The Biology of Luck (17 page)

The neighborhood has gentrified around Jack Bascomb's walk-up. He moved into the sixth-story apartment on Avenue A back in the mid-eighties, at the height of the urban crisis, when the smart money was on continued arson and blight. Decades of neglect had transformed the sidewalks of Alphabet City into a heath of crack vials and syringes, a community garden for the denizens of the Riis Housing Projects and the tent villas in Tompkins Square Park. These were environs for a rusted militant to take pride in, daily corroboration of his forgotten foresight. Nothing pleased Jack more than the popping of gunshots outside his windows in the wee hours of the morning, as soothing as the uncorking of champagne bottles, confirming that little trickles down except ambition. Only now, the after-dark orchestra really does play a bubbly symphony as the brazen gangs of yore have yielded their turf to the offspring of limousine liberals. Jack's un-air-conditioned flat, furnished at tag sales and infested with roaches, used to be the regional standard; the Gestapo antics of a Republican mayor have recast it as a relic. The streets no longer belong to Jack Bascomb. He prefers to cloister himself in his outdated apartment, seated at his home-built folding table, honing his carpenter's skills and composing his memoirs. That's where Starshine finds him, at the appointed hour, self-medicating shamelessly with the door ajar.

“One pill, two pill, red pill, blue pill,” he greets her. “Now that's poetry. Simple language, strong rhyme scheme, implied conclusion. Walt Whitman for the post-industrial age.”

The capsules aligned across the tabletop remind Starshine of aircraft taxiing toward takeoff. They include appetite stimulants, protein inhibitors, and painkillers of every variety. Some of the medication has been manufactured in the micromanaged laboratories of the nation's leading pharmaceutical conglomerates; much has been home brewed in the cellars of cranks. The original source doesn't make a dime's worth of difference to Starshine's lover. He acquires the pills from the shady homeopath on the third floor, a defrocked pharmacist, in exchange for woodwork. And they serve their purpose. They cause drowsiness, weight loss, nausea, moodiness, poor digestion, and probably sperm count reduction, simulating virtually all the side effects of radiation therapy without in any way inconveniencing the cancer. This suits Jack perfectly. He will suffer the full effects of treatment without any hope of recovery, so that in his last breath he can curse the American government for denying him chemotherapy. It is all part of his master plan.

Starshine wipes the veneer of dust from a wooden chair and waits while Jack downs his pills with a chaser of bourbon. He winces with each swig, savoring his own pain with all the gusto of an early Christian flagellant. Starshine examines his hairy arms, still muscular despite his illness, admires the serpentine tattoo that runs the course of his bicep. He is a man's man, she thinks, a feral brute tempered only by intelligence. If he were younger, if he were healthy, she might toss her other lover to the wind and follow her fugitive to Amsterdam. He's dashingly handsome in spite of his ragged clothing and unshorn locks. He's the smartest man she has ever met. And he's even a powerhouse between the sheets. In many ways, Jack is leagues ahead of Colby Parker's daily phone calls and hothouse offerings. But there's the other side of Jack, the insecure tirades, the alcoholic binges, the recriminations, the self-accusation, the perennial irritability, and, above all, the inescapable detail that Jack Bacomb was a man born to live alone. And to die alone. This is his preordained destiny, Starshine knows, and not hers.

“All done,” says Jack. “I'm high as a kite on placebos. I feel like I could die a dozen times in one day.”

“Don't be that way, Jack. It's not funny.”

“You didn't expect me to save any pills for you, baby, did you?”

“Not today, Jack. Please. It has been a dreadful morning. You know that other guy I'm seeing, the one you called the Lyndon Johnson of lawn chairs? Well, his father died today, dropped dead in a parking lot.”

“Conclusive proof of a generous God.”

“Jesus, Jack. I can't deal with this shit. Can't you show an ounce of compassion?”

“For the competition? Not this time around. I already told you, baby, you can screw anybody you please, but I don't want to hear about it. I'm trying to avoid circumstantial jealousy. It's bad for the liver.”

“And then this maniac chased me halfway up Mulberry Street. It was just awful.”

“Was he cute?”

“Enough,” says Starshine, her frustration mounting. “What's gotten into you today?”

