The Biology of Luck (3 page)

But Starshine is a pushover, not an idiot. She prides herself on the distinction. She realizes that Larry has his own hopes, his own muted expectations. Someone famous and dead once said that “all exercises have objects” and there's a reason this guy endures her tales of romance and confusion. He's addicted to them like a housewife hooked on daytime soaps. But that's his business, not hers. It doesn't make her a bad person, does it? She'd fix him up, if she could, but she doesn't know the sort of women who date the Larry Blooms over the world, and she imagines he must have other opportunities. Some woman—but decidedly not Starshine Hart—will see his inner beauty. And yet sometimes, against her visceral instincts, she wonders what it would be like to bestow herself on the hapless guy (bestow is a funny word, somehow the only one that seems appropriate to the circumstances), to purge her life of Jack Bascomb and Colby Parker and all the rest and to bestow complete happiness on someone who might bask for the rest of his life in the glow of his own gratitude. Like Scarlett O'Hara's first marriage in
Gone with the Wind.
How much would it really matter? It's all nonsense, of course. Shit, stuff, and nonsense. Somebody else's pipe dream.

“You know,” says Starshine, “if we were famous, life would be much easier.”

“Uh-huh,” Eucalyptus replies indifferently. “If we were famous, we'd still end up dead.”

“Well, if I were famous, honey, you'd run down to the corner store and pick up a box of cereal for me.”

“Yep,” agrees Eucalyptus, holding a jeweler's glass in front of her ivory schooner to admire her handiwork. “But you're not.”

“Not yet.”

Soon enough, though, thinks Starshine. Eventually. Maybe. She's not even thirty. There's plenty of time left for fame and fortune. She'll be brave in the interim. She'll weather the Don Juan of Karachi and purchase her own breakfast. But first, she'll paint her toenails. Green. Bright, bright green.

No noteworthy disaster has ever occurred in Morningside Heights. Guarded at either end by those two distinctive barbicans of the establishment, Riverside Church and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, shielded from harm's way by the no-man's land that is Morningside Park, and rent stabilization, and the twenty-four-hour security service of Columbia University, the sleepy Westside suburb north of 110th Street offers an oasis of public buildings and wide concourses where budding scholars stroll oblivious to their surroundings and elderly Chinese couples shake the ginkgo trees to collect nuts for roasting. The community boasts its own share of minor catastrophes, four-alarm blazes, limousines driven through storefront plate glass, widows beaten and strangled in prewar apartments, but if one excludes second-tier Beat poet Lucien Carr's stabbing of a male admirer in Riverside Park, an event more farcical than tragic, the area surrounding Grant's Tomb has avoided the Triangle Shirtwaist Fires and General Slocum explosions and Crown Heights race riots which keep the tabloids on the newsstands and remind surviving New Yorkers of their perennial good fortune. Larry Bloom can attest to this tranquility. He is a resident. He is also an uncredentialed expert. His incomplete dissertation on the subject, “The Fire Last Time: Public Disaster and Private Response in New York City, 1869—1914,” yellows in a footlocker beside his nightstand. Perhaps that is why he welcomes the spectacle on Riverside Drive with tempered
amusement, the cynical relief of one who has been waiting from the get-go for lightning to strike.

There is a police cordon composed of blue wooden sawhorses and cops in riot gear. It bisects the granite plaza in front of the mausoleum, separating harmony from discord, suggesting that both are sides of a commemorative coin minted specifically for the occasion. On one side of the barricade, all is order. The Dutch contingent has paid good money to mingle with minor dignitaries, to sip champagne on the steps of the Grant family vault, to admire the size of the caskets, the plenitude of the buffet offerings, the intricate weave of the tricolor bunting. They cluster beneath the banner touting the Dutch-American Heritage Bruncheon, ruddy-cheeked and bespectacled in the spirit of a Van Dyke portrait, deeply concerned that the term
bruncheon
is not to be found in their pocket dictionaries, absorbing the surrounding uproar as a matter of course. Japanese tourists might view the scene as a photo-op, Israelis as fodder for political harangue, but the Dutch are too sanguine, too constrained, for such antics. Funny Americans, they think. Cowboy President, McPuritan culture. An odious word pops into Larry's thoughts, a word he associates with nineteenth-century novels and whalebone corsets and his ever-practical father, Mort, warning him not to place his feet on the coffee table that his parents “plan to die with”: Bourgeoisie.

