I started off toward Central Park South with Paul’s notes, that purple folder, in my hands; even if I wasn’t going to read them, it paid to be polite.
“So you’re going to just walk?”
I stopped without turning back toward the speaker, the voice. “I have fewer plans than you, I guess.” I meant this multiply.
Leather soles echoed across the pavement as Garrett caught up to me. “You know,” he said, “there is one other thing I’d meant to discuss. It wouldn’t take long.”
I waited.
“Just about the drawings—or really the people you’d be drawing for me.”
I held my gaze.
“You’re going to need to meet them soon, right?”
I wondered why he hadn’t brought this up earlier. Did he, for some odd reason, need me alone to get into this? I let him elaborate as we turned with Columbus Circle and lurched toward the Athletic Club, the Ritz, and the rest of it. At certain times of day or night, I could still enjoy surveying this part of New York, even if whatever it once was—what it was in life, so to speak—now felt lost to the past in the way of grand churches. While I indulgently eyed the façades, Garrett, rather than saying whatever it was he had to say, locked onto the same altercation that was apparently still in progress down the street. It seemed to have reignited a couple of blocks down Broadway this time: squad cars crept slowly behind the toughs, expelling them from the neighborhood, when the men stopped and began barking madly.
If earlier it seemed gauche to inquire about Garrett’s fascination with this standoff of no account, the embers of which, in fairness, didn’t appear to want to die, now it felt almost obligatory to press the question.
“Do—”
“Look. At him.” My client’s voice was so sharp he had to throw me an apologetic glance. I imagined this was how he spoke to Antral workers when, at some critical juncture, a discovery was made in the lab that no-one could have predicted. “Look!”
There the men were, reconstituted as a group a few hundred yards south, but with elements missing: only a Latino and two blacks remained, along with the same three police officers—two blacks and a Latino. Was it this new symmetry that stirred Garrett, and indeed me, inasmuch as I found myself unthinkingly following him down Broadway? I too must have desired closer acquaintance with this shouting match, a street tableau that was, for me, like a home away from home, the Bronx in miniature delivered to tourist central.
This second encounter, though, had a certain jocularity missing from the first. The two parties seemed to be enjoying laughing at each other, embroiled in the sort of spirited trash-talk of pick-up games between veteran streetballers. One of the blacks—not tall but powerfully built, with square shoulders and fat calves—he pivoted toward us and gave a prolonged, gravelly chuckle while making and unmaking his fists repeatedly. Ugly possibilities invaded my mind, just as they did in the small hours on the trains in my neighborhood or out in the less manicured parts of Brooklyn: nightmarish imagery followed by a keen queasiness. Rarely were any of these morbid scenarios realized, of course, but that didn’t neutralize their value. That such scenes were so liberally activated in my mind created a margin for error, engraining broad patterns of alertness that proved their worth precisely when your luck finally gave out, as it had to at some point. It was a feeling, this generalized dread in certain company, you couldn’t readily admit to in Manhattan, though in the Bronx it was genuine common sense, a preservation instinct more secure than any principle of fairness. It was, you could say, the principle of life itself, and it operated most effectively when it was most unjust, that is, entirely indifferent to the moral categories of responsibility and blame. To have a problem with it, I knew, was to have a problem with existence itself.
But the thing about this man Garrett singled out for my attention, this well-muscled black man in fiery clothing—yellow chinos, an orange button-down with a collar so narrow it seemed about to burst, and a silvery tie hanging loosely around his neck, the knot near his solar plexus—the thing about this man who shone under the lights of a boutique clothier, lights that set his yellow teeth on fire like the rest of him... well, for a little while, I didn’t know how to complete this thought. Its substance seemed to evaporate while my mind kept flipping through a book of pictures, searching for something, I wasn’t sure what. Then, all at once, I grasped Garrett’s interest: the man appeared, not in the face, but in his general disposition, which was locked up in his posture and trunk, like someone we both knew, or were hoping to.
“Duke.”
“Yes!”
“The feel of him.”
“Well, yeah, it’s not him,” said Garrett rather defensively. Was he worried I’d think him a racist? “The shape, though. The feeling.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you notice him? Earlier, I mean, when we were at the table?”
“Not exactly.”
“But you were walking down this way afterward. Why?”
I shrugged.
“To get a closer look?”
I shrugged again. He was smiling.
Our ersatz Duke was smiling, too, even offering his hand to the officers when one of those big fists unfurled into a giant claw that gave the impression, even more than the fist, of terrible strength. But the Latino officer, so broad that the movement of his arms was restricted by the navy fabric of his uniform, had no interest in this ambiguous gesture. No, he was snarling at the man in Spanish, while the other two miscreants remained a few steps behind. Duke, though, as if he’d taken on the spokesman’s role, kept on laughing in his low, rolling, malignant way, and jutting his hand further forward. Finally one of the black officers—this one had a curious pencil mustache that gave his face (but only his face) the incongruous Prince-like air of a dandy—smacked Duke’s hand when it grew too close for his liking. Yet the outsized appendage barely budged: Duke had converted it into a fist just before the strike. Immediately after he unfolded his fingers, recreating that gesture of peace which was also a taunt, coupled to a smile that was also a grimace. The insult in all of this was so pronounced, I knew it couldn’t be the first run-in between these two men. Such familiarity may have been why the officers hadn’t yet made any arrests for disturbing the peace or the like, although the crowd had also grown since we’d walked down from Columbus Circle, and aggression without more serious provocation might have made for bad optics. The Latino cop spoke with quiet, coded venom to his ethnic counterpart on the other side of the law. Duke wasn’t listening; he’d turned around to face the other black in his own crew, the one that wasn’t anything like him, tiny and anxious.
Finally, Duke turned back to address the muttering cop: “I don’t know what you’re saying to me. I don’t. What about English? Want to try it?”
But the cop kept spewing Latinate invective. Nothing Duke could say would stanch the flow. And all the while, Garrett beamed beside me.
“So, I think we’re just going to go,” Duke said to his adversaries. “At this point, yes. Thank you. Thank you for your beautiful words.” He waved both his hands, those giant frightening things, high above his chest, which gave the false impression that the cops had ordered him to surrender. Slowly he retreated this way, walking backwards down a nearby alley between a Greek diner and an oversized Irish bar, a smile on his face built from thick pink lips. His cohort quickly mirrored him and the group proceeded in a synchronized dance of mock capitulation.