Jack pushes his chair away from the table with both hands. He turns to face Starshine and rests his palms just above her knees. “I'm sorry, babe,” he says. “I didn't mean to upset you. It's just that I woke up this morning, and I had a vision, one of those rare moments of prescience and clarity that you read about in Augustine or Proust. It was like acid and ambrosia and the finest cognac all rolled into one. It was like a private showing of Woodstock, baby. You can't possibly imagine the totalizing effect it had on me. It was the defining moment of my life.”

“Why does that make me so nervous?” asks Starshine. Somehow, she fears that Jack wants to make his vision the defining moment of her own life as well. “I don't know if I can handle a private showing of Woodstock.”

“There were flowers everywhere, baby. Poppies, tulips, orchids. You were standing in an endless meadow of the most dazzling flowers, flowers in every direction for as far as the eye could see. And the amazing thing was that there were no price tags, no migrant workers
weeding between rows, no toxic chemicals poisoning the soil. It was paradise on earth, the Elysian fields right here in our backyard. I could tell it was someplace close, somehow, but I wasn't sure where. And then suddenly I knew. It just happened. One minute, I had no idea where to find this utopia, and the next, it was as though I'd been handed a road map. And do you know where you were, baby?”

“Where?”

“I'll tell you where, baby. Amsterdam. That's where. You were alone in Amsterdam and I was dead. That's what's going to happen, isn't it? It's not a matter of if, only of when. “

Starshine stands up and braces her arms on the back of her chair. She owes Jack an answer, she has owed him an answer for nearly three months, be she is afraid of the consequences. Jack—unlike Colby Parker—can get along well enough without her. If she rejects his offer, he might emigrate to Amsterdam on his own. He might even do it on the spur of the moment to spite her. She knows he has already made arrangements for the private plane, corralled some ex–Black Panther who operates a charter airline into his death plan. Jack intends to die among socialists and tulips, in a nation with universal health care and state-run industries. She is the only elusive factor in his scheme. Sometimes, she finds herself hoping that he will die before she has to make a commitment, that the cancer bell comes to her rescue, but then she despises herself for her cowardice and her cruelty. She does not want to decide, she thinks, because in some perverse, illogical way, she believes that Jack will not die until she makes up her mind. The longer she stalls, the longer he lives. His death, she knows, will devastate her.

“I don't know, Jack,” she says. “I just don't know.”

“You
do
know,” Jack answers, his voice wavering. “Deep down in the core of your being, baby, you must know. Otherwise, we'd already be picking tulips in wooden shoes. It's sad though, isn't it? I fuck God knows how many women, must be hundreds, and when I finally find the only one I ever should have fucked, the only one I ever really fucked and meant it, I'm out of here like yesterday's news. It kind of makes you wonder….”

“Please, Jack,” says Starshine. “I love you. You know that, don't you? It's just circumstance.”

“Maybe I should have done things differently. Maybe I should have cleaned up my act and written cookbooks like Bobby Seale. Can you believe this shit? Bobby-kill-the-pigs-fucking-Seale, the goddamn poster boy for the revolution, he's written a goddam cookbook.
Barbeque'n with Bobby
. It's right there in the window at St. Mark's Books. That's the kind of shit that makes you want to say fuck the revolution and buy a condo in Florida or a fruit plantation or God knows what. It turns my stomach. “

“How about
Humping with Jack
?” suggests Starshine. “After all, you never have gotten around to cooking me lunch. Don't they say you should write about what you know?”

“I like that,” Jack answers, grinning. “You want to coauthor?”

Starshine smiles in relief. She knows she's in the clear now, at least for the moment, that Jack's thoughts have drifted from his deathbed to his futon. And somehow, although in hindsight the routine seems as old as a stock chess opening or the lines of a high school play, in the passion of the moment, it never fails to leave her breathless. She will purr, she will gasp, she will dig her nails into the folds of his back and shake the apartment like an earthquake and he will do anything and everything, like no other lover she has ever known, until she falls to earth with drool oozing down her chin and neck. She knows what is coming. So does Jack. He pours himself another glass of bourbon and polishes it off in one shot. Then he is upon her.

