Chronic City Read Online Free PDF Page B

much I suspected that one might be the price of the other. I wanted this selfishly, for, it dawned on me then, Perkus Tooth—his talk, his apartment, the space that had opened beginning when I’d run into him at Criterion, then called him on the telephone— was my ellipsis . It might not be inborn in me, but I’d discovered it nonetheless in him. Where Perkus took me, in his ranting, in his enthusiasms, in his abrupt, improbable asides, was the world inside the world. I didn’t want him smothered in the tomb-world of migraine. Perkus was the opposite of my distant astronaut fiancée—my caring for him could matter, on a daily basis.

CHAPTER
Two
    Perkus Tooth was right . I may as well acknowledge I function as an ornament to dinner parties. There’s something pleasant about me. I skate on frictionless ball bearings of charm, convey a middling charisma that threatens no one. As a retired actor I evoke the arts, yet feature no unsettling aura of disgruntlement, striving, or need. Anyone can grasp in a single word— residuals —where my money comes from and that I have enough of it. People with money don’t want to wonder, in their private evenings, whether their artist friends have enough (or worse, be certain they don’t have). It was during one of these evenings at their most typical, swirling with faces I’d forget the morning after, that I came to be introduced to Richard Abneg.
    Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s duplex apartment took the disconcerting form of a small town house that had sidled against a representative Park Avenue monolith of an apartment building and been absorbed and concealed there. Entering through the lobby after having passed the doorman’s muster, a visitor veered left, shunning the burnished, inlaid-rosewood elevators leading to the ten-million-dollar apartments, up a small interior stoop, six marble steps narrowing to anornate doorway, to be greeted inside by another, finer, more scrupulous and savvy doorman, the Woodrows’ alone, who spoke the name of any guest before it was given, even at a first visit. This house-within-a-building functioned to enunciate to dwellers in those apartments, elevator-sloggers who imagined they’d come to one of life’s high stations, your indoors is our outdoors, that’s the exponential degree between us . Distinction from merely heedless wealth was tough to obtain on Park, but the Woodrows had purchased some. If it took a surrealist flourish to do so, fair enough. Inside, there was nothing to say the Woodrow dwelling wasn’t some stupendous and historical town house, now widened to modern style, walls layered with black-framed photography and paintings as crisp as photographs, behind dustless glass, and with a curving interior stairwell as much a proscenium for entrances as that in The Magnificent Ambersons . Yet their home was invisible to the street. It had nothing to enunciate to the street.
    A certain script pertained. I wouldn’t speak of my astro-fiancée, off trapped behind her thin steel-and-tile skin against the unfathomable keening void, during cocktails. No, I should reserve the material. There would come a point in the dinner, after some fun had been had, candles burned two-thirds down, glasses just refilled, when someone to my right or left would inquire and as if by previous agreement other talk would fall off, so the whole table could listen as one to my sad tale. Janice Trumbull’s drama, to which I was attached, wasn’t going to go unmentioned, and it was hardly secret—they’d after all been following her fate in the papers. So with earnest concern in their hearts, the guests would lean in unashamed to hear what I knew, the “real story,” maybe. And to moo sympathy, like the approval an audience shows a poetry reading.
    Cocktails were for smaller talk. Eight or nine of us mingled in that plush drawing room, counting Maud and Thatcher, our hosts, while their staff wove amid us, harvesting drink orders and sowingcanapés. Naomi