Chronic City

CHAPTER Two

Perkus Tooth was right. I may as well acknowledge I function as an ornament to dinner parties. There’s something pleasant about me. I skate on frictionless ball bearings of charm, convey a middling charisma that threatens no one. As a retired actor I evoke the arts, yet feature no unsettling aura of disgruntlement, striving, or need. Anyone can grasp in a single word-residuals-where my money comes from and that I have enough of it. People with money don’t want to wonder, in their private evenings, whether their artist friends have enough (or worse, be certain they don’t have). It was during one of these evenings at their most typical, swirling with faces I’d forget the morning after, that I came to be introduced to Richard Abneg.

Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s duplex apartment took the disconcerting form of a small town house that had sidled against a representative Park Avenue monolith of an apartment building and been absorbed and concealed there. Entering through the lobby after having passed the doorman’s muster, a visitor veered left, shunning the burnished, inlaid-rosewood elevators leading to the ten-million-dollar apartments, up a small interior stoop, six marble steps narrowing to an ornate doorway, to be greeted inside by another, finer, more scrupulous and savvy doorman, the Woodrows’ alone, who spoke the name of any guest before it was given, even at a first visit. This house-within-a-building functioned to enunciate to dwellers in those apartments, elevator-sloggers who imagined they’d come to one of life’s high stations, your indoors is our outdoors, that’s the exponential degree between us. Distinction from merely heedless wealth was tough to obtain on Park, but the Woodrows had purchased some. If it took a surrealist flourish to do so, fair enough. Inside, there was nothing to say the Woodrow dwelling wasn’t some stupendous and historical town house, now widened to modern style, walls layered with black-framed photography and paintings as crisp as photographs, behind dustless glass, and with a curving interior stairwell as much a proscenium for entrances as that in The Magnificent Ambersons. Yet their home was invisible to the street. It had nothing to enunciate to the street.

A certain script pertained. I wouldn’t speak of my astro-fiancée, off trapped behind her thin steel-and-tile skin against the unfathomable keening void, during cocktails. No, I should reserve the material. There would come a point in the dinner, after some fun had been had, candles burned two-thirds down, glasses just refilled, when someone to my right or left would inquire and as if by previous agreement other talk would fall off, so the whole table could listen as one to my sad tale. Janice Trumbull’s drama, to which I was attached, wasn’t going to go unmentioned, and it was hardly secret-they’d after all been following her fate in the papers. So with earnest concern in their hearts, the guests would lean in unashamed to hear what I knew, the “real story,” maybe. And to moo sympathy, like the approval an audience shows a poetry reading.

Cocktails were for smaller talk. Eight or nine of us mingled in that plush drawing room, counting Maud and Thatcher, our hosts, while their staff wove amid us, harvesting drink orders and sowing canapés. Naomi Kandel, the lesbian galleryist, tipped her glass in salute when I came in, and I drifted in her direction. Stout and handsome in her evening dress, eyes drowsy with congenital irony, Naomi bore the promise of deadpan commiseration here. Though we’d all chosen to accept this invitation, we had to make ourselves feel better about the decision by imagining ourselves enslaved. Naomi stood with another woman, a curvaceous, fortyish socialite in a sparkling ginger-threaded dress. Together they stood regarding a framed drawing, perhaps a new art acquisition of the Woodrows’, a crisp architectural-style rendering of a dark pit that plunged between two Manhattan office towers, viewed from above. Tiny figures were also represented, gazing into the pit’s depths from the sidewalk.

“Do you know Sharon?” asked Naomi.

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Sharon Spencer, Chase Insteadman.”

“I’m a fan of your work,” said Sharon Spencer. She weighed my handshake for an extra instant. I wondered which work she meant. Was she a fan of Martyr & Pesty? Few bragged of this. And Sharon, attractive as she was, seemed a bit old for that sitcom’s heyday. She was being polite, I decided, or coy. I joined in gazing at the drawing.

“Laird Noteless,” said Naomi, naming the artist. “It’s a study for Expunged Building.”

“Are you his dealer?” I asked Naomi.

