Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“You’re protecting him.”

“From what?”

“We don’t know,” said Maud, with great exasperation. She’d come to me with a problem, and I was refusing to help. “That’s what’s killing us, Chase. Georgina is so nuts, she just talks about him like he’s her boyfriend now, she won’t take a look at what’s going on.” The secret garden of sexual satisfaction was the only truly unimaginable thing. That two people might locate such joy on Maud and Sharon’s watch would be worse for them, by far, than if Richard had been some indiscriminate seducer, bent on pillaging through their beds in turn. The problem might not be that Richard Abneg was an ogre but that he wasn’t ogre enough.

“Now we’ve told you everything we’ve got,” said Sharon Spencer, squinting fiercely. “You owe us the same in return.”

I doubted I could reciprocate such a stew of nonsense, even if I’d wanted to. “I don’t know Georgina, really,” I said. “Maybe they’re good together.”

“Forget Georgina for a minute,” said Maud, totally irritated by my answer. “Tell us about Perkus Tooth.”

“Georgina told us he’s the leader of your little club,” said Sharon.

“Has she met him?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thatcher’s been asking why you’ve never brought him around. We’re all wondering, Chase. Do you and Richard think we wouldn’t like him? Or wouldn’t he like us?”

I tried to fit Perkus for Maud and Thatcher’s compilation album, Great Shrunken Heads of Manhattan . It wasn’t easy. Maybe ten years before, when Perkus had been just arriving at his brief moment of currency, with his bylines in Artforum and Interview . Even then it would have been an ill-fated encounter. Now, I couldn’t even picture them in the same room.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m alone in knowing such opposite, such irreconcilable people: Maud at her regular table at Daniel, vibrantly awake to an invisible yet omnipotent web of social power, and Perkus, in his Eighty-fourth Street burrow, testing his daily reality on a grid of cultural marginalia, simultaneous views of mutually impossible worlds. Or do I flatter myself? Probably everyone feels this way. My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence. Something in me defaults to an easeful plasticity, a modularity. I’d claim it as the curse of my profession, except I’ve forsaken that profession for so long now it defines me only in the eyes of others, not in my own.

And still I flatter myself: my empathy here was sharply circumscribed. I wasn’t finding the vacuum of me too well fed by Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer. Actually, the domain of these hedonist inquisitors seemed, at this moment, the most undernourished I knew. For all the butter-poached and truffle-oiled fare, I felt drunk and annoyed and ready to behave a little badly.

“Do you know what a chaldron is?” I asked Maud and Sharon. I’d asked flippantly, but then felt keen to hear the answer.

“A what?”

“A chaldron. It’s a certain kind of… very rare and desirable… ceramic.”

“Er, no,” said Maud. “Why?”

“That’s Perkus’s current interest,” I said. “He collects chaldrons.”

“Well, that’s… terribly interesting.”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t what I was expecting.”

“No.”

“But what’s Perkus himself like?” said Maud.

“He’s, I don’t know, fairly ellipsistic,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she bluffed.

“I imagine that’s how he’d strike you, yes.”

“I’d love to meet him.”

“Let me see what I can do.” There wasn’t a chance I’d do anything to bring this about. I’d sooner ask my agent (who wasn’t exactly pining for a call from me) to see if he could put me in touch with Marlon Brando’s people.

At that moment I felt Sharon Spencer’s stockinged toes flex against the inner curve of my thigh, then slither beyond, toward my crotch. I didn’t move either to discourage or encourage this maneuver, took it rather as a neutral element in an environment already suffocatingly sensual. Given a pillow at my setting I could have begun napping at the table, with the warmth of Sharon’s instep now cradling my penis. Her foot’s adventure might not mean so much more, to either of us, than the redundant hors d’oeuvres that had slipped down our throats without our even pausing to hear their descriptions. Likely it represented less the divulging of some occult agenda for our lunch date than a local tactical response to what she’d found to be a dull stretch in the table talk.

Anyway, this lunch encounter had made me certain in my present plans. For it was evident Richard Abneg hadn’t forgotten about Perkus Tooth, despite Richard’s recent absence from the scene at Eighty-fourth Street, and no matter his involvements with eagles or Georgina Hawkmanaji’s toilet. Like me, Abneg bore the matter of Tooth around with him wherever he went, and talked about him, too. He might not be up-to-date with chaldrons and other catastrophes, but he could be brought up-to-date. He’d rise to the occasion of my planned intervention. I’d only need to find and rally him.

I find I want to get this description right, or at least a little righter. With the possible exception of my own face in the bathroom mirror, the church spire outside my window is the sole thing I look at deliberately, consciously, every single day. Yet I glance in its direction as if in doubt, as though the spire’s memory is only a rumor between me and myself, and one of the two of us doesn’t completely trust the other. When my eyes do confirm the church’s actuality (buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist, things are relentlessly what they seem even if they serve as hosts, as homes, for other phenomena) , the sight acts on my mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it, into crumbs easily swept from the page. If I’m elsewhere, I have an easy name for the thing: a church spire, a few blocks away, and, sporadically, a flock of wheeling birds. When I look, however, language dies.

Against a white sky the stones of the church are gray-brown. They’re smutched, like scraped toast. Against blue, the stones reveal an earthiness. Sienna? Umber? In sunset, the church nearly looks blue. Darker stones are bricked at right angles, lines of mortar visible between them, while lighter stones form the tight-jointed and apparently seamless triangular spires which cluster, one atop the other, each crowned with a small stone cross, nesting toward the single highest cross at the peak. The long A-frame roof is dusky black, not shingled but smooth, and lined with a ridged ornamental top and gutter, both a shade of copper-gone-green like that of the Statue of Liberty. Windows framed in lighter stone take the shape of a snub, rounded cross. (A Celtic cross, possibly? Or do I just mean it reminds me of a shamrock?) Other windows, in the smaller spires, are formed in clusters of three upright lengths, with arched tops. I’ve never seen anyone in any of those windows. I doubt they open. You’d think they ought to be colored glass, and perhaps they are, but they appear black.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress , etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.