Chronic City

CHAPTER Eight

It struck Richard Abneg that the appropriation of certain buildings-great museums and libraries, music halls, public atriums-for the throwing of benefit galas, those gatherings of social and monetary forces, dressed in their human costumes of ball gown and black tie, to dine at circular tables of ten or twelve, had the effect of seeming to reveal the provenance and rightful ownership of such spaces. Ten trillion schoolchildren might have tramped through these corridors, peered into spooky vitrines and dioramas to contemplate exotic tableaux frozen within: Serengeti lions, emperor penguins, a polar seal writhing in an orca’s jaws. Richard had been one of those children himself, ogling this museum where bland informational placards barely veiled the revelation of morbid oddities, of Barnum voyeurism. But the mystery of a building as grand as this one was as deep as anything locked in the tormented gazes of the taxidermied dead.

To whom does New York City belong? Not to schoolchildren. Not to the citizen shuffling cowed and amazed across marble floors in the Frick or Cooper-Hewitt, or paging bug-like through some tome under the green lampshades of the Forty-second Street reading rooms. Money communes after hours in these places, after the turnstiles have been stilled. Money shows itself only when it cares to. Mostly it lurks instead in the high prosceniums and fitted-rosewood ceilings, the broad granite staircases, the fitted-veneer mosaic archways, and as well in the fitted tuxedos and fur coats slumbering in walk-in closets, the strings of pearls and antique diamond cuff links biding time in their felt-lined drawers. Then comes one morning in the mail the engraved invitation, the stamped reply card, with boxes to check, indicating numbers of seats at two thousand a pop, or the whole table at ten grand.

Richard Abneg loathed the fucking galas. He persistently rented his tuxedos, from Eisenstadt & Sons on Fifty-fourth, a musty theatrical institution, with framed autographed glossies of celebrity customers dating back to Ray Milland. By now for the accumulated sum paid to Eisenstadt he surely could have bought ten tuxes on the installment plan. Yet there was a certain liberty in renting. One of the city’s truths he’d let slip through his fingers, right about the time he scrabbled together a down payment on the Seventy-eighth Street three-bedroom, now beset with eagles. Liberty in renting, greater liberty in squatting. He’d prefer to regard himself as squatting in the tuxedo, if squatting expensively.

Georgina Hawkmanaji had sprung for these seats at the Manhattan Reification Society’s annual fund-raiser, in the room any kid in the city would know as the one with the blue whale strung overhead. This evening being at least in part a tentative experiment in appearing in public together. Indeed, the society’s guest list proved an intersection of their worlds, though by definition a gala was more the Hawkman’s vibe than Richard’s. His tux itched at the crotch. Better update his measurements in Eisenstadt & Sons’ primitive card-file system. Or maybe Georgina had given him crabs-hah! At Hunter College he’d battled them for a shameful semester, his hairy body their dream refuge. Shaved his pubes and the fiends packed off to his navel and the tuft above his ass, a little allegory of urban renewal and displacement. Well, he’d pay that price happily, that was the humble truth. He hadn’t fucked like this since his Hunter days, either, since Marta Tristman, with whom in a sweaty, fly-infested Barnard dorm one famous July he’d once managed intercourse five times in a twenty-four-hour period. The whole month had been a marathon, he and Marta aching and giggling in their pot haze and falling asleep for ten hours on her perfectly filthy futon.

Not since then for Richard Abneg, nothing like that, not if he was honest. The insatiable Hawkman debased herself elegantly to him night after night, in positions and attitudes the involuntary recollection of which he found overriding his senses throughout the days between. For instance, now, here, at the gala. At two that same morning he’d had Georgina swinging in a rope chair she’d had installed at his whimsical suggestion, hung from a bolted hook on her ceiling, her legs spilling over the sides of the mesh seat in which her splendid bottom lay helpless to his savage ministrations. The situation was wildly odd and erotic, Georgina’s hands bound behind her as she rotated in the squeaking device, head turned courteously to one side, ever and absolutely the aristocrat no matter how fiercely he worked to defile her. He’d heard her murmuring as she climaxed, “The best, the best, the best…”

The best!

Remembering it, Richard’s crotch throbbed, grew hotter, the itching more intense. He reached down once to work the tux’s fabric loose around his testicles, then tried to refocus on the dais, the society’s oxygenless sequence of self-congratulatory speeches, the elaborate buildup to this year’s winner of the Dorffl-Huxley Medal, whatever. Only worse thing would be to be ensnared in their table’s mummified conversation, wives with hair precariously piled, exposing necks burdened with bling, husbands all in identical tuxes, with nostrils nicely groomed, gray sideburns and temples expertly carved. Richard Abneg’s hair lapped his ears-that might qualify as his last stand. If I’m ever trimmed so precisely around the curve of my ear let me die in my sleep. Let the eagles pluck out my eyes.

