Men and Cartoons

by Jonathan Lethem

  “There you go,” I said. “You got what you wanted.” “I didn't want anything,” said Addie.

  We put the spray on the table.

  “How long did the police say it would last?” I said. I tried not to look at Lucinda. She was right beside my head.

  “About twenty-four hours. What time is it?”

  “It's late. I'm tired. The police didn't say twenty-four hours. About a day, they said.”

  “That's twenty-four hours.”

  “Probably they meant it's gone the next day.”

  “I don't think so.”

  I looked at the television. I looked at the cuff links. I looked at Charles's ass. “Probably the sunlight makes it wear off,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Probably you can't see it in the dark, in complete darkness. Let's go to bed.”

  We went into the bedroom. All four of us. I took off my shoes and socks. “Probably it's just attached to our clothes. If I take off my clothes and leave them in the other room—”

  “Try it.”

  I took off my pants and jacket. Lucinda was attached to me, not the clothes. Her bare salmon knee was across my bare legs. I started to take off my shirt. Addie looked at me. Lucinda's face was on my bare shoulder.

  “Put your clothes back on,” said Addie.

  I put them back on. Addie left her clothes on. We lay on top of the covers in our clothes. Lucinda and Charles were on top of us. I didn't know where to put my hands. I wondered how Addie felt about Charles's blurred face, his open mouth. I was glad Lucinda wasn't blurred. “Turn off the light,” I said. “We won't be able to see them in the dark.”

  Addie turned off the light. The room was dark. Charles and Lucinda glowed salmon above us. Glowing in the blackness with the vibrator on the side table and the luminous dial of my watch.

  “Just close your eyes,” I said to Addie.

  “You close yours first,” she said.

  Vivian Relf

  PAPER LANTERNS WITH CANDLES INSIDE, their flames capering in imperceptible breezes, marked the steps of the walkway. Shadow and laughter spilled from the house above, while music shorn of all but its pulse made its way like ground fog across the eucalyptus-strewn lawn. Doran and Top and Evie and Miranda drifted up the stairs, into throngs smoking and kissing cheeks and elbowing one another on the porch and around the open front door. Doran saw the familiar girl there, just inside.

  He squinted and smiled, to offer evidence he wasn't gawking. To convey what he felt: he recognized her. She blinked at him, and parted her mouth slightly, then nipped her lower lip. Top and Evie and Miranda pushed inside the kitchen, fighting their way to the drinks surely waiting on a counter or in the refrigerator, but Doran hung back. He pointed a finger at the familiar girl, and moved nearer to her. She turned from her friends.

  The foyer was lit with strings of red plastic chili peppers. They drooped in waves from the molding, their glow blushing cheeks, foreheads, ears, teeth.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “You one of Jorn's friends?”

  “Jorn who?”

  “Never mind,” said Doran. “This is supposed to be Jorn's house, I thought. I don't know why I even mentioned it, since I don't know him. Or her.”

  “My friends brought me,” said the girl. “I don't even know whose party this is. I don't know if they know.”

  “My friends brought me too,” said Doran. “Wait, do you waitress at Elision, on Dunmarket?”

  “I don't live here. I must know you from somewhere else.”

  “Definitely, you look really familiar.”

  They were yelling to be heard in the jostle of bodies inside the door. Doran gestured over their heads, outside. “Do you want to go where we can talk?”

  They turned the corner, stopped in a glade just short of the deck, which was as full of revelers as the kitchen and foyer. They nestled in the darkness between pools of light and chatter. The girl had a drink, red wine in a plastic cup. Doran felt a little bare without anything.

  “This'll drive me crazy until I figure it out,” he said. “Where'd you go to college?”

  “Sundstrom,” she said.

  “I went to Vagary.” Doran swallowed the syllables, knowing it was a confession: I'm one of those Vagary types. “But I used to know a guy who went to Sundstrom. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “I'm twenty-eight. You would have been there at the same time.” This was hardly a promising avenue. But he persisted. “Gilly Noman, that ring a bell?”