She shrugged no. “There’s nothing to deal. Noteless doesn’t usually let go of his sketches. He likes to hoard or destroy the evidence, leave only the major works behind. I think Maud and Thatcher are helping him get Expunged Building past city council.”

“It’s not built yet?” said Sharon Spencer, surprised.

“Not yet.”

She shook her head. “Preposterous, the hurdles they set up.”

“Where’s your husband, anyway?” said Naomi dryly, not concealing her boredom, and maybe wishing to squash any flirtation.

“Reggie’s coming late,” sighed Sharon Spencer. “He’s stuck at work. It’s all dreadful down there now.”

Reggie, I understood, was one of those who shifted the money around, trying to make it get bigger. They all deserved our pity, clearly enough. The money men, effortful and exhausted, slumping through the gray fog. Compared to their wives they were peons.

Maud Woodrow found me next, and broke me away from Naomi and Sharon Spencer to meet Harriet Welk, an editor at Knopf. Maud and Harriet had met when a photographer needed permission to reproduce some of Maud’s collection for a coffee-table book on nineteenth-century folk jewelry. Harriet, though she might have been the youngest player on this intimidating stage, was commanding and keen, and easy to want to charm. It was Harriet who’d brought Richard Abneg along. He was still across the room, getting buttonholed by Thatcher Woodrow. No male arriving in the Wood-rows’ circle was ever spared preemptive marking with Thatcher’s scent. When spirited off to another duty, Harriet retailed a few facts about Richard, who she called her “secular date.”

“You mean ‘platonic,’ I think.”

“Platonic, secular, old friends. Anything between us is unimaginable.” She pointed Abneg out, a short, stolid fellow who appeared, in this company, like a cartoon Communist in his wide-legged charcoal suit, untucked flannel shirt, and a black beard encroaching on his sullen cheeks and fierce eyes. He stood nose to nose with Thatcher, gripping a martini’s neck like the handle of an ax he’d use to hack his way free if Thatcher didn’t quit bragging.

“Clear enough,” I said. “You’re a pair of solo operators here. Lone wolves.”

She explained that they were high-school friends, went all the way back to the corridors and water fountains and sexual embarrassments of Horace Mann. “You know when you’ve known somebody so long, you’re familiar with all their self-reinventions?”

“At least he’s bothered with self-reinventions.”

Richard Abneg had begun as a radical, an anarchist. His formative event the Tompkins Square Park riots, when the police quelled the rebel spirit of the Lower East Side. (I faintly recalled these facts, another version of the city’s Original Sin.) Abneg had spearheaded a squatters’ seizure of a famed building on Ninth and C, a cherished last stand, a toe stuck in the slamming door of progress. Out of this had come a career in tenant advocacy, bulldog negotiations on behalf of those sidelined in gentrification’s parade. Now, ultimate irony, Abneg worked for Mayor Arnheim, managing the undoing of rent stabilization. He’d become a major villain to some who recalled his earlier days, Harriet Welk informed me. Yet Abneg clung to his sense of duty, always alluding to how much worse it might all be without his interventions, a jaw-clenched claim on a higher realism. His intimates, like Harriet, could see what it had cost him, going to that crossroads, making that devil’s bargain. They kindly left the ironies unconfronted. What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when he was fifteen and reading Charles Bukowski and Howard Zinn and Emmett Grogan. I soaked up Harriet’s description and braced myself. What she hadn’t warned me was that I’d like him.

Richard Abneg scotted over to us now. Stuck out a horny hand for me to shake, but while I held it, addressed Harriet Welk.

“You see her?”

“Who?”

“Don’t look, don’t look. The ostrich-woman.”

He meant Georgina Hawkmanaji. I’d seen her come in. For her hair pinned in a high, plumed construction, her long pale neck and narrow shoulders, her lush bottom, ostrich-woman was a fair summary. Worth twenty million or so of inherited Armenian plunder, educated in Zurich and Oxford, but sure, ostrich in stature and perhaps soul as well. She stood a foot taller than Abneg.

