His message to me, if it wasn’t too much to read into the single gesture, seemed to be See you later, at Perkus’s. Away from these fucking rich people. Or maybe I’d invented that last, out of my wish that Abneg could detect my own degree of defiance, of bad faith in this company. Anyway, our instant of collusion was finished. As if at some established cue, Abneg swept in and finished what it looked like he’d never even get back to: spiriting Georgina Hawkmanaji up from that couch and out of the duplex, presumably upstairs, to her penthouse apartment, to prove definitively to her the existence of his penis, or to have her prove it to him. We all sat pretending not to be fascinated at how neatly he sheltered Georgina from her own shyness at being extracted from our nodding assembly. I’ll admit she was revealed (too late) (and unimportantly) as erotic to me, as she’d never been until seeing Abneg’s hairy fingers brushing the nape of her neck, and guiding her, like a virtuoso repositioning a cello, by the hip. So I learned how Richard Abneg, like Perkus Tooth, was someone who could uncover what hid in plain sight.
CHAPTER
Three
I only had to arrive fifteen minutes early at East Eighty-fourth Street one day to discover Oona Laszlo existed. Perkus buzzed me up and I entered to find them standing there, in front of their chairs at his kitchen table, shuffling as if apprehended at a crime. Almost one in the afternoon, but I’d broken up a breakfast scene, coffee, cheese Danish sliced into fingers on a grease-marked white sack, a thin joint modestly half smoked and perching in a cleanish ashtray. A pair of Lucite boxes labeled WHITE RHINO, one of Watt’s brands. The New York Times, which Perkus never read. I assumed it belonged to his guest. A book Perkus had been reading last I visited, a gigantic novel entitled Obstinate Dust. Also, non sequitur, A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey, a sturdy blue trade paperback, inverted on propped-open pages. I did my best to conceal my surprise at this woman’s presence. The foot traffic was a little thicker in Perkus’s apartment than I’d previously understood. It might be that he booked us one after the next, his secret life bustled with visitors, his lonely lobby a revolving door.
Needless to say my first thought was that Oona Laszlo was Perkus’s lover. I was wrong. Yet this error, the tender cameo it conjured in my mind’s eye, is still, weirdly, a place I can retreat to in memory and think It might have been better. It might have been nice. I can still see them there, framed in my mistaken assumption, and feel thrilled and relieved for Perkus, who, in dwelling in that imaginary frame, remains as I first knew him.
The two fit, inviting the mistake. If not lovers, they might be brother and sister. Oona shared Perkus’s marionette-ish aspect, large head connected to a tiny frame and seeming to sweep her nervous limbs behind its weight. She wore black (another hint, I thought, that they’d spent the night together-she seemed dressed for the previous evening), making her like a marker scribble, a silhouette in spastic motion in that cramped kitchen. They were expensive clothes, too-I noted that automatically. Expensive for Perkus’s kitchen at least. Black hair, too, in bangs and a neat bob. Had Perkus spilled a pot of coffee on his tiles and the coffee sprung to life as a woman an instant before I opened the door, it would have explained her perfectly. Oona’s mouth alone confessed female ripeness, seeming to stand for secret curves unrevealed by her silhouette. Her canines caught on her lower lip just as our eyes met, drawing it into an expression faintly lascivious and wry. Or perhaps those tooth tips tended to catch there. This might be her default look, teeth too much for lips to contain. Above this expression Oona’s eyes flitted, measuring distance to the exit. Yet if Oona was Perkus’s female synonym, she was younger and, I had to admit, alluring. If they were siblings, she’d gotten the looks. If they were lovers, I found myself thinking, he’d gotten lucky.
Perkus didn’t seem flustered, exactly. Aggravated was more like it. His independent eye tried to follow Oona as he turned to me.
“Chase, Oona. Oona, Chase.” He discharged the formality, then practically threw down his hands in disgust at his own obedience.
“Hello.”
Oona stared at me with her crooked smile. I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the starstruck gaze, but Manhattanites usually did a better job of concealing it, especially those dressed in black.
“Sorry,” she said. Instead of offering a hand, she crossed her arms, fitting plumlike breasts over her forearms. “I’ve always sort of wanted to meet you. But then again, sort of wanted not to, at all.”
“Okay,” I said, as generous as I could manage under the circumstances. People might dialogue in their own heads with famous or semi-famous strangers. I preferred to think it a fundamental minimum standard that they keep it to themselves. Nothing in Oona Laszlo’s manner suggested any self-reproach. She examined me like a portrait painter seeking a better grasp of the play of light over my facial planes.
“You’re from somewhere really weird, aren’t you?” said Oona Laszlo. Before I could answer she supplied it herself: “Indiana.”
“Yes.” If I didn’t think of it I often forgot. My home was far away, if it was my home.
Perkus had plunked back into his chair. He relit the joint, and scrabbled in a pile of loose CDs, then shoved one into the boom box. “So,” he said. Slumping beneath the bridge of his own templed hands, he drew on the joint centered in his lips so that it crackled, then pinched it from his mouth and waved it free. “I got sent a dub of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn, it’s eighteen minutes longer than the release cut, some kind of early assembly, maybe we should watch it-” Perkus spoke as if to one of us alone, only I was unsure which. Was he resuming a conversation with Oona or beginning one with me? All talk was a resumption. I couldn’t remember who Pontecorvo was, though I knew I was supposed to.
Perkus pounced, as ever, on my hesitation. “Pontecorvo. He did The Battle of Algiers. You know, Burn, with Brando.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Yeah, this is pretty much how I pictured it,” said Oona Laszlo. She gathered up a sweater, also black, from the back of her chair. “You guys are pretty sweet, and I’m going to go now.”
“Sweet how?” I asked. “What’s so sweet about us?”
“Just, you know, watching old Brando movies together in the afternoon, then deconstructing the universe for dessert. It’s like you’re helping Perkus with his homework.”
“See you later,” said Perkus. He was, I understood, very eager to have Oona leave, to avoid having us here together. Which made me eager for the opposite. Oona Laszlo’s little jibe at Perkus made me understand that they weren’t lovers, at least not anymore. She and I shared a protective impulse toward him. Also, an unrelated insight, I’d begun to find Oona beguiling, despite her pointed gawking. It was a little boyish around here, now that she’d pointed it out. She could be the cure.
“Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” I said.
“I would, but I just saw that movie, and Perkus hates it when I shout out the dialogue just before the actors say it.”
“Oh?”
“That was a joke. Forgive me. There’s something about running into you here that’s making me babble.”
“You don’t have to be so self-conscious.”
“No, actually, I do. I’m one of those subtext-on-the-outside people, which is why I should really go.”
She then surprised me by gathering up one of the Lucite boxes of White Rhino and shoveling it into her purse. And then was gone. Perkus barely glanced after her.
“She took your pot.”
“It was hers,” he said, not glancing at the table either. “I scored it for her, as a favor. She doesn’t like to deal with Watt.” He invented tasks for himself, sweeping imaginary crumbs into his cupped palm, fiddling with the volume, jumping up to rinse a glass, seeking, with his whole being, to exorcise the obvious subject. I didn’t allow him.