Perkus was gone. By the last part of January, Oona and I had settled into yet another version of our stilted routine, and not mentioning Perkus or the circumstances of his going was a part of it. It was as if Oona and I had met through some other common friend, or picked each other up at a bar. If our career as secret lovers had always had weird denominators, Perkus now became part of that murky undertow, the stuff Oona and I left unspoken. She was deep in the finishing throes of Noteless’s book, on a crash publication schedule, in order to be in stores concurrently with a ceremony at the hole downtown, at the end of the spring. Without Perkus’s apartment as a rendezvous point, and forbidden from calling lest I interrupt, I mostly ended up waiting at home until she’d exhausted herself writing and felt she needed some reward. I knew just how she liked her martinis now, and had a perfect one waiting for her when she came sighing through the door bragging of how many pages she’d batted out. But she wasn’t looking for conversation, and I managed not to press her on sore points, mostly. My encounter with Noteless at the mayor’s party seemed distant history, part of the Perkus era, last year. I’d satisfied myself well enough that they weren’t lovers, but Oona had established something too. By squiring the artist through the party and leaving in his car she’d cemented me in my subsidiary place, forging our present odd equilibrium. I loved her in my bed, but I kept my mouth shut about it.
One day I whined that I couldn’t leave my apartment for fear of missing her. “You should carry a cell phone like everyone else,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t worry.”
“Perkus doesn’t carry a cell phone.”
“Like regular people. If he did carry one you’d be able to call him, wouldn’t you?”
“But you never call me.”
“I might if you had a number.”
“I don’t like the whole rigmarole, everyone going around… talking… everywhere.”
“You don’t have to talk anywhere you don’t want to.”
“I guess I’m old-fashioned.”
“Sort of like the word rigmarole.”
The next morning, before sharing breakfast at the Mews-a rarity, these days, that she’d linger for breakfast-we ducked in at a newsstand and Oona bought me a disposable mobile phone, with a hundred minutes built in before the thing expired. She entered its digits into her Treo, then handed the little plastic implement to me. It barely weighed anything. “There you go,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything else, just carry it around. If it rings, it’s me. The Oonaphone.”
Nice, but the Oonaphone never rang once. I waited at home with the martini makings-I had nowhere else I wanted to go.
Something else happened then. With Perkus gone, and Oona systematically depriving my heart’s hopes, I pined deeply for Janice, even if I couldn’t know who I was pining for. Maybe I pined for pining, for the notion of love itself. I read and reread the letters, the wealth of them from before her sickness, the few that had come since. Guiltily, I found I loved most not the Janice I was supposed to love, my onetime fiancée on earth, then heroically launched on her mission, nor even the brave professional of the first months after the Chinese mines had trapped her and the Russians in space. No, I loved the deranged astronaut of midwinter, resigned to the space station’s degeneration and perhaps to dying. The less of Janice I got, the more I cherished her. Any past was like the church tower, gray and mute, bedrocked in mystery. Her scant words now were like the birds, who when they circled into view took my breath away. The flock had never quit, returning to soar at kooky angles even in the tailing last flurries the morning after the blizzard and Arnheim’s party.
Perkus was gone. Midway through the month of January, before I’d completely quit pacing the periphery of that quarantined block of Eighty-fourth Street, I had an idea I was investigating his disappearance, though I could hardly report what outward form, if any, my investigation took. I made a pretty lame detective. One of my forays was to call Strabo Blandiana and get an appointment. I couldn’t imagine a way to interrogate Mayor Arnheim or Russ Grinspoon, but Strabo Blandiana was within reach. The Chinese medicinalist was implicated in the first moments of Perkus’s errancy, if that was what it was, the first encounter which eventually led up the mayor’s staircase. I wanted to see the evidence of the framed photograph in his treatment room and weigh for myself Strabo’s awareness of any plot. Likely I sensed that Strabo would treat any question kindly, and also as symptomatic. When I say I made a feeble detective, I mean that I was as willing to be cured of my case as to solve it.
Yet even anticipating Strabo’s soothing, nothing fully prepared me for how much of a rebuke his tranquil offices could be to my disquiet. I came in stamping off snowmelt, my rattling taxicab’s hornhonking pinball course through glistening, trafficky intersections fresh in my ears, and wrought up with recalled images of Strabo at Arnheim’s dinner, among (fellow?) conspirators. Through the door, at the sound of his chimes and sight of his receptionist’s smile, I was ashamed. To arrive here in a state was to fail Blandiana’s test as his longtime client, to suggest I’d gained no peace from all his needles over the years. So before Strabo even appeared I aligned myself, using breathing methods learned in these same rooms, and began dreaming of a time when I’d never known the name Perkus Tooth.
Inside, on his table, any shred of fear was converted. Though in his turtleneck and impeccable razor-cut Strabo could easily be cast as a Bond villain, it was impossible to find him sinister when he turned his Buddha searchlights on your distress. Who needed chaldrons? The light was in yourself. That was possibly the lesson of his tenderness. Though more gift than lesson, with all the reproach lesson implied. You were forgiven even for being inadequately tenacious in your peacefulness. We all slipped. And, as if to reinforce the self-chaldronizing principle, the framed print was gone from the wall at the foot of his bed. Wearing Strabo’s painless needles, mind settled into a fine drone, I gazed up at a dun-colored page of Sanskrit instead.
“You took it down,” I said when he came back for me.
His look in reply was sweetly puzzled.
“The… vase photograph you had there.”
“Oh, yes, that’s true. A few patients found it overstimulating.”
“You took it home instead?”
“I donated it to a charity auction.”
“Ah.” Material things were only ever passing through his relaxed fingers.
“Truthfully, I get too many gifts from patients.”
“What charity?”
“Médecins Sans Frontières.” Strabo never shed a dewdrop of impatience with irrelevant questions, yet also conveyed a sense that such exchanges stood in lieu of personal work that waited to be done. So I let him perform his usual mind-meld, his stunt of empathy. Without intruding or naming names, in elegant paraphrase, Strabo Blandiana informed me that I should quit wondering whether to love Oona Laszlo or Janice Trumbull, that the task instead was simply and unquestioningly to love. Of course. Then, as ever, he added that I obviously hardly needed to be told, that I contained this knowledge within myself and had evidently already been acting upon it, and that Strabo Blandiana as my friend was proud of me and confident in my talent for self-care. A cynic would have asked why he didn’t take his show to Las Vegas. Me, I strode back out into the cold chaos of Manhattan believing myself a sunbeam in which all who wished could bask.
Whether I searched for him or not, Perkus was gone, and I was tired of searching alone. I’d made one attempt to enlist Richard Abneg, two weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve. This was just ten days since the mayor’s party, and all the traces felt fresh, the blizzard’s drifts still reshaping the streets, albeit crusted and steadily blackening. Richard and Georgina took pity on me and called me to spend the evening with them in Georgina’s penthouse, knowing (because I’d complained) that Oona had avoided me on Christmas, rightly suspecting she’d do it again. I was something especially pathetic in the way of third-wheel bachelor companions-there being not one but two women I was divided from, on that night when any couple is meant to be together. Richard and Georgina made the evening easy for me, ordering in excellent Chinese, tilapia medallions with spicy green chilies and Napa cabbage, eggplant with ground pork and green peas, then putting on some old black-and-white movies, consoling ones, Jimmy Stewart as a rube outwitting large numbers of sophisticates.