Chronic City (31 page)

Foley led me downstairs to share a cab back uptown, shaking her head. I felt affectionately toward the small, intent publicist, making such effort always to keep her needless professional distance, forever on my side in any misunderstanding or disappointment, as though my cause was righteous or just, or was a cause at all. This absurdity, that Foley cared more than I did, kept me from ever knowing how to make conversation with her, despite all fondness. So I committed the discourtesy of opening the creamy envelope in front of her there, in the cab’s backseat.
Jules Arnheim / Requests the Presence of You and Your Guest / At His Residence / For a Champagne Dinner / In Celebration of the Holidays
. A separate tiny envelope, stamped, for RSVP, slipped out into my lap. The party was two days before Christmas, eight days from now. Despite the engraved elegance of the paperwork, the whole thing smacked of imperial impulsiveness. Arnheim was known for commanding celebrities to his table at whim.

This was a surprise. I recalled some prediction from Rossmoor Danzig, a mention of the mayor’s gratitude. But that whole episode was like a cameo in fever. So it was as if my own illness had arranged to introduce me to Mayor Arnheim. Anyway, I must have concealed my amazement well enough from Foley. Her face fell. She thought I’d been shunning her calls because I’d wandered into fabulousness. Realms a mere PR girl daren’t imagine. I had no way to explain how wrong she was, that I’d in fact stumbled into squalor and marginal romance. I shouldn’t mention Oona and I couldn’t describe Perkus.
Foley dropped me off at my door, so we could both forget the errand’s conundrum, my near miss with publicity. I was only relieved. That part of my life could go on without me for all I cared, was as distant as the space station.

I had to kill a few hours before I could descend into my well of squalor and romance again. What I failed to note was how those sirens in the fog had sounded a note of disaster that cold morning. I was diverted from contemplation of harbingers by Christmas decorations on Second Avenue and the mayor’s invitation burning a hole in my pocket all through the day’s empty hours. I’ll confess I did feel a little fabulous about it. I became fixated on taking Oona to the mayor’s, flaunting our secret affiliation in a semipublic place from which I could be positive the media would be banished. Nobody was as guarded as Jules Arnheim, never more so than in his private domain. I wanted to present this fun to Oona in person, like a Valentine. Yet I knew she was hammering at her chapters and wouldn’t reward interruption. I also expected she’d find me at Perkus’s later if I was patient.

The phone rang an hour or so after I’d appeared at Eighty-fourth Street myself, but it wasn’t Oona. “It’s Abneg,” Perkus reported to me, holding the receiver aside. “They’re in a cab a few blocks away. He says Georgina’s having a craving for burgers, he wonders do we want to meet them at Jackson Hole?”

There was only one possible reply. I wasn’t worried, Oona could find us there easily enough, at that restaurant which was like an annex to Perkus’s kitchen. We grabbed our coats—even Perkus had at last admitted winter’s irreversibility, and dug out of his closet a moth-eaten maroon stadium coat, half its wooden-peg fasteners missing, and a black captain’s cap, which made him resemble an
Irish folksinger or terrorist. We were just downstairs and in the building’s doorway when we felt the crack and shudder beneath our feet, a wrenching seizure in the earth below the tile of the corridor, the foundations of the building, the pavement of the street. I don’t know if there was truly a roaring sound or if it was merely the disconcerting roar of silence that followed, an instant afterward.

Whatever had snapped beneath the world, beam or bone, wasn’t in our imagination. The cars crawling up the street each braked, and the piano inside Brandy’s halted too, the sing-along stilled. Then, as we stood trying to fathom it, a bubble of laughter and mock-shrieks erupted within the bar, the uncurious singers only relieved to be alive, and the piano resumed its strolling tune, and a ragged harmony of voices resumed, too. The cars picked up their crawl. Perkus and I rounded the corner of Second, hungry and habitual (and yes, freshly stoned).

