Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

*

Did Renee glance at the tapes on the bracket shelves, and the tapes stacked in uneven piles on the floorboards beneath the shelves, and the tapes on the shelf above the closet’s hangers, where Kromer put all their coats? Possibly. Kromer caught Invisible Luna’s glances at them. Yet it was Renee’s containment that Kromer should have taken as a sign. She fell silent, her limbs surrendering their animation. If only the blocks of Ludlow had each been a mile long. Greta sat cross-legged on Kromer’s couch and rolled joints with the crafty intensity and patter of a stage magician, so practiced that she could look away from the trick to meet her audience’s eyes.

“Is all this yours?” Luna said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Kromer seized the opportunity with relief. The tapes had first to be mentioned, so as to be dismissed. “I find it pretty incredible myself,” he said. “My mansion of smut has many doors.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luna said.

Kromer cut the jokes, opting for efficiency. He described the formulaic nature of the reviews, how he’d become adept enough to write one after slogging fifteen or twenty minutes into a given feature, and the logistical annoyance of the VHS cartons stacking up. “You’d never think they could need so much of it, until you see them in the shop, ravenous for new releases. As if watching the same one twice would be the shameful act.” The pronoun “they” was what he meant to put across, a verbal quarantine on the unseen behaviors dividing customer from clerk.

For a few minutes, the subject went underground. The joint circled the room. Kromer was content to see that as it visited under Renee’s elegant nose she sipped deeply, eyes closed. He couldn’t have predicted that it would be a fuse on a stick of dynamite, a spark sizzling its way to Renee’s lips. Or that she’d go off like Yosemite Sam. Kromer was just dropping the needle onto a Cowboy Junkies LP when Renee screeched, “I feel like I’m sitting inside a copy of Guernica !”

“Sorry?” Kromer said.

“I can’t let my eyes rest anywhere,” Renee said. “It’s like a meat shop — carnage everywhere.”

Greta’s eyes widened, which put them at half-mast. “More like Francis Bacon,” she murmured. Greta had been an art-history major at college. “Really, if you squint, it’s like we’re in a Bosch painting.”

“The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Kromer said. It seemed a calming phrase to utter, akin to saying the words The Peaceable Kingdom or Everything That Rises Must Converge , or like the narcotic tone of the LP, which presently purred, “Heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper to me when you smile …”

“My gender-studies professor did a book of life histories of sex workers,” Renee said. “But it’d take a thousand years to debrief this Aladdin’s cave of contorted bodies.” Renee’s expression was mangled, like her words.

“If these walls could talk, they’d moan,” Greta said.

“I think they might be screaming at me,” Renee said.

“Not everything is … the same as everything else.” Kromer recognized that his generalized protest against equivalences wasn’t going to cut much ice. As it happened, a bookshelf at Sex Machines featured Renee’s professor’s book, a fact Kromer didn’t feel obliged to mention.

Renee bolted upright, putting Kromer on alert for a police raid, or a blouse aflame from a loose ember. Instead she darted at the edifice of porn, coming away with three tapes. These she tossed into Kromer’s lap, poisoned potatoes. “Tell us what’s so different.”

Where could he possibly begin? Kromer flashed on the tapes’ contents, helplessly. Actually, Renee had done well, for a random stab. Two of these three had some redeeming imaginative elements. He lifted the topmost, Bare Miss Apprehension . “These — I mean, Bare Miss Adventure and all the sequels — they’re really just star vehicles for Jocelyn Jeethers. A picaresque structure, but charming. People like them, I mean. There’s a good focus on female autonomy—” Kromer stumbled on the proximity of this word to “anatomy.”

“Autonomy of what?” Renee said.

“Autonomy … of pleasure, I guess.” He felt himself whirling down his own motormouthed drain. “Whereas this—” Having shunted the first tape aside, he held the next, Anal Requiem 4: The Assmaid’s Tale , exposed in his lap. He hesitated over the terms “low end” and “bottom drawer” before settling on “Junk.”

“That’s your whole review, O mighty critic?” Invisible Luna said. No one threw him a lifeline here.

“Oh, I tallied up the number of certain acts, which is all you’re really dealing with in this case.” He flipped it away. “This, on the other hand, is actually pretty interesting.” The film, called Social Hormones , Kromer had stayed with to the end. “The Sward brothers are renowned for their commitment to establishing character arcs and narrative causality, and production values generally — you can actually watch their stuff more or less like a movie, if not a great one.” He heard quotes from his own newsletter entry. “Of course, there’s a certain ceiling on the quality of the acting.” It struck him, too late, that he was attempting to demonstrate that he wasn’t a man from the moon by detailing the moon’s topology, cataloging its hollows.

“Let’s watch it!” Greta said.

“Or not,” Renee said. She looked ill. All glanced involuntarily at Kromer’s large black television, stacked with the VCR on its rolling cart. “Is it just me,” Renee continued, “or are the walls getting closer?”

The suggestion’s power was tremendous. Kromer, though eager for a subject on which to agree with Renee, thought better of saying he’d noticed it, too. “I really should clear some of this out—”

“You could just brick up the windows,” Luna mused. “It’s like a Gothic nightmare, what’s it called— The Prisoner of the Rue Morgue ?”

“By Edgar Allan Porn!” Greta shrieked.

Renee jolted from her chair a second time, now veering to the room’s shrinking center, avoiding the looming shelves. She pitched, bent double, attempting a vomity dash for Kromer’s bathroom. She nearly made it. The vision she’d offered earlier — the pig, the dog — now came fully into view, though Kromer felt anything but unsympathetic. She brushed him off, after he’d gained a brief, delicious sensation of her long knobbed spine beneath his fingers, and staggered to the toilet to finish her heaves. Kromer’s special literacy was, it now seemed, something worse than a complete dead loss on the human scoreboard. It was positively toxic, able to compel vomit from gorgeous women. He thought with relief how, on her knees, at least, Renee would be spared any view of the VHS tapes stacked on the porcelain tank.

Kromer labored at the floorboards with wadded paper towel and citrus solvent, wishing to spare her, too, the shame of her stinky action painting. He glanced over to see Luna and Greta side by side on the couch, charting his efforts with amusement, Greta’s short fingers meandering on Luna’s archer’s-bow thigh. Behind him, the apartment door slammed.

*

The permanent mystery was how much you seemed to know before you knew anything at all. Or maybe the permanent mystery was how stupid you could be and yet how you clung to evidence that your stupidity knew things you didn’t. Kromer, just for instance, had named her Invisible Luna without grasping that it was he, Kromer, who was invisible to Luna. She was, he saw now, a pining, tentative lesbian, in love with her best friend.

Kromer’s Conceptual Lesbianism had come with no gaydar. He’d kept Luna blurred in his periphery not only as a defense against how little he signified but also for fear of understanding his small role: Arousing but creepy, Kromer could keep Renee in a state of prurient susceptibility, yet repulsed by the male prospect. For Kromer and Luna had shared the same quarry, she who’d puked and vamoosed. Kromer’s pointless reputation had once again run his tender hopes into the dust. As for Luna’s hopes, who knew? Kromer had overplayed his role, or his apartment had.