by Jarett Kobek
MAY 1995
Adeline Has Lunch with Thomas Cromwell, Touches the Berlin Wall (Again)
I made plans with Thomas Cromwell for lunch near his office in Midtown. Keeping faith with Aubrey’s words, I brought Emil, pushing his stroller forty blocks. When we reached Mr. Cromwell’s place of work, he stood in front, perfectly groomed. He held a lead attached to an astoundingly wrinkled brown dog.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I have to take a rain check. I had to bring Oscar into work. We’re having our carpets cleaned.”
That was more than fine with yours truly. I worried about bringing Emil into a restaurant. I’d spent some great percentage of my years judging those mothers who insisted on bringing their screaming children into unfamiliar situations. With my own offspring in tow, I’d become hypersensitive to re-creating any situation that’d driven me bonkers.
“Let’s get some coffee,” said Thomas Cromwell. “We can go over to a park not far from here. It’s a hidden gem.”
We stopped at a deli. I left Emil with Thomas Cromwell and Oscar, buying two cups of coffee. I’d rushed in and out, terrified to leave my child with a stranger and his dog.
The fear was baseless. Cromwell hadn’t absconded with my child. He was bent over the carriage and talking in a sublingual babble.
I handed Cromwell one of the cups. How I admired the hideous faux-Hellenic design printed on the cardboard! I took a swig from my own, imbibing the vilest brew that I’d yet tasted.
We talked about nothing in particular, about his job in publishing, of which I understood very little. I spoke of Trill and its relative success, about the grind of churning out twenty-two pages a month plus a cover, about how I’d received offers for other work. Some of which I’d be insane to refuse, as work for Marvel and DC was ridiculously lucrative, but how I was having trouble managing my schedule and was unwilling to delay an issue of my own book.
The park was a green sliver wedged between two buildings. At its rear, water cascaded down, drowning out the city’s clamor and din. Add to that the trees, and one could delude herself into believing she was somewhere beyond the city. If one was the sort of person who wanted to be somewhere other than the city. Which one was not.
Emil climbed out of his stroller and chased pigeons before targeting his affections on Oscar, lifting the dog’s ears and hugging it around the neck. Cromwell said the poor thing was a Shar-Pei, purebred. I dared not inquire as to the cost of buying a dog created by pointless eugenics.
Dogs in the city evoke my pity. All of them, Oscar included, have a faraway look in their eyes, as if overexposure has leached away any possible emotion or thought.
I couldn’t help myself. I inquired about Aubrey, about how they met.
“At college,” said Thomas Cromwell, “which is a long time ago, now that I think of it. We didn’t start dating until years later. We’ve been together now seven years. I think she wants a ring, but my parents divorced before I was born. Neither of them remarried. I don’t know about marriage. The word doesn’t mean anything.”
I whistled. “Seven years,” I said. “How about that. That’s perfectly swellegant. And you’ve never been tempted to stray?”
“I’ve strayed,” he said. “I’m not proud. It happened. Two years ago. I started seeing a girl from 143rd Street in Flushing. I liked the odd-couple aspect. Uptight white boy makes a play for Latina who doesn’t care about his industry or his profession.”
“Does Aubrey know?”
“Aubrey knows,” said Thomas Cromwell. “We spent a year in couples’ therapy.”
“What happened to your mistress?”
“Someone on MacDougal Street stabbed her in the thigh. I took it as a message against my unfaithfulness and repented the next day. I told Aubrey everything.”
Emil hugged my leg. I brought him into my lap. All the while I drank that vile coffee. I liked Aubrey, had taken to her, but oh, Thomas Cromwell, how I liked you, sir. How you moved me way inside with your hideous dog and your tales of tail from Flushing.
He mentioned the Elizabeth Murray exhibition up the street at the MoMA. Cromwell had seen it and liked it. I hated tearing another sister down, but I truly disliked Murray’s work. I said that I planned to avoid it.
“Give it a chance,” said Thomas Cromwell. “Aubrey still hasn’t seen it. If you want, we can all go together.”
