Chronic City

CHAPTER Ten

Then came the weird pervasive chocolate smell that floated like a cloud over Manhattan. At first you thought it was local, you’d passed an unseen bakery, smelled something wafting, chocolate-sweet, stirring cravings and memories both. You’d scan the area, find nothing, continue on, but the smell was with you everywhere, with you in your apartment, too, though the windows were tight. On the street again, you’d see others glancing up, sniffing air, bemused. And soon confirming: yes, they smelled the same thing. It had been downtown, too, someone said, quite nervously. Another said even in the subway. Lexington Avenue sidewalks, normally muffled in regular hostility, broke out suddenly in Willy Wonka comparisons, one passerby saying, I thought of a sundae, another replying, No, syrup on crepes. Or, a tad melancholy: I haven’t wanted ice cream like this in forty years. Someone said that the mayor had already given a statement, enigmatically terse, maybe hiding something. The chocolate cloud tugged Manhattan’s mind in two directions, recalling inevitably the gray fog that had descended or some said been unleashed on the lower part of the island, two or three years ago, and that had yet to release its doomy grip on that zone. Theories floated in the sweetened breeze, yet no investigation could pin a source for the odor. And yet the scent was chocolate, ultimately yummy and silly. It brought merry chocolate comparisons out of everyone remarking on it. The mayor’s comment, when you heard it repeated on the news, included as fine a joke as had ever crossed those forbidding lips: he’d called it the sweet smell of success.

The chocolate weather came, too, as a moment of relief in a strange, hunkered, hungover time, winter killing. We’d already woken one November morning to the first snow, an overnight inch that glazed every sidewalk and windshield, all the twenty-four-hour markets hurrying to raise plastic tents around their outdoor goods, the citrus and bouquets, the rest of us digging in hallway-closet-floor shopping bags for last winter’s gloves and scarves, or else shelling out for on-the-spot sidewalk-stand purchases of same, abandoning hope that the portents of warming were real enough, this year, to thwart this local early-onset frost. No such luck, the wind slapped around the tall corners, tilting citizens into stoic silence under daylight’s hastening exit. On the amok calendar’s wheel Manhattan found itself damned again to holidays and influenza. So a chocolate mystery reminded us that we all dwelled in Candyland, after all. It was a news item the exact size of our childish wishes: So much for the deliberate terrors advancing on our shores, let alone our complicity with any wider darkness. We were, it turned out, a whole island of crimeless victims, survivors of nothing worse than a cream pie in the face, which, hey, tasted pretty good!

Perkus and Richard and I avoided one another for a week or so after our night of frenzied losses, but I called Perkus on the third morning of the chocolate benediction over the city. That day I was demented with guilty grief, for Janice Trumbull’s cancer was the lead feature on all the tabloids, and qualified to run above the fold in the Times, at least the War Free copy I’d happened to find abandoned at Savoir Faire, and read over my breakfast cappuccino (which the pervasive scent kept tricking me into thinking was mocha, a beverage I hated). I rang Perkus’s phone at one thirty, late enough, I hoped, not to wake him no matter how late he’d been up or what he’d been up late doing-I didn’t plan to guess at any possibilities. I was counting on Perkus to divert me from Janice’s story, and if I had to tread softly around his own tendernesses, I was willing. Certain words I’d censor. Perkus groaned, though, as if I’d roused him from murky dreams of that item I swore to leave unmentioned. Or else was marooned in his old land of sawdust and sighs, a cluster headache. But he didn’t complain, and I didn’t ask. He didn’t invite me up, either, instead suggesting we meet for a Jackson Hole burger at three.

I slid into the booth, Perkus already there, nattily dressed, hair damped down, face shaved, putting on a good face in a setting he so often treated like an adjunct of his own kitchen, feeling free to lurch in red-eyed, hair like straw. At that hour the restaurant was empty, and the waitress, a zaftig girl with a funny combination of bangs and retro cat-woman glasses topping her sweet bored expression, scurried right over. Perkus raised his finger to preempt her asking, and said, “Two cheeseburgers, deluxe, cheddar, medium-rare. You want a Coke, Chase?”

“Sure.”

“Two Cokes.”

