Chronic City (16 page)

“Well, you got your cab ride after all.”

“You want to make me feel guilty, but I can tell you’re as happy as I am.”

It was true, Oona was exhilarated, we both were, at the escape. If some standard of austerity, indicated by Noteless’s unforgiving aesthetic, had seemed to require a pilgrimage to his artwork by public transportation, then it was as if with the taxicab I’d wooed Oona back from that grim brink.

I couldn’t keep from gloating. “It’s amazing how passive people get in the face of an authority figure like that bully in the orange vest. He told them to go and wait for the shuttle, and they were all doing it, like sheep.”

“No doubt about it, Chase, those people would totally all hail cabs if they only had your iconoclastic courage.”

“I’m just saying we were locked into some kind of collective trance.”

“And then you recalled that you had a hundred dollars in your wallet,
et voilà.”

Oona’s assault was fond, a sting with no venom. In one gesture I’d reclaimed her affection, and been forgiven my obsession with Perkus, too. I suppose I’d bargained for that forgiveness by surrendering
Dust
to
Fjord
. Our surrogates had canceled each other. In the delicious seedy security of the taxicab I felt I’d passed tests, survived fjords, ghettos, tigers. Even my shoulder felt better. My lust flooded back, too, the pang I’d felt earlier, of unfinished bed-business between us. Now I crowded Oona, in a pleasant way, and put my nose in her hair. The city seemed to be parting for us, the lights green in easy sequence, our cab already rounding Central Park’s northeastern shoulder.

“What are you doing later? And by later, I mean pretty much anytime starting immediately.”

She squirmed, also in a pleasant way, but farther from me. “I have to work. I want to get some impressions of
Urban Fjord
on paper while they’re fresh.”

“You sound like you’re working on a serious book for a change.” My jealousy wasn’t too real, but I didn’t mind striking the note.

“Oh, I didn’t get where I am today
working on serious books
. If I ever write a serious book you’ll be the first to know, Chase, I promise.”

“So why not risk an impression that’s… less than fresh?”

She used both hands to push me away. “I have to work, really.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Honestly, I have a lot on my plate.”

“I’m glad you’re being honest.”

“Fuck off.”

We’d pulled up to her building, at Ninety-fourth and Lex. The place had taken on a certain aura for my being excluded from it, and I turned my back to the entranceway and faced the street instead, not wanting to stare like a tourist at the pyramids.

“Don’t sulk,” said Oona. “Maybe I’ll call you later on. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, I heard there was this fabulous crater on Thirty-fourth Street, I thought I’d wander over and have a look.”

“Nice.”

“I mean, I’d sing under your window, but I don’t know which one is yours.”

“I might not even have a window.”

“I might not have much of a singing voice.”

“Okay, well then, that sounds like a plan.”

“Perfect.”

In truth, I wasn’t completely shattered at the prospect of our parting ways for now. I had an assignment, one I’d awarded myself at some point in the morning’s episode, though I couldn’t say exactly when. It would be a secret from Oona for now. I was going to visit Perkus again, but not alone. As Oona had dragged me to the rim of Noteless’s bleak pit, I’d drag some sane witness into the present void of Perkus’s obsessions, his unhealthy onanistic chaldron-hunt. This was overdue. Call it an intervention. So while I went on playing the role I’d been cast in, that of the fluffy vacant boyfriend, he who’d be doing nothing, only pining, while Janice or Oona carried on her important work, just beneath I was full of intent. (This might be seen as the mediocre actor’s basic minimum threshold: to play two moods simultaneously, one on the top surface, the other below, and invest adequately in both.)

With whom to people this intervention, though? Well, my first impulse had been Oona herself. Her vibrant skepticism could be just the tonic Perkus required. I liked to find occasions for us to be around one another, these days. Yet that notion disqualified itself. The triangle between the three of us was a little fierce at the moment, even if Perkus had no knowledge of it. Oona might speak too scornfully, and so drive Perkus deeper into defiance. Anyway, I was already under suspicion with her now, of trying to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. I’d also considered inviting Susan Eldred, who after all had introduced us. Susan was the sanest person I was sure Perkus knew. Yet I had no reason to believe Perkus had ever welcomed Susan into his Eighty-fourth Street sanctum. I wouldn’t want him to feel invaded or overrun. My sole option was that which had been inevitable all along: Richard Abneg.

I hadn’t seen Richard in more than a week, but two days before
I’d been summoned to lunch at Daniel with Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer, almost a sort of intervention of its own. Maud had refused to name the occasion on the telephone, but made my attendance mandatory. The two women wanted me to give expert testimony on Richard Abneg, though this agenda wasn’t unveiled before I’d been plied with several rounds of the gratis appetizers Daniel made its specialty. It was a little early in the day for me, and I had to remind myself to quit draining half my wineglass for appearance’s sake, since the staff hovered, ready to top it off after I’d had even a sip. Too late. I was a little sick from the rich food before we’d eaten a single item we’d actually ordered, and dizzy before the interrogation began.

“He’s practically living at Georgina’s,” said Maud. “We keep seeing him crawling through the lobby at weird hours. He leers at people, Chase. He made friends with the night doorman, they were seen drinking together at four AM.”