“I’d be delighted,” I said.
Cromwell looked at his watch. “I can’t believe we’ve talked this long,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“I’ll walk you,” I said, “it’s the least that I can do.”
“Before we go,” he said, “take a look at this.”
He brought me over to three slabs of freestanding pieces of concrete. I’d noticed them when we’d come in, but hadn’t particularly cared for the mural. Public art gives me a bad case of the shivers.
“This is the Berlin Wall,” said Thomas Cromwell.
“¿Qué es?” I asked.
“These are parts of the Berlin Wall.”
“I’ll be,” I said, running my fingers across the concrete. I’d witnessed the thing when it stood in Berlin, as a young girl on a continental tour with Daddy, Mother, and Dahlia. My father insisted that his daughters touch the wall, despite neither of us understanding its import. I was too young. Dahlia, you’ll not be surprised to learn, was too dense.
“That’s Manhattan for you,” said Thomas Cromwell. “I need to get going.”
I strapped Emil into his stroller. We pushed through Midtown in silence, determined, comfortable. Oh so comfortable, darlings.
Two blocks before his building, Cromwell said to me, “The next time, you’ll have to tell me all about Baby. I read Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle. It’s surprisingly good, especially for a book with an elephant-headed man on its cover. How long have you known each other?”
“For almost a decade,” I said. “We ceased speaking for some while, but things are back to normal. Our lives are hideously entwined. He’s as much my blood as Emil.”
“How do you account for it?” asked Cromwell. “What keeps the friendship going?”
“That’s the simplest thing,” I said. “Both of Baby’s parents are dead. I’ve never asked the details, but I gather it happened with great tragedy. As in murder. My brother committed suicide. When you meet another person with that same awful gift, you never let them go.”
JUNE 1995
Dinner at Tom and Aubrey’s
Aubrey telephoned on Wednesday, inviting yours truly to Saturday dinner. “I’m trying a new recipe,” she said. “Garlic brown sugar chicken. You eat meat, don’t you?”
“I only abstain from the ruddy stuff,” I said. “Chicken is fine. Tell me, do you often cook?”
“Hardly ever,” she said. “My grandmother sent the recipe, so I thought I’d try it.”
I asked if she wouldn’t mind extra guests, meaning Baby and the baby. Aubrey said the more the merrier. She’d be delighted to meet Emil. He’d made quite an impression on Thomas Cromwell. The man couldn’t stop singing my son’s praises.
After hanging up the receiver, I contemplated whether Aubrey and Cromwell had attempted creating their own child. Perhaps the option was tabled for future days.
As I’d soon be within the warm embrace of their home, I considered a surreptitious examination of the medicine cabinet, a hunt for evidence of Ortho Tri-Cyclen. The appalling fantasy passed. I’d ceased raiding toiletries somewheres around high school graduation.
You may be asking, Oh, Adeline, why ever would Aubrey be calling you? Well, darlings, in my unfathomable perversity, as the weeks had passed, I’d experienced many more lunch dates with Aubrey than her fella.
Why, just a week earlier, we’d met at an exceptionally sterile restaurant on Seventh Avenue. The name escapes me but rest assured that it was bleedingly bourgeois.
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br /> Our mouths moved, the proper words came out, but as always the cut of her suit and the shape of her hair transfixed my human soul. I’d seen thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of women like her, young professionals clawing their way through the world, women who believed that New York offered them profound and infinite opportunity. I’d always fantasized about their lives, imaginating what they’d done and where they came from. Now I was friends with one! There she sat, eating arugula and talking about politics.
Could these women be happy working for the sole purpose of accumulating capital that afforded them certain luxuries, the maintenance of which required the further accumulation of capital? Where did it all go? Where would it go? Must we all own property?
Aubrey mentioned her disappointment in President Bill Clinton. “I voted for Jerry Brown in the primaries,” she said, “but we saw how that turned out, so I held my nose and went with Clinton, hoping that he’d be the lesser of two evils before he proved that he didn’t understand the job. Now the Republicans have Congress with their Contract with America. None of the issues that I care about will be addressed for twenty years.”