  “Sounds like a girl's name.”

  “I know, never mind. Where do you live?”

  She mentioned a city, a place he'd never been.

  “That's no help. How long have you lived there?”

  “Since college. Five years, I guess.”

  “Where'd you grow up?”

  The city she mentioned was another cipher, a destination never remotely considered.

  “Your whole life?” he asked. Doran racked his brain, but he didn't know anyone from the place.

  “Yeah,” she said, a bit defensively. “What about you?”

  “Right here, right around here. Wait, this is ridiculous. You look so familiar.”

  “So do you.” She didn't sound too discouraged.

  “Who are your friends here?”

  “Ben and Malorie. You know them?”

  “No, but do you maybe visit them often?”

  “First time.”

  “You didn't, uh, go to Camp Drewsmore, did you?” Doran watched how his feelings about the girl changed, like light through a turned prism, as he tried to fit his bodily certainty of her familiarity into each proposed context. Summer camp, for instance, forced him to consider whether she'd witnessed ball-field humiliations, or kissed one of the older boys who were his idol then, he, in his innocence, not having yet kissed anyone.

  “No.”

  “Drewsmore-in-the-Mist?”

  “Didn't go to camp.”

  “Okay, wait, forget camp, it must be something more recent. What do you do?”

  “Until just now I worked on Congressman Goshen's campaign. We, uh, lost. So I'm sort of between things. What do you do?”

  “Totally unrelated in every way. I'm an artist's assistant. Heard of London Jerkins?”

  “No.”

  “To describe it briefly there's this bright purple zigzag in all his paintings, kind of a signature shape. I paint it.” He mimed the movements, the flourish at the end. “By now I do it better than him. You travel a lot for the congressman thing?”

  “Not ever. I basically designed his pamphlets and door hangers.”

  “Ah, our jobs aren't so different after all.”

  “But I don't have one now.” She aped his zigzag flourish, as punctuation.

  “Hence you're crashing parties in distant cities which happen to be where I live.”

  “Hey, you didn't even know if Jorn was a guy or a girl. I at least was introduced, though I didn't catch his name.”

  He put up his hands: no slight intended. “But where do I know you from? I mean, no pressure, but this is mutual, right? You recognize me too.”

  “I was sure when you walked in. Now I'm not so sure.”

  “Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.”

  In the grade of woods over the girl's shoulder Doran sighted two pale copper orbs, flat as coins. Fox? Bunny? Raccoon? He motioned for the girl to turn and see, when at that moment Top approached them from around the corner of the house. Doran's hand fell, words died on his lips. Tiny hands or feet scrabbled urgently in the underbrush, as though they were repairing a watch. The noise vanished.

  Top had his own cup of wine, half empty. Lipstick smudged his cheek. Doran moved to wipe it off, but Top bobbed, ducking Doran's reach. He glared. “Where'd you go?” he asked Doran, only nodding his chin at the familiar girl.

  “We were trying to figure out where we
knew each other from,” said Doran. “This is my friend Top. I'm sorry, what's your name?”

  “Vivian.”

  “Vivian, Top. And I'm Doran.”

  “Hello, Vivian,” said Top, curtly, raising his cup. To Doran: “You coming inside?”

  “Sure, in a minute.”

  Top raised his eyebrows, said: “Sure. Anyway, we'll be there. Me and Evie and Miranda.” To Vivian: “Nice to meet you.” He slipped around the corner again.

  “Friends waiting for you?” said Vivian.

  “Sure, I guess. Yours?”

  “It's not the same. They're a couple.”

  “Letting you mingle, I guess that's what you mean.”

  “Whereas yours are what—dates?”

  “Good question. It's unclear, though. I'd have to admit they're maybe dates. But only maybe. Vivian what?”

  “Relf.”

  “Vivian Relf. Totally unfamiliar. I'm Doran Close. In case that triggers any recall.” Doran felt irritable, reluctant to let go of it, possibly humiliated, in need of a drink.

