“There are other things to do with it,” she snaps. “Think about it.”
“Jesus,” says Colby. “I was trying to be nice. I’m sure any other woman in the world would be flattered—overjoyed—to take a trip to Tuscany with me. In fact, if you don’t want to go, if you’re so dead-set against it, I’ll send that couple over there. They look like they could use a vacation.”
Colby waves the tickets in the air, signaling for the waiter. Starshine reaches for his arm, tugs at his sleeve from across the tabletop. Her water glass totters on the edge of the Formica and then shatters in the aisle. The couple along the far wall glance toward them and quickly returns to their own purgatory. “Goddamnit,” cries Colby, stooping to dry the corner of his penny loafer with a napkin, the thought of sending their fellow diners to Europe now far from his thoughts.
They order, eat. Colby carries the conversation, avoiding all references to Italy and marriage, trying to earn back his lost ground. Starshine picks at the condiments around her whitefish salad, shreds the lettuce into infinitesimal strands. She can picture Colby at this father’s office later that afternoon, making the most of his sinecure, memorizing Walt Whitman’s “Brooklyn Bridge” to impress her. She can also picture him laid out in a crypt at Woodlawn, surrounded by gold bars and photographs of Starshine Hart, like some modern-day Egyptian pharaoh determined to take it all with him. This last bit strikes her as uproariously entertaining. She is rippling with laughter by the time their dishes are cleared, and Colby, thinking that hindsight has transformed their spat into a comic memory, leaves an exorbitant tip. They both exit the Unicorn in good cheer.
“I’ll call you during the afternoon,” says Colby.
“I’m going out to Staten Island to visit Aunt Agatha. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“And we’re on for Friday night?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Then Friday night it is,” he says. “Send my best to your aunt.”
Colby is a favorite of Aunt Agatha’s, although the pair have only met once. The old woman frequently reminds her niece that there is no crime in loving a wealthy man—a man who can take care of you in your old age, with private attendants, so you don’t get railroaded off to a nursing home. And Colby, of course, believes that Agatha’s opinion might sway Starshine’s, as though marriage were a matter of familial consensus—which, of course, it is not.
“No problem,” answers Starshine. On the tip of her tongue are the words, Why don’t you take her to Italy, but she doesn’t want to provoke a fight.
“And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Colby waves his arm to signify all those transgressions for which an apology might be in order. Starshine pecks him on the cheek and turns quickly on her heels, refusing to hear whatever words he is calling after her. She is in bright spirits again, and her morning has no room for apologies or regrets. Her lover will spend the rest of his day replaying their breakfast, supplying extra dialogue and second-guessing their parting, but she will not. She will return home, look up the address of the credit union’s central office, deposit her cactus on the window ledge, and place her flower in water. No, she won’t even do that. Starshine pins the red rose under the windshield wiper of a random parked car and smiles at her handiwork. It all seems so easy.
NEW AMSTERDAM
They expect to see Dutch New York, the city of Diedrich Knickerbocher and Peter Minuit, but they are sure to be disappointed. Their imperial seat has been swept away by time and progress, its yellow-brick mansions razed by fire, its tidy cow paths bloated to great boulevards. The shimmering monoliths of Big Coal and Big Oil and Gargantuan Capital have swallowed the foundations of the Fort Amsterdam settlement, its vistas, its contours, even its very soil, burying the vestiges in the bottomlands of steel-framed canyons. Landfill scooped from Midtown’s hills has honed the waterfront to perfect symmetry. All that remains from forty years of Dutch rule are a handful of incongruous place names: Wall Street, where a frontier fence once stood; Bridge Street, to mark the shoals of a thwarted creek; Bowery; Old Slip; Gouverneur Lane; the unlikely Bowling Green at the mouth of Broadway. These Dutch emissaries have come a long way to discover that they should have vacationed in Pretoria or Jakarta or Paramaribo, that they really don’t matter in Gotham, that they never really mattered. That New York can get along fine without them.
