Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

  “Probably not, but you know how it is, run into somebody in a bar, bullshit level starts to rise, pretty soon, crazy impulsive kids, they’re hoppin in the rig and headin out yonder.”

  “You’re, ah, planning to attend this get-together?”

  “It’s tough enough figuring out what to give them. A His, His, and Hers bath ensemble? A triple-sink vanity?”

  “Thirty-piece set of cookware.”

  “There you go. Must be a federal fugitive warrant out on em, you could pick up some quick change, fly out there, maybe I could come along for muscle.”

  “I’m not a bounty hunter, Randy. Just a bookkeeper who’s a little surprised the relationship lasted more than ten minutes after the money got frozen. In fact, I think it’s kinda cute. I must be turning into my mother.”

  “Yeah, somethin how Shae and Bruno stepped up for ol’ Willy that way. You start feelin a little bitter about human nature, then people fool you.”

  “Or in my business,” Maxine reminds herself more than Randy, “people fool you and then after a while you start to get bitter.”

  She arrives back at Loehmann’s just about the time Cornelia resurfaces from the crowds of women in the Back Room who’ve been molesting racks of discounted clothing, squinting doubtfully at designer labels, seeking advice by way of cellular phone from their size-zero teenage daughters. Maxine recognizes in Cornelia signs of advanced DITS, or Discount Inventory Tag Stupor.

  “You’re starved, let’s find something before you pass out,” and off they go looking for lunch. Back in the old Fordham Road era, as she recalls, you could at least find a decent knish in the neighborhood, a classic egg cream. Around here there’s a Domino’s Pizza and a McDonald’s, and a possibly make-believe Jewish delicatessen, Bagels ’n’ Blintzes, which is of course where Cornelia simply must do lunch, having heard of it no doubt from some Junior League newsletter, and where they are presently in a booth, surrounded by a dumpsterload of Cornelia’s purchases, which “impulsive” is maybe too kind a word for.

  At least this isn’t some midtown ladies’ tearoom. The waitress, Lynda, is a classic deli veteran, who only needs to hear two seconds’ worth from Cornelia to start muttering, “Thinks I’m the downstairs maid,” Cornelia meantime making a point of asking for “Jewish” rye bread for her turkey-pastrami and roast-beef combo. Sandwich arrives, “And you’re quite sure this is Jewish rye bread.”

  “I’ll ask it. Hello!” Holding the sandwich up to her face, “You’re Jewish? The customer wants to know before she eats you. What? No, she’s goyishe, but they don’t have kosher so maybe this pick-pick-pick is what they do instead,” so forth.

  Maxine introduces Cornelia to Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, pours it in a glass for her. “Here, Jewish champagne.”

  “Interesting, a bit on the demi-sec side—excuse me, oh Lynda? would you happen to have this drier, brut perhaps . . . ?”

  “Sh-shh,” goes Maxine, though Lynda, recognizing WASP jocularity here, ignores.

  In the course of lunchtime yakking, Maxine gets an earful of Slagiatt marriage history. Though the attraction was perverse and immediate, Cornelia and Rocky, it seems, did not so much fall in love as stumble into a classic NYC folie à deux—she, charmed at the notion of marrying into an Immigrant Family, expecting Mediterranean Soul, matchless cooking, an uninhibited embrace of life including not-quite-imaginable Italian sex activities, he meanwhile looking forward to initiation into the Mysteries of Class, secrets of elegant dress and grooming and high-society repartee, plus a limitless supply of old money to borrow against without having to worry too much about debt collection, or not the kind he was used to anyway.

  Imagine their mutual dismay on learning the real situation. Far from the Channel 13 upper-class dynasty he expected, Rocky discovered in the Thrubwells a tribe of nosepicking vulgarians with the fashion sense and conversational skills of children raised by wolves, and with a collective net worth Dun & Bradstreet barely acknowledged. Cornelia was equally stunned to find that the Slagiattis, most of whom were distributed along a suburban archipelago well east of the Nassau line, and for whom the closest thing to an Italian feast was to order in from Pizza Hut, did not “do warmth,” even among themselves, regulating the children, for example, not with the genial screaming or smacking around one might have expected from an adolescence spent at the Thalia watching neorealist films but with cold, silent, indeed one must say pathological glaring.

