Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

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.”

The only role I ever played to anyone’s complete satisfaction was Warren, on Martyr & Pesty . As the idealistic and dreamy boy intern to Gordon Pesty, the fulminating lawyer extraordinaire, I seemed, to myself and others, to embody… something. The show itself was avowedly “dumb” and we all (writers and actors, network, critics, audience) flogged ourselves those days for our complicity in its runaway success, but I, the exception, was unaccountably “soulful.” Or, not I, but Warren Zoom, born on the wrong side of the tracks, single child of glamorous widowed mom, persistently seeking fatherly mentoring from the irate and disarmed Pesty. This Warren Zoom struck the viewer (or at least a critical mass of teenage girls, and a number of their mothers) as possessing some quantity of life outside the cold frame of the screen, beyond the rigid limits of what shadow plays could be mounted within that half-hour frame in the usual attempt to placate, amuse, and sell what needed selling. Short novels, geared to the teenage girls, were hurriedly commissioned by Ballantine Books (written, I suppose, by the eighties equivalent of Oona Laszlo), decorated with my face, and offered on drugstore and supermarket racks-new stuff to sell, exploding out of the old, the great dream. At one point, I remember, I had the cover of TV Guide and People in the same week. Everyone wanted to know or be Warren Zoom! And I was he! This all evaporated rather (extremely) quickly.