Bright Lights, Big City (5 page)

“Husband. I mean, I was.”

“She was in Paris showing the fall collections,” Tad says, “and she got caught in a crossfire between Palestinian terrorists and the French police. Totally fluke thing. Innocent bystander. Senseless death. He doesn’t like to talk about it.” Tad’s delivery is entirely convincing. You almost believe him yourself. His air of being privy to dark secrets and inside stories gives credence to outrageous statements.

“That’s terrible,” Theresa says.

“Tragic is what it is,” Tad says. “Excuse me, but I’ve got to do some business. Back in a minute.” He bows and then heads out the door.

“Is that true?”

“Not really.”

“What is Amanda doing these days,” Elaine asks.

“I don’t know. I think she’s in Paris.”

“Wait a minute,” Theresa says. “Is she alive?”

“We just sort of split up.”

“Too bad for you,” Elaine says. “She was yummy.” She turns to Theresa. “Sort of this slinky girl-next-door look. Farm fresh. Very ingenuous.”

“I don’t understand this,” Theresa says.

“Me neither,” you say. You’d just as soon change the subject. You don’t like this role of bird with broken wing, especially since that’s exactly how you feel. The lame-duck husband. You’d rather be an eagle or a falcon, pitiless and predatory among the solitary crags.

“Aren’t you some kind of writer?” Elaine says.

“I do some writing. I’m sort of an editor actually.”

“Oh, God,” Theresa says, when you mention the name of the magazine. “I’ve been reading it all my life. I mean, my parents get it. I always read it at the gynecologist. What’s your name? Should I know you?” She asks you about writers and artists on the staff. You dish up a standard portion of slander and libel that would never pass the Clinger’s requirements of verification.

Without getting too specific you imply that your job is extremely demanding and important. In the past you could often convince yourself as well as others of this, but your heart is no longer in it. You hate this posturing, even as you persist, as if it were important for these two strangers to admire you for all the wrong reasons. It’s not much, this menial job in a venerable institution, but it’s all you’ve got left.

Once upon a time, you assumed you were very likable. That you had an attractive wife and a fairly interesting job seemed only your due. You were a good guy. You deserved some of the world’s booty. After you met Amanda and came to New York, you began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in. When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing. This conviction grew with each new school you attended. Your father’s annual job transfers made you the perennial new kid. Every year there was a new body of lore to be mastered. The color of your bike, your socks, was always wrong. If you ever go into psychoanalysis, you will insist that the primal scene is not the encounter of parents in coitus: it takes the shape of a ring of schoolchildren, like Indians surrounding a wagon train, laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness. The scene repeated itself in schoolyards across the country. Not until you reached college, where everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept, you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. You succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle. Which is just about how you feel these days. Even now, as you puff yourself up with tales of high adventure in magazine publishing, you can see Elaine’s eyes wandering out over the room, leaving you behind. She’s drinking champagne. As you watch, she dips her tongue into the tulip bowl and slides it around inside the glass.

A woman who looks vaguely famous glances up from her table and waves. Elaine waves back. Her smile goes sour when the woman turns away.

“Check that out,” Elaine says. “Silicone implants.”

“I don’t know. She looks pretty damn flat to me.”

“Not the tits—the cheeks. She’s got fucking silicone implants to make it look like she has cheekbones.”

Tad comes back, pleased with himself. “Bingo,” he says.

It’s somewhere past midnight. Anything that starts now is not going to end at a reasonable hour. You think about slipping out and heading home. All sorts of beneficial effects are rumored to accrue from a good night’s sleep. On the other hand, you wouldn’t mind a taste of that toot. Just enough to boost your morale.

In a moment you are all en route to the bathroom downstairs. Tad lays out some fat lines on the toilet seat. Elaine and Theresa take their turns. Finally, Tad hands you the bill. The sweet nasal burn hits like a swallow of cold beer on a hot August day. Tad fixes another round and by the time you all troop out of the bathroom you are feeling omnipotent. You are upwardly mobile. Certainly something excellent is bound to happen.

“Let us locomote out of here,” Tad says.

“Where to?” Theresa says. “Where the boys are?”

“Where the girls are,” Elaine says. You’re not sure if this is just having fun with movie allusions or something more pointed.

Your merry band decides that Heartbreak is the destination. A cab is procured for the short hop uptown.

