Chronic City (23 page)

We’re soaring atoms, Chase, that’s what orbit consists of, the inhuman hastening of infinitesimal speck-like bodies through an awesome indifferent void, yet in our cramped homely craft, its rooms named to recall childhood comforts, with our blobs of toothpaste drifting between our brushes and the mirror, our farts and halitosis filling the chambers with odor, we’ve defaulted to an illusion of substance. Inside
Northern Lights
we’ve managed to kid ourselves that we exist, that we’re curvaceous or lumpy or angular, bristling with hair and snot, taking up a certain amount of room, and that space and time have generously accorded a margin in which we’re invited to operate these sizable greedy bodies of ours, a margin in which to reside, to hang out and live our pale, stinky stories. The space walk destroyed all that. (No wonder Mission Control has tried to keep this from ever being necessary.) Oh, the lie of weightlessness! We only
feel we’re floating because we’re forever falling, as in an elevator with no bottom floor to impact. And so, inside the elevator, the human party continues oblivious, the riders flirt and complain and mix zero-G cocktails, or chase bewildered zero-G leaf-cutter bees. Outside the ship, our consoling elevator’s walls dissolved, Keldysh and I were two specks falling forever, specks streaming down the face of the night. Ourselves plummeting downward to the gassy blue orb, the gassy blue orb also plummeting at the same mad rate away from us.

Well, after clinging to our telescopic guide-rods in a riot of metaphysical horror for upward of twenty minutes, our eyes locked on each other’s while Zamyatin and Mstislav gently beckoned in our ears to explain, please, why we weren’t moving a muscle to make the needed repairs to the tile, Keldysh and myself completely mute, we finally managed to bluff ourselves into taking one step into the void, and then another, until like brain-locked automatons we began executing the commands we’d rehearsed. The repair consisted of little beyond the clipping of a hangnail of tile and the application of a sealant (think: Krazy Glue) to the gash the misdirected module had carved into the Den’s upper sill. One crumpled signal dish was judged irretrievable; we detached it and let it spin off, down toward the minefield. I think it got through, the reward being, of course, immolation upon reaching the atmosphere—a small blessing of fire sent down in your direction, my Chaseling. My heroism, such as it was, lay in persuading poor Keldysh, who after seeing the dish spiral away, pooped his drawers and reverted to panic, clinging to the tile in a bear hug, to free himself from the ship’s exterior and let the guiderod telescope him home to safety. I had to whisper into Keldysh’s private channel for another five minutes or so, the others on the ship all stymied, waiting for us to budge, before I got him to go.

Now, love, for the bad news. A few days after the space walk,
Mstislav, in his dutiful way (he’s keeping the whole place running!), scheduled checkups for both myself and Keldysh, a routine caution we’d generally neglected for too long. We both came up clean for effects from the walk, but Mstislav seemed puzzled by my white-blood-cell profile. We ran a few successive days’ counts, just to be sure we had a meaningful sample, Mstislav trying not to say what he feared he was on the trail of, me gamely offering various bogus notions of female physiology reacting differently to the Greenhouse’s oxygen deprivation, joking that Mstislav had gone too long without a lady patient. Eventually our efforts devolved to a sit-down for the ever-humbling medical questionnaire, Mstislav narrating me through a series of self-exams, a drill we’d practiced on the ground but hoped never to see put to use. None of us much like dwelling on the slow erosion of our bodies in this environment, bone-density decay, the pale starved skeletons we’ve substituted for our old selves. I liked even less what Mstislav guided me toward: acknowledgment that I’d been managing an uncanny pain in my right foot’s arch for weeks, at least. Do you remember I said I was having a problem with cramping? That cramp was a tumor, Chase. Funny, huh? Oh, you should have seen the looks on the faces of the Russians, and Sledge. Even Sledge. I think they realized too late that I was a sort of mascot here, their woman. The whole mother-earth thing, unavoidable. Now a good-luck charm with cancer. Not to say, you know, that we don’t all still hate one another.

That was yesterday. I’ll know more soon, but I doubt we’ll be able to much delay a leak to the media, and I wanted to tell you before you learned by other means. (Oh, this is going to be a mess, this is going to be hell.) Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma may apparently drain the exultation from one’s prose.

