Agnes Among the Gargoyles (3 page)

   "It is? Why, exactly?"

   "Well, you're getting paid."

   "Would you think I was a jerk if you saw me on the news?" asks Syker.

   "Mostly I'd just be jealous of your high-powered job in the Wegeman organization," says Agnes affably.

   "You'd think it's one big party, but it's not," he says.

  The press conference concludes without Agnes's participation. Later, she is spirited out of the precinct and past the reporters. She crouches down in the back seat of Officer Brian Mooney's Delta 88. The officer has come off duty and is returning to his home in Yonkers. He is very young. He keeps asking Agnes if the tape deck is too loud for her. Of course it is, but she won't admit it. Agnes sneezes, and when he pulls down the sun visor to look for tissues, three condoms slide into his lap. He grabs the little packets and drives with them in his hand, too embarrassed to put them away.

   Agnes directs him to her building. She lives in Washington Heights.

   "I appreciate this," she says, getting out of the car.

   He looks around suspiciously. "This is it? You live here?"

   "Yes."

   Before he pulls away, he rolls down his window to talk to her. "Don't take this the wrong way. I mean, don't get offended or anything, but this is a real nigger neighborhood."

   The telephone is ringing when Agnes gets inside her apartment.

   "I just wanted you to know that I got a bonus for my trouble," says Syker bitterly. "So it doesn't matter that I thoroughly debased myself by spouting that nonsense about Leo Fein and his knishes. Here's what I didn't tell the reporters: when my boss woke up, the first thing he did was pull out his feeding tube and spray blood all over the nurse. On purpose. Joking around. He told her he has AIDS, so she might as well have sex with him. You can't keep him down, I'll say that for him."

   The man who shot Wegeman lies in a drawer in the morgue like a pair of knotted socks. One quadrant of his head is gone. He wears the slack-jawed expression of death the orderlies call the Big O.

   Several months later, the
Voice
will print a free-lance piece by Tollivetti, a bit of muckraking about overtime costs, featherbedding, and litigation brought when a contract is shifted to a new manufacturer under mysterious circumstances. Tollivetti will break the story of how the city paid almost twenty-five thousand dollars to replace that shattered glass globe.

Agnes lives in a sprawling turn-of-the-century apartment house on Riverside Drive in the West 150s. This part of the drive hasn't seen an Astor or a Vanderbilt for a long time, but a few Kennedys and McKibbins may have passed through in the 1970s looking to score heroin. There are plenty of working people here, but the flavor of the neighborhood comes from those who are most visible, the dealers and crackheads, the alcoholics, the screeching lunatics who wander away from the Fort Washington shelter. This is a place of bodegas sheathed in Plexiglas, of stores that sell nothing but glass pipes, of
cuchifritos
and check-cashing emporia. In the summertime, the orange vendors crouch over their machines and score the skins with a spiral groove, looking like Hispanic Thomas Edisons cranking the first phonograph.

   Agnes lives here because the apartments are beautiful. Where else could she afford eight rooms, including a study and a formal dining room, parquet floors with walnut braid, built-in bookshelves? Where else could she have a view of the Hudson? Only in what many would call a slum.

   Agnes's building is called the Duke of Exeter. It was built by a woolens magnate named Randolph St. John Christopher, for whom Christopher Street is named. Obsessive about detail, Christopher hounded his architect about the placement of every sconce and flower box.

   It doesn't take very long for the reporters to find Agnes's apartment. They set up a command post outside her door. Agnes can hear them talking and telling dirty stories and growing increasingly giddy as the night wears on and she doesn't appear.

   Figures from the peripheries of her life have already begun showing up on the TV news. Tollivetti, guesting on The Bulldog Report, interviews Agnes's Tae Kwon Do instructor. Someone else talks to the recording secretary of the Telamones Society. Mike Masters, with whom Agnes once went on an excruciating date, who used to work for
Infertility
and now writes copy for The Bulldog Report, drops the bombshell that Agnes Travertine is pregnant.

   The telephone rings. It is Agnes's mother, Hannah.

