“Perfect,” says Starshine. “But no pineapple.”
“As you wish, but it’s a lucky pineapple.”
“A lucky pineapple?” Starshine hears herself asking.
“That’s right. Strong genetic stock. Most of your pineapples these days come out of Thailand or the Philippines, but this is an Hawaiian pineapple. Among the luckiest fruit in the world. Maybe your aunt will appreciate it. “
“No, thank you.”
Starshine searches for a path around the Armenian, but there is no easy escape. She does not wish to be rude. She does not want to flee without her purchase. He has swiveled to face her, the cellophane-wrapped basket resting on his wide lap, his hands braced against the edge of the crate as though he might pounce. This is monologue stance: Starshine has endured it before. Although she doesn’t know the content, at least the specific content, she anticipates the form. It will be long. It will be pointless. It will be painful.
“So few young men and women these days appreciate the significance, the truly earth-shattering significance, of genetics,” declares the Armenian. “At least, not the genetics of fortune. They’re worried about curing this disease, about that disease, about birth defects, about AIDS, but nobody takes any interest in the biology of fortune. Did you know, my dear young lady, that good luck is an inherited characteristic?”
Starshine shakes her head. She scans the carpenter’s bench for scissors, garden shears, any instrument with which she can defend herself if the Armenian’s verbal assault deteriorates into attempted foreplay. This has also happened before. One minute, she was suffering through a discourse on the panacean qualities of the Nagami kumquat, and the next thing she knew, the Chinese grocer has his hand between her thighs.
“Your ignorance does not surprise me, my dear young lady,” continues the Armenian. “You are not offended by my use of the word ignorance, are you?” My words are limited. I was born in a different country. In another world. My name is Kalhhazian. John Kalkhazian. And I may call you …?”
“Starshine.”
There are no potential weapons on the carpenter’s bench, only a paper cutter.
“A pretty name, Starshine. Well, Starshine, it saddens me profoundly that so few Americans, especially younger Americans, appreciate the gravity of genetics. I will venture that you don’t even know your own genes, that you’ve never explored the fate in your own gene pool. “
Starshine shakes her head again. She wishes she knew how to deal with these situations. She wishes she were Eucalyptus. That she were Jack Bascomb. That she were a man.
“I happen to carry a matching set of good luck genes. The odds against a pair are one in one hundred, maybe one in one thousand. This in itself seems like a testament to my good fortune, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sure.”
“Lady luck smiles on me. I’ve survived a jet crash, a bout of malaria. My wife and daughters died in the crash, but I walked away without a scratch. I just stepped out onto the tarmac in Ankara. Even the paramedics said it was a miracle. I started going to church to thank Saint Gregory. But then I had some tests done, official medical tests, and I found out about my chromosomes. I can show you the proof.”
The proprietor reaches into the folds of his apron and shoves three faded, time-scarred pages into Starshine’s hands. They are written in Armenian. She feigns interest, examines them closely, and returns them to her captor.
“They’re not in English, of course,” he explains, “so unfortunately you can’t read them. But you do understand their significance, I hope. My genes are as lucky as those of an Hawaiian pineapple. I will live to be one hundred fifteen and die peacefully in my sleep. It is all part of the genetic blueprint. “
The Armenian rises suddenly, pushing himself forward off the bench, and Starshine cringes in advance of the blows—but they do not come. Instead he stuffs his paperwork back into his apron and hands her the fruit basket. “Are you sure I can’t interest you in a pineapple, my dear young lady? They’re very lucky fruit. “
“Okay,” Starshine agrees readily. “I’ll take it.”
Her entire body relaxes. He isn’t a predator after all, just a benign crank. He looks so pathetically harmless with his dress shirt half-tucked. Now she regrets suspecting him, feels awful about his dead wife and daughters. Of course, she’ll buy his pineapple. It is the least she can do. She is afraid she may burst into tears. She follows the forlorn man back into the empty display room and scrounges in her pockets for the last of Hannibal Tuck’s offering. She is running low on cash, but this is nothing new. Poverty is old hat to Starshine. Money was meant to be spent.
“Thank you for listening to me, my dear Starshine,” says the Armenian. “You brought me much joy this morning. So few young people have time to listen. Especially to an old man like me. I hope your pineapple will bring you and your aunt much great luck. “
“I hope so too.”
