Chronic City

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 di

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 sowing canapés. Naomi Kandel, the lesbian galleryist, tipped her glass in salute when I came in, and I drifted in her direction. Stout and handsome in her evening dress, eyes drowsy with congenital irony, Naomi bore the promise of deadpan commiseration here. Though we’d all chosen to accept this invitation, we had to make ourselves feel better about the decision by imagining ourselves enslaved. Naomi stood with another woman, a curvaceous, fortyish socialite in a sparkling ginger-threaded dress. Together they stood regarding a framed drawing, perhaps a new art acquisition of the Woodrows’, a crisp architectural-style rendering of a dark pit that plunged between two Manhattan office towers, viewed from above. Tiny figures were also represented, gazing into the pit’s depths from the sidewalk.

“Do you know Sharon?” asked Naomi.

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Sharon Spencer, Chase Insteadman.”

“I’m a fan of your work,” said Sharon Spencer. She weighed my handshake for an extra instant. I wondered which work she meant. Was she a fan of Martyr & Pesty? Few bragged of this. And Sharon, attractive as she was, seemed a bit old for that sitcom’s heyday. She was being polite, I decided, or coy. I joined in gazing at the drawing.

“Laird Noteless,” said Naomi, naming the artist. “It’s a study for Expunged Building.”

“Are you his dealer?” I asked Naomi.

She shrugged no. “There’s nothing to deal. Noteless doesn’t usually let go of his sketches. He likes to hoard or destroy the evidence, leave only the major works behind. I think Maud and Thatcher are helping him get Expunged Building past city council.”

“It’s not built yet?” said Sharon Spencer, surprised.

“Not yet.”

She shook her head. “Preposterous, the hurdles they set up.”

“Where’s your husband, anyway?” said Naomi dryly, not concealing her boredom, and maybe wishing to squash any flirtation.

“Reggie’s coming late,” sighed Sharon Spencer. “He’s stuck at work. It’s all dreadful down there now.”

Reggie, I understood, was one of those who shifted the money around, trying to make it get bigger. They all deserved our pity, clearly enough. The money men, effortful and exhausted, slumping through the gray fog. Compared to their wives they were peons.

Maud Woodrow found me next, and broke me away from Naomi and Sharon Spencer to meet Harriet Welk, an editor at Knopf. Maud and Harriet had met when a photographer needed permission to reproduce some of Maud’s collection for a coffee-table book on nineteenth-century folk jewelry. Harriet, though she might have been the youngest player on this intimidating stage, was commanding and keen, and easy to want to charm. It was Harriet who’d brought Richard Abneg along. He was still across the room, getting buttonholed by Thatcher Woodrow. No male arriving in the Wood-rows’ circle was ever spared preemptive marking with Thatcher’s scent. When spirited off to another duty, Harriet retailed a few facts about Richard, who she called her “secular date.”

“You mean ‘platonic,’ I think.”

“Platonic, secular, old friends. Anything between us is unimaginable.” She pointed Abneg out, a short, stolid fellow who appeared, in this company, like a cartoon Communist in his wide-legged charcoal suit, untucked fla

“Clear enough,” I said. “You’re a pair of solo operators here. Lone wolves.”

She explained that they were high-school friends, went all the way back to the corridors and water fountains and sexual embarrassments of Horace Ma

“At least he’s bothered with self-reinventions.”

Richard Abneg had begun as a radical, an anarchist. His formative event the Tompkins Square Park riots, when the police quelled the rebel spirit of the Lower East Side. (I faintly recalled these facts, another version of the city’s Original Sin.) Abneg had spearheaded a squatters’ seizure of a famed building on Ninth and C, a cherished last stand, a toe stuck in the slamming door of progress. Out of this had come a career in tenant advocacy, bulldog negotiations on behalf of those sidelined in gentrification’s parade. Now, ultimate irony, Abneg worked for Mayor Arnheim, managing the undoing of rent stabilization. He’d become a major villain to some who recalled his earlier days, Harriet Welk informed me. Yet Abneg clung to his sense of duty, always alluding to how much worse it might all be without his interventions, a jaw-clenched claim on a higher realism. His intimates, like Harriet, could see what it had cost him, going to that crossroads, making that devil’s bargain. They kindly left the ironies unconfronted. What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when he was fifteen and reading Charles Bukowski and Howard Zi

Richard Abneg scotted over to us now. Stuck out a horny hand for me to shake, but while I held it, addressed Harriet Welk.

“You see her?”

“Who?”

“Don’t look, don’t look. The ostrich-woman.”

He meant Georgina Hawkmanaji. I’d seen her come in. For her hair pi

“Sorry,” he said abruptly. He introduced himself, and freed my claustrophobic fingers. “Don’t get any ideas, I’m going home with her.”

“I’ll give you an advantage,” I said. “She lives in this building, the penthouse.”

“Well I’m getting clear go-signals.”

“Go-signals from the ostrich-woman.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Never ignore those,” I told him. “I never would.”

When it was time for di