Chronic City (6 page)

Georgina Hawkmanaji and Richard Abneg sat side by side in the center of the largest and whitest of the couches, a kind of centerpiece around which we’d deferentially arrayed: Maud and Sharon Spencer and I bunched at one end of a facing couch, with Reggie Spencer asleep, face propped, curled knuckles indenting his sallow cheek, at the other; Thatcher coming and going from his terrific caramel-leather throne of a chaise longue, and Harriet Welk in another, smaller chaise, with Naomi Kandel camped out on the carpet at her feet—I spotted Naomi reaching casually to caress Harriet’s sheer-stockinged calf for emphasis at some point she was making, but this gesture was going absolutely nowhere, only being blithely tolerated by Harriet. (To be honest I was being similarly molested by Sharon Spencer, and it mattered as little.)

It was Georgina’s and Abneg’s coming together that formed the
main action here, a show we all consented to see slowed to a crawl by Georgina’s elegant jitters and Abneg’s distractibility. The show’s progress was slowed, too, even if sponsored, by the flow of Thatcher’s brandies. Our delight in the exhibition wasn’t unkind. It was simply a real pleasure to witness Georgina uncorked by Richard Abneg’s coarse, crazy appetite for her. In glimpses, between harangues on one subject or another, when he didn’t seem to notice Georgina at all, Abneg appeared not to believe his fortune. You’d have thought their sweet collision was Maud’s engineering—I envisioned her taking credit, with relish—only it became clear Maud couldn’t have known whom her new friend Harriet Welk would bring along to dinner.

Abneg, somehow, had gotten onto the subject of a visit he’d made, some time ago, to Stonehenge. “You park in this little area, it’s across the road, and then you buy a ticket, just to be allowed to cross the street. There’s this underground tunnel, you mill through like sheep. And there’s nothing to do except trudge like that, all the way around the thing. They’ve got you in a kind of track, restrained from Stonehenge itself. You can’t go near the rocks. And that’s it. You trudge around single file in a circle, the thing looks a little smaller and less mysterious than you’d hoped, and you go back through the tunnel and maybe stop at the gift shop or the restroom, then back to your car.”

“Unimpressive,” grunted Thatcher.

“Well, sure,” said Abneg. “Totally unimpressive. I wanted to be like one of those apes in whatchamacallit,
2001
, by whatsisname, Kubrick, you know, kneeling in fear before those slabs, getting brain-zapped.”

“I never saw
2001,”
said Harriet. “It’s about
apes?”

“Ape
-men,”
said Thatcher helpfully.

“They should change the name of that movie,” said Sharon Spencer beside me. “Since the real 2001 turned out so different.”

“Listen,” said Abneg, with exasperation that we hadn’t caught his real drift. “I’m trying to tell you about the Stonehenge restroom. I had to piss, so I went in there, it was a completely modern men’s room, with all these floor-length ceramic urinals. They didn’t have the wit to arrange them in a circle, but the resemblance was obvious. And whereas everyone was jabbering when they walked around Stonehenge, all the moms bargaining with the whining children, in here the men were all silent, avoiding one another’s eyes. Each of us standing at a urinal or waiting our turn, and this profound truth comes over you, a feeling much bigger than anything available outside and across the road, which is that everyone in that restroom just did the exact same thing you did.”

“Which is what?” said Naomi Kandel.

“Looked at Stonehenge,”
said Abneg. “And now you were taking a piss, and then you were going to get back in your car.”

I tried to understand, and almost did, and then found myself wondering if Abneg was emphasizing the word
piss
so strongly in order to force Georgina to visualize the existence of his penis. It was forcing me to visualize it, anyway.

“That… is… not… deep,” said Naomi Kandel conclusively.

Thatcher, Abneg’s biggest fan, seemed to get it. “Got a place like that in Australia,” he said. “Ayres Rock, only you’re supposed to call it something else. Biggest rock in the world, takes a coupla hours to walk around it. Same thing, though. You go around in a track. Center of the country, nothing around for a thousand miles, no other reason you’d ever stop there. Rock has its own damn airport.”

Abneg was thrilled, though it seemed to me his point, if he had one, had been hijacked for Thatcher’s imperial scorn. “Fantastic! So, basically, that airport’s just the world’s foremost example of a
Stonehenge restroom.”

Thatcher toasted this, a little uneasily, with a hoist of his snifter.