“Promise me you will come back again.”
“Scout’s honor,” lies Starshine. “I promise.”
She has already decided that she will never return again. To do so would be indiscreet, even cruel. The old man needs a confidante, probably a lover, but there are some things she knows she will never have it in her to give. Maybe, she finds herself musing, without any conviction, the Armenian’s good luck gene is some sort of late-onset phenomena that will bring him fame and fortune in his golden years. Maybe he’ll become the Grandma Moses of the flower industry. She wouldn’t begrudge him the prosperity. If she were an over-the-hill Armenian florist trapped in a life of isolation and routine, she’d also probably subscribe to pseudo-scientific theories, and believe in the genetic luck of pineapples, and lecture pretty young women. But she isn’t.
She is Starshine. She is in her prime. She is a spring beauty carrying a fruit basket through the heart of Greenpoint. The day still spreads out before her like an endless starscape, like a Whitman poem, its possibilities infinite, an entire city holding its breath in anticipation. Her crises melt under the noonday sun. She balances the fruit basket on her head and she feels like Carmen Miranda. Like a celebrity. Like the sort of woman for whom ships are launched, for whom kingdoms are imperiled, for whom epic literature is composed.
And she is.
PART II
THE BELLY OF THE AFTERNOON
MUNICIPAL PLAZA
Although Gotham takes pride in never sleeping, thrives on a reputation as the arbiter of “making it,” and secretly considers itself the only world-class city west of Paris, in one respect the hemisphere’s unofficial capital lags behind even the average elementary school: New York City does not have a lost and found. This omission reflects a conscious decision on the part of the municipal power brokers, their concession to the unforgiving doctrine of logistical impossibility, an admission that some municipal services were created more equal than others. It is marvel enough, they argue, in a city of eight million residents, in five boroughs claiming more Jews than Jerusalem, more Italians than Venice, more Puerto Ricans than San Juan, that the trash is collected twice weekly and the traffic signals function and the offtrack betting parlors are inspected on a semiregular basis. A lost and found would be the boondoggle of a quixote. Where are the resources, the political capital, the constituent groundswell to support such a superfluous frill? It is true that, on rare occasions, having misplaced a silver tie-clip or a gold-plated cigar case, a reform-minded iconoclast on the city council will lobby zealously for the establishment of such a repository, but his fervor will last only until the next election season, when he will either abandon his cause célèbre for the higher ground of school vouchers and random drug testing, or he will awake one November morning to find himself the newly appointed vice chancellor of some outer borough community college. As a result, there will never be a meeting ground for the countless tokens and keepsakes mislaid each day on the streets of the metropolis, a place where shopping bags may socialize with children’s shoes, and plastic key chains can hobnob among fraternit
y pins, for ever since the Dutch patent-holder dropped the first calfskin glove on the cobblestones of the East River jetty, it has been determined that the city’s bereft shall be left to their own devices, compelled to rely on the kindness of strangers, while their portable property seeks shelter in the pouches of knaves or sacrifices itself for the good of the commonweal and donates its heft to the landfill. South Street and Battery Park City have been built upon the ashes of misplaced correspondence. Larry’s magic letter will not be recovered.
He performs the requisite inquiries nevertheless, calling the Maiden Lane McDonalds from a pay telephone, leaving his name with the porcine deputy at the Castle Clinton information kiosk. He emphasizes the importance of the lost letter, while stressing its purely sentimental value, strenuously insinuating that the missing envelope contains neither food stamps nor cash. It would be no skin off his nose if Stroop & Stone’s decision became public knowledge, of course, if his fate were even broadcast on the nightly news, but he understands that once the seal on the envelope has been broken, the bearer will most certainly destroy the incriminating evidence of his treasure hunt. Such is human nature. The letter will be returned either unopened or not at all. And not at all, the catchphrase of Larry’s floundering existence, seems to be the writing on the wall. He could always phone the agency and relate his misfortune. He could tell them that he was mugged, even kidnapped by bandits. Or own up to his own incompetence. They certainly wouldn’t cancel their offer on the basis of a one-time mishap; it wasn’t as though he’d lost the manuscript. Accidents happen. Yet the names Stroop & Stone are as imposing to Larry as those of Scylla and Charybdis to the most cowardly of mariners. He recollects the white parlor in his parents’ suburban home, a salon of Duncan-Phyfe chairs and Wedgewood china from which he’d been banished for the perpetuity of his childhood, so that the stately Duncan-Phyfes and delicate Wedgewoods acquired personal attributes, anthropomorphized into lords and ladies of a forbidden kingdom; similarly, the prospect of confronting the implacable Stroop and the impenetrable Stone sends seismic waves through his abdomen. He will have to write to the agency and request a second reply. He dares not brave a phone call. And that means that when he tenders his affections to Starshine this evening, in the upscale Greenwich Village bistro where he has had a table booked since late April, he will have to present himself as Larry Bloom tour guide, the author of an unpublished manuscript, one of thousands of wishful scribblers in a city of aspiring literati. She will laugh rather than swoon.
