Chronic City (36 page)

I didn’t want Brando’s name spoken here. Russ Grinspoon would say he not only was dead but had never been alive. Mercifully, Grinspoon pinched the joint’s tip dark, then used it to point through the layers of glass and snow, to where I now saw the whole party with its attention turned to the mayor’s table. Arnheim stood speaking. We’d been missing a toast. I couldn’t see Oona’s table from here.

“I gotta get down there and make a show of things,” said Grinspoon. “Hope the stuff is good to you boys. Enjoy.” Though we’d be returning to the same table, Grinspoon seemed to be offering fair notice that the present conversation wasn’t to be continued downstairs.

“Mr. Grinspoon?” It was strange to hear Perkus default to this formality, addressing the hipster Grinspoon. But I saw clearly now how Perkus wasn’t really any kind of hipster at all. He was too grimly intent on his pursuits to waste time in such poses. The other difference was rage. Grinspoon had none, was breezy to his bones.

“Yep?”

“You mentioned… a vase?”

“Oh yeah, one more flight, in the stairwell, look all the way up. It’s really cool, especially if you’re”—Grinspoon made one more face for us, fingers wriggled in front of his eyes—“stoned.”

Back at the landing Perkus sprinted up the next wide staircase, into the muffled dark. Grinspoon turned the other way, to redescend to the party. I stood between, my mind coursing with marijuana confusion and possibility, my body paralyzed. Grinspoon turned and beckoned to me in my helplessness.

“You’ve got a part to play downstairs too, I think. Have you met the mayor yet?” He checked my glance backward, up that stair. “Don’t worry, he’s a big boy, he won’t get lost.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. What if I’d wanted to see the vase, too? Somehow cowed, I didn’t speak, but followed Grinspoon down the main staircase. A part of me wanted to monitor Oona and Noteless, but also, more prosaically, I was really eager now to greet Sandra Saunders Eppling. The pot smoke had brought up some well of sentiment inside me, for that lost time in my life when I had a simple avocation, to go each day to the cheesy set of
Martyr & Pesty
, that Potemkin village, and pretend that Sandra was my mom. I wanted to meet the mayor, too, and to talk to Richard and Georgina, to know their news. I missed them. They seemed entrenched in a daily world I missed, too. When was the last time I’d gossiped about anyone’s sex life? Meanwhile, Perkus was gone. He was the birds, the party was the tower. So what if I’d glimpsed both worlds—to which did I belong? I was a middling figure, a dabbler, much like Russ Grinspoon, who’d been directed by Groom and Ib and didn’t see much difference, who could decorate a variety of scenes. Like him, I went downstairs.

Straightaway I was prisoner of my plate’s arrival, roast brown glistening something. I dutifully spread it around my plate, while Perkus’s sat at his empty place beside me, glistening and cooling. Wineglasses emptied and were filled, the party at a boil, and I leaned across Perkus’s vacancy to join the niceties at my own table until fair excuse came to abandon it. The pot I’d smoked—it was very good pot—meant I relied on the purely sonic aspects of friendly talk to stand in for comprehension. Had anyone asked me to give the topic of the conversation I’d entered, let alone the names of the speakers, I’d have been reduced to clucking like a chicken. Grinspoon turned his back to me, plainly unconcerned at Perkus’s long absence. In that I took my cue from him again. When one or two others had broken from their seats to commune elsewhere, I was up like a shot to cross the room, and from a place behind Oona’s chair leaned in for an embrace with Sandra Saunders Eppling. I hoped my movements weren’t as raw and hungry as I felt.

Sandra’s features had long since taken on a kind of ageless flensed quality, but when I drew her to my chest I felt with a guilty shiver the brazen torso that had been the uncomfortable object of fantasy for my on-set self as well as for so many teenage boys on the other side of the television screen (I’d spent my life since as the involuntary recipient of such confessions). Could it really be that Sandra squirmed into my embrace as she stood, as if to be sure I knew what she still had? Or was I sexualizing what shouldn’t be, because of the proximity of Oona? Whichever, it was the case that in retrospect this instant was the one where the evening or I began to disintegrate, so that all I’d recollect from this point on was a series of particulate elements strung incoherently in the void—the first of these being the disconcerting volumetrics of Sandra’s breasts, the second her voice maternally pronouncing my first name, introducing me to her evening’s (totally uninterested) companion, then inquiring, as she
would have to do, after Janice’s health. I waved her off with a gesture designed to imply a burden beyond speech.

