Chronic City

CHAPTER Three

I only had to arrive fifteen minutes early at East Eighty-fourth Street one day to discover Oona Laszlo existed. Perkus buzzed me up and I entered to find them standing there, in front of their chairs at his kitchen table, shuffling as if apprehended at a crime. Almost one in the afternoon, but I’d broken up a breakfast scene, coffee, cheese Danish sliced into fingers on a grease-marked white sack, a thin joint modestly half smoked and perching in a cleanish ashtray. A pair of Lucite boxes labeled WHITE RHINO, one of Watt’s brands. The New York Times, which Perkus never read. I assumed it belonged to his guest. A book Perkus had been reading last I visited, a gigantic novel entitled Obstinate Dust. Also, non sequitur, A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey, a sturdy blue trade paperback, inverted on propped-open pages. I did my best to conceal my surprise at this woman’s presence. The foot traffic was a little thicker in Perkus’s apartment than I’d previously understood. It might be that he booked us one after the next, his secret life bustled with visitors, his lonely lobby a revolving door.

Needless to say my first thought was that Oona Laszlo was Perkus’s lover. I was wrong. Yet this error, the tender cameo it conjured in my mind’s eye, is still, weirdly, a place I can retreat to in memory and think It might have been better. It might have been nice. I can still see them there, framed in my mistaken assumption, and feel thrilled and relieved for Perkus, who, in dwelling in that imaginary frame, remains as I first knew him.

The two fit, inviting the mistake. If not lovers, they might be brother and sister. Oona shared Perkus’s marionette-ish aspect, large head connected to a tiny frame and seeming to sweep her nervous limbs behind its weight. She wore black (another hint, I thought, that they’d spent the night together-she seemed dressed for the previous evening), making her like a marker scribble, a silhouette in spastic motion in that cramped kitchen. They were expensive clothes, too-I noted that automatically. Expensive for Perkus’s kitchen at least. Black hair, too, in bangs and a neat bob. Had Perkus spilled a pot of coffee on his tiles and the coffee sprung to life as a woman an instant before I opened the door, it would have explained her perfectly. Oona’s mouth alone confessed female ripeness, seeming to stand for secret curves unrevealed by her silhouette. Her canines caught on her lower lip just as our eyes met, drawing it into an expression faintly lascivious and wry. Or perhaps those tooth tips tended to catch there. This might be her default look, teeth too much for lips to contain. Above this expression Oona’s eyes flitted, measuring distance to the exit. Yet if Oona was Perkus’s female synonym, she was younger and, I had to admit, alluring. If they were siblings, she’d gotten the looks. If they were lovers, I found myself thinking, he’d gotten lucky.

Perkus didn’t seem flustered, exactly. Aggravated was more like it. His independent eye tried to follow Oona as he turned to me.

“Chase, Oona. Oona, Chase.” He discharged the formality, then practically threw down his hands in disgust at his own obedience.

“Hello.”

Oona stared at me with her crooked smile. I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the starstruck gaze, but Manhattanites usually did a better job of concealing it, especially those dressed in black.

“Sorry,” she said. Instead of offering a hand, she crossed her arms, fitting plumlike breasts over her forearms. “I’ve always sort of wanted to meet you. But then again, sort of wanted not to, at all.”

“Okay,” I said, as generous as I could manage under the circumstances. People might dialogue in their own heads with famous or semi-famous strangers. I preferred to think it a fundamental minimum standard that they keep it to themselves. Nothing in Oona Laszlo’s manner suggested any self-reproach. She examined me like a portrait painter seeking a better grasp of the play of light over my facial planes.

“You’re from somewhere really weird, aren’t you?” said Oona Laszlo. Before I could answer she supplied it herself: “Indiana.”

“Yes.” If I didn’t think of it I often forgot. My home was far away, if it was my home.

Perkus had plunked back into his chair. He relit the joint, and scrabbled in a pile of loose CDs, then shoved one into the boom box. “So,” he said. Slumping beneath the bridge of his own templed hands, he drew on the joint centered in his lips so that it crackled, then pinched it from his mouth and waved it free. “I got sent a dub of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn, it’s eighteen minutes longer than the release cut, some kind of early assembly, maybe we should watch it-” Perkus spoke as if to one of us alone, only I was unsure which. Was he resuming a conversation with Oona or beginning one with me? All talk was a resumption. I couldn’t remember who Pontecorvo was, though I knew I was supposed to.