“In a thousand years,” continued Richard Abneg, “they’ll probably lead walking tours around the perimeter of the ruined airport.” “Huh,” said Thatcher, less and less sure.

“It would be a terribly
disappointing
walking tour,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji, with a sly smile to make us know she was playing along. Abneg, who’d snaked a densely haired forearm around Georgina’s tiny waist at some point, drew her nearer to him now, proud to be understood. His grip accordioned a coo from Georgina.

“Very few people know this,” I heard myself saying, “but Stanley Kubrick once tried to make a film with the Gnuppets, if you can believe it.” I’d been silently drunk for so long my voice startled me, but for that same reason some participation seemed demanded of me, to prove I’d been listening. Idiotically, I’d fished up this secondhand anecdote too late, after the Kubrick interlude had passed, and everyone looked at me a little daftly.

“Urgghh, I
hate
Gnuppets!” said Sharon Spencer. She formed her hands into tortured upright figures, snarling at them so we couldn’t fail to taste her avid revulsion.

“Sure,” I said, then tossed a life preserver after my drowning remark. “But just picture it … a
Kubrick
film… with
Gnuppets
… it might be kind of
incredible
…”

“You sound like someone I know,” said Richard Abneg. “I’ve got this one friend who’s always trying to make you imagine films that don’t exist.” He squinted as if seeing me for the first time. I might have returned a similar look. “Actually, he was talking about the Kubrick Gnuppet movie just the other day.”

Busted. It was Perkus Tooth I was parroting in the first place. Of course Abneg knew him. As the tumblers slid into place, I understood
that the tone of Abneg’s Stonehenge story had unconsciously reminded me of Perkus, and made me wish to smuggle him into the conversation, to impress, or perhaps test, Richard Abneg.

Then Abneg shocked me. Looking me in the eye, he lifted thumb and forefinger to his lips as if smooching the damp stub of a joint. It was hardly that marijuana was taboo here. The shock was in how the gesture so carelessly pierced the bubble of harmony that had formed, against the odds, among us. In his contempt for our bonhomie, he also showed me how it was still in some way sacred to me. How I was in the business of protecting, and flattering, the Woodrows’ vanities. It felt as if Abneg had undone his fly and pissed on the Woodrows’ carpet.

His message to me, if it wasn’t too much to read into the single gesture, seemed to be
See you later, at Perkus’s
. Away from these
fucking rich people
. Or maybe I’d invented that last, out of my wish that Abneg could detect my own degree of defiance, of bad faith in this company. Anyway, our instant of collusion was finished. As if at some established cue, Abneg swept in and finished what it looked like he’d never even get back to: spiriting Georgina Hawkmanaji up from that couch and out of the duplex, presumably upstairs, to her penthouse apartment, to prove definitively to her the existence of his penis, or to have her prove it to him. We all sat pretending not to be fascinated at how neatly he sheltered Georgina from her own shyness at being extracted from our nodding assembly. I’ll admit she was revealed (too late) (and unimportantly) as erotic to me, as she’d never been until seeing Abneg’s hairy fingers brushing the nape of her neck, and guiding her, like a virtuoso repositioning a cello, by the hip. So I learned how Richard Abneg, like Perkus Tooth, was someone who could uncover what hid in plain sight.

CHAPTER
Three

I only had to arrive
fifteen minutes early at East Eighty-fourth Street one day to discover Oona Laszlo existed. Perkus buzzed me up and I entered to find them standing there, in front of their chairs at his kitchen table, shuffling as if apprehended at a crime. Almost one in the afternoon, but I’d broken up a breakfast scene, coffee, cheese Danish sliced into fingers on a grease-marked white sack, a thin joint modestly half smoked and perching in a cleanish ashtray. A pair of Lucite boxes labeled WHITE RHINO, one of Watt’s brands.
The New York Times
, which Perkus never read. I assumed it belonged to his guest. A book Perkus had been reading last I visited, a gigantic novel entitled
Obstinate Dust
. Also, non sequitur,
A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey
, a sturdy blue trade paperback, inverted on propped-open pages. I did my best to conceal my surprise at this woman’s presence. The foot traffic was a little thicker in Perkus’s apartment than I’d previously understood. It might be that he booked us one after the next, his secret life bustled with visitors, his lonely lobby a revolving door.

