A Naked Singularity: A Novel (62 page)

“I was going to say, this is a very small—”

“
Cozy
was, I think, the term used by the real estate agent.”

“Yes, this is a very
cozy
apartment.”

“I wish it was fucking
airy
.”

Laughter.

“How come Alyona and those guys’ apartment is so much . . . less cozy?”

Because it was a weird building. I lived in the only brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that wasn’t a box or rectangle. It was a bottleneck. The pressure fizzled and bubbled below in the fat part of the bottle. There it compressed and mounted as it rose up and into the narrow mouth of the bottle. That’s where we were, the escape.

“So you feel pressure?”

“No, but because it sounds sort of cool when you say it that way that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

I didn’t sit on the sofa with her. I sat on this crazy, wobbly stool with my feet on the arm of the sofa. Against the other arm lay Traci. She had slipped out of her shoes and sat on her folded legs, her hands clasped together atop her knees. I’m going to say she had flaxen hair, even though she didn’t, because I like that word. Flaxen. Her eyes I have no good single word for but how could I have previously failed to notice their emerald luminescence? The face was all cheekbones but not too sharp, just right. The entire time I made these observations Traci had been speaking. I had listened not at all, and now she was unmistakably waiting for a response.

“Yeah,” I said plaintively like all
whattya gunna do
?

“So you think I should?”

“Hard to say,” especially when you haven’t the faintest idea what the discussion is about.

“I figured you would be the person to ask.”

“Sure, you’d think.”

“Being that you obviously went to law school.”

“Law school, right. Law school yeah.”

“ . . .”

“Yeah, it’s just a tough question you know? Maybe it would help if you restated the problem. In the plainest language possible.”

“Should I go to law school?”

“That’s as plain as it gets.”

Suddenly Traci didn’t look so great anymore, asking me if she should go to law school. Who cared? Go or don’t go. What, really, was the difference? Who took career advice from the likes of me? And I hated people who used the word
career
in referring to themselves. Not that she had used that word far as I could tell. Like people who wore fancy hats. Just expose your dopey skull, do your time on this rock, then go wherever it is we go when all’s been said. Of course I should point out, in fairness, that if a woman wore a hat I practically melted. That, and the fact that the black, bowler-type hat Traci wore then was highly scrumptious, made me forget my annoyance almost as soon as it had arisen. While thinking these thoughts it seems I had managed to keep my mouth moving and somehow satisfactorily answer Traci’s question. We could move on.

“So you and Louie?”

“Finished. If we ever even got started.”

I was smitten now. She had smote me. I loved her voice. It was gravelly and weak like it had recently been overtaxed. What a revelation being there then, with her. I needed only play this situation just right. The mutuality of our interest was in the air, hanging and waiting. Even the simplest dullard would have no trouble converting the current situation into a long-running, torrid interaction. Even so, the utmost precision and care was called for. Every word would have to be measured. Every nonverbal cue refined to shiny perfection. Just this once I could personate normalcy, do the things everybody else does without spending a second thought. I could pretend. I’d seen it done before and had no doubt about my ability to mimic. Above all, I had to be conventional. Had to play it cool.

“We should fall in love,” I said.

“Love?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure I get what you mean.”

“You’ve heard the expression
falling in love
?”

“Yes.”

“You know generally what it refers to?”

“Yes.”

“So let’s do it, let’s fall in love with each other.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Why? Doesn’t it look like fun?”

“What look like fun?”

“Love. I mean look at all the breath expended on the subject. The movies, the books, poems, songs. That many people can’t be wrong. Love!”

“Yes, love. But what is it and what does it mean to fall in it?”

“You don’t know what it is? You’ve never felt it?”

“Probably not the kind you’re talking about. You? Well, obviously . . .”

“What?”

“You’re telling me you’re in love with me yet we hardly know each other, practically strangers.”

