The Biology of Luck

ALSO BY JACOB M. APPEL

The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

Copyright © 2013 by Jacob M. Appel

All Rights Reserved

Thanks to the Generous Support of the Leo and Rose Burrello Literary Endowment.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For information about permission to reproduce sections from this book, contact Permissions at
[email protected]
. Elephant Rock Books are distributed by Small Press United, a division of Independent Publishers Group.

ISBN: 978-0-9753746-8-9

Library of Congress: 2013937248

Printed in the United States of America

Book Design by Amanda Schwarz,

Fisheye Graphic Svcs, Chicago

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Elephant Rock Books

Ashford, Connecticut

To Rosalie, obviously

We are driven by something as simple and as obvious as the desire to be happy, and, if that fails, by the belief that we once have been.

—André Aciman

The sublime, ephemeral and transcendental are natural interpretations of the trite, melodramatic and clichéd when uttered by someone with whom you wish to have sex.

—Kristen Brennan

Harlem sleeps late. The rest of the city has already accelerated to full throttle. Along Canal Street, the storefront gratings have been up for hours as the pungent odors of smoked mackerel, fresh shellfish, and cured meats slowly smother the background aroma of the metropolis, that faint blend of diesel fuel and decaying produce and bodily fluids to which urban noses have developed an immunity. The subways have yielded their stench of urine to the bustle of the early morning commute; Wall Street has papered over all memories of yesterday's perspiration; in Park Avenue's door-manned buildings and Madison Avenue's upscale galleries, where the previous night's frenzies still trail a scent of alcohol and vomit and lust, upscale matrons fortify themselves against the day with sprays of rose water and lilac perfume. Only Harlem ignores the call to battle, dozes comfortably in the fumes of its own refuse. It is as though a sanitizing cloud has erupted from the depths of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Grand Central Station, rousing the downtown citizenry to industry, to sobriety, to spit-and-polish, and that this cloud—like just about everything else in New York City—will not cross 125th Street until all of the well-off white people are provided for.

Larry Bloom strides up Broadway with his
New York Times
tucked under one arm and a pack of Marlboro menthols bulging from his shirt pocket. He is an unattractive man, although not disfigured or crippled or mutilated in such a way as to provoke pity or indulgence,
but just plain enough to feel a certain solidarity with the dark-skinned inhabitants of the vast swath of city where the trains still run along elevated tracks. Being unattractive is much like being black, Larry thinks: one makes you a second-class citizen in the world of business, the other a peon in the realm of romance. The only difference is that there hasn't been a civil rights movement for the nondescript and homely people of the world, the short, bald, broad-faced Jewish-looking men who stumble into their thirties unloved and unscrewed. Not that it would matter.

One glance up Frederick Douglas Boulevard, the nation's great emporium of check-cashing establishments and notaries public and beeper retailers, says more about the state of America's melting pot than all the great platitudes about affirmative action and interracial healing will ever reveal. You can change your standards of beauty, much as you can change the complexion of poverty, lighten the skin to cream and trill the
r
s, but in the end somebody has to be hideous and somebody has to be indigent. It's what they call inevitability. It's the one thing Larry would like to share with the Dutch tourists he will soon lead on their Big Apple crash course, the secret behind Broadway and Lady Liberty, but nobody wants to see grown men scavenging for recyclables and automotive parts through the belly of the afternoon. Especially not while on vacation.

The homeless veteran who panhandles at the McDonald's drive-through throws Larry a cursory glance and decides he isn't worth the effort. And he's right. Not that on a tour guide's salary Larry has that much to give. The homeless vet is neither homeless nor a veteran, after all, just a scruffy opportunist whose wife drops him off from a tawny late-model Cadillac sedan every morning. He is a staple of the neighborhood, a legendary character like the emaciated dwarf who feigns hunger pangs in front of the Columbia University gates and the three blind men who sing golden oldies on the express train for pocket change. All black. All ugly. The comedy of it is that they will probably all earn
New York Times
obituaries someday, eulogies to their model poverty, while the real victims, who work the night shift
at Kentucky Fried Chicken, or sew hem linings for three dollars an hour, or deliver guided tours atop double-decker buses for tips, will pass away unnoticed. Only today, Larry will cross into the kingdom of the chosen. He feels this as strongly as he feels the hot steam from an exposed manhole slashing his face. Today, an otherwise balmy and thoroughly nondescript day in June, Larry Bloom will discover both love and fortune.

