Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

“Why’d you call me ‘lucky’?” Zwelish asked.

“What?”

“ ‘Lucky Alan.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Blondy said, exhausted at last.

“Then why don’t you just keep your distance.” Zwelish exited on the line.

Now came the deep valley in their relations, though Blondy somehow never doubted it would eventually be crossed. Weeks or a month could go by without their passing on the street, and words were never spoken. Blondy was busy then, in the effort that included our own first meeting, the Koch plays. The boy was born, and the little triad was sighted on Seventy-eighth Street, always self-reliant and self-contained, always in a hurry. And, finally, Blondy uncovered the existence of the “whole block”; it consisted of an older woman (meaning, I guessed, Blondy’s age) living in Blondy’s own building, whom Blondy mainly identified with a boring dispute over recycling, and who, it turned out, was eagerly running him down to absolutely anyone, from the market Koreans to new tenants; to the dog-walkers she’d interrogate after their talks with Blondy, as if deprogramming them; to, presumably, Zwelish. One of the dog-walkers, the most garrulous and multifariously connected (he walked the Jack Russell and the corgis and the aging dachshund), spilled it all to Blondy at last. And also said that Zwelish himself had once halted on the sidewalk to take part in the latest Blondy-trashing session. That Zwelish had said he’d never trusted Blondy, was “always just playing along,” whatever that meant. As though Blondy’s affection were so pernicious it had to be negotiated with.

In the earlier months of this stalemate, Blondy had spotted Zwelish with or without his new family four or five times, then Doris alone with the boy in a stroller two or three others. Blondy hadn’t noticed to what degree he’d pridefully withdrawn from the daily life of the block (this would have been the period of the great escalation in my multiplex encounters with Blondy, when we most frequently “accidentally” rendezvoused and ended up at wine bars) until the garrulous dog-walker stopped him and delivered the news: Alan Zwelish had died, suddenly, of an inoperable brain tumor, discovered only weeks before it killed him. Doris and the child had inherited whatever he had, and an insurance claim was going to keep them in the apartment across the street. Here was the full horror of a relationship that both relied on chance meetings and was subject to utter estrangement: what you could miss in an interval. In this case, the whole end.

There was only one possible choice at the news. Blondy rushed to the apartment to see Doris. She let him in. Entering Zwelish’s lair for the first time ever, seeing — yes! — the high-end audio equipment and the pile of free weights, as well as the framed Motherwell, and most of all the one-year-old playing in a folding crib littered with the plush toys he suspected were Zwelish’s handpicked tokens of adoration, made Blondy’s heart righteous, as if confirmation of his old guesses proved the claims Zwelish had always refused. Doris sat across from him, rigid in her chair, eyes dry. She offered him nothing, and he didn’t approach her, or the child — this wasn’t a visit, it was a reckoning. He started with the only words to start with, “I’m sorry,” meant as an overture to the explanations he wanted to offer whether Doris cared or understood. But she had a clarification of her own to make, one that threw his motives into irrelevancy.

“I’m glad he’s gone.”

Blondy hadn’t misheard. Her syntax was exact and unmistakable, despite the accent. The sentiment laid bare.

“Why?”

“He never let me go anywhere.” Doris’s tone was angry, the feeling fresh. “We only fighted all day.”

Blondy just nodded, needed no prompting to accept the truth of this account.

“I didn’t love Alan. Now we”—she turned, to make Blondy understand she included the boy—“have this. Much better.”

Blondy began weeping, openly, pouring out stuff he didn’t know was inside, matters of his fear of death generally, as well as rage at Alan Zwelish for having pushed him away and at himself for having let himself be pushed.

“You cry,” Doris said, not cruelly.

*

Having been chosen or volunteered to receive the confession from Blondy that Doris Zwelish had preempted, I fastened on the real-estate implications. They seemed to me not inconsiderable, given Blondy’s Seventy-eighth Street rent stabilization. “Your response was to move from the block?”

“I couldn’t confront the recycling lady, to begin with,” Blondy said. “Let alone watch Doris raising the kid before my eyes — what if he came out looking like Alan? The block wasn’t mine anymore. I was like a zombie — they’d be right to shun me after a while. I was embarrassed for myself, but also for Zwelish. Nobody could forget him if I didn’t go.”

“So it was altruistic, moving away?”

“ Necessary , Grahame.”

Again I felt a paranoiac certainty that in telling his tale Sigismund Blondy had enlisted me in a theatrical invention — cast me in a role — for the benefit of an unknown audience, perhaps only himself. There was no Alan Zwelish, or Alan Zwelish had never married or died: The whole episode was confabulation. For an instant I wanted to go to the library and dig for an obituary. But then I knew that the story was true. Inventing a smoker who’d quit and then succumbed to cancer was beneath Blondy. No, my feeling of unreality was a sympathetic response, not a clue to a lie: I’d been infected with Blondy’s own fear, that grandiosity had made his human self specious — a zombie . He fled Seventy-eighth Street afraid he’d made it a stage for theatrics. In his nightmares he might have heard this accusation, delivered in the recycling lady’s voice: not that he was molesting nannies but that he treated others as figures in a shadow play.

The moment I suspected this horror I wanted to assuage it, by speaking of his true and inexpressible feelings for Zwelish. “You don’t choose who you love, Sigismund.”

Blondy looked relieved that I was chasing a moral in his fable, rather than staring with him into the black hole of his personality. “I like that,” he mused. “You don’t choose who you love. Or who loves you. That was Alan’s problem.”

“No wonder he was pissed. Whatever he was searching for, nothing could have made him expect you .”

“Ha!”

I’d have done anything for Blondy at that moment, and, correspondingly, I loathed Alan Zwelish, though I knew there was more Zwelish than Blondy in me, which was likely the reason I was seated here. I hated Zwelish for showing Blondy death, just as I’d hate a teenager for informing a five-year-old that Santa Claus was a fake. I hoped Blondy would live to a thousand, for revenge.

“Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it?”

“Sorry?”

“That’s the next question.” Blondy had unfolded his photocopies again. “Or this: Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal? ”

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences — nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled, not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.