“First of all, I never said I was in love with you. Secondly, the amount of time we’ve known each other is irrelevant. I know a wacky Italian poet who scarcely knew the woman he adored and who would later guide him through Paradise.”

“You didn’t just say you love me?”

“No, I proposed that we fall in love with each other since all indications are it would impact favorably on our lives, make us happier.”

“How romantic, too bad you can’t
choose
to fall in love.”

“No?”

“No, you either feel it or you don’t”

“How would you know?”

“It’s obvious, there’s a loss of control there that precludes choice.”

“So you’re saying no?”

“Right, no.”

“Because?”

Laughs.

“Because you can’t
decide
to fall in love. It either happens or it doesn’t Casi.”

“Guess you’re right, but you sure have strong feelings on something you couldn’t even define a minute ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“What
is
love?”

“Love is like a . . . feeling . . . where . . . you just love.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look we all know what love is even if I can’t put it into words just this moment.”

“You’ll know it when you feel it right?”

“Right.”

“And you don’t feel it now.”

“No.”

“Me either but I think I wish I did.”

Traci looked out the window then placed her palm on the pane. “It’s freezing out again,” she said. “I can’t ever remember anything like this. Can you? I mean it used to be, okay, a cold day here and there, the kind you would take notice of, but this is every day, day after day.”

“Relentless,” I said. “There’s no relent,” I added.

“Exactly. I read today that the temperature hasn’t reached double digits in like two weeks, I mean where are we? Not to mention the wind, my God.” Traci was drawing on my window. With her finger on the condensation. “The thing about this kind of sustained cold,” she said after a fairly long while, “is that after a while it almost fails to register, know what I mean? It becomes like just another part of us, our world, no more noticeable than the sky or the trees.”

“The sky is white.”

“Right.”

“I mean uniformly white though. That can’t be good right?”

Just then, Traci sprang up out of the couch. She had heard something I hadn’t. “Someone’s downstairs,” she said. “Maybe I can get my pendant.” She jumped out promising to return. I turned to watch her go out and almost fell off my stool. I left the stool on the floor and moved to the sofa which was still warm with her heat. I looked at the window and tried to identify her drawing. I couldn’t.

Traci came back in to say “false alarm.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know but he looks lost.”

“Besides lost, what else does he look like?”

“Like professorial, meaning eggheady.”

“Toom!” I shouted out the door and I was right. “Up here!”

My master plan had worked, I was pleased.

Traci was leaving. We said goodbye. First her then me.

She disappeared out the door and Toomberg appeared. “I did have your number,” he said. “And I’ve been trying to call you for the last hour but have received only constant busy signals.”

“I guess my phone’s finally had it, sorry.”

“They now manufacture phones of the cellular variety by the way.”

“Never.”

“Anyway I procured your address from Denise but no apartment number was listed.”

“I see.”

“So I was kind of lost.”

“Understood, thank you.”

“I think someone is calling you, out the window. Is not someone calling your name?”

I looked out the window and saw Traci looking up. When I opened the window to hear what she had to say, the cold stayed outside at first. But nanoseconds later it came in, riding an invisible tidal wave and causing me to shake, my teeth chattering, and turn to the side to avoid a direct hit.

“Casi?”

“Traci.”

“Just saying. If I did do what you proposed? If it was possible?”

“Yes?”

“It would be with you.”

She smiled. I smiled back. Then she turned, hugged herself, and walked down the block. I watched her the whole time. When she reached the end of the block she turned right at the corner and out of my sight. I never saw her again.

“Was that the woman I passed on my ascent?”

“Wasn’t she absolutely, transcendentally, achingly beautiful?”

“She was fairly attractive.”

“Keep your shirt on Toom, don’t go overboard.”

“I’m sorry, are you in love with her? I’m not familiar with the conventions.”

“Relax, I’m talking about her attractiveness on a purely physical level. I didn’t make my statement in any amatory way. I’m simply asking for your opinion as to her level of beauty.”

“I’m a married man.”

