A man opened the door, a sandy-haired, sallow man with acne-burred cheeks and a boneless, indolent quality to his shoulders and hips, seeming not fat but shoddily put together or unfinished, his age hovering nebulous between twenty and forty, and with an expression vaguely drunken and irritable at once. Dressed in a tan polo shirt and brown corduroys, loafers without socks, he was small, too, but not in the pumpkin-on-stick-figure manner of Perkus Tooth or Oona herself, more like a golem made by someone running low on clay, who’d therefore cheated at both proportion and detail, leaving legs, arms, and fingers stubby, nose indistinct, lips nonexistent. As he widened the door he recognized me, unmistakably, and with only mild surprise.
“Oh!” he said. “I thought you were sandwiches.”
I couldn’t find my voice to reply. The door-opener’s smile was like a line drawn in wet sand with a stick, pale doughy eyes not joining in. At last he said, “Just a minute,” and turned without inviting me inside. He didn’t close the door, just called out, “Oona,” without raising his voice, and traipsed back the way he’d come, down an antiseptically white corridor, toward a wide-open room. I followed.
Oona or some previous owner had renovated the apartment clean of molding, or of any furnishings older than a decade or so, the lines around windows and doors as clean and square as a Chelsea gallery’s, the blond floors polished slick, and bare of carpet. The minimal shelves stood free, and were loaded with books sporadically bunched in spine-wrecking slouches, or laid sideways to begin with, and boxed and unboxed manuscripts, the walls undecorated apart from the images Oona had tacked around her work site in temporary and slipshod fashion, most of them letter-sized color printouts, some with e-mail headings intact, others pages seemingly heedlessly razored out of art books. The windows were shaded with Japanese paper, the afternoon’s bright-angled sun glowing through, filling the space with ambient radiance, the ceiling speckled and streaked with light.
Oona’s desk was a simple table, brushed metal like a refurbished medical or laboratory surface, on which a gleaming laptop sat, a bright steel spider enwebbed in external components-speakers, drives, printer, wireless keyboard and mouse, and with Oona hunched over it, thin black wires running to her ears, a daylight vampire in her regular crow’s black. The door-opener preceded me into the large bright room, then seated himself silently in a red leather chair against the farthest wall, as though returning to some penitential observance, seemingly wearing an invisible dunce cap. Oona sensed my presence, an extra ripple in the room’s stillness, removed earbuds, and turned in her chair. She wore the mysterious glasses, but plucked them off into a vest pocket when she spotted me. Then immediately stood.
“Excuse me.” Oona went out of the room, through another corridor, presumably to the more domestic quarter of the apartment, bedrooms and bathroom, though I wondered how warmly furnished they could be, by the standard of the room in which I stood. Oona’s work site, now that I was free to examine it, was festooned with photographs and drawings of a host of excavated pits, precisely dug holes in the ground, at various locations, among buildings, or in woods, or by the sea, or in one case islanded by a suburban industrial park’s circular drive. A couple I recognized as views of Urban Fjord. Others were labeled Local Chasm, Demapped Intersection, Former Landmark, Erased Atrocity. The varied attractions of Laird Noteless. The sculptor stared from another photograph, silver torrent brushed back over his skull, wild unmanaged eyebrows atop drillingly dark pupils, deep-lined cheeks, hands in pockets or behind his back, impossible to tell as the coat he wore buttoned to the top showed no hint of form, was instead a light-destroying blob filling the frame on three sides, his head like a sculpture itself mounted on the black Rorschach of coat, dour sentinel overseeing his works.
I continued this close inspection for a full minute or two. It was as if I’d come for this purpose, Oona’s failure to greet me a consent that I should absorb the scene at her desk. I felt alone there, though technically I wasn’t, being in the company of one who’d melted into the limbs of his padded leather chair-had the chair been dun-colored everywhere, like him, instead of firehouse red, he’d be impossible to notice: Blurred Person. I did feel some whisper of déjà vu at our arrangement, but I placed it soon enough-Susan Eldred had stepped out, left me not completely alone in her office once, a few months ago. So perhaps the man who’d come to Oona Laszlo’s door was Oona’s version of Perkus Tooth. He certainly lingered in a kind of ellipsis. But I not only found him unthreatening, I wasn’t interested. I had no room for another recursion, for human Chinese boxes, Perkuses hiding inside Oonas hiding inside Perkuses. What was next-would the pale-brownish man in Oona’s red leather easy chair turn out to have a Biller of his own, and so on? Forget it. Forget him, he was nothing, and evidently content to be. It was Laird Noteless who bothered me. Had he replaced me in Oona’s life? Her desk looked like a shrine.
Something held me from stepping nearer, to see what words I could read from her screen. I suppose I wasn’t alone, after all. Then, as I hesitated, it blinked off. The room, lit by that flood of sun through the handmade paper over the windows, seemed to pulse, to brighten around that spot of dark in which I now saw myself reflected, the shape of my coat outlined against the clean white walls, not entirely unlike Noteless’s photographic portrait. I could also see the figure behind me. He’d left his loafers on the floor, and tucked his bare feet up to sit cross-legged on the leather cushion, and though I couldn’t be certain I thought his eyes might be closed. I wouldn’t have been shocked to hear him snoring. There was no sound from the corridor down which Oona had fled.
The buzzer sounded. I turned in alarm, though I should have expected it. The dun-man unfolded from his seat and padded down the hallway to the intercom, where he buzzed a sandwich-delivery person into the lobby. Shortly he’d exchanged a wad of dollars for a plastic sack, which he plopped at the foot of the red chair, then retook his cushion, his economy of action suggesting an especially weary distillate of Zen observance.
“I don’t think she’s coming out,” he said. His smile bore an air of wan complicity. “Would you like a half? It’s spa tuna on wheat.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Do you mind terribly-?”
“Please.” I said. He leaned into the bag on the floor and unwrapped his sandwich. I left.
On the street, I felt stripped of all intention, as if shunted outside my own skin. The bright day was already falling to early December dark. I hailed a cab, though it was walking distance, really. It was always so much easier to find one going downtown, like falling out of bed, or out of the sky. I might have fallen out of the sky I was so insubstantial, had so little relation here on Earth, if Lexington Avenue qualified as Earth. Had I even seen Oona? Barely. I’d spent more time with the woman and dog in the elevator. Even more with Oona’s washed-out man. But it wasn’t any particular person I dwelled upon as I bumped across Eighty-sixth Street, to Second Avenue. Instead I considered the fate embodied in New York apartments. Perkus Tooth was utterly a creature of Eighty-fourth Street, that labyrinth of broadsides and collections, the walls bearing a decade’s patina of smoke and old music and conversation. What if Perkus were to be freed into a clean space like Oona’s? Might he take a breath and write something new, something that mattered to him? (With that state-of-the-art computer he’d stand a better chance of winning a chaldron, if nothing else.) Conversely, Oona’s jittery susceptibility, it seemed to me now, might be exemplified in those bare walls, that Teflon floor. Anyone’s portrait might be featured next, to colonize the place as completely as had Noteless and his potholes: a disgraced governor or bishop, a rehabbed rock star or wide receiver, a vindicated scapegoat, a mass killer. No wonder she didn’t want me around the blank slate of those rooms. The ghost writer was too totally permeable.