The Biology of Luck (5 page)

These proposals are the most trying part of Colby's game, Starshine finds, the surreal aspect of their regularly scheduled Wednesday breakfasts. He hopes to plan her into monogamy, clutter her life with so many obligations and commitments that she'll wake up one morning in Chappaqua with one child in a bassinet and a second on the way. It is love approached with the outlook of a biochemist or an economics professor, of a man who approaches her ambivalence as a problem to be solved. How long will she be able to resist? It isn't only about the money, of course, about his multimillion dollar inheritance and her lapsed health insurance. If that were the case, it would all be too easy. But the fact of the matter is that she loves Colby Parker, maybe she's even in love with Colby Parker, and the prospect of Wednesdays without French toast and marriage proposals and prickly pear cacti would shatter her heart. If only there were no breaking point. If only their arrangement—or rather, their multiple arrangements, for Colby knows that she gets her toes wet now and then, but he knows absolutely nothing about Jack—could continue indefinitely.

“You shouldn't have spent the money ahead of time like that,” she says. “It makes me uncomfortable.”

“It wasn't that much money,” he answers, crestfallen. “Besides, what else am I supposed to do with it? You can't take it with you, right?”

“There are other things to do with it,” she snaps. “Think about it.”

“Jesus,” says Colby. “I was trying to be nice. I'm sure any other woman in the world would be flattered—overjoyed—to take a trip to Tuscany with me. In fact, if you don't want to go, if you're so dead-set against it, I'll send that couple over there. They look like they could use a vacation.”

Colby waves the tickets in the air, signaling for the waiter. Starshine reaches for his arm, tugs at his sleeve from across the tabletop. Her water glass totters on the edge of the Formica and then
shatters in the aisle. The couple along the far wall glance toward them and quickly returns to their own purgatory. “Goddamnit,” cries Colby, stooping to dry the corner of his penny loafer with a napkin, the thought of sending their fellow diners to Europe now far from his thoughts.

They order, eat. Colby carries the conversation, avoiding all references to Italy and marriage, trying to earn back his lost ground. Starshine picks at the condiments around her whitefish salad, shreds the lettuce into infinitesimal strands. She can picture Colby at this father's office later that afternoon, making the most of his sinecure, memorizing Walt Whitman's “Brooklyn Bridge” to impress her. She can also picture him laid out in a crypt at Woodlawn, surrounded by gold bars and photographs of Starshine Hart, like some modern-day Egyptian pharaoh determined to take it all with him. This last bit strikes her as uproariously entertaining. She is rippling with laughter by the time their dishes are cleared, and Colby, thinking that hindsight has transformed their spat into a comic memory, leaves an exorbitant tip. They both exit the Unicorn in good cheer.

“I'll call you during the afternoon,” says Colby.

“I'm going out to Staten Island to visit Aunt Agatha. We'll talk tomorrow.”

“And we're on for Friday night?”

“Last time I checked.”

“Then Friday night it is,” he says. “Send my best to your aunt.”

Colby is a favorite of Aunt Agatha's, although the pair have only met once. The old woman frequently reminds her niece that there is no crime in loving a wealthy man—a man who can take care of you in your old age, with private attendants, so you don't get railroaded off to a nursing home. And Colby, of course, believes that Agatha's opinion might sway Starshine's, as though marriage were a matter of familial consensus—which, of course, it is not.

“No problem,” answers Starshine. On the tip of her tongue are the words, Why don't you take
her
to Italy, but she doesn't want to provoke a fight.

“And for what it's worth, I'm sorry.”

Colby waves his arm to signify all those transgressions for which an apology might be in order. Starshine pecks him on the cheek and turns quickly on her heels, refusing to hear whatever words he is calling after her. She is in bright spirits again, and her morning has no room for apologies or regrets. Her lover will spend the rest of his day replaying their breakfast, supplying extra dialogue and second-guessing their parting, but she will not. She will return home, look up the address of the credit union's central office, deposit her cactus on the window ledge, and place her flower in water. No, she won't even do that. Starshine pins the red rose under the windshield wiper of a random parked car and smiles at her handiwork. It all seems so easy.

