“Has she met him?”
“No, I don’t think so. Thatcher’s been asking why you’ve never brought him around. We’re all wondering, Chase. Do you and Richard think we wouldn’t like him? Or wouldn’t he like us?”
I tried to fit Perkus for Maud and Thatcher’s compilation album, Great Shrunken Heads of Manhattan. It wasn’t easy. Maybe ten years before, when Perkus had been just arriving at his brief moment of currency, with his bylines in Artforum and Interview. Even then it would have been an ill-fated encounter. Now, I couldn’t even picture them in the same room.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m alone in knowing such opposite, such irreconcilable people: Maud at her regular table at Daniel, vibrantly awake to an invisible yet omnipotent web of social power, and Perkus, in his Eighty-fourth Street burrow, testing his daily reality on a grid of cultural marginalia, simultaneous views of mutually impossible worlds. Or do I flatter myself? Probably everyone feels this way. My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence. Something in me defaults to an easeful plasticity, a modularity. I’d claim it as the curse of my profession, except I’ve forsaken that profession for so long now it defines me only in the eyes of others, not in my own.
And still I flatter myself: my empathy here was sharply circumscribed. I wasn’t finding the vacuum of me too well fed by Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer. Actually, the domain of these hedonist inquisitors seemed, at this moment, the most undernourished I knew. For all the butter-poached and truffle-oiled fare, I felt drunk and annoyed and ready to behave a little badly.
“Do you know what a chaldron is?” I asked Maud and Sharon. I’d asked flippantly, but then felt keen to hear the answer.
“A what?”
“A chaldron. It’s a certain kind of… very rare and desirable… ceramic.”
“Er, no,” said Maud. “Why?”
“That’s Perkus’s current interest,” I said. “He collects chaldrons.”
“Well, that’s… terribly interesting.”
“Yes.”
“It isn’t what I was expecting.”
“No.”
“But what’s Perkus himself like?” said Maud.
“He’s, I don’t know, fairly ellipsistic,” I said.
“Oh, really?” she bluffed.
“I imagine that’s how he’d strike you, yes.”
“I’d love to meet him.”
“Let me see what I can do.” There wasn’t a chance I’d do anything to bring this about. I’d sooner ask my agent (who wasn’t exactly pining for a call from me) to see if he could put me in touch with Marlon Brando’s people.
At that moment I felt Sharon Spencer’s stockinged toes flex against the inner curve of my thigh, then slither beyond, toward my crotch. I didn’t move either to discourage or encourage this maneuver, took it rather as a neutral element in an environment already suffocatingly sensual. Given a pillow at my setting I could have begun napping at the table, with the warmth of Sharon’s instep now cradling my penis. Her foot’s adventure might not mean so much more, to either of us, than the redundant hors d’oeuvres that had slipped down our throats without our even pausing to hear their descriptions. Likely it represented less the divulging of some occult agenda for our lunch date than a local tactical response to what she’d found to be a dull stretch in the table talk.
Anyway, this lunch encounter had made me certain in my present plans. For it was evident Richard Abneg hadn’t forgotten about Perkus Tooth, despite Richard’s recent absence from the scene at Eighty-fourth Street, and no matter his involvements with eagles or Georgina Hawkmanaji’s toilet. Like me, Abneg bore the matter of Tooth around with him wherever he went, and talked about him, too. He might not be up-to-date with chaldrons and other catastrophes, but he could be brought up-to-date. He’d rise to the occasion of my planned intervention. I’d only need to find and rally him.
CHAPTER
Seven
I find I want to get this description right, or at least a little righter. With the possible exception of my own face in the bathroom mirror, the church spire outside my window is the sole thing I look at deliberately, consciously, every single day. Yet I glance in its direction as if in doubt, as though the spire’s memory is only a rumor between me and myself, and one of the two of us doesn’t completely trust the other. When my eyes do confirm the church’s actuality (buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist, things are relentlessly what they seem even if they serve as hosts, as homes, for other phenomena), the sight acts on my mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it, into crumbs easily swept from the page. If I’m elsewhere, I have an easy name for the thing: a church spire, a few blocks away, and, sporadically, a flock of wheeling birds. When I look, however, language dies.
Against a white sky the stones of the church are gray-brown. They’re smutched, like scraped toast. Against blue, the stones reveal an earthiness. Sienna? Umber? In sunset, the church nearly looks blue. Darker stones are bricked at right angles, lines of mortar visible between them, while lighter stones form the tight-jointed and apparently seamless triangular spires which cluster, one atop the other, each crowned with a small stone cross, nesting toward the single highest cross at the peak. The long A-frame roof is dusky black, not shingled but smooth, and lined with a ridged ornamental top and gutter, both a shade of copper-gone-green like that of the Statue of Liberty. Windows framed in lighter stone take the shape of a snub, rounded cross. (A Celtic cross, possibly? Or do I just mean it reminds me of a shamrock?) Other windows, in the smaller spires, are formed in clusters of three upright lengths, with arched tops. I’ve never seen anyone in any of those windows. I doubt they open. You’d think they ought to be colored glass, and perhaps they are, but they appear black.
Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.
One day recently I glanced out in the spire’s direction and was shocked to see a bird passing, just at that moment, quite near the glass of my window. Not one of my birds (or perhaps I should say “the church’s birds”), but a migrating duck, its Concorde-like shape unmistakable even if I hadn’t seen a hundred drab paintings of winging ducks on the walls of cheap restaurants. The duck flapped in one direction only, intently passing through, so quick it was apparitional. Then, followed by others, twenty or perhaps thirty ducks, none so close to my window as the first, yet all flapping doggedly through the margin between my building and the Dorffl Tower. The ducks seemed a kind of eruption, a happening, yet they were too fixedly themselves, too plainly on a natural mission, to be a harbinger of anything but ducks. I yearned for the group to waver, to turn and linger, to sweep through my sky space a second time at least, but in a moment they were gone, another ordinary mystery, one discrete plane of existence momentarily intersecting with another, under my obtuse witness.
Today the tower’s flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot’s lifted lid. It appeared someone had given the birds new instructions, had whispered that there was something to avoid, or someone to fool. I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he’d woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: “Paranoia is a flower in the brain.” Perkus offered this, then smirked and bugged his eyes-the ordinary eye, and the other. I played at amazement (I was amazed, anyway, at the fact that Perkus dreamed sentences to begin with). Yet I hadn’t understood what the words meant to him until now, when I knew for a crucial instant that the birds had been directed to deceive me. That was when I saw the brain’s flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was.