  As early as their honeymoon in Hawaii, Rocky and Cornelia were exchanging What-have-we-done gazes. But it was heaven there, with ukuleles for harps, and sometimes heaven has its way. One evening, as they watched a postcoital sunset, “WASP chicks,” declared Rocky, an adoring note already throbbing in his voice. “Well.”

  “We are dangerous women. We have our own crime syndicate, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Muffya.”

  A sort of compassionate clarity dawned, and grew. Cornelia went on insisting dramatically that for Thrubwells most of the Social Register was rather too impossibly ethnic and arriviste, and Rocky went on singing “Donna non vidi mai” while ogling her in the shower, often eating a Sicilian slice as he sang. But in growing closer they also came to know who it was they thought they were kidding.

  “Your husband tends to run to extra dimensions,” Maxine supposes.

  “Down in K-Town they call him ‘4-D.’ He’s also psychic, by the way. He thinks you’re having some trouble at the moment, but he’s reluctant to what he calls ‘put in.’” Cornelia with one of those WASP eyebrow routines, possibly genetic, sympathy with a subtext of please, not another loser to deal with . . .

  Still, however unintended, a potential mitzvah should be looked into. “Without getting too cute, it’s some video I’ve come across. I wouldn’t even be wondering how worried I should get, except it’s political in the worst way, maybe international, and I guess I’m to the point where I really could use some advice.”

  With no hesitation Maxine can see, “In that case you must get in touch with Chandler Platt, he has a genius for facilitating outcomes, and he’s really very sweet.”

  Which sets off a game-show buzzer, actually, for if Maxine’s not mistaken, she’s already run into this Platt customer, a financial-community big shot and fixer of some repute with upper-echelon access and what strikes her as a sense, finely calibrated as an artillery map, of where his best interests lie. Over the years they’ve met at various functions at the junction between East Side largesse and West Side guilt, and as it’s coming back to her now, Chandler may even once have grabbed her tit briefly, more of a reflex than anything, some cloakroom situation, no harm no foul. She doubts he even remembers.

  And, well, there are fixers and fixers. “This genius of his—it extends to knowing how to dummy up?”

  “Ah. One cannoli hope, as the Godfather always sez.”

  • • •

  CHANDLER PLATT HAS a roomy corner office midtown, at the high-muzzle-velocity law firm of Hanover, Fisk, up in one of the glass boxes along the Sixth Avenue corridor, with a view conducive to delusions of grandeur. Dedicated elevator, a traffic-flow design that makes it impossible to tell how much, forget what kind of, business is afoot. There seems to be a lot of deep amber and Czarist red in the picture. An Asian child intern shows Maxine into the presence of Chandler Platt, who is installed behind a desk made of 40,000-year-old New Zealand kauri, more like a piece of real estate than a piece of furniture, leading the casual observer, even one with a vanilla view of these matters, to wonder how many secretaries might fit comfortably beneath it and what amenities the space would be furnished with—restroom conveniences, Internet access, futons to allow the li’l cuties to work in shifts? Such unwholesome fantasies are only encouraged by the smile on Platt’s face, uneasily located between lewd and benevolent.

  “A pleasure, Ms. Loeffler, after how long’s it been?”

  “Oh . . . last century sometime?”

  “Wasn’t it that clambake at the San Remo for
Eliot Spitzer?”

  “Might be. Never could figure you at a Democratic fund-raiser.”

  “Oh, Eliot and I go back. Ever since Skadden, Arps, maybe longer.”

  “And now he’s Attorney General and he’s going after you guys as much he ever went after the mob.” If there’s a difference, she almost adds. “Ironic, huh?”

  “Costs and benefits. On balance he’s been good for us, put away some elements that would have eventually turned and bit us.”

  “Cornelia did imply that you have friends all over the spectrum.”

  “In the long run, it’s less to do with labels than with everyone coming out happy. Some of these folks really have become my friends, in the pre-Internet sense of the term. Cornelia, certainly. Long ago I briefly courted her mother, who had the good judgment to show me the door.”

  Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video. But about the time the Stinger crew get set up,

  “Oh. Oh, wait just a minute, is this the pause button here, would you mind—”

  She pauses it. “Problem?”

  “These weapons, they’re . . . Stinger missiles or something. A bit out of my ground, I hope you appreciate.”

  And if she wanted a runaround, she’d be over in Central Park. “Right, I keep forgetting, you people tend to be Mannlicher-Carcano types.”

  “Jackie and I were dear friends,” he replies coolly, “and I’m not sure I oughtn’t to resent that.”

  “Resent, resent, please, I knew this was a mistake.” She’s on her feet, picking up her Kate Spade bag, noticing an unaccustomed lightness. Naturally, the one fucking day she probably should have brought the Beretta. Reaches to eject the DVD. By now Platt’s diplomatic reflexes have taken over, or maybe WASP control freakery. Murmuring something like “There, there,” he hits a hidden call button, which rapidly brings in the intern with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cookies. Maxine wonders if Girl Scouts were inappropriately involved in this. Platt watches the rest of the rooftop footage in silence.

  “Well. Provocative. Perhaps if you could spare me a couple of minutes?” Withdrawing to an inner office and leaving Maxine with the intern, who is leaning in the doorway now gazing at her, she wants to say inscrutably, but that would be racist. Absent a full ingredient list, she is of course not about to start scarfing cookies.

  “So . . . how’s the job? your first step in a legal career here?”

  “I hope not. What I really am is a rap artist.”

  “Like uh, who, Jay-Z?”

  “Well, actually I’m more of a Nas person. As you may know they’re in this feud at the moment, that old Queens-versus-Brooklyn thing again, hate to take sides, but—“The World Is Yours,” how can anything even compare?”

  “You perform in public, like clubs?”

  “Yeah. Got a club date coming up soon, in fact, here, check this out.” From somewhere he has produced a TB-303 clone with built-in speakers, which he now plugs in and powers up, and starts fingering a major pentatonic bass line. “Dig it,”

  Tryin to do Tupac and Biggie thangs

  With red velvet Chairman Mao piggy banks,

  like Screamin Jay in Hong Kong

  jumpin to wrong conclusions

  old-movie confusions, yo who be dat

  Scandinavian brand of Azian

  ya dig wid some Sigrid be

  the daughter of Kublai Khan,

  Warner Oland, Charlie Chan, General Yan

  bitter tea, for her stupidity pullin rank

  Bette Davis shanked by Gale Sondegaard

  like they was on the yard

  or down in some forgotten cell

  far, far from the corner of

  Mott and Pell—

  “Yes oh and Darren,” Chandler Platt reentering a little brusquely, “when you have a chance, could you please bring me those copies of the Braun, Fleckwith side letter? And get Hugh Goldman for me over there?”

  “Mad cool, yo,” unplugging his digital bass and heading for the door.

  “Thanks, Darren,” Maxine smiles, “nice song—from what little Mr. Platt has allowed me to hear.”

  “Actually, he’s unusually tolerant. Not everyone in his demographic goes for what we like to think of as Gongsta Rap.”

  “Y— I thought I might have caught one or two, I’m not sure, racial overtones . . .”

  “Preemptive. They gonna be give me all rice-nigga remarks and shit, this way I beat ’em to it.” He hands her a disc in a jewel case. “My mix tape, enjoy.”

  “He gives them away,” Chandler Platt blinking his eyes at regular intervals and without motive, like faces in low-budget cartoons. “I made the mistake of asking him once how he expects to make money. He said that wasn’t the point, but has never explained what is. To me, I’m appalled, it strikes at the heart of Exchange itself.” He reaches for and sits contemplating a chocolate-chip cookie. “Back when I was getting into the business, all ‘being Republican’ meant really was a sort of principled greed. You arranged things so that you and your friends would come out nicely, you behaved professionally, above all you put in the work and took the money only after you’d earned it. Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation—it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest . . .” Suddenly, and from the cookie’s point of view, rudely, chomping into it and scattering crumbs. “Sure you won’t have one, they’re quite . . . No? All right, thanks, don’t mind if I . . .” Grabbing another, two or three actually, “I just spoke with some people. A most puzzling conversation, I have to say. At least they picked up.”

