by Jack Livings
He wanted to keep it simple, but he couldn’t find the right tone. Very disappointing had a colonial tang to it, an air of self-pity and saccharine innocence in the face of a crumbling social order, like some sop with a pince-nez watching his Rhodesian manor burn while the natives sharpened their spears behind him, and Unsurprising wasn’t much better, only more American in its sarcastic attempt to stave off the expression of any real feeling. Same for Shocker.
The fish reeked.
Fuckface made an appearance, but this was Turk, after all, no need to turn on a flamethrower, and the word looked silly just lying there on the notecard like a cat lounging in a doorway, anyway. He shifted into full drafting mode, filling cards front and back like a middle school toilet stall, until the stinking bag at his feet and the slowly dawning recognition of the absurdity of the project combined to produce Have a Nice Day, which he underlined twice and propped up against the flower vase behind the stack of cards.
He’d only been stalling for time. Now he stood before the elevator call button, his moment of reckoning. He examined the doors, above them the fleur-de-lis in its radiant garden of numbers, and he considered the blizzard, the potential for a power outage. Under perfect conditions, he was, at best, a wary passenger. Under current conditions, he was scared stiff. It hardly mattered that he was intimately familiar with this particular elevator, assembled in Toledo, Ohio, a Haughton Elevonics updated with Schindler parts, as he always paid to accompany the inspectors on their twice-yearly look-sees, the most recent of which had taken place on September 17, 1977, with Andrzej Kaczynski of the New York Department of Buildings, who’d had some stories to tell about the days of occupation, though my father hadn’t volunteered any particulars about his time in Poland except to say that he’d seen some of the countryside, and who my father trusted as much as he trusted any of the inspectors, which is to say zero. He had a special flashlight for the job, a Kel-Lite 5 cell, known to the NYPD as the persuader, and while the inspector did his cursory scan of the hoistway and pit, my father lit up the shackle ties and the rail blocks, the pulleys and ropes, squinting through the distance as though trying to decipher graffiti high on the wall of a paleolithic cave. He of course had the paranoiac’s keen eye for signs of wear and tear on the steel cables, which the inspectors disconcertingly referred to as rope, and which at the Apelles was eight-strand, superior in tensile strength to the perfectly acceptable six-strand—or so you would think. Oh god, the lectures he could deliver on von Mises stress and friction coefficients on drive and deflector sheaves, the immense pressures that could cause the rope strands to score the channel, which would in turn abrade the individual wires, causing deeper scoring, more abrasion, until the strands unfurled one by one, edging toward the inevitable catastrophic failure. So, ultimately, did you want lithe, low-coefficient six- or burly eight-strand? Well, there was a lecture for that, too. He understood in equal detail the safety features of modern elevators, the emergency brakes that made it impossible for a car to careen unheeded to the floor of the shaft, yet that knowledge did nothing to assuage his fears. He believed in extraordinary coincidences. A probabilistic number could be assigned to the likelihood that a pulley would fail at exactly the same time the safety features would fail. The probability might be small, but it existed, and its existence alone was enough to give him the raging palps. He not only believed in extraordinary coincidences, he expected them to be catastrophic. Not only would the engine fall off the jet, it could coincide with the failure of the other three engines under whose power the plane could easily have gotten home. And once you were thinking that way, why not expect the simultaneous failure of the wings, the avionics, the fuel lines? What was stopping the plane from turning into a ball of flame halfway through an otherwise uneventful flight?
That’s how my father walked through the world, waiting for the subterranean steam pipes beneath his feet to rupture at exactly the same time an air conditioner slipped loose from its mooring twenty stories up. Every time he ventured out of the apartment he was confronted by new ways to die. An elevator was a coffin on wires.
Sometimes, under the right circumstances (proper lighting, endorphin levels, barometric pressure, etc.), he could overpower his fears, but that night the storm was one variable too many.
Stage one had been the Christmas tree. An innocuous domestic abnormality, but one that funneled him into: stage two, in which he is forced to take the elevator, where he is trapped when the storm conspires to engage: stage three, power loss. And if those three most unlikely events transpired, what was to keep the cables from snapping, and what was to keep the governor and emergency brakes from failing?
