The Biology of Luck (14 page)

Larry Bloom, the paradigm of the despondent young upstart for whom the structure was commissioned, has traversed the pedestrian causeway on exactly 217 occasions. Every Wednesday for more than two years, at approximately half past noon, he leads a detachment of pleasure seekers, fortified with optimism and bottled water, through the intricate web of suspension cables that supports the majestic span; and every Wednesday at half past one, having conquered several poorly defended corners of Brooklyn Heights, he escorts his merry band back into Manhattan to celebrate its victory. Larry is certainly not the most experienced docent on the circuit. He is probably not classified among the most engaging. He
is
, without a doubt, the only tour leader among the hundreds of underemployed graduate students and retired college librarians and itinerant travel writers piloting foreigners over the channel who can state with absolute precision the number of times he has crossed between boroughs on foot. This anomaly does not reflect some flaw of character, a pernicious compulsion toward the minute and irrelevant. Larry does not double check gas ranges; he feels relatively comfortable in crowds and confined spaces; he does not even recall his mother's date of birth. Yet for Larry, each encounter with the massive pylons and Gothic arches of Colonel Roebling's masterpiece has come to stand for another chapter in his tribute to Starshine. The bridge crossings were his motivation, his benchmark. He determined at the outset of his mission that every passage across Hart Crane's consecrated catwalk, every stroll over Whitman's cherished water, would coincide with the completion of another page in
The Biology of Luck
. For most men, Wednesdays are the hump of the week, a hillock to be surmounted; to Larry, they were milestones in his torpid progress toward passion. He set himself a backbreaking schedule and he stuck to it. Day after day, month after month. Yet now, his letter lost and his romantic prospects dimming, he pities himself for the countless hours wasted in a smoke-filled studio apartment, before an aging word processor, churning out pages of
drivel for a woman who could never appreciate them. He focuses his anger upon Starshine. She is the cause of his suffering, his stupidity. She is a selfish, love-spoiled bitch, and he will despise her, hate as strongly as he once loved, because the only alternative would be to heave himself into the water.

Pedestrian traffic on the bridge slows toward early afternoon as the lunchtime flurry subsides into a trickle of middle-aged power walkers and twenty-something couples on bicycles. Larry halts his party at midspan, allowing them a moment to admire the vista, to finish off the film in their disposable cameras, and even these unflappable Dutch are modestly impressed. The skyline rises before them like the furnished minarets of some mythic kingdom. This is the postcard city, the metropolis cleansed of its noxious odors and incessant din, purged of its people, a glass and steel backdrop seemingly constructed for the Kodak moments of foreigners. The Dutch lean over the railing and shade their eyes with their hands. Van Huizen waxes rich on the history of the Empire State Building, peppering his wife and the priest with details of square footage and elevator capacity. Larry does not bother to tell him that he is looking at the Chrysler Building. After 217 crossings, even the mistakes have grown stale. Usually Larry pays tribute to the neglected features of the cityscape, the tin roofs of the fish market, the distinctive black smoke billowing from the Standard Oil Building, the gabled spires of Governor's Island, but this afternoon, without the benchmark of another paragraph to brace him, he retreats to the background and sulks in silence. The Dutch do not need him. Even Rita Blatt does not need him. He is a pathetic creature plagued by limited talent and unrealistic expectations, and he is of absolutely no use to anyone. He cannot hate Starshine. She is the last person he should blame for his shortcomings. She is a gorgeous, generous, thoroughly awe-inspiring young woman who has befriended him out of the kindness of her heart. How can he possibly hate her? He should be grateful. If anyone is the cause of Larry Bloom's suffering, it is Larry Bloom. The matter is truly quite simple: Some people just don't have what it takes. Larry swears that he will never again harbor
any ill will toward Starshine, that he will cherish her friendship and respect its parameters for the rest of his life, because she is the lone fountain of beauty and decency in his otherwise arid existence. Then he catches sight of the water.

