“Excuse me,” said Perkus, swallowing the words. He pulled himself upright using the back of a chair for a ladder. He’d paused the film, an inadvertent screen-capture of Martin’s foolish, cross-eyed scowl frosted in a blizzard of static, and now turned his head from my view, to face the heavily draped window, around the edges of which blazing light leaked, the sky smashing its whiteness against the city. A major storm had been predicted to tumble in before nightfall, though I had no way of being certain Perkus, devoid of newspapers or neighborly gossip, knew this vindicating fact. All of us, Steve Martin, Ava, Perkus, myself, had revealed in the same instant our pensive side, a moment of collective interspecies ellipsis that would have solemnized the occasion if it could have been solemnized. It couldn’t. Perkus hiccuped silently-I knew well enough by now when he’d hushed one. There was nothing to lose at this point, tensing against the spasm with the muscles of his gut, which had just untensed more than he’d intended. The smell expanded like a parachute, covering the apartment’s prevailing dull canine perfume.
“What happened?” I said, though the question was needless. I knew what had happened.
“I crapped myself,” said Perkus.
CHAPTER
Twenty-three
Anne Sprillthmar, a brilliant young South African magazine writer, had been posted in London before being plucked away and hired by Tina Brown during her brief sensational tenure as editor of The New Yorker. When Brown had just as quickly moved on, Anne Sprillthmar stuck, endeared herself to the new regime at the famous weekly, and thrived, in her way a perfect Manhattanite, typical of the international elite who lately seemed more the island’s right inheritors than its ostensible natives. Sprillthmar was as tall as me and nicely immodest of that fact, standing up without concaving to shelter her breasts as too many tall women do. Bare of a hat, her long copperish hair carried a frosting of snow when she first appeared to shake my hand and say her name, in that faintly exotic, even scandalous accent-bearing its notes of historical shame but presented unshamefully-and when she came near enough I could spot pinpoint snowflakes perching on the tips of her peach-colored lashes. She was even nice-smelling. When we met she’d been shadowing Richard Abneg through his daily paces for four days, fly on the wall as he transacted his duties, the vital errands of the Arnheim administration, and I doubt I’d ever been sorrier to learn that a beautiful and intriguing woman would be difficult to shake from my immediate company. In fact, it wasn’t exactly the first time Anne Sprillthmar and I had met. I hadn’t recognized her without her tall, long-snouted dog. My elevator girl.
Our recently long-lost friend Richard had found himself cast as bureaucratic firewall between city hall and the spiraling fiasco of the giant escaped tiger’s non-capture-of the mayor’s failure even to explain the circumstances and origins of the creature’s loosing upon Manhattan. So Richard had been shoved to the forefront, to dissemble and deflect in Arnheim’s place. This public scapegoat’s role had in turn aroused curiosity about the old semi-reconstructed squatters’ advocate, and the saga of his long rightward drift into legitimate power. Abneg as sweaty and pragmatic everyman in extremis had immediately struck Anne Sprillthmar as a type worth working up for a profile, in lieu of the access the mysterious mayor would never have granted. When Sprillthmar pitched him to her editors she’d been happily green-lit.
This explained why Richard Abneg wasn’t alone when he arrived at the curb of the Friendreth Canine Apartments that next day, in answer to my pleading call. He’d made a commitment to give the journalist access to one of his typical weeks on the go, and grudgingly quit making distinctions between personal and public destinations after she’d insisted she wanted to portray him “in the round.” Richard bolted from the taxicab, punching black shoe prints in the dusty covering that had begun to whirl from the sky, leaving the apparently unflappable journalist to pay their fare, and didn’t apologize or introduce her when she caught up to him under the Friendreth’s portico where I waited. Richard wore the splendid new coat Georgina had purchased for him, and his shoes were fine now, too-he’d always signified his distance from formality by the rattiness of his footwear, but the Hawkman had lately banished all his favorites.
“This had better be good.”
I wasn’t sure whether I should be furious at Richard for his abdication of Toothland, only that he was so patently aggrieved at my summoning him here that I couldn’t bother trying to reverse the charges. Let Richard be the furious one, whether it was to cover feelings of guilt or not. I needed him today.
“We’re taking Perkus in for a checkup, only he doesn’t know it,” I said.
“Your timing is bad,” Richard muttered. I didn’t know whether he meant the snowstorm, the particular curses of his agenda, the hovering presence of his profiler, or something else, more basic to my being. I didn’t doubt he was right in any case. Anne Sprillthmar introduced herself more fully (my name seeming to mean nothing particular to her, a relief), then fell in with us on our way upstairs. Her presence was unassuming, despite her glamour-I figured it was part of her journalist’s talents for putting people at ease when they shouldn’t be. It wasn’t as though she were recording us with anything more than her warmly puzzled, unjudgmental eyes. At Perkus’s door I tried to warn them both, incompetently, mentioning squalor, disjunction, hiccups, a well-intentioned but boundless three-legged dog. Richard pushed past me in annoyance. I held the door for Anne Sprillthmar. By the time I followed her inside the journalist was squatting on the kitchen’s filthy tile, restraining Ava from tunneling too far down her throat with those patented fang-bared tongue-kisses. “Sweet baby, sweet baby, doesn’t anybody ever give you love, you poor thing?” The accent made Anne Sprillthmar’s endearments super-lascivious. “Oh, yes, you’re a big baby, aren’t you, darling?” It was on seeing that Anne Sprillthmar was a “dog person” that I recovered an image of her, riding Oona Laszlo’s elevator at my side.
Further inside, the encounter I’d willed was taking place, Perkus startled into semi-accountability as only Richard Abneg’s implicit reproach could startle him. He’d been huddled on the couch, with Sterling Wilson Hobo’s Immaculate Rust in scissored remnants all around him, shattered like everything else that met Perkus’s interested eye, digested in his own personal mashup. At first I thought to protest-hadn’t Perkus said Hobo wasn’t his sort of poet? — and then I saw the pages and verses had been reduced past even Hobo’s minimalist intentions, the words and even letters dismembered from one another. Perkus had the single syllable fal stuck to his cheek. Here was the final destination of all of Perkus’s languages: the ransom note. Perkus, kidnapped by his own theories, had then suffered Stockholm syndrome, in which one preferred a jailer to oneself.
Or maybe I was unfair. Maybe hiccups wrecked him. Anyhow, he’d wrecked, chin shadow become an unkempt whitish beard, scruff become inane wisps spilling over his ear tops, disarray become dereliction. Perkus wasn’t the only startled person on the scene. Richard Abneg was silenced, too. I saw Perkus through his eyes, miles deep in self-dungeoning since their farewell on Eighty-fourth Street. I recalled they’d been boys together, that unimaginable land of brilliant New York childhood I’d been made to feel ashamed I lacked. I’d given Richard no chance even to understand what the Friendreth Apartments were about-he probably credited the malodorous decor entirely to Perkus. Close enough. Everything stood for itself. Perkus hiccuped violently to rupture the silence and an exclamation mark of drool decorated his chin.
Richard didn’t speak to him at first, but turned back to me, the rage and hurry leached from his voice. “You have a doctor waiting?” he asked. I nodded, and he said, “Take Anne back into the kitchen.” Anne Sprillthmar, with Ava nuzzling up into her kneading hand, had come in behind me, and now stood shocked. Perkus gawked back at her. “I’ll talk to him for a minute,” said Richard, as if neither Perkus nor the journalist could hear him. “We should have kept a cab waiting. There won’t be many in this goddamn cul-de-sac.”