Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  "I really don't understand why these people bring out your venom," says Agnes. "They're just working stiffs, like you and me, only they manage to make money—they're better at it than you and me."

  "I don't hate them, really. I pity them. There's no poetry to them. Look at Jack—he answers to no one."

  "He's a pinboy," Agnes reminds her. "You usually don't have to sell your soul if your job title includes the letters b-o-y."

  They wind up in Smitty's Cove, a former haunt of longshoremen, an overcrowded hole-in-the-wall two blocks from the Seaport. A band plays in the corner. Agnes is puzzled by Barbara's choice. This is a fried seafood place, and Barbara is phobic about restaurants that use old grease.

  "Will ye go, lassie, go...."

  Agnes recognizes the old air the band is playing. Outrage swells in her breast as Barbara threads her way to the bandstand.

  The Pinboy.

  Agnes drinks a sullen pair of beers. Romance does terrible things to people. How much of what Barbara said tonight was a series of lies designed to lure Agnes here? After a while, Agnes's charity returns. Barbara, in the grip of irrational love, unable to admit to herself that her destination was Smitty's Cove all along, could hardly be expected to be straightforward with Agnes.

  Between sets, Barbara introduces Agnes to the Pinboy. He's a skinny little fellow dressed in a flannel shirt and wingtip shoes. Defiant about his receding hairline, he wears his thinning hair brushed straight back. He has a sharp face with thin, moist lips.

  "I saw you on the news," he tells Agnes. "Saving that scumbag's life was not a good thing to do."

  He cannot take his eyes off Barbara and her new hair.

  I once took a job as a coachman

  My money was paid in advance

  Then I took a trip down to London

  From there I crossed over to France

  There I met a charming young lady

  Who dressed me and said with a smile

  Young man, I'm in need of a coachman

  To drive me in old-fashioned style

  Barbara abandons Agnes to sit on an amplifier, and soon she and the Pinboy are leering at and hanging on one another. Agnes takes the subway back to Barbara's. She will go back to Washington Heights in the morning. She goes to bed but cannot sleep. She makes some tea and brandy and goes up on the roof to look at the stars. While she is searching for the Great Orion Nebula, she is distracted by a flash of green light at the horizon. When she looks, there is nothing there. Then it appears again, flickering like a dying radio tube: Wegeman has lit the Parachute Jump with filaments of green neon as part of his redevelopment of the Coney Island boardwalk. They must be testing the system. Wegeman's new casino, the Palace of Versailles, won't open until the spring.

  Across the street, the El train pulls in noisily. Agnes hears singing.

  As I walked out on a midsummer's morning

  For to view the fields and take the air

  Down by the banks of the sweet primroses

  There I beheld a lady fair.

  Barbara and the Pinboy come tripping down the station stairs. They are hand in hand. Agnes hears the two of them singing and laughing all the way to Barbara's door.

  Agnes isn't in the mood to see them. Their idiotic relationship irritates her. She drinks the last of her cold tea then nurses her brandy. She sits alone on the roof for a long time. She wants to give them plenty of time to get busy in the bedroom. Just when she thinks that long enough has elapsed, she hears a noise. It comes from the other side of the roof, from behind the pavilion housing the stairs.

  "Hello?"

  Silence.

  "Is anybody there?"

  A dog barks in the distance.

  Agnes has a funny feeling. She looks around for a weapon. All she can find is an old watering can. She creeps over to the pavilion and peeks around the corner.

  There is a skylight that looks into Barbara's bedroom. Barbara and the Pinboy are screwing away. At the foot of the skylight, someone has set up a lawn chair.

  Agnes walks to the edge of the roof, where a figure in black crouches in the shadows.

  "What are you doing here?" Agnes demands.

  Dov stands up. "I live here. I can be wherever I choose. I was working on the insulation."

  Agnes takes a threatening step forward. "I ought to call the cops on you, you little peeping tom."

  "You smell of liquor," he comments.

  He goes to the skylight and folds up the lawn chair. Agnes follows him.

  "Does your father know you're up here?" she asks him.

  "Yichud forbids this conversation," he says. "The sexes cannot mingle without supervision."

  Agnes and Dov look together through the skylight into Barbara's room. Barbara and Jack uncouple. Jack jumps out of bed and puts on his jockey shorts. He skips out the bedroom door. Barbara lies spread-eagled on the bed, panting and pulling at the sheets. Jack returns with the Crisco Agnes used in her pate brisee. He rolls a condom onto himself and slathers it with shortening.

  "I can't watch this," says Agnes.

  But she can't look away, either, when Barbara and Jack start to assfuck. To Agnes, it looks grotesque. The angle is wrong, like the angle of a broken limb. Barbara's head snaps back repeatedly. If this were happening in an automobile she could sue.

  "Isn't regular sex enough for you people?" says Agnes.

  Barbara groans loudly. She yelps.

  Dov looks at Agnes helplessly.

  "Look who I'm asking," says Agnes.

  Barbara and the Pinboy finish. Dov slips down the fire escape. After a while Agnes follows. She walks around to the front of the building, smoothes her hair, and comes upstairs.

