Chronic City (57 page)

Sledge pursed his lips in mild gray surprise. “Among others…” He spoke almost introspectively, as though I’d forced him to realize he did business with anyone at all.

“Why doesn’t Oona buy directly from you?”

“Oh, gosh, I’d never ask her to pay.”

I suppose Oona would have been glad to have Perkus cheat her on the back end and pocket the difference, as I’d always suspected he did. It was Oona’s way of throwing Perkus a periodic donation without causing him to lose face. I wondered if she even smoked as much as she purchased, or whether she simply ferried it back to Sledge to recycle into his supply, a trick to give her pity gesture double value.

“Oona isn’t here, is she?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Not hidden in her apartment?”

“Do you want to have a look? I have the key.” Sledge’s air was slyly apathetic, as if he might be curious himself to see if she was there, and felt no more loyal to her than to me at the moment. “I was just going in to see if she had some orange juice, anyway. Would you like a glass of orange juice?”

“No, thank you. Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Oh, she left a message. She told me to tell you to meet her at the museum at four o’clock.”

It was just after two. I’d have time to return to my apartment and walk Ava. First, though I believed I understood my instructions, I needed to be sure. “The museum?”

“The Metropolitan,” said Sledge. He scratched his invisible left
eyebrow with the tip of his thumb, gently. His whole body seemed a kind of eraser. I imagined if he rubbed himself too hard he’d crumble away. Perhaps I found myself prickly confronted with one of life’s obvious Gnuppets, being confirmed as one myself. “She said you’d know where.”

“Yes, thank you. I do.”

“Chase?”

“Yes?”

“Be kind to her if you can.”

CHAPTER
Twenty-six

By the time
I crossed Park and Madison, retracing the tiger’s park-ward pilgrimage of the night before, the city had accustomed itself, struggled to a half-life, snow dredged right and left, most parked cars only sculpture. The four o’clock sun was already in submission to the high wintry haze over the Hudson, the light feeble, and when I found myself at the foot of the mountainous museum, the park behind made a dark screen only relieved by a pale-blue snowy band, bright filling in an ominous sandwich of night. The Metropolitan, though mostly uninhabited, was open for business as usual, collecting its imperial “suggested donation” and handing out its little tin badges of entry, the whole engine not so much resolute as indomitable or blithe. The great building housing the art museum was an island city itself, or a virtual universe or space module, operating according to its own necessities, perhaps with its own mayor, and it wasn’t hard to picture it plunging onward unchanged though the surrounding city might be in ruins, as Perkus Tooth had imagined New Jersey or Staten Island already to be. Treasures lived in these vaults never seen except by curatorial guildsmen; a given
human form drifting beneath these monumental ceilings was of no consequence to the larger story of the building as it pushed through time.

I knew my way through the echoing maze to the Asian galleries, and within them, to the Chinese Garden Court, though I couldn’t say whether I’d passed this way a handful of times or hundreds, whether last week or not in years. (What I couldn’t remember could fill a book, one written by a ghostwriter.) The court had a smell, one I’d just now previewed in Sledge’s pot factory, of controlled indoor growth. The museum’s internal weather, its vast thermostatic lungs, carried this scent along the neighboring corridors, and if I’d been lost I might have followed it to the place where Oona waited, in the shadow of the teak bower and slate-shingle roof, looking down onto the tiny curved bridge and the arranged rock garden, all the marvelous stuff that had been shipped here and re-created with such immaculate fakery. I wasn’t lost. My footsteps were full of intent, of personal purpose. What made a better model of free will than a walker in the city? I could have gone anywhere, even hailed a taxicab and asked to be taken across one of the bridges, or through the Lincoln Tunnel, to call Perkus’s bluff.

