Chronic City (5 page)

Reggie, I understood, was one of those who shifted the money around, trying to make it get bigger. They all deserved our pity, clearly enough. The money men, effortful and exhausted, slumping through the gray fog. Compared to their wives they were peons.

Maud Woodrow found me next, and broke me away from Naomi and Sharon Spencer to meet Harriet Welk, an editor at Knopf. Maud and Harriet had met when a photographer needed permission to reproduce some of Maud’s collection for a coffee-table book on nineteenth-century folk jewelry. Harriet, though she might have been the youngest player on this intimidating stage, was commanding and keen, and easy to want to charm. It was Harriet who’d brought Richard Abneg along. He was still across the room, getting buttonholed by Thatcher Woodrow. No male arriving in the Wood-rows’ circle was ever spared preemptive marking with Thatcher’s scent. When spirited off to another duty, Harriet retailed a few facts about Richard, who she called her “secular date.”

“You mean ‘platonic,’ I think.”

“Platonic, secular, old friends. Anything between us is unimaginable.” She pointed Abneg out, a short, stolid fellow who appeared, in this company, like a cartoon Communist in his wide-legged charcoal suit, untucked flannel shirt, and a black beard encroaching on his sullen cheeks and fierce eyes. He stood nose to nose with Thatcher, gripping a martini’s neck like the handle of an ax he’d use to hack his way free if Thatcher didn’t quit bragging.

“Clear enough,” I said. “You’re a pair of solo operators here. Lone wolves.”

She explained that they were high-school friends, went all the
way back to the corridors and water fountains and sexual embarrassments of Horace Mann. “You know when you’ve known somebody so long, you’re familiar with all their self-reinventions?”

“At least he’s bothered with self-reinventions.”

Richard Abneg had begun as a radical, an anarchist. His formative event the Tompkins Square Park riots, when the police quelled the rebel spirit of the Lower East Side. (I faintly recalled these facts, another version of the city’s Original Sin.) Abneg had spearheaded a squatters’ seizure of a famed building on Ninth and C, a cherished last stand, a toe stuck in the slamming door of progress. Out of this had come a career in tenant advocacy, bulldog negotiations on behalf of those sidelined in gentrification’s parade. Now, ultimate irony, Abneg worked for Mayor Arnheim, managing the undoing of rent stabilization. He’d become a major villain to some who recalled his earlier days, Harriet Welk informed me. Yet Abneg clung to his sense of duty, always alluding to how much worse it might all be without his interventions, a jaw-clenched claim on a higher realism. His intimates, like Harriet, could see what it had cost him, going to that crossroads, making that devil’s bargain. They kindly left the ironies unconfronted. What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when he was fifteen and reading Charles Bukowski and Howard Zinn and Emmett Grogan. I soaked up Harriet’s description and braced myself. What she hadn’t warned me was that I’d like him.

Richard Abneg scotted over to us now. Stuck out a horny hand for me to shake, but while I held it, addressed Harriet Welk.

“You see her?”

“Who?”

“Don’t look, don’t look. The ostrich-woman.”

He meant Georgina Hawkmanaji. I’d seen her come in. For her hair pinned in a high, plumed construction, her long pale neck and narrow shoulders, her lush bottom,
ostrich-woman
was a fair summary. Worth twenty million or so of inherited Armenian plunder, educated in Zurich and Oxford, but sure, ostrich in stature and perhaps soul as well. She stood a foot taller than Abneg.

“Sorry,” he said abruptly. He introduced himself, and freed my claustrophobic fingers. “Don’t get any ideas, I’m going home with her.”

“I’ll give you an advantage,” I said. “She lives in this building, the penthouse.”

“Well I’m getting clear go-signals.”

“Go-signals from the ostrich-woman.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Never ignore those,” I told him. “I never would.”