“Sorry,” he said abruptly. He introduced himself, and freed my claustrophobic fingers. “Don’t get any ideas, I’m going home with her.”

“I’ll give you an advantage,” I said. “She lives in this building, the penthouse.”

“Well I’m getting clear go-signals.”

“Go-signals from the ostrich-woman.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Never ignore those,” I told him. “I never would.”

When it was time for dinner Richard Abneg and I were seated on either side of Georgina Hawkmanaji, as it happened. His strategy, which given its unhesitating launch must have been instinctive, was to more or less shun Georgina completely and at the same time physically occupy her lap, in an ostensible campaign to impress himself on me. Repartee with Georgina could, in my experience, be a tad Sisyphean-she wasn’t dumb, on the contrary, astute on nearly any subject, but her formality and deliberateness were a type of damp weather. So I admired the stunt. Abneg used Georgina for triangulation. She didn’t have to keep up, only periodically ratify something particularly emphatic in his talk. That, and tolerate his spittle landing on the breast of her high-necked silk dress, tiny glints accumulating like a new constellation in the night sky.

Richard Abneg liked to dynamite his own ego, with tales of deals struck in offices where you counted your fingers after handshakes and found a few missing, where believing you’d won meant you’d misread the stakes. Between the jokes I heard him rationalizing a life’s arc of excruciating compromise. He painted himself as a specialist in sheltering sand-castle idealisms against the undertow of the city’s force of change, a force not so much cynical as tidally indifferent. Coughing up the lion’s share of what you’d sworn to protect, in days of privatizing plunder, might be to keep from losing it all.

Abneg’s voice was insinuating and sarcastic, a bully’s, though he bullied only himself. At some point Thatcher Woodrow’s internal testosterone meter tipped, and he leaned over to our end of the table. “Do you actually know Mayor Arnheim?”

Abneg had just hoisted a whole duck’s drumstick out of his risotto, leaving a fat white spear of asparagus to ooze back into its sucking footprint. He seemed to revel in being framed in atavistic tableau, ripping at the glistening flesh with his teeth an extra moment while Thatcher waited for a reply.

“I work for him,” said Abneg, swallowing. “I didn’t say I know him. Sure, we’ve met a few dozen times, half of those in public where you’d hardly say it counted as a meeting. Look, Arnheim has fifty guys like me, farmed out covering his ass in one particular or another, sweating bullets on a daily basis. I don’t flatter myself that he wants to be seen with me.”

“We used to play in an all-night poker game, before he ascended to the throne,” said Thatcher. “He and I and Ted Koppel and Ahmet Ertegun, and George Soros, when he was in town. Killers all. I’m not sure it fits the people’s image of their mayor, but he was the biggest killer among us. I’m no lightweight, but I was fighting for my life at that table.”

If I knew Thatcher he’d look for an opening to tell us the cost of a buy-in at that game, too, before he was done. The minimum bets, the big and little blinds, and so on. But Richard Abneg stemmed this curtly and deftly.

“I work mostly with an aide to the mayor you probably didn’t play poker with,” he said. “Her name is Claire Carter. A killer too, of a different type. When we go to lunch she always insists on separate checks.”

I laughed, liking how Abneg checked Thatcher’s one-upmanship with one-downmanship. Georgina laughed too. Maybe Abneg would land his ostrich-woman after all.

At the appointed time the Woodrows’ table turned its searchlight on my woe. I played my part in what was a kind of kabuki enactment. There wasn’t any real news-like the whole city, they’d devoured Janice’s famous epistles from outer space. They only wanted to savor their lucky intimacy with the glamorous would-be astronaut’s-husband. Janice was up there and I was down here. It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse. The Woodrows and their guests wanted a confession of something, but my only confession I wouldn’t offer: my emotions were bogus as long as they were being performed in a setting like this one. I might love Janice, yes, but what I showed these people was a simulacrum, a portrayal of myself.

Harriet Welk asked the usual question. “They publish her letters to you, but do you write back?”

“I used to,” I mumbled in my shame. “But Mission Control needed the communication time for… other stuff. At some point they told me not to bother.”

