Larry is the only genuine victim of the episode. His moment of glory has degenerated into self-consciousness, his teenage beauty lassoed from his clutches like a rodeo steer. His book will fail. His date will fail. It is all carved in stone. Men like Larry Bloom don’t win the love of women like Starshine Hart. Men like Larry Bloom don’t publish epic novels to literary acclaim. When you get right down to it—and Larry doesn’t think he can go much lower at the moment—men like Larry Bloom don’t do much of anything.
One by one, his fingers refasten the buttons of his shirt.
CHAPTER 3
BY LARRY BLOOM
Word on the street: Bone, the one-armed super, can get you anything.
He sits in the forenoon sun, eyes closed but not sleeping, absorbing his beauty rays with a silver reflector, so that if his aluminum lawn chair weren’t planted on the Fillmore Avenue sidewalk, if his Hawaiian shirt weren’t clipped at the top with a bolo tie, if the shades resting in his tight-cropped hair didn’t boast a bridge of custom-made gold leaf, in short, if he were not Bone, but just another olive-skinned cripple at the curbside, you might make the gross mistake of feeling sorry for him. He seems so harmless, so overtly innocuous. It is difficult to imagine, at first glance, that this emaciated creature is the kingpin, the Alpha and the Omega, the man who has connected the sorts of people who know each other. But it would take only one blink of a lizard’s eye, one snap of Bone’s calloused fingers, to supply you with anything, absolutely anything, contraband and coveted. Bone is the Wells Fargo wagon of the nascent millennium. He can get you high, he can get you screwed, he can get you shot. He can arm your band of mercenaries with Kalashnikovs and M-16 rifles, load them onto state-of-the-art personnel transports and deposit them within hours in the mudflats off the Guatemalan coast or Havana harbor. He can wipe clean your record as a pedophile, get you elected to the legislature, have your political opponents’ families dismembered with machetes. If you have the money, if you have the need, if your personal welfare depends upon securing a year’s supply of napalm or nude photographs of the Queen of England or fucking identical twins simultaneously, if your fetish is panda fur or celebrities’ tampons, if your talisman is World Series rings or severed human tongues, if you crave early Christian relics or your employer’s wife or a particular print at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bone can make it happen. That, at least, is the word on the street.
To the tenants of number 72, the enigma of Bone offers a perennial motif for gossip and idle speculation. Rumor holds him to be the illegitimate son of the Lucchese family don, also a disinherited heir to the Walker cosmetics fortune, even the scion of a long line of distinguished Yemeni rabbis. He speaks English with a French accent; his French stops and starts with the glottal punctuation of a German. Nobody knows his origins, his history, the source of his thick roll of bills or the cause of his disfiguring wound, whether he really fought beside Che in Bolivia or against Che in the Sierra Madre or helped the CIA destabilize Iran in 1955. Nobody even knows if Bone is his first name or his surname or possibly a cognominal homage to his lack of flesh. All that is certain is that the one-armed super will move your automobile to the ebb and flow of alternate-side parking for a modest fee, and that your daily existence will prove much more pleasant if he likes you. Unless, of course, he likes you more than you like him, which is why Starshine takes pains to avoid his presence.
She chains her bike down the block and attempts to sneak past Bone at a brisk pace. The Dominican Jesus freak and his pregnant sister-in-law are lounging on the stoop, sharing segments of a diced mango, jabbering away in Spanish. The Jesus freak’s name is actually Jesus. Jesus Echegaray. He works the Transit Authority night shift. She has given up saying hello to him. Sharshine’s key is already in the lock when she can sense the super’s gaze upon her, only one eye raised like a pirate, its intensity stronger than the shock of a taser.
“Three-J,” Bone calls out.
The turnover is too rapid for the super to learn his tenants’ names, even if they catch the fancy of Mr. Little Bone, so he relies upon apartment numbers. To Starshine, the bark of “3-J” is never good news. She stops dead in her tracks.
Bone levers himself out of his chair and approaches her slowly, measuring each step as though it were a precious spice. His gait heralds his power, his placidity. Bone has all of the time in the world.