Beyond the cordon lies chaos. Ordered, orchestrated chaos, the worst variety of confusion, the Old Left's vision of its own Armageddon. The crowd sports gold chains, denim jackets, military fatigues, full feather headdresses, Mao pajamas, tie-dyes, vintage coonskin caps, even a conspicuous wimple. There are gourd rattles, cane flutes, chirimias. Also banjos, kitchen pots, bullhorns. Also a topless woman whipping a wooden cigar store Indian with a leather strap. Sharp young men in freshly pressed suits navigate the throng, the crimson “inverted-A” badges of the Organized Anarchist League conspicuous on their lapels. They make notations on clipboards, calculating the size of the protest, or its longevity, or possibly its karmic energy. They distribute water bottles, folded pamphlets. They compete with the
purveyors of pocket-sized New Testaments, little red books, gardenia wreaths, with the men vending snow cones and glow-in-the-dark yo-yos and oracular crystals. But all is not mayhem. When you've given up sniffing for the starch on the organizers' collars, resigned yourself to the vapors of incense, braced for the impending sting of burning sulfur and smoldering tires, you notice the glass beads. Even madness has its unifying elements, the glimmer of turquoise and orange, the omnipresent necklaces and bracelets and waist chains, the placards reading, “No Pete Stuyvesant, No Bedford-Stuyvesant, No More,” and “Take Back Your Trinkets and Sail Home,” all of which reassure you that the heavenly puppeteer may be palsied but that he still holds the drawstrings. It is all harmless. It is a high-stakes Mardi Gras and nothing more. But then, if you are Larry, you notice the other distinctive blemish that bales the crowd toward collective action: A disquieting absence of beauty.

The moment has the makings of a noteworthy disaster.

Larry scans the tableau behind the cordon for a familiar face. He'd like to push his way through the blockade like a plainclothes detective on a crime show, to stiffen his back, undaunted by the harsh Irish physiognomies of New York's finest, challenging them to deny him access to his rightful place among the upstanding burghers at the banquet tables, thriving on their frustration when his identity is affirmed, but he knows he is better off seeking corroboration at the outset. He does not need to wait long. P. J. Snipe, the tour supervisor, nods in Larry's direction and escorts him into the sanctuary of the privileged.

“This is a goddamn nightmare,” says Snipe. “I feel like I'm at a Dylan concert.”

Snipe isn't fooling anyone. Larry is confident his boss hasn't ever listened to a Dylan song, much less attended a rock show. He is the sort of over-the-hill minor-sport athlete, in this case archery, who one can't imagine at any variety of cultural event, who would sleep his way just as easily through a chamber quartet or an outdoor bluegrass festival or a stadium concert of Hogtie and the Pentecostal Five, all the while managing to look smug with his eyes shut. He is also the
sort of over-confident micromanager who thrives on disruptions such as this one. They hired him over Larry's head, impressed by his fifth-tier law degree, probably also by his gold wedding band and toned biceps, although the cretin failed the Mississippi state bar three times and wears the ring to attract unpossessive women. Snipe is a sham. A robust, clean-cut sham. But Snipe makes no pretense of being anything but a sham, hangs it out there on his sleeve until you're surprised to discover that you've known him three years and he still hasn't sold you an annuity or an Arizona condo, until you realize that—in spite of your initial determination and better judgment—he's endeared his way into your life.

“Do you realize what a nightmare this is, Bloom? The Dutch consul is set to show up in twenty minutes and he's expecting brotherly love, and bagels and lox, and that New York shit. Not a Christ-forsaking freak show! Do you know what this is, Bloom? I'll tell you what this is. This is dog piss.”

“But what exactly
is
it?”

Snipe has steered them into a shaded alcove behind the guard tower. His conversation voice carries over the staccato of the wooden spoons on brass, but Larry needs to shout to make himself heard.

“How the hell should I know?” demands Snipe. “Something about Native American Indian Liberation Day. We apparently scheduled our event for the same day as their event—and they took it as a slight. And now this!”

“They could have at least warned us.”

“They did. They sent a petition with three thousand names. I double-checked with Fed Ex. Some moron lost the letter.”