I was rescued from painting the last brushstrokes of my picture by the haggard entrance of Reggie Spencer, Sharon’s husband, the funds manager who’d been delayed downtown. I thought I could see shreds of the gray fog still clinging to his creased pinstripe three-piece, to his scuffed chestnut wingtips. Certainly the gray fog was still reflected in Reggie Spencer’s eyes as he rolled them upward and faked a smile and slid into the seat that had been kept open between Naomi Kandel and Harriet Welk. There was something tragical about the men who worked downtown, never more than when they were expected on return to manfully reassert their role entertaining ladies at parties, or cheerfully take over on weekends from nannies in Central Park, in order to remind their children of who their fathers were or had once been.

“Sorry, folks,” said Reggie Spencer. “You don’t want to know about it.” Judging from his wife’s expression, truer words couldn’t be spoken. Staff were just clearing our ruins, pouring coffee from silver. “The F ground to a halt and just sat whining at Rockefeller Center. Eventually I got out and took a cab, I don’t know if it was a mistake or not. Traffic was a nightmare. The cabbie was saying something about that escaped tiger getting loose again on Lexington Avenue.”

“One hears continually of this… tiger,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji. “It is supposedly of a tremendous size.” She spoke as if this represented some personal provocation, from which adequate skepticism could offer insulation. I sympathized. I’d heard of the tiger perhaps three or four times now myself, yet found it difficult to bring into focus as a real and ongoing problem, something capable of bollixing traffic on Lexington. My fault. It was too long since I’d read a newspaper.

“See, they should let a few of us who know what we’re doing track that baby down,” said Thatcher Woodrow. “I ought to give Arnheim a call and suggest it. Can’t imagine what’s taking so long with one little old tiger.” He raised his arms and squinted one eye like a five-year-old to mime bagging a moving target with a blunderbuss or elephant gun, alluding, I suppose, to facts we were supposed to have absorbed during some earlier dinner, about Thatcher’s record of accomplishments up against big game. I thought I remembered something Hemingwayesque in his background, and maybe, god knew, a room full of pelts and heads lurked in the duplex some-where, quarantined by Maud in favor of Diane Arbus and Gregory Crewdson prints and studies for sculptures by Laird Noteless.

“It isn’t that kind of tiger,” said Richard Abneg. His tone was dismissive. These two, Thatcher and Abneg, were going to be at it all night long, I saw. They’d find materials over which to dispute through the dessert, and through the round of Cuban cigars Thatcher always loved to personally distribute, and the seemingly spontaneous offerings of brandy and Armagnac Thatcher would haul out after the cigars, to distend the evening into a contented, blithering haze, meanwhile instructing the staff to do the final clearing in the morning, to Maud’s disgust. (This was Thatcher’s real enmity, anyway. Maud’s conversational prerogatives ruled while conversation was possible, so Thatcher worked steadily to numb our tongues with stimulants, until we were reduced to the humming and grunting and Morse-code glances he preferred.)

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked not Thatcher but Naomi Kandel.

“Just that it isn’t that kind of tiger, where you can, you know, kill it with a well-placed shot between the eyes or something.”

“I have heard it is quite… sizable,” murmured Georgina, allying herself with Abneg.

“Yeah, it’s big. A big problem is what it is. You have no idea.” Was Richard Abneg implying that as a mayor’s aide he was privy to facts about the tiger not printed in the Times? His heavy glances seemed to say Yes I am. He adjusted the collar of his shirt, grimacing sweatily, as if adding and I’ve got claw marks on my back, they itch like hell. Thatcher Woodrow seemed to take this as a signal to depart, without explanation, for a visit to the bathroom, or possibly to his humidor, to poison Abneg’s cigar in advance.

Of course, there was no poison in Thatcher’s cigars. Or, only a kind of poison we craved. An hour later, with all of us sprung from the vise of Maud’s table, sprawled on her white couches, snifters hovering at the level of our heads, hostilities were forgotten. Or drowned. Thatcher, in his absurd maroon dinner jacket with its college emblem, was our champion, keeping those snifters full of colored fluids with magical properties. He always had another exotic bottle that cried to be sampled, always with a name I instantly forgot, thinking instead: Funky Monkey, Blueberry Kush, Chronic.