“Bedsprings,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“Bedsprings,” he repeats. “At night, you make this noise with the bedsprings. The neighbors complain.”
Bone raises and lowers his hand, palm down, in an effort to mime the compression of bedsprings. His lips form a thin, dark gash. It is impossible to decipher his intentions: Is this a come-on? A warning? Starshine is fairly confident that it is not a joke. The one-armed super is decidedly above humor.
“I’m sorry,” stammers Starshine. “I’ll be more careful.”
“You’ll be more careful,” agrees Bone. “The neighbors complain.”
Starshine is too uncomfortable with the subject, with the super, to pursue the matter further. But it makes her blood boil. Here these people are operating an illegal poultry farm outside her windows, papering the second floor landing with posters of their so-called savior and the Virgin Mary, discarding their cigarette butts and fast-food wrapping on the stoop, not to mention overpopulating the world with excess children, cramping them all together in a railroad flat with at least two pit bulls and God knows how many flea-infested cats and a deranged brother-in-law who proselytizes door-to-door, and they have the nerve to complain that she has an occasional houseguest. It really is too much to stomach.
“I’ll take care of it,” Starshine promises. “I didn’t realize they could hear us.”
“Good,” says Bone. “We go up and see.”
Arguing would serve no purpose. Bone has done this before, has invited himself into her apartment on one pretext or another, although none as compromising as this one, but the visits are short in duration, more like inspections than social calls, so Starshine has learned to acquiesce to the course of least resistance. After the super’s first visit, an examination of the bathroom grouting in response to a flood on the second floor, Starshine made the mistake of complaining to the management company. A midlevel agent humored her for twenty minutes. Her hot water supply vanished mysteriously for three consecutive days. Although she could substantiate nothing—afterward she couldn’t even document the loss of hot water—Starshine learned her lesson. She is an at-will sojourner in the kingdom of Bone.
The super leads her into the dimly lit vestibule.
“You pick up your mail,” he says. “I wait.”
“What?”
“You did not pick up your mail yesterday. I wait while you pick it up.”
Bone folds his arm under the pit of his stump. Starshine, tears of frustration pooling behind her eyes, fumbles for her mailbox key. She feels violated, torn to shreds. It couldn’t be any worse if Bone mounted her forcibly to test the decibel level of the bedsprings. How can the asshole possibly know whether or not she has collected yesterday’s mail? But he does, damn it. She hastily retrieves her allotment of correspondence, mostly bills and late notices, and stuffs the assortment of official-looking envelopes into the waistband of her pants. She will not humiliate herself any further by examining them in his presence.
They ascend the narrow staircase in tandem, navigating a graveyard of children’s toys, the overhead bulb dancing on its wire, projecting their silhouettes against the warped plaster, consecrating the doll torsos and tanker trucks abandoned to the stairwells. The reaffirming strains of Edith Piaf’s brassy voice float from Starshine’s apartment. She knocks to give Eucalyptus fair warning. Her roommate replies with the rustle of clothes, the sticky patter of bare wet feet on hardwood. The door opens, first a crack, then all the way. Eucalyptus, her long black hair hidden under a lavender bath towel, stands at the threshold.
“He needs to examine the beds,” expla
ins Starshine. “The loonies downstairs complained.”
“You mean he needs to examine your bed, darling,” says Eucalyptus.
Bone follows Starshine into the apartment, peeking through each doorway as though on a realtor’s tour. He pauses momentarily at the entrance to Eucalyptus’s room, taking in the wall collage of celebrity obits and the cabinet of tchotchkes and the harpoon mounted over the rosewood bureau, then passes through the common room and, like a rodent drawn by a pheromone, sniffs the musty air before targeting Starshine’s bed. Starshine does not follow him. Bone won’t take anything, she knows, nor does she own anything worthy of pocketing, and she would like to have as little to do with this intrusion as possible. She retreats to the comfort of her wicker chair and sorts through the previous day’s mail.
“Visa bill, jury summons, a friendly letter from our Community Board,” she enumerates. “Here you go, honey. Personal correspondence from the Internal Revenue Service. For Eucalyptus Caroll. Shall I open it?”
