Chronic City

“We’re hanging out,” said Perkus, now with a shade of chagrin, or even pleading, as if he really needed my presence to buffer Oona’s. Women, I began to think, embarrassed him per se, made him feel goofy or uneasy, when they didn’t make him furious. “It’s not the same around here without you.”

Well, it wasn’t the same around here, either, I wanted to joke. I did feel I’d vacated my life somehow. Instead I told him I’d be right over. Needless to say.

Doing so, rushing back to Eighty-fourth Street, I was steering into a storm’s eye. Things in Perkus Tooth’s apartment could never be as they were, because they’d never been any particular way for more than two evenings in a row, really. Nevertheless, I was to briefly reenter a dream I’d idealized. One of life’s oases, those moments that come less often than we want to believe. And are only known in retrospect, after the inevitable wreck and rearrangements have come.

That first night I was shocked to arrive and find them on Perkus’s living-room floor together, Perkus cross-legged like a kindergartener, scissors looped on thumb and forefinger as he browsed half-mangled magazines, Oona kneeling on folded knees, squinting at scraps of text, forgoing her glasses, I guessed, in anticipation of my arrival. They had a broadside in progress between them, one in the late ma

“Hello, Chase Insteadman.” She gri

“Hello, Oona.”

“Haven’t see you in a while.”

I suppose we weren’t counting that curtailed encounter in her apartment. It now seemed totally unreal. “Too long,” I said keeping it noncommittal.

“We’re making a poster,” she said. “For old times’ sake, while trying not to, you know, feel old.”

“Yes, I see.”

“It’s on the theme of isolation,” she said. At this Perkus tilted up one goonish eye, and one severe. “Excuse me,” Oona corrected. “It’s on the theme of bears.”

“Why feel the need to choose?” I said.

“Great point.” She slugged Perkus on the arm. “Bears and isolation.”

In my conception Perkus and Oona were enemies or contestants, yet I’d never known what was at stake. Now Perkus was wholly caught up in Oona’s ironic frolic, or frolicsome irony, whichever it was. He seemed cowed and catalyzed at once. I wondered if Oona was thrilled to reclaim her place as his Tweedledee, if the nostalgic gesture hadn’t opened some door into discarded possibilities, taking her by surprise. She might have set out to please Perkus just to please (and u

Or perhaps this was my projection. I might be crediting to Oona the thrill of relief I felt to reenter the Eighty-fourth Street sensorium, to hear Perkus’s strange music (if I asked what was playing he’d surely pretend to be shocked I didn’t know it), to step into his arena of exhaled fumes, knowing that soon enough I’d exhale plenty myself (I’d absentmindedly catalogued the presence of a fresh row of joints on the kitchen table, and one, half smoked, tipped into a tray), to see his information hectically distributed across the living-room afghan, a puzzle whose pleasure was its insolvability, to find myself restored to my small shelf in his collection. It had taken just one disinvitation to make me glimpse exile.

Perkus tried to fit a clipping containing a paragraph of small type into the white expanse surrounding the bear photo. Over his shoulder, I read: Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished… The way he shifted the clipping from spot to spot, intently evaluating, then rejecting, each position, suggested Perkus was trying to believe in the worthy coexistence of those words with the conundrum of the bear, almost as if hoping that the paragraph could comprise a rescue, make a bridge or raft back to the mainland the bear could hop across to safety. But no, the new element fell short, no matter where he placed it, and so Perkus swept it into a pile of others that lay to one side and behind him. I sca

“Light up a smoke, if you want,” said Perkus, the eyes in the back of his head telling him I’d shifted back toward the kitchen. “We’ve got more on the way, actually,” he added. “Watt should be coming around any minute now, just so you know.”

“Waiting for Watt,” said Oona, in singsong, not looking up from the old magazine she browsed. She unfurled the centerfold from a crackling thick copy of Playboy, circa the early ’70s at the latest, given the model’s coy mascara and bobbed hair, and the Technicolor wrongness of her aureoles. “Who’ll tell us what’s what. And sell us some pot.”

“Oona only comes around here to score,” said Perkus cheerily, at last daring to jab back. “I no longer hold that against her.”

Foster Watt did come and lay out his wares, though not before we’d attempted to use up the last of the present supply. The poor pot dealer was shivering, still locked into his uniform of red vinyl jacket and no head covering, despite the cold, and he must have felt, coming into that kitchen, that he’d stepped onto a vaudeville stage. We were so high we finished each other’s lines like the Marx Brothers, even if the result was mostly a verbal version of a game of exquisite corpse. Perkus offered Watt a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, and Watt took it and struck a pose of claustrophobic cool by the door while the three of us slavered over his open case of goods, ru

“Hindu Kush… ooh, that’s too exotic for me…” she said. “What’s this, Giant Tiger? Are you trying to frighten your customers, Foster?”

“Yeah,” said Watt absently, though it was hardly meant as affirmative to her question. Conversationally, Watt was a Magic 8 Ball. It was merely a question of which answer would come up. “Yeah, I got a few new things, good stuff.”

“Ice,” said Perkus. “Where’s the Ice?”

“Have I ever let you down, Perkus? I’ve got plenty of your favorite.”

“Giant Tiger, Gray Fog, Two Eagles,” Oona listed. “Very, uh, topical selection, Foster.”

“People are digging Two Eagles,” said Watt. “You ought to try it.”

Perkus hoarded all the Ice he could find in the sample case, built a little architectural stack of five Lucite boxes at one corner of his table. Oona went on listing brand names. “Northern Lights, Chinese Mine… what’s next? Lonely Astronaut? Do you make these up yourself, Foster? Because no offense, but somebody’s really cribbing a lot of this material.”