Cat's Pajamas (5 page)

We transported the harpsichord another block and set it down at the Madison Avenue intersection, from which vantage we could see both Grand Central Station and the library. The Phobosian army had indeed spent the night bivouacked between the stone lions. Inevitably I thought of Gettysburg—James Longstreet's suicidal sweep across the Pennsylvania farmlands, hurtling his divisions against George Meade's Army of the Potomac, which had numerical superiority, a nobler cause, and the high ground.

Rupert took the score from my sack, laid the twelve pages against the rack, and made ready to turn them. Melvin removed his dish antenna and got down on all fours before the instrument. Annie seated herself on his massive back. She laid her hands on the keyboard. A stiff breeze arose. If the score blew away, all would be lost.

Annie depressed a constellation of keys. Martian language came forth, filling the canyon between the skyscrapers.

A high bugling wail emerged from deep within the throats of the Deimosian officers, and the soldiers began their march. Annie played furiously. “Materialist Prelude and Fugue,” page one… page two… page three… page four. The soldiers kept on coming. Page five… page six… page seven… page eight. The Deimosians continued their advance, parting around the harpsichord like an ocean current yielding to the prow of a ship. Page nine… page ten… page eleven… page twelve. Among the irreplaceable volumes in the New York Public Library, I recalled, were first editions of Nicolaus Copernicus's
De Revolutionibus,
William Gilbert's
De Magnete,
and Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica.

Once again the Deimosian officers let loose a high bugling wail.

The soldiers abruptly halted their advance.

They threw down their weapons and broke into a run.

“Good God, is it working?” asked Rupert.

“I think so,” I replied.

“It worked!” insisted Annie.

“Really?” said Melvin, whose perspective on the scene was compromised by his function as a piano stool.

“We've done it!” I cried. “We've really done it!”

Within a matter of seconds the Deimosians accomplished a reciprocal disarmament. They rushed toward their former enemies. The two forces met on Fifth Avenue, Phobosians and Deimosians embracing passionately, so that the intersection seemed suddenly transformed into an immense railroad platform on which countless wayward lovers were meeting sweethearts from whom they'd been involuntarily separated for years.

Now the ovation came, two hundred thousand extraterrestrials cheering and applauding Annie as she climbed off Melvin's back and stood up straight. She took a bow, and then another.

A singularly appreciative chirp emerged from a Phobosian general, whereupon a dozen of his fellows produced the identical sound.

Annie got the message. She seated herself on Melvin's back, turned to page one, and played “Materialist Prelude and Fugue in C-Sharp Minor” all over again.

AUGUST 18

The Martians have been gone for only five days, but already Manhattan is healing. The lights are back on. Relief arrives from every state in the Union, plus Canada.

Valerie, Bobby, and I are now honorary members of the Asaph Hall Society. We all gathered this afternoon at Gracie Mansion in Carl Schurz Park, not far from Annie's houseboat. Mayor Margolis will let us use his parlor whenever we want. In fact, there's probably no favor he won't grant us. After all, we saved his city.

Annie called the meeting to order. Everything went smoothly. We discussed old business (our ongoing efforts to contact the Galilean satellites), new business (improving patient services at the Frye Institute and the Krauss Clinic), and criteria for admitting new participants. As long as they remember to take their medicine, my lunatics remain the soul of reason. Melvin and Annie plan to marry in October.

“I'll bet we're all having the same thought right now,” said Rupert before we went out to dinner.

“What if Dr. Onslo's quarter had come up heads?” said Melvin, nodding. “What if we'd devised arguments favoring the Phobosians instead? What then?”

“That branch of the reality tree will remain forever hidden from us,” said Annie.

“I think it's entirely possible the Deimosians would've thrown down their arms,” said Valerie.

“So do I,” said Melvin. “Assuming our arguments were plausible.”

“Know what I think?” said Rupert. “I think we all just got very lucky.”