“And have you met…?” Sandra had forgotten Oona’s name, a fact she didn’t trouble to conceal, off-loading the task of introductions with the candid indifference of an air kiss.

“Oona Laszlo,” I said. “Selfless autobiographer. I’m a fan.”

“Mr. Insteadman,” said Oona, barely playing along. Noteless sat stiff and remote, his chair pushed back from the table so he could evaluate the room for possible demolition.

“So you’ve met my mom.”

Sandra took this as incitement to lean in, again, it seemed to me, lasciviously. “Oh, Chase, you never write, you never call, you never visit…” I clutched her waist, fishing for jealous reaction, and registered her unsteadiness on her heels. Drunk Sandra and I verged on reviving that treacherous sentimental fiction of
theater people
, and I was already disgusted with how we appeared through Oona’s eyes. I took it out on Oona’s silent friend. “And have you met Laird Noteless, Sandy? He’s the living master of dystopian public sculpture.”
Dystopian
was a Perkus word I’d fished up—I was probably too cowardly to insult Noteless as myself, but I could do it if I pretended to be Perkus filleting some cosmic mediocrity.

Sandra knit her brow, exaggerating sobriety. “But of course. I sit on the board of the memorial, Chase.”

“Ah!”

Now Noteless grumbled to life. “There’s nothing dystopian in my work, young man.” My borrowed dart had found its mark. “In point of fact, I operate strictly on what Robert Smithson termed an
atopian
basis. That is to say, my work attempts to erase received notions or boundaries, and hence to reinstate the viewer in the world as it actually is, without judgment.”

“So if a viewer were to, say, stumble into one of your holes and
break his foot, henceforth that would have to be considered a
strictly atopian
broken foot.”

“You must forgive Chase,” said Oona to Sandra Saunders Eppling, as if she were the one who should feel affronted. “He’s sensitive on the subject of injured feet lately.”

“I am not.” My voice struck me as issuing from some place other than my body, and sounding rather bratty, too. Perhaps it was my inner child.

“Excuse me,” said Oona to the others, as she stood and swept me from the group there, into the zone between tables, now occupied by milling bodies exploiting the lull before dessert. Since this departure was what I’d most have wished to have happen, it wasn’t difficult for Oona to accomplish. I smiled at her to show it was a happy thing, however coerced.

“I spotted you lads sneaking off upstairs like the band at a wedding.” She mimed a sniff, as if catching the tang of smoke on my jacket. I doubted she could, but since her guess was right I gave her the point. Anyway, I felt proud to be stoned, at that exact moment. Oona and I had shed our dates and stood paired in full view of the party, a total fulfillment of my childish yearning. Go figure: I’d only had to set free my brat for him to be instantly gratified! That I’d also cut Perkus loose to some macabre, unauthorized quest in the mayor’s private rooms, I pushed out of mind. I further decided I didn’t need to apologize for insulting Laird Noteless.

“See that blizzard outside?” I asked, fluttering my fingers to indicate the blue fever overhead. “That’s how I feel
inside
, when I see you.”

“Would a cup of coffee help? Because I promised to drag you over to meet Arnheim, and I think I’d better quickly, before you get any further unspooled.”

“You know Mayor Arnheim?”

“We’ve met a few times.”

“He knows—about us?”

“Don’t be idiotic. He knows I know you, that’s all. People see us talking, Chase.”

“Why does he care about meeting me?”

“The things that escape your notice, Chase—it isn’t always the case that you’ve escaped theirs. You’re a public person.”

“Now you’re going to remind me of my duties.”

“You used to remind me of them, not so long ago.”