   "I think it's an absolutely marvelous way to break the news," says Hannah.

   Agnes had fallen prey to the notion that she should date more, and the disastrous evening with Mike Masters was the result. Mike, was retiring and bookish, not to mention movieish and theaterish and recordsish. He was thoroughly steeped in art; the movie he and Agnes were to see would be his second film of the day. (Agnes's vanity was a little wounded by this; in her mind, their dinner took on the character of a short subject between features.) Mike described the movie he had seen that day as "important." This was more than Agnes could bear. "Important for the director and actors—they made a fortune," she hooted. Mike just looked at her in a puzzled fashion. She spent a few minutes trying to dissuade him from his life of aesthetic consumerism. She tried to see how much money he was spending on other people's half-baked notions. Then she stopped. Why was she doing this? Mike Masters was perfectly happy—more content with his life than Agnes would ever be, certainly. He was an innocent monument of welladjustedness, a monument on which Agnes was spray-painting graffiti.

   She felt guilty about raining on Mike Masters' parade, even though he seemed oblivious. She felt so guilty when he asked her for another date that she took a coward's way out. She told him she was pregnant.

   "Relax ma," she says. "I'm not pregnant."

   "But Mike Masters—"

   "Mike Masters misunderstood me."

   Hannah knows her daughter too well. "You know, Agnes, you'll never catch a man that way."

   "I'm not looking to catch one. Besides, once he thought I was pregnant, he never called me again. So I guess he wasn't worth catching, was he?"

   "He seemed very nice on the news. Maybe he's got German Measles, so he's staying away. Give him a call. Clear up the misunderstanding."

   "I'm not interested in Mike Masters."

   "I didn't call to talk about him, anyway," says Hannah. "I called to tell you that I'm proud of you."

   "Oh, don't be. I should have minded my own business. Now everything is all screwed up."

   "Nonsense," says Hannah. "You should be positively gleeful. Ronald Wegeman owes you his life! Granted, he's not my cup of tea. I'm sure he sleeps through all those operas he goes to. He's always reminded me of a pharmacist, for some reason. He's got that bad complexion they all get from staying in the back room with the pills. He's not too bright, I'm sure. But Agnes—he could hand you a million dollars out of his pocket change if he wanted to."

   Hannah Travertine has never quite thrown off her dreamy adolescence, much of which was spent in movie theaters. She retains a great fondness for that staple of American cinema so beloved of screenwriters groping for a climax: the flamboyant, romantic gesture—the bequeathing of a fortune to a total stranger, the marriage proposal chalked on Mount Rushmore, the pregnancy announced on the 11 o'clock news.

   Agnes makes a preemptive strike. "Ma, don't talk to any reporters, okay?"

   "I already have."

   Agnes's heart sinks. "What did you tell them?"

   "I just answered a few questions."

   "I know the format, Ma. What did you talk about?"

   "About you, of course. And it went quite well."

   Agnes cradles the telephone on her shoulder. She rubs her eyes with weariness and frustration. "Ma, don't discuss me with anybody. It's a violation."

   "Oh, here we go again," says Hannah.

   "Well, it is."

   "Agnes, this could be the best thing that ever happened to you. You never know where it might lead."

   "To where, Ma? To my own comedy/variety series? Don't talk to any more news guys. They don't care about you. You're just fodder."

   "They went to a lot of trouble to find me," says Hannah, who is overawed by any vaguely official presence. "It would have been rude not to talk to them. And I am proud of you."

   The conversation dies away.

   The reporters wait outside Agnes's apartment all night long. Agnes is too wired to sleep. At three in the morning, she catches the mayor on CNN:

   "She has what more New Yorkers should have, namely, a working knowledge of Oriental combat techniques. Actually, in terms of violent crime, New York has a bad rap...."

   At daybreak Agnes encounters her mother on WEGE. Agnes kicks the remote control across the room and forces herself to watch.

