Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-six

By the time I crossed Park and Madison, retracing the tiger’s park-ward pilgrimage of the night before, the city had accustomed itself, struggled to a half-life, snow dredged right and left, most parked cars only sculpture. The four o’clock sun was already in submission to the high wintry haze over the Hudson, the light feeble, and when I found myself at the foot of the mountainous museum, the park behind made a dark screen only relieved by a pale-blue snowy band, bright filling in an ominous sandwich of night. The Metropolitan, though mostly uninhabited, was open for business as usual, collecting its imperial “suggested donation” and handing out its little tin badges of entry, the whole engine not so much resolute as indomitable or blithe. The great building housing the art museum was an island city itself, or a virtual universe or space module, operating according to its own necessities, perhaps with its own mayor, and it wasn’t hard to picture it plunging onward unchanged though the surrounding city might be in ruins, as Perkus Tooth had imagined New Jersey or Staten Island already to be. Treasures lived in these vaults never seen except by curatorial guildsmen; a given human form drifting beneath these monumental ceilings was of no consequence to the larger story of the building as it pushed through time.

I knew my way through the echoing maze to the Asian galleries, and within them, to the Chinese Garden Court, though I couldn’t say whether I’d passed this way a handful of times or hundreds, whether last week or not in years. (What I couldn’t remember could fill a book, one written by a ghostwriter.) The court had a smell, one I’d just now previewed in Sledge’s pot factory, of controlled indoor growth. The museum’s internal weather, its vast thermostatic lungs, carried this scent along the neighboring corridors, and if I’d been lost I might have followed it to the place where Oona waited, in the shadow of the teak bower and slate-shingle roof, looking down onto the tiny curved bridge and the arranged rock garden, all the marvelous stuff that had been shipped here and re-created with such immaculate fakery. I wasn’t lost. My footsteps were full of intent, of personal purpose. What made a better model of free will than a walker in the city? I could have gone anywhere, even hailed a taxicab and asked to be taken across one of the bridges, or through the Lincoln Tunnel, to call Perkus’s bluff.

But I was tired of models, even ones as cute and complete as the Chinese Garden Court. I didn’t want to model free will, I wanted to embody it. What I’d learned was that I didn’t. Even if every worst suspicion Perkus had urged on me was untrue (they couldn’t all be), I’d been forced to understand I was an actor in a script. As according to my long training, in my only avocation. And I was a less-out-of-work actor than I’d believed. Those obnoxious young producers I’d lunched with had enlisted me in the role of my lifetime, after all. I was wrong to think their script had never arrived. I’d obviously memorized my part so well that I could lose myself inside it, forget it was a script, live it as my own life. I was the ultimate Method actor, better than Brando-or as bad, I suppose, as any performer on Jerry Springer who, having agreed to pretend to be defiantly astounded by some cartoon version of their life, then feels the emotions surge in him for real when the red light blinks on and the studio audience begins hooting. My script’s updates arrived periodically in The New York Times in the form of Janice’s letters, and all of Manhattan was my studio audience.

I wanted to think I was here to enact free will at last, as I came to where Oona stood at the railing, overlooking the lily pads and bamboo in the court’s shallow waters. So far, so good: my footsteps had carried me all this way into the museum, the blocking quite perfect, but when it came time to speak I found my lines were missing. Then I recalled I’d been supplied with my line the night before, in the hospital waiting room.

“Perkus told me a riddle, but he wouldn’t give me the answer,” I said.

“Shoot,” said Oona. She raised her hands to make a little mime show of it, surrendering to my nonexistent weapon.

“Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet?”

“Oh, sure,” said Oona, not meeting my eye. “She fucked the writer.”

“Ah.”

“Everyone knows that one.”

“Maybe in your circle,” I said defensively. It would be as near as I’d come to saying to her that I couldn’t try to live anymore inside her boundary, her circle, or glancing against it, as I mostly had been-that with Perkus’s release from his hiccups, and having read and reread the last weakening report from Janice Trumbull, those words Oona could only risk letting me hear through her forlorn devices, I now found myself also released, into a different life, however unknown. Post-Oona, post-Janice, now that I knew the two were one and the same.

“Chase, please don’t leave me.”

“I wasn’t ever really with you,” I said, unable to hold the bitterness from my voice. “I’m engaged to be married, you know that as well as anyone.”

“Forgive me, Chase. I wanted to make you love me both ways.”

“Both ways?”

“Janice… and Oona.” She barely got it out. Her voice was frail, not in the old brittle manner of cracks showing in a façade, but molten, her throat full of tears. And how sad that she put herself second. I think I’d never heard her say her name aloud before, Oona, and it sounded to me now like a fading pulse, a formless thing half swallowed in doubt, the double O’s like a pair of dice that had miraculously come up twice zero. If you wanted to love two ways you had to be prepared to lose two ways, I suppose.

If at the very last moment I’d become my own director, I couldn’t think of an instruction for this scene, other than cut. Then I found a stray Perkus witticism I could use. “Two fakes don’t make a real, Oona.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Or three,” I corrected. “I think we’re three fakes, thanks to you. In fact, Janice might be the realest of the three of us.”

Oona fell silent. I’d attained that much, if it was anything to be proud of. I was ready to leave her there, in her precious Chinese Garden Court, yet I couldn’t quite move. We stood in silence, then Oona freed the long-hidden glasses from her purse and showed her true face-I suppose she did it simply because she wanted to see mine, and I’d always been a bit blurry. (The story of my life.) We couldn’t bear the look between us for long, however, and bowed our gazes to the pond instead. A black goldfish meandered there, in and out of rocks directly beneath our feet, and when it wriggled through Oona’s reflection and mine, rippling the tender screen that bore our doubles, Oona turned her head slightly and one hinged corner of the heavy black glasses frames seemed to squirt free for an instant, wholly separate from the glasses or from Oona’s outline, a thing born, tadpole or guppy, and wanting its own life.