The Biology of Luck

by Jacob M. Appel

  Larry realizes that he is no longer alone in his contemplation. A young woman has joined him on the flagstone concourse before the Whitman statue. She is tall, pale, flat chested. Her hair has the texture of cord. Although her features are delicate, if a bit too narrow, her sober expression and awkward bearing undermine nature’s limited gifts. Even her attire—a dull floral-print dress—strives toward the unattractive. Larry notices the woman is sizing him up, deciding whether he passes muster, participating in the same ritual of abortive courtship, the scoping out of total strangers in public places, women riding subway cars and waiting in airport terminals and filling out informed consent forms at the dentist’s office, a pantomime of mating that always ends in the same place, absolutely nowhere, when he notices the final defect that solidifies his intentions: under one arm, on this glorious summer morning, the woman is carrying a folded umbrella. He does not know why, of all things, the umbrella is decisive. But it is. His fellow Whitman admirer is not for him. She has been pigeonholed among the unattractive, banished beyond the pale. Larry retreats to the far edge of the concourse, careful to keep his eyes on the statue, hoping that his companion will judge him similarly and depart. There are no bedfellows, no kindred spirits, among the ugly.

  The woman holds her ground. Although his gaze is focused on the statue, he senses that she is staring at him. He catches her approaching in his peripheral vision and notes that her manner exudes all the joie de vivre of a pallbearer hauling a casket. She stands beside him for a full twenty seconds before speaking.

  “Do you enjoy Whitman?” she asks.

  “Me?”

  “I don’t care for him myself. All that bunk about daffodils and the scent of wheat and celestial orbs rising and whatnot. I never understood it. That’s not part of my shtick. I need something meaty, something epic. I’d trade ten Whitmans for one Tennyson any day. But I’m only saying that, you know. I’m not actually sure if I mean it. It’s all part of my persona. Tennyson seems to dovetail with the umbrella. “

  Larry has inched backwards during the course of the woman’s onslaught, struggling to expand the personal space between them, but she has inched forward simultaneously. He has no facility with strangers, and they must sense this, for they ordinarily pass him by. He often wishes it were otherwise. But now, confronted with this peculiar young woman who values poets like trading cards and off-handedly subverts her own opinions, he longs to return to the evil that he knows. What can this aggressive creature think he has to offer her? What has he done to solicit her attentions? Is it possible that, fortified with a book deal and Starshine’s potential love, he is emitting some previously untapped pheromone, some pent-up aphrodisiac, which will magnet lonely eccentrics in civic plazas. In the future, he will have to be more careful.

  “I’m scaring you off, aren’t I?” asks the woman. “It’s this over-the-top, in your face thing. But don’t worry. I’m really not like this at all. I’m quite reserved, almost pathologically shy. This is my way of overcompensating. “

  “Okay,” says Larry.

  “By the way, we haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Rita Blatt. The reporter from the Downtown Rag. Please say they told you I was coming. “

  “I’m confused.”

  “I knew this was going to happen,” Rita says. “I just knew it. The right fist never knows who the left hook is punching, if you know what I mean. I’m a reporter for the Downtown Rag, the city’s only free weekly dedicated entirely to the offbeat—I’m sure you’ve picked up a copy in a pizza shop or something and thrown it away—and I’m supposed to be doing a story on a group of Dutch tourists coming back to New York to discover the city’s roots. They should have warned you. Whatever. Anyway, I was going to meet you at Castle Clinton, but one of the park rangers said I had at least an hour’s wait before you returned from the Statue of Liberty, so I thought I’d kill some time in the park and, what do you know, I end up running into the very person I’m looking for. Small city, isn’t it?”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re a reporter doing a piece on my tourists?”

  “You’re catching on, Larry Bloom. And you look just like your company photo, although I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to speak to you if not for your name tag. I have an eye for detail, you know. Of course, if I really had an eye for detail, I’d be a foreign correspondent with the New York Times instead of a thirty-four-year-old stringer with a paper nobody reads, but that’s neither here nor there. “

  “Did Snipe sign off on this?”