Perkus pounced, as ever, on my hesitation. “Pontecorvo. He did The Battle of Algiers. You know, Burn, with Brando.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Yeah, this is pretty much how I pictured it,” said Oona Laszlo. She gathered up a sweater, also black, from the back of her chair. “You guys are pretty sweet, and I’m going to go now.”

“Sweet how?” I asked. “What’s so sweet about us?”

“Just, you know, watching old Brando movies together in the afternoon, then deconstructing the universe for dessert. It’s like you’re helping Perkus with his homework.”

“See you later,” said Perkus. He was, I understood, very eager to have Oona leave, to avoid having us here together. Which made me eager for the opposite. Oona Laszlo’s little jibe at Perkus made me understand that they weren’t lovers, at least not anymore. She and I shared a protective impulse toward him. Also, an unrelated insight, I’d begun to find Oona beguiling, despite her pointed gawking. It was a little boyish around here, now that she’d pointed it out. She could be the cure.

“Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” I said.

“I would, but I just saw that movie, and Perkus hates it when I shout out the dialogue just before the actors say it.”

“Oh?”

“That was a joke. Forgive me. There’s something about running into you here that’s making me babble.”

“You don’t have to be so self-conscious.”

“No, actually, I do. I’m one of those subtext-on-the-outside people, which is why I should really go.”

She then surprised me by gathering up one of the Lucite boxes of White Rhino and shoveling it into her purse. And then was gone. Perkus barely glanced after her.

“She took your pot.”

“It was hers,” he said, not glancing at the table either. “I scored it for her, as a favor. She doesn’t like to deal with Watt.” He invented tasks for himself, sweeping imaginary crumbs into his cupped palm, fiddling with the volume, jumping up to rinse a glass, seeking, with his whole being, to exorcise the obvious subject. I didn’t allow him.

“An old girlfriend?”

Perkus shook his head. “Just a friend.”

“She’s a funny one. How’d you meet her?”

“Oona’s great, when you’re in the mood. She used to be a kind of intern of mine, I guess that’s what you’d call it. She answered an ad I placed at the New School, she used to help me pasting up broadsides…” His voice trailed, even as his desublimated eyeball zipped to walls of the living room, rolling wildly to indicate the framed and unframed manifestos of his youth.

“Oona was your glue-girl!” I said.

“Something like that. My apprentice.”

“Every mad scientist needs an apprentice.”

“Fuck you.”

“She didn’t want to change the world, I suppose? Or what did she call it-deconstruct the universe.”

“There was this editor from Viking Penguin, uh, Paul somebody. He proposed to do a compilation of the broadsides, and took us out for drinks. I didn’t care to do the book, but Oona ended up with a job in publishing. She was looking for a writing career, and I guess she felt it was her way in.”

“Why didn’t you do the book?”

“We differed on… context.”

“He saw you as a rock critic?”

Perkus nodded.

“So she’s in publishing?”

“Oona?” he asked, as if we’d dropped the subject hours earlier. He stood and put his back to me, fussing at his coffeepot. “Nope, she’s a freelancer. A self-admitted hack.”

“I’m interested in hacks, Perkus, being one myself. What does she write?”

“Nothing under her own name. She ghostwrites. Autobiographies of people who can’t write their own. She brought one around once-here.” He’d poured us fresh coffees. Now he clapped these, with a pair of spoons, on the table before me, then moved into the living room, to burrow into a stack of unsorted books at the foot of a shelf.

The hardcover Perkus delivered into my hands was unexpectedly garish and grim: Across Foul Lines, by Rose Arbogast, the memoir of a seven-foot-tall WNBA center who as a high-school star had been abducted and serially tortured by a teenage gang, then rescued by a federal agent she’d married a decade later. “This is shit,” I blurted.

“Read the inscription.”

“What?”

“On the title page.”

Someone, Oona Laszlo, had printed in a stenographically precise hand To Perkus Tooth, who taught me to lay up, not lie down, warmly, R.O./O.L. “She’s become a specialist in traumatized athletes, frostbitten Everest climbers who have to wear plastic noses, etcetera, a narrow field she dominates. She fully knows it’s shit. How she gets through her days is another question.”

