Chronic City (26 page)

“Well, it can’t be sheer coincidence,” reasoned Arjuna. “First, a
walk
in space. Next…” She appeared sorry to say it aloud, but after a moment’s silence, reluctantly connected the dots. “Next a cancer in her
foot.”

“I’m not sure a space walk works the way you’re thinking.” At that moment my levees were breached again by the uncanny chocolate smell, catalyzing with the egg and lobster medley already fogging my sinuses. I staggered out of my chair and backward from the table, out of the golden circle, frittata steam rising into the cone of spotlight. “Do you … smell… that?” I asked.

“Smell what?” said Arjuna.

“He means the chocolate,” said Rossmoor.

“Yes, yes, a kind of chocolate smell,” I said. “It’s been happening for days—”

“I
told
you!” said Rossmoor to Arjuna.

“For me it’s been more of a
tone,”
said Arjuna, sounding truly puzzled. “It just began again, now that you mention it, a kind of ringing—”

I was cheered to think Perkus wasn’t completely alone. I’d find a way to let him know. But now I had to flee the mingled odors, flee Rossmoor’s silk sleeves and toxic munificence, Arjuna’s pity. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go, I’m not feeling well…” Invisible waiters rustled nearby. I envied their simple, anonymous lives. “Please,” I
called into the darkness, “please … get me a taxicab.” I flagged with both hands, struggling for balance, as if a cabbie could somehow see me here, and veer inside from the street. My eyes misting, the table before me fragmented into kaleidoscopic glints. “Sorry—” I said again.

“It was lovely seeing you,” said Arjuna.

“Stay strong!” woofed Rossmoor.

CHAPTER
Twelve

Enduring a flu alone
in an apartment has always included a certain psychedelic aspect, it seems to me. But it is a psychedelia of the body, not the mind. A sustained, sapping fever is a reeducation in the true weight of a blunt human collection of arms and legs, of a lollipop head wobbling on a woozy neck, and in the sensation of a throw pillow’s scrape against ribs as sensitive as a lover’s lips. To taste, in that condition, Tom Kha Gai, a white cardboard quart of which may be easily summoned to your door, there handed over by a Thai delivery boy who’s left his bicycle with the doorman downstairs, is to feel coconut-sweet chicken and tomato broth flood your ravaged pipes as succor, the soup replacing lost spinal fluids directly with each mouthful. The distances between bathroom and couch, then back to huddle within womb of mattress and duvet, becomes an epic slog, full of feeble triumphs. Comfortably arranging for oneself a clean glass of water, a paperback or magazine, and a television remote, a magician’s feat. Crossing a room to lift a ringing phone’s receiver, an Everest ascent.

I was sick for a week and a half. That first night I just managed
to drag myself home and call Oona Laszlo to cancel, even as I fell into a teeth-chattering swoon. Oona wasn’t vastly sympathetic, told me to find her when I felt better—at that point I still credited my illness to the events of the day before. It all seemed mixed up with cheeseburgers, champagne, and chocolate, at least for the first Swenty-Cour hours, which I spent mostly shivering over my toilet. After I’d racked myself dry, the sickness decamped from my gut and percolated outward, to the very ends of my fingertips and eyelids, which felt thick and sodden as ravioli when I shut them over my poor eyes.

Oona did pass through on the second day, but she wasn’t much in the way of a nursemaid, and I was hardly company. She didn’t remove her coat, just unloaded a batch of recycled magazines,
Vanity Fair, People, The New York Observer
, onto the couch, where I lay cocooned in a stained blanket, surrounded by half-finished mugs of Theraflu. In the wavery depths of my fever I recall monologuing to her all about chaldrons, unburdening myself totally, but I’m not convinced she was really present for the confession. I might have been babbling at Oona-phantasms, perhaps not even speaking aloud. On the fourth day I’d begun feeling stronger, possibly hungry for the first time, and capable of self-pity, and I rang her number, mildly surprised she hadn’t checked up on me a second time, after witnessing my early dejection.

“You sound better,” she said uncomfortably.

“I’m
horrible,”
I said.

“Look, Chase, sick isn’t my thing. You should call your friends.”