“You are? And you’re getting married again this weekend? Isn’t that illegal you polygamous bastard?”

“I am not getting married this weekend, I am merely
attending
a wedding.”

“Guess that’s your story, may as well stick with it. But what of that woman’s heart-delaying beauty?”

“I said, she’s attractive.”

“I pity you Toomie, using that word to describe the situation. Don’t you realize how intoxicating women are? How amazing life is? You know, there didn’t have to be women, and they certainly didn’t have to be this compelling.”

“There had to be women for life to continue.”

“Exactly, I for one would certainly kill myself.”

“I meant from a reproductive standpoint.”

“I suppose that’s true too, if you want to get all technical.”

“You believe life to be amazing Casi? As in amazingly good?”

“As in, yes. Amazingly good. How else can you describe a state of affairs where I can be sitting in this lonely apartment one minute only to answer the door the next to find
that
woman standing before me? Where she will later stop in bone-piercing cold to tell me that, if she could, she would fall in love with me.”

“Where two seven-year-olds will snatch an infant and beat her to death?”

“There’s that.”

“Just pray nothing similar ever happens to you or yours.”

“I’m in control here Toom. Things don’t happen
to
me. They happen
because
of me. Do you have any kids Mr. Melvyn Toomberg?”

“No but did Hurtado conclude the way you wished?”

“Ow. Agony. Stop. That’s different though.”

“What happens more often? An attractive woman appears in your doorway or you deal with someone like Arronaugh or Cymbeline?”

“You know about Cymbeline?”

“Naturally, everyone does.”

“Who’s everyone and what do they know? Specifics.”

“Fine, everyone at work knows that you are going to be charged with contempt because of Arronaugh and Cymbeline.”

“Oh.”

“What did you say to Arronaugh anyway?”

“I don’t know but it was probably contemptible.”

“Did you urge a client to leave Cymbeline’s courtroom because she was going to put him in?”

“Of course not. But I should have.”

“Aren’t you concerned?”

“Why should I be? Somebody’ll smooth it over for me. Maybe Gold, he’s great at that sort of thing.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen here.”

“So I’ll fight it. Isn’t Tom supposed to be like the greatest lawyer in the Western Hemisphere or something? You think he’s going to let me get convicted?”

“Now you sound like a client.”

“That
was
stupid. The point is that our psuedo law firm will expend, if necessary, all of its limitless resources on my defense.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re right, you can’t expend all of something that has no limit.”

“Also, from what I’m hearing, the people you’re counting on to help, you may end up viewing as additional enemies.”

“How so?”

“Well the rumor, and it’s just that for now, is that along with the contempt proceeding there’s going to be a contemporaneous in-house investigation.”

“Regarding what?” I was laughing, near-hysterically, I think at the phrase
in-house
.

“Well, several things.”

“Like what?”

“Like that you might have forged Tom’s signature to get some minutes.”

“Of course, they should investigate me if I hadn’t!”

“That you verbally assaulted Solomon Grinn.”

“Verbally?”

“Assaulted.”

“Assaulted?”

“Verbally.”

“Which time?”

“On more than one occasion.”

“That’s all? It’ll never stick.”

“That you physically assaulted Liszt.”

“Liszt?”

“Physically.”

“His wall?”

“No his person.”

“Whose person?”

“Liszt’s person.”

“Liszt has a person now?”

“The allegation, I surmise, is that you tried to punch him.”

“That’s crazy. That should be an easy one to fight. Just ask Liszt, he’ll say it was his wall, not him, that I took offense with. Ask him.”

“I can’t because he’s out.”

“Out where?”

“Out of work, out on Disability.”

“Why, what happened?”

“You happened it seems.”

“Me? He can’t be saying I hit him.”

“Emotional distress, I gather, from the near miss. That’s my impression although he may be saying you did in fact hit him, that sort of thing being notoriously difficult to ascertain. At any rate, he’s on indefinite Disability Leave as a result of your encounter with him.”