It was the problem of excess imagination, of possibility carrying as much weight as reality. My father had lived there for ten years, and he was religious about using only one passenger elevator, his Haughton Elevonics updated with Schindler parts. He knew its wobbles and clanks, its shimmy at the sixth floor. So slavish was he in his devotion to that elevator that he didn’t even know the names of the doormen stationed in the other three lobbies, each one situated at the elbow of each block-long run of apartments. For that matter, he wouldn’t have recognized residents of the other wings of the building. His realm was the fourteenth floor, the West End side, apartments A through F, the outer limits extending just around the corner to 14G, on the other side of the elevator.
Everything beyond was tundra. He might offer a tense, arm-crossed elevator greeting to a few members of the vertical brotherhood who occupied the apartment lines above and below him, but by and large he lived in a world of his own making, into which few were allowed to enter, and out of which he rarely ventured.
No doubt about it: He was nuts. But on the whole, no more nuts than, say, a woman who, upon finding herself in an empty elevator, seizes the opportunity to ball up her cardigan, jam her face into it, and scream all the way to the lobby. People do all sorts of things, and in his line of work, an overactive imagination was hardly a handicap.
My father sighed, gave the bag a twist, and made for the stairwell door.
14.
In the early days of the twentieth century, residents of the Apelles marked holiday celebrations with the defenestration of champagne flutes, dessert plates, hurricane glasses, whatever was lying around on the sideboard. Anything that made a satisfying pop on the cobblestones of the interior courtyard was fair game. What fun! Less festive, but worth noting: Twice, in episodes separated by twenty-five years, the industrialist Alexander Flagg played bombardier with dining room chairs, both times targeting men he suspected of staining his wife’s honor. Both times, building management levied heavy fines.
The first Christmas tree was jettisoned by a freshly discharged Army Air Corps lieutenant in the early hours of New Year’s 1946, and although the building’s management board frowned on what they wrote up as a dangerous act of impertinence, they assigned a token fine of only a halfpenny, as they, like the young pilot, were feeling buoyed at the time. Though the lieutenant was merely happy to have survived the shooting galleries of the Pacific theater, the board was, to a man, ecstatic over the recent atomic annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, which had set off a sustained market rally, which pleased the bankers among them, and had opened up new territory into which to expand American factories and export American goods, which pleased the industrialists among them.
Residents interpreted the halfpenny fine imposed on the lieutenant as an implicit blessing, and the next New Year’s Eve, as fireworks flowered over the Hudson River, a cascade of trees showered the courtyard. The residents, however, had been mistaken. The board, detecting folly, imposed a ten-dollar fine on each tree. They intended to shut this business down just as they’d have shut down a labor union or a socialist revolution.
The residents, who were themselves mostly bankers and industrialists, reacted as the wealthy always have. Their indignity stoked, they retrenched and carried on behaving just as they pleased. When New Year’s 1948 rolled around,
even more residents took part in the tree toss. Alexander Flagg, an enemy of regulation in any form, purchased a second tree and had his butler affix a banner that read:
COMPLIMENTS OF ALEXANDER B. FLAGG, ESQ
Duly provoked, the board announced new fines for the following year. One hundred dollars per tree (today about an even thousand, adjusted for inflation). For New Year’s 1949, Alexander Flagg tossed three.
Residents of the Apelles, riding the postwar wave of prosperity curling majestically down an infinite American shore, obviously enjoyed burning up their cash. They were aroused by the thought of being so careless with an instrument that so much of the world was dying for want of. Every year the fines increased, and every year the trees kept flying. But as much as they enjoyed throwing money out the window, they were not entirely without conscience, and in 1955 a proposal was brought before the board by Magda Brunn, Turk’s mother, to put the fines to good use for the poor of New York City. The board, its ranks of aged curmudgeons having been thinned somewhat by infirmity and death, had among its new members some more progressively minded men who managed to push the proposal through in 1956. By then it was part of the fun to affix embroidered identification banners to the trees, and the board’s Xmas fine slush fund was edging close to $100,000. Quite a tradition.
