Chronic City (35 page)

“Probably the man only goes there because he thinks the librarian is hot,” said Oona.

“The point is, Biller’s computer universe might not make any difference to these guys at all. Our little simulated brains have got to be paying attention to
something
. Who says it’s any harder for them to put some virtual-reality gobbledygook in front of our eyes than it is to, I don’t know, persuasively cobble up a visit to the Cloisters or a cheeseburger deluxe.”

“I’ve personally never found the Cloisters persuasive in the least,” said Oona. “I don’t care how old it’s supposed to be.”

I now had another wave of my straddling-universes feeling. Perkus and Noteless could meet each other, yet they were forever apart, impenetrable essences. Only I had the freedom to dabble in each of their realities and feel the native absurdity of their simultaneous distance and proximity. Who needed computers to simulate worlds? Every person was their own simulator. But give him credit, Noteless didn’t flinch at Oona’s witticisms, or Perkus’s non sequiturs. His eyes only flared as if he thought the Cloisters might make a nice locale for a monumental pit. And then tilted forward to issue a non sequitur of his own: “Potemkin villages.”

Oona and I were silent, demurring to the gnomic imperious, while Perkus blurted, “Yes, that’s it, Potemkin villages, exactly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Oona.

“Potemkin villages, you know—huts and bonfires and flocks of sheep, false fronts, stage sets, like they used to fool Catherine the Great,” said Perkus impatiently, before returning to his main thread. “So, I was thinking it might even be cheaper on the computing power, because a simulation of the Cloisters or this room or whatever has to obey certain dictates of time and space, all our different impressions
have to be brought into alignment, whereas from what I’ve gathered about a virtual space like Yet Another World, it’s sort of rubbery and expansible, full of jump cuts and glitches. So, maybe that would be easier, since no one’s expecting smooth continuity.”

“It is only our wishful senses that give continuity to chaos,” said Noteless ominously.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Because I was just about to say the exact same thing.” Standing in Noteless’s shade had brought out a twitchy, hectoring humor in me. I’m taller than most men, and when I look up at one, it makes me feel like Bugs Bunny. Or perhaps I was sick of watching Noteless burn holes in Perkus with his eyes, wanted the great man to know I was his proper rival, the one to hate. “You really ought to give virtual reality a chance, Mr. Noteless.”

“Ought I?”

Oona’s glance said I’d better squelch this impulse, but I had one more jape in me, at least. “A place like Yet Another World might be a terrific opportunity for one of your installations. Without applying for a permit you could insert the Grand Canyon between Seventy-second and Seventy-third Streets, and no one would be in any way inconvenienced.”

“I don’t work in pixels,” intoned Noteless, with the self-regard of a Stella Adler student declaring he refused to consider commercials. “I work in stone and soil.”

“Like a rock critic,” I suggested. Now all three stared, and I shut up. I’d at least gained my share of Noteless’s scorn. Before I could screw myself deeper into this hole—call it
One-Man Fjord
—a member of the catering staff intruded to announce that dinner was served, and we should feel free to move into the dining room, and to take any seat we liked. Aroused from my fixation, I saw the guests had been trickling away for a while now.

“Let’s go,” said Perkus, instantaneously frantic. His radar had
gone off: he meant to sit near enough to interrogate Russ Grinspoon, and I felt I should sit near enough to monitor Perkus.

“Your date needs you,” said Oona, with the relish of a savored line. Noteless ignored us, returned to his mental aerie. I gave her one look I hoped could say I contained as large a love as she’d ever require, but that obviously no love could encompass Laird Noteless, then let myself be swept off in the direction the party was flowing, helpless Alice to Perkus’s Red Queen.

Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money had its solvent powers, could dissolve the rear walls of a nineteenth-century town house to throw a dining room into what must have been the backyard, under a glass atrium that now worked as a blizzardy planetarium. Admittedly, the effect was thrilling, and the guests fell into a nice hush as they sorted out into seats around the six circular, candelabra-lit tables. Perkus, true to my guess, made a beeline for a far table where I now spotted Russ Grinspoon, albeit a demurely suited, balding, and goateed rendition of the singer I remembered. He still had the languor of a congenital sidekick (it takes one to know one), and I could restore his frizzy reddish halo of hair and Nehru jacket in mind’s eye easily enough. Perkus grabbed us two places beside him, and then seated himself in the middle. I followed, distantly aware of Oona and Noteless taking places in the room’s opposite corner.

