“But not lonely.”
Eucalyptus grins. “You’ve been saving that line up, haven’t you?”
Starshine pours the hot water into two earthenware mugs, slides one across the table and sinks into a wicker chair. The morning Times is already neatly folded at her place setting, unmussed, only the large gaps where Eucalyptus has clipped celebrity obituaries revealing that it has been devoured from cover to cover. Starshine’s roommate boasts a morbid streak. She is trying to learn history through death notices.
“Any important bigwigs kick it?” Starshine asks.
“Not really. There was another former President of General Motors, though. That’s the second this month. It kind of makes you wonder ….”
“Conspiracy?”
“He was ninety-eight years old.”
“I see.”
“And diabetic.”
“Poor fellow.”
Eucalyptus shrugs. “Win some, lose some. Say, why no man du jour?”
“I’m taking a vow of celibacy.”
“Bullshit.”
“Then practicing for the convent.”
“Double bullshit.”
“I think I’m in over my head.”
Eucalyptus carefully places her ongoing masterpiece, a miniature schooner, into her lacquered workbox. She breathes into her glasses and wipes them on her blouse, then replaces them and smiles knowingly at Starshine. “It’s easier to start sleeping with a guy than to stop, isn’t it?”
“Damn straight,” Starshine agrees. “So who wants to stop?” But she has to stop, and she knows it. Starshine raises three fingers in a Girl Scout pledge, although she has never been a Girl Scout—could never belong to any organization so rigidly structured. “I’m placing a moratorium on men. At least new men.”
Two men are already planning their lives around her and juggling them is anxiety enough. How in God’s name could I handle a third? she thinks. Yet the truth of the matter is that she’s still lonely, that nine years as the swan haven’t made up for twenty as an ugly duckling, and that if she can’t conceive of a future without either of her principal lovers, she can’t imagine a future with either of them. Maybe that’s why she has brought home three other men in the past month.
The casual flings mean nothing: Her two principal suitors mean a lot. Probably too much.
Colby Parker has the sharp-featured good looks and lanky body of the British upper class and the charm to match, although he is generations removed from his aristocratic Saxon roots. His father, the illustrious Garfield Lloyd Parker, is a third-generation lawn chair magnate who presides over family dinners like the Mighty Oz but plays fast-and-loose with his hands when greeting a prospective daughter-in-law. Colby solves every problem with a box of chocolate truffles or a dozen long-stemmed red roses. When she threatened to break things off, he sent twenty-four dozen. Two hundred eighty-eight goddamned blossoms! They arrived every hour, on the hour, in batches of twelve, like some mechanical toy gone berserk. Eucalyptus dried them and suspended them from the ceiling. Starshine hates the flowers—hates the money behind the flowers, the emotional blackmail behind the flowers, the painstakingly choreographed future that awaits her on the Parkers’ suburban Chappaqua spread—but she loves Colby in spite of it all. How can a girl resist a guy who says “thank you” after screwing?
Jack Bascomb has nothing, except a line of coarse black hair running down his chest to his navel, but she loves him too. He’s fifty-four years old and looks it. Beer gut, graying beard, the works. And then there’s the matter of personal hygiene. Even three decades on the lam can’t excuse shit-stained briefs and day-long morning breath. But Jack Bascomb believes in something, believed in it enough to join the Weather Underground and blow up recruiting stations, and still believes in it enough to turn down the government’s offers of leniency. And Starshine believes in what Jack Bascomb believes in. Sometimes. Enough to be twenty-nine years old and refuse any job that require her to wear shoes. Enough to chain herself to the sprinkler head at the local community garden to ward off the city’s bulldozers. Not enough to emigrate to Amsterdam with a cancer-riddled, over-the-hill revolutionary determined to live off freelance carpentry in the Buitenveldert. There lies the problem.
Starshine walks over to the kitchen window and breathes in the damp, verdant air of the courtyard, absorbs the trumpet of taxi horns and the banter of mating starlings and the awkward indifference of several pigeons resting on the fire escape. She hoists herself onto the wide sill, a ledge of wood splinters and chipping paint, perching herself inside the frame and letting her bare legs dangle over the edge. The window apron wheezes under her weight. Her back adjusts to the cool morning air while her arms and face remain warm and snug inside. The sensation is that of a self-induced fever. It is vaguely pleasurable.
