Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Speaking of long times, when did you last have a girlfriend?”

He tried to ignore me, stuck to the paper. “So, let’s see about this chocolate odor of yours-”

“No, really, how long?”

He looked up now. “I’m serious, Chase, shut up . It’s so easy for you, you don’t have any idea-” He almost hissed. “I don’t want to talk about it here.”

I showed both palms in surrender. “Okay.”

“And don’t you talk to her.”

“Okay.”

I smoothed my expression, but beneath that mask I marveled at the whole thing: How frustrated was he? I thought of something Oona had said, just a few nights ago, when while suspended in her slippery limbs in some kind of interlude or afterglow I’d mentioned how Richard Abneg and the Hawkman had been so grabby, so febrile in their formal dress, that evening in Perkus’s rooms. “My theory is you can never overestimate how much sex the people having sex are having,” Oona said. “Or how little sex the people not having sex are having.” “The rich getting richer?” I suggested and she’d said, “Yes, and the healthy, healthier.” Then I’d said, “And the-” and she’d put her finger to my lips.

So, how frustrated? Was the Jackson Hole waitress a slow-cooking crush, or only something flitting across his distractible radar? She looked approachable, but I wondered if Perkus knew how to get from here to there. Then I thought of his zany corralling of me, outside the Criterion offices: Perkus knew how to come on. Unless it was that he only knew how to come on to a sort of boyfriend, a gormless disciple like I’d turned out to be. So did that make Perkus gay? I didn’t think so. What hints I knew didn’t make him anything .

Perkus had been flipping the newspaper’s front section over and over again, passing, I assumed, from the chocolate-smell story to the news of Janice’s diagnosis, his forehead in a scowl, his lips a determined line. Now he pinned some item with his finger, and looked up. That I’d be made to rehearse the spacewoman’s tragedy for Perkus was exhausting, though not as dreadful as contemplating that subject tonight, with the Danzigs. But as it turned out that wasn’t the item Perkus had in mind. He rotated the paper to my view. A front-page photograph I’d glossed over showed a polar bear atop a largely melted-away chunk of glacial ice, drifting in a calm open sea, its muzzle raised to howl or bellow at the photographer, who from the picture’s angle must have been cruising past on a cutter’s deck, or leaning out of a low-zooming helicopter’s window. The photograph was cute until you contemplated it. The scribble of ice on which the bear perched was pocked, Swiss-cheesed with melting, the sea all around endless. The bear already looked a little starved. Judging from that ice, it might not have time to starve completely. The War Free edition really depended on how you defined war.

“You see that?” Perkus fingered it again so I wouldn’t fail to understand. “I am that polar bear.”

I just looked.

“That bear is me, Chase.”

His deadpan look, with even his AWOL eye attendant, defied interrogation. The polar bear was another of Perkus’s concerted enigmas: Was this about a doomed species, or was he trying to say that the bear on ice allegorized the existential condition of one such as he-one who, when all others detected an enticing aroma of chocolate, heard instead a high ringing sound? Or was the bear just a description of his dating life, a rebus reply to my question? Here’s my distance from my last girlfriend, and from the prospect of my next , he might be saying. As distant as that stranded bear is from the solace of another bear . Then I recalled Perkus’s nebulous rage at Richard Abneg, when we last discussed Marlon Brando: What makes you the authority on who’s inhabiting what island?

Or was I overthinking? Had Perkus simply awoken, in his usual fierce sudden way, to the plight of bears adrift on ice? Now I would have given anything to hear him talking about Brando or Mailer, Echolalia or Recalcitrant Women , the invisible black iron prison of our perceptual daydream, or the difference between epiphany and ellipsis, between Chet Baker and a Gnuppet with a trumpet. It was as though I was being punished for each and every time I’d tried redirecting him into a healthier obsession. The only thing less cultural than that ceramic-whose-name-I-did-not-wish-to-pronounce was an arctic bear. I tried to picture Perkus volunteering on some Greenpeace ship, scrubbing tar off a penguin. It was pretty much like wishing he was another person entirely, or dead.

So what did my dull Occam’s razor do with the conundrum? I decided my friend needed to get his ashes hauled. A dilemma suiting my own strengths, for once. I could play the tutor, even if I’d have to keep the lessons subliminal to the student. I vowed to set Perkus up. And where better to start than with the large perky waitress whose hipster glasses frames seemed a confession of her susceptibility to nerd celebrities, even shopworn ones like Perkus Tooth. She already knew his name, which had to mean something good. When she arrived with our deluxes I took them from her myself and set them at our places, and said, “What’s your name?”

She seemed to know more than his name, knew to glance at Perkus for a kind of permission to speak. He looked sourly into his plate, x-raying his fries, and so she stumbled answering, “I, I’m Lindsay.”

“There’s nobody here,” I pointed out. “You can talk to us for a minute-” I knew how much Perkus wanted me to stop. It was the same amount that it was impossible for me to stop. My project had become compulsive, my premise self-confirming. The more Perkus twitched and recoiled the more he proved his need of an erotic ambassador. “We’re harmless, Lindsay, don’t worry.”

“Oh… sure…” Lindsay was a little confused.

“How old are you?” I asked her. I gestured at the empty space in the booth beside Perkus, but she didn’t dare. “Have you ever seen a Montgomery Clift movie?”

She brightened. “I saw The Misfits!”

You’re seeing them now , I wanted to tell her. We’re hoping to enlist you into their company . Instead I said, “Did you know Montgomery Clift was buried in Prospect Park?”

“Can you bring some mustard?” said Perkus stonily.

“Oh, right, you always have mustard, sorry!” Off Lindsay scurried to find some. I suddenly imagined what it might have been like for Oona Laszlo, in her glue-girl phase, apprenticed to a little tin god of guerrilla criticism, one not yet tempered by a decade of broadsider’s block. Even tempered he was obnoxious.

“Hey, Colonel Mustard,” I whispered. “You’ve really got her dodging bullets. Lighten up.”

Perkus only gritted his teeth at me, a cartoon of impotent rage. Lindsay returned with a ramekin of yellow mustard, and then gamely ignored the rotten vibes, which were as undeniable between us as the chocolate smell (unless, that is, you were immune to chocolate smells). “You’re… Chase Unperson, aren’t you?”

“Insteadman, yes, that’s me.”

“Sorry-Insteadman.” Lindsay slapped her forehead. She was shaping into one of the all-time apologizers. Perkus, meanwhile, was having a kind of fit. It was lucky his mouth wasn’t full, or bits of beef and bun would have flumed through his nose. “Un-person,” he sneezed in bitter hilarity. “Chase Unperson!” He still hadn’t looked at Lindsay directly, or what would pass for directly in his ambidextrous gaze.

“Funny,” I said, trying to absorb and neutralize Perkus’s hostility. Lindsay, I could see, was only going to take anything in the air between me and Perkus as her fault. Too late. The default deference in her role as waitress, given the obvious distress in Perkus, would prevail. She shrunk away, giving me a funny helpless smile. Perkus and I were left to the travesty of our steaming mounds of food, spoiled under clouds of chocolate and ill manners, spoiled, really, under Perkus’s outright and indignant fury. It helped nothing that we’d been there, in our regular booth with our regular order, so often before. Hemmed in by ghosts of our more innocently garrulous selves, the days of the discovery of our friendship, early September, felt like years ago now. We gnawed the cheeseburgers despondently, under the regime of all we couldn’t say.