But this time is different. Usually there is lightning; today there is thunder. It begins with a soft patter, the gentle rhythm of a spring shower, but it rapidly swells to an angry gale. Starshine focuses on Jack, blocks out everything but the contours of his chest, his arms, the feel of flesh against flesh and sweat lathering her stomach and the violent energy building between them, inside them, then concentrates on her own orgasm, on getting over, on getting through, but her head is spinning, throbbing, with the furious roar of impending destruction. Of artillery, of blasting, of hail pelting tin. The entire universe explodes
around her in a deafening eruption of flesh and hair and fluids—and then she is through, over, lost in silence. All she can hear is Jack's hard breathing and the incessant labor of someone behind her head, on the opposite side of the plaster, pounding the wall with what sounds like the sole of a shoe. She is too content to be ashamed.

“Fuck this,” growls Jack. He rolls off her and pulls up his trousers. “Goddamn neighbors! I'm going down for a cigarette, babe. I'll be back. “

And this is how it ends, how it always ends. There is no afterglow with Jack Bascomb. For a short interval he is all hers, voracious, craven, but then he recovers like a patient from a bout of fever and he needs his space, his time, his air. Starshine hears the clatter of metal as he retrieves his keys from the table, then the dull thud of the door. The person on the opposite side of the plaster slams the wall one final time, maybe for emphasis, and goes back to his business. Starshine is abandoned to her thoughts. She stares up into the sagging ceiling, into the water wounds, into the chipping paint. She has had her pleasure. Now comes the pain. It is always the same with Jack Bascomb. Somehow sex with Jack drives her back into her adolescence, into her life before Jack Bascomb and Colby Parker and all the others. Into her life before men. Alone in Jack Bascomb's dimly lit apartment among his books and heirlooms, she is once again an ugly duckling, the plain, talentless child who nobody loves. She is once again irrelevant, neglected, a prop in her parents' incessant warfare, an obese teenager deserted by a narcissistic, bankrupt father to care for a dying mother with a soul as fragile as an ostrich shell. Her mind is suddenly flooded with all the hidden insecurities and fears she has struggled so long to bury. She is Starshine before she bought the bicycle, before she discovered her own beauty. She is nothing. And she refuses to be that again.

Starshine runs her hand over the scars on her wrists.

Slowly, decisively, she buttons her blouse.

The pale of settlement beyond the Bowery is the one New York City neighborhood in which Larry has never quite felt at home. The pushcart vendors plying Orchard Street intimidate him; the pickle vats along Roosevelt Park render him tense. Every Wednesday, he introduces a fifth column of outsiders into this last refuge of Old World Jewry, exposing wealthy gentiles and High Holiday suburbanites to the rich texture of immigrant life, but the frequent visits have done nothing to surmount his unease. If anything, they have intensified it. The Dutch admire the dingy sanctuary of the Bialystoker Synagogue and the Tenement Museum's glass-enclosed artifacts with detached respect. They gaze up at the roof of the Ritularium and feign regard for the caftaned Hasids who collect rainwater in cisterns for use in their
mikvah
baths. They shake their heads at the interior windows
between
apartments that turn-of-the-century slum lords constructed to evade the zoning codes. They gorge themselves on pan-fried blintzes and pierogis. But although they defer and praise, they do not relate. Larry alone feels a comradeship with the small-time peddlers and elderly widows who cling to the haunts of their forebears—not just Jews, but Greeks and Poles and Romanians—and it is this undesired fellowship that makes him self-conscious. His maternal grandfather ran a haberdashery from one of these run-down storefronts. His paternal grandfather examined fresh eggs for embryos at a processing plant on Montgomery Street—a man his own father, Mort Bloom, boasts
worked 365 days each year and an extra on leap years. Both of his grandmothers stitched gloves at the same Cleveland Place sweatshop. Their shame is Larry's inheritance. Although the Blooms have since escaped the warrens of the Lower East Side, traded in their workmen's aprons for judicial robes and lab coats, the guilt of urban poverty still afflicts the third generation. This heritage is a latent genetic malady, a Tay Sachs disease of the soul, which may smite without warning. These streets explain why Larry's father phones every month to press his son to apply to law school; they drive Larry's quest for literary immortality and his fear of failure. But their legacy runs far deeper than mere psychology. For it is this swarming ghetto, amidst the bedbugs and rats, where four short broad-faced Eastern European peasants tendered the promises and whispered the sweet nothings that ensured their progeny its ugliness.