She obediently scribbled and departed, not speaking a word. Perkus’s air was of command and distraction, and I hadn’t wished to interfere, but it was a perverse choice for me to join him in one of those mammoth burgers, let alone the slag of fries that came with a deluxe, at this hour on this particular day. In only three more hours I was to be treated to dinner at the restaurant of Le Parker Meridien, a privilege I’d have done nearly anything to wriggle free of. My presence for an evening, or at least the duration of an elegant dinner, had been auctioned off as a premium, at a benefit for one of Maud Woodrow’s charities, I couldn’t anymore recall which. The night of the auction I’d sat in a ballroom with Maud, at a table with Damien Hirst and Bono and Andrew Wylie, a champagne night, spirits frivolous and self-congratulatory, the named celebrities mostly bidding on and winning one another’s offerings, whether fifty-thousand-dollar artworks or the promise of a mention in a song or a film. The whole absurd ritual seemed an excuse for the names on the benefit committee to impress one another with largesse, and I’d believed to the last instant that Maud intended to spare me, to win the dinner with me herself, but, cruelly, she hadn’t. I’d gone instead, at the price of fifty thousand, to the Danzigs, Arjuna and Rossmoor, names unknown to me yet reputedly iconic on the social register, names denoting not accomplishments nor even celebrity but rather stewardship of the oldest money, wealth like sacraments, wealth to make Hirst’s, and Bono’s, even Maud Woodrow’s, look silly. The Danzigs, I heard explained, had a staff of two hundred. Staff doing what? I was foolish enough to ask. Staff just keeping things running, was the vague reply. Hiring and firing itself, training new operatives, the several layers between the Danzigs and the world. The Danzigs’ money was a kind of nation unto itself.

(That I’d been an item sold at auction, like the chaldrons, only now struck me.)

This was six months earlier, and ever since then I’d been in denial that the dinner in question would actually need to be enacted. How could the lordly Danzigs really care to make an evening’s worth of small talk with the child star, the astronaut’s beau? Wasn’t the point just to win the auction? But no, they were eager. One member of their two hundred, their chief social secretary, I suppose, had contacted me, a few days before, to confirm the dinner reservation. The stupid day had come at last. Even worse, the news of Janice’s cancer would surely have reached the Danzigs-they’d likely been briefed over breakfast-ensuring cloying sympathies, over sorrows I didn’t relish elaborating. I could, at least, arrive hungry. It would be a little peculiar to down a half-pound fist of ground beef as an appetizer. Anyway, the chocolate odor was very much with me, even as I’d stepped inside this emporium of greasy smells, not much of a complement.

Perkus didn’t mention it. He spent a while squinting and shaking his head, even beat on his temple once with the base of his palm. His rude eye careened after our waitress, but she’d gone into the kitchen. I wondered again, had Perkus been dragged down into cluster? Anyway, had I been summoned here for a reason? (I was eliding the fact that I’d called him.) I’d been relieved, I thought, to find Perkus not on a mission, myself not a conscript. Yet perhaps his urgency was addictive, and I felt its absence now. My annoyance mingled in a sorry anticipation of dinner with the Danzigs.

“Do you smell it?” I asked finally.

“Smell what? Our meal?”

“Do you have a headache, Perkus?” Maybe his sinuses were blocked.

“No.”

“There’s a chocolate smell everywhere in the city right now. Has been for days. You must have noticed.”

“Oh, that,” he said, smirking unhappily. “I guess I have heard it described that way, but no, I don’t smell any chocolate. For me it’s coming in more as a kind of high-pitched whining sound.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said, Chase. For you it’s a chocolate smell, for me, a ringing in my ears. On and off for three days now. Can we just forget about it, please? It kept me up practically all night last night.”

“But nobody’s talking about any sounds,” I protested. “Everybody’s smelling something sweet, either maple or chocolate…” I fished the folded-up section of the Times, still in my trench-coat pocket. “It’s all over the papers…”

Our waitress had arrived, to plant tall Cokes on the mats before us. “You smell it, too?” she said brightly. She leaned in, smiling at us in turn as she whispered, “It’s kind of making me sick, actually.”

Perkus squirmed in his seat, crossed his arms tightly, and cinched one knee over the other, knotting himself. “Thank you,” he said painfully, staring at the Coke.

“Sure… your burgers will be right out.”

“Cheeseburgers.”

“Oh, sure. Don’t worry, I wrote it down right, Perkus.”

He waved her off, and pulled the newspaper section toward him across the booth’s countertop, tracking the headlines with his good eye, the other uncooperating.

“You know her,” I said wonderingly. For my own part, I couldn’t have said whether she was the waitress we always had here or I’d never seen her before. The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.

“Sure, yeah.”

“You like her.” I understood it as I said it.

“Whatever.”

“No, really, Perkus. Is she-do you want to ask her out? On a date?” I enjoyed at least glimpsing his taste. The waitress, in her funny glasses and skirt, made a charming target of Perkus’s nerve-wracked attentions. She was womanly enough, if he scored, to snap his spindly femurs like a panda browsing in bamboo.