  Barbara is in her bathrobe on the couch.

  "Jack was here, but he's gone," she says. "This time it's for good."

  Agnes nods. "Mercurial fellow."

  There is a newspaper next to the couch. It is in English. Agnes sees that she is free to go home. She has been pushed off the front pages by weightier matters. The mayor wants all-female subway cars as a safety measure; the ACLU is fighting him. Ronald Wegeman has declared that Coney Island will soon be the most beautiful place in the world. And Reverend Lenten Gunn of the First Congregation of Neptune Avenue is asking his flock from his pulpit if a few hundred minimum-wage jobs are enough reason to surrender to the sin and vice and corruption that will come with the Palace of Versailles.

  "I've done it for less," the Great Man replies to reporters from his hospital bed. "And that's a joke, you shitheads."

  Chapter Seven

  For a while in the late Fifties, the commuter train on which Agnes is riding was known to a few sharp-eyed commuters as the Latex Express. Then, as now, the Harlem rooftops over which it sped on its way to Connecticut served as the base for a forest of billboards advertising things presumably of no interest to the slum-dwellers below. One night in 1958, the Nucoforms Company of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, put up a condom ad. It depicted a young couple holding a threepack, and it was captioned BE PREPARED. It was on a site no other advertiser would touch. It was mounted at a funny angle, half-hidden by an ad for The Music Man, and if the train slowed to a crawl, it was visible only for a moment. How many nights of passion in Westport did that sign subliminally ignite? The riders who knew of the sign's existence chuckled to themselves and mentioned it to no one. Even the Times reporters kept it to themselves. The sign stayed up for many years.

  Those were the days, thinks Agnes, when a secret was still possible, when a vacuum of information was not so fiercely abhorred. Agnes remembers, dimly, a time when you could read the obituary of a prominent figure and—not having already been bombarded with tributes and retrospectives and lists of ex-spouses— not think, "Good riddance to bad rubbish!" And if those deserving of their fame could be so handily wrung out and tossed aside, pity the poor slobs thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the lottery winners, the separated Siamese twins, the assassination foilers.

  Agnes reads a newspaper. Wegeman's assail
ant has finally been identified as Frederick Geister, husband of the late assemblywoman Francine Geister. Mrs. Geister was an early advocate for the homeless. In 1971 she helped sponsor a bill, little noted at the time, that was to become section 421 of the New York State Real Property Law. It granted a tax abatement to dwellings built on "predominantly vacant or underutilized sites." The purpose of the bill was to encourage the building of low-income housing. Wegeman proceeded to buy the faltering Wentworth & Co. department store on lower Fifth Avenue. He demolished it and built his first luxury apartment building. The top three floors of Wentworth's—the cafeteria, furniture department and fur salon—had been closed for years, and Wegeman calculated that the store had been using only 35% of its square footage. He demanded his tax break, which was eventually granted by the Court of Appeals.

  Francine Geister always felt guilty for ushering in the Age of Wegeman. She insisted on thinking of herself as the cause of New York City's real estate boom. After she died of lung cancer her husband Frederick was inconsolable. He did a lot of pre-dawn typing and posted anti-Wegeman broadsides all over the city.

  Wegeman commented from his sickbed, "That sort of devotion is nice and all, but Fred Geister should have gotten his wife to quit smoking. End of story."

  The Telamones Society is meeting tonight in Bronxville, at the home of Isabel and Marty Zollner. Marty greets Agnes at the door. He is short and froglike, with prominent lips and a startlingly deep voice. Isabel is the one involved with architecture. Marty thinks the Telamones Society is full of lunatics, but he is fond of Agnes. She assumes that he has some sort of girl-of-the-streets fetish working.

  Marty is drinking a balloon glass of red wine. "They're all going berserk, you know."

  "It was the worst mistake of my life," says Agnes. "I should have shot him myself."

  "That would have been interesting," says Marty, almost lewdly.

  Several Telamones members greet Agnes by name. They no longer ignore her. Agnes has grabbed two handfuls of that fierceness which is the legacy of growing up in the Bronx and forged it into something palpable. They can see her now.

  Marty pours her a glass of Pichon-Lalande.

  "Today's my birthday," he tells her.

  "Congratulations. Happy Birthday. What did Isabel get you?"

  "Hmm? Oh, we don't exchange gifts."

  "Why not?"

  "Habit, I suppose. When Isabel and I were starting out, that's how we economized. We bought for the kids, but not for ourselves."

  "That's sensible," says Agnes, but she doesn't tell him what she really thinks: that he and his wife both come from money, and that it was hardly pinching pennies and never buying a Christmas necktie that got them this lovely solid house with loveseats on the landings and not a single creaking floorboard.

  Isabel comes into the kitchen. She is a lanky, scowling woman with glasses that slide down her nose. She has a voice as piercing as a Klaxon in the Nantucket fog. "We've got a bone to pick with you, young lady."

  "Isabel wasn't amused by your rescue," says Marty.

  "I hope the man was at least grateful," says Isabel. "What did he say?"

  "I haven't spoken to him," says Agnes.