Now we all loved one another to death. Which is to say, until the end of the evening. There was no other place to be, it was unimaginable not to float on our backs in this ocean of luxury, an archipelago of personalities lobbing witticisms across one another’s beaches. Only I’d lately become irresolute in my dissolution. Gazing up at blue from my island, I’d begun to wonder how near that sky was. Whether it was some ceiling, perhaps a tissue I could rend with my fingertips if I only reached up to try.

Georgina Hawkmanaji and Richard Abneg sat side by side in the center of the largest and whitest of the couches, a kind of centerpiece around which we’d deferentially arrayed: Maud and Sharon Spencer and I bunched at one end of a facing couch, with Reggie Spencer asleep, face propped, curled knuckles indenting his sallow cheek, at the other; Thatcher coming and going from his terrific caramel-leather throne of a chaise longue, and Harriet Welk in another, smaller chaise, with Naomi Kandel camped out on the carpet at her feet-I spotted Naomi reaching casually to caress Harriet’s sheer-stockinged calf for emphasis at some point she was making, but this gesture was going absolutely nowhere, only being blithely tolerated by Harriet. (To be honest I was being similarly molested by Sharon Spencer, and it mattered as little.)

It was Georgina’s and Abneg’s coming together that formed the main action here, a show we all consented to see slowed to a crawl by Georgina’s elegant jitters and Abneg’s distractibility. The show’s progress was slowed, too, even if sponsored, by the flow of Thatcher’s brandies. Our delight in the exhibition wasn’t unkind. It was simply a real pleasure to witness Georgina uncorked by Richard Abneg’s coarse, crazy appetite for her. In glimpses, between harangues on one subject or another, when he didn’t seem to notice Georgina at all, Abneg appeared not to believe his fortune. You’d have thought their sweet collision was Maud’s engineering-I envisioned her taking credit, with relish-only it became clear Maud couldn’t have known whom her new friend Harriet Welk would bring along to dinner.

Abneg, somehow, had gotten onto the subject of a visit he’d made, some time ago, to Stonehenge. “You park in this little area, it’s across the road, and then you buy a ticket, just to be allowed to cross the street. There’s this underground tunnel, you mill through like sheep. And there’s nothing to do except trudge like that, all the way around the thing. They’ve got you in a kind of track, restrained from Stonehenge itself. You can’t go near the rocks. And that’s it. You trudge around single file in a circle, the thing looks a little smaller and less mysterious than you’d hoped, and you go back through the tunnel and maybe stop at the gift shop or the restroom, then back to your car.”

“Unimpressive,” grunted Thatcher.

“Well, sure,” said Abneg. “Totally unimpressive. I wanted to be like one of those apes in whatchamacallit, 2001, by whatsisname, Kubrick, you know, kneeling in fear before those slabs, getting brain-zapped.”

“I never saw 2001,” said Harriet. “It’s about apes?”

“Ape-men,” said Thatcher helpfully.

“They should change the name of that movie,” said Sharon Spencer beside me. “Since the real 2001 turned out so different.”

“Listen,” said Abneg, with exasperation that we hadn’t caught his real drift. “I’m trying to tell you about the Stonehenge restroom. I had to piss, so I went in there, it was a completely modern men’s room, with all these floor-length ceramic urinals. They didn’t have the wit to arrange them in a circle, but the resemblance was obvious. And whereas everyone was jabbering when they walked around Stonehenge, all the moms bargaining with the whining children, in here the men were all silent, avoiding one another’s eyes. Each of us standing at a urinal or waiting our turn, and this profound truth comes over you, a feeling much bigger than anything available outside and across the road, which is that everyone in that restroom just did the exact same thing you did.”

“Which is what?” said Naomi Kandel.

“Looked at Stonehenge,” said Abneg. “And now you were taking a piss, and then you were going to get back in your car.”

