Oona guffawed. “When I write my masterpiece it won’t have so many boring machines in it. That’s boring as in ‘What do we do with all the soil this boring machine has piled up?’”
I’d never put Noteless and Abneg’s tiger in conjunction until that instant. I looked at Perkus, sure he’d make the same leap, but either this was too obvious or I was no longer the target for his arched eyebrow. He was elsewhere. Ava whined and hiccuped quietly where she crouched below, but he seemed not to notice her, either. It was the longest I’d seen him go without caressing the dog since I’d come to the Friendreth. How predictable, my confusion: I was never able to appreciate one of his phases until they were vanishing, assuming wrongly I’d have a little while to get used to things. But this was Perkus’s trick, he shed orientations like skins. Yet he’d seemed so permanent when we met. Bogged in stasis, writer’s block elevated to a principle. I’d have to relegate this paradox to my growing pile of impossible questions, like why he and Oona Laszlo periodically shrugged off their enmity and converged, or whether Laird Noteless’s holes and the tiger’s were aspects of the same phenomenon, like Groom’s and Ib’s movies. I was sure of one thing: if Perkus wasn’t interested anymore, I refused to be. He could shrug off skins, but I wouldn’t wear them. Besides, I had an easy question: What was that book in his lap? I had it confused with Oona’s supposed masterpiece. But I knew enough not to embarrass myself-unpublished manuscripts weren’t bound in cloth and boards.
Oona answered for him. “That was my ticket of entry to this dog museum,” she laughed. “Perkus had me buy him a book on my way over here. I guess he and his new friend don’t darken the doors of Barnes & Nobles.”
It figured. Perkus had turned each of us into a version of Foster Watt, on call for the supplies he needed. Susan Eldred was his dealer in celluloid, Oona text. I’d been entrusted with nothing more cultural than bagels.
Perkus stirred himself from the mire to say, “Yeah, but you bought the wrong book.” He pushed it into my hands. Immaculate Rust, by Sterling Wilson Hobo. A volume of poetry, fifty or sixty pages, largely white space, strewn with paltry syllables. I never peeked / behind your bogus ducks / and lilies to see / the cogs and wheels concealed / or / everywhere your glamorous / falsified apples… “I asked for Obstinate Dust, by Ralph Warden Meeker,” Perkus continued. “How hard could that have been?”
“This looks about the same,” shrugged Oona. “Just mercifully shorter.”
“Hobo is a charlatan,” said Perkus, mustering energy for the dismissal. “A third-rate W. S. Merwin.”
“I got confused,” said Oona. “You’re lucky I didn’t come back with Adequate Lust, which is a how-to book. I might have written it, I forget.”
“Why not rely on communiqués from the storage-space people?” I said bitterly. “Anyway, didn’t you already give Obstinate Dust a go?”
“I wanted to try again,” said Perkus through a slurp at his glass. He felt no need to justify his whims. Why should he? He couldn’t imagine my regard for him was tipping into ruin. I felt he was a fraud, making theater of acquiring weighty books he’d never read.
I finished my glass and poured another, to catch up and to salve the aggravation of their banter. At this Oona showed a glance of panic, fearing her self-commiserating bottle would be drained without her help. She refilled not only her glass, but Perkus’s, seeming to incriminate me for rudeness. Ava wedged her cranium under my hand. She barely hiccuped at all, deferentially minimizing her presence, trying not to be displaced. With the prompting of the dog’s heightened instincts, I sniffed a lie in the air. There was a name for the flavor of mixed dislike and intimacy between Oona and Perkus. The two were exes, I was positive, no matter what I’d been told. So I added sexual jealousy to my roster of hurts and mysteries. It was simpler to manage, and blotted out the others, at least with the help of Oona’s Scotch. The evening blundered forward this way, until Perkus went into the back to urinate or lie down, I didn’t ask, Ava abjectly trotting after him. I demanded to know how Oona had ended up in the Friendreth, and heard my sibilants hiss.
“You weren’t home, so I called your cell, you idiot.”
“The Oonaphone,” I said stupidly.
“Right, the Oonaphone.”
“You never call in the daytime.”
“It was a special occasion, as you can see. I was making an afternoon booty call. Imagine my surprise.”
“I was at the movies.”
“For five hours?”
I didn’t care to say what effort had been required to topple Saruman and Sauron.
“Well, it hardly matters, since you gave your phone away.”
I brushed aside this line of inquiry, which was making me look foolish when I wanted to be fierce and prosecutorial. I was full of wild thoughts and convergences. In my brain Sterling Wilson Hobo was to Ralph Warden Meeker as Florian Ib was to Morrison Groom. Or maybe they were all the same person! Was Noteless involved in designing the tiger? But if paranoiac interpretation was a skin Perkus had shed and I’d involuntarily assumed, it fit awkwardly. If I thought I was close, I was nowhere at all. The secret lay outside my understanding. Oona Laszlo might have my existential puzzle’s edge pieces hidden on her person somewhere, but I’d never make her admit it. I could only formulate bizarre accusations: for instance, that Oona was preventing anyone from reading Meeker’s Obstinate Dust. This was obvious, since she’d tricked me into chucking one copy into Urban Fjord, and then pretended to forget the title when Perkus requested a second. What information was hidden in those pages? If that was idiotic, at least it was fancier than accusing her and Perkus of having been lovers. I felt sure something fancy was going on.
“Is there something you and Perkus aren’t telling me?” I kept my question vague, to invite any confession that might want to produce itself.
“What makes you think it’s one thing?” she teased. “Perkus and I might be not telling you completely different things. Why assume we’ve gotten our stories synced?”
“There are times when I think he’s trying to warn me about you.”
“I’d have returned the favor, but unfortunately by the time you and I met you’d already fallen completely into his clutches.”
At that point I did something regrettable. I used the only articulate weapon I had at my disposaclass="underline" I threw my body at her. I’d been at full attention since the phrase “booty call” anyhow, rigid with intent in the one part of me capable of sustaining a clear thought. Maybe it could impart one, too. If I fucked Oona right, she might take my distress seriously at last, and blurt in the throes of ecstasy an explanation of why I’d felt so much more alive and at the same time so disassembled, so out of joint, since that day I’d walked into Perkus’s Eighty-fourth Street kitchen and seen her, since the time seven months ago when I’d fallen into both their clutches.
Oona was drunk enough that I could push her around easily, and soon enough we worked together on the same project. By the time Perkus and Ava strolled back into the kitchen I had Oona raised against the wall, her hands clutching my ass, though our pants were still on.
“Ava and I are going out,” said Perkus, marble-mouthed with drink and embarrassment. I turned to see him grappling to clip the leash to Ava’s collar, fingers evidently as anesthetized as his tongue. If I was the friend to Perkus I wanted to believe I was, I’d have insisted he not go out into the slippery night alone in that state. Let’s all walk the dog! We could have linked arms, like companions on the Yellow Brick Road (I knew which among us had straw for brains, and Ava made a nice Uncowardly Lion). Nobody spoke before he was through the door.