Chronic City (8 page)

“Didn’t mice kill the dinosaurs?” asked Perkus.

Richard shook his head. “The dinosaurs were stupid, they were on their last legs. Anyhow, the mice had help, they needed comets and glaciers, all kinds of stuff. I’m pretty certain the mice just jumped in at the end and administered the coup de grâce, then took all the credit.”

“We need a predator,” said Perkus.

“Exactly.”

“We should go up there, the three of us,” said Perkus. “Not now, but later, when it’s dark, when they’re sleeping.” We were always, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg and I, on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knife-scarred table, laying plans for plunder. Oh, how Manhattan yearned for our expert intervention! We never budged from that kitchen, however, unless if it was to tumble out coughing into the fresh chill air, and around the corner, to pile into a booth at Jackson Hole for cheeseburgers and Cokes.

“The thing about animals,” Perkus said, “I remember this clearly, is that when you bring in, you know,
kangaroos
to chase away
monkeys
, then you have a kangaroo problem. Then you bring in
zebras
to chase off the kangaroos, and you’re overrun with zebras, and so on.”

“You learned that in a Dr. Seuss book, didn’t you?” said Richard.

“What about the tiger?” I said. “What if somehow the tiger could be brought into play?”

Perkus gave Richard a look of horrified helplessness, seeming to say at once,
Don’t blame me, I didn’t suggest it
, and
Well, why not?

Richard tittered. “The tiger?”

“Sure.”

“Sure, that’s just what my apartment needs, Chase. That tiger destroyed one of the city’s primary water mains last week. I mean, totally shattered layers of concrete and brick that had held since the nineteenth century, it’s going to take
months
to repair it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, maybe the tiger could be … blamed somehow.”

Richard snorted smoke through his nostrils. “Blamed when I
off the eagles
, you mean?”

“Sure.”

“Brilliant.” At this Richard Abneg dissolved in giggles, sweeping Perkus Tooth along with him. And soon enough myself, too. “Blame the tiger!”

Let this stand for a typical night in our company there. I don’t remember them all in such detail.

I met Oona next at a funeral, the funeral of a man I didn’t know, a purportedly great man. I had to cross the park to be there—the services were held at the Society for Ethical Culture, on Central Park West—and when I saw how populous the congregation was, I felt foolish for troubling. Emil Junrow was a famous science-fiction writer of the 1940s, a lowly career he took upmarket by being also an accredited (if undistinguished) scientist, and a famous humanist who’d uttered fine early doubts about the Cold War, a sort of Einstein
without any theory. He’d then gone on to become a relentless prose-lytizer for the peaceful exploration of space, appearing many times before Congress and in public forums, a dwarfish wizened presence in bolo ties and flyaway hair (I learned all this in tributes presented during the long memorial presentation, including video clips that made me realize I’d seen Junrow on television without registering his name).

It was in this last role that Emil Junrow had once or twice been photographed in the company of Janice Trumbull, lady spaceexplorer. My receiving an invitation wasn’t anything personal, however, a fact that was made plain the instant I entered. Some publicist, knowing the cavernous size of the society’s hall, had emptied his Rolodex into the invitation list. In range of my glance I spotted Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and Lou Reed. There were surely many others I didn’t recognize. Despite being a low-grade semi-celebrity myself, I’m rotten at picking out any but the cartoon-obvious among us. I felt like an idiot, dressed to the nines, alone and invisible in the dim back rows as the stately figures spoke one after the other on the distant stage. I’d attended out of an absurd pity, imagining an old man who’d been exaggerating his connection to Janice, and therefore to me, not remotely guessing that Emil Junrow’s passing was an authentic cultural moment, and that with the gravity and glamour of those who’d come to pay respects no one would trouble to register my presence. I only stayed out of a mild curiosity, and discretion. No one should duck out of a funeral.

Oona found me just as the three-hour marathon of tributes concluded and the crowd broke into a buzzing mass, before I could sprint to the exit. Perhaps she’d spotted me earlier. She seemed, anyway, to be alone here.

“What did you think?” she said.

“It was all very impressive.”

“For me, there was only one good line in the whole show,” said Oona, oblivious to the risk of being overheard.

“What was that?”

“From when Emil Junrow was born, when he was handed to his mother in the hospital and she said, ‘He looks like he can remember happier days.’”

The words had been offered up by one of the few family members giving testimony amid the parade of luminaries, a cantankerous elderly cousin, a woman as shriveled and fierce as Junrow. Hearing the quip, it was hard not to picture the newborn already possessing Junrow’s white muttonchops and furrowed brow, his hectoring eyes.

“Sometimes one good line is enough,” I said.

“Oh, absolutely, I wasn’t complaining. Junrow’s mom, she goes straight into the annals with that remark.”

As we drifted out into the lobby a waiter appeared, balancing a tray of wineglasses, half of them filled with white, half with red. Oona and I each grabbed a white.

“Did you know Junrow?” I said. A stupid choice, since I wouldn’t have wished to be asked the same in return. I was groping. My tongue felt cardboardy in my mouth. Yet other parts of me were unaccountably alive, all at once, despite the soporific effects of three hours in that whiskey-colored auditorium, and the sober and seemly procession of tributes.

“I wrote his last two books,” she said, fixing me with that same steady, warmly sardonic gaze I’d faced at Perkus’s.

“Ah. You know a lot about science, then?”

“Barely anything. I wrote his funny, personable books.
Junrow’s Rules for Amateurs
and
I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”

“So you must have spent a lot of time together. I’m surprised you weren’t invited up onstage to pay homage.”

“My existence is meant to be a secret,” she said, again with no concern for secrecy. “I didn’t get where I am today speaking at funerals.”

“Did you like him?”

