Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

First we had to eat what now appeared, tongues of eggplant and bell pepper rolled into a juicy little vortex or eye at the center of a plate spattered with pesto, and then depart the table in the flurry as these dishes were cleared, following Russ Grinspoon, who’d ever-so-suavely placed his fishy hand on the bare shoulder of his rapt listener and asked her to excuse him, explaining that he’d promised to show me and Perkus a certain rare vase in Arnheim’s collection. Out we went, incredibly, easily, through the maze of tables and up the mighty staircase, afraid to touch a polished banister too wide for mortal hands, on steps so plushed by carpet that our footfalls felt ungravitied, so that we might have been ghosts, or snowflakes, riding an updraft instead of settling to earth where we belonged. In a dim, swank study at the top of the stairs, walls lined with leather-bound sets, storm-giddy windows overlooking the top of the greenhouse roof and, within it, the dinner party we’d vacated, Grinspoon sparked a ready joint.

“You’re the cat with the astronaut gig,” said Grinspoon. He was nothing if not an aging, red-haired hepcat, his freckles sunburned at Christmastime. I might be predisposed to dislike him because his present career echoed mine, only with the difference he’d just pointed out. His job was just to preside, while I had to play Janice’s fiancé.

“Yes.”

“And you-just along for the ride?” He gave the joint to Perkus.

“I like to keep my eye on this kind of thing,” said Perkus coolly, taking the pose of the first hard-boiled detective to crash a scene in purple velvet. I recalled him telling me I could “learn a lot” from my vantage amid the privileged. He drew on the joint and blew a gust toward the bookshelves. “You worked with Morrison Groom, didn’t you?”

“Funny you should mention that name,” parried Grinspoon. “It doesn’t come up so often these days.” He smirked as if despite his words he’d been expecting Perkus’s question, as though he knew what I didn’t: that Perkus and I had really come here to enact this weird interrogation in a room apart. I hadn’t even smoked yet and the party seemed to be melting away into some more essential reality of Perkus’s devising-this one, unexpectedly, a detective movie starring a crapped-out ’70s star whose songs had been used, I believed I now remembered, as the soundtrack to a Robert Altman film about young orderlies at an old-age home, who ducked into broom closets to get high just as we were doing. Or possibly I remembered wrong. Perkus would tell me later. For now he passed me the smoldering joint.

“Actually, I’m working on a piece,” said Perkus, as if this explained anything. A piece of what? I received an involuntary vision of the name “Morrison Groom,” clipped and pasted beneath an ice-floe polar bear.

“None of those movies made any money,” said Grinspoon.

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“No?” Grinspoon shrugged. “Okay.”

Game, set, and match, Grinspoon. Perkus would have to organize his indignant feelings into some more impressive foray. “Any one of those unprofitable movies is worth all the rest of the films you appeared in put together.”

Grinspoon showed his palms, a Nazi officer so decadent he was pleased to surrender. “Sure, but I was never much of an actor.” With this he winked at me, the fucker. “You didn’t dig Bartleby Rising?”

“You were in that?”

“I’m Bartleby’s boss.” Grinspoon now peered through his fingers to mimic spectacles, and pursed his lips like Scrooge. “Guess you missed it, huh?” Grinspoon kept mutating his appearance and affect, as though sensing, and wishing to mock, Perkus’s investment in matters of authenticity. He was rather obligingly monstrous, I thought.

“I wasn’t curious. Florian Ib’s comedies are everything that’s wrong with Hollywood since 1976. At least George Lucas made American Graffiti . Ib should be forbidden from working with humans. He was better with Gnuppets.”

“See, that’s the difference between us,” said Grinspoon. “To me they’re pretty much the exact same thing.” He gestured for me to return the joint to him, even as he glanced to check the progress of the party below.

“Humans and Gnuppets?” asked Perkus with alarm.

“No, no,” laughed Grinspoon. “Groom and Ib. But hey, man, I’m not an expert on film, like you.”

“Groom and Ib are two opposed principles.”

“I was thinking more of the joy they each took in a plate of carbonara, or a drunk hooker. Actually, I used to wonder if under that Santa Claus beard and beer belly, Florian might actually be Mo, hiding behind an assumed name.”

“What?” Perkus’s response was electric, one eye riveted to Russ Grinspoon, the other pleading with me to attend this emergency.

“You’ve heard the rumor that Groom’s suicide was staged, right?” said Grinspoon. “Nobody really believes coyotes could drag a corpse away and chew off all identifying features in twenty-four hours.”

I was happy not to have another suck at the joint, for this evening was already dangerously distorted, the mayor’s home colonized by the magic zone of Perkus’s kitchen. How was it possible that Grinspoon could so acutely push Perkus’s buttons, molest his sacredest theories? Well, I watched Perkus gather himself, summoning forces reserved for a crossroads like this one. His first instinct was to outflank Grinspoon. “Sure, that’s common knowledge. But Groom wouldn’t waste his time on the kind of stuff Florian Ib’s been doing…” Then, despite himself, he turned the possibility over. “Though it would certainly explain why Brando would appear in The Gnuppet Movie …”

I didn’t want Brando’s name spoken here. Russ Grinspoon would say he not only was dead but had never been alive. Mercifully, Grinspoon pinched the joint’s tip dark, then used it to point through the layers of glass and snow, to where I now saw the whole party with its attention turned to the mayor’s table. Arnheim stood speaking. We’d been missing a toast. I couldn’t see Oona’s table from here.

“I gotta get down there and make a show of things,” said Grinspoon. “Hope the stuff is good to you boys. Enjoy.” Though we’d be returning to the same table, Grinspoon seemed to be offering fair notice that the present conversation wasn’t to be continued downstairs.

“Mr. Grinspoon?” It was strange to hear Perkus default to this formality, addressing the hipster Grinspoon. But I saw clearly now how Perkus wasn’t really any kind of hipster at all. He was too grimly intent on his pursuits to waste time in such poses. The other difference was rage. Grinspoon had none, was breezy to his bones.

“Yep?”

“You mentioned… a vase?”

“Oh yeah, one more flight, in the stairwell, look all the way up. It’s really cool, especially if you’re”-Grinspoon made one more face for us, fingers wriggled in front of his eyes-“stoned.”

Back at the landing Perkus sprinted up the next wide staircase, into the muffled dark. Grinspoon turned the other way, to redescend to the party. I stood between, my mind coursing with marijuana confusion and possibility, my body paralyzed. Grinspoon turned and beckoned to me in my helplessness.

“You’ve got a part to play downstairs too, I think. Have you met the mayor yet?” He checked my glance backward, up that stair. “Don’t worry, he’s a big boy, he won’t get lost.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. What if I’d wanted to see the vase, too? Somehow cowed, I didn’t speak, but followed Grinspoon down the main staircase. A part of me wanted to monitor Oona and Noteless, but also, more prosaically, I was really eager now to greet Sandra Saunders Eppling. The pot smoke had brought up some well of sentiment inside me, for that lost time in my life when I had a simple avocation, to go each day to the cheesy set of Martyr & Pesty , that Potemkin village, and pretend that Sandra was my mom. I wanted to meet the mayor, too, and to talk to Richard and Georgina, to know their news. I missed them. They seemed entrenched in a daily world I missed, too. When was the last time I’d gossiped about anyone’s sex life? Meanwhile, Perkus was gone. He was the birds, the party was the tower. So what if I’d glimpsed both worlds-to which did I belong? I was a middling figure, a dabbler, much like Russ Grinspoon, who’d been directed by Groom and Ib and didn’t see much difference, who could decorate a variety of scenes. Like him, I went downstairs.