   "...Fearless? I should say not! When she was small the craziest things used to frighten her." Hannah is at ease before the camera. "We had a set of illustrated Dickens, and Agnes was terrified of the pictures on the covers, especially the one for
Martin Chuzzlewit.
How she hated those books! I finally had to throw them away...."

   Agnes calls her friend Barbara Foucault.

   The phone rings about twenty times. When Barbara answers, her voice is comically clipped.

   "Yes?".

   "I know you were asleep. It's six in the morning. I need a favor."

   "Anything at all," says Barbara. "Who are you?"

   "This is serious. I need a place to stay for a few days."

   Barbara groans and coughs. Agnes can hear the igniting of a lighter.

   "What did you do, kill someone?" Barbara asks.

   "Would that I had. Didn't you see the news?"

   Barbara coughs again. "No. Last night I watched six hours of the Westminister Kennel Club finals. I taped it last year, and it's been nagging at me."

   "Hang on, would you?" says Agnes. She lowers the receiver. Her mother is on a roll.

   "...For a long time she couldn't set eyes on the image of George Washington without bursting into tears. Even his silhouette could set her off. And I seem to remember her being terrified of certain typefaces...."

   "What's happening?" says Barbara.

   "A portrait is emerging of a child with severe psychological difficulties," Agnes tells her. "I'll be right over."

   Agnes throws a few things into a knapsack and goes down the fire escape to avoid the reporters. She emerges in a courtyard between two of the Duke of Exeter's wings. She hops a short fence and runs down the street.

   The sun is barely up. The streets are empty and silent. Agnes reaches the subway entrance. She bounds down the steps and runs smack into a bum urinating on the wall. She screams. He screams. The sight of his diseased penis is bad enough, but it is his face that is truly alarming. It is a face from Agnes's past. It chills her. It is a gray face, creased and stubbled, with deep-set eyes that mock her as she passes.

   My God, she thinks. It's him.

   After all these years.

   Chuzzlewit!

Barbara Foucault lives in Brooklyn, in Borough Park, a center of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism.

   "I think Lamark was right," says Barbara. She sits in the Eames chair her therapist sold her when he moved his office from Manhattan to Hartsdale. "Acquired characteristics can be passed on. How else could Madelaine Wegeman look so aristocratic? Her nose looks like the rudder of a yacht. Her greatgrandfather was a complete prole. Black Jack McKibbin—they never talk about him."

   Barbara folds up her legs under her. "The McKibbins are new money, and they might as well admit it. I remember when Madelaine got married. June of '68. I was already wasting time reading
Town & Country.
I followed Madelaine quite closely in those days. I thought we looked alike. I read somewhere that she had enjoyed the Mushroom Planet books as a child—I
loved
the Mushroom Planet books! I was shocked when I saw the pictures of her wedding. It was incredibly tasteless. I loathed her dress. It had puffed sleeves and this absurd conical headdress. She looked like Rapunzel. Then I found out she and Ron went to Puerto Vallarta on their honeymoon. Puerto Vallarta! That was where you went with your chaperone when you won on
The Dating Game.
So tacky."

   Barbara is an actress. Agnes sees all her shows. She goes to storefront theaters in the plant district, the antiques district, the office supplies district. Barbara belongs to an acting company that specializes in highbrow revivals, Moliere and Racine and the like. Agnes first saw her as Lady Teazle in
The School For Scan
dal.
The show was genteel and irrelevant, a Georgian sitcom. On a sweltering night you take refuge in an air conditioned movie theater and when you come out the heat is a shock; when you leave one of Barbara's shows, the strains of the final minuet ringing in your ears, the shock is life itself, unchoreographed and in the basest prose.

   "I had to get away," Agnes tells Barbara. "Let everyone else scramble for that little slice of fame. I'm not interested."

  "It's always people like you who have opportunity handed to them," says Barbara. "It's not fair. You don't even like Wegeman."

   "I despise him," says Agnes. "Look what he's done to New York."

   "He's egregious, certainly, but I don't care," says Barbara. "I'd let him show his appreciation by adopting me. I'd renounce the theater and move right in."