They expect to see Dutch New York, the city of Diedrich Knickerbocher and Peter Minuit, but they are sure to be disappointed. Their imperial seat has been swept away by time and progress, its yellow-brick mansions razed by fire, its tidy cow paths bloated to great boulevards. The shimmering monoliths of Big Coal and Big Oil and Gargantuan Capital have swallowed the foundations of the Fort Amsterdam settlement, its vistas, its contours, even its very soil, burying the vestiges in the bottomlands of steel-framed canyons. Landfill scooped from Midtown's hills has honed the waterfront to perfect symmetry. All that remains from forty years of Dutch rule are a handful of incongruous place names: Wall Street, where a frontier fence once stood; Bridge Street, to mark the shoals of a thwarted creek; Bowery; Old Slip; Gouverneur Lane; the unlikely Bowling Green at the mouth of Broadway. These Dutch emissaries have come a long way to discover that they should have vacationed in Pretoria or Jakarta or Paramaribo, that they really don't matter in Gotham, that they never really mattered. That New York can get along fine without them.

Larry primes his audience with atmosphere, background, trivia. He blends history and legend, hot yarn and cold fact, pulling every last trick from his tour guide's magic sleeve, serving up a smorgasbord of myths supplied by his employer and distortions culled from memory and outright lies fabricated for the occasion. He wants to impress the dimpled teenage godsend reclining in the fifth row; her
momentary pleasure is the breadth and depth of his constituency. As Big Louise pummels the accelerator into the floorboards, plummeting the coach down Riverside Drive with the full force of her ample weight, Larry sermonizes on the age of the harbor, on its span, on its bridges, Verrazano and Hudson, Colonel Roebling and Robert Moses, before detouring into an anecdote about wampum-dealer Frederick Phillipse's love for an Indian princess. The Dutch tourists listen with polite deference. Big Louise grits her teeth as she tears through potholes and amber stoplights. The girl in row five fidgets, stifles a yawn with her hand, and leans forward in her seat to meet Larry's stare. He speaks faster, describing the moonlit night of the couple's final meeting, painting a pastoral, even romantic, portrait of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. There are mighty patrons, noble Wappingers, spiteful Portuguese slavers. He is making it up as he goes. The bus picks up speed, lurching, its skeleton rattling; Big Louise jolts over manholes, cuts off taxis, moaning and cursing under her breath; the Dutch girl smiles, bathes Larry with a flush of attention, maybe even a spark of interest, her long hair shimmering in a panel of light. This is his moment. But suddenly, with all the advance warning of a boiler explosion, long after Larry's charges have abandoned courtesy for a view of the downtown skyline or the Jersey coast, precisely at the moment of climax, of passion, of bloodshed, when it has become clear to him that his anecdote is not an anecdote at all, but a hackneyed rip-off of Alfred Noyes's “The Highwayman,” the coach rasps to a halt at the foot of Battery Place, drowning Larry's fable in the wail of burning brake lines. The Dutch tourists blink themselves alive. Big Louise slides open both sets of the double doors. Larry's teenage beauty slings her backpack over her shoulder, whispers briefly in her mother's ear, and sashays her way down the aisle, exiting the rear of the bus. Larry rolls his eyes at Big Louise, to say here we go again, to say wish me luck, and he steps into his workday of asphalt and heat.

There are already other tour groups on the plaza: hordes of Germans and Italians, Koreans posing for snapshots, day-trippers on
double-decker cruisers, a battalion of heartland senior citizens basking in all their porcine glory. The Germans carry Baedeker's guides and canteens. The midwesterners lug beach chairs and ice chests. Each group eyes the others with muted scorn. They are all part and parcel of the same game, victim to the universal folly which convinces travelers everywhere that they blend, that they can pass themselves off as locals, should the exigency arise, while others cannot. Larry waits for his own team of upscale refugees to stow their personal effects and disembark. He waves at another tour guide, a pudgy-faced old-timer whose name he no longer remembers; the veteran nods in his direction. They exchange the knowing, jaded looks of the enlightened. Unlike the sun-visored midwesterners or the happy-go-lucky Dutch, they know the somber truth: This is business, not pleasure. It is immigration in reverse, the start of the day's tribute to Lady Liberty and Ellis Island, a routine which will repeat itself with different faces until the end of time. There is no escape.

