Richard Abneg liked to dynamite his own ego, with tales of deals struck in offices where you counted your fingers after handshakes and found a few missing, where believing you’d won meant you’d misread the stakes. Between the jokes I heard him rationalizing a life’s arc of excruciating compromise. He painted himself as a specialist in sheltering sand-castle idealisms against the undertow of the city’s force of change, a force not so much cynical as tidally indifferent. Coughing up the lion’s share of what you’d sworn to protect, in days of privatizing plunder, might be to keep from losing it all.
Abneg’s voice was insinuating and sarcastic, a bully’s, though he bullied only himself. At some point Thatcher Woodrow’s internal testosterone meter tipped, and he leaned over to our end of the table. “Do you actually know Mayor Arnheim?”
Abneg had just hoisted a whole duck’s drumstick out of his risotto, leaving a fat white spear of asparagus to ooze back into its sucking footprint. He seemed to revel in being framed in atavistic tableau, ripping at the glistening flesh with his teeth an extra moment while Thatcher waited for a reply.
“I work for him,” said Abneg, swallowing. “I didn’t say I know him. Sure, we’ve met a few dozen times, half of those in public where you’d hardly say it counted as a meeting. Look, Arnheim has fifty guys like me, farmed out covering his ass in one particular or another, sweating bullets on a daily basis. I don’t flatter myself that he wants to be seen with me.”
“We used to play in an all-night poker game, before he ascended to the throne,” said Thatcher. “He and I and Ted Koppel and Ahmet Ertegun, and George Soros, when he was in town. Killers all. I’m not sure it fits the people’s image of their mayor, but he was the biggest killer among us. I’m no lightweight, but I was fighting for my life at that table.”
If I knew Thatcher he’d look for an opening to tell us the cost of a buy-in at that game, too, before he was done. The minimum bets, the big and little blinds, and so on. But Richard Abneg stemmed this curtly and deftly.
“I work mostly with an aide to the mayor you probably didn’t play poker with,” he said. “Her name is Claire Carter. A killer too, of a different type. When we go to lunch she always insists on separate checks.”
I laughed, liking how Abneg checked Thatcher’s one-upmanship with one-downmanship. Georgina laughed too. Maybe Abneg would land his ostrich-woman after all.
At the appointed time the Woodrows’ table turned its searchlight on my woe. I played my part in what was a kind of kabuki enactment. There wasn’t any real news-like the whole city, they’d devoured Janice’s famous epistles from outer space. They only wanted to savor their lucky intimacy with the glamorous would-be astronaut’s-husband. Janice was up there and I was down here. It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse. The Woodrows and their guests wanted a confession of something, but my only confession I wouldn’t offer: my emotions were bogus as long as they were being performed in a setting like this one. I might love Janice, yes, but what I showed these people was a simulacrum, a portrayal of myself.
Harriet Welk asked the usual question. “They publish her letters to you, but do you write back?”
“I used to,” I mumbled in my shame. “But Mission Control needed the communication time for… other stuff. At some point they told me not to bother.”
I was rescued from painting the last brushstrokes of my picture by the haggard entrance of Reggie Spencer, Sharon’s husband, the funds manager who’d been delayed downtown. I thought I could see shreds of the gray fog still clinging to his creased pinstripe three-piece, to his scuffed chestnut wingtips. Certainly the gray fog was still reflected in Reggie Spencer’s eyes as he rolled them upward and faked a smile and slid into the seat that had been kept open between Naomi Kandel and Harriet Welk. There was something tragical about the men who worked downtown, never more than when they were expected on return to manfully reassert their role entertaining ladies at parties, or cheerfully take over on weekends from nannies in Central Park, in order to remind their children of who their fathers were or had once been.
“Sorry, folks,” said Reggie Spencer. “You don’t want to know about it.” Judging from his wife’s expression, truer words couldn’t be spoken. Staff were just clearing our ruins, pouring coffee from silver. “The F ground to a halt and just sat whining at Rockefeller Center. Eventually I got out and took a cab, I don’t know if it was a mistake or not. Traffic was a nightmare. The cabbie was saying something about that escaped tiger getting loose again on Lexington Avenue.”
“One hears continually of this… tiger,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji. “It is supposedly of a tremendous size.” She spoke as if this represented some personal provocation, from which adequate skepticism could offer insulation. I sympathized. I’d heard of the tiger perhaps three or four times now myself, yet found it difficult to bring into focus as a real and ongoing problem, something capable of bollixing traffic on Lexington. My fault. It was too long since I’d read a newspaper.
“See, they should let a few of us who know what we’re doing track that baby down,” said Thatcher Woodrow. “I ought to give Arnheim a call and suggest it. Can’t imagine what’s taking so long with one little old tiger.” He raised his arms and squinted one eye like a five-year-old to mime bagging a moving target with a blunderbuss or elephant gun, alluding, I suppose, to facts we were supposed to have absorbed during some earlier dinner, about Thatcher’s record of accomplishments up against big game. I thought I remembered something Hemingwayesque in his background, and maybe, god knew, a room full of pelts and heads lurked in the duplex some-where, quarantined by Maud in favor of Diane Arbus and Gregory Crewdson prints and studies for sculptures by Laird Noteless.
“It isn’t that kind of tiger,” said Richard Abneg. His tone was dismissive. These two, Thatcher and Abneg, were going to be at it all night long, I saw. They’d find materials over which to dispute through the dessert, and through the round of Cuban cigars Thatcher always loved to personally distribute, and the seemingly spontaneous offerings of brandy and Armagnac Thatcher would haul out after the cigars, to distend the evening into a contented, blithering haze, meanwhile instructing the staff to do the final clearing in the morning, to Maud’s disgust. (This was Thatcher’s real enmity, anyway. Maud’s conversational prerogatives ruled while conversation was possible, so Thatcher worked steadily to numb our tongues with stimulants, until we were reduced to the humming and grunting and Morse-code glances he preferred.)
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked not Thatcher but Naomi Kandel.
“Just that it isn’t that kind of tiger, where you can, you know, kill it with a well-placed shot between the eyes or something.”
“I have heard it is quite… sizable,” murmured Georgina, allying herself with Abneg.
“Yeah, it’s big. A big problem is what it is. You have no idea.” Was Richard Abneg implying that as a mayor’s aide he was privy to facts about the tiger not printed in the Times? His heavy glances seemed to say Yes I am. He adjusted the collar of his shirt, grimacing sweatily, as if adding and I’ve got claw marks on my back, they itch like hell. Thatcher Woodrow seemed to take this as a signal to depart, without explanation, for a visit to the bathroom, or possibly to his humidor, to poison Abneg’s cigar in advance.