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.A cynic would have asked why he didn’t take his show to Las Vegas.Me, I strode back out into the cold chaos of Manhattan believing myself a sunbeam in which all who wished could bask.Whether I searched for him or not, Perkus was gone, and I was tired of searching alone.I’d made one attempt to enlist Richard Abneg, two weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve.This was just ten days since the mayor’s party, and all the traces felt fresh, the blizzard’s drifts still reshaping the streets, albeit crusted and steadily blackening.Richard and Georgina took pity on me and called me to spend the evening with them in Georgina’s penthouse, knowing (because I’d complained) that Oona had avoided me on Christmas, rightly suspecting she’d do it again.I was something especially pathetic in the way of third-wheel bachelor companions—there being not one but two women I was divided from, on that night when any couple is meant to be together.Richard and Georgina made the evening easy for me, ordering in excellent Chinese, tilapia medallions with spicy green chilies and Napa cabbage, eggplant with ground pork and green peas, then putting on some old black-and-white movies, consoling ones, Jimmy Stewart as a rube outwitting large numbers of sophisticates.Between features Richard took me into their bedroom and cracked a window and we got high.Richard didn’t seem to want Georgina to know.He rolled a joint out of a box of Chronic and at first I didn’t think anything of it.We exhaled into the chill whistling breeze and it seemed to me the smoke was all blown back inside, that its perfume would draft to Georgina, several rooms away, but I didn’t point this out.I was just grateful to be where I was.From the high penthouse window distant party noises rose to find us, sweetly harmless at this distance, though I hoped we’d shut the window before the appointed hour, not hear the popping of corks, the commemorating hollers.I didn’t want to think of the year’s end passing with Perkus’s whereabouts unknown.The smell of the dope was commemoration enough, and I grew wistful.In return for Richard and Georgina’s kindness in not mentioning Oona or Janice, I could have left another name unmentioned, but the impulse was too fierce.Though I’d brought Perkus to the party, I wanted Richard to feel as responsible as I did.“Where do you think he’s gone?” I said, handing over the joint, and waving off any return.Richard shrugged.He reached through the window opening to stub the remaining quarter-joint against the outer sill before replying.“I wouldn’t drive myself crazy over it,” he said.“He’ll reappear right when you’ve given up.”“I keep visiting Eighty-fourth, thinking I’ll see him haunting the block,” I said.“Other tenants are at the barricades sometimes, pleading for access to stuff they left inside.That apartment was Perkus’s snail shell.I can’t picture him surviving naked.”“He’s resourceful, Chase.You’d be surprised.” The words might be hopeful, but Richard’s tone was curtly dismissive.It only made me want to push him.“Have you talked to the mayor’s people? After all, he was last seen at Arnheim’s town house—”“That’s where he was last seen by you,” said Richard irritably.“I’ll bet he was last seen elsewhere.He’s a grown-up.Anyway, Perkus’s name wasn’t on the guest list.What do you expect me to do, barrel into Arnheim’s office and say, ‘Did anyone cleaning up after your party find a one-eyed rock critic dressed in purple, because one’s gone missing’?”“You’re being deliberately callous.”Richard’s sneer said What else is there to do? I had no answer.“Let’s go in,” he said.“She’s probably wondering what we’re up to.”“What if he got away with the mayor’s chaldron?” I whispered.It was a possibility too terrifying and thrilling to speak aloud.“Listen, Chase.No fucking chaldron talk tonight, okay? It isn’t good for Georgina.That word’s verboten around here.”It struck me as peculiar and maybe suspicious that Richard had declared martial law.We’d lost Perkus, and now the crippled Fellowship of the Chaldron might be suspending the civil rights of one of its remaining members.“Does Georgina know you’ve made that decision for her?” I said, managing to get honestly indignant on her account, though I knew I was up against the tyranny of coupledom—what Perkus would have called “pair-bonding.” I reminded myself I’d met Georgina several times before Richard laid eyes on her, and that we’d all lusted for chaldrons democratically together.Richard had judo for my righteousness.“Have you had a look at her?” He cupped his hand, low at his own slight paunch, and raised his brows, waiting for me to understand.Then he couldn’t wait.“You haven’t noticed she’s not drinking, I guess—”“What? Wait, really?”“Use your eyes.”“When—?”“We’re pretty sure the very first night.She’s three months along, but she’s built so flat there you can already see a bulge, like a sweet potato.” I heard a crazy wondering pride in Richard Abneg, a dreaminess that had colonized his patented tone of worldly grousing.In conquering the exotic ostrich-woman, seizing her from the bracket of privilege, that now-epochal night at Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s, something else had conquered Abneg in turn, an unaccountable human possibility.So I went in half tripping and gathered Georgina in an embrace, making a joke about my dimness and self-absorption in not noticing sooner, and insisting that no matter what the date happened to be, we really ought to open some champagne.Richard uncorked another Châteauneuf-du-Pape instead, but he did pour an aggressively protective thimbleful for Georgina, who didn’t blink at being stinted.Her mood was implacably mellow, as though bodily exalted by pregnancy, shifted to some elevated plane, past the flushed-and-vomity phase.(And indeed, I could make out the sweet potato she was sporting [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]