“The same way you do,” I suggested. “White Rhino.” I nodded at the remaining container.

Perkus ignored me. I learned nothing further about Oona Laszlo that day, nor did Perkus and I get around to viewing the early-assembly dub of Pontecorvo’s Burn, though the videotape sat talismanically before us through the afternoon and into the evening. For lately, with the addition of Richard Abneg, my Perkus afternoons had distended into Perkus-and-Richard nights. I’d begun to let other priorities shrivel in favor of these bouts of epic squalor. It was easy to drop out of my drifting existence. The Eighty-fourth Street apartment was a container bigger on the inside than the outside, and days there might seem to hold thirty or forty hours, yet more and more I reeled home in dawn light, along a Second Avenue mostly vacated, the downtown stream of empty wishful taxicabs all veering to toot their horns at me until I waved them off, pavement deliveries of Italian loaves and kaiser rolls and bundles of tabloids under way-the clocks outside hadn’t stopped, after all. Richard Abneg was the one among us with an office, a morning agenda shackled to those unstopped clocks, yet he drove us maniacally through the night, toward daybreak, as much as Perkus (or his coffeepot, or dope supply) or myself, more perhaps.

Was the afternoon when Oona first appeared the third or fourth Richard and Perkus and I spent together? Or the hundredth? I can’t say. In the swamp of memory I can only confidently fix that occasion to Richard Abneg’s eagles, and that only because of A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey which lay propped open on the table from which Oona retrieved her stash before vanishing. I was always foolish to slight any clue at Perkus’s kitchen table, for what seemed to happen to occupy space there was always destined to colonize my brain soon enough. (I suppose I could say the same about Oona. Soon. Soona.)

Richard Abneg came in enraged about eagles. He liked to come in enraged about something. Hadn’t I read the front page of the Metro section? The answer was no. Richard found this incredible. My neglect of the headlines was practically as egregious as the birds themselves. Richard nearly slammed down his bottle of wine, Rioja in a paper sack. He always arrived with one in tow. Not a gift, since Perkus wouldn’t touch red wine, a trigger, he claimed, for his cluster migraines. Richard and I would drink it later, in the smaller hours. For now it sat.

Perkus tossed the relevant section into my lap and resumed rolling a joint to welcome and soothe Richard, to whatever extent he could be soothed. Richard jabbed his finger at a newsprint photograph, so my attention wouldn’t wander. A pair of enormous birds perched on the massive lintel of a prewar building’s entranceway, each with a beak-borne branch. Between them stood the object of their efforts, a conical structure of twigs and leaves. HOMECOMING OF MATING PAIR REWARDS 78TH STREET FAITHFUL. “Okay,” I said.

“Not okay,” said Richard, poking harder at the newspaper on my knee. “That’s my fucking window.”

“You live there?” I asked, trying to catch up.

“My headboard’s against that wall. Right above the scratching, whining, gobbling fiends themselves. They don’t sound like you’d think eagles should sound, Chase. They sound like vampires. Vampires at a buffet of dying rodents.”

A joke occurred to me. “Well, you know what they say. Go to bed with the Hawkman, wake up with the eagles.” It was now three weeks past our fateful introduction at the Woodrows’ Park Avenue duplex, and Richard Abneg had surprised me, and perhaps himself, by persisting in an affair with Georgina Hawkmanaji, Turk heiress. He called her, in his irascible way, Georgie Hawkman. Or the Hawkman, or the Hawk. The complicity between us, my having seen him infringe on Georgina’s rectitude the first time, formed the backdrop to our new friendship, a ready-made history we could allude to. If Richard seemed to bristle when I mentioned her, this was only ritual. He loved being reminded I knew of his conquest. Perkus was the one whom mentions of the Hawkman truly provoked. Perkus was a possessive friend, true enough. But he also cringed at evidence of my migrations, or Richard’s, through a milieu he viewed as corrupt.

Richard only glowered. “It’s not funny. I’ve been spending nights at the Hawkman’s just to sleep. She thinks I can’t get enough of her.”

“If it’s your window, can’t you have the nest removed?”

“You really live in a cloud, don’t you?”