I said something noncommittal, a pleasant nothingness. Our conversation drifted elsewhere. I wasn’t so naive as to express my political opinions in polite conversation, particularly not to a woman who did legal work for major corporations.
By any measurable American spectrum, my ridiculously far-left convictions ranked me as amongst the certifiably insane. No one wanted to hear my opinions. Not even my own self.
We’d drawn each other further into the net, moving from acquaintance into friendship. When the idea of a mythical garlic brown sugar chicken came upon her, she telephoned.
They resided on the East Side, on 56th Street, on the twenty-eighth floor of a drab building constructed within the last decade. If you’re surprised that Aubrey in all of her proper taste would ever consent to such a nondescript building, please remember that New York remains New York. Every soul makes the devil’s bargain in the matter of living quarters. Even Norman Mailer.
In the elevator, riding towards the sky, questions danced through my head, tormenting me like visions of sugarplum fairies. Adeline, why are you dining at the apartment of an unavailable man? Adeline, why are you regularly lunching with his common-law wife? Adeline, what is wrong with you?
I’d not expressed my depth of feeling for Thomas Cromwell, not even to Baby, but I knew that I needn’t. Not with the young author, trained with a novelistic predilection for detail and human squalor. He’d been kind enough not to inquire after the obvious.
Aubrey opened their door, a clean white apron over her perfectly casual outfit. She hugged Baby, whom she had not met, and examined Emil. “Isn’t he lovely?” she said. “Tom’s getting dressed. Make yourselves comfortable.”
Like the New World, some realms are better left unexplored. The décor lacked any defining feature but was so of its very moment, hovering at the exact edge of a taste. Faddish technology du jour and reproduction posters from the Art Nouveau.
“Their television is fucking enormous,” whispered Baby.
“It’s far worse than yours,” I said, “which is an astounding sentiment.”
The bedroom door opened and out ran the great wrinkled beast. I put Emil on the ground. My toddler tumbled towards the animal, throwing his stubby arms around the dog’s neck and kissing its folds of flesh.
Baby cooed at the image, but even Emil’s joy couldn’t mask the cruelty of a fifty-pound Shar-Pei trapped in a two-bedroom apartment. We are all prisoners of our environs but typically the bars are not so visible.
Thomas Cromwell sauntered out, wearing a modest shirt and khaki pants. He still looked like one of America’s best-groomed men.
“I thought that I heard the buzzer,” he said.
“We’ve been here for a while,” said Baby. “We’ve been judging you and Aubrey by the books on your shelves. It’s something that Adeline and I do. You can learn a lot by what books people keep in their living room. The book’s physical presence is pure wish fulfillment. It’s a marketing device, like your identity refracted through a misreading of the author’s intent.”
“Baby,” I whispered. “Stop being a dick.”
“If you’re interested in my insecurities,” said Thomas Cromwell, “then you’ll want to examine the shelves in the other room. These are only the ones that I’ve worked on professionally.”
That simply set the tone, didn’t it, darlings? Baby mildly aggressive and possibly autistic whilst he and Tomás del Pozo talked shop. I’d whittled away enough time with literary people to know that soon enough Baby’d start spreading gossipy rumors about Jay McInerney and frozen watermelon, so I went out on the balcony, which wasn’t much more than a little 8 x 3-foot rectangle.
One could see across the East River, staring straight at Queens and Roosevelt Island, a view that one never caught in the East Village. The 58th Street Bridge, the tram, the United Nations headquarters, and the Pepsi-Cola logo blazing through the darkness, stationed atop a squat factory that bottled ghastly soft drinks.
Aubrey called us in for dinner. As these things go, which is the distance from plate to mouth, the food was delicious. “Your grandmother’s recipe really knocks me out,” said Baby. She served wine with the meal, a Sauvignon Blanc.
Baby and Thomas Cromwell talked more shop. Booooooooooooring. They descended into that most dismal of all masculine quagmires, trying to discern the future of their industry. How would writing change with the rise of things like the Internet and AOL? What did it mean for the role of the author?