Outside the door there is a crowd of would-be Heartbreakers with a uniform outer-borough look. Tad pushes through the supplicants, confers with the bouncer and then waves the three of you in. Elaine and Theresa are chatting away when it comes time to pay, so you cover one and Tad covers the other. Inside, there is still room to move.

“It’s early,” Tad says. He is disappointed. He hates to arrive before everyone else is in place. He takes pride in his timing, being on time by being the latest.

Elaine and Theresa disappear and you don’t see them for fifteen minutes. Tad discovers some friends, advertising people, at a table. Everyone is discussing the new
Vanity Fair
. Some are for and some against. “Utter confusion,” says Steve, a copywriter. “It’s the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.”

You go off to buy a drink, keeping both eyes peeled for lonely women. There don’t seem to be any at the moment. Everyone knows everyone else. You are on the anti-cline of your first rush. You are also experiencing the inevitable disappointment of clubs. You enter with an anticipation that on the basis of past experience is entirely unjustified. You always seem to forget that you don’t really like to dance. Since you are already here, though, you owe it to yourself to make a sustained assault on the citadel of good times. The music pumps you up, makes you want to do something, not necessarily dance. The drugs make you feel the music and the music makes you want to do more drugs.

At the bar someone thumps your shoulder. You turn around. It takes you a minute to place the face, but in the time it takes to shake hands you come up with a name: Rich Vanier. He was in your dining club at college. You ask what he’s been doing. He’s in banking, just back from South America tonight, after saving a banana republic from bankruptcy.

“What the hell, I restructured, gave the generals a few more months of high living. So what are you doing to keep body and soul together. Still the poet?”

“I do a little South American business myself.”

“I heard a rumor you married an actress.”

“
Activist
. I married a beautiful activist. She was the illegitimate daughter of Che Guevara. A few months ago she went home to visit her mother and got herself arrested and tortured by a series of rich South American generals. She died in prison.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

Rich Vanier can’t get away from you fast enough. He says you’ll have to have lunch sometime.

Walking back to the table you see Theresa and Elaine heading off with Tad. You catch up with them just outside the Men’s Room. The four of you occupy a stall. Elaine sits on the tank and Theresa sits on the seat.

“Seems like I spend about half my life in bathrooms,” Theresa says as she blocks off a nostril.

Later you run into a woman you met at a party. You can’t remember her name. She acts embarrassed when you greet her, as if something shameful had once passed between you, though all you can remember is a discussion about the political ramifications of The Clash. You ask her if she wants to dance and she says sure.

Out on the floor, you invent your own dance step. You call it the New York Torque. “Some Girls” segues to “Shattered.” You keep outstripping the prevailing tempo. Your partner sways back and forth metronomically. When you look at her, she seems to be studying you sympathetically. After you have soaked through your shirt you ask her if she wants to take a break. She nods her head vigorously.

“Is there something the matter?” You have to shout in her ear to be heard.

“Not really.”

“You seem nervous.”

“I heard about your wife,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

“What did you hear?”

“About what happened. About the, you know, leukemia.”

You are riding the Bolivian Local up through the small mountain villages into the lean oxygen of the Andean peaks.

“We’ve got Terrain and Elisa eating out of our hands,” Tad says. “I think it’s time we suggested that we all slip out to someplace more comfortable.”

You are in the bathroom again. Elaine and Theresa are in the Ladies’ on legitimate business.

“I do not appreciate this leukemia bit,” you say. “Not funny.”

“Just trying to boost sales. Consider me your agent.”

“I’m not amused. Bad taste.”

“Taste,” says Tad, “is a matter of taste.”

You are dancing with Elaine. Tad is dancing with Theresa. Elaine moves with an angular syncopation that puts you in mind of the figures on Egyptian tombs. It may be a major new dance step. Whatever it is, she is making you feel self-conscious. She’s a tough act to accompany. You feel like a recent transplant from the junior prom. You are not particularly attracted to Elaine, who’s too hard-edged in your view. You do not even think she is a particularly nice person. Yet you have this desire to prove that you can have as good a time as anyone, that you can be one of the crowd. Objectively, you know that Elaine is desirable, and you feel obligated to desire her. It seems to be your duty to go through the motions. You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.