Did we merely get lucky? Hard to say. But I do know one thing. In two weeks the New York Philharmonic will perform a fully orchestrated version of “Materialist Prelude and Fugue in C-Sharp Minor” at Lincoln Center, which miraculously survived the war, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

E
VEN AS I HAULED
his shivering body from the river and dragged it onto the pier, examining his ancient face as a numismatist might scrutinize a rare coin, I did not recognize him. He was supposed to be dead, after all—killed along with his wife when their rental Citroen transmuted into a fireball following its collision with a concrete wall in Florence. Not until he'd stopped wheezing, lifted his head, and placed a kiss of gratitude on my cheek did I understand that the newspaper accounts of his incineration were false. This was surely Bruno Pearl. I'd been privileged to rescue the genius who'd given his audiences Sphinx Recumbent, Flowering Judas, and a dozen other masterpieces of copulation.

Just as musical comedy eclipsed operetta—just as silent movies killed vaudeville, talkies usurped the silents, and television reduced radio drama to a prolix mockery of itself—so did the coming of the Siemanns plasmajector spell the demise of the sex artists, whose achievements today survive largely in the memories of aging aficionados. I shall always regret that I never saw a live concert. How enthralling it must have been to enter a public park during the last century knowing that you might witness a pair of high-wire sensualists, avant-garde couplers, or Viennese orgasmeisters. It was an age of giants. Sara and Jaspar. Quentin and Alessandra. Roger and Dominic. The anonymous Phantoms of Delight. Teresa and Gaston, also known as the Portions of Eternity. Marge and Annette, who styled themselves Enchanted Equinox. You might even find yourself in the legendary presence of Bruno and Mina Pearl.

During my student days at the New England School of Art and Design, I was shrewd enough to take Aesthetics 101, “Metaphysics of the Physical,” taught by the benignly fanatical Nikolai Vertankowski. Thanks to Vertankowski's extensive collection of pirate videos and bootleg DVD's, his students experienced tantalizing intimations of the medium that Bruno Pearl and his wife took to such dazzling heights. We learned of the couple's chance meeting at the audition for Trevor Paisley's defiant presentation of
Oedipus Rex
(it began with Antigone's conception), as well as their early struggles on the eros circuit and their eventual celebrity. At the height of the lovers' fame nobody came close to matching their carnal sorcery, their lubricious magic, that bewitchment for which there is no name. Vertankowski also taught us about Bruno and Mina's uncanny and unaccountable decline: the inexplicable fact that, when their Citroen exploded, they had not given a memorable performance in over two years.

Throughout the work week I cross the Hudson twice a day, riding the ferry back and forth between the unfocused city of Hoboken, where I live, and the cavernous reaches of lower Manhattan, where I work. A decade ago my independent film company, Kaleidoscope Productions, received an Oscar nomination for
The Rabble Capitalists,
a feature-length documentary about the unlicensed peddlers of Gotham, those dubious though ambitious folk you see selling fake Rolexes, remaindered books, and sweatshop toys on street corners and in subway stations. Alas, my success was fleeting, and I eventually resigned myself to a career in cranking out instructional videos (tedious and talky shorts intended to galvanize sales forces, inspire stockholders, and educate dentists' captive audiences). One of these days I'm going to sell the business and return to my former life as the SoHo bohemian who signed her oil paintings “Boadicea,” though my name is really Susan Fiore.

The night I delivered Bruno Pearl from death, my mood was not far from the syndrome explicated in the Kaleidoscope video called
Coping with Clinical Depression.
At the beginning of the week I'd broken up with Anson, a narcissistic though singularly talented sculptor for whom I'd compliantly aborted a pregnancy one month earlier. As always occurs when I lose a lover, I'd assumed a disproportionate share of the blame, and I was now engaged in a kind of penance, pacing around on the ferry's frigid upper level as the wind cut through my fleece jacket and iced my bones. Despite my melancholy, I took note of the old man, the only other passenger on the weather deck. He was leaning over the stern rail, a skeletal septuagenarian in a tweed overcoat, his face as compacted as a hawk's, his nose supporting a pair of eyeglasses, one lens held in place by a ratty pink Band-Aid. He stared at the Statue of Liberty, an intense gaze, far-reaching, immune to the horizon. My forlorn companion, it seemed, could see all the way to Lisbon.

Glancing north, I fixed on the brightly lit George Washington Bridge, each great sagging cable gleaming like a rope of luminous pearls. Anson believed that our descendants will regard suspension bridges with the same admiration we ourselves accord cathedrals and clipper ships, and tonight I understood what he meant. I turned back to the Statue of Liberty. The gentleman with the broken glasses was gone. In his place—a void: negative space, to use one of Anson's favorite terms.