Larry primes his audience with atmosphere, background, trivia. He blends history and legend, hot yarn and cold fact, pulling every last trick from his tour guide’s magic sleeve, serving up a smorgasbord of myths supplied by his employer and distortions culled from memory and outright lies fabricated for the occasion. He wants to impress the dimpled teenage godsend reclining in the fifth row; her momentary pleasure is the breadth and depth of his constituency. As Big Louise pummels the accelerator into the floorboards, plummeting the coach down Riverside Drive with the full force of her ample weight, Larry sermonizes on the age of the harbor, on its span, on its bridges, Verrazano and Hudson, Colonel Roebling and Robert Moses, before detouring into an anecdote about wampum-dealer Frederick Phillipse’s love for an Indian princess. The Dutch tourists listen with polite deference. Big Louise grits her teeth as she tears through potholes and amber stoplights. The girl in row five fidgets, stifles a yawn with her hand, and leans forward in her seat to meet Larry’s stare. He speaks faster, describing the moonlit night of the couple’s final meeting, painting a pastoral, even romantic, portrait of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. There are mighty patrons, noble Wappingers, spiteful Portuguese slavers. He is making it up as he goes. The bus picks up speed, lurching, its skeleton rattling; Big Louise jolts over manholes, cuts off taxis, moaning and cursing under her breath; the Dutch girl smiles, bathes Larry with a flush of attention, maybe even a spark of interest, her long hair shimmering in a panel of light. This is his moment. But suddenly, with all the advance warning of a boiler explosion, long after Larry’s charges have abandoned courtesy for a view of the downtown skyline or the Jersey coast, precisely at the moment of climax, of passion, of bloodshed, when it has become clear to him that his anecdote is not an anecdote at all, but a hackneyed rip-off of Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman,” the coach rasps to a halt at the foot of Battery Place, drowning Larry’s fable in the wail of burning brake lines. The Dutch tourists blink themselves alive. Big Louise slides open both sets of the double doors. Larry’s teenage beauty slings her backpack over her shoulder, whispers briefly in her mother’s ear, and sashays her way down the aisle, exiting the rear of the bus. Larry rolls his eyes at Big Louise, to say here we go again, to say wish me luck, and he steps into his workday of asphalt and heat.
There are already other tour groups on the plaza: hordes of Germans and Italians, Koreans posing for snapshots, day-trippers on double-decker cruisers, a battalion of heartland senior citizens basking in all their porcine glory. The Germans carry Baedeker’s guides and canteens. The midwesterners lug beach chairs and ice chests. Each group eyes the others with muted scorn. They are all part and parcel of the same game, victim to the universal folly which convinces travelers everywhere that they blend, that they can pass themselves off as locals, should the exigency arise, while others cannot. Larry waits for his own team of upscale refugees to stow their personal effects and disembark. He waves at another tour guide, a pudgy-faced old-timer whose name he no longer remembers; the veteran nods in his direction. They exchange the knowing, jaded looks of the enlightened. Unlike the sun-visored midwesterners or the happy-go-lucky Dutch, they know the somber truth: This is business, not pleasure. It is immigration in reverse, the start of the day’s tribute to Lady Liberty and Ellis Island, a routine which will repeat itself with different faces until the end of time. There is no escape.
One of the Dutch tourists steps forward and pats Larry too intimately on the shoulder. He is a stately, older gentleman with thin-rimmed spectacles and an unconvincing hair weave. His wife, also taller than Larry, holds her lips perpetually pursed as though about to spit out a cherry
pit. They share the look of academics, of know-it-alls, the sort of people who view you as a burdensome accoutrement to their own self-guided tour.
“Willem van Huizen,” the man says in the Queen’s English, extending his hand. “I wanted to take the liberty of complimenting you on your handling of this morning’s—how shall we call it?—Episode? We Netherlanders aren’t accustomed to civil disturbance. At least not in modern times. I dare say that some of my countrymen may have taken a scare. But not me and Klara. We have lived in New York before. Diamonds are my trade, but I consider myself something of an amateur historian of the American colonies. Isn’t that right, Klara?”
“He certainly does,” agrees his wife. Her words are earnest, not ironic.
“I’m writing a book on the trans-Atlantic trade. From an economic perspective, naturally. My focus is on currency, bullion, precious stones. I always say one ought to stick to one’s area of expertise. Mercifully, colonial gems and jewelry are a relatively untapped field. Did you know that the trinkets with which my countrymen purchased your lovely island were worth slightly more than sixty guilders? That’s the equivalent of five florins or twenty ducats. In present day terms, that’s one month’s rent on a studio apartment in this city. Inflation adjusted, of course.”
“Of course.”