“I really enjoyed Amanda,” Elaine says between songs. “I do hope I see her again.” There is something confidential in her manner, as if you shared a secret with regard to Amanda. You would be happier if she had said she didn’t like Amanda. Being still unable to think the worst of her, you need other people to think it and speak it for you.

Tad and Theresa have disappeared. Elaine excuses herself and says she will be right back. You feel abandoned. You consider the possibility of conspiracy. They have planned to meet at the door and ditch you. You are doing bad things to their mood. Or, worse yet, you are missing out on drugs. You get yourself a drink. You wait five minutes and then decide to reconnoiter. You check the Men’s Room first and then the Ladies’. A woman in a leather jump suit is teasing her hair at the mirror. “Plenty of room,” she says. You hear sounds coming from one of the stalls. Giggling. Looking down, you see Elaine’s pumps and Theresa’s sandals under the door.

“Save a little for me,” you say, pushing on the door of the stall, which yields just enough to allow you to stick your head in and discover Elaine and Theresa engaged in an unnatural act. You look on in wonder and confusion.

“Want to join the party?” Elaine asks.

“
Bon appétit,
” you blurt, and you lurch out of the Ladies’ Room. You emerge into a din of bodies and music.

It is very late.

A WOMB WITH A VIEW

You dream about the Coma Baby. You sneak into the hospital, past the nurses and reporters. Nobody can see you. A door with a plaque reading
L’Enfant Coma
opens into the Department of Factual Verification. Elaine and Amanda are doing lines on Yasu Wade’s desk and swearing in French. The Coma Mom is stretched out on your desk in a white gown. IV bottles are hanging from the bookshelves, tubes plugged into her arms. The gown is open around her midsection. You approach and discover that her belly is a transparent bubble. Inside you can see the Coma Baby. He opens his eyes and looks at you.

“What do you want?” he says.

“Are you going to come out,” you ask.

“No way, José. I like it in here. Everything I need is pumped in.”

“But Mom’s on her way out.”

“If the old lady goes, I’m going with her.” The Coma Baby sticks his purple thumb in his mouth. You try to reason with him, but he does a deaf-and-dumb routine. “Come out,” you say. Then there is a knock on the door, and you hear Clara Tillinghast’s voice: “Open up. It’s the doctor.”

“They’ll never take me alive,” the Baby says.

The phone is ringing. The receiver squirts out of your hand like a trout. You keep expecting things to be solid and they’re not. You recover the receiver from the floor and apply it to your face. One end goes next to your ear and the other next to your mouth.

“
Allô?
” You expect the speaker to be French. It’s Megan Avery. She wanted to make sure you were awake. Oh yes, you were just making some breakfast. Sausage and eggs.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “But I didn’t want you getting in Dutch with Clara again. I thought I’d just make sure you were awake.”
In Dutch?
You make a note to look up this expression in Partridge’s dictionary of slang when you get to work. The clock says nine-fifteen. You slept through the eight-thirty alarm. You thank Meg and tell her you will see her at work.

“You’re sure you’re awake?” she says.

It certainly feels like it: headache, sour stomach—all the vital signs.

The generalized dread attendant upon regaining consciousness becomes localized around the image of Clara Tillinghast. You can face the fact that you will probably lose your job, but you do not think you can face Clara. Not on four hours of teeth-grinding sleep. Nor can you stand the sight of those page proofs—the evidence of your failure. In your dreams you have been on the phone to Paris, waiting for the piece of information that would save your life. You were barricaded inside the Department of Factual Verification. Someone was pounding the door. You were holding the line. The operator broke in intermittently, speaking in a language you could not even partly understand. The palms of your hands have been flayed by your fingernails. All night you lay with your arms held rigidly at your sides, your fists clenched.

You consider calling in sick. She would call up sometime during the day to say you were fired and you could hang up before she got abusive. But the magazine goes to press tomorrow and your absence would put pressure on your colleagues. And hiding would rob your failure of dignity. You think of Socrates, the kind of guy who accepted his cup and drank it down. More than this, you cling to the hope that you will somehow escape your fate.