On that chilly note we ended the call. I’d have liked to think she meant we were something more than friends, though nothing in her tone had encouraged me to think she meant anything but less. Perhaps she’d only visited the first time to be sure I wasn’t malingering. I’d never even been inside Oona’s apartment and now I wondered
whether she’d be inside mine again. All I had to show for my illicit love was wrinkled magazines, and the copy of
People
had turned out to be a poison pill, containing a one-page piece on Janice’s diagnosis called “Adversity in the Sky.” I left it untouched on my couch. Oona must have spotted the item herself, and what she meant by bringing it into my apartment I couldn’t guess.

Perkus didn’t find me, but Susan Eldred did. The occasion was the arrival in her office of the first finished DVD copies of
The City Is a Maze
. When Susan learned I was sick she used her lunch hour to visit, showing no fear of taking away my infection, bearing in roast lentil soup and a jar of a remedy she swore by, a mossy-smelling horse tablet called Wellness Formula. (These reminded me exactly of what Strabo Blandiana might prescribe; in the next days I’d choke down as many of the pills as I could stand.) Along with the early copy of Von Tropen Zollner’s film, Susan also brought a cache of Criterion booty, the cheeriest items, she claimed, on their list: William Powell and Carole Lombard in
My Man Godfrey
, a British romance called
I Know Where I’m Going!
, and what Susan advertised as “Godard’s only musical,”
A Woman Is a Woman
. This was the fifth or sixth day of my quarantine, my strength returning, and Susan struck me as a vision of what a sane, female version of Perkus Tooth might resemble: you didn’t have to be mad to care for mad stuff. Maybe Susan would stay and ladle me soup and educate me on the outer reaches of the Criterion list, and I could forget Perkus and Oona both. My self-pity was opening to a more acquisitive phase (sometimes, reinstated in my body by illness, in the grip of weakening fevers I woke to paradoxically vital erections), but Susan Eldred had a fiancé, as did Janice Trumbull, a fact everyone knew. So I let her get away unmolested.

I watched the effervescent
My Man Godfrey
first, then I tried
I Know Where I’m Going!
But I started the second feature at the
wrong hour, my fever tending to peak toward midnight, and the movie, which seemed to concern a woman who was trying to leave one island and go to another, and a man who was afraid to enter, even in daylight, an ancient stone tower, struck me as dreamlike and terrifying, not a romance at all. At the climax, if I wasn’t actually dreaming, a man frantically rowed a minuscule boat at the edge of a whirlpool, thanks a lot, Susan. All the film lacked was a bear on a floe. The next morning I ejected the disk and put it with the others in a drawer (I was relieved to have skirted the Godard musical). I only paused to glance at Perkus’s liner notes for
The City Is a Maze
, which began:
As Leonard Cohen tells us, “there is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.” Equally, according to Iris Murdoch, “the bereaved have no language for speaking to the unbereaved.” For denizens of the country of Noir, such protests delineate the incommensurable rift or gulf between those doomed to patrol the night country and those moored in daylight, a coexistence of realms, one laid upon the other as veneer. This irreconcilable doubleness may be credited to dictates of the Production Code, but is also grounded in the fecund versatility of the studio system, where crew, actors, and even sets were employed in hasty alternation to the task of depicting the fates of both doomed and undoomed, bereaved and unbereaved. Many of the studio pros helping realize Zollner’s exemplary nightmare had been, weeks before, shooting a romantic comedy on the same row of facsimile New York brownstones as
The City Is a Maze,
one featuring the same lead players, among whom Edmond O’Brien, for one, gives no evidence of having read to the end of the script to see his character’s fate…

Oh, I missed him, and his ridiculous language. I wanted to hear Perkus speak it again, everything revealing its opposite, everything
in
commensurate and
ir
reconcilable and
un
bereaved. In the same spirit, we’d been too briefly chaldroned, and now were unchaldroned.
Was it better to have loved chaldrons and lost, or never to have loved them at all? And what came after?