  “Not the standard corporate chitchat, then.”

  “No, something else, something . . . peculiar. Not out loud, or in so many words, but as if . . .”

  “Wait. If you don’t want to tell me—”

  “. . . as if they know already what’s going to happen. This . . . event. They know, and they’re not going to do anything about it.”

  Is this all yet another exercise in freaking out the common folk so we’ll keep bleating and begging for protection? How scared is Maxine supposed to feel? “I didn’t get you in any trouble, I hope.”

  “‘Trouble.’” She thinks she’s seen most of the looks of despair available to men of this pay grade, but what now briefly appears on his face you’d have to open a new file for. “In trouble with that bunch? Never that easy to tell, really. Even if there were to be unpleasantness, I could rely without hesitation upon young Darren, who’s board-certified in everything from nunchaku up through . . . well, Stinger missiles, I’m sure, and beyond. Rest easy as to my safety, young lady, and look instead to your own. Try to avoid terrorist-related activities. Oh, and would you mind going out the back way? You weren’t here, you see.”

  The back exit happens to be near Darren’s cubicle. Maxine glances in and finds him standing by a window, turned away in quarter profile, looking, sighting, down fifty stories into New York, down into that specific abyss, with an intensity she recognizes from the DeepArcher splash screen. Should she run in, break his concentration with questions like, Do you know Cassidy, did you pose for the Archer, provoking him into who knows what don’t-be-in-my-face-bitch gongsta displeasure . . . Is she that desperate for a literal link between this kid and some screen image? when she knows all the time there is none, that the figure was there, has always been there, that’s all, that Cassidy thanks to some intervention nobody knows how to name found her way to the silent, stretched presence at the edge of the world and copied what she remembered and immediately forgot the way back there . . . .

  Jangling with unquiet thoughts, Maxine emerges onto the street and notices it’s only a sh
ort walk to Saks. Maybe a half hour of fashion-related fugue, don’t call it shopping, will soft-sell her back down. She cuts across to Fifth Avenue by way of Forty-Seventh Street. It being the Diamond District, who wouldn’t? Not only on the chance however remote of glimpsing from afar exactly the stones, the setting she’s been looking for all her life, but also for the general air of intrigue, the feeling that nothing, nobody on this block is positioned where they are by accident, that saturating the space, invisible as the wavelengths that carry soap operas into the home, dramas of faceted intricacy are teeming all around.

  “Maxine Tarnow? Isn’t it?” Seems to be Emma Levin, Ziggy’s krav maga teacher. “Just down here to meet my boyfriend for lunch.”

  “So you two are what—shopping for diamonds? maybe . . . the diamond? Oh! What’s that . . . dingdong sound I hear? Could it be . . .” No. She didn’t actually say this out loud. Did she? is she really turning into Elaine, nonconsensually as Larry Talbot into the Wolf Man, for example?

  Naftali, the ex-Mossad boyfriend, works security for a diamond merchant here on the street. “You’d think we’d’ve met years ago on the job, field guy in on a visit to the office, kaplotz! Magic! but no, it was a fixer-upper. Same lightning bolt, however . . .”

  “Ziggy’s been bringing home Naftali stories since he started krav maga. Big impression, which on Ziggy it’s hard to make.”

  “There he is. My dreamboat.” Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God. According to Ziggy, the first time Naftali visited the studio, Nigel immediately asked him how many people he’d killed, and he shrugged, “I lost count,” and when Emma glared, added, “I mean . . . I can’t remember?” Maybe a case of kidding a kidder, but Maxine wouldn’t want to have to find out. Flabless and close-cropped, a black suit, a face amiable from half a block away reacquiring as it comes into focus its history of laceration and breakage and feelings kept at a professional distance. Though for Emma Levin he makes exceptions. They smile, they embrace, and for a second they’re the two brightest sparklers on the block.