Oona found me just as the three-hour marathon of tributes concluded and the crowd broke into a buzzing mass, before I could sprint to the exit. Perhaps she’d spotted me earlier. She seemed, anyway, to be alone here.
“What did you think?” she said.
“It was all very impressive.”
“For me, there was only one good line in the whole show,” said Oona, oblivious to the risk of being overheard.
“What was that?”
“From when Emil Junrow was born, when he was handed to his mother in the hospital and she said, ‘He looks like he can remember happier days.’”
The words had been offered up by one of the few family members giving testimony amid the parade of luminaries, a cantankerous elderly cousin, a woman as shriveled and fierce as Junrow. Hearing the quip, it was hard not to picture the newborn already possessing Junrow’s white muttonchops and furrowed brow, his hectoring eyes.
“Sometimes one good line is enough,” I said.
“Oh, absolutely, I wasn’t complaining. Junrow’s mom, she goes straight into the annals with that remark.”
As we drifted out into the lobby a waiter appeared, balancing a tray of wineglasses, half of them filled with white, half with red. Oona and I each grabbed a white.
“Did you know Junrow?” I said. A stupid choice, since I wouldn’t have wished to be asked the same in return. I was groping. My tongue felt cardboardy in my mouth. Yet other parts of me were unaccountably alive, all at once, despite the soporific effects of three hours in that whiskey-colored auditorium, and the sober and seemly procession of tributes.
“I wrote his last two books,” she said, fixing me with that same steady, warmly sardonic gaze I’d faced at Perkus’s.
“Ah. You know a lot about science, then?”
“Barely anything. I wrote his funny, personable books. Junrow’s Rules for Amateurs and I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”
“So you must have spent a lot of time together. I’m surprised you weren’t invited up onstage to pay homage.”
“My existence is meant to be a secret,” she said, again with no concern for secrecy. “I didn’t get where I am today speaking at funerals.”
“Did you like him?”
“Picture one of those old New Yorker cartoons with the old man chasing the secretary in circles around the desk. Luckily he was easy to outrun.”
“I read Across Foul Lines the other night-I mean, part of it.”
“I’m guessing you mean Perkus Tooth’s copy.”
“It was pretty good, actually.”
“Oh God, I can totally picture it, you and Perkus getting stoned and reading pages aloud and roaring with laughter, until the words quit making any literal sense. Am I right?”
This was closer than I wanted to admit.
“Did you guys do voices, trying it out as Donald Duck and Greta Garbo and so on? It’s perfectly okay, sometimes I do that myself when I’m writing them.”
“I’d like to hear that,” I said, not wanting to put up a fight.
“Maybe you do a great Marlon Brando, Chase? I know Perkus would like that one.”
Was Oona Laszlo mocking Perkus now? Our secret sharing of the apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street felt almost disagreeably intimate, here in this crowd. I went for a gulp of wine and found my glass was empty. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?” I said impulsively. I had no idea how to navigate the West Side, but we were near Lincoln Center-there had to be something.
“There’s plenty here, for free. I think they might even bring out some sushi or cocktail frankfurters if we play our cards right.”
Oona Laszlo’s teasing dared me onward. She was a sprite of sarcasm, even her pensive torso, her small breasts concealed in black silhouette, seeming to jape. I’d been immune for three hours to the shameful survivor’s lust that I’d known to sometimes wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one’s own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crosswords in ballpoint and then tossing them aside, to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run out. But now, three hours’ worth of such lust seemed to flood me all at once, in retrospect. Oona and I were surely not the two youngest people in that crowded hall of five or six hundred, many of whom were just now filing through the doors into the lobby, being handed their first glass of white or red. But it felt to me at that moment as though we were teenagers who’d dressed up and snuck in.
“I’d be willing to pay for my own drinks or even cocktail frankfurters in exchange for a little privacy,” I told her.
“You don’t want to be seen with me?”
“I’d like to be seen with you,” I said, “elsewhere.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you’re afraid somebody’s going to try to ask you for your autograph or to pose for a picture with your arm around Salman Rushdie, and then I’ll slip away. Which I absolutely would. I’d be out of here like a shot.”
“I-”
“We could go to the movies,” she said, surprising me. “Or just find a doorway somewhere and make out awkwardly, then later not call each other, or call but not find anything to say.”
“Let’s go,” I said, applying my palm to the small of her back, to guide her from the reception. Disconcertingly, her dress was cut out in a circle there, so my cool fingers slipped inside and made her jump. Then she smiled again, canines caught on her lip.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
I only meant to insist that we go out of hearing range of the mourners and celebrants, though it had the effect of seeming to endorse her dizzy talk as a kind of plan. And as well to suggest I took the matter of my celebrity seriously in that crowd, as she’d joked. In truth, I doubted anyone cared. But I cared. It was my pitiful flame to nurture, that I should behave upstandingly as Janice Trumbull’s signifier in public places, at funerals at least. I was arm candy on Janice’s phantom arm, not much else. And the difference between this setting and Perkus’s apartment, or even Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s, was real to me.
We stopped to get our coats from the checkroom, then stepped outdoors, into a street vacant in a gutter-choking rainstorm, the black sky seemingly half liquid, snail-crawling taxicabs hugging the gleaming avenue’s crest for safety. I manage never to be prepared for the weather. Nobody else had left the hall, and as the heavy doors slammed behind us, all warmth and light seemed definitively on their backside, the reception an oasis we’d foolishly forsaken. Oona Laszlo was unsurprised. She produced a short black umbrella from her trench-coat pocket, and we struggled to shelter ourselves beneath it together long enough to put Emil Junrow and Ethical Culture behind us. Swirling wind made comedy of our attempt, and soon enough we found a doorway, just as Oona had scripted for us. I suppose she knew the weather forecast. Brass nameplates identified our hiding place as the entrance to a cabal of dentists. Across Central Park West trees lashed like an island’s in a typhoon.
The shoulders of my suit were drenched, the shirt beneath pasted to my back, and my slacks to my calves as well. Oona had fared a bit better, centered beneath the shred of umbrella. Yet she was wet and cold enough to be shivering. I felt it as she nestled into me. The lintel above us played the role of a tiny Niagara, the sheet of droplets a white-noise curtain drawn against the city and the whole of the storm.