Neither of us spoke, and in that heartbeat’s moment of bogus imperturbability, like the interval before blood wells in a deep-sliced fingertip, it seemed not impossible we’d take our booth at Jackson Hole and never mention it. Except the gaudy burger joint had just an instant before been demolished, the building wholly wrecked from underneath, the recognizable shards of exterior window frame and signage and also the chrome-and-vinyl booths and bar and stools of the interior sagging together, under the crushing weight of the roof and the yellow-painted brick of the upper stories, into a groaning trench, a ragged black smile in the concrete that was meant never to betray us, with tiny waterfalls of pulverized drywall like chalk trickling into the corners of that new mouth. Stepping up entranced with others on the sidewalk, Perkus and I found ourselves transformed into first members of a mob of rubberneckers, gathered at the outskirts of a crime or disaster, the nearest layer of the concentric amazed staring from windows and out of stopped vehicles. Then the
sirens came, as if replying to those in the morning’s fog, and converged on us where we swayed stupefied in the blossoming dust.

Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji joined us there, milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparking red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades. I’d read of this, an unintended consequence of the city’s Tiger Watch Web site, that hundreds with vicarious investment in the activities of the predator, citizens superstitious or worshipful, others disbelieving, seeking to confirm conspiracy explanations for the shutdowns and ruin, others armed with cameras or concealed weaponry, others hoping to pillage wrecked stores, all had been flocking in increasing numbers to the coordinates of reported sightings, their numbers growing, their response times unnervingly sharp. Then again, by any outward measure Perkus and I were part and parcel, members of the Tiger Stalkers’ Union.

Richard, when he and Georgina located us, linked each of his arms into one of ours, breaking the spell of disaster a little, divorcing us from the spectating group mind. He and Georgina were bundled into their cold-weather finery, returning, I suppose, from another of their endless sequence of formal occasions. Richard, since meeting Georgina, seemed to have shelved his irreverence toward ceremony.

“Hey,” Richard said. “I talked to a cop, he says they’re pretty sure it tunneled back uptown. We aren’t likely to hear anything about survivors for a while yet. It’s pretty cold out here—maybe we ought to get something to eat?” He spoke embracingly, as though escorting mourners from a graveside, toward the consolations of the wake. “This’ll be waiting when we get back, it’s not going anywhere.”

“Did this happen because of us?” said Perkus hollowly. “In another minute we would have been inside.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Richard.

“I think if I don’t eat a meal soon I will vomit,” said Georgina. “Please. I’m sorry.”

“Isn’t there another place around here for a burger?” said Richard. He must know he risked hamburger heresy. It might be worth the grievance if it drew Perkus back from the brink of total identification with the mauled restaurant. There’d be no cheeseburger deluxes originating there anytime soon. As for any further losses, we were numbed, unable to think. Or at least, if Perkus thought of them, he didn’t speak.

I said, “We could go to Gracie Mews.” I worried about missing Oona, but then again, unlike Richard Abneg, Oona was hardly likely to come browsing for us in this mad scene.

Now it was Georgina who clutched my arm. “Please—anything.” She really did look a bit green. Actually, there was an unhealthy sheen of agitation to the Hawkman and Richard Abneg both, as though it had been too hot in their taxicab, or they’d been making out in it. By the time we’d nudged Perkus out of his spell enough to filter out of the crowd, walked to First Avenue, and gotten ourselves seated under the grilling fluorescents of the Mews, I saw they were both perspiring, their eyes raccoonish. Richard’s blustery good cheer, which I’d taken as concern for Perkus’s fragility, now seemed to me an almost frantic heartiness in response to the disaster. “This looks really bad,” he chirruped. “There’s certainly fatalities this time out!” He might be overcompensating, out of some sense of culpability.

Or was it in fear? Perhaps Richard felt Perkus’s guess had been off by a degree, that the tiger had come not for Perkus but for him.
That absurd epithet Perkus had thrown at him,
eagle-hunted—
maybe tiger-hunted, too. Yet, how absurd and solipsistic. I’d begun to do Perkus’s thinking for him. As if the tiger had had to be hunting someone in our company, and it was only a matter of figuring who! As if it had to be hunting any one person. As if it was a tiger after all, and we hadn’t been given another explanation. Yet there must be some reason Richard and Georgina were so agitated, in contrast to Perkus’s zomboid numbness. I suppose I too might have seemed out of kilter, to the others—it was as if we’d all just climbed out of that crater, rather than merely wandering up to its periphery.

