The Biology of Luck (9 page)

Her credit representative's name, according to a white-on-black plastic placard, is Hannibal Tuck. His office is really nothing more than a sparsely furnished freestanding cubicle located toward the rear of the lobby. While Starshine waits for the computer to process her name, she examines the personal effects that offer a peephole into Tuck's outside life: a gold wedding band; a framed photograph of two toddlers on the lap of a mousy young woman; a second, smaller photograph, tucked into the first, of the mousy young woman beside Tuck; a college badminton trophy; and a nautilus shell paperweight with an analog clock and a barometer embedded in its jade base. Although Hannibal Tuck will never lead elephants over mountain passes, probably never take any risk greater than waiting on the platform at Massapequa Station, he will surely never confront defeat. Not on the racquetball courts, not in the bedroom, and not in front of his computer screen. Of all the bankers on the face of the planet, Wall Street financiers and small-town Rotarians, cigar-smoking stuffed-shirts and flashy S and L swindlers, Warburgs and George Baileys, Starshine has landed upon the lender least likely to remit her forty-five dollars without the appropriate paperwork. He is a man who doesn't speak any of her languages.

“Now what can I do for you this morning, Miss Hart? Can I interest you in one of our special offers on a Sea Fund? For every thousand dollars you invest, Dolphin Credit is able to contribute ten dollars to deserving environmental causes. “

“It's about my account balance. There seems to be a mistake. “

“Well, we'll have to straighten matters out, Miss Hart,” says Tuck. “Now what seems to be the problem?”

The agent leans forward in his swivel chair, clasping his hands together on his desk blotter, scrutinizing Starshine with patronizing indulgence. A dark stain discolors the cuff of his jacket sleeve, a vestige of his morning's coffee or the brand of an early corned beef lunch,
and Starshine focuses all of her attention on this minute imperfection, Hannibal Tuck's tragic flaw, in the fleeting hope that it will prove fatal. She takes a deep, heavy breath and plunges headlong into the depths of panic.

“I'm supposed to buy a gourmet fruit basket for my dying aunt, Mr. Tuck,” she says. “She's bedridden at a nursing home in Staten Island and she's blind as a bat and one of the only joys left to her is to be able to press fresh fruit against her cheeks. My problem is that a nice fruit basket, even a modest one, is going to run me forty-five dollars, minimum, and I've been keeping track of my spending so I'd have enough to buy one, but now it seems that there's been some sort of terrible mistake, and my account balance doesn't match the amount I thought I had in the account, and I need the rest of my money to pay next month's rent, so without that forty-five dollars, I'm going to have to choose between my aunt's dying wishes and having a roof over my head, and, oh God, I feel like I'm about to start crying. I'm so sorry. I'm really not at all like this.”

“There, there, Miss Hart,” Tuck answers. “I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this. Can I see your checkbook and your most recent statement?”

Starshine buries her face in her hands, sobs briefly, and composes herself. “That's the worst part of it, Mr. Tuck. I don't have them. I've looked everywhere for them and I can't imagine what happened to them unless my boyfriend took then with him when he walked out on me. I'm usually very responsible, and this is
so
embarrassing, and I really don't know what I'm going to do. Is there any way you can check if there's been some sort of computer glitch or something?”

Tuck swivels to the computer monitor. “I've pulled up your file. According to our records, Miss Hart, you have a balance of $475.19. You're telling me that you believe that forty-five dollars have been inadvertently deducted from your account, is that right?”

Starshine nods and helps herself to a Kleenex. She is suddenly thankful that she left her financial dossier at home because her statement balance matches the one from the screwy computer and
the entries in her checkbook are so cryptic and haphazard that even she often has a difficult time deciphering them. Her records would only serve to impugn her credibility. The best opportunity lies in feigning hysteria and hoping that even as staunch a bureaucrat as Hannibal Tuck will let this one slide. Just this once. After all, the credit union must control millions of dollars in assets and she's asking for only a piddling forty-five. They'll forgo forty-five dollars to retain a loyal customer, won't they? It's good business sense.

“I'm sorry, Miss Hart,” says Tuck, “But without your records, I'm not sure there's anything that I can do for you. And quite honestly, even if you did have your statement and your checkbook, I doubt it would make a difference. Our records are highly accurate. I can tell you which of your checks have cleared, if that will help. “

“You don't understand, Mr. Tuck. I need that forty-five dollars or I can't buy my aunt a fruit basket. I can't fulfill the dying wish of the woman who raised me. I know this isn't your fault—you seem like such a kind man and I'm sure someone will catch the mistake in a few days—but what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Can't you credit my account now, and when the error turns up, we'll be even?”