  “It doesn't.”

  “Have we pretty much eliminated everything?”

  “I can't think of anything else.”

  “We've never been in any of the same cities or schools or anything at the same time.” It gave him a queasy, earth-shifty sensation. As though he'd come through the door of the party wrong, on the wrong foot. Planted a foot or flag on the wrong planet: one small step from the foyer, one giant plunge into the abyss.

  “Nope, I don't think so.”

  “You're not on television?”

  “Never.”

  “So what's the basis of all this howling familiarity?”

  “I don't know if there really is any basis, and anyway I'm not feeling such howling familiarity anymore.”

  “Right, me neither.” This was now a matter of pure vertigo, cliff-side terror. He didn't hold it against Vivian Relf, though. She was his fellow sufferer. It was what they had in common, the sole thing.

  “You want to go back to your friends?” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Don't feel bad.”

  “I don't,” lied Doran.

  “Maybe I'll see you around.”

  “Very good then, Less-Than-Familiar-Girl. I'll look forward to that.” Doran offered his hand to shake, mock-pompously. He felt garbed in awkwardness.

  Vivian Relf accepted his hand, and they shook. She'd grown a little sulky herself, at the last minute.

  Doran found Top and Evie and Miranda beyond the kitchen, in a room darkened and lit only by a string of Christmas lights, and cleared of all but two enormous speakers, as though for dancing. No one danced, no one inhabited the room apart from the three of them. There was something petulant in choosing to shout over the music, as they were doing.

  “Who's your new friend?” said Miranda.

  “Nobody. I thought she was an old friend, actually.”

  “Sure you weren't just attracted to her?”

  “No, it was a shock of recognition, of seeing someone completely familiar. The weird thing is she had the same thing with me, I think.” The language available to Doran for describing his cataclysm was cloddish and dead, the words a sequence of corpses laid head to toe.

  “Yeah, it's always mutual.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Look around this party,” said Doran. “How many people could you say you've never been in a room together with before? That they didn't actually attend a lower grade in your high school, that you couldn't trace a link to their lives? That's what she and I just did. We're perfect strangers.”

  “Maybe you saw her on an airplane.”

  Doran had no answer for this. He fell silent.

  Later that night he saw her again, across two rooms, through a doorway. The party had grown. She was talking to someone new, a man, not her friends. He felt he still recognized her, but the sensation hung uselessly in a middle distance, suspended, as in amber, in doubt so thick it was a form of certainty. She irked him, that was all he knew.

  IT WAS two years before he saw the familiar girl again, at another party, again in the hills. They recognized one another immediately.

  “I know you,” she said, brightening.

  “Yes, I know you too, but from where?” The moment he said it he recalled their conversation. “Of course, how could I forget? You're that girl I don't know.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She seemed to grow immensely sad.

  They stood together contemplating the privileges of their special relationship, its utter and proven vacancy.

  “It's like when you start a book and then you realize you read it before,” he said. “You can't really remember anything ahead, only you know each line as it comes to you.”

  “No surprises to be found, you mean?” She pointed at herself.

  “Just a weird kind of pre—” He searched for the word he meant. Preformatting? Precognition? Pre-exhaustion?

  “More like a stopped car on the highway slowing down traffic,” she said, seemingly uninterested in his ending the unfinished word. “Not a gaudy crash or anything. Just a cop waving you along, saying Nothing to see here.”

  “Doran,” he said.

  “Vivian.”

  “I remember. You visiting your friends again?”

  “Yup. And before you ask I have no idea whose party this is or what I'm doing here.”

  “Probably you were looking for me.”

  “I've got a boyfriend,” she said. The line that was always awkward, in anyone's language. Then, before he could respond, she added: “I'm only joking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just didn't want you thinking of me as Ben and Malorie's, oh, sort of party accessory. The extra girl, the floater.”

  “No, never the extra girl. The girl I don't know from anywhere, that's you.”

  “Funny to meet the girl you don't know, twice,” she said. “When there are probably literally thousands of people you do know or anyway could establish a connection with who you never even meet once.”