When it was time for dinner Richard Abneg and I were seated on either side of Georgina Hawkmanaji, as it happened. His strategy, which given its unhesitating launch must have been instinctive, was to more or less shun Georgina completely and at the same time physically occupy her lap, in an ostensible campaign to impress himself on
me
. Repartee with Georgina could, in my experience, be a tad Sisyphean—she wasn’t dumb, on the contrary, astute on nearly any subject, but her formality and deliberateness were a type of damp weather. So I admired the stunt. Abneg used Georgina for triangulation. She didn’t have to keep up, only periodically ratify something particularly emphatic in his talk. That, and tolerate his spittle landing on the breast of her high-necked silk dress, tiny glints accumulating like a new constellation in the night sky.

Richard Abneg liked to dynamite his own ego, with tales of deals struck in offices where you counted your fingers after handshakes and found a few missing, where believing you’d won meant
you’d misread the stakes. Between the jokes I heard him rationalizing a life’s arc of excruciating compromise. He painted himself as a specialist in sheltering sand-castle idealisms against the undertow of the city’s force of change, a force not so much cynical as tidally indifferent. Coughing up the lion’s share of what you’d sworn to protect, in days of privatizing plunder, might be to keep from losing it all.

Abneg’s voice was insinuating and sarcastic, a bully’s, though he bullied only himself. At some point Thatcher Woodrow’s internal testosterone meter tipped, and he leaned over to our end of the table. “Do you actually
know
Mayor Arnheim?”

Abneg had just hoisted a whole duck’s drumstick out of his risotto, leaving a fat white spear of asparagus to ooze back into its sucking footprint. He seemed to revel in being framed in atavistic tableau, ripping at the glistening flesh with his teeth an extra moment while Thatcher waited for a reply.

“I work for him,” said Abneg, swallowing. “I didn’t say I know him. Sure, we’ve met a few dozen times, half of those in public where you’d hardly say it counted as a meeting. Look, Arnheim has fifty guys like me, farmed out covering his ass in one particular or another, sweating bullets on a daily basis. I don’t flatter myself that he wants to be seen with me.”

“We used to play in an all-night poker game, before he ascended to the throne,” said Thatcher. “He and I and Ted Koppel and Ahmet Ertegun, and George Soros, when he was in town. Killers all. I’m not sure it fits the people’s image of their mayor, but he was the biggest killer among us. I’m no lightweight, but I was fighting for my life at that table.”

If I knew Thatcher he’d look for an opening to tell us the cost of a buy-in at that game, too, before he was done. The minimum bets, the big and little blinds, and so on. But Richard Abneg stemmed this curtly and deftly.

“I work mostly with an aide to the mayor you probably didn’t play poker with,” he said. “Her name is Claire Carter. A killer too, of a different type. When we go to lunch she always insists on separate checks.”

I laughed, liking how Abneg checked Thatcher’s one-upmanship with one-downmanship. Georgina laughed too. Maybe Abneg would land his ostrich-woman after all.

At the appointed time the Woodrows’ table turned its searchlight on my woe. I played my part in what was a kind of kabuki enactment. There wasn’t any real news—like the whole city, they’d devoured Janice’s famous epistles from outer space. They only wanted to savor their lucky intimacy with the glamorous would-be astronaut’s-husband. Janice was up there and I was down here. It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse. The Woodrows and their guests wanted a confession of something, but my only confession I wouldn’t offer: my emotions were bogus as long as they were being performed in a setting like this one. I might love Janice, yes, but what I showed these people was a simulacrum, a portrayal of myself.

Harriet Welk asked the usual question. “They publish her letters to you, but do you write back?”

“I used to,” I mumbled in my shame. “But Mission Control needed the communication time for… other stuff. At some point they told me not to bother.”

I was rescued from painting the last brushstrokes of my picture by the haggard entrance of Reggie Spencer, Sharon’s husband, the funds manager who’d been delayed downtown. I thought I could see shreds of the gray fog still clinging to his creased pinstripe three-piece, to his scuffed chestnut wingtips. Certainly the gray fog was still reflected in Reggie Spencer’s eyes as he rolled them upward and faked a smile and slid into the seat that had been kept open between
Naomi Kandel and Harriet Welk. There was something tragical about the men who worked downtown, never more than when they were expected on return to manfully reassert their role entertaining ladies at parties, or cheerfully take over on weekends from nannies in Central Park, in order to remind their children of who their fathers were or had once been.

