Or was I overthinking? Had Perkus simply awoken, in his usual fierce sudden way, to the plight of bears adrift on ice? Now I would have given anything to hear him talking about Brando or Mailer, Echolalia or Recalcitrant Women, the invisible black iron prison of our perceptual daydream, or the difference between epiphany and ellipsis, between Chet Baker and a Gnuppet with a trumpet. It was as though I was being punished for each and every time I’d tried redirecting him into a healthier obsession. The only thing less cultural than that ceramic-whose-name-I-did-not-wish-to-pronounce was an arctic bear. I tried to picture Perkus volunteering on some Greenpeace ship, scrubbing tar off a penguin. It was pretty much like wishing he was another person entirely, or dead.
So what did my dull Occam’s razor do with the conundrum? I decided my friend needed to get his ashes hauled. A dilemma suiting my own strengths, for once. I could play the tutor, even if I’d have to keep the lessons subliminal to the student. I vowed to set Perkus up. And where better to start than with the large perky waitress whose hipster glasses frames seemed a confession of her susceptibility to nerd celebrities, even shopworn ones like Perkus Tooth. She already knew his name, which had to mean something good. When she arrived with our deluxes I took them from her myself and set them at our places, and said, “What’s your name?”
She seemed to know more than his name, knew to glance at Perkus for a kind of permission to speak. He looked sourly into his plate, x-raying his fries, and so she stumbled answering, “I, I’m Lindsay.”
“There’s nobody here,” I pointed out. “You can talk to us for a minute-” I knew how much Perkus wanted me to stop. It was the same amount that it was impossible for me to stop. My project had become compulsive, my premise self-confirming. The more Perkus twitched and recoiled the more he proved his need of an erotic ambassador. “We’re harmless, Lindsay, don’t worry.”
“Oh… sure…” Lindsay was a little confused.
“How old are you?” I asked her. I gestured at the empty space in the booth beside Perkus, but she didn’t dare. “Have you ever seen a Montgomery Clift movie?”
She brightened. “I saw The Misfits!”
You’re seeing them now, I wanted to tell her. We’re hoping to enlist you into their company. Instead I said, “Did you know Montgomery Clift was buried in Prospect Park?”
“Can you bring some mustard?” said Perkus stonily.
“Oh, right, you always have mustard, sorry!” Off Lindsay scurried to find some. I suddenly imagined what it might have been like for Oona Laszlo, in her glue-girl phase, apprenticed to a little tin god of guerrilla criticism, one not yet tempered by a decade of broadsider’s block. Even tempered he was obnoxious.
“Hey, Colonel Mustard,” I whispered. “You’ve really got her dodging bullets. Lighten up.”
Perkus only gritted his teeth at me, a cartoon of impotent rage. Lindsay returned with a ramekin of yellow mustard, and then gamely ignored the rotten vibes, which were as undeniable between us as the chocolate smell (unless, that is, you were immune to chocolate smells). “You’re… Chase Unperson, aren’t you?”
“Insteadman, yes, that’s me.”
“Sorry-Insteadman.” Lindsay slapped her forehead. She was shaping into one of the all-time apologizers. Perkus, meanwhile, was having a kind of fit. It was lucky his mouth wasn’t full, or bits of beef and bun would have flumed through his nose. “Un-person,” he sneezed in bitter hilarity. “Chase Unperson!” He still hadn’t looked at Lindsay directly, or what would pass for directly in his ambidextrous gaze.
“Funny,” I said, trying to absorb and neutralize Perkus’s hostility. Lindsay, I could see, was only going to take anything in the air between me and Perkus as her fault. Too late. The default deference in her role as waitress, given the obvious distress in Perkus, would prevail. She shrunk away, giving me a funny helpless smile. Perkus and I were left to the travesty of our steaming mounds of food, spoiled under clouds of chocolate and ill manners, spoiled, really, under Perkus’s outright and indignant fury. It helped nothing that we’d been there, in our regular booth with our regular order, so often before. Hemmed in by ghosts of our more innocently garrulous selves, the days of the discovery of our friendship, early September, felt like years ago now. We gnawed the cheeseburgers despondently, under the regime of all we couldn’t say.
I looked on Perkus, for the first time, as a creature formed of anger. That was how I’d characterized Richard Abneg to myself, but I’d reserved the judgment for Richard, blinding myself to the essence the two had in common. In truth, there was anger enough to go around. I knew I should ask myself (Strabo Blandiana, in one of his post-needle talks, would have gently insisted I do so) why I made my world out of these kind of persons. Who else struck me as angry in my vicinity just lately? Oona Laszlo, with her acid flippancy. I ached for her. We’d planned to meet up after my dinner with the Danzigs-Oona liked to be more accidental, but I’d persuaded her to be my reward for getting through the evening.
Lindsay surprised me. As she set down our check-Perkus had signaled to her for it even as he wolfed the last bite of his burger, and I’d only unpacked and rearranged my own-she said, “If you guys want to party sometime-”
“Oh-” I began.
She tucked one of the restaurant’s cards under my place mat. “Here’s my number. Or just, you know, look for me here.” I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. She was a waitress, after all, on a fading afternoon, and, in the Of Human Bondage way of waitresses, she’d grab any ticket out.
Perkus slapped down a twenty, really slapping the table, punctuation to his mute wrath. Lindsay and I both looked up shocked. “Pack up his burger to go,” said Perkus tightly.
“Oh, that’s okay-” I began.
“For Biller.”
“Oh.”
On the sidewalk, Perkus turned from me, his gloveless knuckles buried in the pockets of his suit, almost, it appeared to his knees, the white sack containing my leftovers tucked into his elbow. The chocolate wind howled, the early winter still so fierce, the sky darkening at four. I drifted after him, trying to demonstrate we were together on the sidewalk. He muttered, “You’re something, Chase, you’re really something.”
“It’s better than not even trying, Perkus. She wants to ‘party’ with us. Who knows?”
“She thought you wanted her, Chase.”
“No, no.” I shook my head, but he didn’t see it, pressing on ahead toward the corner of Eighty-fourth, toward his building. I didn’t really want to keep him outside without a coat for long, but I hurried after. “She could tell you liked her, Perkus, anybody knows that a friend often plays the go-between-”
“Anybody knows nothing, Chase. You don’t see yourself, you don’t see the way women cast their eyeballs at you like a kid shooting marbles on the sidewalk.”
At least I’d sparked some irate brilliance in him, I thought, instead of the moribund bovine cheeseburger-chewer he’d been inside Jackson Hole. Perkus couldn’t be so intimidated by his waitress, it didn’t seem possible.
“You’ve got women falling out of open windows, out of trees, you’ve got women on the moon, Chase. You don’t have any idea how it might be different for me. You actor, you utter unperson.”
“Now, that’s not-”