“Lower your voice.”

“Is that why we come here so much?”

He sneered. “I’ve been coming here a long time, Chase.”

“Speaking of long times, when did you last have a girlfriend?”

He tried to ignore me, stuck to the paper. “So, let’s see about this chocolate odor of yours-”

“No, really, how long?”

He looked up now. “I’m serious, Chase, shut up. It’s so easy for you, you don’t have any idea-” He almost hissed. “I don’t want to talk about it here.”

I showed both palms in surrender. “Okay.”

“And don’t you talk to her.”

“Okay.”

I smoothed my expression, but beneath that mask I marveled at the whole thing: How frustrated was he? I thought of something Oona had said, just a few nights ago, when while suspended in her slippery limbs in some kind of interlude or afterglow I’d mentioned how Richard Abneg and the Hawkman had been so grabby, so febrile in their formal dress, that evening in Perkus’s rooms. “My theory is you can never overestimate how much sex the people having sex are having,” Oona said. “Or how little sex the people not having sex are having.” “The rich getting richer?” I suggested and she’d said, “Yes, and the healthy, healthier.” Then I’d said, “And the-” and she’d put her finger to my lips.

So, how frustrated? Was the Jackson Hole waitress a slow-cooking crush, or only something flitting across his distractible radar? She looked approachable, but I wondered if Perkus knew how to get from here to there. Then I thought of his zany corralling of me, outside the Criterion offices: Perkus knew how to come on. Unless it was that he only knew how to come on to a sort of boyfriend, a gormless disciple like I’d turned out to be. So did that make Perkus gay? I didn’t think so. What hints I knew didn’t make him anything.

Perkus had been flipping the newspaper’s front section over and over again, passing, I assumed, from the chocolate-smell story to the news of Janice’s diagnosis, his forehead in a scowl, his lips a determined line. Now he pinned some item with his finger, and looked up. That I’d be made to rehearse the spacewoman’s tragedy for Perkus was exhausting, though not as dreadful as contemplating that subject tonight, with the Danzigs. But as it turned out that wasn’t the item Perkus had in mind. He rotated the paper to my view. A front-page photograph I’d glossed over showed a polar bear atop a largely melted-away chunk of glacial ice, drifting in a calm open sea, its muzzle raised to howl or bellow at the photographer, who from the picture’s angle must have been cruising past on a cutter’s deck, or leaning out of a low-zooming helicopter’s window. The photograph was cute until you contemplated it. The scribble of ice on which the bear perched was pocked, Swiss-cheesed with melting, the sea all around endless. The bear already looked a little starved. Judging from that ice, it might not have time to starve completely. The War Free edition really depended on how you defined war.

“You see that?” Perkus fingered it again so I wouldn’t fail to understand. “I am that polar bear.”

I just looked.

“That bear is me, Chase.”

His deadpan look, with even his AWOL eye attendant, defied interrogation. The polar bear was another of Perkus’s concerted enigmas: Was this about a doomed species, or was he trying to say that the bear on ice allegorized the existential condition of one such as he-one who, when all others detected an enticing aroma of chocolate, heard instead a high ringing sound? Or was the bear just a description of his dating life, a rebus reply to my question? Here’s my distance from my last girlfriend, and from the prospect of my next, he might be saying. As distant as that stranded bear is from the solace of another bear. Then I recalled Perkus’s nebulous rage at Richard Abneg, when we last discussed Marlon Brando: What makes you the authority on who’s inhabiting what island?

Or was I overthinking? Had Perkus simply awoken, in his usual fierce sudden way, to the plight of bears adrift on ice? Now I would have given anything to hear him talking about Brando or Mailer, Echolalia or Recalcitrant Women, the invisible black iron prison of our perceptual daydream, or the difference between epiphany and ellipsis, between Chet Baker and a Gnuppet with a trumpet. It was as though I was being punished for each and every time I’d tried redirecting him into a healthier obsession. The only thing less cultural than that ceramic-whose-name-I-did-not-wish-to-pronounce was an arctic bear. I tried to picture Perkus volunteering on some Greenpeace ship, scrubbing tar off a penguin. It was pretty much like wishing he was another person entirely, or dead.

So what did my dull Occam’s razor do with the conundrum? I decided my friend needed to get his ashes hauled. A dilemma suiting my own strengths, for once. I could play the tutor, even if I’d have to keep the lessons subliminal to the student. I vowed to set Perkus up. And where better to start than with the large perky waitress whose hipster glasses frames seemed a confession of her susceptibility to nerd celebrities, even shopworn ones like Perkus Tooth. She already knew his name, which had to mean something good. When she arrived with our deluxes I took them from her myself and set them at our places, and said, “What’s your name?”

