CHAPTER
Two
Perkus Tooth was right. I may as well acknowledge I function as an ornament to dinner parties. There’s something pleasant about me. I skate on frictionless ball bearings of charm, convey a middling charisma that threatens no one. As a retired actor I evoke the arts, yet feature no unsettling aura of disgruntlement, striving, or need. Anyone can grasp in a single word-residuals-where my money comes from and that I have enough of it. People with money don’t want to wonder, in their private evenings, whether their artist friends have enough (or worse, be certain they don’t have). It was during one of these evenings at their most typical, swirling with faces I’d forget the morning after, that I came to be introduced to Richard Abneg.
Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s duplex apartment took the disconcerting form of a small town house that had sidled against a representative Park Avenue monolith of an apartment building and been absorbed and concealed there. Entering through the lobby after having passed the doorman’s muster, a visitor veered left, shunning the burnished, inlaid-rosewood elevators leading to the ten-million-dollar apartments, up a small interior stoop, six marble steps narrowing to an ornate doorway, to be greeted inside by another, finer, more scrupulous and savvy doorman, the Woodrows’ alone, who spoke the name of any guest before it was given, even at a first visit. This house-within-a-building functioned to enunciate to dwellers in those apartments, elevator-sloggers who imagined they’d come to one of life’s high stations, your indoors is our outdoors, that’s the exponential degree between us. Distinction from merely heedless wealth was tough to obtain on Park, but the Woodrows had purchased some. If it took a surrealist flourish to do so, fair enough. Inside, there was nothing to say the Woodrow dwelling wasn’t some stupendous and historical town house, now widened to modern style, walls layered with black-framed photography and paintings as crisp as photographs, behind dustless glass, and with a curving interior stairwell as much a proscenium for entrances as that in The Magnificent Ambersons. Yet their home was invisible to the street. It had nothing to enunciate to the street.
A certain script pertained. I wouldn’t speak of my astro-fiancée, off trapped behind her thin steel-and-tile skin against the unfathomable keening void, during cocktails. No, I should reserve the material. There would come a point in the dinner, after some fun had been had, candles burned two-thirds down, glasses just refilled, when someone to my right or left would inquire and as if by previous agreement other talk would fall off, so the whole table could listen as one to my sad tale. Janice Trumbull’s drama, to which I was attached, wasn’t going to go unmentioned, and it was hardly secret-they’d after all been following her fate in the papers. So with earnest concern in their hearts, the guests would lean in unashamed to hear what I knew, the “real story,” maybe. And to moo sympathy, like the approval an audience shows a poetry reading.
Cocktails were for smaller talk. Eight or nine of us mingled in that plush drawing room, counting Maud and Thatcher, our hosts, while their staff wove amid us, harvesting drink orders and sowing canapés. Naomi Kandel, the lesbian galleryist, tipped her glass in salute when I came in, and I drifted in her direction. Stout and handsome in her evening dress, eyes drowsy with congenital irony, Naomi bore the promise of deadpan commiseration here. Though we’d all chosen to accept this invitation, we had to make ourselves feel better about the decision by imagining ourselves enslaved. Naomi stood with another woman, a curvaceous, fortyish socialite in a sparkling ginger-threaded dress. Together they stood regarding a framed drawing, perhaps a new art acquisition of the Woodrows’, a crisp architectural-style rendering of a dark pit that plunged between two Manhattan office towers, viewed from above. Tiny figures were also represented, gazing into the pit’s depths from the sidewalk.
“Do you know Sharon?” asked Naomi.
“I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Sharon Spencer, Chase Insteadman.”
“I’m a fan of your work,” said Sharon Spencer. She weighed my handshake for an extra instant. I wondered which work she meant. Was she a fan of Martyr & Pesty? Few bragged of this. And Sharon, attractive as she was, seemed a bit old for that sitcom’s heyday. She was being polite, I decided, or coy. I joined in gazing at the drawing.
“Laird Noteless,” said Naomi, naming the artist. “It’s a study for Expunged Building.”
“Are you his dealer?” I asked Naomi.
She shrugged no. “There’s nothing to deal. Noteless doesn’t usually let go of his sketches. He likes to hoard or destroy the evidence, leave only the major works behind. I think Maud and Thatcher are helping him get Expunged Building past city council.”
“It’s not built yet?” said Sharon Spencer, surprised.
“Not yet.”
She shook her head. “Preposterous, the hurdles they set up.”
“Where’s your husband, anyway?” said Naomi dryly, not concealing her boredom, and maybe wishing to squash any flirtation.
“Reggie’s coming late,” sighed Sharon Spencer. “He’s stuck at work. It’s all dreadful down there now.”
Reggie, I understood, was one of those who shifted the money around, trying to make it get bigger. They all deserved our pity, clearly enough. The money men, effortful and exhausted, slumping through the gray fog. Compared to their wives they were peons.
Maud Woodrow found me next, and broke me away from Naomi and Sharon Spencer to meet Harriet Welk, an editor at Knopf. Maud and Harriet had met when a photographer needed permission to reproduce some of Maud’s collection for a coffee-table book on nineteenth-century folk jewelry. Harriet, though she might have been the youngest player on this intimidating stage, was commanding and keen, and easy to want to charm. It was Harriet who’d brought Richard Abneg along. He was still across the room, getting buttonholed by Thatcher Woodrow. No male arriving in the Wood-rows’ circle was ever spared preemptive marking with Thatcher’s scent. When spirited off to another duty, Harriet retailed a few facts about Richard, who she called her “secular date.”
“You mean ‘platonic,’ I think.”
“Platonic, secular, old friends. Anything between us is unimaginable.” She pointed Abneg out, a short, stolid fellow who appeared, in this company, like a cartoon Communist in his wide-legged charcoal suit, untucked flannel shirt, and a black beard encroaching on his sullen cheeks and fierce eyes. He stood nose to nose with Thatcher, gripping a martini’s neck like the handle of an ax he’d use to hack his way free if Thatcher didn’t quit bragging.
“Clear enough,” I said. “You’re a pair of solo operators here. Lone wolves.”
She explained that they were high-school friends, went all the way back to the corridors and water fountains and sexual embarrassments of Horace Mann. “You know when you’ve known somebody so long, you’re familiar with all their self-reinventions?”
“At least he’s bothered with self-reinventions.”
Richard Abneg had begun as a radical, an anarchist. His formative event the Tompkins Square Park riots, when the police quelled the rebel spirit of the Lower East Side. (I faintly recalled these facts, another version of the city’s Original Sin.) Abneg had spearheaded a squatters’ seizure of a famed building on Ninth and C, a cherished last stand, a toe stuck in the slamming door of progress. Out of this had come a career in tenant advocacy, bulldog negotiations on behalf of those sidelined in gentrification’s parade. Now, ultimate irony, Abneg worked for Mayor Arnheim, managing the undoing of rent stabilization. He’d become a major villain to some who recalled his earlier days, Harriet Welk informed me. Yet Abneg clung to his sense of duty, always alluding to how much worse it might all be without his interventions, a jaw-clenched claim on a higher realism. His intimates, like Harriet, could see what it had cost him, going to that crossroads, making that devil’s bargain. They kindly left the ironies unconfronted. What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when he was fifteen and reading Charles Bukowski and Howard Zinn and Emmett Grogan. I soaked up Harriet’s description and braced myself. What she hadn’t warned me was that I’d like him.