You’re dressed and out of the house before ten. The train pulls in just as you make the platform. You consider letting it go by. You’re not quite ready yet. You need to hone the steel of your resolution, consider your strategy. The doors close with a pneumatic hiss. But someone in the back is holding one open for a man who is running up the platform. The doors open again. You step onto the train. The car is full of Hasidim from Brooklyn—gnomes in black with briefcases full of diamonds. You take a seat beside one of them. He is reading from his Talmud, running his finger across the page. The strange script is similar to the graffiti signatures all over the surfaces of the subway car, but the man does not look up at the graffiti, nor does he try to steal a peek at the headlines of your
Post
. This man has a God and a History, a Community. He has a perfect economy of belief in which pain and loss are explained in terms of a transcendental balance sheet, in which everything works out in the end and death is not really death. Wearing black wool all summer must seem like a small price to pay. He believes he is one of God’s chosen, whereas you feel like an integer in a random series of numbers. Still, what a fucking haircut.

At Fourteenth Street three Rastafarians get on, and soon the car reeks of sweat and reefer. Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation. An old lady with a Macy’s bag sitting across from you looks around as if to ask what the world is coming to between these Dracula Jews and zonked-out Africans, but when you smile at her she quickly looks away. You could start your own group—the Brotherhood of Unfulfilled Early Promise.

The
Post
confirms your sense of impending disaster. There’s a Fiery Nightmare on page three—an apartment blaze in Queens; and on page four a Killer Tornado that ravaged Nebraska. In the heartland of the country, carnage is usually the result of acts of God. In the city it’s man-made—arson, rape, murder. Anything that goes wrong in other parts of the world can usually be attributed to the brutishness of foreigners. It’s a nice, simple world view. The Coma Baby is buried on page five. No developments: “
COMA BABY LIVES
.” The doctors are considering a premature Caesarean delivery.

It’s ten-ten when you come up on Times Square, ten-sixteen when you enter the building. The first elevator down is operated by a kid who looks like his last job was purse snatching. You say good morning and step into the back. After a minute he turns around.

“You gonna tell me what floor or do I gotta be psychic?”

You tell him twenty-nine. Accustomed to Lucio and his gracious peers, this kid strikes you as a rude interloper. He swings the gate closed and latches the door. Halfway up he takes out a Vicks inhaler and snorts on it. This makes your nose twitch sympathetically.

“Twenty-nine,” he says when you get to the floor. “Ladies’ undies and accessories.”

No armed guards waiting for you. You ask Sally, the receptionist, if Clara is in yet.

“Not yet,” she says. You’re not sure if this is good news or bad. It could be a case of prolonging the agony. Your colleagues are all huddled around a copy of the New York
Times
, the newspaper of record and of choice here in Fact. Clara told you when you were hired that all members of the department were expected to read the paper thoroughly, excluding the new features sections, but you haven’t looked at it in weeks.

“Is it war,” you ask.

Rittenhouse tells you that one of the magazine’s writers, a favorite among members of the Department for her scrupulous research and general lack of snottiness toward underlings, has just won a big award for her series on cancer research.
Cancer
. Rittenhouse is particularly pleased because he helped research the articles. “How about that?” he says. He holds up the paper so you can see the article. You are about to nod your head and impersonate enthusiasm when you see the ad on the facing page. You take the paper from Rittenhouse. There are three women modeling cocktail dresses and one of them is Amanda. You feel dizzy. You sit back on the desk and look at the picture. It’s Amanda, all right. You didn’t even know she was in New York. The last you heard she was in Paris and planning to stay. She might have had the decency to call as long as she’s here. But, then, what is there to say?

Why does she have to haunt you like this? If she would just work in an office like everyone else. Right before she left she mentioned a billboard contract, and you have dreamt of seeing her face, monstrously enlarged, on the wall across from your apartment.

“I think we can all be proud of her,” Rittenhouse says.

“What?”

“Is anything wrong,” Meg asks.

You shake your head and fold up the paper.
Leukemia, Tad said
. Meg tells you that Clara hasn’t come in yet. You thank her for the wake-up call. Wade asks if you finished the French piece and you say, “More or less.”