“Go for it.”
Eucalyptus is burnishing a fresh chunk of ivory with glass wool. Starshine tears open the envelope.
“Ode to joy! You’re being audited. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Read it and weep.”
Starshine slides the letter down the tabletop and continues sorting. All of it—the bills, the overdue library notices, the increasingly threatening letters from the Selective Service Bureau erroneously reminding her that she is a male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six and must register for the draft—will go down the trash chute. It isn’t worth the hassle. She refuses to waste her precious waking moments arguing with vengeful computers. She’s doing the best she can. What else can they expect? If her seventy-eight-dollar credit card payment is so damn important to them, they can send somebody over in person to discuss it. That would be civilized, decent. And she’d even brew coffee for their representative.
“Do we know a Peter Smythe?”
“No sale.”
“Well, we’ve both been invited to his wedding.”
“Are we going?”
“It’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia.”
“Guess not.”
“Discard pile?”
“Isn’t that always the way, darling?”
Eucalyptus crumples her audit notice into a ball and tosses it in the direction of the wastepaper basket. From the bedroom comes the high-pitched rhythm of Bone playing Sherlock Holmes. The beat grows faster, more frenzied, almost ecstatic, suggesting that the super is at his worst, warning Starshine that she will have to wash her sheets, but more unsettling because it exposes her to an outsider’s perception of her own passion. Can she really be that loud? Has she developed an auditory immunity? It only makes sense that one’s other senses are dulled in the heat of the moment, that the bedspring chorus, not to mention the symphony of mewing and moaning and expletives, must be pure torture to the sex-starved lunatic downstairs. But we all have our crosses to bear, don’t we? At least Jesus Echegaray doesn’t have a one-armed pervert doing something unimaginable on his bedspread.
A personal letter catches Starshine’s attention. There is no stamp, no return address. The envelope is frayed, indicating that is has been squeezed through the narrow aperture in her postal box. Her curiosity has been piqued. She slides her finger gently under the flap. The stationer’s card is written in a tight, distinctively female hand, garnished by a bouquet of printed roses.
“Take a look at this,” says Starshine. “Any guesses?”
The message reads:
Dearest Starshine:
Please tell me you love me as I love you.
I can wait no longer.
You know who
Eucalyptus scans the note and groans. “That could be half of New York. But if I had to put my money somewhere, I’d go with that friend Larry of yours. He sounds like the type.”
“Larry?” Starshine answers, forcing a laugh. “You overestimate him, honey. He’d never had the courage to do something like this. He’s one of the puppy dogs. One of the wait-and-seers.”
“You may be right, darling. Then again, you may be wrong. What’s that they say about advice? It’s what you ask for when you need somebody to confirm your opinion.”
“It’s a woman,” says Starshine. “You can tell by the handwriting.”
“Maybe his mother wrote it for him.”
They share a laugh. There was a time when Starshine would have been alarmed by such a note, fresh off the bus from San Francisco with her post-teenage angst regarding stalkers and sex predators and all the deviants of the night who prey on young women in the big city, but life experience has taught her that the vast majority of men are stupid and harmless. Especially the sorts of men who leave notes in women’s mailboxes, the types who can’t distinguish love from lust, the ones who really believe she can solve their problems like some druggist’s cure-all. The dangerous ones are the guys who don’t give a damn, the ones who don’t worry where their next fuck is coming from because they know they’ll get it somehow, the ones who would batter the living shit out of the Larry Blooms of the world for a pair of sneakers. But why did Eucalyptus plant the idea in her head? Starshine attempts to conjure up Larry’s handwriting, to feminize it, but her memory draws a blank. She never would have suspected Larry. He would have been the last human being on earth to cross her mind, but now that her thoughts have been rutted into a particular path, she can’t imagine it being anybody else. Poor, poor fool. She’ll have to say something at dinner.
Bone reemerges. His trousers are buttoned, his forehead free of sweat. Maybe she won’t have to wash her sheets after all.
“Water bed,” he says.
“What?”
“You get a water bed,” he announced. “No more problems with bedsprings. No more neighbors complain.”