He enters the post office at 125th Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard. It is nine o'clock. A fortuity of urban planning has assigned Larry's niche of Morningside Heights to the central Harlem postal zone, has lured him beyond the perimeter of gentrification to seek his fortune. The post office itself is part neoclassical monolith, part Turkish bazaar. Despite the rusting lockers and frosted glass windows that line the dimly lit lobby, one senses the subtle pulse of a hidden commerce beating against the marble floors and swaying the cast-iron chandeliers, a brisk trade in good cheer and shared resignation, as well as every illicit substance one could desire. A makeup-caked woman in a tight leather skirt argues with the white clerk at the passport counter. She has a child in tow. It appears that the woman is not the child's mother, an admission she is heatedly trying to retract, and Larry suppresses the urge to step forward as the child's father.

At her right, two portly women have wedged themselves between the cordon and the package retrieval window. They are wearing colorful hats, dressed for church although it is a Wednesday. A sign posted
inside
the window—one cannot be too careful—reads, “Pick up parcels between 9:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.” The heavier of the women, arms akimbo, rakes Larry with her eyes. Her fishlike mouth hangs open to reveal a gold-capped tooth. He fears she is reading his thoughts, his pity for the makeup-caked woman who will someday, soon enough, wait for packages in church-wear, but maybe she is just deciding whether he will attempt to usurp her place in line, for she purses her lips to emit a soft-pitched hum and smiles approvingly.

Some people might speak to the portly women, small talk, chitchat, but Larry is not one of those people. He wishes he were.
He ought to have responded to the woman's smile with a greeting, an inane observation about the impending heat or the inconvenience of the package window hours. But he didn't and it is too late. Any words now would sound forced, even threatening. It is that barrier, so much like the barrier that has kept him from expressing himself to Starshine, that keeps Larry a prisoner of his own inhibitions. Yet tonight, he is determined to speak to Starshine. To offer his love. He will present himself not as Larry Bloom, nondescript tour guide, but as Larry Bloom, published author. How can a woman, even an attractive, self-assured woman, turn down the advances of a man who has spent two years immortalizing her in manuscript form? Not only immortalizing her, for that matter, but immortalizing the very day of her life which will culminate in his offer of devotion. In his gut, he knows the answer, senses that he has scoured the floors of his apartment in vain, but there remains hope that Starshine Hart is also trapped behind a barrier and it is this hope that must buoy him through the day.

“I thought you said nine o'clock,” declares one of the portly women. “I could have sworn you said nine o'clock.”

“That's what they told me,” answers the other. “I phoned them up and that's what they told me.”

The women are not speaking to each other, not really, but rather to the crowd of postal customers who suffer with them on an ever-expanding line; they let their words ricochet across the lobby like grapeshot, so that their comrades-in-waiting will hear their indignation. They may also hope to shame a third heavyset black woman, younger with bad skin, who stands perfecting the art of idleness behind the drop-off window. When Larry offers her a questioning look, she glares through him. He averts his gaze to the floor, focuses his attention on an object beside the express mail bins that looks like a child's sneaker, and he cannot help thinking of the recent terrorist attacks, of the watches and wallets and key chains strewn for blocks around the remnants of the Twin Towers. Larry would like to lecture this woman on the dangers of bureaucracy—he momentarily
envisions himself a modern-day Rosa Parks, standing up for the rights of postal customers everywhere—but his one semester stint lecturing at Jefferson Community College has taught him that this woman has likely never heard of Rosa Parks. Besides, he is nonconfrontational by nature. Does half an hour really matter? He does not need to be at Grant's Tomb until 10:15.

“Nine o'clock,” the first woman announces again. Her dental plates rattle when she speaks and Larry is embarrassed for her. “I know what I was told.”

The clerk ignores them. The minute hand on the wall clock winds its way past 9:30, 9:40, 9:45. Sweat builds on Larry's palms. He wipes them on his jeans, sniffs the faint traces of tobacco on his fingers. Impatience is getting the better of him. He has ordered a hold on his own mail, putting off the arrival of Stroop & Stone's answer until the morning of his date with Starshine, but he suddenly fears that he will receive a large envelope and all hope will be lost. Rejection is a possibility. All of the other major agencies have turned down his manuscript.
The Biology of Luck
is not for them. And yet Stroop & Stone responded so warmly to his query, promised him a reply to the manuscript within two weeks. It has been four. Larry scans the counter on the other side of the package window, but there are many large manila envelopes, so he has no way of knowing what to expect. Finally, one of the uniformed squadron milling around behind the bulletproof glass notices the time.