Perkus had done tonguing the new joint’s glue, and he handed the result to Richard. “So, about six weeks ago Richard opened his window and pushed the whole mess into the street. The eagles went into mourning, started wheeling around crying, and all the TV news stations picked it up. The eagles flew off to Central Park, I guess. It seemed like it was going to blow over, but then the other apartments got together and held a press conference saying they loved the eagles, that the lone pusher didn’t speak for the building’s wishes. Richard got hung out to dry. That’s what they called him, the lone pusher.”

“The president of the co-op board didn’t give my name, mercifully. But I’ve had to creep in and out of the building for weeks. The Post published a telephoto picture of me in my Fruit of the Looms. Now the feathered monsters are beginning again with the nest, and everybody’s so thrilled. I’m totally stuck. There’s this bored old television star on the eighth floor, she’s made the eagles her whole raison d’être.”

“What television star?” I had an odd feeling I knew.

“You know, what’s her goddamn name?” Richard slurped air around the joint’s tip, waved his hand.

“Sandra Saunders Eppling,” supplied Perkus. “She was married to Senator Eppling for a while. She was the one who spoke at the press conference.”

“Sandra Saunders played my mom on Martyr & Pesty,” I said. I felt, as I often do at those rare times I actually choose to speak of my child stardom, as if I was boring my listeners with information too familiar to mention, and yet also evoking a distant pocket realm no living human could imagine. In either case, the result felt as though I were being humored. Possibly I did live on a cloud.

“She was in an Elvis movie,” said Perkus, frowning at me for not citing the more salient fact. I’d noticed-this may have been when I first noticed it-how Perkus didn’t browbeat Richard Abneg for his cultural illiteracy. He had me for that.

“Right, that’s the one,” said Richard, uninterested in anything but his nest. He seized the newspaper section from me now. “These days she’s a kind of fundamentalist vegetarian eagle-advocate. It’s horrendous luck for me she doesn’t have a real career to keep her busy. My whole building’s brimming with mediocrities and has-beens.”

“The whole island’s brimming with them,” said Perkus agreeably.

“Yes, but your bedroom isn’t full of the smell of moldering underbrush and the death screams of squirrels and pigeons and sewer rats,” said Richard. “Look at this.” He handed the fuming joint to me and raised the newspaper for us to consider, folded to the photograph of the eagles and their startlingly large construction. “It’s obscene. It’s practically… pubic.”

“Yes,” said Perkus. “Your building is definitely wearing a merkin.”

“That’s a polite word for it.” Richard stroked his beard, perhaps unconsciously making an association.

“I don’t think merkin is the polite word for something,” I said. “It’s more specific than that-”

“Read it to me,” interrupted Richard. Perkus had taken up the book, the Field Guide. I now saw it lay flapped open to the entry on eagles, Perkus having already delved into study on Richard’s behalf. “I’ve got to find some way to eradicate them that can’t be traced back to me…”

“I guess if you got a dog it would bark at them.” This was my pallid contribution, while Perkus studied the pages, tilting the book to favor his orderly eye.

“No, it can’t be inside my apartment, it has to be something that will crawl up the front of the building. Besides, I hate dogs.” We were deep into crime melodrama, a caper, Richard and Perkus collaborating on the perfect interspecies murder. “I’m going to need an alibi, too. I can’t be anywhere in the vicinity when those eagles go. That building is ready to come after me with torches and pitchforks.”

“So, here’s the thing.” Perkus held up a finger proclaiming Eureka! He was forever ferreting out the key, always distilling essences. “Majestic in his privilege,” he narrated from the Field Guide, “the bald eagle knows no natural enemy apart from Man.”

“What a freight of shit,” said Richard.

“Why?”

“There’s something totally insane about saying a frigging psychotic serial killer has no natural enemy! What they mean is the eagle’s enemies don’t stand a chance. All those mice and squirrels and pigeons, believe me, they’d gladly define themselves as enemies in that instant before the talons tore through their hearts.”

“In nature I think a thing doesn’t qualify as your enemy if it can’t fight back,” I said. “It’s just a victim.”

“Maybe we could corral a whole bunch of mice and squirrels and pigeons together,” suggested Perkus. “If they somehow were all run up the side of the building at once, when the eagles were sleeping…” He flipped eagerly through the Guide’s back pages, perhaps scanning the index for some precedent.

