Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

I continued this close inspection for a full minute or two. It was as if I’d come for this purpose, Oona’s failure to greet me a consent that I should absorb the scene at her desk. I felt alone there, though technically I wasn’t, being in the company of one who’d melted into the limbs of his padded leather chair-had the chair been dun-colored everywhere, like him, instead of firehouse red, he’d be impossible to notice: Blurred Person . I did feel some whisper of déjà vu at our arrangement, but I placed it soon enough-Susan Eldred had stepped out, left me not completely alone in her office once, a few months ago. So perhaps the man who’d come to Oona Laszlo’s door was Oona’s version of Perkus Tooth. He certainly lingered in a kind of ellipsis. But I not only found him unthreatening, I wasn’t interested. I had no room for another recursion, for human Chinese boxes, Perkuses hiding inside Oonas hiding inside Perkuses. What was next-would the pale-brownish man in Oona’s red leather easy chair turn out to have a Biller of his own, and so on? Forget it. Forget him, he was nothing, and evidently content to be. It was Laird Noteless who bothered me. Had he replaced me in Oona’s life? Her desk looked like a shrine.

Something held me from stepping nearer, to see what words I could read from her screen. I suppose I wasn’t alone, after all. Then, as I hesitated, it blinked off. The room, lit by that flood of sun through the handmade paper over the windows, seemed to pulse, to brighten around that spot of dark in which I now saw myself reflected, the shape of my coat outlined against the clean white walls, not entirely unlike Noteless’s photographic portrait. I could also see the figure behind me. He’d left his loafers on the floor, and tucked his bare feet up to sit cross-legged on the leather cushion, and though I couldn’t be certain I thought his eyes might be closed. I wouldn’t have been shocked to hear him snoring. There was no sound from the corridor down which Oona had fled.

The buzzer sounded. I turned in alarm, though I should have expected it. The dun-man unfolded from his seat and padded down the hallway to the intercom, where he buzzed a sandwich-delivery person into the lobby. Shortly he’d exchanged a wad of dollars for a plastic sack, which he plopped at the foot of the red chair, then retook his cushion, his economy of action suggesting an especially weary distillate of Zen observance.

“I don’t think she’s coming out,” he said. His smile bore an air of wan complicity. “Would you like a half? It’s spa tuna on wheat.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Do you mind terribly-?”

“Please.” I said. He leaned into the bag on the floor and unwrapped his sandwich. I left.

On the street, I felt stripped of all intention, as if shunted outside my own skin. The bright day was already falling to early December dark. I hailed a cab, though it was walking distance, really. It was always so much easier to find one going downtown, like falling out of bed, or out of the sky. I might have fallen out of the sky I was so insubstantial, had so little relation here on Earth, if Lexington Avenue qualified as Earth. Had I even seen Oona? Barely. I’d spent more time with the woman and dog in the elevator. Even more with Oona’s washed-out man. But it wasn’t any particular person I dwelled upon as I bumped across Eighty-sixth Street, to Second Avenue. Instead I considered the fate embodied in New York apartments. Perkus Tooth was utterly a creature of Eighty-fourth Street, that labyrinth of broadsides and collections, the walls bearing a decade’s patina of smoke and old music and conversation. What if Perkus were to be freed into a clean space like Oona’s? Might he take a breath and write something new, something that mattered to him? (With that state-of-the-art computer he’d stand a better chance of winning a chaldron, if nothing else.) Conversely, Oona’s jittery susceptibility, it seemed to me now, might be exemplified in those bare walls, that Teflon floor. Anyone’s portrait might be featured next, to colonize the place as completely as had Noteless and his potholes: a disgraced governor or bishop, a rehabbed rock star or wide receiver, a vindicated scapegoat, a mass killer. No wonder she didn’t want me around the blank slate of those rooms. The ghost writer was too totally permeable.

Why she didn’t see that this was what we had in common-this was the only thing I didn’t understand.

Yet for all I felt bankrupt and stranded that day as I slumped back to my empty turret, a Rapunzel unbeckoned from below, not even raving sick and feverish anymore, just as natty clean and straight of posture and pointlessly deferential as I’d been before I’d ever met Perkus Tooth or Oona Laszlo, too noble to pursue strange redheads in elevators, not noble enough to live out my scripted role as Janice Trumbull’s betrothed, rather somewhere hopelessly between, I was, in fact, about to be rescued. As if they’d been testing me, Perkus and Oona gathered me back into the strange consolations of their company just before I petulantly flunked out of it.

In other words, I only had to stare at my telephone for a day and a half to will it to ring. It was Perkus who called, the following night at nine, but as if by miracle or design, Oona was in tow.

“So, where have you been?”

“Hello, Perkus.”

“You were sick? Why didn’t you call?” I knew him well enough to hear how his tone of grievance contained both an apology and a commandment to pretend our Second Avenue street squabble had never taken place.

“I was barely able to lift the phone. There was nothing anyone could do, I just had to sweat it out.”

“Why don’t you come over now?”

“Well-”

I was surely going to be convinced, but my sulkiness hadn’t quite dissolved. Then, behind Perkus, Oona’s voice chimed in to dissolve it. “Come on, Chase, get with the program!” As if I’d already missed an appointment.

“We’re hanging out,” said Perkus, now with a shade of chagrin, or even pleading, as if he really needed my presence to buffer Oona’s. Women, I began to think, embarrassed him per se, made him feel goofy or uneasy, when they didn’t make him furious. “It’s not the same around here without you.”

Well, it wasn’t the same around here , either, I wanted to joke. I did feel I’d vacated my life somehow. Instead I told him I’d be right over. Needless to say.

Doing so, rushing back to Eighty-fourth Street, I was steering into a storm’s eye. Things in Perkus Tooth’s apartment could never be as they were, because they’d never been any particular way for more than two evenings in a row, really. Nevertheless, I was to briefly reenter a dream I’d idealized. One of life’s oases, those moments that come less often than we want to believe. And are only known in retrospect, after the inevitable wreck and rearrangements have come.

That first night I was shocked to arrive and find them on Perkus’s living-room floor together, Perkus cross-legged like a kindergartener, scissors looped on thumb and forefinger as he browsed half-mangled magazines, Oona kneeling on folded knees, squinting at scraps of text, forgoing her glasses, I guessed, in anticipation of my arrival. They had a broadside in progress between them, one in the late manner, made entirely of collaged elements, devoid of Perkus’s distinctive scribbled hand, Oona resuming her glue duties-perhaps I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten nostalgic around here! Yet they’d only settled, so far, on a single image, smack in the center of a large sheet of drawing paper: the newsprint photo of the polar bear on his raft of ice, which Perkus had latched onto during our last visit. The image, raggedly clipped free of surrounding text, now sat smeared and wrinkling in an excess of rubber cement, worse for wear, bordered by the mute page. Oona’s hair was rubber-banded up into two blunt, irregular ponytails, as if to make an extra joke about my discovering the pair in their childish arrangement on the carpet.