One of the privileges of rising at the crack of dawn, Starshine reflects, is that it offers her license to do absolutely nothing. She has earned a brief respite from obligation and responsibility, a momentary lull before she puts on her adult face and steps through the looking glass into another day. There are things she must do, phone calls to return, necessities to purchase. There is the infuriating business of her appointment at the credit union, where she must haggle or plead for the forty-five dollars which have mysteriously vanished from her account, then the gourmet fruit basket she will purchase with the proceeds, then the exhausting visit to the Staten Island nursing home where her great aunt will nuzzle the fruit against her withered cheeks. There is nothing more depressing than bringing bosc pears and artificially sweetened figs to a blind woman who speaks through a tracheotomy. But all of that is later. It is half past six in the morning and Starshine can’t even run down to the grocery to pick up a box of cornflakes, at least not until seven when the beefy Pakistani proprietress replaces her son behind the counter and she no longer has to fear another marriage proposal. All she can do for the moment is sit, bake, freeze, shiver, be. It is all so simple.
“So what’s on tap for today?” asks Eucalyptus.
“The usual,” answers Starshine. “Breakfast with Colby, lunch at Jack’s. And lots and lots of canvassing.”
“So much for the convent.”
“Oh, and dinner with Larry Bloom.”
“That should be a blast.”
Although Eucalyptus has not actually met Larry, she has seen him at the helm of his tour bus and formed her judgments. Starshine knows that her own descriptions and anecdotes haven’t helped his cause. This makes her feel marginally guilty, but only marginally so, because the jury is still out on her dinner companion. He’s a bit too pliable, a bit too attached to her for comfort. He’s given her too many of the cheap key-chains and coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets he receives gratis from tourist traps. Theirs is one of those New York friendships, struck up over a mutual interest in the history of landfills (years before when Starshine, for several months, developed a fascination with the changing contours of the Manhattan shoreline), that might easily fade away into acquaintanceship and unease. Only it hasn’t faded, somehow, maybe because Larry’s the one man in whom she has no romantic interest. He has become her sounding board, her authority on the coupling habits of the male subspecies. And tonight, of all nights, she is feeling like she needs any insight she can get.
But Starshine is a pushover, not an idiot. She prides herself on the distinction. She realizes that Larry has his own hopes, his own muted expectations. Someone famous and dead once said that “all exercises have objects” and there’s a reason this guy endures her tales of romance and confusion. He’s addicted to them like a housewife hooked on daytime soaps. But that’s his business, not hers. It doesn’t make her a bad person, does it? She’d fix him up, if she could, but she doesn’t know the sort of women who date the Larry Blooms over the world, and she imagines he must have other opportunities. Some woman—but decidedly not Starshine Hart—will see his inner beauty. And yet sometimes, against her visceral instincts, she wonders what it would be like to bestow herself
on the hapless guy (bestow is a funny word, somehow the only one that seems appropriate to the circumstances), to purge her life of Jack Bascomb and Colby Parker and all the rest and to bestow complete happiness on someone who might bask for the rest of his life in the glow of his own gratitude. Like Scarlett O’Hara’s first marriage in Gone with the Wind. How much would it really matter? It’s all nonsense, of course. Shit, stuff, and nonsense. Somebody else’s pipe dream.
“You know,” says Starshine, “if we were famous, life would be much easier.”
“Uh-huh,” Eucalyptus replies indifferently. “If we were famous, we’d still end up dead.”
“Well, if I were famous, honey, you’d run down to the corner store and pick up a box of cereal for me.”
“Yep,” agrees Eucalyptus, holding a jeweler’s glass in front of her ivory schooner to admire her handiwork. “But you’re not.”
“Not yet.”
Soon enough, though, thinks Starshine. Eventually. Maybe. She’s not even thirty. There’s plenty of time left for fame and fortune. She’ll be brave in the interim. She’ll weather the Don Juan of Karachi and purchase her own breakfast. But first, she’ll paint her toenails. Green. Bright, bright green.