  “That name sounds right. But don’t depend upon it. I’m dreadful with names. I did a feature last month on some tycoon philanthropist who set up a guns-for-furniture exchange. For every weapon you brought in, his company gave you a free patio set. The whole thing was preposterous, but it looked like it was going to work. These kids would come in with assault rifles and leave with chaise lounges. Nobody bothered to find out what a bunch of ghetto youth were doing with garden chairs. It turns out they were selling them on the West Side Highway. But the point is that the millionaire’s name was Garfield Lloyd Parker and I accidentally called him Parker Lloyd Garfield throughout the article. Protestant names work like that, I suppose. But the old stuffed-shirt went through the roof! So I’m not really sure who I spoke to, but the important thing is that we found each other and I’m coming on your tour.”

  “I’ll have to phone the office.”

  “As you wish. I was supposed to meet you up at Grant’s Tomb, but I got tied up. Between you and me, I had a huge row with my boyfriend. I’m still somewhat riled up. You can tell, can’t you?”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  “I didn’t miss anything, did I? Wasn’t it just some sort of catered breakfast?”

  “You didn’t miss a thing.”

  “That’s a relief,” says Rita. “My first major assignment ever as a reporter was to cover the Tyson-Spinks boxing match. Do you remember it? The ninety-one-second knockout. Well, I got stuck in traffic and showed up just in time to cover the mass exodus of fans. I’m unlucky, that way. A regular Calamity Jane. So I’m relieved I didn’t miss anything this morning. “

  “Nothing important,” says Larry. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m on break. I’ll meet you at the ticket kiosk in about twenty minutes. “

  Larry turns on his heels and walks briskly in the direction of the old IR Control House. It amazes him that life never offers completely smooth sailing, even for one day, that just when the morning seems as flawless as the mountain sky, a sinister cloud manages to creep its way over the horizon. And, what makes life even more mysterious, what truly probes the depth and complexity of the psyche, is that on an overcast day that one cloud would pass entirely unnoticed. But he will not let Rita Blatt darken his afternoon. He will not even phone the office. There are too many other pleasures to absorb, the feathery feel of verdant spring air, the overhead sun sparkling off the opaque glass of skyscrapers, the promise of Starshine’s caress only hours away. Larry settles onto a vacant park bench on the shaded side of the footpath and smiles at an elderly woman feeding bread crusts to the pigeons. She wears too much lipstick and her hair is hidden under a lime-green kerchief, but somehow, at the end of this magic morning, even she is beautiful. Even the image of Rita Blatt henpecking her boyfriend is beautiful. It is this sensation, this moment of omnipresent promise, that Larry has striven to capture in his prose.

  He often asks himself why writers write, other writers, good-looking established luminaries who no longer have anything to prove, anything to gain, but sitting in Battery Park on a fair summer’s day, he fully understands their motivation. They long to capture the ephemeral bliss of the fleeting moment, the sun’s rays twinkling on the freshly cut grass. They yearn to trap the tapering gleam in an old woman’s eyes, to preserve her faded beauty like a rose petal pressed under a book, to give future generations a particular midday stroll, a purple butterfly, a young mother pushing a perambulator beneath a blushing red maple. Larry reflect
s upon all of the dogged, driven men and women throughout the city, throughout time, composing in longhand, running quill over parchment, blotting ink, upon their obsession, upon their self-doubt, upon Whitman crossing the Brooklyn ferry, upon Melville harpooning in his musty rooming house, upon Ziggy Borasch struggling for one perfect sentence, upon Anne Frank in her garret and Gramsci in his cell, upon the blind Joyce and the blind Homer and Heller Keller before her desktop Remington, all mulish, all muddling, all fighting the dark phantoms of boredom and fatigue and isolation. And for what? An old woman, a butterfly, a flock of craven pigeons? Not that. Of course, not that. Not even for a girl named Starshine. They dream of something grander, something immutable, something to transcend their own hunger and want and sacrifice. They dream of immortality.