Grinspoon played our table’s host, I suppose in his role as the mayor’s man, shaking hands, kissing the ladies, remaining standing until the chairs were full. I couldn’t tell whether this was something planned or not, but at the table to our left Richard Abneg took a similar role, while at the mayor’s table the small steely blonde still acted as Arnheim’s usher and protector. Only after this ritual settling did
Grinspoon turn to Perkus Tooth, a curious expression on his face, and under cover of the jocular roar and babble that now rose to the snow-mad skylights to drown out any soft-spoken comment, said wryly, “What are
you
doing here?”

“Oh, you know each other?” I said.

Grinspoon wrinkled an eyebrow, and let a beat pass. “No.” I understood he meant he’d simply heard his freak alarm go off—purple velvet over crimson didn’t make it too hard—and that it amused him to find someone like Perkus here, where Grinspoon himself was accustomed to defining the perimeter of the outré. He offered his hand to Perkus, then me, and it was droopy and soft as an empty glove. “I haven’t had that pleasure.” We said our names, and Grinspoon looked at me a moment longer, and said, “Right.” But it was Perkus who interested him. “You want to get high?” Grinspoon said, not whispering, relying that others were engaged elsewhere, showing the assurance of a veteran of a hundred such evenings.

“Sure!” said Perkus.

“Okay, but down, boy. We’re going to have to wait until after the appetizers.” With that, Grinspoon turned decisively from us, to the guests at his right, leaving me with Perkus, who seemed totally gratified but also mastered, as if in some preemptory maneuver, by Grinspoon’s offer. All his verbal imperatives stifled for the moment, the stuff I imagined he’d been saving to tell or ask a man who, however unimportant an artist himself, had been directed by two men
who’d also directed Brando
. Perkus was a little beside himself, in the glittering room, recognizable faces everywhere, and the throne of power, too. When he found his tongue again he began yammering disjointedly in my ear, charting associations the party’s inhabitants and scenery held for him, and I trusted myself to appear to be listening even as I phased him out for my own relief. I felt bad, almost, for overstimulating Perkus. I’d ushered a kind of Rip Van Winkle from
the gentle bed of his fantasies to this harsh tableau of real fame and influence, and jarring a sleepwalker incurs responsibility.

It was all I could do, though, to keep from craning my neck at Oona’s far table. As Russ Grinspoon had implied, this getting-to-know-you interlude, while only wine had been poured but no plates set down, would be an impolite moment to break from our table. Later, in the rhythm of such things, we could browse between the tables. I had a good excuse for going over to Oona’s. Sandra Saunders Eppling was seated there, and it was in the nature of male-to-female etiquette, as well as the duties of a sitcom son to a sitcom mom, that I should approach Sandra for the reunion scene I could safely guess many bystanders quietly anticipated. Oona and Noteless were chatting with Sandra now.

First we had to eat what now appeared, tongues of eggplant and bell pepper rolled into a juicy little vortex or eye at the center of a plate spattered with pesto, and then depart the table in the flurry as these dishes were cleared, following Russ Grinspoon, who’d ever-so-suavely placed his fishy hand on the bare shoulder of his rapt listener and asked her to excuse him, explaining that he’d promised to show me and Perkus a certain rare vase in Arnheim’s collection. Out we went, incredibly, easily, through the maze of tables and up the mighty staircase, afraid to touch a polished banister too wide for mortal hands, on steps so plushed by carpet that our footfalls felt ungravitied, so that we might have been ghosts, or snowflakes, riding an updraft instead of settling to earth where we belonged. In a dim, swank study at the top of the stairs, walls lined with leather-bound sets, storm-giddy windows overlooking the top of the greenhouse roof and, within it, the dinner party we’d vacated, Grinspoon sparked a ready joint.