  "I thought what Agnes did was damned sporting," says Marty, refilling their wine glasses. Marty always drinks to excess at Telamones functions. "Extending a hand to the enemy and all that. He is a human being, after all."

  "Have you seen his buildings?" says Isabel. "Marty, why haven't you hung up Agnes's coat?"

  "We weren't out that way yet. We were talking."

  Agnes takes a folding chair into the living room. Tonight there will be guest speakers: Jessica Sanborne and several representatives from a Japanese group involved in some sort of restoration project. The Zollners have a big brown dog with custardy eyes that wanders around freely, smelling everyone.

  Malthus Grosvenor, who handles the society's legal affairs, strikes the bowl of his calabash on the podium and reads the traditional invocation: a quote from Ronald Wegeman.

  "Remember, he actually said this," says Grosvenor to expectant laughter. Several people look at Agnes. Grosvenor puts on his reading glasses. "This comes from an interview in Ad Age. Wegeman was asked to describe his vision of the city of New York. I quote:

  I don't have one. But I know the kind of city it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be like London, where people are proud of how early they go to bed. I guess they might as well turn in early—it's not like you can get a decent meal after nine. It shouldn't be like Paris, either. I

  hate Paris. I hate the men there. I hate their lips. I hate the way they help their girlfriends pick out shoes. I've seen them get into screaming, spitting fights with the salesmen. Of course, the salesmen care too. Un-fucking-real. And forget about Tokyo. Fort Lauderdale of the East. All you see there are Bermuda shorts and six-packs of Bud. It's like Spring Break. Sick. Sick fucking people. Next question.

  With everyone's spirits brightened, the meeting gets underway. A report is delivered on the restoration of the Brevoort House on Peck Slip. The wife of a local anchorman says her husband is planning to tape a series on the statues of Central Park, "Who Are These Bearded Men?"

  Agnes raises her hand. "Does anyone know about the Hotel Anacosta?"

  "George Gershwin's favorite hotel," a voice pipes up.

  Marty sits down beside Agnes. He has switched from red wine to white. He is already a little looped.

  "Well, it's gone," says Agnes.

  Isabel looks though a three-ring binder. "What was the name?"

  "The Anacosta."

  "Got it. Hotel Anacosta, formerly the Hotel Bellwood. Opened 1923. Architect: Robert-Chartes. 48 rooms, 4 suites. Presently on the agenda for the next session of Landmarks."

  "They can scratch it off," says Agnes. "It's gone."

  Isabel looks up. "That's not possible."

  "I was there. There was nothing left but a vacant lot and a fence. I put my fingers in the knotholes."

  "Wegeman!" someone cries.

  "You'd know about this if you'd come to the Grand Central demonstration," says Agnes scornfully.

  "We should have some," says a man in a cape seated in the back row. "We could have stopped you."

  "That awful man is still alive," says Mrs. Tisch, the treasurer.

  "And laughing at us!" says someone else.

  "Let's take it easy, everyone," says Isabel.

  "I saw the whole thing on the news and I thought our Miss Travertine was splendid," says Grosvenor, snaking his pipe with a straightened paper clip. Agnes always thought he was a self-important jerk and now she doesn't. "I should not care to get into a fracas with her."

  Anger and shock at the fate of the Anacosta, pride in Agnes , loathing of Agnes—many emotions percolate through the room. The big dog bays. Malthus Grosvenor vows to investigate the illegal razing. Greta Anselm, professor of Comparative Lit. at Sarah Lawrence, asks Agnes for lessons in Tae Kwon Do.

  "Are you sure it was 44th Street?" says Isabel in desperation. "Of course you are, Agnes."

  Into this hubbub comes Jessica Sanborne, one of the Telamones Society's special guests for the evening. She is followed by a pair of Japanese men in navy blue suits. Jessica's family made its fortune in brewing, and Gotham Amber, Gotham Lager and Gotham Premium Porter—the Sanborne line—are the only beers still brewed in New York City. A regal woman of fifty, Jessica is dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and Reeboks. That's how I would dress if I were rich, thinks Agnes. Nothing fancy but everything new.

  Jessica Sanborne is a famous New York personality. She is heavily involved in architectural preservation as well as various left-wing causes that don't interest Agnes in the slightest. Agnes's approach is one of aesthetics and reverence for tradition; Jessica has more complicated notions of urban space and the New City and the right of the people to define their own environment. She spoke at Francine Geister's funeral. She fought Wegeman tooth and nail over the old Customs House Annex in Tribeca. When the Federal Government moved their
offices elsewhere, Wegeman wanted to buy the property from the city for luxury apartments. Jessica Sanborne put together a coalition that matched his offer; she wanted to set up an AIDS hospice.

  "This city needs luxury housing," said Wegeman. "And with me you'll get your hospice, too. I'll give you a property outright. I'll even do the renovations."

  Jessica Sanborne wasn't happy about that. The property Wegeman was offering was an art deco apartment building on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

  "It's too far for the patients to travel," said Jessica.

  "They only have to make the trip once," Wegeman pointed out. "Look, Tribeca is a very hot neighborhood. I'm not sure the poor and the dying are entitled to a hot neighborhood."