Chronic City (27 page)

I was amazed. “You’ve been bidding in auctions?”

He frowned annoyance. “Just a couple of times. The supply’s dried up at the moment.”

“You haven’t won?”

“Nope. But, you know what? Stay tuned. The Hawkman’s accustomed to getting what she wants. Shhhhh.” Georgina had returned, closing off further questions. Yet I’d had answered the one question I never meant to ask, had avoided even framing. Phenomena I’d in some way been hoping were circumscribed within the Eighty-fourth Street apartment, within Perkus’s computer or broadsides or ravings, weren’t. Even when I—and Perkus, possibly—ignored them, chaldrons, for instance, went on being chaldrons. For some people, apparently, they were a way of life. I’d be forced to make my peace with the fact.

CHAPTER
Thirteen

It wasn’t as though
I didn’t know where Oona lived. I’d dropped her at her building’s entrance in a taxicab more than once. So on the first day I felt completely well I put myself thoroughly together, shaving, flossing, even patrolling my nostrils for vagrant hairs and lint-rollering my winter coat and my scarf, then conveyed myself to her address, on a bright cold Monday afternoon, the first in December, as if turning up for an audition for entrance into her rooms. Oona’s building had no doorman, and after spotting O. Laszlo on the buzzer’s directory, I declined using the intercom, wanting to ensure she at least had to look me in the eye. A tall young woman with a tall silky dog appeared as I stalled at the intercom, and in my well-ordered state she showed no hesitation holding the door open for me, even before I smiled for her. So I was inside. The lobby was consummately ordinary, the building’s old bones renovated into timeless blandness, but I felt a prickle of revelation, as though crossing some secret boundary or limit, Manhattan’s hidden panels sliding open to my gentle pressure. My week of fever might have been a price paid in advance for passing so easily into forbidden territory: I
felt transparent, had even shed an authentic pound or two, my pants riding looser on my hips. I’d revved myself to make this run at Oona’s door, but now, past first defenses so easily, my mood turned slinky, elliptical, possibly even ellipsistic. I sort of wanted just to poke around the corridors a bit.

Or do something else. We rode the elevator together, the door-holding woman and the pony-like dog and I, and I could see she wanted to ask who I might be in her building to see, and that she hoped it wasn’t a woman prettier than herself, or any woman at all. And she was awfully pretty, in a way I didn’t have to take personally, copper hair in unkempt ringlets under her felt cap’s earlaps, her profile, once she’d unwound her scarf so I could see it, elegantly long, an imperial snout to match the dog’s. She had an unneurotic attractiveness, or so I could tell myself. I could also tell that she liked me without knowing who I was. This made me want to be someone other, even entertain the scoundrel fantasy. Perhaps this was what I was really for, after all. And New York, a puzzle trap for anonymous encounters. You might find no pity to spare for the child star, but I’d known this feeling too rarely. I’d always had to be dutifully myself, even while shirking any other duty. Now, for the eternity of an elevator’s ascent to the eleventh floor, I had another idea. The copper-haired woman presented a path between my schizoid fates, Janice Trumbull in the sky and Oona Laszlo behind a door on the floor the elevator’s red numbers now lazily counted off. The dog had this woman to himself, I could see from his assuming posture. He slept in her bed. I felt I could probably handle the mute furry rival, and that otherwise nothing else stood between me and escape, not only from my women but from larger confusions I’d wandered into these past months. I only had to think up another name to go by. Kertus Booth. Then the doors opened to the eleventh, and I stepped off, fantasy bursting like a soap bubble. I went straight to Oona’s door, and rang the chime there.

A man opened the door, a sandy-haired, sallow man with acne-burred cheeks and a boneless, indolent quality to his shoulders and hips, seeming not fat but shoddily put together or unfinished, his age hovering nebulous between twenty and forty, and with an expression vaguely drunken and irritable at once. Dressed in a tan polo shirt and brown corduroys, loafers without socks, he was small, too, but not in the pumpkin-on-stick-figure manner of Perkus Tooth or Oona herself, more like a golem made by someone running low on clay, who’d therefore cheated at both proportion and detail, leaving legs, arms, and fingers stubby, nose indistinct, lips nonexistent. As he widened the door he recognized me, unmistakably, and with only mild surprise.

