The Biology of Luck (7 page)

They ascend the narrow staircase in tandem, navigating a graveyard of children's toys, the overhead bulb dancing on its wire, projecting their silhouettes against the warped plaster, consecrating the doll torsos and tanker trucks abandoned to the stairwells. The reaffirming strains of Edith Piaf's brassy voice float from Starshine's apartment. She knocks to give Eucalyptus fair warning. Her roommate replies with the rustle of clothes, the sticky patter of bare wet feet on hardwood. The door opens, first a crack, then all the way. Eucalyptus, her long black hair hidden under a lavender bath towel, stands at the threshold.

“He needs to examine the beds,” explains Starshine. “The loonies downstairs complained.”

“You mean he needs to examine
your
bed, darling,” says Eucalyptus.

Bone follows Starshine into the apartment, peeking through each doorway as though on a realtor's tour. He pauses momentarily at the entrance to Eucalyptus's room, taking in the wall collage of celebrity obits and the cabinet of tchotchkes and the harpoon mounted over the rosewood bureau, then passes through the common room and, like a rodent drawn by a pheromone, sniffs the musty air before targeting Starshine's bed. Starshine does not follow him. Bone won't take anything, she knows, nor does she own anything worthy of pocketing, and she would like to have as little to do with this intrusion as possible. She retreats to the comfort of her wicker chair and sorts through the previous day's mail.

“Visa bill, jury summons, a friendly letter from our Community Board,” she enumerates. “Here you go, honey. Personal correspondence from the Internal Revenue Service. For Eucalyptus Caroll. Shall I open it?”

“Go for it.”

Eucalyptus is burnishing a fresh chunk of ivory with glass wool. Starshine tears open the envelope.

“Ode to joy! You're being audited. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

“Read it and weep.”

Starshine slides the letter down the tabletop and continues sorting. All of it—the bills, the overdue library notices, the increasingly threatening letters from the Selective Service Bureau erroneously reminding her that she is a male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six and must register for the draft—will go down the trash chute. It isn't worth the hassle. She refuses to waste her precious waking moments arguing with vengeful computers. She's doing the best she can. What else can they expect? If her seventy-eight-dollar
credit card payment is so damn important to them, they can send somebody over in person to discuss it. That would be civilized, decent. And she'd even brew coffee for their representative.

“Do we know a Peter Smythe?”

“No sale.”

“Well, we've both been invited to his wedding.”

“Are we going?”

“It's in Halifax, Nova Scotia.”

“Guess not.”

“Discard pile?”

“Isn't that always the way, darling?”

Eucalyptus crumples her audit notice into a ball and tosses it in the direction of the wastepaper basket. From the bedroom comes the high-pitched rhythm of Bone playing Sherlock Holmes. The beat grows faster, more frenzied, almost ecstatic, suggesting that the super is at his worst, warning Starshine that she will have to wash her sheets, but more unsettling because it exposes her to an outsider's perception of her own passion. Can she really be
that
loud? Has she developed an auditory immunity? It only makes sense that one's other senses are dulled in the heat of the moment, that the bedspring chorus, not to mention the symphony of mewing and moaning and expletives, must be pure torture to the sex-starved lunatic downstairs. But we all have our crosses to bear, don't we? At least Jesus Echegaray doesn't have a one-armed pervert doing something unimaginable on his bedspread.

A personal letter catches Starshine's attention. There is no stamp, no return address. The envelope is frayed, indicating that is has been squeezed through the narrow aperture in her postal box. Her curiosity has been piqued. She slides her finger gently under the flap. The stationer's card is written in a tight, distinctively female hand, garnished by a bouquet of printed roses.

“Take a look at this,” says Starshine. “Any guesses?”

The message reads:

Dearest Starshine:

Please tell me you love me as I love you.

I can wait no longer.

You know who

Eucalyptus scans the note and groans. “That could be half of New York. But if I had to put my money somewhere, I'd go with that friend Larry of yours. He sounds like the type.”

“Larry?” Starshine answers, forcing a laugh. “You overestimate him, honey. He'd never had the courage to do something like this. He's one of the puppy dogs. One of the wait-and-seers.”