  Larry senses that he will soon be among the immortals, that his name and Starshine’s will forever be imprinted in the collective conscience of Western Civilization, vividly, indelibly, their names intertwined like so many lovers of yore. He reaches into his breast pocket for a cigarette, determined to prolong his reverie, to keep the Dutch waiting if necessary, when he recoils at the realization that somewhere, maybe on the plaza before the Whitman statue, maybe while placating Ziggy Borasch, most likely bare chested on the parapet, but possibly anywhere, absolutely anywhere in a city of nine thousand thoroughfares and eight million people, his everlasting glory has met an untimely death. Somewhere, anywhere, he has lost his letter from Stroop & Stone.

  CHAPTER 5

  BY LARRY BLOOM

  Floral shops are the last havens of masculinity.

  The act of raising flowers, of trellising roses, of laying out begonia beds and watering window-box petunias, also the art of arrangement, of melting paraffin into silver vases, edging nosegays with paper frills, weaving wreaths and chaplets, fashioning corsages and sprays, transforming isolated clippings into breathtaking mosaics—all of these endeavors bespeak the feminine. But for the brief interval when Mother Nature’s magical blossoms lie constrained in tepid water, packed together like refugees behind a merchant’s counter, each flower bears the frown of subservience, the imprimatur of commerce, which defines it as a serf to the patrimony.

  Starstine knows that truth about floral shops: that they are more virile than smoke-filled conference rooms, more exclusive than the floors of the stock exchange, more macho than conventions of Hells Angels at interstate truck stops. They are American’s answer to Victorian drawing rooms. For the purchase of cut flowers anticipates candlelit dinners, hospital stays, theatrical productions, memorial services, promotion banquets, share holders’ meetings, honeymoons, hearses, hours in seedy motel rooms, days in probate court, the full retinue and regalia of things men orchestrate, men pay for, men rely upon, the things men crave when they send women anonymous love notes, as though each time a man buys a woman a bouquet, he experiences a minor orgasm. No glass ceiling, in Starshine’s view, is as impregnable, as the rolling doors of the floral display cabinet. Maybe that is why she has grown to dread flowers.

  She has been inside Blooming Grove on two prior occasions. Once, at the behest of her aunt, to purchase white lilies for her uncle’s grave site; the other time, to plead with the Armenian proprietor to cease dispatching a dozen long-stemmed red roses every hour, on the hour. Both visits traumatized her. The lilies proved to be as scarce as the roses were abundant. If the florist seemed perturbed that a bouquet of mixed spring flowers, irises and daffodils, wouldn’t substitute for the lilies, the prospect that anyone might turn down virgin roses at $62.50 a dozen, especially when they came in crystal vases nuzzled by asparagus ferns and hypericum clippings, turned out to be beyond his comprehension. He seemed to think that the clockwork delivery was part of some familial dispute, maybe even a legal matter. Her request yielded to his entrepreneurial instincts, to the fear that he might open himself up to breach of contract litigation. But if Starshine can take on the Dolphin Credit Union, she heartens herself, if she can establish her footing in the arena of high finance, then she can stand up to this Armenian peddler and buy her fruit basket. At least, she hopes she can.

  The proprietor allows her little time to adjust to the steamy, pollen-rich air of the shop. He is stocky, bearded, his broad forearms jutting from rolled shirtsleeves, a pencil stub balanced above his ear. He is on the far side of forty, the near side of seventy; his craggy, sun-dried skin defies further precision. The man could easily pass as an extra from Zorba the Greek. Starshine is his only customer at midmorning. He saunters forward, wiping his palms on his chlorophyll-stained apron and then rubbing them together like an overzealous butcher at some dubious abattoir, sizing up his patron’s limitations and possibly her market potential. Starshine steps backward at his advance.

  “How can I help you this morning, my dear young lady?” he asks, his voice rising as he speaks like the call to some exotic house of worship. “It is a long time we haven’t seen you.”

  “I need a gourmet fruit basket,” Starshine explains. “To bring to a nursing home.”