With his fork Richard nudged the remains of the two-thousand-dollar pork medallion and scalloped potatoes facing him like a cameo on his navy-blue plate, sickened at what the price tag could have bought instead. He didn’t so much have in mind hundreds of cleft-palate surgeries to brighten the prospects of African orphans, no. Richard had begged off such mathematics long ago. Worlds couldn’t be seen to balance as on a seesaw; their relation was tangential, irreducible, oblique. Dollars resided intrinsically here in Manhattan. Their transfer elsewhere was only a mystical wish, as unlikely as the wish to see the gala’s overdressed constituency suddenly swap existences with the long-dead dolphins and ocelots and forest gorillas trapped within the museum’s glass cases.

Two days before, the steward at Arc d’X had accompanied their young, coltish waitress back to Richard and Georgina’s table, to explain in the place of the frightened, voiceless girl that the credit card company had not only refused Richard’s card for payment, it had commanded her to immediately scissor the thing into pieces, a command she’d followed. Doing so was contrary to the restaurant’s policy, but certainly Mr. Abneg could understand how in the girl’s deference to authority she’d obeyed the voice on the telephone. The quartered plastic card had been returned to him with this apology, in a Ziploc bag. Georgina had laid down her own card to pay for the meal, and treated the episode as an endearing joke, tipping the waitress unusually well for her trouble. But Richard was still without a replacement from the company that had canceled the card, his last. Georgina’s four-thousand-dollar subsidy of this glum evening could have repaired his credit rating. Richard’s embarrassment at thinking this, the one thing he’d never say, only amplified his rage at Georgina’s sacred obliviousness.

At that moment she touched his arm. Their neighbors at either side stared at him with polite, puzzled expressions.

“Darling,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I think it is your cell phone.”

Well, duh. Logically nobody else here would have a snippet of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” seeping from their tuxedo pocket. Richard knew the ringtone typified his strategy, a strategy also tipped by his beard and the hair overlapping his ears, to festoon himself with harmless signifiers of his past selves. The problem was that through endless repetition the song had become inaudible to him, providing only a mild affront in certain mixed companies, like this one. He should have set it to vibrate, but was grateful he hadn’t. Fuck it, he was important, the mayor’s fixer, not merely here as the Hawkman’s hirsute man-candy. Let their tablemates feel the urgency of his business, an urgency they’d never know in their own coddled existences, that was unless the sky truly fell on all of them. Still, Richard imagined, the Manhattan Reification Society and its constituency here would manage to shore up their bubble of bemusement, of obliviousness. Not-knowing being the supreme luxury. As for Richard, he bore the heavy duty of partly-knowing. So he flipped open the phone and stepped away from the table, raising up a faux-apologetic hand and scowling his seriousness to Georgina as he left.

He glanced, but didn’t recognize the number. “Abneg,” he said.

“Richard? It’s Chase Insteadman.”

The actor. The dupe. Richard was chagrined at how fond he’d let himself become. It felt unwise. “What’s up?”

“It’s about Perkus.” The actor then launched into an anxious jumbled monologue worthy of Perkus himself, something to do with Chinese medicine and the purchase of rare vases on the Internet, all in the cause, so far as Richard could tell, of saying that Perkus had suffered a bout of the usual headaches and madness, only much worse than usual. The actor was working to enlist Richard in something.

Richard retreated farther from the nearest table, under the overhang of the room’s mezzanine, into a dark corner behind a caterer’s table, near a long display full of penguins bunched on floes of ice.

“You think he’s going off the rails, huh?”

“That’s putting it lightly. I don’t think he’s been within sight of the rails in quite a while. I don’t know if he’s taking care of himself, Richard.”

“Well, I’ve known Perkus a lot longer than you. He’s always going off the rails, that’s his signature. He’ll be fine.”

“I’d personally appreciate it if you’d come by and see if you think this is the same sort of thing.”

“You sound like a man with a plan.”

“Is there a chance you’d meet me at Perkus’s tonight?”

Richard found himself almost interested, the actor’s panic was so tangible-tangible, that was, beneath his archaically dapper reserve. (Who did he think he was, William fucking Holden? He’d starred in a sitcom, for crissakes.)

To care for Perkus Tooth, as Richard would have to confess he did, was to worry. But Perkus was also a perpetual motion machine, on an uncorrectable course, and quite ferociously selfish, too. He’d built for himself a protective armature of text and recordings, an exoskeleton that, however maladaptive in a wider sense, got Perkus through his days as well as anything, say, the denizens of the Reification Society’s gala had come up with. Perkus had his little orbit: burgers, coffee and pot, free DVDs, acolytes like the actor. There wasn’t much Perkus needed in the way of help. That was, unless he lost his rent-stabilized apartment, or the planners of the Second Avenue subway issued an eminent domain seizure of Jackson Hole, and tore the restaurant down. At that, Richard might feel some need to intervene.

But the actor’s panic meant the actor identified with something in Perkus’s plight, whether he’d admitted it to himself or not. That was interesting. More so, at least, than the evening at hand.

“Sure, I’ll be there, just as soon as I can get away from this other thing,” Richard said. He liked leaving stuff vague, putting it all on a par, items on the agenda of Abneg.

“Great.”