“You may be right, darling. Then again, you may be wrong. What's that they say about advice? It's what you ask for when you need somebody to confirm your opinion.”

“It's a woman,” says Starshine. “You can tell by the handwriting.”

“Maybe his mother wrote it for him.”

They share a laugh. There was a time when Starshine would have been alarmed by such a note, fresh off the bus from San Francisco with her post-teenage angst regarding stalkers and sex predators and all the deviants of the night who prey on young women in the big city, but life experience has taught her that the vast majority of men are stupid and harmless. Especially the sorts of men who leave notes in women's mailboxes, the types who can't distinguish love from lust, the ones who really believe she can solve their problems like some druggist's cure-all. The dangerous ones are the guys who don't give a damn, the ones who don't worry where their next fuck is coming from because they know they'll get it somehow, the ones who would batter the living shit out of the Larry Blooms of the world for a pair of sneakers. But why did Eucalyptus plant the idea in her head? Starshine attempts to conjure up Larry's handwriting, to feminize it, but her memory draws a blank. She never would have suspected Larry. He would have been the last human being on earth to cross her mind, but now that her thoughts have been rutted into a particular path,
she can't imagine it being anybody else. Poor, poor fool. She'll have to say something at dinner.

Bone reemerges. His trousers are buttoned, his forehead free of sweat. Maybe she won't have to wash her sheets after all.

“Water bed,” he says.

“What?”

“You get a water bed,” he announced. “No more problems with bedsprings. No more neighbors complain.”

“I'll take care of it,” says Starshine. “I didn't realize it was that loud.”

“I can get you a water bed. I'll bring it by tomorrow.”

A water bed?
She recalls that she once had a lover with a water bed, an ambulance driver, and every time they screwed she felt she'd been cast as Wendy in some obscene version of Peter Pan. Water beds leak. Water beds ooze. Water beds sway like pirate ships. Starshine needs an old-fashioned bed, a bed that bounces like a trampoline, that contracts and expands, that makes music like an accordion, like a set of bagpipes, a bed that isn't going to puncture at precisely the wrong moment and leave her high and dry. Water beds are for orthopedic patients, for undersexed tour guides. She's a four-poster kind of girl. But all of this would be lost on the one-armed super, determined as he is to take control of her sleeping arrangements, already having let himself out without so much as a good-bye, and now happily ensconced in his aluminum chair, so what the hell is she supposed to do? She'll deal with it later. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is far, far away.

“I'm going to fight it out with the bankers,” she says. “Wish me luck.”

“You don't need luck. You need a tight-fitting skirt.”

She will not wear a tight-fitting skirt, of course—she does not even own one. But tight-fitting, acid-washed jeans seem a reasonable tactic to disarm a credit officer. After she changes, she admires herself in the bathroom mirror. If she were a banker, she thinks, she'd give herself the keys to the vault.

Starshine looks up the address of her credit union in the phone directory. She pulls the apartment door shut behind her, takes a deep breath and kicks a dolmen of multicolored toy blocks down the stairs. They ricochet into the abyss. Good riddance to bad rubbish! She won't have misguided children constructing makeshift altars, at least not on her landing, because then they grow up into the sorts of men who make their landlords equip the neighbors with water beds. It is all part of the same pandemic, the original sin behind her impending fight with the credit union and her aunt's deterioration and all the men who keep picking and poking at her. The cycle must be broken. Starshine mounts her Higgins and coasts toward Long Island City; she has already passed the towers of the Queensboro Bridge and eclipsed Roosevelt Island when she realizes that she's left her financial dossier on the kitchen table.

No matter, she thinks. These things happen.

They'll deal. It is their problem, not hers.

There is no more fitting place to meet Ziggy Borasch than at the deluxe McDonalds.