The river is darker than in Whitman's day. Centuries of barge commerce and unregulated waste disposal have coated the naturally transparent harbor with a tenebrous sheen. Yet the distended reflections of the downtown office towers and the distorted dome of the municipal building instill confidence. The view is so placid, so inviting, like a panorama into which one might step without the slightest discomfort. Larry recalls the impassive face of the dead man, the slack features absolved of all their earthly anxiety, the hollow eyes rid of want and care. What is the use of torturing himself over an improbable book and an impossible girl? Why not spite fate and his own ugliness and end his suffering in the process? Death is not a negative. Death is a neutral. Larry takes one final, lingering look at the Dutch tourists posing for photographs, collecting evidence of their visit for indifferent friends and relatives, contentedly oblivious to the anguish of their ad hoc chieftain. He'd like to think that his death will traumatize them, but he knows that it will not. They have no more interest in his welfare than they do in the fate of the teenage temptress or the protestors beaten at Grant's Tomb or the businessman consigned to the morgue. And why should they? Thousands of people die every day, stumbling over land mines on the outskirts of peasant villages and slashing each other's throats with machetes, while millions more abide in squalid poverty. One Larry Bloom, more or less—and, for that matter, one Walt Whitman, more or less—doesn't make a dime's worth of difference. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy. Larry steps to the railing, vaults himself onto the security barricade, and closes his eyes. He is falling, plummeting, nearing death, when he suddenly hears the sound of his name reverberating like a drill inside his skull. A man is calling out Larry's name. A living man. Larry opens his eyes. He is standing 130 feet above the water, on the precipice of death, but he hasn't yet let go of the guard rail.

“Larry Bloom!”

The summons shames Larry into retreat. If the results of suicide are painless, the actual act is highly embarrassing. He rescales the security barricade self-consciously, determined to cover his tracks, only to find himself face-to-face with the piteous Peter Smythe. This is the height of humiliation, a fate worse than death. He now owes a life debt to the one man on the planet who has less to live for than he does.

“Larry Bloom,” says Smythe. “I suspected I'd find you here. You're a creature of habit, if you don't mind my saying, and I admire that in a man. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I say, then I'll take a pea-brained fellow any day. That Larry Bloom, I was saying down at the castle, he's as regular as a bowel movement. You can set your watch by him.”

Smythe chuckles heartily. He holds his stubby hands against the girth of his mammoth paunch as though trying to contain his wit. His bushy gray mustache and ginger cap give him the appearance of a pushcart vendor who has sampled one too many apples from his own cart. Smythe is the city's assistant deputy parks commissioner for Historical Cartography. He occupies a dank, cell-like office beneath the battleworks of Castle Clinton where he studies nineteenth-century traffic patterns and the placement of antebellum drainage pipes. Forty years of devoted civil service have bleached his complexion and crippled his vision, so that in his later years, he has grown into a colorless being who might actually have been born Peter Smythe rather than Fyodor Szymsky. Smythe's one claim to Larry's friendship is that three years earlier, on a sultry June afternoon much like this one, he'd introduced the novice tour guide to the city's most attractive woman. Starshine Hart had heard from some ex-boyfriend, a professional treasure hunter, that Captain Kidd's cache of riches had never been recovered. He'd planted in her brain the idea that the missing loot was buried under the Water Street landfill and she'd found her way to Smythe's crypt searching for an easy fortune. Larry, having abandoned his treatise on disasters, was briefly dabbling with the idea of a book on
the synthetic geology of Manhattan. The aged cartographer, hoping to impress Starshine with his connections and work his way into her pants, inadvertently brought them together. So Larry pursued treasure and Smythe pursued Starshine. Later, Smythe pursued Starshine's roommate. All parties came up empty handed. Yet Peter Smythe, having used Larry once, culled from this experience a claim for future friendship. He sincerely believes, despite the overt evidence to the contrary, that Larry admires him.

“So congratulate me, Larry Bloom,” says Smythe.

“What am I congratulating you for?”