So we ordered and ate. The Hawkman consoled her nerves by gobbling the bowlful of dill halves our waiter plunked down to keep us while we waited for our meal. I didn’t point out to her that someone else might have wanted one. Instead I borrowed Richard’s cell phone, and dialed Oona’s number. When I entered the last digit and hit Call, the screen announced
CALLING
/
OONA LASZLO
.

“Oona’s in your phone?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I didn’t realize you even knew each other.”

Of all things, this snapped Perkus from his daze, just to snipe at my innocence. “You’re like the ultimate amnesiac American, Chase. You never can imagine anything actually happened before you wandered along.” This attack, both rote and gratuitous, was surely Perkus at his most mediocre. Under the circumstances I cut him slack—I had no reply to his jibe, anyhow.

I got Oona’s voice mail, as expected, and told her where we’d ended up. (Oona never answered her phone, that I’d seen. Just checked it constantly.) And she must have been near, for this brought her, so quickly that she beat the Mews’ kitchen, by a whisker. Our four burgers slid onto our place mats just after she’d crowded in between
Georgina and Perkus. Oona signaled to the imperturbable waiter that she’d take one too, then added, “Medium rare.”

“Hello, Oona,” said Richard, a neutral greeting, devoid of clues for me to examine. “You haven’t met Georgina, I don’t think.”

The women managed a polite introduction, even as the Hawkman drowned her plate in ketchup and jammed a bouquet of fries into her mouth, still trying to outrun disaster’s appetite. Only now did it occur to me how by making the call, and then blurting the surprised question that elicited Perkus’s scolding, I’d widened the circle of conspirators—mine, and Oona’s—to include Richard and Georgina. This felt natural, in a life-during-wartime sort of way.

Seeing the company assembled here for the first time—four of us with our burgers, and now came Oona’s, too—I believed I was seeing my present life complete for what it was, or what I wished it to be. Like a foreign correspondent in a zone of peril, a Graham Greene protagonist, I was secretly thrilled that chaos had rearranged a few things. I had my people around me. There might be undercurrents of the undisclosed between us at that table—Oona’s ignorance of chaldrons, say (but then again, like the readout on Richard’s phone, nearly anything might be known to all but me), or the extra reason, quite beyond milk shakes, which I knew, but couldn’t risk saying, that Perkus might have to mourn the demolition of Jackson Hole. Yet these hesitations didn’t outweigh the solidarity of our team. That we existed against a backdrop of baffling and indistinct dangers gave us our shape.

Then again, utterly negating all this camaraderie was the gasp of jealousy I’d felt at spotting her name on Richard’s phone. This made me want to assert my place, at any risk to our secret. So I reached across the table and took Oona’s hand. She didn’t pull it away, but while I held it she wouldn’t meet my eyes. After a moment
I let her go. I’d at least conveyed my unguilty pleasure at her arrival. Who knew I’d take such crazy comfort in the leavings of catastrophe? I might be giddy that something of my own had come along, to rival Janice’s melodrama.

“At least it’s on a Second Avenue axis, that’s the good news… maybe we should have been fueling the fucking thing with hamburgers to keep it underground …” Garrulous Richard carried on, and meanwhile the women seemed to be getting along splendidly over their burgers, Georgina buzzing through hers, using the bun to swab ketchup, Oona mostly tiptoeing around her own. Their talk was largely dropped names, the filling in of degrees of social separation, always fewer than you’d expect. I thought of them in those terms, as if I were a member of a frontier wagon train: “the women.” They shed grace on our table by fitting together so disparately well: the Hawkman towering above us, Euro-exotic and impeccable, despite her frantic chowing, and Oona, so raven-like and quarrelsome, a rib of Manhattan torn out to make a woman.