One of the Dutch tourists steps forward and pats Larry too intimately on the shoulder. He is a stately, older gentleman with thin-rimmed spectacles and an unconvincing hair weave. His wife, also taller than Larry, holds her lips perpetually pursed as though about to spit out a cherry pit. They share the look of academics, of know-it-alls, the sort of people who view you as a burdensome accoutrement to their own self-guided tour.

“Willem van Huizen,” the man says in the Queen's English, extending his hand. “I wanted to take the liberty of complimenting you on your handling of this morning's—how shall we call it?—Episode? We Netherlanders aren't accustomed to civil disturbance. At least not in modern times. I dare say that some of my countrymen may have taken a scare. But not me and Klara. We have lived in New York before. Diamonds are my trade, but I consider myself something of an amateur historian of the American colonies. Isn't that right, Klara?”

“He certainly does,” agrees his wife. Her words are earnest, not ironic.

“I'm writing a book on the trans-Atlantic trade. From an economic perspective, naturally. My focus is on currency, bullion, precious stones. I always say one ought to stick to one's area of expertise. Mercifully, colonial gems and jewelry are a relatively untapped field. Did you know that the trinkets with which my countrymen purchased your lovely island were worth slightly more than sixty guilders? That's the equivalent of five florins or twenty ducats. In present day terms, that's one month's rent on a studio apartment in this city. Inflation adjusted, of course.”

“Of course.”

Larry looks around for an opportunity to desert his newfound friend. If only the stragglers would disembark more rapidly, he could excuse himself to begin the tour. He has no use for armchair scholars and dilettante pedagogues, aggressive glad-handers writing books and citing minutiae to impress their wives, especially those who spruce up their names with ersatz
vans
and
vons
. Does the blockhead really think he's fooling anyone into believing he's an aristocrat? Van Huizen! It sounds like one of those puffed-up surnames adopted by second-tier Nazis, like Von Papen or Von Ribbentrop. But Van Huizen, the diamond dealer? That's the beginning of an off-color joke, a potshot at self-hating Jews. Van Huizen the diamond dealer and Von Goldberg the deacon walk into a basilica…. Larry hasn't been to a synagogue in nearly a decade, but he can see his own heritage, maybe his own worst instincts regarding that heritage, reflected in his companion's disguise. He knows Van Huizen's type. He knows the man will profess a deeply personal interest in Grace Church. He knows—and here lies the dolt's one redeeming quality—that he will offer a generous tip. Gentrified European Jews are the backbone of historical tourism. They are a dime a dozen.

Van Huizen's next move confirms Larry's suspicions.

“
Blowm
,” he says, reading Larry's nametag in the Dutch style, merging the o's to elevate him to the stature of Roosevelt and Van Loo. “Is that a Netherlander name?”

“Bloom,” answers Larry. “German.”

“I see,” van Huizen says apologetically—and maybe with a hint of pity. “I thought you might be related to Pastor Bloem of the Reformed Church. He's an old friend of our family.”

“No doubt.”

Van Huizen steps closer, his face florid with conspiracy.

“I was just telling Klara how much I enjoyed your talk on Frederick Phillipse. A seminal figure, unquestionably. Wall Street's first lion, a forerunner of Astor and Morgan. And you did him such justice. For the most part. I don't want to overstep my bounds,
Meneer Blowm
, but isn't it possible you erred in the quantity of wampum he paid to the Wappinger chieftain for his daughter's hand? You said fifteen tons, but I recall reading fifty tons. This
is
my particular field of expertise, you understand.”

“Fifty tons it is. It's not the first time I've made that mistake.”

Larry catches sight of his teenage inspiration. She seems older in the daylight, eighteen, maybe even twenty. Her breasts push against the front of her tank top. Larry wonders for a moment whether he will have the courage to speak to her, if she will accede to his advances, if there is the remotest possibility that she might cast off the shackles of her dour-faced parents and meet him for a nightcap, for an early evening stroll, but then he recalls Starshine, his dinner engagement, and the matter of Snipe's girlfriend, also the pageant of other young women, equally innocent and alluring, whom he has had the forbearance not to pester. His future rests with Starshine; hope endures in those quarters. It is a universally established truth that teenage girls don't appreciate come-ons from down-at-the-heel tour guides. Larry taps the letter in his breast pocket. He excuses himself, too brusquely, from the Dutch couple and launches into his show.