The return of the Dutch tourists forces Larry from his self-pity. They descend the gangway of the Ellis Island ferry like so many newly arrived immigrants, renewed, prepared to banish all memories of past misfortune and to explore the gold-paved streets of the welcoming metropolis. They have gorged themselves on knishes and cotton candy; they have purchased T-shirts and tote bags. Many of the older couples have bonded over sepia photographs of peasant families and have pooled their outrage at the immodest group showers in the delousing stations, so they are now able to exchange snapshots of their nieces and nephews in the recklessness of timeworn friendship. Van Huizen, a coffee-table book tucked under one arm, is resolutely talking the ear off a wizened specimen sporting an inverted collar. The priest cups his hand around his ear as though riveted by his companion’s knowledge. Only when the pair advances down the boardwalk to the information kiosk, the historian rambling, the cleric smiling in complete serenity, does Larry surmise the truth: Van Huizen’ disciple has turned off his hearing aid. The Dutchman has found the ideal audience. That is a minor blessing, Larry thinks. The last thing he needs on such a bleak afternoon is a blue-streaker poking at his buttonholes. He is waiting for the last of the stragglers to congregate in a half circle when Rita Blatt prods him in the ribs with the point of her umbrella. Larry suddenly wishes he too were hard of hearing.
“I have a couple of questions I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she ventures. “I figure I better grill you now, or I’m liable to forget. You know how it is. I once interviewed this woman who compulsively adopts foster grandchildren, more than a hundred at one time or another, and I got so caught up in her photo albums that I didn’t inquire whether she had any children of her own. I had to write around the matter and it left a glaring hole at the heart of my story. So, if you don’t mind, can you tell me the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to you on the touring circuit?”
“Oh Lord,” answers Larry. “I have no idea. It’s pretty much your run-of-the-mill, nine-to-five job until you get fired or decapitated by a traffic light. Will you let me think about it?”
“Think, think, think. Take as much time as you need. I’ll lob you another one while you’re combing that old gray matter. A more personal question. You won’t mind, will you? Some people get all huffy when you start asking about their private lives. They don’t understand that it’s nothing personal, that I’m just doing my job as a reporter as best I can. But like I was saying … Have you ever developed a—what shall I call it—a romantic attachment to one of your customers? Some pretty young girl from some exotic land?”
“Never,” says Larry. “That would be against company policy.”
“That is too bad,” says Rita, still smiling. “It would have made such good copy. But the day is still young. One never knows what will happen on the streets of the Big Old Apple. That’s the amazing thing about New York, isn’t it? Of course you already know that. Why else would you have become a tour leader?”
“It pays the bills,” Larry answers curtly. “And some things never happen.”
He turns from Rita to his charges and addresses them in the slow, stentorian, pseudo-conversational tone that is the dialect of his trade. He strives to walk the tightrope between the official and the officious, imparting information without intimating ignorance, to convince his hardy Dutch burghers that he is knowledgeable, witty, hardworking, that he is a replica of themselves, albeit on a minor scale, and that is therefore worthy of a generous gratuity. It is all artifice, stratagem. He meets their expectations halfway. Lurking deep within their consciences, of course, beneath their benevolent transfixion, is the knowledge that their leader cannot be what he appears, that he must harbor his own longings and sordid fantasies, yet—in the way that grammar school pupils hold their teachers upon the loftiest pedestals of purity and compassion, even after they develop doubts—the Dutch burghers steadfastly refuse to be disappointed. Larry’s thoughts can drift through self-pity and self-hatred, even toward suicide, as long as his legs carry them past city hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge. It is an arrangement of mutual convenience.