Remember (please remember) the Chinese garden at the Met,
that unlikely bit of outdoors indoors? It shouldn’t feel so expansive, yet somehow it does. My favorite place in Manhattan, I think. Remember that we went there together, Chase? Did I already ask this? One of our first days in New York, we were so tired and drunk on sex and the sense of recognition of those early days of our love, and we meandered into the Met, not with any plan, and the suffocating heaviness of those endless European oil paintings made us drowsy and we escaped (I never remember the path exactly, always have to rediscover it) to the Chinese Garden Court, and were nearly alone there, and anyway the gurgling of the water and the rustling of the grasses, the bamboo, seemed to cover any human sound, and we lay down there on that stone that had been chiseled out and shipped from its ancient source and no guard troubled us and soon with our heads tipped together on that dark slate we fell coolly asleep, dozed for who knows how long. Do you remember, Chase? I remember, too, when we woke, and turned to look into the pool beside our heads, and you thought you saw a fish, a little black darting goldfish-type fish, but it was only the reflection of my glasses, a black shimmering reflected shape that had separated, for an instant, from the reflection of my head and from the rest of my glasses, and seemed a separate darting thing, a fish, or a tadpole. Please remember Chase remember please remember, I adore you, my terrestrial saint, my angel wandering avenues, I’m your cancerous angel adrift,

Janice

CHAPTER
Ten

Then came the weird
pervasive chocolate smell that floated like a cloud over Manhattan. At first you thought it was local, you’d passed an unseen bakery, smelled something wafting, chocolate-sweet, stirring cravings and memories both. You’d scan the area, find nothing, continue on, but the smell was with you everywhere, with you in your apartment, too, though the windows were tight. On the street again, you’d see others glancing up, sniffing air, bemused. And soon confirming: yes, they smelled the same thing. It had been downtown, too, someone said, quite nervously. Another said even in the subway. Lexington Avenue sidewalks, normally muffled in regular hostility, broke out suddenly in Willy Wonka comparisons, one passerby saying, I thought of a sundae, another replying, No, syrup on crepes. Or, a tad melancholy: I haven’t wanted ice cream like this in forty years. Someone said that the mayor had already given a statement, enigmatically terse, maybe hiding something. The chocolate cloud tugged Manhattan’s mind in two directions, recalling inevitably the gray fog that had descended or some said been unleashed on the lower part of the island, two or three years ago, and
that had yet to release its doomy grip on that zone. Theories floated in the sweetened breeze, yet no investigation could pin a source for the odor. And yet the scent
was
chocolate, ultimately yummy and silly. It brought merry chocolate comparisons out of everyone remarking on it. The mayor’s comment, when you heard it repeated on the news, included as fine a joke as had ever crossed those forbidding lips: he’d called it
the sweet smell of success
.

The chocolate weather came, too, as a moment of relief in a strange, hunkered, hungover time, winter killing. We’d already woken one November morning to the first snow, an overnight inch that glazed every sidewalk and windshield, all the twenty-four-hour markets hurrying to raise plastic tents around their outdoor goods, the citrus and bouquets, the rest of us digging in hallway-closet-floor shopping bags for last winter’s gloves and scarves, or else shelling out for on-the-spot sidewalk-stand purchases of same, abandoning hope that the portents of warming were real enough, this year, to thwart this local early-onset frost. No such luck, the wind slapped around the tall corners, tilting citizens into stoic silence under daylight’s hastening exit. On the amok calendar’s wheel Manhattan found itself damned again to holidays and influenza. So a chocolate mystery reminded us that we all dwelled in Candyland, after all. It was a news item the exact size of our childish wishes: So much for the deliberate terrors advancing on our shores, let alone our complicity with any wider darkness. We were, it turned out, a whole island of crimeless victims, survivors of nothing worse than a cream pie in the face, which, hey, tasted pretty good!

