Chronic City (39 page)

Yet even anticipating Strabo’s soothing, nothing fully prepared me for how much of a rebuke his tranquil offices could be to my disquiet. I came in stamping off snowmelt, my rattling taxicab’s hornhonking pinball course through glistening, trafficky intersections fresh in my ears, and wrought up with recalled images of Strabo at Arnheim’s dinner, among (fellow?) conspirators. Through the door, at the sound of his chimes and sight of his receptionist’s smile, I was ashamed. To arrive here in a state was to fail Blandiana’s test as his longtime client, to suggest I’d gained no peace from all his needles
over the years. So before Strabo even appeared I aligned myself, using breathing methods learned in these same rooms, and began dreaming of a time when I’d never known the name Perkus Tooth.

Inside, on his table, any shred of fear was converted. Though in his turtleneck and impeccable razor-cut Strabo could easily be cast as a Bond villain, it was impossible to find him sinister when he turned his Buddha searchlights on your distress. Who needed chaldrons? The light was in yourself. That was possibly the lesson of his tenderness. Though more gift than lesson, with all the reproach lesson implied. You were forgiven even for being inadequately tenacious in your peacefulness. We all slipped. And, as if to reinforce the self-chaldronizing principle, the framed print was gone from the wall at the foot of his bed. Wearing Strabo’s painless needles, mind settled into a fine drone, I gazed up at a dun-colored page of Sanskrit instead.

“You took it down,” I said when he came back for me.

His look in reply was sweetly puzzled.

“The… vase photograph you had there.”

“Oh, yes, that’s true. A few patients found it overstimulating.”

“You took it home instead?”

“I donated it to a charity auction.”

“Ah.” Material things were only ever passing through his relaxed fingers.

“Truthfully, I get too many gifts from patients.”

“What charity?”

“Médecins Sans Frontières.” Strabo never shed a dewdrop of impatience with irrelevant questions, yet also conveyed a sense that such exchanges stood in lieu of personal work that waited to be done. So I let him perform his usual mind-meld, his stunt of empathy. Without intruding or naming names, in elegant paraphrase, Strabo Blandiana informed me that I should quit wondering whether to
love Oona Laszlo or Janice Trumbull, that the task instead was simply and unquestioningly
to love
. Of course. Then, as ever, he added that I obviously hardly needed to be told, that I contained this knowledge within myself and had evidently already been acting upon it, and that Strabo Blandiana as my friend was proud of me and confident in my talent for self-care. A cynic would have asked why he didn’t take his show to Las Vegas. Me, I strode back out into the cold chaos of Manhattan believing myself a sunbeam in which all who wished could bask.

Whether I searched for him or not, Perkus was gone, and I was tired of searching alone. I’d made one attempt to enlist Richard Abneg, two weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve. This was just ten days since the mayor’s party, and all the traces felt fresh, the blizzard’s drifts still reshaping the streets, albeit crusted and steadily blackening. Richard and Georgina took pity on me and called me to spend the evening with them in Georgina’s penthouse, knowing (because I’d complained) that Oona had avoided me on Christmas, rightly suspecting she’d do it again. I was something especially pathetic in the way of third-wheel bachelor companions—there being not one but two women I was divided from, on that night when any couple is meant to be together. Richard and Georgina made the evening easy for me, ordering in excellent Chinese, tilapia medallions with spicy green chilies and Napa cabbage, eggplant with ground pork and green peas, then putting on some old black-and-white movies, consoling ones, Jimmy Stewart as a rube outwitting large numbers of sophisticates.

Between features Richard took me into their bedroom and cracked a window and we got high. Richard didn’t seem to want Georgina to know. He rolled a joint out of a box of Chronic and at first I didn’t think anything of it. We exhaled into the chill whistling breeze and it seemed to me the smoke was all blown back inside, that
its perfume would draft to Georgina, several rooms away, but I didn’t point this out. I was just grateful to be where I was. From the high penthouse window distant party noises rose to find us, sweetly harmless at this distance, though I hoped we’d shut the window before the appointed hour, not hear the popping of corks, the commemorating hollers. I didn’t want to think of the year’s end passing with Perkus’s whereabouts unknown. The smell of the dope was commemoration enough, and I grew wistful. In return for Richard and Georgina’s kindness in not mentioning Oona or Janice, I could have left another name unmentioned, but the impulse was too fierce. Though I’d brought Perkus to the party, I wanted Richard to feel as responsible as I did.