The mercury has risen into the eighties by midday and as the tour group puts distance between itself and the waterfront, Larry leading backward like some crab chieftain at the helm of a crustacean pilgrimage, ties are loosened and sleeves are rolled up. Even these decorous Dutch burghers, immune to the forces of lust that prey upon the lesser souls in the park, cannot withstand the unrelenting prowess of heat. Perspiration trumps decorum; comfort conquers convention. Larry loosens his collar in front of the gates of Saint Paul’s Church during his discussion of the Great Fire of 1776, incorporating the move into his description of the rising flames, as he has done so many time before, simulating the illusion that he is acting on his guests’ behalf and not his own. Then he leads his charges up lower Broadway, past the ornate vertical thrust of the Woolworth Building, onto the manicured green at the foot of city hall. There is no longer a teenage temptress to inspire his lectures, to enkindle his passions, so he toes the straight and narrow path of the official guidebook: His Dutch will hear that city hall was constructed at the outermost fringe of development in 1811; that the northern side of the structure was finished with common brownstone, rather than marble, because no self-respecting New Yorker was ever expected to stroll beyond Chambers Street. They will not learn that Mayor Jimmy Walker built the twin marble staircases inside for two underage sisters he met at a speakeasy. Larry’s pockets are empty; sweat glues his shirt
to his shoulder blades. He senses the indifference in his voice, his hackneyed anecdotes that boast all the verve of chewed string, but does it really matter? The words of Whitman and Melville may live long after their bridges and wharves have crumbled, but his own utterances will soon lie buried like those of some muted Milton in a country churchyard. He is neither a poet nor a lover, but only a paid hack. As much of a sham as Snipe or Van Huizen. Maybe even more so. They possess the power of self-delusion. He doesn’t even have that poultice. Who in God’s name does he think he’s going to fool?
Larry crosses Park Row, ambles up Spruce Street and makes an offhanded reference to the welded-copper monument on the facade of Pace University’s main building. It is Henri Nachemia’s masterpiece, the sculptor’s lustrous tribute to The Brotherhood of Man. If only such a consoling fraternity actually existed! But Larry recognizes the bitter truth, knows it as well as he knows the back alleys and unmarked byways of the traffic knot south of Dover Street, understands that the city is nobody’s friend and that daily life is not the labor of love that leads one toward some sublime and exalted pinnacle of self-actualization, but merely a tedious and malignant struggle for survival. At least for him. A handful of anointed souls rise above the humdrum and the fray, but these are good-looking men, talented men, men who are conspicuously not Larry Bloom. The greater part of humanity lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation and die unnoticed. These, at least, are Larry’s bitter thoughts at the moment. Yet even he is surprised, if confirmed in his own worst suspicions, when he rounds the corner of Gold Street and spies, smack in the middle of the municipal workers’ parking lot, belly-up like a beached porpoise in the sun, a white-faced and wide-eyed human corpse.
Larry sees the body over Van Huizen’s shoulder and breaks off his spiel in midsentence. Although he has never seen a dead man before, not even at a funeral, his instincts tell him that the victim is long past hope. There’s something finite in the man’s heavenly gaze, something rigid in the thick arms reaching for his throat. Larry pushes his way quickly through his entourage. He bends over the body and instinctively checks for a carotid pulse. It is an exercise in futility. The sorry fool before him has died unnoticed, like so many others, and neither his ritzy pocket watch nor double-breasted suit have made his death any more memorable. A rich, portly man has died and must now struggle to pass through the eye of a needle. It is sad. It is inevitable. It is life. And yet somehow, as Larry rolls the cadaver to its side, he feels a whole lot better. Not because he is alive and this other man is dead; he is not that heartless. It is rather that the deceased businessman exudes a certain placidity, even a refined composure, which reminds Larry that death is not a negative, but a neutral. If Larry does not achieve immortality through prose, he will never know what he has missed. He will never suffer.
The Biology of Luck Page 9