MORNINGSIDE
No noteworthy disaster has ever occurred in Morningside Heights. Guarded at either end by those two distinctive barbicans of the establishment, Riverside Church and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, shielded from harm’s way by the no-man’s land that is Morningside Park, and rent stabilization, and the twenty-four-hour security service of Columbia University, the sleepy Westside suburb north of 110th Street offers an oasis of public buildings and wide concourses where budding scholars stroll oblivious to their surroundings and elderly Chinese couples shake the ginkgo trees to collect nuts for roasting. The community boasts its own share of minor catastrophes, four-alarm blazes, limousines driven through storefront plate glass, widows beaten and strangled in prewar apartments, but if one excludes second-tier Beat poet Lucien Carr’s stabbing of a male admirer in Riverside Park, an event more farcical than tragic, the area surrounding Grant’s Tomb has avoided the Triangle Shirtwaist Fires and General Slocum explosions and Crown Heights race riots which keep the tabloids on the newsstands and remind surviving New Yorkers of their perennial good fortune. Larry Bloom can attest to this tranquility. He is a resident. He is also an uncredentialed expert. His incomplete dissertation on the subject, “The Fire Last Time: Public Disaster and Private Response in New York City, 1869—1914,” yellows in a footlocker beside his nightstand. Perhaps that is why he welcomes the spectacle on Riverside Drive with tempered amusement, the cynical relief of one who has been waiting from the get-go for lightning to strike.
There is a police cordon composed of blue wooden sawhorses and cops in riot gear. It bisects the granite plaza in front of the mausoleum, separating harmony from discord, suggesting that both are sides of a commemorative coin minted specifically for the occasion. On one side of the barricade, all is order. The Dutch contingent has paid good money to mingle with minor dignitaries, to sip champagne on the steps of the Grant family vault, to admire the size of the caskets, the plenitude of the buffet offerings, the intricate weave of the tricolor bunting. They cluster beneath the banner touting the Dutch-American Heritage Bruncheon, ruddy-cheeked and bespectacled in the spirit of a Van Dyke portrait, deeply concerned that the term bruncheon is not to be found in their pocket dictionaries, absorbing the surrounding uproar as a matter of course. Japanese tourists might view the scene as a photo-op, Israelis as fodder for political harangue, but the Dutch are too sanguine, too constrained, for such antics. Funny Americans, they think. Cowboy President, McPuritan culture. An odious word pops into Larry’s thoughts, a word he associates with nineteenth-century novels and whalebone corsets and his ever-practical father, Mort, warning him not to place his feet on the coffee table that his parents “plan to die with”: Bourgeoisie.
Beyond the cordon lies chaos. Ordered, orchestrated chaos, the worst variety of confusion, the Old Left’s vision of its own Armageddon. The crowd sports gold chains, denim jackets, military fatigues, full feather headdresses, Mao pajamas, tie-dyes, vintage coonskin caps, even a conspicuous wimple. There are gourd rattles, cane flutes, chirimias. Also banjos, kitchen pots, bullhorns. Also a topless woman whipping a wooden cigar store Indian with a leather strap. Sharp young men in freshly pressed suits navigate the throng, the crimson “inverted-A” badges of the Organized Anarchist League conspicuous on their lapels. They make notations on clipboards, calculating the size of the protest, or its longevity, or possibly its karmic energy. They distribute water bottles, folded pamphlets. They compete with the purveyors of pocket-sized New Testaments, little red books, gardenia wreaths, with the men vending snow cones and glow-in-the-dark yo-yos and oracular crystals. But all is not mayhem. When you’ve given up sniffing for the starch on the organizers’ collars, resigned yourself to the vapors of incense, braced for the impending sting of burning sulfur and smoldering tires, you notice the glass beads. Even madness has its unifying elements, the glimmer of turquoise and orange, the omnipresent necklaces and bracelets and waist chains, the placards reading, “No Pete Stuyvesant, No Bedford-Stuyvesant, No More,” and “Take Back Your Trinkets and Sail Home,” all of which reassure you that the heavenly puppeteer may be palsied but that he still holds the drawstrings. It is all harmless. It is a high-stakes Mardi Gras and nothing more. But then, if you are Larry, you notice the other distinctive blemish that bales the crowd toward collective action: A disquieting absence of beauty.
