Great Jones Street

24

Her name came back to me the moment before he spoke it. He opened a bottle of warm champagne and we gathered together, at angles of caricatured intimacy, huddled all three in the room's lone dollop of sunlight. Globke passed out the drinks in paper cups he had brought along, suspecting unsanitary conditions in the native glassware. Seated in my bowl-shaped chair, knees above my belly, I drank to the health of the mountain tapes.

"Bucky, you remember Michelle."

"Definitely."

"You had dinner with us over at our place about a year ago, right after we just moved in."

"I remember."

"We had roast leg of lamb and two kinds of wine. Michelle made those fantastic Hindu vegetable things she makes. We listened to highlights from Madame Butterfly. We sipped our wine in the candlelight."

"I remember," I said.

"Then we sat on the upper terrace and talked about the uses of money. Then we talked about greed. Then we talked about the misuses of money. Then we had tea and that gummy dessert-shit I hate so much. Then I called a limousine to take you to the airport So anyway here she is. My young wife. Wife, mother, lover, colleague, friend. You remember Michelle."

"Sure," I said.

"Don't touch her," Globke said.

"I won't."

"It makes me nervous when she gets touched. See, oldness and fatness. See that? See what it does? Makes me a figure of fun. But I'm not succumbing without a fight. I'm pushing on ahead. I'm double-clutching through middle age. You should have seen me when I got my hands on the tapes. I was all action. My voice crackled with authority. I rounded up personnel, made plans, gave instructions. Then I put the tapes in my Pan Am flight bag and flew off in the night to Cincinnati, where I called you from. Combination studio-warehouse-record plant. Small but big enough. Known to few. A place where for years they recorded marching bands and high school chorales. Cincinnati. Queen city of the early West. All technical work on the tapes plus final pressing being done there. Call it unfounded fear but I was afraid to take that material anywhere else. Too much chance of sabotage. Material that there's no way to duplicate can't be handled like a job-lot product. We drink to the mountain tapes. The mountain tapes. Keep them safe, God of my fathers, until the record's in the racks."

"When do I leave?"

"We drink to the tour now. The tour. Day after tomorrow, Bucky. Zap, you're gone. Drink up, everybody.

It's all set. Day after tomorrow. We inaugurate the greatest record promotion in history. In fact I'm leaking word about the mountain tapes starting today. Tomorrow I begin co-opting the rumors behind the reason for your comeback. You've got an incurable disease. One year to live. You want to spend it with your fans."

"Other rumors are bound to arise."

"Will they compare?"

"I guess not," I said.

"For sheer bad taste, will they compare? Will they even come close? I appropriate all other potential rumors. I sponge them up. They belong to me by divine right of bad taste. I come out of a tradition, Bucky. I'm not new money, new culture, new consciousness. I emerge from a distinct tradition. Bad taste. Michelle softens the edges of it but nothing can kill it completely. It's there to stay and I'm proud and delighted. The dynamics of bad taste is something they should investigate with a research grant. A fantastic subject. My whole life is a study in bad taste. Bad taste is the foundation for every success I've ever had. I'm a self-made mogul in an industry that abounds in bad taste. Look at me. Mogul is written all over me. How did I get there? Aggressiveness got me there. Massive double-dealing. Loudmouthedness. Insults beyond belief. Little white lies. Farts and belches. Betraying a friend and then bragging about it. These are the things that give you stature in the industry. Not just respect or clout or notability. Stature. It's not enough to betray a friend. That gives you respect at the very most. You have to supply the extra touch. You betray a friend and then you brag about it. That's star quality. That gives you stature. Do you know what I have on top of bad taste?

I have self-starting entrepreneurial instincts. The combination is unbeatable."

"I like your suit," I said.

"Chemical-stretch three-piece herringbone. Factory outlet. Clifton, New Jersey. Twenty per cent less than wholesale."

"Quietly assertive."

"I sold the movie rights for two hundred thousand."

"To your suit?"

"It goes before the cameras in late summer."

"You're in a good mood," I said.

"Do you know what this suit has that other suits don't have? Want me to tell you?"

"Go ahead."

"Star quality," he said. "This suit has star quality."

"You're really happy, aren't you? You're all puffed up with it. Action. You can't wait to send me off."

"But this isn't my favorite suit. Far from it. My favorite suit is the suit I bought at Simon Ackerman in the Bronx in nineteen hundred and fifty-four. Revolving credit was just starting then. And I'll tell you a funny thing if you want to hear a funny thing. That suit didn't fit me then but it fits me now. That suit did not fit me in nineteen fifty-four. You should see it now. But what they should do, they should date suits the way they date automobiles or fine wines. You could say I got a nineteen fifty-four Simon Ackerman. Shoulder fins and fully pleated. I got a nineteen sixty-eight Klein's basement. Forty-four dollars, wear it off the rack, turns purple when it rains. But you should see that suit now. Tell him, Michelle. Is it a fit or isn't it? Am I exaggerating or not? Are we here or aren't we?"

"Seen Hanes lately?" I said.

"Hanes is back at work. Hanes? He's back at work. Why do you ask, Bucky?"

"No reason."

"We power our way up the charts," Globke said. "We reach the break-even point. We determine our allocations. We gross and outgross. We work out test cities versus chart cities. We refill the record racks. We confer with our senior people. We climb and-grab. We yell over the telephone. We sell and outsell. We display perpetual bad taste."

"The epics teach us that all work is equal to all other work," Michelle said. "Once we have freed ourselves of fear and desire, no act we perform is more important than the act that precedes it or the act that follows. Non-attachment is the path to beyond-reality. Beyond-reality is where our true nature indwells. The body is an illusion. The epics teach us that men cannot leap across time to the eye of the absolute. Men must proceed in stages across many boundaries. Free of fear and desire, we find our true nature. Good. Goodness. God. Godhead. Evil is nothing more than attachment. Evil is attachment."

"Evil is movement toward void," I said.

"One and the same," she said.

Before they departed she came to my chair and put her lips to my left temple. She had the kind of face that allows love or pain to rise immediately to the surface, unshrouded face usually belonging to older women, those who've forgotten what must be shielded and what disclosed. What now she revealed was not a longing for me but rather a need for what she took to be my suffering. In her eyes and warm lips was the wish to be burdened, to take whatever I could not bear. Globke waited at the door, oddly deferential to the moment's solemnity. He held the empty champagne bottle under his arm, a souvenir (he'd said) of the day of my second birth.

That evening I sat by the window, imagining tiny men in black booties scampering out of the firehouse, the house itself on fire, flames leaping and smoke pouring, the little men skipping about in glee, men in booties and stunted red helmets, men with bushy eyebrows, tiny men all in a circle holding hands.