Larry holds his tongue. He'd like to speculate on the identity of the moron, suggest that the idiot be instantly terminated, but the last thing he needs is to get himself fired for impertinence on the day of his date with Starshine. All he wants to do is get through this ordeal of a day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Tomorrow, he will have an agent and a live-in lover, a raison d'être, a justification for phoning Snipe and proffering his resignation. Or for not phoning Snipe, for
letting Empire Tours float over the horizon of his life like so much driftwood. There will be no more questions about his long-term plans, no more jokes at Christmas parties about colleagues decapitated by traffic lights. Larry Bloom will never again stand in solitude on the platform of a red tour bus describing Captain Kidd's role in the financing of Trinity Church and wondering whether the full-breasted temptation in the third row is old enough to ask out. So why doesn't he ram his fist into Snipe's mandible? Or even dare make a joke at his expense? Larry's eyes have locked onto his supervisor's chiseled chin, his angular jaw, the florid patches of flesh where a razor has chafed too close. He imagines they would make an easy target, if he truly wished to deck Snipe, but he wouldn't even know the mechanics of the swing. Hitting just isn't his medium.

Snipe rubs his jaw, stamping approval on his shave. Then he cups his palm and punches it methodically with his fist. “You want some coffee, Bloom?”

“Why not?”

“That's the one thing we seem to have enough of this morning. And it's fresh. They sent up seventy-five gallons. Who is going to drink seventy-five gallons of coffee? If Juan Valdez at the caterer's spent a little less time brewing coffee and a little more time baking bagels, we might fatten these Dutch fellows up some. They sure could use it…. Try this….”

Snipe hands Larry a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee and a poppy-seed bagel.

“Dog piss,” says Snipe.

Larry nearly breaks his teeth on the first bite. “A bit on the hard side.”

“It's granite. It's marble. It's a goddamned marble statuette of a bagel, that's what it is. We've been trying to unload the extras on the freak show, but it seems they also have standards. Even the cops won't take them. By the way, Bloom, you have a car, don't you?”

Larry nods. Snipe knows he has a car. The bastard has borrowed it twice. Both times he claimed he had a funeral to go to in South
Jersey, which might have been the case, but Larry has a hunch that Snipe's overnight trips are more likely to end in a birth than a burial. The second time, Snipe brought Larry the program from the service, a two-page foldout bearing the Twenty-third Psalm and a requiem to his godmother, but that only added to Larry's suspicions. Who brings back a program from an interment as though it were a playbill or a National Park brochure? But Larry spent a full Saturday morning fine-toothing the backseat of his Plymouth, searching for so much as a Virginia Slims filter or a stray blond hair, an entirely futile endeavor, and the episode left him twice as convinced that if his boss is lying to him, he'll never be able to prove it. For all he knows, Snipe is banging the director of a funeral parlor.

“That's right,” says Snipe. “I remember now. A 1970-something white Plymouth. I wasn't sure if you still owned it.”

“I still own it.”

“Well, here's the thing, Bloom. I was kind of hoping I could borrow it.”

“I see.”

“Tonight, that is.”

“Let me guess. A death in the family.”

Larry stuns himself with his own audacity. After years of humoring his boss, he has suddenly hinted—not too subtly—that he thinks the man would kill off his own relatives, in a manner of speaking, if it suited his pecker. Then a worse idea strikes him: What if
this time
somebody has actually died?

Snipe grins and crushes the bottom out of his empty Styrofoam cup. He does not appear insulted. “So you heard already. Word travels fast in the world of tourism. Anyway, here's the deal: I have this girl I'm seeing, just hooking up with really, and her grandmother passed away last night.”

“I'm sorry,” says Larry.

“Don't be. The old lady was a cow. She had it coming. But that's neither here nor there. The thing is, the woman lived up in Riverdale, and she owned this vintage sewing machine, or maybe it's a sewing cabinet,
but the bottom line is that Jessie has had her eye on it for a long time, and it looks like it's going to end up going to some cousin unless we take matters into our own hands. Pronto, I mean. So I told her that a buddy of mine with a car might have an hour or so to move the contraption before they seal the place and probate kicks in … and everybody starts suing the pants off each other. It's one fucked-up family.”