Needless to say my first thought was that Oona Laszlo was
Perkus’s lover. I was wrong. Yet this error, the tender cameo it conjured in my mind’s eye, is still, weirdly, a place I can retreat to in memory and think
It might have been better. It might have been nice
. I can still see them there, framed in my mistaken assumption, and feel thrilled and relieved for Perkus, who, in dwelling in that imaginary frame, remains as I first knew him.

The two fit, inviting the mistake. If not lovers, they might be brother and sister. Oona shared Perkus’s marionette-ish aspect, large head connected to a tiny frame and seeming to sweep her nervous limbs behind its weight. She wore black (another hint, I thought, that they’d spent the night together—she seemed dressed for the previous evening), making her like a marker scribble, a silhouette in spastic motion in that cramped kitchen. They were expensive clothes, too—I noted that automatically. Expensive for Perkus’s kitchen at least. Black hair, too, in bangs and a neat bob. Had Perkus spilled a pot of coffee on his tiles and the coffee sprung to life as a woman an instant before I opened the door, it would have explained her perfectly. Oona’s mouth alone confessed female ripeness, seeming to stand for secret curves unrevealed by her silhouette. Her canines caught on her lower lip just as our eyes met, drawing it into an expression faintly lascivious and wry. Or perhaps those tooth tips tended to catch there. This might be her default look, teeth too much for lips to contain. Above this expression Oona’s eyes flitted, measuring distance to the exit. Yet if Oona was Perkus’s female synonym, she was younger and, I had to admit, alluring. If they were siblings, she’d gotten the looks. If they were lovers, I found myself thinking, he’d gotten lucky.

Perkus didn’t seem flustered, exactly. Aggravated was more like it. His independent eye tried to follow Oona as he turned to me.

“Chase, Oona. Oona, Chase.” He discharged the formality, then practically threw down his hands in disgust at his own obedience.

“Hello.”

Oona stared at me with her crooked smile. I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the starstruck gaze, but Manhattanites usually did a better job of concealing it, especially those dressed in black.

“Sorry,” she said. Instead of offering a hand, she crossed her arms, fitting plumlike breasts over her forearms. “I’ve always sort of wanted to meet you. But then again, sort of wanted not to,
at all.”

“Okay,” I said, as generous as I could manage under the circumstances. People might dialogue in their own heads with famous or semi-famous strangers. I preferred to think it a fundamental minimum standard that they keep it to themselves. Nothing in Oona Laszlo’s manner suggested any self-reproach. She examined me like a portrait painter seeking a better grasp of the play of light over my facial planes.

“You’re from somewhere really weird, aren’t you?” said Oona Laszlo. Before I could answer she supplied it herself: “Indiana.”

“Yes.” If I didn’t think of it I often forgot. My home was far away, if it was my home.

Perkus had plunked back into his chair. He relit the joint, and scrabbled in a pile of loose CDs, then shoved one into the boom box. “So,” he said. Slumping beneath the bridge of his own templed hands, he drew on the joint centered in his lips so that it crackled, then pinched it from his mouth and waved it free. “I got sent a dub of Gillo Pontecorvo’s
Burn
, it’s eighteen minutes longer than the release cut, some kind of early assembly, maybe we should watch it—” Perkus spoke as if to one of us alone, only I was unsure which. Was he resuming a conversation with Oona or beginning one with me? All talk was a resumption. I couldn’t remember who Pontecorvo was, though I knew I was supposed to.

Perkus pounced, as ever, on my hesitation. “Pontecorvo. He did
The Battle of Algiers
. You know,
Burn
, with Brando.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Yeah, this is pretty much how I pictured it,” said Oona Laszlo. She gathered up a sweater, also black, from the back of her chair. “You guys are pretty sweet, and I’m going to go now.”

“Sweet how?” I asked. “What’s so sweet about us?”

“Just, you know, watching old Brando movies together in the afternoon, then deconstructing the universe for dessert. It’s like you’re helping Perkus with his homework.”

“See you later,” said Perkus. He was, I understood, very eager to have Oona leave, to avoid having us here together. Which made me eager for the opposite. Oona Laszlo’s little jibe at Perkus made me understand that they weren’t lovers, at least not anymore. She and I shared a protective impulse toward him. Also, an unrelated insight, I’d begun to find Oona beguiling, despite her pointed gawking. It was a little boyish around here, now that she’d pointed it out. She could be the cure.