I glanced back. The chair beside Russ Grinspoon was empty. “He’ll want to meet Perkus, too.” I overlooked the fact that, technically, they’d met at the start of the party. “We should wait.”

“Nobody here cares about Perkus.” Oona left this blatancy between us, her gaze merciless. It seemed to demand I grant how distant we were from broadsides and glue pots.

“I’d better find him.” My resistance was meek.

“Have a coffee with the mayor and then I’ll help you find him.” It made the reverse of the deal I’d struck with Perkus at the party’s beginning, but I doubted I’d amuse Oona pointing out this symmetry. What I liked about the present situation was how it didn’t include Noteless. I nodded.

The party had broken out beyond espresso and biscotti. Cigars, banned in public places, were the order here. Borne around in silver boxes, surprising numbers of us found no way of refusing, including many of the women. The mayor himself gave grandiose lessons on the pruning of a cigar tip, and the proper method of lighting one. Oona and I crashed the golden circle and were made to join in the corrupted smoky revels, which seemed to place us above the law and a little out of time, too, the ultimate luxury. In front of Oona and what had become a number of other female observers I was pleased to demonstrate that even in my state I knew well enough how to
handle one of the leaf-stinky things, though I had to remind myself not to suck the fumes to the far tendrils of my lungs as I had the pot smoke upstairs. Chairs were now pulled away and rearranged, our corner a pocket drama within the larger room, consisting of Arnheim and Insteadman and any number of women, and I was glad that Oona was seeing me this way, and that Perkus was away elsewhere for the time being. Only that same blonde, the professional watcher at the mayor’s hand, didn’t seem at all charmed by me.

I didn’t care. Jules Arnheim was all he was cracked up to be, fully manifesting power’s great refractive tendency. I found him almost impossible to regard directly, he was like a black hole or a blot on my vision in the shape of a small Jewish man, yet I could enjoy the gravitational warpage effects, the way we all seemed denser and more luscious in his presence. I couldn’t actually hear my voice, except as a kind of damped trembling echo in the wake of his pronouncements, which emerged in cigar gusts, between flame blasts from his silver lighter.

“Chase Insteadman.”

“Mr. Mayor.”

“I like the way you do things.”

“What things?”

“You keep the faith.”

“Thank you.”

“You bring honor to this city.”

“I do?”

“We learn from your example.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Keep an eye on this one, ha ha ha ha ha.” He threatened Oona with his cigar, turning the ember downward. The mouthy part glistened, so gross and juicy it might have been politer, actually, to point the fiery end. “She’s a troublemaker.”

“I’ll do that, Your Honor.” I liked the way Arnheim seemed to place her in my care, and hoped she was listening. I realized, a happy surprise, that I was better off with Oona in public groupings tonight. Here we exchanged complicated glances, intimations of the layered parts we played in each other’s stories, and I could enjoy knowing we were a conspiracy. Off alone, as we had been in the room’s center, with no one listening, Oona was free to inform me we were nothing.

“We mustn’t let Janice Trumbull die up there in space,” said the mayor, with surprising directness, even bullying force.

“Well, we’re all doing our best.”

“I hope so.”

“She is quite sick,” said Oona. Sympathetically, it seemed to me.

“That doesn’t mean she has to die,” said Arnheim. He seemed to insinuate this outcome was in our power, adding to my sense of a man accustomed to nudging galactic bodies in and out of orbit with gesticulations of his furry eyebrow.

Into this arena came a disturbance, someone or thing moving at cross-purposes, without deference to the postures and attitudes that made us all like a painting of Dutch burghers around the mayor’s table. Perkus, shooting in like an unanticipated and hence uncontrolled galactic body in his velvet and red, emergency colors, his high narrow forehead and flop of hair a semaphore flag of panic. At this gathering he was akin to a tiger erupting from beneath the pavement, I saw it now. What had I been thinking, bringing him? I’d already fitted myself so naturally to the mayor’s company that our renegade jaunt upstairs with Grinspoon seemed implausible at best.