“Oh!” he said. “I thought you were sandwiches.”

I couldn’t find my voice to reply. The door-opener’s smile was like a line drawn in wet sand with a stick, pale doughy eyes not joining in. At last he said, “Just a minute,” and turned without inviting me inside. He didn’t close the door, just called out, “Oona,” without raising his voice, and traipsed back the way he’d come, down an antiseptically white corridor, toward a wide-open room. I followed.

Oona or some previous owner had renovated the apartment clean of molding, or of any furnishings older than a decade or so, the lines around windows and doors as clean and square as a Chelsea gallery’s, the blond floors polished slick, and bare of carpet. The minimal shelves stood free, and were loaded with books sporadically bunched in spine-wrecking slouches, or laid sideways to begin with, and boxed and unboxed manuscripts, the walls undecorated apart from the images Oona had tacked around her work site in temporary and slipshod fashion, most of them letter-sized color printouts, some with e-mail headings intact, others pages seemingly heedlessly razored out of art books. The windows were shaded with Japanese paper, the afternoon’s bright-angled sun glowing through, filling the
space with ambient radiance, the ceiling speckled and streaked with light.

Oona’s desk was a simple table, brushed metal like a refurbished medical or laboratory surface, on which a gleaming laptop sat, a bright steel spider enwebbed in external components—speakers, drives, printer, wireless keyboard and mouse, and with Oona hunched over it, thin black wires running to her ears, a daylight vampire in her regular crow’s black. The door-opener preceded me into the large bright room, then seated himself silently in a red leather chair against the farthest wall, as though returning to some penitential observance, seemingly wearing an invisible dunce cap. Oona sensed my presence, an extra ripple in the room’s stillness, removed earbuds, and turned in her chair. She wore the mysterious glasses, but plucked them off into a vest pocket when she spotted me. Then immediately stood.

“Excuse me.” Oona went out of the room, through another corridor, presumably to the more domestic quarter of the apartment, bedrooms and bathroom, though I wondered how warmly furnished they could be, by the standard of the room in which I stood. Oona’s work site, now that I was free to examine it, was festooned with photographs and drawings of a host of excavated pits, precisely dug holes in the ground, at various locations, among buildings, or in woods, or by the sea, or in one case islanded by a suburban industrial park’s circular drive. A couple I recognized as views of
Urban Fjord
. Others were labeled
Local Chasm, Demapped Intersection, Former Landmark, Erased Atrocity
. The varied attractions of Laird Noteless. The sculptor stared from another photograph, silver torrent brushed back over his skull, wild unmanaged eyebrows atop drillingly dark pupils, deep-lined cheeks, hands in pockets or behind his back, impossible to tell as the coat he wore buttoned to the top showed no hint of form, was instead a light-destroying blob filling the frame on
three sides, his head like a sculpture itself mounted on the black Rorschach of coat, dour sentinel overseeing his works.

I continued this close inspection for a full minute or two. It was as if I’d come for this purpose, Oona’s failure to greet me a consent that I should absorb the scene at her desk. I felt alone there, though technically I wasn’t, being in the company of one who’d melted into the limbs of his padded leather chair—had the chair been dun-colored everywhere, like him, instead of firehouse red, he’d be impossible to notice:
Blurred Person
. I did feel some whisper of déjà vu at our arrangement, but I placed it soon enough—Susan Eldred had stepped out, left me not completely alone in her office once, a few months ago. So perhaps the man who’d come to Oona Laszlo’s door was Oona’s version of Perkus Tooth. He certainly lingered in a kind of ellipsis. But I not only found him unthreatening, I wasn’t interested. I had no room for another recursion, for human Chinese boxes, Perkuses hiding inside Oonas hiding inside Perkuses. What was next—would the pale-brownish man in Oona’s red leather easy chair turn out to have a Biller of his own, and so on? Forget it. Forget him, he was nothing, and evidently content to be. It was Laird Noteless who bothered me. Had he replaced me in Oona’s life? Her desk looked like a shrine.