“Where do you think he’s gone?” I said, handing over the joint, and waving off any return.

Richard shrugged. He reached through the window opening to stub the remaining quarter-joint against the outer sill before replying. “I wouldn’t drive myself crazy over it,” he said. “He’ll reappear right when you’ve given up.”

“I keep visiting Eighty-fourth, thinking I’ll see him haunting the block,” I said. “Other tenants are at the barricades sometimes, pleading for access to stuff they left inside. That apartment was Perkus’s snail shell. I can’t picture him surviving naked.”

“He’s resourceful, Chase. You’d be surprised.” The words might be hopeful, but Richard’s tone was curtly dismissive. It only made me want to push him.

“Have you talked to the mayor’s people? After all, he was last seen at Arnheim’s town house—”

“That’s where he was last seen by
you,”
said Richard irritably. “I’ll bet he was last seen elsewhere. He’s a grown-up. Anyway, Perkus’s name wasn’t on the guest list. What do you expect me to do, barrel into Arnheim’s office and say, ‘Did anyone cleaning up after
your party find a one-eyed rock critic dressed in purple, because one’s gone missing’?”

“You’re being deliberately callous.”

Richard’s sneer said
What else is there to do?
I had no answer. “Let’s go in,” he said. “She’s probably wondering what we’re up to.”

“What if he got away with the mayor’s chaldron?” I whispered. It was a possibility too terrifying and thrilling to speak aloud.

“Listen, Chase. No fucking chaldron talk tonight, okay? It isn’t good for Georgina. That word’s verboten around here.”

It struck me as peculiar and maybe suspicious that Richard had declared martial law. We’d lost Perkus, and now the crippled Fellowship of the Chaldron might be suspending the civil rights of one of its remaining members. “Does Georgina know you’ve made that decision for her?” I said, managing to get honestly indignant on her account, though I knew I was up against the tyranny of coupledom—what Perkus would have called “pair-bonding.” I reminded myself I’d met Georgina several times before Richard laid eyes on her, and that we’d all lusted for chaldrons democratically together.

Richard had judo for my righteousness. “Have you had a look at her?” He cupped his hand, low at his own slight paunch, and raised his brows, waiting for me to understand. Then he couldn’t wait. “You haven’t noticed she’s not drinking, I guess—”

“What? Wait,
really?”

“Use your eyes.”

“When—?”

“We’re pretty sure the very first night. She’s three months along, but she’s built so flat there you can already see a bulge, like a sweet potato.” I heard a crazy wondering pride in Richard Abneg, a dreaminess that had colonized his patented tone of worldly grousing. In conquering the exotic ostrich-woman, seizing her from the bracket of privilege, that now-epochal night at Maud and Thatcher
Woodrow’s, something else had conquered Abneg in turn, an unaccountable human possibility.

So I went in half tripping and gathered Georgina in an embrace, making a joke about my dimness and self-absorption in not noticing sooner, and insisting that no matter what the date happened to be, we really ought to open some champagne. Richard uncorked another Châteauneuf-du-Pape instead, but he did pour an aggressively protective thimbleful for Georgina, who didn’t blink at being stinted. Her mood was implacably mellow, as though bodily exalted by pregnancy, shifted to some elevated plane, past the flushed-and-vomity phase. (And indeed, I could make out the sweet potato she was sporting.) By contrast I felt Richard smoldering as he shifted around the room, ruminating through his beard while replacing one DVD with another and crushing white cartons slimed with sauce into a trash bag, his impregnator’s pride mingled with something more ambivalent and turgid. Our talk of Perkus felt incomplete, usurped by the news of the Hawkman’s pregnancy. Whatever was disgruntling Richard, I knew what I felt it should be. I wanted Georgina to hear about Perkus, too, before they sealed themselves in parental solipsism and forgot the floe-stranded polar bears of the world. My passive-aggression took form as the last thing I’d expected to hear myself delivering this night, a toast.