The moment has the makings of a noteworthy disaster.
Larry scans the tableau behind the cordon for a familiar face. He’d like to push his way through the blockade like a plainclothes detective on a crime show, to stiffen his back, undaunted by the harsh Irish physiognomies of New York’s finest, challenging them to deny him access to his rightful place among the upstanding burghers at the banquet tables, thriving on their frustration when his identity is affirmed, but he knows he is better off seeking corroboration at the outset. He does not need to wait long. P. J. Snipe, the tour supervisor, nods in Larry’s direction and escorts him into the sanctuary of the privileged.
“This is a goddamn nightmare,” says Snipe. “I feel like I’m at a Dylan concert.”
Snipe isn’t fooling anyone. Larry is confident his boss hasn’t ever listened to a Dylan song, much less attended a rock show. He is the sort of over-the-hill minor-sport athlete, in this case archery, who one can’t imagine at any variety of cultural event, who would sleep his way just as easily through a chamber quartet or an outdoor bluegrass festival or a stadium concert of Hogtie and the Pentecostal Five, all the while managing to look smug with his eyes shut. He is also the sort of over-confident micromanager who thrives on disruptions such as this one. They hired him over Larry’s head, impressed by his fifth-tier law degree, probably also by his gold wedding band and toned biceps, although the cretin failed the Mississippi state bar three times and wears the ring to attract unpossessive women. Snipe is a sham. A robust, clean-cut sham. But Snipe makes no pretense of being anything but a sham, hangs it out there on his sleeve until you’re surprised to discover that you’ve known him three years and he still hasn’t sold you an annuity or an Arizona condo, until you realize that—in spite of your initial determination and better judgment—he’s endeared his way into your life.
“Do you realize what a nightmare this is, Bloom? The Dutch consul is set to show up in twenty minutes and he’s expecting brotherly love, and bagels and lox, and that New York shit. Not a Christ-forsaking freak show! Do you know what this is, Bloom? I’ll tell you what this is. This is dog piss.”
“But what exactly is it?”
Snipe has steered them into a shaded alcove behind the guard tower. His conversation voice carries over the staccato of the wooden spoons on brass, but Larry needs to shout to make himself heard.
“How the hell should I know?” demands Snipe. “Something about Native Ame
rican Indian Liberation Day. We apparently scheduled our event for the same day as their event—and they took it as a slight. And now this!”
“They could have at least warned us.”
“They did. They sent a petition with three thousand names. I double-checked with Fed Ex. Some moron lost the letter.”
Larry holds his tongue. He’d like to speculate on the identity of the moron, suggest that the idiot be instantly terminated, but the last thing he needs is to get himself fired for impertinence on the day of his date with Starshine. All he wants to do is get through this ordeal of a day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Tomorrow, he will have an agent and a live-in lover, a raison d’être, a justification for phoning Snipe and proffering his resignation. Or for not phoning Snipe, for letting Empire Tours float over the horizon of his life like so much driftwood. There will be no more questions about his long-term plans, no more jokes at Christmas parties about colleagues decapitated by traffic lights. Larry Bloom will never again stand in solitude on the platform of a red tour bus describing Captain Kidd’s role in the financing of Trinity Church and wondering whether the full-breasted temptation in the third row is old enough to ask out. So why doesn’t he ram his fist into Snipe’s mandible? Or even dare make a joke at his expense? Larry’s eyes have locked onto his supervisor’s chiseled chin, his angular jaw, the florid patches of flesh where a razor has chafed too close. He imagines they would make an easy target, if he truly wished to deck Snipe, but he wouldn’t even know the mechanics of the swing. Hitting just isn’t his medium.
Snipe rubs his jaw, stamping approval on his shave. Then he cups his palm and punches it methodically with his fist. “You want some coffee, Bloom?”
“Why not?”
“That’s the one thing we seem to have enough of this morning. And it’s fresh. They sent up seventy-five gallons. Who is going to drink seventy-five gallons of coffee? If Juan Valdez at the caterer’s spent a little less time brewing coffee and a little more time baking bagels, we might fatten these Dutch fellows up some. They sure could use it…. Try this….”
The Biology of Luck Page 2