Free Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Page A

sometimes I do that myself when I’m writing them.”
    “I’d like to hear that,” I said, not wanting to put up a fight.
    “Maybe you do a great Marlon Brando, Chase? I know Perkus would like that one.”
    Was Oona Laszlo mocking Perkus now? Our secret sharing of the apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street felt almost disagreeably intimate, here in this crowd. I went for a gulp of wine and found my glass was empty. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?” I said impulsively. I had no idea how to navigate the West Side, but we were near Lincoln Center—there had to be something.
    “There’s plenty here, for free. I think they might even bring out some sushi or cocktail frankfurters if we play our cards right.”
    Oona Laszlo’s teasing dared me onward. She was a sprite of sarcasm, even her pensive torso, her small breasts concealed in black silhouette, seeming to jape. I’d been immune for three hours to theshameful survivor’s lust that I’d known to sometimes wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one’s own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crosswords in ballpoint and then tossing them aside, to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run out. But now, three hours’ worth of such lust seemed to flood me all at once, in retrospect. Oona and I were surely not the two youngest people in that crowded hall of five or six hundred, many of whom were just now filing through the doors into the lobby, being handed their first glass of white or red. But it felt to me at that moment as though we were teenagers who’d dressed up and snuck in.
    “I’d be willing to pay for my own drinks or even cocktail frankfurters in exchange for a little privacy,” I told her.
    “You don’t want to be seen with me?”
    “I’d like to be seen with you,” I said, “elsewhere.”
    “I don’t believe you. I think you’re afraid somebody’s going to try to ask you for your autograph or to pose for a picture with your arm around Salman Rushdie, and then I’ll slip away. Which I absolutely would. I’d be out of here like a shot.”
    “I—”
    “We could go to the movies,” she said, surprising me. “Or just find a doorway somewhere and make out awkwardly, then later not call each other, or call but not find anything to say.”
    “Let’s go,” I said, applying my palm to the small of her back, to guide her from the reception. Disconcertingly, her dress was cut out in a circle there, so my cool fingers slipped inside and made her jump. Then she smiled again, canines caught on her lip.
    “Where?”
    “Anywhere.”
    I only meant to insist that we go out of hearing range of themourners and celebrants, though it had the effect of seeming to endorse her dizzy talk as a kind of plan. And as well to suggest I took the matter of my celebrity seriously in that crowd, as she’d joked. In truth, I doubted anyone cared. But I cared. It was my pitiful flame to nurture, that I should behave upstandingly as Janice Trumbull’s signifier in public places, at funerals at least. I was arm candy on Janice’s phantom arm, not much else. And the difference between this setting and Perkus’s apartment, or even Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s, was real to me.
    We stopped to get our coats from the checkroom, then stepped outdoors, into a street vacant in a gutter-choking rainstorm, the black sky seemingly half liquid, snail-crawling taxicabs hugging the gleaming avenue’s crest for safety. I manage never to be prepared for the weather. Nobody else had left the hall, and as the heavy doors slammed behind us, all warmth and light seemed definitively on their backside, the reception an oasis we’d foolishly forsaken. Oona Laszlo was unsurprised. She produced a short black umbrella from her trench-coat pocket, and we struggled to shelter ourselves beneath it