The Latino cop was unappeased by this routine. The vulgarities began to flow more freely, though the volume sank in a way that signaled greater intensity, not less. Duke’s cadences, I’d noticed, hadn’t corresponded to his crass dress: they were precise, carefully modulated, quite close to proper English. If you’d heard him over the phone, you couldn’t be sure he wasn’t white. Some blacks were like this. It would have granted him access to markets in which a more authentic black might have a harder time selling his wares. For all I knew, it was this business, his trade with whites in prosperous areas, that had drawn police notice, whereas when his deal-making stayed black or Puerto Rican, as in the Bronx, where there was no human involved, as some say, the authorities’ appetite for upholding the law would have been rather less keen. I should know. I’d seen brazen drug deals in diners where rocks sat right on the table with the food. Nobody cared.
Again images pressed in on me, suffused my mind. I didn’t have to try to conjure anything, nor exercise my imagination in the least, to see this man not only as a stand-in for Duke but as one of those mid-level dealers, the kind who, even while knowing better, was congenitally incapable of passing on flash, and had no way of not skimming off the top and crossing the big fish.
The Latino officer’s mustache—Lopez, his badge said; he’d been so compelling I hadn’t bothered to look for a name until now—Lopez’s mustache, which curved over his top lip so that it partly obscured the action of his mouth as he spoke, shone from all the spittle of his words. Really it was the only thing preventing foam from forming there. He was being counseled by his partners, entreated in the way one might coax a suicide down off the ledge. The spotlight was on all three of them now, with Duke’s arms raised high, his eyes big, all in mock fear, though you had to be quite close to discern the mockery. For much of the crowd it would have read as genuine. Lopez was furious with the ploy, so the spittle kept flying. His two partners were evidently keen on leaving the scene without making any arrests, which would have looked all wrong now, however justified detention may have been, on various grounds.
The three toughs kept backing away, beyond where we could see, into the small alley only the cops could peer down. Lopez’s anger, so intense it had become mute—he was now only mouthing the words—slowly made the extraordinary transition into laughter: soft and knowing at first, though quickly building to bilious peals that rang out into the night. Lopez would catch himself now and then to jeer at the urchins in heavily inflected English—he could speak it after all: “Get out, okay? Get out. You understand. I can see you understand.” The uniformed blacks flanking him, originally intent on calming or even restraining their apoplectic comrade, gazed deeply into the alley and themselves began to chuckle and snort with relief. Lopez had relented. What had Duke and his crew done to change his mind? It was a mystery Garrett and I weren’t going to solve, as squad cars on either side had blocked off the area from pedestrians. By the time the officers had gotten into their cars and we were let through, Duke and his cronies were gone.
Garrett pursed his lips and nodded, as though we’d been watching a play with an ambiguous ending and had been left to draw our own conclusions while the audience dispersed. Something like the same look was on the faces of several others we passed while retracing our steps up Broadway, back toward the park and the fountain at the Circle glowing gold in front of us.
“Did you see the size of the crowd, how it just spontaneously formed? People know a good thing when they see one, don’t they?” Garrett rubbed his fingers together and sighed, turning it all over in his head, his eyes half-closed in meditation. “And the officers won, in the end, without even resorting to force—just Spanish swears! Did you understand any of those? I wish I had.”
We reached the edge of the park and turned eastward onto CPS without speaking, threading our way through the usual mess of tourists, hansom cab hustlers, and the well-to-do, this last in glinting tuxedos and gowns: probably they’d just let out at Lincoln Center and they were on their way back to their hotels.
“You know the thing about the real Duke?” asked Garrett after a long silence. “He’s a guy from Cal. That’s where it all starts for me. You must’ve been wondering, why this guy. Were you?”
I nodded vaguely while tramping along the cobblestone.
“It’s funny, I never paid attention to the football team when I was there, on campus—not until my senior year, and even then it was only because Martine, my girlfriend, dragged me to a couple of home games. Very smart girl. Very sad one, in the end. We’ve lost touch. But for whatever reason, she found sitting in the bleachers therapeutic, the simplicity of watching it all unfold on the field, and she was sure I would as well, so far from home, so lost in testing chemical reactions, in making things instead of observing them. That’s why I was so unhappy, she thought. I forget now what really was bothering me back then. It might’ve been her, actually. It was certainly hard opening myself up like that, to science, I mean. I was brought up straight, Baptist. But why’d I go all the way to Berkeley if I wasn’t trying to see what else was out there?
“Martine was right, though. Rooting without a thought in your head, against Stanford and UCLA, and obviously USC. The throng, the thrum of the band. The pure heat of the crowd, even on a cold day. The bond you could feel on game days, with Berkeley students, so-called radical individualists—not me, personally, though maybe back then I could talk myself into thinking that was the answer. To me, the stadium just felt deeper to me than any classroom, all those ideas we had of ourselves, non-conformists and whatnot. And ever since college, well, I’ve loved the bleachers. There is just nothing like observation. I should’ve known that, as a scientist. But it was Martine, the actress, who showed me.
“We got blown out by Oklahoma in the first game I saw. Absolutely torched. But who cares? Who cared? The QB that year was a savant, Polazzio. He played backup for the Texans until a few years ago, but he went fifth in the draft that year. He struggled in the pros. That can happen. But he was a magician at Cal, I can tell you. He’s what led us to Aaron Rodgers, you know that? And Goff. He’s turned out okay. A QB has partly got to be a thinking man, doesn’t he? Why shouldn’t he go to Berkeley? Anyway, Polazzio threw some lasers in that game with the Sooners, but they ran right over us, huge O-line, classic Oklahoma team. Nothing you can do about it, sometimes. We were meant to lose.”
As he talked, the Hampshire, the Ritz, and then the Plaza slipped past us, though we were walking on the park side, tasting the straw and horse droppings in the air until we met that gaudy gold yankee on horseback at Fifth Avenue—Sherman, of course. I hated to look at him, so I didn’t. We cut back across CPS and sat on a bench in Grand Army Plaza not far from the single-screen Paris Theater and its marquee, which presented a young Eurasian woman superimposed onto the Great Steppe. For a little while we listened to the water gurgle behind us in the Pulitzer Fountain.
“The best pure talent from Cal in a decade, at any position, even QB,” Garrett carried on. “And I should know: ever since Polazzio, I’ve followed them as closely as I follow anything. Duke especially, these last years.” Apparently our friend could remake a game from the receiver position, but he, like Polazzio, precursor to Rodgers, was a riddle. “Did you get that from the game tape? I hope so.” He turned away before I could answer and continued expounding at a more languid pace as the air sharpened. Plays drawn up for Duke were simple: send him on a slant or a go or a post and just toss it up to him. Give him the time he needed to get there—that was pretty much it. He had a habit of getting to the spot in roundabout ways, not clean routes. But in the critical moment, when the ball first became catchable, he was there ahead of anyone else, even off a ricochet, or with someone grabbing his mask or gouging at his eyes. “He made Hail Marys seem like smart play-calling.” That was true to what I’d seen, too, not the exaggeration it sounds like. But that unruly energy he flashed on the field followed him right off it. He’d been quite the presence at Berkeley. “He’s a kind of cult figure, almost,” Garrett nearly whispered. “Hard to read, I guess. He would have gone early in the draft if it weren’t for the baggage. Not just girls and substances, though there was that. There was the stuff he wrote, too: the strange essays he’d turn in for class. They’re almost rants.”