But I was tired of models, even ones as cute and complete as the Chinese Garden Court. I didn’t want to
model
free will, I wanted to embody it. What I’d learned was that I didn’t. Even if every worst suspicion Perkus had urged on me was untrue (they couldn’t all be), I’d been forced to understand I was an actor in a script. As according to my long training, in my only avocation. And I was a less-out-of-work actor than I’d believed. Those obnoxious young producers I’d lunched with
had
enlisted me in the role of my lifetime, after all. I was wrong to think their script had never arrived. I’d obviously memorized my part so well that I could lose myself inside it, forget it was a script, live it as my own life. I was the ultimate Method actor,
better than Brando—or as bad, I suppose, as any performer on
Jerry Springer
who, having agreed to pretend to be defiantly astounded by some cartoon version of their life, then feels the emotions surge in him for real when the red light blinks on and the studio audience begins hooting. My script’s updates arrived periodically in
The New York Times
in the form of Janice’s letters, and all of Manhattan was my studio audience.

I wanted to think I was here to enact free will at last, as I came to where Oona stood at the railing, overlooking the lily pads and bamboo in the court’s shallow waters. So far, so good: my footsteps had carried me all this way into the museum, the blocking quite perfect, but when it came time to speak I found my lines were missing. Then I recalled I’d been supplied with my line the night before, in the hospital waiting room.

“Perkus told me a riddle, but he wouldn’t give me the answer,” I said.

“Shoot,” said Oona. She raised her hands to make a little mime show of it, surrendering to my nonexistent weapon.

“Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet?”

“Oh, sure,” said Oona, not meeting my eye. “She
fucked the writer.”

“Ah.”

“Everyone knows that one.”

“Maybe in your circle,” I said defensively. It would be as near as I’d come to saying to her that I couldn’t try to live anymore inside her boundary, her
circle
, or glancing against it, as I mostly had been—that with Perkus’s release from his hiccups, and having read and reread the last weakening report from Janice Trumbull, those words Oona could only risk letting me hear through her forlorn devices, I now found myself also released, into a different life, however
unknown. Post-Oona, post-Janice, now that I knew the two were one and the same.

“Chase, please don’t leave me.”

“I wasn’t ever really with you,” I said, unable to hold the bitterness from my voice. “I’m engaged to be married, you know that as well as anyone.”

“Forgive me, Chase. I wanted to make you love me both ways.”

“Both ways?”

“Janice… and Oona.” She barely got it out. Her voice was frail, not in the old brittle manner of cracks showing in a façade, but molten, her throat full of tears. And how sad that she put herself second. I think I’d never heard her say her name aloud before,
Oona
, and it sounded to me now like a fading pulse, a formless thing half swallowed in doubt, the double
O
’s like a pair of dice that had miraculously come up twice zero. If you wanted to love two ways you had to be prepared to lose two ways, I suppose.

If at the very last moment I’d become my own director, I couldn’t think of an instruction for this scene, other than
cut
. Then I found a stray Perkus witticism I could use. “Two fakes don’t make a real, Oona.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Or three,” I corrected. “I think we’re three fakes, thanks to you. In fact, Janice might be the realest of the three of us.”

Oona fell silent. I’d attained that much, if it was anything to be proud of. I was ready to leave her there, in her precious Chinese Garden Court, yet I couldn’t quite move. We stood in silence, then Oona freed the long-hidden glasses from her purse and showed her true face—I suppose she did it simply because she wanted to see mine, and I’d always been a bit blurry. (The story of my life.) We couldn’t bear the look between us for long, however, and bowed our gazes to
the pond instead. A black goldfish meandered there, in and out of rocks directly beneath our feet, and when it wriggled through Oona’s reflection and mine, rippling the tender screen that bore our doubles, Oona turned her head slightly and one hinged corner of the heavy black glasses frames seemed to squirt free for an instant, wholly separate from the glasses or from Oona’s outline, a thing born, tadpole or guppy, and wanting its own life.

CHAPTER
Twenty-seven

This was another kind
of waiting room. I had no appointment and so it should not be so strange that I was left there to wait a while. Yet I was left to wait a long time. It began to seem to me that my appointment here was with the room itself, that I’d been installed here in order that I understand what the room had to tell me, and that I was expected to need a while to absorb it completely. At the mayor’s party I’d been cushioned by the occasion, the crowd’s mania, from this room’s full severity, the pressure of that thunderhead of plaster ornament, the gravity of the furnishings, the majesty and provenance radiating from the French chairs, arrayed like bewigged justices. I found it almost impossible to stay seated in one.