Magda Brunn was put in charge of establishing the charitable organization that would dispense funds to the indigent, and she did a fine job—so fine, in fact, that the organization, known as the Apelles Fund, branched out after only three years of existence and began taking donations from all over the city. On the way out of Bonwit’s or Macy’s with your Christmas gifts, you dropped a coin into a little plastic castle with red plastic flags flying from the turrets, and your donation sponsored after-school programs in the Bronx, soup kitchens in the Bowery, summer camps, single mothers.
Magda died on December 27, 1960, having spent every day post-Thanksgiving soliciting donations for the fund outside Barney’s. Pneumonia. Even though she wasn’t around to ring the little silver triangle anymore, the fund kept going strong.
Over the years, apartments changed hands and the tree-toss lost steam. By 1978, no one was throwing much of anything out the window due to liability concerns, but everyone in the building still made nice donations to the Apelles Fund.
For instance, the year of the blizzard party, Bo and Jane Vornado had donated ten thousand dollars. They were also cochairs of the fund, which is in part why they had such huge Rolodexes. Almost everyone at the party except for me, Vik, and Albert Caldwell had donated that year. Even Shahin and Nelofar Jahanbani had chipped in a thousand.
While I was in the bedroom with Albert Caldwell, my mother was chatting up the Jahanbanis. Sales were not her strong suit, but Neil Ford had been talking her up while she studied the backs of her hands and smiled sideways, and the Iranians were urbane and seemed interested, so she was doing her best to come off as cool but not too cool. She didn’t know that the Jahanbanis were looking to stash money anywhere they could before the U.S. government could get its greasy palms all over it, but to be fair, their motivations were not exclusively financial. Neither were Neil Ford’s. All four of them were, like most people, aswirl with contradiction, their shifting desires constantly reshuffling their intentions. They were, each one of them, cunning, benevolent, fighting back their kindest impulses with guns firing self-interest. They overruled their basest instincts for no reason other than human decency. They were angels, they were selfish pigs. They were just people trying to have a conversation. At the time, my mother’s overriding desire was to do something about the nagging feeling that she wasn’t a very good painter, which, unbeknownst to her, meshed nicely with Neil’s intention to get her into bed. He also intended to help his clients hide their money. He kept calling her a visionary. And he meant it. The Jahanbanis were as interested as people could be in art they’d never seen. They were all trying to do the right thing, up to a point. It was a Mexican standoff where everyone was trying to serve everyone else a cream pie.
When my mother died a few years ago, she and Neil had been living in Salerno, Italy, in a medieval house high on the side of a mountain. From inside she could see the bay and the shipping channels, the small cloister windows having been stretched to accommodate a more modern field of vision, and in every room the light was spectacular, but she had stopped painting, and those beautiful stone walls were not hung with her paintings, or anyone else’s. She had an herb garden, three orange trees. On the east side of the house were neat rows of olive trees. Goats roamed the slopes, their little neck bells clanking. She was bitter, ashamed of her work, unable to separate herself from her most famous painting. Publicly, she had chosen to avail herself of the artist’s credo, which states that once a work leaves the studio, the artist no longer has any claim to its interpretation or use. Thus, if Satellite, purchased by Shahin Jahanbani a week after they met at the party, was later gifted to his partner Salem bin Laden, and if Salem, in turn, made a gift of it to his brother, Osama, she could frown and say, It ceased to be mine long, long ago. But she didn’t believe that. In her estimation, she’d as good as killed her own son-in-law.
Osama was a horse guy, not an art guy, and once in his possession the painting had gone straight to a warehouse in Riyadh, where it stayed until his Saudi citizenship was revoked in 1994, whereupon it was shipped to a warehouse in Dubai, then to Switzerland before being sold.
