Free Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Page B

together long enough to put Emil Junrow and Ethical Culture behind us. Swirling wind made comedy of our attempt, and soon enough we found a doorway, just as Oona had scripted for us. I suppose she knew the weather forecast. Brass nameplates identified our hiding place as the entrance to a cabal of dentists. Across Central Park West trees lashed like an island’s in a typhoon.
    The shoulders of my suit were drenched, the shirt beneath pasted to my back, and my slacks to my calves as well. Oona had fared a bit better, centered beneath the shred of umbrella. Yet she was wet and cold enough to be shivering. I felt it as she nestled into me. The lintel above us played the role of a tiny Niagara, the sheet of droplets a white-noise curtain drawn against the city and the whole of the storm.
    “This has to be a secret.”
    “I’m terrific at secrets. It’s a professional requirement.”
    “I don’t have a whole lot in the way of a public role. I’m only known for one thing: my fidelity to Janice.”
    “Oh wow, yeah, you scream fidelity.”
    “Look, it’s all I’ve got.”
    “That’s true. You’re a very one-dimensional character.”
    Her gaze zipped shyly from the coursing street to my damp collar and tie, anywhere but to meet mine. Her tiny hand, sharp and mouselike, slid between my jacket and shirt at my ribs. It seemed I was waiting to understand. The West Side was a mysterious distance from the East, the howling park between us and home. There was no one there to protect us from each other. There never was. I thought, irrelevantly, of the tiger. This is too true of me: my thoughts migrate, precisely when I ought to be attending. I stare into one face and begin to recall tendrils of another conversation. Richard Abneg had mentioned that the tiger kept to the East Side. Maybe we were safer here, in that case. But now came a dozen questions I wished I’d been bright enough to ask. Where did the tiger go in the rain? Why wouldn’t it want to take up in the park?
    This night it might be fair to think such thoughts were the place I fled in a storm of guilt. I might not remember Janice very well, but wasn’t I supposed to love her? Here, beneath this sill, I toyed with wrecking the greatest long-distance relationship in the history of the cosmos. Or at least the long-distantest.
    “I didn’t think I would like you,” whispered Oona Laszlo, offering a glimpse of devastating tenderness toward us both. The tiny cracks in this woman’s hard-boiled façade were as entrancing to me as the fine tracing of shattered glaze on a Renaissance portrait, vulnerable everywhere, though the face that glared from beneath dared you to waste any sympathy upon it.
    My own words were more than usually missing. I let my hands play at Oona’s hair and clothes, her perimeter, didn’t plunge inside.
    “Should we go to your place?” I asked.
    “You’ll never be invited to my place, Chase. Please don’t suggest it again.”
    “Okay.” I felt a little rapturous and awed, but completely tawdry, too. Oona seemed to demand it, the ticket price of entry. I was meant to ignore the shattered glaze.
    “Have I insulted you yet?” she asked.
    “I’m hard to insult, for the same reason you’re good at secrets.”
    “Too delicate by half, Chase. Fucking kiss me.”

CHAPTER
Four
    The only role I ever played to anyone’s complete satisfaction was Warren, on Martyr & Pesty . As the idealistic and dreamy boy intern to Gordon Pesty, the fulminating lawyer extraordinaire, I seemed, to myself and others, to embody… something. The show itself was avowedly “dumb” and we all (writers and actors, network, critics, audience) flogged ourselves those days for our complicity in its runaway success, but I, the exception, was unaccountably “soulful.” Or, not I, but Warren Zoom, born on the wrong side of the tracks, single child of glamorous widowed mom, persistently seeking fatherly mentoring from the irate and disarmed Pesty. This Warren Zoom