As with all college athletes of promise, there were “irregularities” surrounding Duke’s studies. Physics and chem, for instance. Wouldn’t everyone avoid that stuff if they could? Garrett shrugged as he said this. But as far as the social sciences went—economics, anthro, government—Duke was thought very capable, even if that didn’t save his professors from exasperation when he more or less made up his own syllabi. Duke was stubborn. He knew exactly what he had. Athletics meant entitlement—so why shouldn’t he take advantage? “He missed out on the draft because of all the red flags, but someone was bound to take a chance on him eventually. His talent’s too alluring not to. Players have done a hell of a lot worse than him—out-and-out criminal stuff—and gotten signed in the end, when the media moved on to other scandals.”
Garrett’s expression brightened. He picked up a few pebbles from between the red and gray cobblestones at our feet and lazily side-armed the largest of them, snapping his wrist like someone accustomed to throwing a ball, right into the basin rippling toward us, circles radiating, as the water flowed in from the fountain. “The Bears. You like the Bears? The Chicago ones—my team. That’s who picked up Duke in the off-season. Isn’t that just perfect? That man’s energy, the one we just saw, I mean—” he turned around and pointed back toward Broadway “—walking away with his hands up like that. Toying with the refs, right? That man’s energy, that’s Duke’s energy—on my team. That’s what got me out of my seat at the restaurant. We would’ve eaten if it wasn’t for that.” Garret’s arms dropped to his sides, leaving one hand dangling off the bench in a loose fist. “But even he got sent packing in the end, right? Run off. It’s hard to fool the refs for long.”
“He didn’t actually look much like Duke, though,” I offered. “Not at all, really.”
“But what does that even matter? He was still Duke. Duke the Transgressor,” he said with a touch of whimsy. “Charmed—even in a losing cause. I mean, didn’t it look for sure like those three guys were going to get it back there?” He underhanded the rest of the pebbles into the water and they landed like a shotgun blast. “But they all walked away unscathed. Duke turned a gloomy-looking thing around, didn’t he? Turned it into nothing.”
“A comeback game, I guess.”
Garrett frowned playfully and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “Oh, I think you know just what I mean, even when I don’t exactly come out and say it.” He grabbed my thigh and put his weight on it. “Now, if we could tie up that guy’s spirit with these drawings in some way—not a straight way, but some way, some way I can’t even imagine yet, but you might—wouldn’t that be something? To look at? You agree with that?”
He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and cocked his head back toward Apple’s flagship store, the formidable glass monument across the street that presented its wares more or less as MOMA did a few blocks away.
“Duke’s going to have an interesting few months with my Bears. The whole tradition—they’re hard-nosed, there will be no bullshit. Definitely not with the hell they’ve been through, all these years of mediocrity.”
He planted his hands on the wooden slats of the bench and sprung up smoothly, his natural athleticism showing, scientist or not. “I haven’t met the man, myself.” He gave me his hand and pulled me up easily. “But Paul tells me we can get to him in a hurry.”
“Where’s Martine now?” I asked as we ambled toward the church of Apple.
“Martine? I wish I could say. She went down to Los Angeles after we graduated. She wanted Hollywood and my chances were out east. I know that she ended up on the arm of a Universal executive, worked the party circuit, tried to launch herself right into the spectacle. Observation wasn’t cutting it anymore, I guess. She wanted the stage.”
“And did she get it?”
“Not really. A few tiny parts and then nothing much. Though she did marry the exec, which I thought was a mistake. I knew it would snuff out her ambitions, and it did. She got divorced. And, well, bad things can happen after that.” He flicked a glance my way. Where, I wondered, was the woman who went with that wedding band he’d been playing with? And was there anyone in his life now?
“Paul—he finds out everything in the end—he found that Martine had moved to New York a few years ago. And now... I’m stuck wondering when I’ll run right into her. Like in that park, tonight. It could happen. But my luck’s held out.”
What about the prospect of seeing her troubled him? I knew better than to ask.
“Paul knows her, then?”
“They met a couple of times in Chicago, when I’d come home from college in the summer—she was the ‘art girl’ I’d met out in woolly-headed California. I don’t think Paul cares for her much. He was skeptical even back then, and, well, he was right to be, wasn’t he? I don’t think she gave much thought to sticking with me when LA came calling. But I thought if what she really wanted was the stars, then why not take a shot? Obviously things could have played out better for her in movies, television. And Paul, I think... it’s not right, but he takes a certain pleasure in how things went for her. It’s well-meant, though, he’s a good friend.”
“A childhood friend?”
Garrett gave me a long look. He was on the cusp of answering me but opted for a question instead: “What did you make of Paul? Tell me.”
“I’ve got to read all this first, don’t I?” I held out the purple folder Paul had given me.
“Don’t take any of that stuff wrong, though, whatever you do. He’s got strong views, he always has, but then I bet you do, too.”
We found ourselves astride a kebab cart on Fifth that did business most of the night.
“Hotdog?”
I demurred.
“You want to walk down this way a little?” he asked, pointing down Fifty-Ninth Street, beyond Apple. “Just to see if we can feel its aura.”
Garrett bought himself a dirty water dog with nothing on it, ripping it away from the swarthy vendor before he could sully it with condiments that were purest sacrilege to a native Chicagoan. He stuffed this bit of carnival food into his gaping mouth as we walked past the glass cube of Apple: neither of us felt anything much. So we got onto Madison and the boutiques flashed by: Celine, Cucinelli, Ford. He pointed at them with quarter of a hotdog; it was going fast.
“These guys present themselves in the least intriguing ways, again and again: women with their bones poking every which way, rakes in too-long coats, all sipping Barolo in some crumbling villa at dusk. What a starved dream life.” He took the last bite of the dog as if to highlight the finality of his point. “Who can get absorbed by any of this, really? That question, when I walk up Madison or Fifth, that’s all I can think about. It’s not so much that the imagery is out of touch with life, because there are interesting fantasies, right? But this stuff is like a lazy impression of a capitalist paradise. They know this. They’re just trying to avoid offending anyone with a fantasy that actually appeals. The thing is, though, people buy offensive things all the time, if it’s got some force to it, even when they can full well see the offense it gives. All you have to do is look at football. Most offensive thing in the world, neurologically, socially, economically. But also terribly compelling, at its core, the power on display. And them?”—Garrett gestured back at Apple, now out of sight. “They sell a lot, yes. But the dreams they deal in are paper-thin. Anodized lifestyles. No aura at all, right? That’s not technology, not to me. I know they make a lot of money doing it, but there’s just something missing there. Nobody’s home. What I want someone to do is tell me about my insides! Apple doesn’t have any insides. We, though, we have insides, even if it’s inconvenient when it comes to marketing. You can’t wish that away. Football, that’s inside. Alcohol too. Infinite psychic enhancement, as Paul likes to put it. Movies, TV? You get the idea. Technology doesn’t have to bracket all that, take you away from your own life, put it behind glass, a screen. I mean, just think about the park.”
