Straightaway I was prisoner of my plate’s arrival, roast brown glistening something. I dutifully spread it around my plate, while Perkus’s sat at his empty place beside me, glistening and cooling. Wineglasses emptied and were filled, the party at a boil, and I leaned across Perkus’s vacancy to join the niceties at my own table until fair excuse came to abandon it. The pot I’d smoked-it was very good pot-meant I relied on the purely sonic aspects of friendly talk to stand in for comprehension. Had anyone asked me to give the topic of the conversation I’d entered, let alone the names of the speakers, I’d have been reduced to clucking like a chicken. Grinspoon turned his back to me, plainly unconcerned at Perkus’s long absence. In that I took my cue from him again. When one or two others had broken from their seats to commune elsewhere, I was up like a shot to cross the room, and from a place behind Oona’s chair leaned in for an embrace with Sandra Saunders Eppling. I hoped my movements weren’t as raw and hungry as I felt.
Sandra’s features had long since taken on a kind of ageless flensed quality, but when I drew her to my chest I felt with a guilty shiver the brazen torso that had been the uncomfortable object of fantasy for my on-set self as well as for so many teenage boys on the other side of the television screen (I’d spent my life since as the involuntary recipient of such confessions). Could it really be that Sandra squirmed into my embrace as she stood, as if to be sure I knew what she still had? Or was I sexualizing what shouldn’t be, because of the proximity of Oona? Whichever, it was the case that in retrospect this instant was the one where the evening or I began to disintegrate, so that all I’d recollect from this point on was a series of particulate elements strung incoherently in the void-the first of these being the disconcerting volumetrics of Sandra’s breasts, the second her voice maternally pronouncing my first name, introducing me to her evening’s (totally uninterested) companion, then inquiring, as she would have to do, after Janice’s health. I waved her off with a gesture designed to imply a burden beyond speech.
“And have you met…?” Sandra had forgotten Oona’s name, a fact she didn’t trouble to conceal, off-loading the task of introductions with the candid indifference of an air kiss.
“Oona Laszlo,” I said. “Selfless autobiographer. I’m a fan.”
“Mr. Insteadman,” said Oona, barely playing along. Noteless sat stiff and remote, his chair pushed back from the table so he could evaluate the room for possible demolition.
“So you’ve met my mom.”
Sandra took this as incitement to lean in, again, it seemed to me, lasciviously. “Oh, Chase, you never write, you never call, you never visit…” I clutched her waist, fishing for jealous reaction, and registered her unsteadiness on her heels. Drunk Sandra and I verged on reviving that treacherous sentimental fiction of theater people, and I was already disgusted with how we appeared through Oona’s eyes. I took it out on Oona’s silent friend. “And have you met Laird Noteless, Sandy? He’s the living master of dystopian public sculpture.” Dystopian was a Perkus word I’d fished up-I was probably too cowardly to insult Noteless as myself, but I could do it if I pretended to be Perkus filleting some cosmic mediocrity.
Sandra knit her brow, exaggerating sobriety. “But of course. I sit on the board of the memorial, Chase.”
“Ah!”
Now Noteless grumbled to life. “There’s nothing dystopian in my work, young man.” My borrowed dart had found its mark. “In point of fact, I operate strictly on what Robert Smithson termed an atopian basis. That is to say, my work attempts to erase received notions or boundaries, and hence to reinstate the viewer in the world as it actually is, without judgment.”
“So if a viewer were to, say, stumble into one of your holes and break his foot, henceforth that would have to be considered a strictly atopian broken foot.”
“You must forgive Chase,” said Oona to Sandra Saunders Eppling, as if she were the one who should feel affronted. “He’s sensitive on the subject of injured feet lately.”
“I am not.” My voice struck me as issuing from some place other than my body, and sounding rather bratty, too. Perhaps it was my inner child.
“Excuse me,” said Oona to the others, as she stood and swept me from the group there, into the zone between tables, now occupied by milling bodies exploiting the lull before dessert. Since this departure was what I’d most have wished to have happen, it wasn’t difficult for Oona to accomplish. I smiled at her to show it was a happy thing, however coerced.
“I spotted you lads sneaking off upstairs like the band at a wedding.” She mimed a sniff, as if catching the tang of smoke on my jacket. I doubted she could, but since her guess was right I gave her the point. Anyway, I felt proud to be stoned, at that exact moment. Oona and I had shed our dates and stood paired in full view of the party, a total fulfillment of my childish yearning. Go figure: I’d only had to set free my brat for him to be instantly gratified! That I’d also cut Perkus loose to some macabre, unauthorized quest in the mayor’s private rooms, I pushed out of mind. I further decided I didn’t need to apologize for insulting Laird Noteless.
“See that blizzard outside?” I asked, fluttering my fingers to indicate the blue fever overhead. “That’s how I feel inside, when I see you.”
“Would a cup of coffee help? Because I promised to drag you over to meet Arnheim, and I think I’d better quickly, before you get any further unspooled.”
“You know Mayor Arnheim?”
“We’ve met a few times.”
“He knows-about us?”
“Don’t be idiotic. He knows I know you, that’s all. People see us talking, Chase.”
“Why does he care about meeting me?”
“The things that escape your notice, Chase-it isn’t always the case that you’ve escaped theirs. You’re a public person.”
“Now you’re going to remind me of my duties.”
“You used to remind me of them, not so long ago.”
I glanced back. The chair beside Russ Grinspoon was empty. “He’ll want to meet Perkus, too.” I overlooked the fact that, technically, they’d met at the start of the party. “We should wait.”
“Nobody here cares about Perkus.” Oona left this blatancy between us, her gaze merciless. It seemed to demand I grant how distant we were from broadsides and glue pots.
“I’d better find him.” My resistance was meek.
“Have a coffee with the mayor and then I’ll help you find him.” It made the reverse of the deal I’d struck with Perkus at the party’s beginning, but I doubted I’d amuse Oona pointing out this symmetry. What I liked about the present situation was how it didn’t include Noteless. I nodded.
The party had broken out beyond espresso and biscotti. Cigars, banned in public places, were the order here. Borne around in silver boxes, surprising numbers of us found no way of refusing, including many of the women. The mayor himself gave grandiose lessons on the pruning of a cigar tip, and the proper method of lighting one. Oona and I crashed the golden circle and were made to join in the corrupted smoky revels, which seemed to place us above the law and a little out of time, too, the ultimate luxury. In front of Oona and what had become a number of other female observers I was pleased to demonstrate that even in my state I knew well enough how to handle one of the leaf-stinky things, though I had to remind myself not to suck the fumes to the far tendrils of my lungs as I had the pot smoke upstairs. Chairs were now pulled away and rearranged, our corner a pocket drama within the larger room, consisting of Arnheim and Insteadman and any number of women, and I was glad that Oona was seeing me this way, and that Perkus was away elsewhere for the time being. Only that same blonde, the professional watcher at the mayor’s hand, didn’t seem at all charmed by me.