The upscale burger joint stands at the intersection of Broadway and Maiden Lane, a sentinel at the northern tier of the Financial District, catering to the divergent needs of Wall Street's harried financiers and the enclave of working-class immigrants who have commandeered the tenements south of City Hall. A tuxedo-clad doorman welcomes customers into a stately glass-and-wood dining hall where the lighting is incandescent, the plants aren't synthetic, and the background music rolls off the keys of a baby-grand piano. Even the cutlery, no longer silver on account of the security risk, is made of stainless steel. In a world of fast food, which so often is neither, the snappy counter staff serves up double cappuccinos and gourmet pastries imported from an East Side bakery. It is hard to believe that, excepting the napoleons and éclairs, this ambience operates in the service of an orthodox Golden Arches menu, Big Macs and Happy Meals and assembly-line hash browns, that the napkins and ketchup packets are still tightly rationed, dispensed only upon request by aproned Latino women earning seven dollars and fifteen cents an hour, but there are limits to the corporate board's benevolence, even in New York City, even at their international headquarters, which is why Larry thinks of the Maiden Lane McDonalds as so much whitewash on the Aunt Polly's fence that is American capitalism. The
luxury is an illusion, the restaurant a modern-day Theresienstadt. And yet the food does seem to taste better, the beef more tender, the sausages leaner, as though it is the vinyl booths and rough wallpaper, not something inherent to the freeze-dried cattle loins, which account for the numbing uniformity of the standard franchise fare. Our senses, after all, are slaves to expectation. The king's broth curdles in the mendicant's cup, while beggars' scraps become pheasant and venison on the platters of royalty. It is true of food. It is also true of people. Yet somehow, among all the chameleons and pretenders who vie for Larry's veneration, it is most true of Ziggy Borasch.

To many, particularly the entrenched stewards of the academy, Borasch is a crackpot. He has steered his ship of independent scholarship so far from the narrow, demarcated channels of ordered intellectual liberty that no rescue party dares tow him back to shore. He is a renegade, a buccaneer. His first published book—an historical novel in which an aging Harvard history professor exposes the American Civil War as an elaborate hoax—will surely be his last. Now pushing fifty, unmarried, untenured, surviving on the modest legacy of an entrepreneurial grandfather, which enables him to rent an efficiency apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn and to stock his hard-cover library, but not much more, Borasch devotes his days to two equally elusive, some might even say quixotic, pursuits: He is writing a multi-volume treatise on the nature and implications of coincidence, and he is struggling, so far without success, to produce the Great American Sentence. When Larry spies his mentor in the nook behind the piano, Borasch has already finished his meal of chocolate chip cookies and Coke and is scribbling in a cloth-bound notebook, one of several strewn over the tabletop, his distended blue veins bulging at the temples. Borasch's long gray hair is tied back in a ponytail. His hands shake with a Parkinsonian tremor. Flesh pockets like canvas sacks sag under his glassy eyes. An interstate roadhouse might color him a derelict; Maiden Lane casts him as an eccentric, a sage.

Larry orders a combination breakfast and slides into the seat across from Borasch. The pianist, all hands and teeth, croons the
Everly Brothers'
Bye Bye, Love
. He arches his back as he plays. His voice is somber, but undistinguished. Borasch, still scribbling, holds up his hand to keep his guest at bay. Several minutes pass before he has recorded his full train of thought.

“Sorry about that,” he finally says. “I thought I had something.”

“Any progress?”

“None whatsoever. Except that I've discarded another possibility. Who said that genius is the dross of the process of elimination?”

“Sounds like Edison.”

“That's the problem. I've read too many books of quotable quotations. Everything these days is starting to sound like Edison. Tell me the truth, man, you don't think I'm nuts, do you? I had a conversation with my sister-in-law last night and she made me out to be certifiably stark-raving bonkers. It kind of shook me up.”

“Don't you always say there's a fine line between genius and madness?” Larry answers, choosing his words carefully. “What about Nietzsche? And Immanuel Kant? Most great thinkers go unappreciated in their own lifetimes. Are you a bit idiosyncratic? Certainly. But crazy? Don't let it get to you. What in God's name does your sister-in-law know about genius?”

“The half-wit holds a MacArthur fellowship,” says Borasch. “But I take your point. I like to think of myself as functionally insane, you know, but sometimes I get to thinking that maybe she has it right, that maybe everybody else has it right, and I really am mad as a hatter. Can you reassure me one more time? You don't really think I'm nuts?”