She seemed to know more than his name, knew to glance at Perkus for a kind of permission to speak. He looked sourly into his plate, x-raying his fries, and so she stumbled answering, “I, I’m Lindsay.”

“There’s nobody here,” I pointed out. “You can talk to us for a minute-” I knew how much Perkus wanted me to stop. It was the same amount that it was impossible for me to stop. My project had become compulsive, my premise self-confirming. The more Perkus twitched and recoiled the more he proved his need of an erotic ambassador. “We’re harmless, Lindsay, don’t worry.”

“Oh… sure…” Lindsay was a little confused.

“How old are you?” I asked her. I gestured at the empty space in the booth beside Perkus, but she didn’t dare. “Have you ever seen a Montgomery Clift movie?”

She brightened. “I saw The Misfits!”

You’re seeing them now, I wanted to tell her. We’re hoping to enlist you into their company. Instead I said, “Did you know Montgomery Clift was buried in Prospect Park?”

“Can you bring some mustard?” said Perkus stonily.

“Oh, right, you always have mustard, sorry!” Off Lindsay scurried to find some. I suddenly imagined what it might have been like for Oona Laszlo, in her glue-girl phase, apprenticed to a little tin god of guerrilla criticism, one not yet tempered by a decade of broadsider’s block. Even tempered he was obnoxious.

“Hey, Colonel Mustard,” I whispered. “You’ve really got her dodging bullets. Lighten up.”

Perkus only gritted his teeth at me, a cartoon of impotent rage. Lindsay returned with a ramekin of yellow mustard, and then gamely ignored the rotten vibes, which were as undeniable between us as the chocolate smell (unless, that is, you were immune to chocolate smells). “You’re… Chase Unperson, aren’t you?”

“Insteadman, yes, that’s me.”

“Sorry-Insteadman.” Lindsay slapped her forehead. She was shaping into one of the all-time apologizers. Perkus, meanwhile, was having a kind of fit. It was lucky his mouth wasn’t full, or bits of beef and bun would have flumed through his nose. “Un-person,” he sneezed in bitter hilarity. “Chase Unperson!” He still hadn’t looked at Lindsay directly, or what would pass for directly in his ambidextrous gaze.

“Funny,” I said, trying to absorb and neutralize Perkus’s hostility. Lindsay, I could see, was only going to take anything in the air between me and Perkus as her fault. Too late. The default deference in her role as waitress, given the obvious distress in Perkus, would prevail. She shrunk away, giving me a funny helpless smile. Perkus and I were left to the travesty of our steaming mounds of food, spoiled under clouds of chocolate and ill manners, spoiled, really, under Perkus’s outright and indignant fury. It helped nothing that we’d been there, in our regular booth with our regular order, so often before. Hemmed in by ghosts of our more innocently garrulous selves, the days of the discovery of our friendship, early September, felt like years ago now. We gnawed the cheeseburgers despondently, under the regime of all we couldn’t say.

I looked on Perkus, for the first time, as a creature formed of anger. That was how I’d characterized Richard Abneg to myself, but I’d reserved the judgment for Richard, blinding myself to the essence the two had in common. In truth, there was anger enough to go around. I knew I should ask myself (Strabo Blandiana, in one of his post-needle talks, would have gently insisted I do so) why I made my world out of these kind of persons. Who else struck me as angry in my vicinity just lately? Oona Laszlo, with her acid flippancy. I ached for her. We’d planned to meet up after my dinner with the Danzigs-Oona liked to be more accidental, but I’d persuaded her to be my reward for getting through the evening.

Lindsay surprised me. As she set down our check-Perkus had signaled to her for it even as he wolfed the last bite of his burger, and I’d only unpacked and rearranged my own-she said, “If you guys want to party sometime-”

“Oh-” I began.

She tucked one of the restaurant’s cards under my place mat. “Here’s my number. Or just, you know, look for me here.” I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. She was a waitress, after all, on a fading afternoon, and, in the Of Human Bondage way of waitresses, she’d grab any ticket out.

Perkus slapped down a twenty, really slapping the table, punctuation to his mute wrath. Lindsay and I both looked up shocked. “Pack up his burger to go,” said Perkus tightly.

“Oh, that’s okay-” I began.

“For Biller.”

“Oh.”

On the sidewalk, Perkus turned from me, his gloveless knuckles buried in the pockets of his suit, almost, it appeared to his knees, the white sack containing my leftovers tucked into his elbow. The chocolate wind howled, the early winter still so fierce, the sky darkening at four. I drifted after him, trying to demonstrate we were together on the sidewalk. He muttered, “You’re something, Chase, you’re really something.”