I peered over the rail. If suicide had been the old man's aim, he'd evidently thought better of the decision; he was thrashing about amid the ferry's widening wake with a desperation indistinguishable from panic. For a fleeting instant the incongruity transfixed me—the lower Hudson, an aquatic wasteland, a place for concrete quays and steel scows but not this fleshy jetsam—and then I tossed aside my rucksack, inhaled sharply, and jumped.

Anyone who has ever studied under Nikolai Vertankowski knows better than to equate performance intercourse with displays of more recent vintage. Today's amateur exhibitionists and open-air stunt fuckers, the professor repeatedly reminded us, are not carrying on a tradition—they are desecrating it. For the true sex artist, all was subtext, all was gesture and grace. In revealing their skin to the world, the classical copulationists achieved not pornographic nudity but pagan nakedness. When Bruno and Mina ruled the eros circuit, they shed each garment so lissomely, planted each kiss so sublimely, and applied each caress so generously that the spectators experienced this tactile cornucopia no less than the lovers themselves.

Then, of course, there was the conversation. Before and after any overt hydraulics, Bruno and Mina always talked to each other, trading astute observations and reciting stanzas of poetry they'd composed especially for the occasion. Sensitive women wept at this linguistic foreplay. Canny men took notes. But the connections themselves remained the
sine qua non
of each concert. By the time they were famous, Bruno and Mina had perfected over a dozen acts, including not only Sphinx Recumbent and Flowering Judas but also Fearful Symmetry, Sylph and Selkie, Chocolate Babylon, Holy Fools, Menses of Venus, Onan in Avalon, Beguiling Serpent, Pan and Syrinx, and Fleur de Lis. When their passions were spent, their skins sated, and their reservoirs of postcoital verse exhausted, Bruno and Mina simply got dressed and watched approvingly as the spectators dropped coins and folding money into their gold-hinged mahogany coffer.

Performance copulators lived by a code, a kind of theatric chivalry, its nuances known only to themselves. None had an agent or manager. They never published their touring schedules or distributed press kits. Souvenir mongering was forbidden. Videotaping by spectators was tolerated but frowned upon. The artists always arrived unexpectedly, without fanfare, like a goshawk swooping down on a rabbit or a fox materializing in a henhouse. Naturally they favored the major venues, appearing frequently in Golden Gate Park, Brussels Arboretum, Kensington Gardens, and Versailles, but sometimes they brought their brilliance to the humblest of small-town greens and commons. Quixotic tutelaries. Daemons of the flesh. Now you saw them, now you didn't.

Although I had never before attempted the maneuvers illustrated in the Kaleidoscope video called
Deep Water Rescue,
my relationship with that particular short was so intimate that, upon entering the Hudson, I spontaneously assumed a backstroke position, placed one hand under the drowning man's chin, bade him relax, and, kicking for motive power, towed him to New Jersey. The instant I levered him onto the derelict wharf, his teeth started chattering, but he nevertheless managed to explain how his eyeglasses had slipped from his face and how in grabbing for them he'd lost his balance and tumbled over the rail. He chastised himself for never learning to swim. Then came the kiss on the cheek—and then the flash of recognition.

“You're Bruno Pearl,” I told him.

Instead of responding to my assertion, he patted his pants, front and back, soon determining that his wallet and keys had survived the misadventure.

“Such a wonderfully courageous, a
foolishly
courageous young woman.” His teeth continued to vibrate, castanets in the hands of a lunatic. “Tell me your name, dear lady.”

“Susan Fiore.”

“Call me John.”

“You're Bruno Pearl,” I informed him again. When you've just saved a person's life, a certain impertinence comes naturally. “You're Bruno Pearl, and the world believes you're dead.”

He made no response, but instead rubbed each arm with the opposite hand. “In my experience, lovely Susan,” he said at last, “appearances are deceiving.”

Whether this was Bruno Pearl or not, my obligation to him clearly had not ended. My beneficiary's most immediate problem was not his lost eyeglasses—though he said he was functionally blind without them—but the threat of hypothermia. When the gentleman revealed that he lived in north Hoboken, near the corner of Willow Avenue and 14th Street, I proposed that we proceed directly to my apartment, a mere two blocks from the wharf.