“No.” Richard leaned forward, grabbing for the joint I still held. He took it and drew in a puff and shook his shaggy head. “No, it won’t do.” His grave tone suggested real deliberation. “Prey is prey, I’m sorry to have to disenchant you two dreamers. You total Communists. If you’d heard them whimper and die, the way I have, you’d understand. A million mice couldn’t do it.”

“Didn’t mice kill the dinosaurs?” asked Perkus.

Richard shook his head. “The dinosaurs were stupid, they were on their last legs. Anyhow, the mice had help, they needed comets and glaciers, all kinds of stuff. I’m pretty certain the mice just jumped in at the end and administered the coup de grâce, then took all the credit.”

“We need a predator,” said Perkus.

“Exactly.”

“We should go up there, the three of us,” said Perkus. “Not now, but later, when it’s dark, when they’re sleeping.” We were always, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg and I, on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knife-scarred table, laying plans for plunder. Oh, how Manhattan yearned for our expert intervention! We never budged from that kitchen, however, unless if it was to tumble out coughing into the fresh chill air, and around the corner, to pile into a booth at Jackson Hole for cheeseburgers and Cokes.

“The thing about animals,” Perkus said, “I remember this clearly, is that when you bring in, you know, kangaroos to chase away monkeys, then you have a kangaroo problem. Then you bring in zebras to chase off the kangaroos, and you’re overrun with zebras, and so on.”

“You learned that in a Dr. Seuss book, didn’t you?” said Richard.

“What about the tiger?” I said. “What if somehow the tiger could be brought into play?”

Perkus gave Richard a look of horrified helplessness, seeming to say at once, Don’t blame me, I didn’t suggest it, and Well, why not?

Richard tittered. “The tiger?”

“Sure.”

“Sure, that’s just what my apartment needs, Chase. That tiger destroyed one of the city’s primary water mains last week. I mean, totally shattered layers of concrete and brick that had held since the nineteenth century, it’s going to take months to repair it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, maybe the tiger could be… blamed somehow.”

Richard snorted smoke through his nostrils. “Blamed when I off the eagles, you mean?”

“Sure.”

“Brilliant.” At this Richard Abneg dissolved in giggles, sweeping Perkus Tooth along with him. And soon enough myself, too. “Blame the tiger!”

Let this stand for a typical night in our company there. I don’t remember them all in such detail.

I met Oona next at a funeral, the funeral of a man I didn’t know, a purportedly great man. I had to cross the park to be there-the services were held at the Society for Ethical Culture, on Central Park West-and when I saw how populous the congregation was, I felt foolish for troubling. Emil Junrow was a famous science-fiction writer of the 1940s, a lowly career he took upmarket by being also an accredited (if undistinguished) scientist, and a famous humanist who’d uttered fine early doubts about the Cold War, a sort of Einstein without any theory. He’d then gone on to become a relentless prose-lytizer for the peaceful exploration of space, appearing many times before Congress and in public forums, a dwarfish wizened presence in bolo ties and flyaway hair (I learned all this in tributes presented during the long memorial presentation, including video clips that made me realize I’d seen Junrow on television without registering his name).

It was in this last role that Emil Junrow had once or twice been photographed in the company of Janice Trumbull, lady spaceexplorer. My receiving an invitation wasn’t anything personal, however, a fact that was made plain the instant I entered. Some publicist, knowing the cavernous size of the society’s hall, had emptied his Rolodex into the invitation list. In range of my glance I spotted Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and Lou Reed. There were surely many others I didn’t recognize. Despite being a low-grade semi-celebrity myself, I’m rotten at picking out any but the cartoon-obvious among us. I felt like an idiot, dressed to the nines, alone and invisible in the dim back rows as the stately figures spoke one after the other on the distant stage. I’d attended out of an absurd pity, imagining an old man who’d been exaggerating his connection to Janice, and therefore to me, not remotely guessing that Emil Junrow’s passing was an authentic cultural moment, and that with the gravity and glamour of those who’d come to pay respects no one would trouble to register my presence. I only stayed out of a mild curiosity, and discretion. No one should duck out of a funeral.