The room was not precisely as I’d remembered it. I now saw that inlaid-rosewood panels, so impressive in themselves, were only covers, the room an enormous magician’s cabinet, beautifully joined, made to slide aside in order to reveal a gallery and library, all the fetishes and collected works that had needed to be protected from the grubby hands and eyes of the guests at the champagne reception. I was idiotically proud to recognize the oils as examples of the Hudson
River school, verdant mysterious panoramas of the Palisades, of ice floes bottlenecking at West Point. The books were bound or rebound in leather succulent as amber. I tried to read their fine gilt titles and found my eyes stinging. I might have pulled one down to examine it but my fingers felt numb and weak, nearly immaterial, as though the density of a hardbound volume would pass through my hands. This may have been the effect of a day where I’d steered Ava through snow three times, grappling with the weave of her leash in my childishly soft palms.

I was also embarrassed. I no more wished to be caught fondling the books as be seen creeping upstairs to ogle Arnheim’s hologram. I didn’t want the setting to unravel the meager poise that had brought me here to make my stand. Yet by the time Claire Carter appeared, it had almost done that. She’d left me long enough for me to feel she’d rescued me by appearing, that if I’d been there longer the age and force of the place would have wholly disintegrated the small pretense of me. Nearly dark out when I’d approached the town house, the windows were black now, as if I’d risked the vanishing of all nurturing illusion by entering this chamber, this sole place certain of its purposes. I apprehended here the indifference of the ancient and unchangeable city, the incidental nature of its use for me. Claire Carter didn’t say “Any further questions?,” but she might as well have. The room was lit by one standing glass lamp, and it didn’t seem to light me at all, but Claire Carter in her peach-sherbet pantsuit glowed like the green shores so luminous with underpainting, glowed like the amber spines of the Collected Works, glowed, yes, like a chaldron, a thing glimpsed only to deny you.

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

“You’re always thanking me, Mr. Insteadman,” said Claire Carter. “But that isn’t what you came for.”

Her brittleness gave me some courage. “No offense, but I hoped to talk to Mayor Arnheim.”

“Here’s how this goes. You get five minutes with me, and the meter’s running on that, so skip the formalities. The mayor will join us at some point. You should tell me anything you need him to know.”

“Is he listening now?”

“How can we help you, Mr. Insteadman?”

Again I was voiceless. No wonder the Polish starlet fucked the writer. I wanted to spellbind and scald Claire Carter with a hiccup-punctuated tour de force of accusation. Yet after all I knew nothing, had no evidence, only dubious questions wilting on my tongue. “Is the tiger… being used to destroy… the city’s enemies?” I asked her.

“The tiger is a distraction,” said Claire Carter firmly, as if placing it in a bureaucratic category beyond further consideration. I recalled Perkus’s commandment,
no conspiracies but of distraction
. I didn’t suppose Claire Carter was about to use that other word. If I used it myself I was a fool.

“Does Richard Abneg know the truth?”

“The truth about what?”

“About distractions like the tiger… and me.” I surprised myself.

“Richard’s like you,” she said. “He forgets a lot of what he knows, forgets everything except what he needs to carry on, and do his job.”

“What about you?”

“What
about
me?”

“Do you forget?”

“I’m the same as anyone else,” said Claire Carter. “Don’t mystify things.”

“Do you know Oona Laszlo?”

“We’ve met.” The weary tone suggested my questions had drifted into irrelevance, that she’d begun wondering why she’d bothered to grant me even these five minutes.

“My friend died,” I blurted out, not wishing to fail in my only secure complaint. Yet I didn’t wish to give Perkus’s name aloud here, feeling as superstitious as I’d been in the police-station basement, though I believed him beyond Claire Carter’s or the mayor’s harm now, either dead or gone underground … I’d begun telling myself that if Marlon Brando could be alive, the same was possible for Perkus. The medical world could form an anti-conspiracy, a form of underground railroad originating in hospital emergency rooms, to hide the
Non-Dupes
from their enemies. I remembered a phrase Strabo Blandiana had mentioned, Médecins Sans Frontières, which might be a cover name for this secret society.