On the first Tuesday of the month, everyone gets one of the short pieces from the front section of the magazine. The articles have already been divvied up: yours is a report on the annual meeting and reception of The Polar Explorers Society, held this year at the Sherry Netherland. The Polar Explorers are predictably eccentric. They wear divers’ watches and obscure military decorations. The hors d’oeuvres at the reception include blubber and smoked Emperor Penguin on Triscuits. You underline
Emperor Penguin
and make a note to check the spelling and whether or not it is edible. Also check spelling on
Triscuits
. As Clara says, one can’t be too careful. If you botch a brand name the manufacturer will never let you hear the end of it. If there were no such thing as an Emperor Penguin, or if it were an Empress, three hundred letters would land in the mailroom by the middle of next week. The magazine’s most fanatic readers are exactly the sort who would know about Penguins; ornithology seems to be a particular field of scrutiny, and the slightest error or even vagueness of fact brings a flurry of vigilant correspondence. Just last month an innocuous sketch on birdfeeder activity raised a storm. Readers protested that a certain type of finch couldn’t possibly have been at a feeder in Stonington, Connecticut, when the writer claimed to have seen a pair. The letters are still coming in. The Druid called Meg, who worked on the piece, and asked for the opinion of the Audubon Society. The matter is still under advisement. You once wrote a spoof on this genre called “Birds of Manhattan,” which amused your colleagues but disappeared without a trace when you sent it upstairs to Fiction.

First stop on the present assignment is volume E for Emperor of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. No sign of penguins, but there’s a fascinating article about embryology with sequential pix of the human egg changing from a salamander at ten days into a homunculus at ten weeks. Eventually you replace E on the shelf and reach for P, one of your favorites.
Paralysis; Paranoid Reactions; Parasitology
, for fun and profit, sub-chapters on rhizopods, ciliates, flagellates and sporozoans.
Pardubice
, a town in the East Bohemian section of Czechoslovakia, an important junction on the Brno-Prague line.
Paris
, with color pix;
Particles
,
Elementary; Pascal; Pavlov; Peccary
, the New World counterpart of the swine (w. pic.);
Pedro
, the name of five kings of Portugal. Finally,
Penguins
. Flightless and clumsy on land. You know the feeling. The Emperor reaches a height of four feet. No mention of edibility. In the picture they look like eccentric Polar Explorers dressed for a reception at the Sherry Netherland.

Your colleagues are abuzz with details from their own pieces. Wade has one about an inventor who has just received his hundredth patent, for a rotary nose-hair clipping device. Wade gets the inventor on the phone and learns that he was also responsible for the automatic toilet-bowl cleaning revolution, although the big companies stole the idea out from under him and made millions. He gives Wade a long account of this injustice and then says he can’t discuss the matter because it’s under litigation. All this should be wonderfully diverting, yet there is a forced quality to your laughter. You find it hard to listen to what other people are saying, or to understand the words of the article on which you are ostensibly working. You read the same paragraph over and over, trying to remember the difference between a matter of fact and a matter of opinion. Should you call up the president of the Polar Explorers and ask if it’s true that someone was wearing a headdress made out of walrus skin? Does it matter? And why does the spelling of
Triscuit
look so strange? You keep watching the door for Clara. Odd phrases of French run through your brain.

The first thing to do is call the writer and get from him the number of someone who can confirm that such a society exists, that it had a reception at the hotel mentioned, on the date mentioned, that this is a matter of fact and not fiction. Names are named. You must find out if these names belong to real people and, if so, how they are spelled.

Rittenhouse announces that he’s just had a call from Clara, who is sick and won’t be in: the reprieve you have been waiting for. The boa constrictor wrapped around your heart eases its grip. Who knows? The illness might prove serious.

“Actually,” Rittenhouse continues, “what she said is that she would not be in
this morning
. She’s not certain if she will be feeling well enough to come in this afternoon. She can’t say at this point.” He pauses and tugs on his glasses, considering whether further qualification is necessary, and then concludes, “Anyone wishing to consult her may call her at home.”

You ask Rittenhouse if there are any messages.

“Nothing specific,” he answers.

Here is your chance to redeem yourself. A day’s work might pull you into the clear with the French piece. You could get the guys in Typesetting to cut you a few hours’ slack on the deadline. You could get the Penguin thing out of the way in half an hour and then buckle down to it.

Alors! Vite, vite! Allons-y!

An hour later, the Polar Explorers are put to bed. It’s a little after noon, and your energy is flagging. What you need is some lunch to set you right. Return to the French elections with renewed vigor. Maybe pick up
une baguette
with ham and Brie to get you into the proper frame of mind. You ask if anybody wants anything from the outer world. Megan gives you money for a bagel.

On the way out you see Alex Hardy standing in front of the water cooler staring into the aquamarine glass. He looks up, startled, and then, seeing it’s only you, he says hello. He turns back to the water cooler and says, “I was just thinking it could use some fish.”