“It’s better than not even trying, Perkus. She wants to ‘party’ with us. Who knows?”

“She thought you wanted her, Chase.”

“No, no.” I shook my head, but he didn’t see it, pressing on ahead toward the corner of Eighty-fourth, toward his building. I didn’t really want to keep him outside without a coat for long, but I hurried after. “She could tell you liked her, Perkus, anybody knows that a friend often plays the go-between-”

“Anybody knows nothing, Chase. You don’t see yourself, you don’t see the way women cast their eyeballs at you like a kid shooting marbles on the sidewalk.”

At least I’d sparked some irate brilliance in him, I thought, instead of the moribund bovine cheeseburger-chewer he’d been inside Jackson Hole. Perkus couldn’t be so intimidated by his waitress, it didn’t seem possible.

“You’ve got women falling out of open windows, out of trees, you’ve got women on the moon, Chase. You don’t have any idea how it might be different for me. You actor, you utter unperson.”

“Now, that’s not-”

“How can you fail to see your hostility toward me? I mean, Montgomery Clift? Please.”

Hostility? I’d been thinking I’d just uncovered Perkus’s. Would I always be just one insight away? Insight was an onion, I doubted there was anything but layers.

“I’ve been trying to help you,” Perkus said. “And this is the way you repay me. Well, you’re a hopeless case anyhow. I wash my hands.”

Perkus helping me! At least I understood that everything was inside out and upside down. Rather than argue with him like a couple going through a breakup on the street, I elected to silently agree. I was a hopeless case.

“Do you ever look in the mirror, Chase?”

“Sure,” was my idiot reply.

“How convenient that you’d mention Montgomery Clift to her. You resemble Clift, you know. Before the accident.”

Perkus somehow managed to make this seem a warning, or even a threat. In his view every Clift, I suppose, was scheduled for a face-rearranging encounter with a windshield or dashboard. There being no happy medium between innocence and jaw-smashing, ruinous disenchantment. Now I felt my own hostility around me like a burred skin. Also I tried on my despair. For Perkus, I was cast permanently as fool. Maybe I was one, I’d had to consider it before. Yet I’d always preferred to think I was a harmless fool, at least. Who knows, maybe I’d been lasciviously poaching on my friend’s burger waitress. I might be that irresponsible, it seemed to me now. In point of fact I was reeling, rudderless, without a compass, high on phantom chocolate and infidelity, ignoring the phone, voice mail piling up, in deranged avoidance of the Janice cancer crisis. I ought to be stifling tears at a press conference somewhere, giving evidence of my loving support in this crisis. Perkus was surely right to be mad. I must be acting out.

We stood at his entrance, in a penumbra of stubbed butts from the previous night’s sidewalk smokers. A single half-full martini glass stood perched on the curb. Inside, a tuner was refurbishing Brandy’s piano, the plinked notes groaning sharper as he tightened its bolts. I offered Perkus the card on which Lindsay had scribbled her digits. He didn’t budge hands from pockets, only glared. He wouldn’t even go for his key until I was safely away, and so we hovered in stalemate, me in a coat and scarf, Perkus shivering in his suit jacket, its two buttons pathetically done up, covering nothing. The white sack containing my burger-Biller’s burger-rustled in the crook of his arm.

“See you later,” Perkus said at last.

I nodded at that sack, making small talk. “So how is old Biller, in this cold?”

“He’s fine.”

“He could always build a bonfire out of your books,” I joked.

“Actually, I think Biller got a bed in a rooming house,” said Perkus, with a dryness evidently restraining sarcasm. “He’s not selling books on the street anymore, he got a job on the Internet.”

“I’ve seen him at his computer. He looked like a real wizard.”

“When was that?” he said, scowling. Our fight wasn’t over. I was still under suspicion of all sorts of skulduggery-rustling waitresses might be the least of it.

“Some night,” I said, not wanting to specify. “Outside, in your little alley.”

I saw I’d only fueled his suspicions. Yet I also saw him shiver. Though I wore a coat, I too felt the wind ripping at me. Actually, I felt horrendous, like I wanted to lie down.

“Don’t you have anywhere to be, Chase?”

“Not for a couple of hours.” I might as well have begged for an invitation inside.

“Then go home,” he said acidly.

“Of course, sure, hey, uh, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

“Nothing, out of respect for Sacheen Littlefeather.” He abruptly pulled out his keys and went through the door, taking my cheeseburger with him.