Chronic City: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jonathan Lethem

Author:Jonathan Lethem [Lethem, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780385532150
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

Sixteen

The ruinous night had more to give. Richard and Georgina led us in retreat to a wine bar up Second Avenue, a place for grown-ups (and therefore, to me, usually invisible) called Pangaea. It was as if we were intent on dishonoring the occasion, as if one bottle of wine could drive the scent of catastrophe and sorrow, the ozone singe of an acetylene torch cutting in twisted rebar, from our nostrils. Yet after a perfunctory glass of Barbera the other couple quit the place, and it was then that Oona and I tumbled into a grotesque conflict. Like a member of an ensemble still working from an earlier draft of the appointed script, I’d clung to my fancy idea about the mayor’s party, and I now produced that creamy invitation from my pocket, slid it across the candlelit table between us.

“I’ve got one of those,” Oona said.

“You do?”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“I was hoping we’d go together.” I winced at hearing myself reproduce the tones of some minor courtier, or possibly those of Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant. Oona’s hunched and hunted posture suggested she felt uncomfortably public with me here, and that, in turn, seemed relevant to my dim proposal. Our skulking, I’d notice, was for Oona a highly local matter: West Side or Inwood okay, the East Side distinctly not. The mayor’s address was on Fifth Avenue. I’d pleased myself thinking she meant to spare me bad publicity, rather than avoid embarrassment with her friends. I could be wrong.

“I’ll be bringing Laird Noteless,” she told me. The unspoken insinuation I couldn’t keep from hearing was that she’d be sorry to see me there at all. The name she’d spoken revived an image of that shrine she kept over her desk, glowering Noteless and his portentous potholes, and threatened to give fly to every fearful accusation I’d kept partitioned for weeks simply out of gratitude that Oona would see me.

But I began coolly enough. “That reminds me, something happened downtown, I never had a chance to mention it with all this stuff. I don’t know if you heard, a man killed himself by jumping into Noteless’s memorial pit. As a result I never got to go on Brian Lehrer.”

Everything I mentioned annoyed her. “That happens from time to time. It’s just one of those stories they like to make a big deal over. You know how many suicides there are in this city?”

“You mean… more than one person has thrown themselves into his memorial?”

“The memorial, and other things he built. If you build bridges people throw themselves off those, too.”

“I’m surprised there’s such a big hole downtown,” I said. “I was under the impression Noteless just got that commission.”

“You’re mistaken. Excavation started down there a long time ago.”

Sure, sure, I was always mistaken. To be so was my great role, my Lear. Only I was less Learian than Othelloish at the moment. What was rising in me wouldn’t be so curtly swept aside whatever the mistaken facts surrounding excavations, fog, or suicide.

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