Larry looks around for an opportunity to desert his newfound friend. If only the stragglers would disembark more rapidly, he could excuse himself to begin the tour. He has no use for armchair scholars and dilettante pedagogues, aggressive glad-handers writing books and citing minutiae to impress their wives, especially those who spruce up their names with ersatz vans and vons. Does the blockhead really think he’s fooling anyone into believing he’s an aristocrat? Van Huizen! It sounds like one of those puffed-up surnames adopted by second-tier Nazis, like Von Papen or Von Ribbentrop. But Van Huizen, the diamond dealer? That’s the beginning of an off-color joke, a potshot at self-hating Jews. Van Huizen the diamond dealer and Von Goldberg the deacon walk into a basilica…. Larry hasn’t been to a synagogue in nearly a decade, but he can see his own heritage, maybe his own worst instincts regarding that heritage, reflected in his companion’s disguise. He knows Van Huizen’s type. He knows the man will profess a deeply personal interest in Grace Church. He knows—and here lies the dolt’s one redeeming quality—that he will offer a generous tip. Gentrified European Jews are the backbone of historical tourism. They are a dime a dozen.
Van Huizen’s next move confirms Larry’s suspicions.
“Blowm,” he says, reading Larry’s nametag in the Dutch style, merging the o’s to elevate him to the stature of Roosevelt and Van Loo. “Is that a Netherlander name?”
“Bloom,” answers Larry. “German.”
“I see,” van Huizen says apologetically—and maybe with a hint of pity. “I thought you might be related to Pastor Bloem of the Reformed Church. He’s an old friend of our family.”
“No doubt.”
Van Huizen steps closer, his face florid with conspiracy.
“I was just telling Klara how much I enjoyed your talk on Frederick Phillipse. A seminal figure, unquestionably. Wall Street’s first lion, a forerunner of Astor and Morgan. And you did him such justice. For the most part. I don’t want to overstep my bounds, Meneer Blowm, but isn’t it possible you erred in the quantity of wampum he paid to the Wappinger chieftain for his daughter’s hand? You said fifteen tons, but I recall reading fifty tons. This is my particular field of expertise, you understand.”
“Fifty tons it is. It’s not the first time I’ve made that mistake.”
Larry catches sight of his teenage inspiration. She seems older in the daylight, eighteen, maybe even twenty. Her breasts push against the front of her tank top. Larry wonders for a moment whether he will have the courage to speak to her, if she will accede to his advances, if there is the remotest possibility that she might cast off the shackles of her dour-faced parents and meet him for a nightcap, for an early evening stroll, but then he recalls Starshine, his dinner engagement, and the matter of Snipe’s girlfriend, also the pageant of other young women, equally innocent and alluring, whom he has had the forbearance not to pester. His future rests with Starshine; hope endures in those quarters. It is a universally established truth that teenage girls don’t appreciate come-ons from down-at-the-heel tour guides. Larry taps the letter in his breast pocket. He excuses himself, too brusquely, from the Dutch couple and launches into his show.
Larry walks backwards. He steers his burghers around Hardenbergh’s Whitehall Building, points out the black smoke billowing from the Standard Oil headquarters, pays tribute to the Downtown Athletic Club and the ornate friezes of the custom house. He preps his pupils for Castle Clinton, waxes rich on its previous incarnations as an aquarium and concert venue. The Dutch nod appreciatively at the names P. T. Barnum, Jenny Lind, Fiorello La Guardia. They have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Larry has given up trying to impress the girl, and now he is free to talk over the crowd, through them, to address his wisdom to the whole expanse of lower Manhattan, to the stalagmitic towers of granite and glass, letting his words reverberate through the bowels of world capitalism and reach for the distant peaks of the Times Tower and the Empire State Building. His words are the mantra of a hollow culture, an incantation to form over substance. His lips must keep moving, his larynx quivering until it burns, but the content of his discourse is as trifling, as thoroughly irrelevant, as are the conversion figures in Van Huizen’s book. Larry can say absolutely anything he desires. Anything at all.
They pass through the heavy wooden doors of Castle Clinton. The rounded walls of the fortress stand eight feet thick, solid stone, equipped with twenty-eight cannons, none ever fired except in target practice, and Larry shares all of this, striving to do his duty, relating in painstaking detail the firing of the first salute, Evacuation Day, November 25, 1811, but the Dutch prefer to stroll the gangways and battlements at their own leisurely pace and to poke their noses into the barrels of the guns. A handful of loyalists, including both Van Huizens and the parents of the teenage beauty, cling to Larry as he leads them through the fort and onto the exterior boardwalk. A pair of twin boys in matching shorts, not affiliated with Larry’s tour, toss pieces of Styrofoam packaging from the fortress into the surf; these synthetic fragments float for a moment, and then the sea swallows them ferociously.