“Here we sit … in this city of apartments… in one of the most superb examples anywhere … such a perch you enjoy, Georgina! We’re lucky souls, aren’t we? And you’re bringing along a little Hawkboy, who’ll someday need an apartment of his own…” In my muddle I couldn’t remember whether Richard ever called Georgina “Hawkman” to her face. And I’d awarded them a boy child, with random confidence. “I’ll go home to mine tonight and give thanks, though by comparison it’s a tawdry shoe box… yet what a thing it is to have a place, any place at all, in the great conglomeration
of apartments making up this mad island … so let’s drink, too, to our friend Perkus who’s been cast out in the cold, who’s lost his purchase on Manhattan…” I aimed at Richard’s weakness, real estate. By harping on apartments I’d remind him he’d lost one, too. I couldn’t have known, though, how exactly I probed a sore point.

“What are you driving at, Insteadman?”

“Nothing, just thinking of Perkus, on this night of blessings.”

Georgina asked. “I fail to understand. What has happened to Perkus?”

“Richard didn’t tell you? After the blizzard, the city condemned the tract of apartments around the Jackson Hole disaster. We don’t know where Perkus ended up.” I was restricted from saying the rest: that his actual departing gesture was to throw himself at Arnheim’s chaldron, on all our behalves.

“That’s terrible. Richard, did you know about this?”

Abneg bore a hole in me, his gaze like a cigarette ember knocked off onto a sleeve. “Perkus was just playing out the string in that place to begin with,” he said, his tone hard-boiled. “He was on borrowed time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Look, nobody’s entitled to live in a rent-controlled apartment forever. I protected him as long as I could. He was past his time, that’s all.”

Past his time?
The era of Mailer and Brando? I tried to grasp Richard’s implications. “Protected him exactly how?”

“Protected literally. You don’t think he’d have been able to afford that apartment if he’d lost his sixty-year-old rent control, do you? Did you imagine Perkus was actually the legitimate holder? Wanna know why his name wasn’t on the buzzer? Because he and I pried off the old linoleum nameplate reading
E. Abneg.”

“Who’s E. Abneg?”

“Funny you should ask. Ephraim Abneg—my father. That pad was my college graduation gift, at the rent, in 1988, of seven hundred and forty-six dollars. I think it’s gone up a hundred bucks since then. I set up Perkus in the sublet when I bought my place. A new management company bought the building five years ago and harassed all the rentstabilized tenants out with the old trick of not cashing their checks and then suing for nonpayment, so I’ve had to personally wade in and fend off all sorts of shit just to keep him installed there, including a definite abuse or two of the power invested in me by blah-blah-blah. The point is, it wasn’t going to last forever, Chase.”

It was as if I’d just wandered into the big city from the boondocks, and was forever to be the callow newcomer. Everyone else’s friendships had provenances I couldn’t begin to trace, let alone compete with. Also, I might be stoned, and reading too elaborately into Richard’s outburst, but it puzzled me how eager he was to view the tiger as an envoy of real estate destiny, an impartial (if regrettable) agent calling in the city’s old debts. At this instant, though, I only wished to rebottle the pressures I’d uncorked in Richard, which looked to wreck the evening. I felt I’d rewarded Georgina’s hospitality poorly. She now reached out to stroke Richard’s arm, to draw him back to her special corporeal calm, that oasis in her which they’d created together. But Richard wasn’t pregnant, she was—just as this wasn’t his glorious penthouse, but hers. If apartments were fate, what about Abneg’s?

“I didn’t know you’d put yourself out like that,” I said placatingly. “Still, just because Perkus was on borrowed time in that place doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about his going up in smoke entirely.”

“You’re the one who raised a toast to
apartments,”
Richard snarled.

“This is irrelevant,” said Georgina, her tone of correction gentle but absolute. “You must try to do something from within your offices, Richard.”

“What makes you think I
haven’t
done something from within my offices?” asked Richard darkly, though his words were plainly chosen to skirt a lie. “Though some would defend the right of an adult to fall off the radar in this town without necessarily conferring with the fucking authorities.”

“You must find your friend,” said Georgina. The clarity of her statement suggested a simple parallel with Richard’s fussing to keep her from red wine, pot smoke, and chaldrons, a posture that plainly hadn’t escaped her. If Richard Abneg was a protector now, he should protect.

With that we turned to Jimmy Stewart, who always knew when he was a protector. Stewart set about rescuing a gun-ridden town without carrying a gun, but before Marlene Dietrich could be won over, the Hawkman was fast asleep, her stockinged feet drawn up and tucked to one side. The love seat on which she’d been sitting formed a plush catcher’s mitt where she sagged, so Richard and I finished the movie before he gently guided her away to bed. Somewhere in there midnight had tolled, but sealed in our turret we’d been blessedly unaware.