“I can't do that, Miss Hart,” says the agent. “As much as I'd like to. I'm sure you understand. I'll be happy to print you out your balance sheet for you. It's a small amount of money. If there is a mistake, and although it is highly unlikely, I am not ruling out the possibility, I'm confident we'll clear it up soon enough. That's the best we can offer. “

Now Starshine's tears are genuine. Years of experience have taught her that any man, no matter how callous, no matter how straitlaced, will capitulate to her unremitting whimpers. She's wept her way out of traffic tickets, into rock concerts, through dozens of cab fares. Once she even sobbed a two-hundred-dollar dental bill in half. Men
always
grant carte blanche to doe eyes and bursts of anxiety. Always. So what's gone wrong? Has she grown too old to play the helpless female? Have desperate women hoodwinked Tuck one too many times before? Do the reasons really matter? Starshine makes an effort to collect herself. The moan of a distant siren resonates
through the lobby, magnifying the otherwise antiseptic silence of the credit union, warning Starshine that she ought to make a graceful exit. Her eyes plead with Turk, imploring, beseeching, but it is no use. His loyalties lie with the mousy girl in the photograph. With the two toddlers dressed in matching red frocks. It strikes Starshine suddenly, for a split second, that Hannibal Tuck is truly an upstanding individual, a divine human being, maybe the only man she has ever met who is so devoted to his homely wife and tedious job that even her tears will not move him, that he will never yield to temptation, but then she thinks of Aunt Agatha, of the old woman's disappointment, of her scorn, and Starshine wants the mousy creature's head on a platter. She is bawling again. Why is life so goddamn complicated?

Tuck is about to speak, probably to suggest that her visit is winding down, that she'd best sing her swan song and depart, when an equally stubby, thickset young man, distinguishable from Tuck only by his thick-rimmed glasses and a pronounced mole on his upper lip, pokes his head into the office. “Sorry to disturb you while you're with a customer, Tuck, but you really have to see what's going on across the street. It's a once in a lifetime. “

“Please, Bill,” her representative answers—but his doppelganger has already vanished.

Tuck apologizes profusely and excuses himself. Starshine trails him through the lobby, suddenly alive with dozens of Tuck-like men and even a few Tuck-like women, garnished with brooches and frosted highlights, all emerging from hidden doorways and freestanding cubicles like marmots surfacing from a burrow. Beyond the panoramic windows of the credit union, she sees the collage of emergency vehicles and official uniforms, the synthetic navy of police officers, the all-weather yellow of the fire department, the pristine white of the medical service. She hurries through the revolving doors. On the other side, the sirens have gone suddenly mute and, in their wake, an ominous silence has descended upon the street—the haunting stillness of shipwrecks and combat lulls—as though the eye of a category-five hurricane had momentarily settled above the decaying infrastructure of
Long Island City. Starshine follows the heads of the crowd, inspecting the upper stories of an adjacent building, the boarded-up windows, the potted geraniums on curtained sills, the vertical banner advertising discount meats, before the curiosity suddenly registers, the once-ina-lifetime, the spectacle to end all spectacles, the image that embodies every man's wildest fantasies and every woman's deepest terror. It is the gender gap, the glass ceiling, the war between the sexes. It is human sexuality and the impenetrable divide laid bare. It is a stunning young woman performing a public striptease.

