Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

Renee and Luna, in History at the Graduate Center — Kromer’s names for them were Beautiful Renee and Invisible Luna — practiced the buddy system, never letting themselves be caught alone with him. Kromer learned this fact from their bolder colleague Sarah, who was willing to meet Kromer unaccompanied in Union Square, at least by daylight. The afternoon was bright, pigeons combing mud baked by winter, a scarf keeping Sarah’s mouth hidden. Kromer had been speculating that Sarah might want him herself, when she mentioned Renee and Luna’s policy.

“They shouldn’t be afraid of me.”

“They’re not afraid. They’re dizzy and repulsed. They want to be able to compare notes.”

Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn’t make understood.

Nor could Kromer confess that it was Renee, all-but-dissertation on contemporaneous Western representations of the Boxer Rebellion, whom he loved. Renee Liu, who wore turtlenecks and resembled a whippet, her nose a beacon of melancholy, who furrowed her brow and laughed in suspicion of anything Kromer said that was halfway sincere, whose older sister had been at college with Kromer and Greta, and whose tiny Chinese parents Kromer had once therefore seen picking up Renee’s sister and her belongings at her dorm.

Kromer had no idea whether Renee knew this, or whether her sister had told her terrible stories about Kromer’s college years. But he couldn’t interrogate Sarah on the subject, for fear that she might be injured by being overlooked in favor of Renee. What Kromer wanted to injure was the image of himself as debauchery’s emissary. He said nothing. They fled the frozen park for a coffee shop, where Kromer suggested hot chocolate, adding, he hoped, a brushstroke of harmlessness.

*

Was it Greta and her pre-ops, or the depth of Kromer’s eye sockets? Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preempting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.

Sex Machines’ interior and stock had been painstakingly derived from that of a famous San Francisco shop, founded by a sex-positive lesbian collective. In lieu of such a collective, the owner had installed Kromer, transferred from the video-rental outlet, as both manager and night man. Night hours were what counted in this instance. A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesbian, a term he’d invented and never spoken aloud, nor advanced into any coherent definition. Kromer was fairly certain he’d never experienced an erection within the bounds of the shop.

Four things. Pre-ops, eye sockets, Sex Machines, and the state of Kromer’s apartment. Few had been inside, but word evidently got around. Kromer’s boss, whose video store featured “staff picks” shelves with extensive written remarks, had insisted that Sex Machines produce their own version of the San Francisco collective’s newsletter, a hallmark of that store’s unfurtive friendliness. In the newsletter, pornographic movies were extensively categorized according to predilections and interests, and rated on several indices: number of key scenes, story or its desirable absence, diversity of performer types, et cetera. It seemed that this was the way to sell porn to bored marrieds, a market Kromer’s employer characterized as “Moby Dick.”

Kromer, outed once in conversation as a novice writer, was deputized as the editor of the Sex Machines newsletter, as well as its sole contributor and reviewer of new materials. His apartment was a maze of stacked porn. The volume was staggering. The disarranged piles melded into a wallpaper of ludicrous fonts and slashes of pink, brown, and yellow flesh; though the job was chiefly a matter of inventorying characteristics, tabulating spurts and lashings, Kromer couldn’t get through the tapes fast enough. As invisible to him as familiar bookshelves would be to another, the accumulation tended to make a powerful impression on visitors. This Kromer ought to keep in mind, but hadn’t.

*

It should have been foremost, especially on that in-like-a-lamb evening in March, a month or so after his stroll with Sarah, when Kromer improbably pried Renee and Luna loose from a dull celebration held at a pub just a few blocks from his building (some underdog had passed his orals, on second attempt). Kromer had brought Greta along, and it was she who actually accomplished the trick, keening for Kromer to lead her back to his apartment, where she knew he had a fresh bag of good pot. “Do you want to get high?” Greta, inserting herself beside Kromer, posed this question flatly to Renee and Luna, whom she’d only just met. Greta’s dress, mascara, and mannerisms in this company made her appear a woman garbed as a bat or a cat at a party where no one else was costumed. She was an instinctive corrupter and seducer, guilty of everything ever imputed to Kromer. Yet he’d never have carried off the extraction himself.

The walk couldn’t have been improved, Luna falling in beside Greta, Renee lagging behind with Kromer, the air nearly balmy. Kromer peppered Renee with teasing questions, even dared express surprise at learning of her sister.

“We must have been at school together. If I tried, I’d remember her.”

“Think of me but better looking. She was a model. Now she’s a model’s agent.”

“Really?”

“Not the famous kind. In catalogs for winter gear, under hot lights. She told me you could lose ten pounds in one session, just mopping sweat.”

“Like a starting pitcher, I’ve heard.” He threw a pretend forkball.

“Completely demeaning work.”

“I’m sure,” he said, ignoring the ominous word, failing at that moment to worry about his association with the demeaning work of removing clothes under hot lights rather than piling them on. “You could be one.”

This drew her furrowed laugh. “Look at this profile. I’m a pig, I’m a dog.”

He held up an L of finger and thumb, making the shape of her regal or mournful nose, something he’d practiced alone, imagining fitting his hand to its length. “I’d cast it in gold.” The line came from somewhere, surely, but wasn’t practiced in the least. It startled not only Kromer but Renee, too, enough to spare him the laugh.

“I’ve been wanting to find a way to split you from Luna for so long I can’t say,” he told her. “This little distance of pavement is all I’ve managed.”

Renee watched her feet, and Luna’s and Greta’s, ahead. “There’s always the telephone.”

“I’d heard you two had a party line — was I misinformed?” He hoped the joke wasn’t too antique for her. Their knuckles brushed. Not quite fingers entangling. No one said ouch.

But the walk, that brief elbow of Houston and Ludlow, was done. Their appointment with his baggie of pot commanded they exit the sweet night, in favor of the radiator thud and hiss of his walk-up. The super hadn’t yet adjusted the heat to the season, so Kromer balanced blazing pipes with yawning windows. Air so plush at sidewalk level would be like ice coursing through his fourth-story windows. He’d apologize for luring them into a sauna riven with blasts of cool, nothing else.