“Sorry, folks,” said Reggie Spencer. “You don’t want to know about it.” Judging from his wife’s expression, truer words couldn’t be spoken. Staff were just clearing our ruins, pouring coffee from silver. “The F ground to a halt and just sat whining at Rockefeller Center. Eventually I got out and took a cab, I don’t know if it was a mistake or not. Traffic was a nightmare. The cabbie was saying something about that escaped tiger getting loose again on Lexington Avenue.”

“One hears continually of this…
tiger,”
said Georgina Hawkmanaji. “It is supposedly of a tremendous size.” She spoke as if this represented some personal provocation, from which adequate skepticism could offer insulation. I sympathized. I’d heard of the tiger perhaps three or four times now myself, yet found it difficult to bring into focus as a real and ongoing problem, something capable of bollixing traffic on Lexington. My fault. It was too long since I’d read a newspaper.

“See, they should let a few of us who know what we’re doing track that baby down,” said Thatcher Woodrow. “I ought to give Arnheim a call and suggest it. Can’t imagine what’s taking so long with one little old tiger.” He raised his arms and squinted one eye like a five-year-old to mime bagging a moving target with a blunderbuss or elephant gun, alluding, I suppose, to facts we were supposed to have absorbed during some earlier dinner, about Thatcher’s record of accomplishments up against big game. I thought I remembered something Hemingwayesque in his background, and maybe, god knew, a room full of pelts and heads lurked in the duplex some-where,
quarantined by Maud in favor of Diane Arbus and Gregory Crewdson prints and studies for sculptures by Laird Noteless.

“It isn’t that kind of tiger,” said Richard Abneg. His tone was dismissive. These two, Thatcher and Abneg, were going to be at it all night long, I saw. They’d find materials over which to dispute through the dessert, and through the round of Cuban cigars Thatcher always loved to personally distribute, and the seemingly spontaneous offerings of brandy and Armagnac Thatcher would haul out after the cigars, to distend the evening into a contented, blithering haze, meanwhile instructing the staff to do the final clearing in the morning, to Maud’s disgust. (This was Thatcher’s real enmity, anyway. Maud’s conversational prerogatives ruled while conversation was possible, so Thatcher worked steadily to numb our tongues with stimulants, until we were reduced to the humming and grunting and Morse-code glances he preferred.)

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked not Thatcher but Naomi Kandel.

“Just that it isn’t that kind of tiger, where you can, you know, kill it with a well-placed shot between the eyes or something.”

“I have heard it is quite … sizable,” murmured Georgina, allying herself with Abneg.

“Yeah, it’s big. A big
problem
is what it is. You have no idea.” Was Richard Abneg implying that as a mayor’s aide he was privy to facts about the tiger not printed in the
Times?
His heavy glances seemed to say
Yes I am
. He adjusted the collar of his shirt, grimacing sweatily, as if adding
and I’ve got claw marks on my back, they itch like hell
. Thatcher Woodrow seemed to take this as a signal to depart, without explanation, for a visit to the bathroom, or possibly to his humidor, to poison Abneg’s cigar in advance.

Of course, there was no poison in Thatcher’s cigars. Or, only a kind of poison we craved. An hour later, with all of us sprung from the vise of Maud’s table, sprawled on her white couches, snifters hovering at the level of our heads, hostilities were forgotten. Or drowned. Thatcher, in his absurd maroon dinner jacket with its college emblem, was our champion, keeping those snifters full of colored fluids with magical properties. He always had another exotic bottle that cried to be sampled, always with a name I instantly forgot, thinking instead:
Funky Monkey, Blueberry Kush, Chronic
.

Now we all loved one another to death. Which is to say, until the end of the evening. There was no other place to be, it was unimaginable not to float on our backs in this ocean of luxury, an archipelago of personalities lobbing witticisms across one another’s beaches. Only I’d lately become irresolute in my dissolution. Gazing up at blue from my island, I’d begun to wonder how near that sky was. Whether it was some ceiling, perhaps a tissue I could rend with my fingertips if I only reached up to try.