The girl is perched on the fifth story ledge of a residential building, already topless, her pallid skin cutting a sharp contrast with the exposed red brick. Two of New York's bravest have scaled a nearby fire escape, but dare not advance any further. Their all-weather suits are no match for the half-naked waif as she removes her purple skirt and waves it at the crowd like a matador taunting a bull. One of the firefighters extends his hand through the rusted bars of the fire escape, and from the sidewalk it is impossible to tell whether he is reaching for the girl or the garment. Starshine backs into the granite pilasters of the credit union, wincing with each step in the girl's macabre dance, longing for the ordeal to conclude, for the girl to inch back to safety. That is the only possible finale, she promises herself. There is no other way. For Starshine loves the girl on the ledge, viscerally, impulsively, feels more for this nameless stranger than she will ever feel for Jack Bascomb or Colby Parker or even for her cherished Aunt Agatha. It is the devotion of a starling sheltering her brood, a lioness defending her cubs. Starshine loves the girl for all the reasons people love one another, for her beauty, for her vulnerability, for her own desire to protect that which is beautiful and vulnerable, but primarily because she sees herself mirrored in another human being, a girl not too much closer to the edge than she is, everyday, a girl who could easily be her. The men on the street see only an individual tragedy, private pain exposed as public psychosis. They sympathize. They pity. But they do not understand. Only the women, the stunning young girls and the faded beauties who have not yet forgotten the pressures of being
a stunning young girl, can fully comprehend the stress, the urgency, the unwanted advances, the persistent picking and pulling, the sheer madness of it all, that magnets every potential Helen toward the parapets of Troy, and that sometimes, on desperate days like today, drives women like Starshine Hart to run stark naked into the open streets. It is the path of least resistance.

The girl on the ledge has broken free of the madness. She advances inch by inch, her bare toes resting on the lip of death, and lets the skirt fall lifeless into the crowd. Then she raises one leg, her weight shifting forward, her entire frame tottering like a diver aborting a plunge, before she slips back onto the ledge, maybe intentionally, maybe inadvertently, where she folds her arms across her bare chest and shivers violently. Her fans murmur in relief, in disappointment. While the men in yellow escort the quaking girl though an open window and into her prison of prosaic madness, the spectators filter back to their berths and cubicles, giddy, soothed, yet alive with the disquiet of unfulfilled promise. The ordeal is now an anecdote to share with their mousy young wives, their colleagues on sick leave, the like-minded couples with whom they share tables at college reunions. It is an artifact, a negotiable commodity, to be bartered for tales of subway gunmen and celebrity sightings and hearsay about the latest scandal at Gracie Mansion. It is something to discuss while eyeing the centerpieces at weddings. It is another New York story and nothing more.

“Miss Hart!”

Starshine has unlocked her bicycle and walked it as far as the corner when Tuck, jostling his way through the throng, finally overtakes her. He plants his stocky form on the sidewalk in front of her, at a safe distance, his eyes downcast, and shoves his hand uncomfortably into his pocket. Starshine fears that she has committed some unpardonable transgression, that she has accidentally walked off with the banker's cufflinks or umbrella. He is a dangerous man, this Tuck. He will push her further toward the edge. But no! Is it possible? Super-agent Tuck, the curate of red tape, has reached into
his wallet and forced three twenty dollar bills into Starshine's hand. His own money, not the credit union's. He stands at the intersection for another moment, waiting, expecting, the Don't Walk sign flashing above his head, then he mutters her name one more time, the words “Miss Hart” stumbling over his tongue, and he steps past her into the crowd. The entire exchange takes less than fifteen seconds.

Starshine counts her sixty dollars and grins. She has not yet lost her magic.

Larry bids farewell to Ziggy Borasch and ambles along Broadway at the height of good cheer. He flirts with the eight Athenian maidens perched above the vaulted doors of the Bank of Tokyo, stares down the gargoyles guarding the approach to the Trinity Building, lets himself drift into the current of pedestrian traffic. The streets are a sea of herringbone suits and Harris tweeds, cordovan shoes and double-pleated slacks. Bicycle messengers navigate the throng, whistling, cursing, risking life and limb, speeding their enigmatic missives and secured parcels from the Stock Exchange to the Reserve Bank. Droves of office boys and secretaries on summer hours picnic on the Trinity churchyard, laughing, bantering, discarding plastic forks and aluminum tins before Alexander Hamilton's faded headstone. Red-eyed analysts swagger in the resplendence of their pinstripes. Everywhere surges the exhilaration of late morning, the scramble, the blitz, the frenetic maelstrom of unfilled orders and unfilled promises, the hailing of taxis, the quoting of prices, the leveraging of empires and the placement of lunch reservations and the determined trampling of the morning's ticker-tape that precedes the great tsunami, noon, when for a fleeting instant the city takes stock of itself, cataloging what has been accomplished and what may still be accomplished. Possibility is ubiquitous. Although Larry has walked down this very stretch of Broadway every Wednesday for three years, past the Smithsonian annex and onto the bowling green, this morning he feels he is experiencing
mankind for the first time, living the pulse, sensing the throb, taking in the sublime grandeur of the city's beat. The pianist's forecast of “Good morning, Starshine,” echoes in his ears.