“You’re the cat with the astronaut gig,” said Grinspoon. He was nothing if not an aging, red-haired hepcat, his freckles sunburned at
Christmastime. I might be predisposed to dislike him because his present career echoed mine, only with the difference he’d just pointed out. His job was just to preside, while I had to play Janice’s fiancé.

“Yes.”

“And you—just along for the ride?” He gave the joint to Perkus.

“I like to keep my eye on this kind of thing,” said Perkus coolly, taking the pose of the first hard-boiled detective to crash a scene in purple velvet. I recalled him telling me I could “learn a lot” from my vantage amid the privileged. He drew on the joint and blew a gust toward the bookshelves. “You worked with Morrison Groom, didn’t you?”

“Funny you should mention that name,” parried Grinspoon. “It doesn’t come up so often these days.” He smirked as if despite his words he’d been expecting Perkus’s question, as though he knew what I didn’t: that Perkus and I had really come here to enact this weird interrogation in a room apart. I hadn’t even smoked yet and the party seemed to be melting away into some more essential reality of Perkus’s devising—this one, unexpectedly, a detective movie starring a crapped-out ’70s star whose songs had been used, I believed I now remembered, as the soundtrack to a Robert Altman film about young orderlies at an old-age home, who ducked into broom closets to get high just as we were doing. Or possibly I remembered wrong. Perkus would tell me later. For now he passed me the smoldering joint.

“Actually, I’m working on a piece,” said Perkus, as if this explained anything. A piece of what? I received an involuntary vision of the name “Morrison Groom,” clipped and pasted beneath an ice-floe polar bear.

“None of those movies made any money,” said Grinspoon.

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“No?” Grinspoon shrugged. “Okay.”

Game, set, and match, Grinspoon. Perkus would have to organize his indignant feelings into some more impressive foray. “Any one of those unprofitable movies is worth all the rest of the films you appeared in put together.”

Grinspoon showed his palms, a Nazi officer so decadent he was pleased to surrender. “Sure, but I was never much of an actor.” With this he winked at me, the fucker. “You didn’t dig
Bartleby Rising?”

“You were in that?”

“I’m Bartleby’s boss.” Grinspoon now peered through his fingers to mimic spectacles, and pursed his lips like Scrooge. “Guess you missed it, huh?” Grinspoon kept mutating his appearance and affect, as though sensing, and wishing to mock, Perkus’s investment in matters of authenticity. He was rather obligingly monstrous, I thought.

“I wasn’t curious. Florian Ib’s comedies are everything that’s wrong with Hollywood since 1976. At least George Lucas made
American Graffiti
. Ib should be forbidden from working with humans. He was better with Gnuppets.”

“See, that’s the difference between us,” said Grinspoon. “To me they’re pretty much the exact same thing.” He gestured for me to return the joint to him, even as he glanced to check the progress of the party below.

“Humans and Gnuppets?”
asked Perkus with alarm.

“No, no,” laughed Grinspoon. “Groom and Ib. But hey, man, I’m not an expert on film, like you.”

“Groom and Ib are two opposed principles.”

“I was thinking more of the joy they each took in a plate of carbonara, or a drunk hooker. Actually, I used to wonder if under that Santa Claus beard and beer belly, Florian might actually
be
Mo, hiding behind an assumed name.”

“What?” Perkus’s response was electric, one eye riveted to Russ Grinspoon, the other pleading with me to attend this emergency.

“You’ve heard the rumor that Groom’s suicide was staged, right?” said Grinspoon. “Nobody really believes coyotes could drag a corpse away and chew off all identifying features in twenty-four hours.”

I was happy not to have another suck at the joint, for this evening was already dangerously distorted, the mayor’s home colonized by the magic zone of Perkus’s kitchen. How was it possible that Grinspoon could so acutely push Perkus’s buttons, molest his sacredest theories? Well, I watched Perkus gather himself, summoning forces reserved for a crossroads like this one. His first instinct was to outflank Grinspoon. “Sure, that’s common knowledge. But Groom wouldn’t waste his time on the kind of stuff Florian Ib’s been doing…” Then, despite himself, he turned the possibility over. “Though it would certainly explain why Brando would appear in
The Gnuppet Movie
…”