We went west at Sixty-Third, back toward the grand yard’s silhouetted trees and shrubs. “Even when I lived just a few blocks down the other way, I never came to the park much. I always preferred those little grassy cul-de-sacs looking out over the river. Some of them have just a single bench, a couple of trees giving shade, and then the water. No-one really uses those spots. But I could sit there by myself for hours. It’s the way I feel about Roosevelt now. A perfect desert.”
Pleased with this formulation, Garrett smiled softly and stuck his hands in his pockets as we abandoned a murderer’s row of luxury boutiques for Fifth Avenue and the sculpted verdure of Central Park.
“Doesn’t this giant yard say something about us? About how we must feel—even if we don’t usually say it out loud? The way it boxes up nature, packages it, pins it right in the middle of town for our use, as and when needed. It’s saying to us, there is nothing we cannot arrange. Because we believe that. The Greeks put their faith in other things, glory, fortune, fate. What we’ve got is control: everything in its place, ready to hand. That’s what convenience is, isn’t it? Ease? What a vantage!” He punched his palm. “See, at the end of the day, I’m a Christian man, as most of us are in this country, whether we grasp that or not. And we’ve all got a choice to make. It’s in our hands, right? What I’m after in the lab—mixing elements, seeking effects—I do the same thing on Sundays. I’m hunting enchantment. The only difference then is I’m not doing the mixing. I’m the element. But we’re still talking about reactions, emergence of the unforeseen, and so on; so we must be talking about conviction and faith, too. Because a good scientist has got to be faithful.”
Soon we came past Seventieth Street, the Frick, and by that point I started to understand why Paul had reserved his stranger faces at Sanguina for moments when Garrett got talking. In fact I knew I was making one of those faces now, going by the devilish way he looked at me, reveling in my consternation. Garrett was a bit of a philosopher, or a theologian; his Berkeley days had affected him. Not that he sounded like the usual Bay Area technologists, holding forth on white space and stoicism, or liberally tossing around words like delight, which, in the first days of our acquaintance, I was always expecting to fall from his lips. So it made sense that Paul’s response to Garrett’s ruminations was never one of listless dismissal—the kind he’d had to Karen’s words at least once, though in point of fact he’d misunderstood her. No, the looks he wore while Garrett spoke were more exasperated than that, because his boss’ meditations were hard to condescend to, having every appearance of genuine thinking, the way they confidently, even arrogantly, bypassed clichés. But not only clichés. Garrett also managed to skirt ideas that, though still living and breathing, were in line to become clichés, ideas that the mass of moderately clever people relied on, that had found a place in the elite niches of society, which is just what made them safe to deploy without fear of censure. Such notions remained just fresh enough to retain some of their imaginative force, which is to say, some of their charm.
For instance: it was today’s “thoughtful” position that Central Park represented an urban planning fantasy of having it all that was miserably myopic—we were profaning the planet’s real wilds while doting on this nugatory patch of green—and that ipso facto this delusion was a problem in need of a solution. (Never mind, of course, how many people lived happily with the idea.) Garrett welcomed the first half of the view but not the second. If I had to distill his thoughts for him, perhaps this is what he held: what we think we think is less important than what the shape of our lives reveals we actually think. Consider the park, then. The city could easily use some of this space to build more housing and shorten commutes, reducing energy consumption and pollution and protecting the broader environment, not to mention making Manhattan more affordable and humane. Yet almost two hundred years later, the park is still here, real estate is ever scarcer, and our commutes are growing. There must be something, then, about the park and merely symbolic nature that has been and still is utterly apt, whatever we might think about this fact (and ourselves).
Garrett had a habit I was growing to admire, of venturing thoughts before they were fully formed, thoughts that lacked the finer definition of more mature ideas, which often came armored in jargon and depended for their persuasive force on appeals to authority or an apparatus of endnotes. Strangely enough, in some of the things he said I felt the ghosts of such references; they gave what he said a peculiarly cogent air, for words so casual, as if there was always more learning shoring up what he said than was apparent, and it was simply modesty, along with a respect for the intelligence of his interlocutor, that prevented him from being any more explicit. This was one way to read such omissions, in any case. Another might be—as I’d felt in first talking to him on the phone—that modesty, for him, was not a courtesy or a function of good breeding but an engrained strategy for getting along in the world.
Eventually we found ourselves at Eightieth Street, with the Met looming in the dark. On past that, the Kennedy Reservoir, the giant manmade lake at the heart of the park, came into view. As did the sand on both sides of the walkway. A perfect desert, Garrett had said. I suppose I, too, was interested in what was properly elemental. For me it wasn’t about what was natural or real, the way it was for philosophers drawn to the metaphor of the desert. I thought first of the great American W.V. Quine, the kind of thinker they never taught at Cal Arts. I’d studied him on my own, and quite eagerly, too, ever since high school, when I’d picked up a worn anthology of modern philosophers, Descartes to Nietzsche, at City Lights. It was Quine, the last of the positivists, or the one who put an end to positivism, depending on how you saw it, who’d talked of his taste for desert landscapes in metaphysical matters. So he’d gone in for the simplest of ontologies, or what he thought was the simplest—an austere materialism—building up the rest of the world, all of the good and the just and the beautiful things, from that, and discarding anything that couldn’t be constructed from these materials—which is to say, most things. Elemental for me meant something else: it was that which was beyond taming. It was what was vital, you could say, so long as you understood, pace Nietzsche or Artaud, that there needn’t be anything natural or essential about vitality.
