Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Perkus and Richard and I avoided one another for a week or so after our night of frenzied losses, but I called Perkus on the third morning of the chocolate benediction over the city. That day I was demented with guilty grief, for Janice Trumbull’s cancer was the lead feature on all the tabloids, and qualified to run above the fold in the Times , at least the War Free copy I’d happened to find abandoned at Savoir Faire, and read over my breakfast cappuccino (which the pervasive scent kept tricking me into thinking was mocha, a beverage I hated). I rang Perkus’s phone at one thirty, late enough, I hoped, not to wake him no matter how late he’d been up or what he’d been up late doing-I didn’t plan to guess at any possibilities. I was counting on Perkus to divert me from Janice’s story, and if I had to tread softly around his own tendernesses, I was willing. Certain words I’d censor. Perkus groaned, though, as if I’d roused him from murky dreams of that item I swore to leave unmentioned. Or else was marooned in his old land of sawdust and sighs, a cluster headache. But he didn’t complain, and I didn’t ask. He didn’t invite me up, either, instead suggesting we meet for a Jackson Hole burger at three.

I slid into the booth, Perkus already there, nattily dressed, hair damped down, face shaved, putting on a good face in a setting he so often treated like an adjunct of his own kitchen, feeling free to lurch in red-eyed, hair like straw. At that hour the restaurant was empty, and the waitress, a zaftig girl with a funny combination of bangs and retro cat-woman glasses topping her sweet bored expression, scurried right over. Perkus raised his finger to preempt her asking, and said, “Two cheeseburgers, deluxe, cheddar, medium-rare. You want a Coke, Chase?”

“Sure.”

“Two Cokes.”

She obediently scribbled and departed, not speaking a word. Perkus’s air was of command and distraction, and I hadn’t wished to interfere, but it was a perverse choice for me to join him in one of those mammoth burgers, let alone the slag of fries that came with a deluxe, at this hour on this particular day. In only three more hours I was to be treated to dinner at the restaurant of Le Parker Meridien, a privilege I’d have done nearly anything to wriggle free of. My presence for an evening, or at least the duration of an elegant dinner, had been auctioned off as a premium, at a benefit for one of Maud Woodrow’s charities, I couldn’t anymore recall which. The night of the auction I’d sat in a ballroom with Maud, at a table with Damien Hirst and Bono and Andrew Wylie, a champagne night, spirits frivolous and self-congratulatory, the named celebrities mostly bidding on and winning one another’s offerings, whether fifty-thousand-dollar artworks or the promise of a mention in a song or a film. The whole absurd ritual seemed an excuse for the names on the benefit committee to impress one another with largesse, and I’d believed to the last instant that Maud intended to spare me, to win the dinner with me herself, but, cruelly, she hadn’t. I’d gone instead, at the price of fifty thousand, to the Danzigs, Arjuna and Rossmoor, names unknown to me yet reputedly iconic on the social register, names denoting not accomplishments nor even celebrity but rather stewardship of the oldest money, wealth like sacraments, wealth to make Hirst’s, and Bono’s, even Maud Woodrow’s, look silly. The Danzigs, I heard explained, had a staff of two hundred. Staff doing what? I was foolish enough to ask. Staff just keeping things running, was the vague reply. Hiring and firing itself, training new operatives, the several layers between the Danzigs and the world. The Danzigs’ money was a kind of nation unto itself.

(That I’d been an item sold at auction, like the chaldrons, only now struck me.)

This was six months earlier, and ever since then I’d been in denial that the dinner in question would actually need to be enacted. How could the lordly Danzigs really care to make an evening’s worth of small talk with the child star, the astronaut’s beau? Wasn’t the point just to win the auction? But no, they were eager. One member of their two hundred, their chief social secretary, I suppose, had contacted me, a few days before, to confirm the dinner reservation. The stupid day had come at last. Even worse, the news of Janice’s cancer would surely have reached the Danzigs-they’d likely been briefed over breakfast-ensuring cloying sympathies, over sorrows I didn’t relish elaborating. I could, at least, arrive hungry. It would be a little peculiar to down a half-pound fist of ground beef as an appetizer. Anyway, the chocolate odor was very much with me, even as I’d stepped inside this emporium of greasy smells, not much of a complement.

Perkus didn’t mention it. He spent a while squinting and shaking his head, even beat on his temple once with the base of his palm. His rude eye careened after our waitress, but she’d gone into the kitchen. I wondered again, had Perkus been dragged down into cluster? Anyway, had I been summoned here for a reason? (I was eliding the fact that I’d called him.) I’d been relieved, I thought, to find Perkus not on a mission, myself not a conscript. Yet perhaps his urgency was addictive, and I felt its absence now. My annoyance mingled in a sorry anticipation of dinner with the Danzigs.

“Do you smell it?” I asked finally.

“Smell what? Our meal?”

“Do you have a headache, Perkus?” Maybe his sinuses were blocked.

“No.”

“There’s a chocolate smell everywhere in the city right now. Has been for days. You must have noticed.”

“Oh, that,” he said, smirking unhappily. “I guess I have heard it described that way, but no, I don’t smell any chocolate. For me it’s coming in more as a kind of high-pitched whining sound.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said, Chase. For you it’s a chocolate smell, for me, a ringing in my ears. On and off for three days now. Can we just forget about it, please? It kept me up practically all night last night.”

“But nobody’s talking about any sounds,” I protested. “Everybody’s smelling something sweet, either maple or chocolate…” I fished the folded-up section of the Times , still in my trench-coat pocket. “It’s all over the papers…”

Our waitress had arrived, to plant tall Cokes on the mats before us. “You smell it, too?” she said brightly. She leaned in, smiling at us in turn as she whispered, “It’s kind of making me sick, actually.”

Perkus squirmed in his seat, crossed his arms tightly, and cinched one knee over the other, knotting himself. “Thank you,” he said painfully, staring at the Coke.

“Sure… your burgers will be right out.”

“Cheeseburgers.”

“Oh, sure. Don’t worry, I wrote it down right, Perkus.”

He waved her off, and pulled the newspaper section toward him across the booth’s countertop, tracking the headlines with his good eye, the other uncooperating.

“You know her,” I said wonderingly. For my own part, I couldn’t have said whether she was the waitress we always had here or I’d never seen her before. The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.

“Sure, yeah.”

“You like her.” I understood it as I said it.

“Whatever.”

“No, really, Perkus. Is she-do you want to ask her out? On a date?” I enjoyed at least glimpsing his taste. The waitress, in her funny glasses and skirt, made a charming target of Perkus’s nerve-wracked attentions. She was womanly enough, if he scored, to snap his spindly femurs like a panda browsing in bamboo.

“Lower your voice.”

“Is that why we come here so much?”

He sneered. “I’ve been coming here a long time, Chase.”