Oona found me just as the three-hour marathon of tributes concluded and the crowd broke into a buzzing mass, before I could sprint to the exit. Perhaps she’d spotted me earlier. She seemed, anyway, to be alone here.

“What did you think?” she said.

“It was all very impressive.”

“For me, there was only one good line in the whole show,” said Oona, oblivious to the risk of being overheard.

“What was that?”

“From when Emil Junrow was born, when he was handed to his mother in the hospital and she said, ‘He looks like he can remember happier days.’”

The words had been offered up by one of the few family members giving testimony amid the parade of luminaries, a cantankerous elderly cousin, a woman as shriveled and fierce as Junrow. Hearing the quip, it was hard not to picture the newborn already possessing Junrow’s white muttonchops and furrowed brow, his hectoring eyes.

“Sometimes one good line is enough,” I said.

“Oh, absolutely, I wasn’t complaining. Junrow’s mom, she goes straight into the annals with that remark.”

As we drifted out into the lobby a waiter appeared, balancing a tray of wineglasses, half of them filled with white, half with red. Oona and I each grabbed a white.

“Did you know Junrow?” I said. A stupid choice, since I wouldn’t have wished to be asked the same in return. I was groping. My tongue felt cardboardy in my mouth. Yet other parts of me were unaccountably alive, all at once, despite the soporific effects of three hours in that whiskey-colored auditorium, and the sober and seemly procession of tributes.

“I wrote his last two books,” she said, fixing me with that same steady, warmly sardonic gaze I’d faced at Perkus’s.

“Ah. You know a lot about science, then?”

“Barely anything. I wrote his funny, personable books. Junrow’s Rules for Amateurs and I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”

“So you must have spent a lot of time together. I’m surprised you weren’t invited up onstage to pay homage.”

“My existence is meant to be a secret,” she said, again with no concern for secrecy. “I didn’t get where I am today speaking at funerals.”

“Did you like him?”

“Picture one of those old New Yorker cartoons with the old man chasing the secretary in circles around the desk. Luckily he was easy to outrun.”

“I read Across Foul Lines the other night-I mean, part of it.”

“I’m guessing you mean Perkus Tooth’s copy.”

“It was pretty good, actually.”

“Oh God, I can totally picture it, you and Perkus getting stoned and reading pages aloud and roaring with laughter, until the words quit making any literal sense. Am I right?”

This was closer than I wanted to admit.

“Did you guys do voices, trying it out as Donald Duck and Greta Garbo and so on? It’s perfectly okay, sometimes I do that myself when I’m writing them.”

“I’d like to hear that,” I said, not wanting to put up a fight.

“Maybe you do a great Marlon Brando, Chase? I know Perkus would like that one.”

Was Oona Laszlo mocking Perkus now? Our secret sharing of the apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street felt almost disagreeably intimate, here in this crowd. I went for a gulp of wine and found my glass was empty. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?” I said impulsively. I had no idea how to navigate the West Side, but we were near Lincoln Center-there had to be something.

“There’s plenty here, for free. I think they might even bring out some sushi or cocktail frankfurters if we play our cards right.”

Oona Laszlo’s teasing dared me onward. She was a sprite of sarcasm, even her pensive torso, her small breasts concealed in black silhouette, seeming to jape. I’d been immune for three hours to the shameful survivor’s lust that I’d known to sometimes wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one’s own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crosswords in ballpoint and then tossing them aside, to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run out. But now, three hours’ worth of such lust seemed to flood me all at once, in retrospect. Oona and I were surely not the two youngest people in that crowded hall of five or six hundred, many of whom were just now filing through the doors into the lobby, being handed their first glass of white or red. But it felt to me at that moment as though we were teenagers who’d dressed up and snuck in.

“I’d be willing to pay for my own drinks or even cocktail frankfurters in exchange for a little privacy,” I told her.

“You don’t want to be seen with me?”

“I’d like to be seen with you,” I said, “elsewhere.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you’re afraid somebody’s going to try to ask you for your autograph or to pose for a picture with your arm around Salman Rushdie, and then I’ll slip away. Which I absolutely would. I’d be out of here like a shot.”

“I-”

“We could go to the movies,” she said, surprising me. “Or just find a doorway somewhere and make out awkwardly, then later not call each other, or call but not find anything to say.”