In the interim, Salem, a passable guitarist who, once they got to know each other, liked to jam with Bo Vornado whenever he was in New York on business, flew his ultralight into a high-voltage wire and that was the end of him. The bin Laden patriarch, Mohammed, had died in a plane crash, too. It’s just a coincidence, a point of intersection, just as it’s a coincidence that at the same time Vik was delivering Albert Caldwell to the room where I was sleeping, my mother was delivering into the stream of commerce a painting that would fund the aeronautical training of Mohamed Atta, who plunged American Airlines flight 11 like a broadsword into Tower One.
Before it was destroyed, Satellite found its way back to the Apelles. It was Bo Vornado who bought it at auction in 1998, a sort of dim-witted gift for Jane, who had for years agonized over whether my mother would have stayed at the party that night trying to sell it to the Jahanbanis if only she’d agreed to buy it instead, friendship be damned. Bo paid two hundred thousand dollars, not including commission and tax, to Sotheby’s, which cut a check to a shell corporation established by François Genoud, the Swiss banker who represented Third Reich interests after the war and later established the Banque Commerciale Arabe in Lausanne, which laundered money for the PLO and other anti-Israel groups. Thus one might argue that it was actually Bo’s money, not the painting, that sent Atta to flight school. When government investigations after 9/11 exposed the painting’s chain of ownership, Bo burned it and dumped the ashes in the Atlantic. He retired not long after, and he and Jane moved permanently to their house in Montauk.
Albert Caldwell would have pointed out that my mother and Bo hadn’t acted with malicious intent, therefore couldn’t possibly have been held responsible, but it was exactly her own passivity that so distressed my mother. By her art, she had been made into an instrument of Vik’s destruction, a dupe, a member of the same club as the flight instructors who’d trained the al-Qaeda crews, the government agents who’d missed clues, the desk agent at the Portland airport who dismissed his suspicions about Atta and his accomplice Abdulaziz al-Omari, the captain and first officer of the flight that transported the men from Portland to Boston, where they boarded the 767, which had been assembled by workers at Boeing in Everett, Washington, whose livelihoods owed a debt to Senator Henry Jackson, who’d lobbied for the plant’s construction way back in 1966, who owed his position of power to the voters who elected him, and on and on.
* * *
The party. People who’d eaten downers were all over the penthouse in various states of crumple and drape, chins slick with drool; the upper-eaters were all ov
er the place, too, but like a band of rhesus monkeys, and they wouldn’t shut up, and were responsible, it turned out, for one hundred percent of the damage done to the apartment’s bathrooms and bedrooms. It was a subset of the speed freaks, a few cranked-up former residents of the Apelles, who decided that the building’s most spirited and dearly departed ritual should be revived without delay. When they threw open the terrace doors, the storm welcomed itself into the living room, snow plastering Franklin the bartender, and a great insane greeting, something between a groan and a whoop, rose from the crowd, each individual reacting uniquely to the blizzard conditions as a result of the aforementioned intemperate approach to the intake of psychopharmaceuticals and alcohol. Pandemonium at the doorway, as if an air lock had been sprung and suddenly everyone was flying out into space. There were tornadoes of snow on the terrace. Thunder rumbling across the shrouded sky. Everyone pitched their drinks into the white void over West End. A pause, and then a man in a tiger costume hoisted a wooden chair aloft and hurled it over the edge. It arced gracefully down until the wind blew it into the building’s façade at the tenth floor, where it caught an outcropping, ricocheted, and went into a tight spin before vanishing into the swirling snow.
Bombs away, baby! cried a white man dressed like Jimi Hendrix. Another chair went over the edge.
It all went—the rest of the chairs, the table. The crowd cheered every time something new disappeared over the parapet. The twin concrete planters, leaden with frozen earth, required teamwork, two guys each, and after they’d wrestled them onto the top of the railing, the crowd counted down from ten and over they went, synchronized sumo divers. On the way down, a percussive crack as one took out a gargoyle on the eighth floor. Holy shit! several someones cried, not unhappily. This marked a turning point in the exercise, the moment at which their exultation in the freedom of flight was eclipsed by the joy of destruction. In a corner of the terrace was a French café table, a little wire job, and some iron chairs. They were passed forward, hand over hand, floating across the top of the crowd like leaves on a river, the revelers closest to the edge simply handing them along to the blizzard. Down, down, down.