Perkus and Richard and I avoided one another for a week or so after our night of frenzied losses, but I called Perkus on the third morning of the chocolate benediction over the city. That day I was demented with guilty grief, for Janice Trumbull’s cancer was the lead feature on all the tabloids, and qualified to run above the fold in
the
Times
, at least the War Free copy I’d happened to find abandoned at Savoir Faire, and read over my breakfast cappuccino (which the pervasive scent kept tricking me into thinking was mocha, a beverage I hated). I rang Perkus’s phone at one thirty, late enough, I hoped, not to wake him no matter how late he’d been up or what he’d been up late doing—I didn’t plan to guess at any possibilities. I was counting on Perkus to divert me from Janice’s story, and if I had to tread softly around his own tendernesses, I was willing. Certain words I’d censor. Perkus groaned, though, as if I’d roused him from murky dreams of that item I swore to leave unmentioned. Or else was marooned in his old land of sawdust and sighs, a cluster headache. But he didn’t complain, and I didn’t ask. He didn’t invite me up, either, instead suggesting we meet for a Jackson Hole burger at three.

I slid into the booth, Perkus already there, nattily dressed, hair damped down, face shaved, putting on a good face in a setting he so often treated like an adjunct of his own kitchen, feeling free to lurch in red-eyed, hair like straw. At that hour the restaurant was empty, and the waitress, a zaftig girl with a funny combination of bangs and retro cat-woman glasses topping her sweet bored expression, scurried right over. Perkus raised his finger to preempt her asking, and said, “Two cheeseburgers, deluxe, cheddar, medium-rare. You want a Coke, Chase?”

“Sure.”

“Two Cokes.”

She obediently scribbled and departed, not speaking a word. Perkus’s air was of command and distraction, and I hadn’t wished to interfere, but it was a perverse choice for me to join him in one of those mammoth burgers, let alone the slag of fries that came with a deluxe, at this hour on this particular day. In only three more hours I was to be treated to dinner at the restaurant of Le Parker Meridien,
a privilege I’d have done nearly anything to wriggle free of. My presence for an evening, or at least the duration of an elegant dinner, had been auctioned off as a premium, at a benefit for one of Maud Woodrow’s charities, I couldn’t anymore recall which. The night of the auction I’d sat in a ballroom with Maud, at a table with Damien Hirst and Bono and Andrew Wylie, a champagne night, spirits frivolous and self-congratulatory, the named celebrities mostly bidding on and winning one another’s offerings, whether fifty-thousand-dollar artworks or the promise of a mention in a song or a film. The whole absurd ritual seemed an excuse for the names on the benefit committee to impress one another with largesse, and I’d believed to the last instant that Maud intended to spare me, to win the dinner with me herself, but, cruelly, she hadn’t. I’d gone instead, at the price of fifty thousand, to the Danzigs, Arjuna and Rossmoor, names unknown to me yet reputedly iconic on the social register, names denoting not accomplishments nor even celebrity but rather stewardship of the oldest money, wealth like sacraments, wealth to make Hirst’s, and Bono’s, even Maud Woodrow’s, look silly. The Danzigs, I heard explained, had a staff of two hundred. Staff doing what? I was foolish enough to ask. Staff just keeping things running, was the vague reply. Hiring and firing itself, training new operatives, the several layers between the Danzigs and the world. The Danzigs’ money was a kind of nation unto itself.

(That I’d been an item sold at auction, like the chaldrons, only now struck me.)

This was six months earlier, and ever since then I’d been in denial that the dinner in question would actually need to be enacted. How could the lordly Danzigs really care to make an evening’s worth of small talk with the child star, the astronaut’s beau? Wasn’t the point just to win the auction? But no, they were eager. One member of their two hundred, their chief social secretary, I suppose, had contacted me,
a few days before, to confirm the dinner reservation. The stupid day had come at last. Even worse, the news of Janice’s cancer would surely have reached the Danzigs—they’d likely been briefed over breakfast—ensuring cloying sympathies, over sorrows I didn’t relish elaborating. I could, at least, arrive hungry. It would be a little peculiar to down a half-pound fist of ground beef as an appetizer. Anyway, the chocolate odor was very much with me, even as I’d stepped inside this emporium of greasy smells, not much of a complement.

Perkus didn’t mention it. He spent a while squinting and shaking his head, even beat on his temple once with the base of his palm. His rude eye careened after our waitress, but she’d gone into the kitchen. I wondered again, had Perkus been dragged down into cluster? Anyway, had I been summoned here for a reason? (I was eliding the fact that
I’d
called
him.)
I’d been relieved, I thought, to find Perkus not on a mission, myself not a conscript. Yet perhaps his urgency was addictive, and I felt its absence now. My annoyance mingled in a sorry anticipation of dinner with the Danzigs.