I understood the situation instantly: Richard’s invasion of Georgina Hawkmanaji wasn’t in Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s plans. To those Lords of the Building, he’d been amusing enough, turning up at their party as an outcropping of Mayor Arnheim’s power, which seemed feeble contrasted with the deeper sway of the Woodrows’ ancient dough. But Richard had overstepped his bounds by going after Georgina, though even that was diverting enough at first, and could have been a perfect scandal-in-a-martini-glass, if it had caused merely a little harmless wreckage as they’d wagered after the party. Georgina slightly broken by a taste of sex, Richard totally humbled by a taste of wealth: either or both of those outcomes would have been suitable. Instead Richard, by succeeding with Georgina, threatened to make her not so conveniently absurd, less a container for their patronage and pity. Or anyway, that was what was at stake at this lunch. The women had no actual evidence
of what had gone on, except that he was suddenly
in the building
. They only knew what Georgina had told them and, more important, what they’d invented by themselves. In truth, by threatening to be a Visigoth Richard had gratified their unacknowledged yearning for chaos, for the torching of their complacency.

“I first met Richard at your dinner,” I pointed out. “It’s not like we’ve got some huge history.”

“But you’re in that secret after-hours club with him,” said Sharon Spencer. “He must confide in you, you must know what he’s up to.”

I raised my eyebrows. By what game of Telephone had my connection to Richard Abneg become an “after-hours club”? Georgina’s arcane English might be partly to blame.

“By all reports Abneg’s apparently a bit of an
animal,”
said Sharon, her nostrils flaring while her mouth cinched in disdain. “If you can imagine Georgina Hawkmanaji waking up
handcuffed.”

“My problem is I can imagine almost anyone waking up handcuffed,” I said irresponsibly.

“To her
toilet.”

“Perhaps Georgina’s bed doesn’t have an easily accessible frame?”

“He’s taking advantage of her, Chase, anyone can see that,” said Maud. “He’s setting up some kind of beachhead in her apartment. What I can’t imagine is why.”

I didn’t understand her implication. I really ought to push aside my wineglass. “There’s a problem at his building,” I said, stalling. “A problem… with… eagles.”

“We’ve heard about the eagles, Chase,” said Sharon. “That’s a pretty lame justification, if you ask me.”

“Thatcher was saying he thinks the eagles might have come specifically for Richard,” said Maud. “He says they may follow him
here now. Somebody told Thatcher they follow him
everywhere
, that when he leaves his building they fly overhead.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “We’ve been out together and I’ve never seen any eagles following him. They’re nesting, Maud. They just happened to pick his window ledge.”

“You and I both know these things don’t ‘just happen.’”

“I Googled him,” said Sharon. “He has a history in this particular regard.”

“What particular regard? Eagles?”

“Abneg began as a
squatter,”
said Sharon. “He has a track record of colonizing apartments that don’t belong to him. That’s how he got his
start.”

“That’s not the same at all.”

“I admit it’s not the same, I’m just saying there’s a certain tendency in both.”

“She’s got a point,” said Maud.

“No, she doesn’t.” I was eating something now that had looked like an oyster but when eaten tasted like foie gras, an item I distantly recalled picking from the menu. For some reason the courses seemed to be clumping around me at the table, while the women went on sipping at balloon-sized glasses of white wine and thimblefuls of chilled soup.

“You’re protecting him.”

“From what?”

“We don’t
know,”
said Maud, with great exasperation. She’d come to me with a problem, and I was refusing to help. “That’s what’s killing us, Chase. Georgina is so nuts, she just talks about him like he’s her
boyfriend
now, she won’t take a look at what’s going on.” The secret garden of sexual satisfaction was the only truly unimaginable thing. That two people might locate such joy on Maud and Sharon’s watch would be worse for them, by far, than if Richard had
been some indiscriminate seducer, bent on pillaging through their beds in turn. The problem might not be that Richard Abneg was an ogre but that he wasn’t ogre enough.

“Now we’ve told you everything we’ve got,” said Sharon Spencer, squinting fiercely. “You owe us the same in return.”

I doubted I could reciprocate such a stew of nonsense, even if I’d wanted to. “I don’t know Georgina, really,” I said. “Maybe they’re good together.”

“Forget Georgina for a minute,” said Maud, totally irritated by my answer. “Tell us about Perkus Tooth.”

“Georgina told us he’s the leader of your little club,” said Sharon.

“Has she met him?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thatcher’s been asking why you’ve never brought him around. We’re
all
wondering, Chase. Do you and Richard think we wouldn’t like him? Or wouldn’t he like us?”

I tried to fit Perkus for Maud and Thatcher’s compilation album,
Great Shrunken Heads of Manhattan
. It wasn’t easy. Maybe ten years before, when Perkus had been just arriving at his brief moment of currency, with his bylines in
Artforum
and
Interview
. Even then it would have been an ill-fated encounter. Now, I couldn’t even picture them in the same room.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m alone in knowing such opposite, such irreconcilable people: Maud at her regular table at Daniel, vibrantly awake to an invisible yet omnipotent web of social power, and Perkus, in his Eighty-fourth Street burrow, testing his daily reality on a grid of cultural marginalia, simultaneous views of mutually impossible worlds. Or do I flatter myself? Probably everyone feels this way. My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence. Something in me
defaults to an easeful plasticity, a modularity. I’d claim it as the curse of my profession, except I’ve forsaken that profession for so long now it defines me only in the eyes of others, not in my own.

And still I flatter myself: my empathy here was sharply circumscribed. I wasn’t finding
the vacuum of me
too well fed by Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer. Actually, the domain of these hedonist inquisitors seemed, at this moment, the most undernourished I knew. For all the butter-poached and truffle-oiled fare, I felt drunk and annoyed and ready to behave a little badly.

“Do you know what a
chaldron
is?” I asked Maud and Sharon. I’d asked flippantly, but then felt keen to hear the answer.

“A what?”

“A chaldron. It’s a certain kind of… very rare and desirable… ceramic.”

“Er, no,” said Maud. “Why?”

“That’s Perkus’s current interest,” I said. “He collects chaldrons.”

“Well, that’s… terribly interesting.”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t what I was expecting.”