The girl scales the parapet and balances herself, arms outstretched, like an aspiring ballerina. Her pale skin stands out against the deep, opulent blue of the harbor. She is a fitting masthead for this island nation, for the undisputed capital of glamour. But she is too young, much too young. Larry turns his back on the girl and acknowledges several park rangers, crisp young men, more polish than spit, and he wonders if they share his unhealthy thoughts. No matter. All will go home empty handed. It is enough to know that girls like this exist, to survive hand-to-mouth on the distant promise that such a beauty might someday be his, may fall into his lap, that he may share a stalled elevator with such a radiant creature or rescue her off a window ledge or win her heart with an epic novel, to keep Larry going, to keep his lips moving, to buttress him against the Willem van Huizens of the world.
“Is it true,” asks Van Huizen “that the channel used to freeze over frequently? It is my understanding that O’Callaghan and Hastings, who in my opinion are the two most trustworthy chroniclers of the city, differ on the subject. My own inclination is that Hastings has the better half of the argument, but I’d appreciate your thoughts….” Van Huizen tucks his hands into his pockets, his chest cocked forward, every joint of his soft body announcing that he doesn’t give a damn for Larry’s thoughts.
Even by the standards of men like Van Huizen, this strikes Larry as a particularly pompous question. Larry knows little of the long-dead Edmund Baily O’Callaghan and Hugh Hastings beyond their names and has no reason to believe them particularly gifted historians; he does know that the harbor has only frozen once in recorded times, during the winter of
1779–1780, and he begins to recount that frigid episode. Halfway through his answer, Larry hears the splash.
His first vision of the calamity is on the faces of the crowd. Eyes widen, mouths drop. All at once there is a frenzied charge toward the parapet, led by the girl’s mother, accompanied by wild gesticulations and shouting in a foreign tongue. Shock rapidly diffuses into panic, even terror, before stabilizing itself on the bedrock of helplessness. The girl is flailing, sputtering, sinking. The water lashes against the concrete flood break, churning up clouds of spray. The crowd is hollering, pointing, pleading. The girl’s mother pummels the father’s chest, blaming him for the ultimate disaster, although it has not yet transpired, her mournful wail suggests that the girl’s death is already a fait accompli. Larry’s universe slows to freeze-frame. This is the opportunity he has been waiting for all of his adult life, one of those rare instances of heroic potential. He takes in the drowning girl, also a pair of tugboats guiding a barge through the bay. The water churns cold and turbulent. Larry slowly, methodically, unbuttons his shirt; his actions are as precise and meticulous as those of a watch smith dismantling a mechanical timepiece. He vaults himself onto the parapet. He looks over his shoulder, capturing the ambivalence of the spectators, the hope, the apprehension, the mother’s distorted features, Van Huizen’s bemused grimace, the unadulterated befuddlement of a stout woman in a beige shawl. Larry steps forward, braces himself. And then, as the girl’s head nears the point of submersion, her bare arms slackening, the tension easing from her face, in recognition, maybe in resignation, she resurfaces on the shoulders of a park ranger armed with a life ring. The ordeal is over.
Larry has no place in the bathos that follows. He is not a hero, not even a player, only a bare-chested tour guide standing on a parapet, holding a button-down shirt—a man self-conscious of his concave chest and sun-starved skin. The park ranger receives the applause, the grateful maternal hug, the generous-if-gauche gratuity from the armchair historian. They lay the girl out on a cushioned tarp, drawing her hair away from her slightly bloated face. She sputters water, smiles. Soon sirens announce the arrival of professionals, paramedics, strapping men equipped with a gurney and gauze. They do not offer Larry medical attention; they do not even inquire after his health. Their only concern is loading the teenager onto an ambulance, shepherding her parents in after her, transporting the VIP trio out of the war zone at a high rate of speed. The Dutch tourists disperse. They replay the incident in hushed voices, queuing for tickets to the Ellis Island ferry, still determined to make the most of their morning. No irreparable damage has been done. Nobody has died. If their numbers have been marginally reduced, it is their responsibility, their moral duty, like alpine hikers or characters in a murder mystery, to compensate for the loss. They are up for the occasion.
The Biology of Luck Page 4