“In twenty years, no one will read on paper,” said Baby. “It’ll be digital, on our computer screens. You can’t fight the future, so why not embrace it?”
This was not the first time that I’d heard Baby lay this jive turkey rap. I’d asked that he refrain from discussing it, but he had no self-control. He’d gone native in Nash Mac territory, subscribing to Wired magazine and trading his typewriter for a computer. He spent time on chat boards dedicated to his own work. He received email from his fans, discussing the finer points of his narrative strategy. It all made me gag on my own vomit.
“I hope not,” said Thomas Cromwell. “It’s like what you were saying earlier, about the book being a physical ideological point. What’s the point of owning a book if you can’t show it off?”
“You can’t fight change,” repeated Baby. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” I asked. “What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? Of course you can. I’m always telling Baby that if I have to read on a screen, then I’ll simply stop. Electric books can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon. Paper is radical. Paper will always be radical. Computers are conservative. Computers are a tool by which the rich pen in the poor. Obviously there’ll be an attempt to put books on computers. Why wouldn’t there? Corporations love computers. Yet print culture shall never die, if for no other reason than no one will ever screw out another person’s brains for a computer. Well, perhaps some people will, but imagine those ghastly beasts. Imagine how ugly they’ll be. Imagine how poor their taste. There will always remain acres of beautiful lithe bodies willing to drop trousers at the sight of a smarmy boy with his copy of Franny and Zooey. The problem is that the dopes like you, you great stupid woolly mammoths of publishing, you market yourselves as if reading were an ennobling act of high culture or a passing amusement. When it is neither. You have debased the rush and throb and gob of it. Personally, I’d strike posters of sexy young things sitting in darkly lit Parisian cafes, dressed to the nines, face in a classic, and the text would read: ‘BOOKS. THEY GET YOU LAID.’”
Aubrey was too interested in Emil to engage our malarkey. She helped him with his food. She talked to him. She rubbed his head. “He’s so cute,” she said. “Tom, you never s
aid he was this cute.”
“All babies are cute,” said Baby. “But Emil really is the cutest.”
“Having spent more than my fair share amongst a gaggle of recent mothers,” I said, “I’ll have it known that some babies are quite ugly.”
We moved back to the living room. The distance was only about ten feet. Thomas Cromwell talked about gentrification and the East Village. He spoke of things that existed before my arrival in the city, like Colab, the Mudd Club, Tier 3, and Club 57.
“There was an art installation in the back of the Mudd Club,” he said, “which was called The Talking Head of Oliver Cromwell. The name caught my eye. As it would. There was an artist’s statement, hand-carved into a wooden plaque. After Charles II regained power following the brief reign of Tumble Down Dick, the newly enthroned King had all of the regicides dug up and beheaded. He had their heads put on stakes at Westminster. Cromwell’s sat for thirty years before a storm knocked it down. The head circulated in the hands of private collectors for centuries. For a while it was in a traveling circus. They only reburied it in the ’60s. The artist claimed that the buried head was a fake, and that he’d stolen the real head from the Knights Templar and put it on display in the East Village. The Templars had cast a spell upon it, giving it immortal life and the ability to engage in discourse. People would go to the Mudd Club and ask questions of the head. It gave practical advice. There was something very fascinating watching New Wave kids asking a mechanical talking head about their sex lives.”
We drank more wine, a drug lacking in social stigma, and chatted about absolutely nothing. I promise you, dearies, that I didn’t make too much a fool of myself, paying Aubrey equal time.
Emil fell asleep in my arms. I suggested that it might be time to depart, as the poor boy needed his rest. Aubrey and Thomas Cromwell protested, but what could one do? The child took precedence.
Aubrey had stored our coats in their bedroom. She suggested that she and I retrieve them. I thought the request mildly odd. Surely she devoted enough time to the gym that two adult garments couldn’t weigh her down. Yet I said nothing. In the right frame of mind, I’ll agree to any old thing.