Just then, two stately women crossed over to our side of Fifth and strode beside us. They were long-limbed, African, and, I suppose, built like gazelles, if you learned to live with this phrase that emphasized what blacks could never overcome, even after they’d taken the White House—their closeness to nature, I mean, another dangerous euphemism. These fine women, only just beyond being girls, had hair out of magazines, good ones like Cereal or Aesthetica: one had hers teased out into a tender afro that swayed delicately in the breeze, and the other had put hers into tight naps just covering her head. Not once had they looked our way. Women of this kind, on Manhattan’s streets, never seemed to look directly at anyone. Where would they find their match? No, a look exchanged with another was for them almost always a bad trade. They moved just in front of us, effectively cutting us off without noticing; yet they walked with those great authoritative strides, having legs to match their uncommon height, and soon pulled away from us, we who were merely maundering in a way New York only permitted after dark. During the day, the same walk would sooner or later get you into trouble with someone. The ladies’ dresses billowed in the wind, and the lights revealed sheer and delicious fabrics in bright, flat colors that gave a vaguely Japanese impression, although, if I were to guess, the designers were probably Europeans operating in the eclectic vein, the one with no critics, because nothing was missing. How could you go wrong? For a moment, the breeze held steady on an eastern slant and made manifest the purity of the girls’ frames, wrapped in waves of luscious silk (I could tell by how it fluttered). All of this was no less appealing and alienating than a Bugatti rolling up beside you on the Lower East Side. Garrett simply pursed his lips, as if to say, Yes, I know.
It occurred to me then, seeing these ladies, that Garrett had gone on about Duke all night and yet said almost nothing about Daphne.
“Ah, well she’s just... ethereal, isn’t she. Silly word, granted. I don’t know Duke, but I can personally vouch for Daphne.”
“Have you seen her other films, besides the one?”
“And her theater work, too. I don’t think I’ve told you about that.”
“I looked her up.”
“I’ve been to those shows. Little experimental things, black boxes in Brooklyn and even Queens, these days. Not a world I spend a lot of time in—I guess that’s obvious. But my reasons for being there have nothing to do with art.”
I waited a beat; I sensed he wanted me to.
“Really, she’s not far from family to me: the daughter of one of my closest friends. Well, closest, I don’t know. Maybe not as close as Paul is to me in some ways. I’ve known Tony for almost twenty years now, met him right when I got to the city, that first year, when I was really hungry for culture. We both were. I think of Tony as a great friend. He’s probably right up your alley. A scholar of comparative literature: Scandinavian languages, illuminated manuscripts—that’s his thing. Really a special man. He reminds me a bit of my classics prof at Berkeley. He taught for a while at NYU, actually, when they were just handing out cash, subsidizing apartments in the Village, trying to become a serious place of research. It did work, in the end.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Now? Well, nowhere, I guess. You’d have to call him an independent scholar. He takes up fellowships from time to time. He was on a Radcliffe a while back, and more recently he was at the Cullman Center. But Tony, he thinks of literature as a complement to solitude. I think he does his best work that way. There’s a book he’s putting together now, it’s about the Norse Sagas, the pre-Columbian discovery of the New World. I can tell you he’s much better company than the businessmen I deal with all day. I just can’t afford solitude the way he can. Antral would collapse. But I’ve learned an enormous amount from him, about how to live.”
Just past the lake, the two beauties cut through the park at the transverse at Ninety-Seventh. What an odd sight they made, these high-heeled waifs confidently breaching this pastoral construction in the dark, without fear, the city had become so set-like: nature as only the Ford Modeling Agency understood it.
Having nothing to look at anymore, we crossed over to the east side of Fifth. Neither of us was following or leading; we co-operated implicitly, the way people jointly maneuvered the letters on a Ouija board, with no-one and nothing but fate responsible for what was spelled out. It wasn’t long before we came across a bus shelter I’d used once, after a party nearby in my first or second year in the city, at a Frieze editor’s apartment in Spanish Harlem. I was thinking of writing something for the magazine back then, when I believed writing might help me break in—and when I still desired to break in. We had fun at her place, I recall, not just during the party but afterward, too. Yet the piece never appeared. I believe I saw the girl twice more. This was at a time, coming from California, in which I’d underestimated the size of the city, and thought I’d see people again who in fact would only turn up in my life many months or years later. It was, I realized, part of why New Yorkers behaved so heedlessly. If you were lucky, you’d not bump into the aggrieved party until your transgressions had been forgotten or overshadowed by someone else’s.
Buses, of course, were the most distasteful form of public transport in town, far worse than the trains. These strap-hangers had reached a state of abjection unrivalled by their subway counterparts; one crosstown bus trip is all it took to figure this out. There was also the problem of aboveground exposure to riders’ faces: good light meant having to really see past those countenances to the dog-eared souls within. Whereas when you descended into the Earth at a subway station, left the sun behind, these same faces were both harder to make out and anyway better matched to circumstances: a trip to hell and back.
Garrett paused in front of the bus shelter and squinted at the digital poster forming its near wall, glare-stained as it was from passing headlights. When the cars cleared, we found Vince Vaughn gazing back at us: his wilting visage, some illegible bubble typeface arching above it, and very little else. At this point in his career, the movie was merely a vector for his likeness, even if he was aging poorly and by my reckoning had fallen a few rungs below rivals like Rogen and Farrell and at least one of the Wilson brothers.
“There’s nothing wrong with a bus stop, you know, as a place to experience something,” Garrett said. “It’s just, the things they put on display. How much do you have to hate someone to make them look at this?”
I smiled and rapped my knuckles against Vaughn—I hit him right in the mouth—while Garrett gently fumed, something he did uniquely well. He was genuinely offended, I could see, and not just because of Vaughn; it was also the mindless execution of this virtualized poster whose electronic frame seemed to be meaninglessly pulsating. Most of us overlooked this kind of shortcoming in advertising the second we recognized the wares being hawked: trashy Hollywood comedy, say. Selective attention like this could even have been a sign of a visual maturity; Garrett might simply be childish in the manner only the very wealthy and the extremely poor can afford to be. But then it also could have been an index of how far people not particularly close to either pole had shrunk in imagining the possibilities of public imagery.
My cheek felt damp. Was I tearing up? There was, after all, something sad in all of this: in Garrett and his peculiar mission, whatever it amounted to; in the two beauties absconding into that night-blackened idyll; and in Vaughn, his crumbling career. But then I felt wet pinpricks in other places, not just my face but my hands and arms. Nothing unpleasant, no tears at all—it was just the faintest drizzle from above. The two of us anyway needed a rest from the dozens of blocks we’d come, and the hole in my sneaker sole raised its own issues. (I was already imagining my foot soaking through if the water fell faster).
“But see—this guy is one thing,” Garrett spat at Vaughn, at me. “Daphne is actual magic”—the words came in a voice as ethereal as the sentiment. Immediately he got that look of devotion in his eyes, turning almost angry with passion, though tenderness was threaded through it.
“I’m sure I can work with her,” I said a bit too flatly. I was thinking of home by this point, and I’d lost the stamina to incarnate my sentiments in speech anymore. How out of phase all feeling could grow with my body, the encumbrance, the nuisance, the fading thing.