Something held me from stepping nearer, to see what words I could read from her screen. I suppose I wasn’t alone, after all. Then, as I hesitated, it blinked off. The room, lit by that flood of sun through the handmade paper over the windows, seemed to pulse, to brighten around that spot of dark in which I now saw myself reflected, the shape of my coat outlined against the clean white walls, not entirely unlike Noteless’s photographic portrait. I could also see the figure behind me. He’d left his loafers on the floor, and tucked his bare feet up to sit cross-legged on the leather cushion, and though I couldn’t be certain I thought his eyes might be closed. I wouldn’t
have been shocked to hear him snoring. There was no sound from the corridor down which Oona had fled.

The buzzer sounded. I turned in alarm, though I should have expected it. The dun-man unfolded from his seat and padded down the hallway to the intercom, where he buzzed a sandwich-delivery person into the lobby. Shortly he’d exchanged a wad of dollars for a plastic sack, which he plopped at the foot of the red chair, then retook his cushion, his economy of action suggesting an especially weary distillate of Zen observance.

“I don’t think she’s coming out,” he said. His smile bore an air of wan complicity. “Would you like a half? It’s spa tuna on wheat.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Do you mind terribly—?”

“Please.” I said. He leaned into the bag on the floor and unwrapped his sandwich. I left.

On the street, I felt stripped of all intention, as if shunted outside my own skin. The bright day was already falling to early December dark. I hailed a cab, though it was walking distance, really. It was always so much easier to find one going downtown, like falling out of bed, or out of the sky. I might have fallen out of the sky I was so insubstantial, had so little relation here on Earth, if Lexington Avenue qualified as Earth. Had I even seen Oona? Barely. I’d spent more time with the woman and dog in the elevator. Even more with Oona’s washed-out man. But it wasn’t any particular person I dwelled upon as I bumped across Eighty-sixth Street, to Second Avenue. Instead I considered the fate embodied in New York apartments. Perkus Tooth was utterly a creature of Eighty-fourth Street, that labyrinth of broadsides and collections, the walls bearing a decade’s patina of smoke and old music and conversation. What if Perkus were to be freed into a clean space like Oona’s? Might he take a breath and write something new, something that mattered to him?
(With that state-of-the-art computer he’d stand a better chance of winning a chaldron, if nothing else.) Conversely, Oona’s jittery susceptibility, it seemed to me now, might be exemplified in those bare walls, that Teflon floor. Anyone’s portrait might be featured next, to colonize the place as completely as had Noteless and his potholes: a disgraced governor or bishop, a rehabbed rock star or wide receiver, a vindicated scapegoat, a mass killer. No wonder she didn’t want me around the blank slate of those rooms. The ghost writer was too totally permeable.

Why she didn’t see that this was what we had in common—this was the only thing I didn’t understand.

CHAPTER
Fourteen

Yet for all I felt
bankrupt and stranded that day as I slumped back to my empty turret, a Rapunzel unbeckoned from below, not even raving sick and feverish anymore, just as natty clean and straight of posture and pointlessly deferential as I’d been before I’d ever met Perkus Tooth or Oona Laszlo, too noble to pursue strange redheads in elevators, not noble enough to live out my scripted role as Janice Trumbull’s betrothed, rather somewhere hopelessly between, I was, in fact, about to be rescued. As if they’d been testing me, Perkus and Oona gathered me back into the strange consolations of their company just before I petulantly flunked out of it.

In other words, I only had to stare at my telephone for a day and a half to will it to ring. It was Perkus who called, the following night at nine, but as if by miracle or design, Oona was in tow.

“So, where have you been?”

“Hello, Perkus.”

“You were sick? Why didn’t you call?” I knew him well enough to hear how his tone of grievance contained both an apology and a
commandment to pretend our Second Avenue street squabble had never taken place.

“I was barely able to lift the phone. There was nothing anyone could do, I just had to sweat it out.”

“Why don’t you come over now?”

“Well—”

I was surely going to be convinced, but my sulkiness hadn’t quite dissolved. Then, behind Perkus, Oona’s voice chimed in to dissolve it. “Come on, Chase, get with the program!” As if I’d already missed an appointment.

“We’re hanging out,” said Perkus, now with a shade of chagrin, or even pleading, as if he really needed my presence to buffer Oona’s. Women, I began to think, embarrassed him per se, made him feel goofy or uneasy, when they didn’t make him furious. “It’s not the same around here without you.”

Well, it wasn’t the same around
here
, either, I wanted to joke. I did feel I’d vacated my life somehow. Instead I told him I’d be right over. Needless to say.