“Picture one of those old
New Yorker
cartoons with the old man chasing the secretary in circles around the desk. Luckily he was easy to outrun.”

“I read
Across Foul Lines
the other night—I mean, part of it.”

“I’m guessing you mean Perkus Tooth’s copy.”

“It was pretty good, actually.”

“Oh God, I can totally picture it, you and Perkus getting stoned and reading pages aloud and roaring with laughter, until the words quit making any literal sense. Am I right?”

This was closer than I wanted to admit.

“Did you guys do voices, trying it out as Donald Duck and Greta Garbo and so on? It’s perfectly okay, sometimes I do that myself when I’m writing them.”

“I’d like to hear that,” I said, not wanting to put up a fight.

“Maybe you do a great Marlon Brando, Chase? I know Perkus would like that one.”

Was Oona Laszlo mocking Perkus now? Our secret sharing of the apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street felt almost disagreeably intimate, here in this crowd. I went for a gulp of wine and found my glass was empty. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?” I said impulsively. I had no idea how to navigate the West Side, but we were near Lincoln Center—there had to be something.

“There’s plenty here, for free. I think they might even bring out some sushi or cocktail frankfurters if we play our cards right.”

Oona Laszlo’s teasing dared me onward. She was a sprite of sarcasm, even her pensive torso, her small breasts concealed in black silhouette, seeming to jape. I’d been immune for three hours to the
shameful survivor’s lust that I’d known to sometimes wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one’s own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crosswords in ballpoint and then tossing them aside, to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run out. But now, three hours’ worth of such lust seemed to flood me all at once, in retrospect. Oona and I were surely not the two youngest people in that crowded hall of five or six hundred, many of whom were just now filing through the doors into the lobby, being handed their first glass of white or red. But it felt to me at that moment as though we were teenagers who’d dressed up and snuck in.

“I’d be willing to pay for my own drinks or even cocktail frankfurters in exchange for a little privacy,” I told her.

“You don’t want to be seen with me?”

“I’d like to be seen with you,” I said, “elsewhere.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you’re afraid somebody’s going to try to ask you for your autograph or to pose for a picture with your arm around Salman Rushdie, and then I’ll slip away. Which I absolutely would. I’d be out of here like a shot.”

“I—”

“We could go to the movies,” she said, surprising me. “Or just find a doorway somewhere and make out awkwardly, then later not call each other, or call but not find anything to say.”

“Let’s go,” I said, applying my palm to the small of her back, to guide her from the reception. Disconcertingly, her dress was cut out in a circle there, so my cool fingers slipped inside and made her jump. Then she smiled again, canines caught on her lip.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

I only meant to insist that we go out of hearing range of the
mourners and celebrants, though it had the effect of seeming to endorse her dizzy talk as a kind of plan. And as well to suggest I took the matter of my celebrity seriously in that crowd, as she’d joked. In truth, I doubted anyone cared. But
I
cared. It was my pitiful flame to nurture, that I should behave upstandingly as Janice Trumbull’s signifier in public places, at funerals at least. I was arm candy on Janice’s phantom arm, not much else. And the difference between this setting and Perkus’s apartment, or even Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s, was real to me.

We stopped to get our coats from the checkroom, then stepped outdoors, into a street vacant in a gutter-choking rainstorm, the black sky seemingly half liquid, snail-crawling taxicabs hugging the gleaming avenue’s crest for safety. I manage never to be prepared for the weather. Nobody else had left the hall, and as the heavy doors slammed behind us, all warmth and light seemed definitively on their backside, the reception an oasis we’d foolishly forsaken. Oona Laszlo was unsurprised. She produced a short black umbrella from her trench-coat pocket, and we struggled to shelter ourselves beneath it together long enough to put Emil Junrow and Ethical Culture behind us. Swirling wind made comedy of our attempt, and soon enough we found a doorway, just as Oona had scripted for us. I suppose she knew the weather forecast. Brass nameplates identified our hiding place as the entrance to a cabal of dentists. Across Central Park West trees lashed like an island’s in a typhoon.

The shoulders of my suit were drenched, the shirt beneath pasted to my back, and my slacks to my calves as well. Oona had fared a bit better, centered beneath the shred of umbrella. Yet she was wet and cold enough to be shivering. I felt it as she nestled into me. The lintel above us played the role of a tiny Niagara, the sheet of droplets a white-noise curtain drawn against the city and the whole of the storm.

“This has to be a secret.”

“I’m terrific at secrets. It’s a professional requirement.”

“I don’t have a whole lot in the way of a public role. I’m only known for one thing: my fidelity to Janice.”

“Oh wow, yeah, you scream
fidelity.”

“Look, it’s all I’ve got.”

“That’s true. You’re a very one-dimensional character.”

Her gaze zipped shyly from the coursing street to my damp collar and tie, anywhere but to meet mine. Her tiny hand, sharp and mouselike, slid between my jacket and shirt at my ribs. It seemed I was waiting to understand. The West Side was a mysterious distance from the East, the howling park between us and home. There was no one there to protect us from each other. There never was. I thought, irrelevantly, of the tiger. This is too true of me: my thoughts migrate, precisely when I ought to be attending. I stare into one face and begin to recall tendrils of another conversation. Richard Abneg had mentioned that the tiger kept to the East Side. Maybe we were safer here, in that case. But now came a dozen questions I wished I’d been bright enough to ask. Where did the tiger go in the rain? Why wouldn’t it want to take up in the park?

This night it might be fair to think such thoughts were the place I fled in a storm of guilt. I might not remember Janice very well, but wasn’t I supposed to love her? Here, beneath this sill, I toyed with wrecking the greatest long-distance relationship in the history of the cosmos. Or at least the long-distantest.