Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

I looked on Perkus, for the first time, as a creature formed of anger. That was how I’d characterized Richard Abneg to myself, but I’d reserved the judgment for Richard, blinding myself to the essence the two had in common. In truth, there was anger enough to go around. I knew I should ask myself (Strabo Blandiana, in one of his post-needle talks, would have gently insisted I do so) why I made my world out of these kind of persons. Who else struck me as angry in my vicinity just lately? Oona Laszlo, with her acid flippancy. I ached for her. We’d planned to meet up after my dinner with the Danzigs-Oona liked to be more accidental, but I’d persuaded her to be my reward for getting through the evening.

Lindsay surprised me. As she set down our check-Perkus had signaled to her for it even as he wolfed the last bite of his burger, and I’d only unpacked and rearranged my own-she said, “If you guys want to party sometime-”

“Oh-” I began.

She tucked one of the restaurant’s cards under my place mat. “Here’s my number. Or just, you know, look for me here.” I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. She was a waitress, after all, on a fading afternoon, and, in the Of Human Bondage way of waitresses, she’d grab any ticket out.

Perkus slapped down a twenty, really slapping the table, punctuation to his mute wrath. Lindsay and I both looked up shocked. “Pack up his burger to go,” said Perkus tightly.

“Oh, that’s okay-” I began.

“For Biller.”

“Oh.”

On the sidewalk, Perkus turned from me, his gloveless knuckles buried in the pockets of his suit, almost, it appeared to his knees, the white sack containing my leftovers tucked into his elbow. The chocolate wind howled, the early winter still so fierce, the sky darkening at four. I drifted after him, trying to demonstrate we were together on the sidewalk. He muttered, “You’re something, Chase, you’re really something.”

“It’s better than not even trying, Perkus. She wants to ‘party’ with us. Who knows?”

“She thought you wanted her, Chase.”

“No, no.” I shook my head, but he didn’t see it, pressing on ahead toward the corner of Eighty-fourth, toward his building. I didn’t really want to keep him outside without a coat for long, but I hurried after. “She could tell you liked her, Perkus, anybody knows that a friend often plays the go-between-”

“Anybody knows nothing , Chase. You don’t see yourself, you don’t see the way women cast their eyeballs at you like a kid shooting marbles on the sidewalk.”

At least I’d sparked some irate brilliance in him, I thought, instead of the moribund bovine cheeseburger-chewer he’d been inside Jackson Hole. Perkus couldn’t be so intimidated by his waitress, it didn’t seem possible.

“You’ve got women falling out of open windows, out of trees, you’ve got women on the moon , Chase. You don’t have any idea how it might be different for me. You actor, you utter unperson.”

“Now, that’s not-”

“How can you fail to see your hostility toward me? I mean, Montgomery Clift? Please.”

Hostility? I’d been thinking I’d just uncovered Perkus’s. Would I always be just one insight away? Insight was an onion, I doubted there was anything but layers.

“I’ve been trying to help you,” Perkus said. “And this is the way you repay me. Well, you’re a hopeless case anyhow. I wash my hands.”

Perkus helping me! At least I understood that everything was inside out and upside down. Rather than argue with him like a couple going through a breakup on the street, I elected to silently agree. I was a hopeless case.

“Do you ever look in the mirror, Chase?”

“Sure,” was my idiot reply.

“How convenient that you’d mention Montgomery Clift to her. You resemble Clift, you know. Before the accident.”

Perkus somehow managed to make this seem a warning, or even a threat. In his view every Clift, I suppose, was scheduled for a face-rearranging encounter with a windshield or dashboard. There being no happy medium between innocence and jaw-smashing, ruinous disenchantment. Now I felt my own hostility around me like a burred skin. Also I tried on my despair. For Perkus, I was cast permanently as fool. Maybe I was one, I’d had to consider it before. Yet I’d always preferred to think I was a harmless fool, at least. Who knows, maybe I’d been lasciviously poaching on my friend’s burger waitress. I might be that irresponsible, it seemed to me now. In point of fact I was reeling, rudderless, without a compass, high on phantom chocolate and infidelity, ignoring the phone, voice mail piling up, in deranged avoidance of the Janice cancer crisis. I ought to be stifling tears at a press conference somewhere, giving evidence of my loving support in this crisis. Perkus was surely right to be mad. I must be acting out.

We stood at his entrance, in a penumbra of stubbed butts from the previous night’s sidewalk smokers. A single half-full martini glass stood perched on the curb. Inside, a tuner was refurbishing Brandy’s piano, the plinked notes groaning sharper as he tightened its bolts. I offered Perkus the card on which Lindsay had scribbled her digits. He didn’t budge hands from pockets, only glared. He wouldn’t even go for his key until I was safely away, and so we hovered in stalemate, me in a coat and scarf, Perkus shivering in his suit jacket, its two buttons pathetically done up, covering nothing. The white sack containing my burger-Biller’s burger-rustled in the crook of his arm.

“See you later,” Perkus said at last.

I nodded at that sack, making small talk. “So how is old Biller, in this cold?”

“He’s fine.”

“He could always build a bonfire out of your books,” I joked.

“Actually, I think Biller got a bed in a rooming house,” said Perkus, with a dryness evidently restraining sarcasm. “He’s not selling books on the street anymore, he got a job on the Internet.”

“I’ve seen him at his computer. He looked like a real wizard.”

“When was that?” he said, scowling. Our fight wasn’t over. I was still under suspicion of all sorts of skulduggery-rustling waitresses might be the least of it.

“Some night,” I said, not wanting to specify. “Outside, in your little alley.”

I saw I’d only fueled his suspicions. Yet I also saw him shiver. Though I wore a coat, I too felt the wind ripping at me. Actually, I felt horrendous, like I wanted to lie down.

“Don’t you have anywhere to be, Chase?”

“Not for a couple of hours.” I might as well have begged for an invitation inside.

“Then go home,” he said acidly.

“Of course, sure, hey, uh, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

“Nothing, out of respect for Sacheen Littlefeather.” He abruptly pulled out his keys and went through the door, taking my cheeseburger with him.

Some member of the Danzigs’ staff arranged a limousine to pick me up at my apartment. The driver needed to have my doorman ring me twice, as I’d fallen into a toxic slumber with the early nightfall, my rooms dim as midnight, and I’d lapsed back to sleep between the ringings, then staggered out into the lobby, through the frigid margin of outdoors, and into the backseat of the feverishly overheated limousine. There I wiped my running nose on my coat sleeve and watched the snail trail of smear saturate into the coat’s black wool, wondering how long it had been since the coat had been dry-cleaned and what layers of filth its dark elegance might be bearing around, feeling myself a skeleton or ghost, a being of no substance draped in a grimy cloak. By the time I found myself delivered to the lobby of Le Parker Meridien, I felt bullied, bruited about by staff and handlers, like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth , an incomprehensible film Perkus had weeks before insisted I watch, a treatise on luxuriant self-pity that now felt terrifically relevant. I said I thought I was expected at Seppi’s, the French restaurant off the hotel lobby, but the concierge told me I was expected at Norma’s instead.