I tried to understand, and almost did, and then found myself wondering if Abneg was emphasizing the word piss so strongly in order to force Georgina to visualize the existence of his penis. It was forcing me to visualize it, anyway.

“That… is… not… deep,” said Naomi Kandel conclusively.

Thatcher, Abneg’s biggest fan, seemed to get it. “Got a place like that in Australia,” he said. “Ayres Rock, only you’re supposed to call it something else. Biggest rock in the world, takes a coupla hours to walk around it. Same thing, though. You go around in a track. Center of the country, nothing around for a thousand miles, no other reason you’d ever stop there. Rock has its own damn airport.”

Abneg was thrilled, though it seemed to me his point, if he had one, had been hijacked for Thatcher’s imperial scorn. “Fantastic! So, basically, that airport’s just the world’s foremost example of a Stonehenge restroom.”

Thatcher toasted this, a little uneasily, with a hoist of his snifter.

“In a thousand years,” continued Richard Abneg, “they’ll probably lead walking tours around the perimeter of the ruined airport.” “Huh,” said Thatcher, less and less sure.

“It would be a terribly disappointing walking tour,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji, with a sly smile to make us know she was playing along. Abneg, who’d snaked a densely haired forearm around Georgina’s tiny waist at some point, drew her nearer to him now, proud to be understood. His grip accordioned a coo from Georgina.

“Very few people know this,” I heard myself saying, “but Stanley Kubrick once tried to make a film with the Gnuppets, if you can believe it.” I’d been silently drunk for so long my voice startled me, but for that same reason some participation seemed demanded of me, to prove I’d been listening. Idiotically, I’d fished up this secondhand anecdote too late, after the Kubrick interlude had passed, and everyone looked at me a little daftly.

“Urgghh, I hate Gnuppets!” said Sharon Spencer. She formed her hands into tortured upright figures, snarling at them so we couldn’t fail to taste her avid revulsion.

“Sure,” I said, then tossed a life preserver after my drowning remark. “But just picture it… a Kubrick film… with Gnuppets… it might be kind of incredible…”

“You sound like someone I know,” said Richard Abneg. “I’ve got this one friend who’s always trying to make you imagine films that don’t exist.” He squinted as if seeing me for the first time. I might have returned a similar look. “Actually, he was talking about the Kubrick Gnuppet movie just the other day.”

Busted. It was Perkus Tooth I was parroting in the first place. Of course Abneg knew him. As the tumblers slid into place, I understood that the tone of Abneg’s Stonehenge story had unconsciously reminded me of Perkus, and made me wish to smuggle him into the conversation, to impress, or perhaps test, Richard Abneg.

Then Abneg shocked me. Looking me in the eye, he lifted thumb and forefinger to his lips as if smooching the damp stub of a joint. It was hardly that marijuana was taboo here. The shock was in how the gesture so carelessly pierced the bubble of harmony that had formed, against the odds, among us. In his contempt for our bonhomie, he also showed me how it was still in some way sacred to me. How I was in the business of protecting, and flattering, the Woodrows’ vanities. It felt as if Abneg had undone his fly and pissed on the Woodrows’ carpet.

His message to me, if it wasn’t too much to read into the single gesture, seemed to be See you later, at Perkus’s. Away from these fucking rich people. Or maybe I’d invented that last, out of my wish that Abneg could detect my own degree of defiance, of bad faith in this company. Anyway, our instant of collusion was finished. As if at some established cue, Abneg swept in and finished what it looked like he’d never even get back to: spiriting Georgina Hawkmanaji up from that couch and out of the duplex, presumably upstairs, to her penthouse apartment, to prove definitively to her the existence of his penis, or to have her prove it to him. We all sat pretending not to be fascinated at how neatly he sheltered Georgina from her own shyness at being extracted from our nodding assembly. I’ll admit she was revealed (too late) (and unimportantly) as erotic to me, as she’d never been until seeing Abneg’s hairy fingers brushing the nape of her neck, and guiding her, like a virtuoso repositioning a cello, by the hip. So I learned how Richard Abneg, like Perkus Tooth, was someone who could uncover what hid in plain sight.