  “I'm tempted to say small world.”

  “Either that or we're very large people.”

  “But maybe we're evidence of the opposite, I'm thinking now. Large world.”

  “We're not evidence of anything,” said Vivian Relf. She shook his hand again. “Enjoy the party.”

  THE NEXT time was on an airplane, a coast-to-coast flight. Doran sat in first class. Vivian Relf trundled past him, headed deep into the tail, carry-on hugged to her chest. She didn't spot him.

  He mused on sending back champagne with the stewardess, as in a cocktail lounge—From the man in 3A. There was probably a really solid reason they didn't allow that. A hundred solid reasons. He didn't dwell on Vivian Relf, watched a movie instead. Barbarian hordes were vanquished in waves of slaughter, twenty thousand feet above the plain.

  They spoke at the baggage carousel. She didn't seem overly surprised to see him there.

  “As unrelated baggage mysteriously commingles in the dark belly of an airplane only to be redistributed to its proper possessor in the glare of daylight on the whirring metal belt, so you repeatedly graze my awareness in shunting through the dimmed portals of my life,” he said. “Doran Close.”

  “Vivian Relf,” she said, shaking his hand. “But I suspect you knew that.”

  “Then you've gathered that I'm obsessed with you.”

  “No, it's that nobody ever forgets my name. It's one of those that sticks in your head.”

  “Ah.”

  She stared at him oddly, waiting. He spotted, beneath her sleeve, the unmistakable laminated wristlet of a hospital stay, imprinted RELF, VIVIAN, RM 315.

  “I'd propose we share a cab but friends are waiting to pick me up in the white zone.” He jerked his thumb at the curb.

  “The odds are we're anyway pointed in incompatible directions.”

  “Ah, if I've learned anything at all in this life it's not t
o monkey with the odds.”

  There was a commotion. Some sort of clog at the mouth where baggage was disgorged. An impatient commuter clambered up to straddle the chugging belt. He rolled up suit sleeves and tugged the jammed suitcases out of the chute. The backlog tumbled loose, a miniature avalanche. Doran's suitcase was among those freed. Vivian Relf still waited, peering into the hole as though at a distant horizon. Doran, feeling giddy, left her there.

  All that week, between appointments with art collectors and gallerists, he spied for her in the museums and bistros of the vast metropolis, plagued by the ghost of certainty they'd come here, to this far place, this neutral site, apart but together, in order to forge some long-delayed truce or compact. The shrouded visages of the locals formed a kind of brick wall, an edifice which met his gaze everywhere: forehead, eyebrows, glasses, grim-drawn lips, cell phones, sandwiches. Against this background she'd have blazed like a sun. But never appeared.

  Oh Vivian Relf! Oh eclipse, oh pale penumbra of my yearning!

  Pink slip, eviction notice, deleted icon, oh!

  Stalked in alleys of my absent noons, there's nobody

  knows you better than I!

  Translucent voracious Relf-self, I vow here

  Never again once to murk you

  With pallid tropes of familiarity or recognition

  You, pure apparition, onion—

  Veil of veils only!

  DORAN CLOSE, in his capacity as director of acquisitions in drawings and prints, had several times had lunch with Vander Polymus, the editor of Wall Art. He'd heard Polymus mention that he, Polymus, was married. He'd never met the man's wife, though, and it was a surprise, as he stepped across Polymus's threshold for the dinner party, bottle of Cabernet Franc in a scarf of tissue thrust forward in greeting, to discover that the amiable ogre was married to someone he recognized. Not from some previous museum fete or gallery opening but from another life, another frame of reference, years before. Really, from another postulated version of his life, his sense, once, of who he'd be. He knew her despite the boyishly short haircut, the jarring slash of lipstick and bruises of eyeshadow, the freight of silver bracelets: Vander Polymus was married to Vivian Relf.

  Meeting her eyes, Doran unconsciously reached up and brushed his fingertips to his shaved skull.