In my head I composed tormented letters, but I’d been warned that Mission Control would refuse their delivery, so I never put a word on paper. I screened my calls. The only news I wanted, finally, was outside my window: that the birds still attacked their routes around the spire, those pathways to nowhere that seemed to articulate my own invisible urgencies. The birds couldn’t interpret the stone, but by their proximity they could seem to define it, adore it, abide with it. That was as near to a sense of valuable work in the world as I could imagine myself having. Only I would need, when I was well again, to make sure of what my own church spire should be. I knew the plan for Chase Insteadman was that I should wait for Janice. Yet something nearer at hand, some person or artifact, some situation or scene, was calling. I didn’t know whether I was bereaved or unbereaved, but I wasn’t bereaved the way I felt I ought to be.
Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji came on Thursday. I was almost well. They learned not from Perkus (who might be oblivious, so far as I knew) but from Maud Woodrow, whom I’d telephoned just hoping for some breath of gossip in my loneliness, not because I hoped she’d visit or even be particularly sympathetic. When I’d then been contacted by Richard I explained I was really fine, but he said Georgina insisted they look in. The two of them arrived just before noon with a caterer’s roasted turkey and some sides, shocking me. Richard seemed to think it was incredibly funny, and maybe it was. He wore an expensive Burberry coat, unmistakably new, and after he helped Georgina out of her own he went into my wardrobe and found wooden hangers for them both. The Hawkman helped me set a small table, scooping sweet-potato mash and creamed spinach from plastic quarts into rarely used serving bowls, gravy poured into a coffee mug, and dusting off a batch of cloth napkins I’d forgotten I owned. We even switched on the television to catch the end of the Macy’s parade, the kooky giant balloons, supermen and Gnuppets and unrecognizable new personae bobbing through the sleety canyons, the kids toughing it out in the cold.
“May I ask, what does that represent?”
“That represents SpongeBob SquarePants, Georgie.”
My appetite suddenly savage, I was, yes, thankful, wildly so, to have the turkey’s inexhaustible flesh before me, ate white and dark in a gravied pile together, felt myself plundering the bird’s life forces, stripping it free of the obedient skeleton. Recovering with each bite, I felt a teenager’s strength and greed rising in me. Richard laughed. They ate, too, more decorously, though threads of dry breast lodged in Richard’s beard until Georgina picked them out, and gossiped absently, remarking on items of paltry interest in my apartment, which was revealing, truthfully, only in its hotel-ish anonymity, order, booklessness.
Something in the parade caught my eye, a golden-swelling outline among the balloons filing down Broadway. The distracting balloon wasn’t the focus of the shot, which framed instead a swollen Spider-Man, but trapped behind the blue-and-red superhero that golden shape bobbed in and out of visibility between the lampposts, its vinyl skin peppered with sleet and confetti. The balloon, I was fairly certain, was meant to depict a chaldron. My mouth, I think, fell open. Anyway, my eyes widened, chewing stopped. Richard Abneg followed my attention to the television screen, and before I could speak he’d already raised a finger to his lips and shook his head to silence me, even while raising his brows and rolling his eyes to acknowledge that yes, he’d recognized it too. This petition wasn’t threatening or duplicitous; rather, his look conveyed hope I’d keep it from Georgina in the manner of an indulgence between henpecked husbands, as if Richard were a sworn quitter sneaking a cigarette.
Georgina made a visit to my bathroom and Richard immediately leaned across the turkey’s carcass to whisper an apology. “I’m trying to get her mind off those things,” he said. “She just gets too worked up, it’s not healthy. You’d be amazed, there are little reminders, hints of them everywhere, once you know what you’re looking for.”
I was amazed. “You’ve been bidding in auctions?”
He frowned annoyance. “Just a couple of times. The supply’s dried up at the moment.”
“You haven’t won?”
“Nope. But, you know what? Stay tuned. The Hawkman’s accustomed to getting what she wants. Shhhhh.” Georgina had returned, closing off further questions. Yet I’d had answered the one question I never meant to ask, had avoided even framing. Phenomena I’d in some way been hoping were circumscribed within the Eighty-fourth Street apartment, within Perkus’s computer or broadsides or ravings, weren’t. Even when I-and Perkus, possibly-ignored them, chaldrons, for instance, went on being chaldrons. For some people, apparently, they were a way of life. I’d be forced to make my peace with the fact.
CHAPTER
Thirteen
It wasn’t as though I didn’t know where Oona lived. I’d dropped her at her building’s entrance in a taxicab more than once. So on the first day I felt completely well I put myself thoroughly together, shaving, flossing, even patrolling my nostrils for vagrant hairs and lint-rollering my winter coat and my scarf, then conveyed myself to her address, on a bright cold Monday afternoon, the first in December, as if turning up for an audition for entrance into her rooms. Oona’s building had no doorman, and after spotting O. Laszlo on the buzzer’s directory, I declined using the intercom, wanting to ensure she at least had to look me in the eye. A tall young woman with a tall silky dog appeared as I stalled at the intercom, and in my well-ordered state she showed no hesitation holding the door open for me, even before I smiled for her. So I was inside. The lobby was consummately ordinary, the building’s old bones renovated into timeless blandness, but I felt a prickle of revelation, as though crossing some secret boundary or limit, Manhattan’s hidden panels sliding open to my gentle pressure. My week of fever might have been a price paid in advance for passing so easily into forbidden territory: I felt transparent, had even shed an authentic pound or two, my pants riding looser on my hips. I’d revved myself to make this run at Oona’s door, but now, past first defenses so easily, my mood turned slinky, elliptical, possibly even ellipsistic. I sort of wanted just to poke around the corridors a bit.
Or do something else. We rode the elevator together, the door-holding woman and the pony-like dog and I, and I could see she wanted to ask who I might be in her building to see, and that she hoped it wasn’t a woman prettier than herself, or any woman at all. And she was awfully pretty, in a way I didn’t have to take personally, copper hair in unkempt ringlets under her felt cap’s earlaps, her profile, once she’d unwound her scarf so I could see it, elegantly long, an imperial snout to match the dog’s. She had an unneurotic attractiveness, or so I could tell myself. I could also tell that she liked me without knowing who I was. This made me want to be someone other, even entertain the scoundrel fantasy. Perhaps this was what I was really for, after all. And New York, a puzzle trap for anonymous encounters. You might find no pity to spare for the child star, but I’d known this feeling too rarely. I’d always had to be dutifully myself, even while shirking any other duty. Now, for the eternity of an elevator’s ascent to the eleventh floor, I had another idea. The copper-haired woman presented a path between my schizoid fates, Janice Trumbull in the sky and Oona Laszlo behind a door on the floor the elevator’s red numbers now lazily counted off. The dog had this woman to himself, I could see from his assuming posture. He slept in her bed. I felt I could probably handle the mute furry rival, and that otherwise nothing else stood between me and escape, not only from my women but from larger confusions I’d wandered into these past months. I only had to think up another name to go by. Kertus Booth. Then the doors opened to the eleventh, and I stepped off, fantasy bursting like a soap bubble. I went straight to Oona’s door, and rang the chime there.