In this interval I barely saw a newspaper, but I gathered that the chocolate smell cleared up without explanation. Also I heard that the cold front wouldn’t budge, the slate skies winter-locked, and that the tiger wrecked a York Avenue temple gymnasium where aging Jewish men played pickup ball every Monday and Wednesday in a game that had been regular for thirty years. The following day the mayor’s office unveiled a Web site for tracking the tiger’s movements, and recommended it to those seeking forewarning of traffic tie-ups and subway cancellations. All this came to me while flipping channels, and when I passed over a news station I never lingered. I avoided news and newspapers because I feared getting word of Janice’s heroic self-biopsy, and what it would reveal. I learned anyway, from breaking-news crawls at the bottom of my screen, that she had a malignant cancer in her foot, and spreading to other regions. That plans were under way for a course of improvised chemotherapy, using what they had on hand in
Northern Lights’
medical supplies. Possibly an attempt would be made to launch a small rocket filled with better meds past the Chinese mines, into orbit, where the Russians could grapple it into the space station. Failing chemical intervention, there was talk of the possibility of a desperate surgery, even amputation.

In my head I composed tormented letters, but I’d been warned that Mission Control would refuse their delivery, so I never put a word on paper. I screened my calls. The only news I wanted, finally, was outside my window: that the birds still attacked their routes around the spire, those pathways to nowhere that seemed to articulate my own invisible urgencies. The birds couldn’t interpret the stone, but by their proximity they could seem to define it, adore it, abide with it. That was as near to a sense of valuable work in the
world as I could imagine myself having. Only I would need, when I was well again, to make sure of what my own church spire should be. I knew the plan for Chase Insteadman was that I should wait for Janice. Yet something nearer at hand, some person or artifact, some situation or scene, was calling. I didn’t know whether I was bereaved or unbereaved, but I wasn’t bereaved the way I felt I ought to be.

Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji came on Thursday. I was almost well. They learned not from Perkus (who might be oblivious, so far as I knew) but from Maud Woodrow, whom I’d telephoned just hoping for some breath of gossip in my loneliness, not because I hoped she’d visit or even be particularly sympathetic. When I’d then been contacted by Richard I explained I was really fine, but he said Georgina insisted they look in. The two of them arrived just before noon with a caterer’s roasted turkey and some sides, shocking me. Richard seemed to think it was incredibly funny, and maybe it was. He wore an expensive Burberry coat, unmistakably new, and after he helped Georgina out of her own he went into my wardrobe and found wooden hangers for them both. The Hawkman helped me set a small table, scooping sweet-potato mash and creamed spinach from plastic quarts into rarely used serving bowls, gravy poured into a coffee mug, and dusting off a batch of cloth napkins I’d forgotten I owned. We even switched on the television to catch the end of the Macy’s parade, the kooky giant balloons, supermen and Gnuppets and unrecognizable new personae bobbing through the sleety canyons, the kids toughing it out in the cold.

“May I ask, what does that represent?”

“That represents SpongeBob SquarePants, Georgie.”

My appetite suddenly savage, I was, yes, thankful, wildly so, to have the turkey’s inexhaustible flesh before me, ate white and dark in a gravied pile together, felt myself plundering the bird’s life forces, stripping it free of the obedient skeleton. Recovering with
each bite, I felt a teenager’s strength and greed rising in me. Richard laughed. They ate, too, more decorously, though threads of dry breast lodged in Richard’s beard until Georgina picked them out, and gossiped absently, remarking on items of paltry interest in my apartment, which was revealing, truthfully, only in its hotel-ish anonymity, order, booklessness.

Something in the parade caught my eye, a golden-swelling outline among the balloons filing down Broadway. The distracting balloon wasn’t the focus of the shot, which framed instead a swollen Spider-Man, but trapped behind the blue-and-red superhero that golden shape bobbed in and out of visibility between the lampposts, its vinyl skin peppered with sleet and confetti. The balloon, I was fairly certain, was meant to depict a chaldron. My mouth, I think, fell open. Anyway, my eyes widened, chewing stopped. Richard Abneg followed my attention to the television screen, and before I could speak he’d already raised a finger to his lips and shook his head to silence me, even while raising his brows and rolling his eyes to acknowledge that yes, he’d recognized it too. This petition wasn’t threatening or duplicitous; rather, his look conveyed hope I’d keep it from Georgina in the manner of an indulgence between henpecked husbands, as if Richard were a sworn quitter sneaking a cigarette.

Georgina made a visit to my bathroom and Richard immediately leaned across the turkey’s carcass to whisper an apology. “I’m trying to get her mind off those things,” he said. “She just gets too worked up, it’s not healthy. You’d be amazed, there are little reminders, hints of them everywhere, once you know what you’re looking for.”