“Well, of course you can,” Garrett said, “but in the flesh, too, you’re going to see. Tony and I caught her at this performance-art thing a couple of months back. She had hardly any lines, but it was obvious the show was built around her. She could screw up her mouth thirty different ways, you know? I don’t know how else to put it.” He paused for breath. “That’s not just me saying it, either. She was onstage most of time. Others came and went, pivoted right around her. It was almost choreography.”
“I’d gotten that feeling from The Sort,” I said.
“Right?” He grabbed me by the forearm and squeezed. “In that world, the film world... film-festival cinema–you know there’s stuff they reject every year for being too outré? Berlin and Venice and Toronto all have their formulas. But not the things Daphne’s in, not where she takes them. Do you follow that kind of stuff? The really odd stuff. Because of Tony, I know a tiny bit.”
“I know some of it, sure. People show me things.”
“So maybe you’ve even heard of her?”
“Well, I focus on the kind of pictures that don’t move. Paintings—”
“What difference does that make? Those pictures move, too. Think of... well, think of—
I was, not unusually, thinking of Degas and said so.
“The chanteuses!”
“Twirling and twirling, and so totally still.”
“Daphne’s going to work in drawings. And I know the idea excites her.”
It pleased me to hear that he liked the notion, and that Daphne knew something of what was to come. But it pleased me more, frankly, simply to contemplate my dear Degas, that bewitching conservative radical, Manet’s great foil. Any excuse to think of him would do, to think especially of an alternate future of art that might have flowed from him rather than from Cézanne and Gauguin. How easily my mind returned to him—to Goya as well, but mostly Degas. His dancers, maybe his horses, too, are what Garrett knew, but Degas’ entire career, through its many phases, and not just the famous bits, came to me at any mention of his name, even when that mention was my own: the early realism, pictures of the urbane in the countryside; the opera and café-concert works, which might be more useful than ever to me now; and those late, intensely colored abstractions, the ones no-one really talks about, that are no less extreme than anything by Cézanne. They say Degas only painted them because he was going blind at the time, late in life, as he fell into seclusion and shed his friends, one by one, until he endured more solitude as an éminence grise than any man could bear without losing something of himself.
“She knows her art, then, not just her acting?” I asked.
“She’s had that kind of childhood—every cultural opportunity you can imagine. Not a bit like mine out in the country, I’ll tell you that.” He winked at me, playing down his learning or anyway emphasizing how unlikely it was, which carried no water, given how wealthy I understood his father to be. Money converts effortlessly into culture—and right back again.
“I had dinner with her and Tony and the woman he’s seeing these days. A stepmother in the making, maybe. After I brought up your name with Daphne, she went on about what her friends were doing and seeing, about the resurgence of drawing. She even told her father off, defending you!”
“Does he not care for my work?”
Garrett smiled a little ruefully.
“At least he knows about it, I guess.”
“Well, he knows about everything. But she likes it. She’ll be so pleased to hear from you, work with you.” He held the breath in his lungs a second and released it as a melancholic sigh. “Still,” he said, “I should warn you, she’s very much her own person. Just like Duke—how I imagine Duke is, anyway.”
“The two of them haven’t met, I guess?”
Garrett nearly laughed but didn’t while bringing two fingers up just under his temple and drawing them down hard to his chin. I thought it must have carried a message, and he had to do it twice more before I realized he was merely scratching his face. When he finished with these long strokes, his mouth, those thin lips of his—blotchy like his skin, which had the reddish complexion of very fair people—his lips turned out a slender smile.
“No, I don’t know how those two would cross paths without a little help. Although, with Duke, anything’s possible. He’s a pretty intellectual guy. That’s why he chose Cal. Auburn was calling, Florida as well. Powerhouse programs but not big on the books. Anyway, he’s deep into art and fashion, not just politics. He’s a studied man in many ways, even if he doesn’t know just what sort of impression he makes in the world, not by a long shot. Certain kinds of people overflow themselves like that, right? Even real savvy ones. I could ask you: did Warhol know the full extent of what he did? The full effect? Because to me, he was as cringe-worthy as he was clever. Not everyone will see it that way, I know. But that’s how it is in business, too. Facebook and Apple think they understand themselves. But when they’ve been swept aside thirty years, fifty years from now, by some thing or circumstance we have no real grasp of today, we’re going to have to rethink that... But anyway—Duke.” Garrett narrowed eyes, searching for words. “He’s probably—definitely—a little ‘out of hand.’ Maybe you could even take the quotes off that. She is too. I shouldn’t pretend. But that is the meat on this bone. These two kids are both becoming—they aren’t anything yet. They’re going somewhere, I don’t quite know where; no-one does. Nothing about their futures is assured. But they—I just have this sense—they are American futures, and there’s—”
A thunderous gurgling swallowed up his words: a city bus pulled up with its engine running rough. Through the windows, I could see passengers dotting it, mostly in the disabled section in front, with one woman sleeping in the second-to-last row, her head tucked firmly into her chest as if her will and quite possibly her soul had deserted her. I could have waited for the bus to pull away before responding to Garrett, but the bus driver seemed in no rush to leave the scene. Meanwhile, a man who could have used this information lurched down Fifth Avenue in the developing rain with harried strides—a cripple, I presumed, his gait was so mangled. For me he was mostly a jerky silhouette, a very loud one, actually, yelling unintelligibly through the engine’s hysterical idle. Was the driver waiting because he’d somehow seen him, even heard him? Could the man loping southward even be a regular rider, so that this bizarre drama played out here more or less every night?
“You want me to chart all that?” I screamed in Garrett’s ear. The driver looked at us, and the approaching man had a few garbled words for me; I think he may have been more than physically defective. I had my own problems, apparently: I was taken aback by my voice, the way it broke up under duress. I wasn’t one to scream, and in the end I don’t think I really needed to for Garrett to hear me. But I was competing with a bus engine and a madman; it may have skewed my judgment.
Garrett, for his part, refused to raise his voice. I wasn’t surprised by this, though I like to think, as he sat there rubbing the ear of his I’d assaulted, that he was impressed by my own decision. We watched the limping man finally claw his way up the steps of the bus. It’s perfectly possible my screaming had done the cripple some good, confusing the driver just long enough for the guy to make it onboard. I thought I saw him smile at me from within the bus through the raindrops sliding down the windows, though his smile might well have had nothing to do with me.