“I’ll take care of it,” says Starshine. “I didn’t realize it was that loud.”
“I can get you a water bed. I’ll bring it by tomorrow.”
A water bed? She recalls that she once had a lover with a water bed, an ambulance driver, and every time they screwed she felt she’d been cast as Wendy in some obscene version of Peter Pan. Water beds leak. Water beds ooze. Water beds sway like pirate ships. Starshine needs an old-fashioned bed, a bed that bounces like a trampoline, that contracts and expands, that makes music like an accordion, like a set of bagpipes, a bed that isn’t going to puncture at precisely the wrong moment and leave her high and dry. Water beds are for orthopedic patients, for undersexed tour guides. She’s a four-poster kind of girl. But all of this would be lost on the one-armed super, determined as he is to take control of her sleeping arrangements, already having let himself out without so much as a good-bye, and now happily ensconced in his aluminum chair, so what the hell is she supposed to do? She’ll deal with it later. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is far, far away.
“I’m going to fight it out with the bankers,” she says. “Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need luck. You need a tight-fitting skirt.”
She will not wear a tight-fitting skirt, of course—she does not even own one. But tight-fitting, acid-washed jeans seem a reasonable tactic to disarm a credit officer. After she changes, she admires herself in the bathroom mirror. If she were a banker, she thinks, she’d give herself the keys to the vault.
Starshine looks up the address of her credit union in the phone directory. She pulls the apartment door shut behind her, takes a deep breath and kicks a dolmen of multicolored toy blocks down the stairs. They ricochet into the abyss. Good riddance to bad rubbish! She won’t have misguided children constructing makeshift altars, at least not on her landing, because then they grow up into the sorts of men who make their landlords equip the neighbors with water beds. It is all part of the same pandemic, the original sin behind her impending fight with the credit union and her aunt’s deterioration and all the men who keep picking and poking at her. The cycle must b
e broken. Starshine mounts her Higgins and coasts toward Long Island City; she has already passed the towers of the Queensboro Bridge and eclipsed Roosevelt Island when she realizes that she’s left her financial dossier on the kitchen table.
No matter, she thinks. These things happen.
They’ll deal. It is their problem, not hers.
MAIDEN LANE
There is no more fitting place to meet Ziggy Borasch than at the deluxe McDonalds.
The upscale burger joint stands at the intersection of Broadway and Maiden Lane, a sentinel at the northern tier of the Financial District, catering to the divergent needs of Wall Street’s harried financiers and the enclave of working-class immigrants who have commandeered the tenements south of City Hall. A tuxedo-clad doorman welcomes customers into a stately glass-and-wood dining hall where the lighting is incandescent, the plants aren’t synthetic, and the background music rolls off the keys of a baby-grand piano. Even the cutlery, no longer silver on account of the security risk, is made of stainless steel. In a world of fast food, which so often is neither, the snappy counter staff serves up double cappuccinos and gourmet pastries imported from an East Side bakery. It is hard to believe that, excepting the napoleons and éclairs, this ambience operates in the service of an orthodox Golden Arches menu, Big Macs and Happy Meals and assembly-line hash browns, that the napkins and ketchup packets are still tightly rationed, dispensed only upon request by aproned Latino women earning seven dollars and fifteen cents an hour, but there are limits to the corporate board’s benevolence, even in New York City, even at their international headquarters, which is why Larry thinks of the Maiden Lane McDonalds as so much whitewash on the Aunt Polly’s fence that is American capitalism. The luxury is an illusion, the restaurant a modern-day Theresienstadt. And yet the food does seem to taste better, the beef more tender, the sausages leaner, as though it is the vinyl booths and rough wallpaper, not something inherent to the freeze-dried cattle loins, which account for the numbing uniformity of the standard franchise fare. Our senses, after all, are slaves to expectation. The king’s broth curdles in the mendicant’s cup, while beggars’ scraps become pheasant and venison on the platters of royalty. It is true of food. It is also true of people. Yet somehow, among all the chameleons and pretenders who vie for Larry’s veneration, it is most true of Ziggy Borasch.
The Biology of Luck Page 5