  “A basket for a nursing home,” repeats the florist. “Baskets we have. Many, many baskets. I do hope your loved one is not too ill. “

  “Not too ill,” retorts Starshine. “All I need is a fruit basket. I’m in a hurry. “

  She glances at the wall clock to emphasize her time constraints. She does happen to be in a hurry. She is due at the Children’s Fund at noon, but her primary fear is that she will become the sole repository for the florist’s pent-up longings and stymied ambitions. Men have the noxious habit of unburdening themselves to her, exposing their secrets and frustrations and anxieties with the zeal of a colporteur unloading religious tracts, confiding their gambling debt and the injustice of their child support payments and the final moment of their dying parents. The men who do this are often middle aged, often small-time clerks, often the sort of self-styled undiscovered geniuses who, under different circumstances, might dabble with necromancy or National Socialism. They are lonely souls who have no one to talk to, men for whom a brief intimate conversation with an intoxicating young woman is their only available substitute for casual sex. Starshine genuinely feels sorry for these men, for the widowed token clerk at the Nassau Avenue station, for the pockmarked dairy-counter attendant at the Safeway, for the Armenian florist, but not sorry enough to indulge them. That way lies madness and stalking.

  The proprietor lifts a segment of the countertop and instructs her to follow. They pass through a narrow corridor, lined with potted African violets and bags of fertilizer, emerging into a stale, cedar-paneled chamber which does double service as both work chamber and stockroom. A carpenter’s bench runs along the far wall; metal trays and plant stands clutter the entryway, also block the emergency exit; desiccated spider plants and wandering Jews hang from the exposed rafters. The unfinished floor is littered with wood chips and an array of empty clay pots. The room stands as a testament to the green thumb’s Jekyll and Hyde existence, the grisly underbelly of sacrifice which makes possible the grandeur out front.

  “So we need a sixty-five-dollar gourmet basket,” says the Armenian.

  “Forty-five,” objects Starshine. “Forty-five is my upper limit.”

  Her host flashes her an almost hostile grin; she can see the points of his canines.

  “I must have misheard you, my dear young lady,” he says. “But forty-five, sixty-five, no matter. I’m sure your loved one will appreciate the thought as much as the deed.”

  It is questionable whether Aunt Agatha will be in any condition to appreciate either. The woman is eighty-one years old, permanently bedridden, marginally cognizant of the outside world. Her sole source of pleasure, other than the feel of fruit, is to sneak an illicit cigarette and puff herself to a head rush through her tracheotomy. A twenty-five-dollar minibasket might meet her needs. But Agatha Hart does have her moments of lucidity, those spells when the old battle-ax is liable to grill the nurse’s aides on the precise dimensions of Starshine’s offering, and Aunt Agatha, her surrog
ate mother through all those years of adolescent turbulence, is the only family Starshine has left. She’s worth forty-five dollars. If Starshine had the money, if she could raise the money, Aunt Agatha would be worth sixty-five dollars, sixty-five thousand dollars. Starshine entertains the thought of marrying Colby Parker and expending his entire fortune on guavas and grapefruits, sending dear Agatha into eternity with the entire national citrus crop, but her aunt would be much happier with a forty-five-dollar basket and the continued independence of her niece. And so, for that matter, would Starshine.

  The Armenian settles onto a wooden crate and examines the tags on various gourmet baskets. His shirt slides up when he bends forward, exposing a back of dark brown moles and tufts of gray hair. Starshine stares down into his bald spot. She is conscious that he is a larger man than she had first thought, that he has planted his body between her and the corridor. This is a neurotic concern, she knows.

  The proprietor is harmless. A charlatan, yes. Possibly even a letch. But not a rapist. She tries to focus her attention on fruit.

  “A nursing home, you said. Forty-five dollars. “

  “That’s right.”

  “You can’t include wine for forty-five dollars. Are you sure you couldn’t stretch to sixty?”

  “My aunt doesn’t drink.”

  “Your aunt doesn’t drink,” echoes the proprietor. “Myself, I take a glass of retsina every morning. It stills the nerves. How about figs and dates? Does your aunt have a sweet tooth?”

  “I was hoping for something with fresh fruit. My aunt isn’t actually going to eat the fruit, she’s just going to feel it. “

  The proprietor nods knowingly. “All is now clear, my dear young lady,” he says. “Fruit to feel. Nectarines, apricots, carambola. For fifty-five, I can throw in a pineapple. “