“It all feels a little plotty to me,” I said, dead set on disappointing him. “I was never one for plots.”
“Too bad, since you’re in one.”
“The newspaper is the news, too, at least on the day it’s published. Did you read about the crane collapse on Ninety-first? They think Abneg’s tiger might be to blame.”
“Fuck Abneg’s tiger, and fuck the newspaper.” Perkus began swearing, invoking Richard’s style. “The Times isn’t the commissar of the real, not anymore, not as far as I’m concerned. It’s the cover story.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Perkus. You don’t have to rely on it, like I do, for updates on your personal life!”
“Why are you yelling?”
I had gotten a little ventilated, without noticing. I felt tide-swamped with provocations: the serial bulging of Ava’s ribs as she hiccuped under my hand; the moldering smell and tawdriness of the Friendreth generally; the fine grounds the gold filter hadn’t kept from ending in the bottom of my cup and on the carpet of my tongue; the unrelenting March weather, which seemed to prove some arcane fact my loopy friend Perkus held over me like a threat, as though he could be right and I could be wrong about everything; that neither Perkus nor Oona ever called me on the phone-I was somehow a principle taken for granted, as much an item of decor in Perkus’s circle as I had been the chunk of handsome furniture at wealth’s table; that Mission Control hadn’t received a communication from Janice or Northern Lights generally for almost three weeks. Once upon a time Janice had peppered the newspapers with affectionate updates I guiltily speed-read; now I guiltily scoured the papers daily for hints of her existence which refused to appear. All of this seemed irreconcilable data, yet the ultimate provocation was the way Perkus arched his eyebrows at me as though I was supposed to grasp it as a whole.
“Janice might be dead,” I blurted, seeking his sympathy. “And I’m in love with Oona.”
“Have you ever found yourself exhausted by a friend whose problems simply never change? Here, Ava.” Perkus rattled her leash and she sprang from the couch to the door-her transitions, from placidity to avidity, were like jump cuts. Then he began bundling himself into outer layers I’d mostly purchased for him. Despite the uncanny truth The Twilight Zone episode had revealed, he’d protect himself from the cold outside. Perkus’s selfish certainties took my breath away. Yet I had to grant the distinction: he was, if nothing else, a person whose problems were never exactly the same twice. There is a war, I thought, between the ones who stagger from chaldron drunkenness to cohabitation with a three-legged pit bull, and those who try to keep up with them. I was losing the war. Chaldrons, for instance: Would they ever be mentioned again, or had they slipped from his scheme? Was it my duty, as I’d earlier assumed, to suppress uncomfortable facts, or was I somehow the stooge who couldn’t keep all the essentials in his head? I didn’t mind jigsaw puzzles, but this one seemed to have no edge pieces. Marlon Brando is dead! I wanted to shout after him as he departed, leaving me there alone in Ava’s digs.
I think!
I said nothing, as footfalls of man and dog waned to silence in the corridor. So much for the fight I’d planned. I was no match. Perkus’s transitions were as rapid as Ava’s, and if he was applying tough love it was fairly tough. On the other hand, his mysterioso style left my pride some wiggle room. Sure, I replied to Perkus’s absence, I have been exhausted by those people whose problems never change. Good thing there’s none of those around here! My own bedevilments seemed dynamic enough to me. If I stuck around and changed the subject I could pretend we’d never tangled. Only I might have to praise Rod Serling to get back in Perkus’s graces. That’s when I located my pride-I fled.
Well, if I’d felt betrayed by Perkus consorting with Susan Eldred, it was only a warm-up. I didn’t wander round to the Friendreth for three days after, making an interval of self-containment and restored private routine, like I’d established when Perkus went missing. There wasn’t any Oona to distract me, either. She counted the days to delivery of the Noteless manuscript. In this vacuum I reacquainted myself with the afternoon movie theaters of the Upper East Side, a good place not to think about the weather among other things. I scared myself, one day at the old United Artists on First Avenue and Eighty-fifth, imagining that a low rumble on the film’s soundtrack was the scraping of the mechanical tiger’s excavations beneath the theater-of course, it was only the noise of an army of Orcs grinding into battle, silly me.
At home after that endless afternoon movie I recalled the moment of worry, and took it as an intimation: if one of us was being hounded by that tiger, it probably wasn’t me. So I rushed to my computer to pull up TigerWatch, to make certain the Friendreth hadn’t been destroyed. It was the first time I’d ever condescended to visit the Web site, which had struck me previously as a sop to public prurience at misfortune, rather than an upstanding service. Anyway, I’d prided myself on having the inside scoop from Richard Abneg. What I found allowed me to breathe easy. At last reports the tiger was off the map of my companions entirely, in Spanish Harlem. But the scare made me want to overlook dignity’s boycott, and see Perkus. This was the very day Oona had said she’d be putting the book on her editor’s desk. Rather than waiting for whatever degree of celebration she’d deign to share, I elected not to be such a slave, or anyway such an obedient one. So it was a curiously mingled pride and pridelessness that saw me headed back out into the fresh night.
I heard Oona through the door to Ava’s apartment. She was in the midst of a self-lacerating harangue, in what I thought of as her single-malt voice. Sure enough, a bottle of twelve-year-old Oban sat between them, its gold essence at the halfway point, its discarded paper wrapper and shards of lead-foil cork wrapper on the table beside Oona’s handbag to prove the bottle’s halfwaying had been accomplished just now. Seeing an intoxicant other than coffee inside the walls of the Friendreth was as startling as seeing Oona (intoxicant to me). I’d come to think of the place as a rehab facility, though Perkus would have said, Dogs have no use for the twelve steps, Chase! But I hadn’t regarded it as my own hiding place from Oona until seeing it stormed by her. Oona and Perkus each held juice glasses, full with more than a finger, and smiled up at me guiltlessly. Perkus, curiously, held a small hardcover book in his lap, as though using it as a handy shield to protect his genitals. Ava knelt beneath Oona’s chair, head craned adoringly upward, obviously enthralled by that wiry, fitful little black-clad poppet, or Gnuppet, with the maniacal, winding voice. I knew Ava well enough now to gather she’d developed a quick crush. The dog might have been starved for female companionship, too. I was. Oona all at once called out a kind of Mickey Spillane urgency from me, I wanted to kiss her and take her away from there and I wanted to hit her for being there in the first place. And for getting Perkus drunk. And for knowing where to find him, and coming to find him instead of me. And. And. And.
Well, Oona was beating herself up, and quickly let me understand the occasion. “Oh, hello, Chase. We’re having an Irish wake for the greatest book I ever wrote or will write. I called it Pages from a Void, though I guess I figured that title was never going to fly with the sales force. Still, I like saying it aloud.”
“The editor didn’t love it?” I stepped in and shut the door behind me.
“Oh, the editor was always sure to hate this book. I didn’t get where I am today, Chase, relying on the integrity of a New York publishing syndicate. My mistake was imagining I had Noteless at my back. I thought the joke was on the editor for signing up a nihilist absolutist who’s made a career of treating the hand that feeds him like a plate of gravy fries. I climbed inside this project, I channeled that mofo’s tar pit of an aesthetic and served it to them chilled. Excuse the mixed metaphors, they’re strictly a symptom of alleviation from Laird’s black tunnel of suffocation and silence. I mix my metaphors so I know I’m alive. I mix metaphors, I fall down, no problem. Speaking of which, help yourself, darling.”