gam was in the hospital again. I don’t remember what she’d broken, but after the hospital stay, she had the option of going to a rehab facility or having a physical therapist sent to her home. She opted for the rehab facility. “Anything to avoid going back to the House,” she told me.
It was better that way. After the mugging, she had had to sleep in a hospital bed in the library for weeks. My grandfather, who’d recovered very well from his hip surgery, hadn’t had much to say in the way of commiseration or comfort.
“Everything’s great. Right, Toots?” he’d say.
In 1998, we celebrated Father’s Day at Donald’s apartment at Trump Tower for the first time. It had become too difficult for my grandfather to be in public, so our traditional trip to Peter Luger in Brooklyn was out of the question. It was a family custom to go there twice a year, on Father’s Day and my grandfather’s birthday.
Peter Luger was a deeply strange, very expensive restaurant that charged extra for bad service and accepted only cash, check, or a Peter Luger charge card (which my grandfather possessed). The menu was limited, and whether you asked for them or not, huge platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes and white onions arrived, accompanied by tiny ceramic dishes of hash fries and creamed spinach that usually went untouched. A side of beef was brought out on trays, punctuated with little plastic cows in varying shades ranging from red (still mooing) and pink (almost able to crawl across the table) to—actually, I don’t know. All of our little cows were red and pink. Most of us ordered Cokes, which were served in six-ounce bottles; because of the legendarily bad service, that meant at the end of the evening the table was littered with the wreckage of a couple of cow carcasses, dozens of Coke bottles, and plates full of food nobody in my family ever ate.
The meal wasn’t over until my grandfather had sucked the marrow out of the bones, which, given his mustache, was a sight to behold.
Since I’d stopped eating meat in college, dinner at Peter Luger had become a challenge. I’d once made the mistake of ordering salmon, which took up half the table and tasted about as good as you might expect salmon from a steak house would taste. Eventually my meal consisted of Coke, the little potatoes, and an iceberg wedge salad.
I wouldn’t miss the rude waiters, but I hoped there would at least be something for me to eat at Donald’s.
I made the mistake of arriving at the penthouse early and alone. Although Donald and Marla were still married, she was already a distant memory, replaced by his new girlfriend, Melania, a twenty-eight-year-old Slovenian model whom I’d never met. They sat on an uncomfortable-looking love seat in the foyer, a large, undefined space. Everything was marble, gold leaf, mirrored walls, white walls, and frescoes. I’m not sure how he managed it, but Donald’s apartment felt even colder and less like a home than the House did.
Melania was five years younger than I was. She sat slightly sideways next to Donald with her ankles crossed. I was struck by how smooth she looked. After Robert and Blaine had met her for the first time, Rob told me that Melania had barely spoken throughout the entire meal.
“Maybe her English isn’t very good,” I said.
“No,” he scoffed. “She knows what she’s there for.” Clearly it wasn’t for her sparkling conversation.
As soon as I sat down, Donald started telling Melania about the time he’d hired me to write The Art of the Comeback and then launched into his version of my “back from the brink” redemption story. He thought it was something we had in common: we’d both hit rock bottom and then somehow clawed our way back to the top (in his case) or just back (in mine).
“You dropped out of college, right?”
“Yes, Donald, I did.” It was exactly how I wanted to be introduced to someone I’d never met. I was also surprised he even knew about it
“It was really bad for a while—and then she started doing drugs.”
“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands.
“Really?” said Melania, suddenly interested.
“No, no, no. I’ve never done drugs in my life.”
He slid me a look and smiled. He was embellishing the story for effect, and he knew I knew it. “She was a total disaster,” he said, smiling more broadly.
Donald loved comeback stories, and he understood that the deeper the hole you crawled out of, the better billing your triumphant comeback would get. Which was exactly how he experienced his own journey. By conflating my dropping out of college and his hiring me to write his book (while throwing in a fictional drug addiction), he concocted a better story that somehow had him playing the role of my savior. Of course, between my dropping out of school and his hiring me, I’d dropped back into school, graduated, and gotten a master’s degree—all without taking any drugs at all. There was no point in setting the record straight, however; there never was with him. The story was for his benefit as much as anybody else’s, and by the time the doorbell rang, he probably already believed his version of events. When the three of us rose to greet the new guests, I realized that Melania had said only one word during our time