“I'm getting married. You would never have thought it, would you? A bachelor at sixty-eight years and I'm throwing it all away to tie the knot. My friends think I've lost it. What's the point of hitching up at this time of life, they want to know. But I say better late than never. She's way out of my league too. One hot mamma. The way I see it, Larry Bloom, this gal was worth the wait. “

Larry feels the blood pooling in his stomach. He has lost his letter, lost his romance, aborted his suicide—and now the least attractive man he knows, the crass, self-absorbed, grossly obese Peter Smythe is marrying the woman of his dreams. He doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. His glorious day is rapidly degenerating into some satanic episode of
Candid Camera
. He sees the Dutch priest beside Van Huizen and he wonders whether he isn't better off asking the cleric to marry him to Rita Blatt. On the spot. But then there is the possibility that even she might turn him down, that he'd suffer rejection from a woman for whom he has no romantic interest, whom he actively dislikes, which only reminds him how truly pathetic is his own existence. He'd like nothing more than to roll the hideous cartographer into the water.

“Well, congratulations,” says Larry. “I'm happy for you.”

“She's really something,” replies Smythe. “She's a retired home health aide in Nova Scotia. I met her on the computer. In what they call an Internet chat room. We've been corresponding for nearly a year, but about a month ago, I finally took the train up to meet her
and it was love at first touch. So I proposed on the spot. At my age, Larry Bloom, there's no time like the present.”

“Well, congratulations again.”

“I bet you're green with envy, Larry Bloom, but don't worry. Your time will come. Consistency pays off in the long run.”

“I'm sure.”

Smythe scratches his ear with his fingers and wipes the wax on his trouser leg. He is just the sort of man who would chase you down on the bridge, interrupt your suicide, and then have nothing worthwhile to share. That is not why Larry dislikes him though. He dislikes the cartographer for the only reason people truly dislike one another, because they are all too similar, because he sees his future in Smythe's isolated labor and Internet romances. He will age into a leaner, less presumptuous Peter Smythe.

“By the way, Larry Bloom,” says Smythe. “I almost forgot. This is business, not pleasure. There's a reason I'm here. “

“Which is …?”

“I was in the office before you stopped by. You probably didn't notice me. I was
under
the information desk, searching through a crate of mildewed brochures. But I heard you mention that you'd lost a letter, and I figured it had to be a love letter for you to care so much. I've lost many a love letter in my day. The sort of notes that don't mean anything to anybody else but keep you from sleeping late at night, fearing you'll be found out. I've been a bachelor all my life. I know how it is. So when the maintenance guy turned in your letter, I thought I'd do you a good turn and bring it straight to you. I've heard of Stroop & Stone. They used to have an office in the Flatiron Building, as I recall. Later at 500 Fifth Avenue. They move around a lot.”

“You have my letter?”

“Here you go, lover boy.”

Smythe retrieves the letter from the interior folds of his jacket and hands it to Larry. The envelope bears the scars of both water and coffee, but it is unopened.

“So you're dating a literary gal,” says Smythe. “Tell me, Larry Bloom, do they put out?”

Smythe chuckles again, his eyes aglow with schoolyard conspiracy. Larry resists his impulse to hug his savior, to embrace the jiggling ball of flesh and to plant a wet kiss on his drooping forehead. His gratitude is fleeting. The old man's stench of stale sweat and tobacco smoke is engrained. Larry fears that if he does lock his arms around Smythe's chest, his appreciation will instantaneously evaporate and leave only the silt of revulsion in its wake. And from there it would be a short, awkward jig over the railing.

Earning money is one of life's most formidable chores. Asking for money is easy. This is particularly true if you are a well-proportioned blond female between the ages of sixteen and thirty who solicits funds for destitute and disabled children. All you need to do is play to your audience. The older women want to see photographs—not documentation of suffering and torture, certainly not images of one-legged teenage prostitutes and mutilated toddlers—but snapshots of healthy young foreigners, slightly underfed yet never emaciated, who can be restored to full vigor for the price of a cup of coffee. The younger women prefer facts and figures, sound bites for carpool chatter, pamphlets to be left on their coffee tables; they seek tangible evidence of their charitable exploits. This generation gap is conspicuous. It is as though menopause induces a transition from personal insecurity to universal skepticism. Starshine's greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures or photos, but their underlying concern is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine's favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn
them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure. Cheap sex is not their game. What these men desire, and what Starshine dishes out generously, is nothing more than the esteem and gratitude of a beautiful young girl.