“Let’s go,” I said, applying my palm to the small of her back, to guide her from the reception. Disconcertingly, her dress was cut out in a circle there, so my cool fingers slipped inside and made her jump. Then she smiled again, canines caught on her lip.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

I only meant to insist that we go out of hearing range of the mourners and celebrants, though it had the effect of seeming to endorse her dizzy talk as a kind of plan. And as well to suggest I took the matter of my celebrity seriously in that crowd, as she’d joked. In truth, I doubted anyone cared. But I cared. It was my pitiful flame to nurture, that I should behave upstandingly as Janice Trumbull’s signifier in public places, at funerals at least. I was arm candy on Janice’s phantom arm, not much else. And the difference between this setting and Perkus’s apartment, or even Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s, was real to me.

We stopped to get our coats from the checkroom, then stepped outdoors, into a street vacant in a gutter-choking rainstorm, the black sky seemingly half liquid, snail-crawling taxicabs hugging the gleaming avenue’s crest for safety. I manage never to be prepared for the weather. Nobody else had left the hall, and as the heavy doors slammed behind us, all warmth and light seemed definitively on their backside, the reception an oasis we’d foolishly forsaken. Oona Laszlo was unsurprised. She produced a short black umbrella from her trench-coat pocket, and we struggled to shelter ourselves beneath it together long enough to put Emil Junrow and Ethical Culture behind us. Swirling wind made comedy of our attempt, and soon enough we found a doorway, just as Oona had scripted for us. I suppose she knew the weather forecast. Brass nameplates identified our hiding place as the entrance to a cabal of dentists. Across Central Park West trees lashed like an island’s in a typhoon.

The shoulders of my suit were drenched, the shirt beneath pasted to my back, and my slacks to my calves as well. Oona had fared a bit better, centered beneath the shred of umbrella. Yet she was wet and cold enough to be shivering. I felt it as she nestled into me. The lintel above us played the role of a tiny Niagara, the sheet of droplets a white-noise curtain drawn against the city and the whole of the storm.

“This has to be a secret.”

“I’m terrific at secrets. It’s a professional requirement.”

“I don’t have a whole lot in the way of a public role. I’m only known for one thing: my fidelity to Janice.”

“Oh wow, yeah, you scream fidelity.”

“Look, it’s all I’ve got.”

“That’s true. You’re a very one-dimensional character.”

Her gaze zipped shyly from the coursing street to my damp collar and tie, anywhere but to meet mine. Her tiny hand, sharp and mouselike, slid between my jacket and shirt at my ribs. It seemed I was waiting to understand. The West Side was a mysterious distance from the East, the howling park between us and home. There was no one there to protect us from each other. There never was. I thought, irrelevantly, of the tiger. This is too true of me: my thoughts migrate, precisely when I ought to be attending. I stare into one face and begin to recall tendrils of another conversation. Richard Abneg had mentioned that the tiger kept to the East Side. Maybe we were safer here, in that case. But now came a dozen questions I wished I’d been bright enough to ask. Where did the tiger go in the rain? Why wouldn’t it want to take up in the park?

This night it might be fair to think such thoughts were the place I fled in a storm of guilt. I might not remember Janice very well, but wasn’t I supposed to love her? Here, beneath this sill, I toyed with wrecking the greatest long-distance relationship in the history of the cosmos. Or at least the long-distantest.

“I didn’t think I would like you,” whispered Oona Laszlo, offering a glimpse of devastating tenderness toward us both. The tiny cracks in this woman’s hard-boiled façade were as entrancing to me as the fine tracing of shattered glaze on a Renaissance portrait, vulnerable everywhere, though the face that glared from beneath dared you to waste any sympathy upon it.

My own words were more than usually missing. I let my hands play at Oona’s hair and clothes, her perimeter, didn’t plunge inside.

“Should we go to your place?” I asked.

“You’ll never be invited to my place, Chase. Please don’t suggest it again.”

“Okay.” I felt a little rapturous and awed, but completely tawdry, too. Oona seemed to demand it, the ticket price of entry. I was meant to ignore the shattered glaze.

“Have I insulted you yet?” she asked.

“I’m hard to insult, for the same reason you’re good at secrets.”

“Too delicate by half, Chase. Fucking kiss me.”