Great, but the call was too short. Richard didn’t want to be returned yet to the gala table. Retreating farther into the shadows by the penguin display, nodding and winking to a member of the catering staff who eyed him suspiciously, Richard pulled up his e-mail on the phone and began scrolling for something that felt like important business. Nothing much. At least forty new Reply Alls on the tiger Listserv-now there was one ad hoc committee he should never have agreed to join! He twitched Delete until his thumb got tired, then quit. Then glanced up, conscious of some other figure beside him in the penguin gloom. The caterer? No. A woman, another shirking gala attendee punching buttons on a BlackBerry. None other than Claire Carter.

Fuck me. Richard felt a vertiginous return of the disquiet he’d had to shrug off earlier, his scorn at an affair full of those who liked to imagine they ran the city just because they took their tuxes from their own mothballs instead of Eisenstadt’s. Now Richard’s undertow of apprehension tugged the other way: What was she doing here? Was the Reification Society in some way important? Worth the time of the mayor’s real fixer?

“Hello, Richard.”

“Claire.”

“I wouldn’t have assumed this was your sort of cause.”

He shrugged. “I’m slumming. What about you?”

“I’m presenting the Dorffl-Huxley Medal.” Lit from beneath by the tiny screen of her phone, Claire Carter’s gaze appeared more than usually unearthly and impassive. She’d always struck him as ageless, but there was no mistaking that she was younger than he was, a member of the generation of automatons, her blond cowl of hair as immaculate and slick as a helmet. He’d never even bothered to wonder if he found her attractive before this moment. His erotic voyage into Georgina Hawkmanaji had sexualized his whole world, that could be the only explanation.

“How cool for you,” he said. “Since you rarely get to do that kind of stuff.” He meant it sarcastically. Claire Carter likely cut a ribbon or handed over a medal twice daily.

She ignored him, focusing on her own scroll of e-mails. Presumably she’d been blind-cc’ed on all the tiger stuff he’d just been looking at.

“I’m, ah, just going to get back to my table,” he said, needing to be acknowledged.

“Excuse me, Richard,” said Claire Carter, as if it were she who’d been rude. She was infuriatingly immune to his attempted slights. “I’m about to go on. Perhaps I’ll see you at the after party.”

“I doubt it.”

As he slipped into his spot at the table Georgina touched his wrist and smiled, conveying an imperial pride and curiosity that he should have been called away. The Hawkman obviously got her rocks off on Richard’s air of civic stewardship. He decided to push it. “I’ve gotta go,” he whispered.

“Oh, no, what’s the matter?”

Richard had been relying on implication to carry him, but found he couldn’t lie baldly now that it was required. Georgina seemed too ready to be afraid for him. “It’s a friend, actually. Probably nothing.”

“What friend?”

“Perkus Tooth.”

“He’s sick?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll join you.”

He shook his head.

“Is there some secret about Perkus Tooth I’m not permitted to know?” Her voice had begun to rise.

“It’s not that.”

“Then I’d like to meet your friend.”

“Listen, I’ll go and see what’s up, and meet you at your place by the time this thing is over.” He slid his hand up her thigh, teasingly high into her softness, near the frontier of her wild private hairs. “You can meet him anytime, I’m not hiding him, for fuck’s sake.”

“If you leave here without me, Richard, please return to your own apartment, not mine.”

Richard Abneg felt a humid lurch in his gut, as carnal scenarios he’d been nurturing at some barely conscious level flatlined. Too, he hadn’t confronted whatever waited for him at his own bedroom window in many days, and was hardly eager to try for a night’s sleep beside that nest of horrors now.

“Fine, fuck it, come along.”

The Hawkman had the refinement not to gloat. Her knit brow demonstrated only concern for his friend’s needs. “Should we leave now?”

“After the award,” he said.

Claire Carter apologized on behalf of Mayor Arnheim, who wished he could be with them, a version of a remark Richard had heard her convey half a hundred times, she the human emblem of Mayor Arnheim’s non-presence. Then, platitudes as inaudible to Richard Abneg as his own ringtone. When she turned to an account of the honoree’s accomplishments, Richard felt himself relax: the project was familiar. Richard even had his own hand in it. The winner was Abigail Friendreth, heir to the Friendreth Securities haul. The childless widow had converted a condemned prewar apartment building for the cause of abandoned dogs, espousing a domesticated beast’s need to inhabit human surroundings, even if there were no human to live with it, or to love it; dogs should live in homes, not cages. Hence the Friendreth Canine Apartments, maintained by a staff paid out of some bottomless trust.

Richard’s part? He’d had to fend off advocates for the homeless, who’d claimed Friendreth’s dogs lived better than some of Manhattan’s humans. The truth that it was the widow’s money to spend wasn’t sufficient to blunt negative hype, so Richard had played his usual conciliatory role, diverting some Friendreth tax write-offs to a few key charities while preserving the Canine Apartments’ charming halo. Another truth, that Manhattan had more advocates than it had homeless, wasn’t politic to say. Richard had barely spotted one in months, apart from the oddball working Perkus Tooth’s back window. Speaking of which, Hawkman or no, it was time to blow this popcorn stand.

Such was Richard Abneg’s state of mind in the hour before he glimpsed his first chaldron.