When the bus had pulled out of earshot, Garrett answered me with a steady intensity: “Right now, those two, the actor and the ball-player, are in the moment that tells you if there’s going to be any moment at all. That tells you where it all might go.” He smoothed his shirt with his palms and picked his teeth with his thumb, grimacing to expose the front two, between which he must have imagined bits of hotdog wedged, if this wasn’t simply a tic. The rest of his hand formed a ball covering his mouth. “You and I know, any adult knows, about, well, the vagaries of it all. Isn’t that what you’d call it? That’s what I need you to get down here, the vagaries of a life like ours, in this country. And that’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it, with your series? Mapping... fortunes? American fortunes. It seems like happenstance, but one level up the pattern comes out. The direction. The principle. The end. You make all these choices, thinking you know what’s best for you, and life shows you otherwise, again and again. What Tony is talking about all the time: telos, logos, these Greek notions—the way they feed into Christianity and the Norse and Saxon things he studies.”
I shrugged, only to give myself some time to consider his many points.
He leaned over, put his head too near to mine. “What you’ll do is wait and see, just wait and see. Your eye’ll always be on the two of them. And then something happens. Or nothing happens. Or maybe something terrible unfolds. You just keep right on drawing, straight through it. That’s the way I imagined it all, anyway, when I saw Roger’s walls covered in your pictures. Am I wrong? That they were just brimming with chance? Life, I mean, alongside make-believe, story, design, everything else. That’s how you get to the logos, right?” He looked at me with real expectation. He wanted me to be possessed, too. But when he could see I wasn’t going to return an answer or even a proper look, only broken glances as I pondered these meanings I knew he prized, he leaned out over his knees.
“I don’t think I’m wrong,” he said matter-of-factly. “You couldn’t have scripted everything, dreamt up all those scenes.” He arched his back and pinched his shoulder blades together, easing the strain of our long walk. “I mean, I met Claire.”
I looked away so he couldn’t see the involuntary contortions of my face. Once I’d found a bit of composure, I played off his remark as if it were nothing to me.
“You know Roger’s little sister, Maddy? Just a beautiful person. She and I were having dinner a couple of weeks ago. I mentioned you and the drawings of yours I saw at Rog’s home, and she said, ‘Oh, you already know that girl. I introduced you two at an exhibit a few months ago.’ And then suddenly I remembered the woman Maddy meant, how delicate she’d seemed that evening, sipping wine, even though we talked for only a minute or two, and how whatever someone said or didn’t, or did or didn’t, how it affected her. That quality of hers, it must have been a guide for you, your pencil. Because who would turn that down—that invitation?
“All I mean by this is, try to stay as open with Duke and Daphne as you were with Claire. They might have just as many ‘multitudes’ for you to trace. And I really don’t want Paul and Karen scripting everything. What are you going to see like that?”
He drummed on his knees, made to whistle but decided not to. He seemed younger now, less composed. Talking like this had roused the part of him that remained vitally enmeshed with youth, and that had kept him, as it kept artists and beggars, too, from becoming middle managers, a vein of youth that ran on and on, which was generally for the worse—but not always.
Garrett steepled his hands, flexed them momentarily, and folded them in his lap. After a beat he crossed his legs.
“Tonight, you said my two drinks are a little hard to come to grips with.”
His tone was measured, like the first words delivered at a corporate meeting. Nothing of what came before, that spontaneity, lingered any longer. All it took was a faux prayer and he was a new man. I studied him without saying anything. He wouldn’t look at me this time. His gaze shot across the street and penetrated the rainy depths of Central Park. The tree growth before us, black from the night but a sickly yellow-orange where the lamps struck it, receded into the distance, though just above its far edge you could see the buildings abruptly spire on the west side, setting and enforcing, like a guard checking a prisoner, the parameters of the park. Garrett’s eyes held to a point in the distance that was pure black. I don’t believe he was really looking, only wondering if he’d misjudged me.
“But the drinks have a kind of obscure potency, don’t they?” he said at last. “They affected you, showed you something hidden. Even with the whiskey, it was more than just the alcohol.”
“I don’t know if I’d say that.”
“Well, isn’t that what you meant?” he sneered, his anger flaring more freely now. “That’s the impression I got, that you grasped at least that much.” He was really wondering now: was I wasting his time?
“That they’re what?” I said. “Potions or something? Is that it?” My words tasted bitter, I’m not entirely sure why. I hit the ‘p’ of potions brutally hard, I suppose to match the acridity of Garrett’s voice.
He looked a little stunned at the first real bit of resistance, maybe even distaste, from me—for his plans, for him even. He took his time looking me over, reappraising me, I felt, before he began to smile wider than I’d known possible, his eyes aglow, their blues and greens shifting like a sea at just the point where it meets lava, turbid and churning. This gargantuan smile made fully manifest his pristine teeth, which weren’t frighteningly washed-out, as was so common in Manhattan, but a healthy eggshell tone. I don’t believe he was expressing anything like happiness: I don’t even know if smile was the right word for it. It had the same shape as a smile, at least, even while radiating contempt or some close cousin. In the event, I managed to find him pleasant enough: after all, a smile is a smile.
“How about an elixir, then?” Garrett snapped. “Would that do it for you? That’s a good word. It’s really not used enough.”
Those beautiful natural teeth hardly parted as he spoke. I could see the musculature of his jaw flex in the light of the street.
I looked out into the distance, into the dark across the wet street. I thought I saw afterimages of his teeth there, little white squares flashing over the black trees. The whine and buzz of car engines accelerating and decelerating, tracing the pattern of shifting traffic lights, enfolded us. There were few vehicles about this late, which brought their warbling into the foreground. This was the bass note of the city, probably every modern city, whether Manila or Oslo or Santiago. If anything had a claim to being the sound of cities, it was this indefatigable chorus of engines, rising and falling and rising without end.
“Look, I think I do know what you mean, at least about Theria,” I conceded.
“Okay, so just suppose it’s true then. That after every test we can think to conduct, after the FDA has had its fun as well, it turns out to be true: Theria does something nothing else quite does—as they would have said in the Wild West.” His eyebrows shot up comically. He must have been in on the joke, all those quack advertisers of the nineteenth century with their cure-alls. Or could he really be speaking in earnest, that he’d accomplished what they’d only aspired to or lied about achieving? I didn’t know him well enough to ask, which pleased him, I’m sure. He seemed to protect the exact dimensions of his knowledge like a trade secret.
“So maybe,” he said, kicking up his Midwestern drawl, “think of it as a parallel we’re intimating.”
“A parallel to Daphne and Duke?”
“Of... a power or effect you couldn’t quite know, but you couldn’t really doubt either.”
Did he arrive at this formulation just now, as his cadences suggested? Was the conversation between us tonight as extemporaneous as the squabble we’d witnessed in the street? And was he truly back to God?
“The word for that would be enchantment,” he said. “That’s the common element, right? Unbelievable performance.”
I offered him a smile of my own now, admiring and a touch incredulous. “What about benightedness?”
