CHAPTER
Twenty
He’d spent that whole night right there, huddled at what came to seem the bottom of a well of dark, as though rather than climb to this point he’d fallen, and the snow-covered skylight and the glowing chaldron in its nook were two portals above, representing his only hope of escape. The mayor’s carpeted stair was thick enough to make a comfortable perch, and he chose the stair that split the difference between his need to be as near as possible to the chaldron and to find an angle of view from which the least of its form was obstructed by the underside of the shelf on which it sat, then settled there, fully expecting to be interrupted, rescued, arrested, or assassinated.
But no. Mayor Arnheim never arrived with a flock of policemen or some dark-suited private force, the modern equivalent of Pinkertons. Nor did Richard Abneg or Chase Insteadman or even Georgina Hawkmanaji come. Nor his dangerous new acquaintance Russ Grinspoon, who’d said such disturbing things about Morrison Groom. Nor his cunning old protégée Oona Laszlo, no surprise in that. The mayor’s astounding chaldron had no appreciator besides himself, and Perkus Tooth began to wonder if it had only conjured him into being to provide itself with an imaginary friend, he felt so invisible and unknown there through the passing hours. The party sounds were long gone from the foyer below. The irreverent clangor of a catering staff sealing up and loading its materials soon followed. Abandoning him in silence there. He centered the chaldron in his vision, a matter, paradoxically, of turning his head to disfavor the rebellious eye. Then steeled himself to ignore the portion he couldn’t see, the imperfection of its outline. What was ever perfect? The form pulsed in his vision, beaming concurrence with his most reconciled thoughts, absolving all failure. To abide was not to compromise. At this Perkus fell deeply asleep.
He woke in early-morning light flooding the stairwell, his neck sore where it had rested crookedly against the curved wall. A woman stood on the stair above him. The mayor’s aide, Chase had pointed her out at Arnheim’s table.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he replied.
“I wondered when you’d wake up,” she said. “My name is Claire Carter, by the way.” How long had she stood there? Was he caught? If so, at what?
“So, I’m Perkus Tooth,” he said.
“We know.”
“You do?”
“You came with the actor,” she said.
“Yes.” He glanced up at the chaldron. In the bright light its unearthly radiance was a little blanched. He wondered whether it would have caught his eye in this light. A ridiculous thought. A chaldron was a chaldron, immeasurable and bright. Yet here Claire Carter stood, just beneath one, and either totally oblivious or uninterested. This weird fact imparted some of the chaldron’s force to the woman herself, whose corn-husky-golden Dorothy Hamill was back-lit to a halo like a solar flare, while her rectangular glasses pitched back to Perkus letterboxed, fish-eye-lens impressions of his own sorry form. Beneath those reflections her own features were precisely serene and nonjudgmental. The mayor’s woman had brought with her no cops or Pinkertons, apparently not fearing him, and she presented nothing for Perkus to fear-not, anyway, apparently. He felt his presence had been lightly tolerated in the stairwell overnight, nothing worse. That “they” knew his name suggested he wasn’t just some phantasm the chaldron had dreamed up to keep itself amused or adored.
“How-”
“There was a single checked overcoat left behind,” she said. “In its pocket was a woolen hat with a distinctive patch featuring bright red lips and tongue. Security found you on the tape, walking in.”
“Ah.” So this was the sense in which he was known, by cultural iconography Claire Carter was apparently too young to identify. Perkus could imagine spadefuls of earth dropping onto a casket where everything that had ever been relevant to him was being quietly buried.
“Your coat is waiting downstairs.”
“You don’t care that I broke in?”
“You didn’t break in,” she pointed out. “You stayed.”
“You don’t want to know what I’m doing here?” He began to feel taken lightly. He didn’t know how he wanted to be taken instead. His heart beat wildly.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’d like to speak with Mayor Arnheim, please.” He stood, gathered himself, joined Claire Carter on the landing so that she no longer loomed above him, smoothed real and imaginary lint from the front of his velvet, hoping she knew it was intended to be wrinkled. Perkus decided he wanted her to understand that he was fundamentally a dandy, a word he’d never precisely applied to himself before but which he felt might pardon his spending the night on the fourth stair from the top. She should consider herself lucky he didn’t have a pet lobster on a string, though that reference was likely beyond the compass of someone who couldn’t identify the Rolling Stones’ logo.
“He’s not here.”
“Isn’t this his home?” Now he detected himself growing uselessly huffy, as though he had some higher ground attainable in this situation. He couldn’t quit trying to make an impression, however, since Claire Carter, with her implacable, nearly mechanized mood of bright efficiency, made him feel invisible.
“The mayor entertains here, but he’s got an apartment he prefers.”
“Did you spend the night here?” Perkus asked. He found himself suddenly stirred by the notion of the two of them alone in the town house together through the long hours of the night, the chaldron really a sort of sexual beacon.
“The mayor’s been very generous in letting me occupy the in-law apartment downstairs.”
“Are you lovers?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.” She appeared unoffended, but regarded him with fresh curiosity, ticking the golden bowl cut of her head sideways like the second hand of an alert clock. Impressively, in meeting Perkus’s gaze she never once took the bait of tracking the wrong eye.
“I’ve got a question for him about… that vase up there.”
“The chaldron, you mean? Jules couldn’t tell you much about that.”
“You know what it is?”
“Sure. I gave it to him. I don’t think he’s glanced at it twice.”
She gratified each question with a little surplus of revelatory value for which he couldn’t have thought to ask. Yet the ease of this exchange felt slippery and corrupt, as though she were toying with him. He preferred to find the question that would make Claire Carter balk. “Where did you get it? Did you buy it on eBay?”
“My brother gave it to me. Do you want to have a look? I think you’ll be surprised.”
At last Perkus could quit trying to make an impression, or to calibrate the nature of this encounter, for he was surely still asleep on the stair, and dreaming. Or perhaps the dream had begun long before. “Who’s your brother?”
“Linus Carter, you may have heard of him. He’s the designer.”
“Designer of what-chaldrons?”
“That and all the rest of it, yes.”
“The rest of what?”
“Yet Another World.”
“I would very much like to see it, yes.”
He followed her through the door at the landing, to find himself surprised, if surprise were still possible, by a curved stair leading up inside what he’d taken for a thin outer wall. Deep-set windows in the turret allowed just slivers of blue above gouts of snow, evidence of the storm Perkus had nearly forgotten. They climbed the steep curled stair in single file, the ascent of her tiny, pear-shaped buttocks before him a transfixing vision, as though one by one a chaldron’s effects were transferring to Arnheim’s Girl Friday.