He put on a face of shock. “Now, now—that’s not what you felt, was it? Though I guess it’d be an easy enough mistake to make. Someone will fall into that trap. Not you, though.”
Sensing the return of my doubts, Garrett stood up and, quite startlingly, walked right out into the heavy rain beyond the shelter. He turned back sharply to face me as the laces on one of his shoes went flapping about in the water gathered in deep puddles.
“Is this all too grand for you?” he said with acid, his nostrils flaring slightly. “Look, this isn’t advertising in the old sense. No-one gives a damn about that anymore, anyway.” He knelt and briskly retied his shoe. “Find some faith, maybe.” He laughed as he rose.
“What do you think Paul was—”
“I don’t care about it, anyway. And I know you don’t. So don’t worry about it. Paul doesn’t have as much faith as he should. It’s been a problem since elementary school. But I’m always willing to help the ones who don’t yet see what we see.” Again he laughed, but no-one would believe he was having any fun. Interrupting me had come off solely as a rebuke: he’d been waiting, I felt, for the mention of his lanky sidekick’s doubts and I’d provided it. Garrett’s dirty blond hair, deranged by winds giving him a different style every minute, was soaking through. He ran his hand over his head and water sprayed off him. He held his hands close together, clasped them. Mock beseechment?
“There are people now promoting things—culture, music—by withholding all promotion,” he said with renewed sobriety. “Releasing things for free. Pay what you want. Deliberately letting things spread almost totally by word of mouth. And those are all, well—they’re not terribly impressive efforts in the end, but they are stabs at creating the conditions for magic. And I just think, with the right gifts behind them, they could really bloom.” He dropped his hands, pushed them out toward me, dripping with water, as if he might anoint me. Then he wiped them crudely on his trousers, vigorous strokes on a fine-looking wool that was as beaded with water as his hair.
Garrett went around to Mr. Vaughn, whose foolish mug and mock neck-shirt were still utterly dry as rain poured off his plastic cage, and looked the faded actor in the eye. “I can tell you one thing: we’re going to give you reach.” He pointed vaguely at Museum Mile. “Your stuff won’t be beholden to that, all the people solemnly nodding for a moment and then leaving you behind in the gallery. No, you’ll be chasing them down the street instead!”
He came back around to me, speaking matter-of-factly. “I could have you look at the marketing research: the motivational work, the psychological stuff, the polling data. But would you want to? Paul knows all about it, inside out.
Garrett slapped Vaughn across the cheek and water flew like tears. “The fact is, we’ve used Paul’s analytics for certain products—the sportswear, for instance. But I’ve got to say, I’ve lost interest in that. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it doesn’t cut nearly deep enough, not in the way I want it to. Paul’s never really had a feel for the spirit. Too much of an aesthete for that. I’ve been coaxing him along his whole goddamned life, it feels like. So I’ve stopped Paul—he’s not thrilled about it—from talking you through all the advertising research, his findings and so on. You should be leading it. Someday it’ll show, I know this, that you’ve intervened directly in people’s lives with your pictures. We don’t need predictions, we aren’t telling fortunes—the future’s for the future. Mysterious ways, and all that,” he added with a certain edge to his voice.
Karen sometimes talked of such things, with real ambivalence. In design circles it was thought that advertising only followed the lead of consumer behavior, that technology really molded people’s habits, not marketers. But then here was Garrett saying that this wasn’t so. Maybe he did have the right guy in me. We would do some joint molding, on the premise that images mattered, and quite a bit more than words. After all, if he wanted to call it enchantment, or an act of God, what was the harm? Even if I didn’t have much use for these terms, especially when they came from someone with financial interests like his, that didn’t mean he didn’t have a point. And if I could only grasp these notions weakly at the time, well, that might have just meant I needed to squeeze tighter.
Garrett paced in rain—he’d stopped caring about it a while ago—as another bus came rolling in, the second or third of them, which drowned out my meditations. This one stopped near enough to my apartment. We hadn’t been waiting for it, not intentionally. We’d been taking a rest and, at least for a time, cover from the rain. My thoughts could only turn to Roosevelt Island, how Garrett had walked me to the shuttle and seen me off. The symmetry, I felt, as he went to and fro just in front of me, leaving me now to think things over, was too perfect to pass up. Whenever I sensed the possibility of this sort of recurrence in my life, I tended to help things along in that direction, for no other reason than that I found it comforting that you could engineer your fate, revise it, improve it on the second or third or fourth pass, creating motifs just as easily in one’s life as in art.
“Could this be your ride?” he said, even before I could politely suggest that I might just take this bus.
“Uptown, yeah.” Apparently he, too, wanted to engineer my life. Was he thinking about that previous encounter on Roosevelt now? Or was some force rippling beneath the surface, creating loops of certain kinds, driving him to it?
“Take it, then.” Again he smoothed his shirt, darkened as it was by the water it carried. He slicked his hair back with both hands, though his curls sprung up before he’d finished. “Look—I’m going to put you in touch with Daphne and Duke as soon as I can. And apologize to Karen for me. I just couldn’t tonight.”
Karen. I’d been craving her tonight, hadn’t I? When she’d asked me to come early to the restaurant, I suppose I’d hoped it was a personal matter: to share a moment with me alone, to tell me something. Instead, her reticence, her speedy departure afterward, had left me in stinging doubt, so that by the time she stepped into that Uber with only a nod, I felt a little like slapping her, just to negate the swat she’d given me. She would have drunk with John and Rick and who knows who else tonight; probably she was drinking right now. Claire was with them, too, maybe. Why not? It would certainly explain why Karen hadn’t invited me along.
I felt a trickle run from behind my ear, down my neck. To Garrett it would have looked like rainwater; only I would know it was sweat. Even in the cool night, I was burning from the neck up, and although I was outdoors, I somehow felt I needed fresh air. “Where will you go?” I asked in a voice so constricted, it seemed to come from someone else.
“Where?” He looked at me strangely, quizzical yet amused. Without knowing its source, I think he sensed my distress. His face straightened as he turned away. “Just the office.”
“This late?”
“Don’t feel sorry. It’s like a playground for me over there. There’s always more to do,” his tone carrying the wink he didn’t bother to deliver.
I grinned vacantly and climbed onto the bus, which even at this hour was a quarter-full with the tattered sort, the ones who were grateful simply to be indoors, shielded by this mobile refuge stinking of cologne and vomit. God knows where they called home. Once I found my seat near the front, in the disabled area, I didn’t look back at Garrett from the window, as the madman had looked at me. I didn’t wave. I hadn’t even shaken Garrett’s hand or given him a valedictory nod. Finally, noisily, the bus pulled away and warm air blasted me in the face. Which way Garrett went, I don’t know.