“Hindu Kush… ooh, that’s too exotic for me…” she said. “What’s this, Giant Tiger? Are you trying to frighten your customers, Foster?”
“Yeah,” said Watt absently, though it was hardly meant as affirmative to her question. Conversationally, Watt was a Magic 8 Ball. It was merely a question of which answer would come up. “Yeah, I got a few new things, good stuff.”
“Ice,” said Perkus. “Where’s the Ice?”
“Have I ever let you down, Perkus? I’ve got plenty of your favorite.”
“Giant Tiger, Gray Fog, Two Eagles,” Oona listed. “Very, uh, topical selection, Foster.”
“People are digging Two Eagles,” said Watt. “You ought to try it.”
Perkus hoarded all the Ice he could find in the sample case, built a little architectural stack of five Lucite boxes at one corner of his table. Oona went on listing brand names. “Northern Lights, Chinese Mine… what’s next? Lonely Astronaut? Do you make these up yourself, Foster? Because no offense, but somebody’s really cribbing a lot of this material.”
Watt didn’t even trouble to shrug, just ignored her. I suspect she’d lost him at “topical.” Oona couldn’t let it go, though. “Somebody needs to get some of their own material,” she said again pointedly, as if she were a professor offering a plagiarizing student a first warning. Watt took it lightly enough. Yet even after he left, bearing away a large stack of our pooled twenties in return for eight of his Lucite containers-Perkus’s five portions of Ice, a couple of the old standby, Chronic, which vanished into Oona’s purse, and one Northern Lights I purchased as a morbid souvenir-Oona circled back to the topic. “Don’t you think Watt isn’t playing fair, Perkus?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re on about.”
“Tailoring his material to his audience like that,” she said. “It sort of breaks the illusion, don’t you think?” She kept calling it “material,” though it seemed to me an odd word for names snatched from the headlines.
“What illusion?” Perkus rolled a joint while he contended with her.
“That, you know, there’s an ancient and mighty marijuana tree somewhere in South America called El Chronic, named that by some Mayan priest a thousand centuries ago, for its special properties of transubstantiation-you know. It just doesn’t seem right some skanky Irish kid from Chelsea Clinton or wherever it is Watt lives to rename this ancient essence ‘Balthazar’ or ‘Derek Jeter’ just because he has a laser printer and a captive audience.”
“I don’t think it’s Watt,” said Perkus slyly, seeming to take her concern seriously. “He’s just a middleman. I think it’s someone else giving them names. Maybe actually even a Mayan priest, one who’s just, you know, keeping up with the news.”
“Then it’s him I want a word with,” said Oona. “Can you get the Mayan priest’s beeper number?”
“So,” said Perkus, the key word signaling he’d become interested at last, had found something he could work with, “maybe we’ve got the polarities reversed. It’s crucial we remember to question basic assumptions.”
“Polarities reversed… how?” The hungry mind supplying this query was my own. Perkus’s paradoxes were just what I’d been starved of, no matter that they gave me a dangerous sense of reality slippage. I’d become an addict and needed replenishment, as much as Perkus had needed Watt’s visit.
“What if The New York Times is getting its material from Watt’s brand names, rather than the other way around?” said Perkus. At this, his revelatory eye exulted, though we’d no time to linger on the point-Perkus had reminded himself he had a sort of front page of his own to consider, an edition in progress. “Maybe the bear is enough,” he said to Oona, musingly. “Maybe the empty border around the picture says something nothing else could ever say…”
“We might not even need the bear,” said Oona.
That first night of reunion, and the ones that came after, turned out to be episodes hinged in the middle. A brief frigid walk back to my building and Oona and I were at it. Actually, that night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment. Our December fucks made what had come before seem like glimpses, tourist views from some highway pull-off-now we abandoned the car and climbed the guardrail and built a hut in that landscape below, where no one could see, to dwell for a while in a place from which, when we climbed out woolly-eyed and helplessly grinning afterward, we were astonished to find any highway so close, it was so primeval.
This wasn’t the sort of thing I was inclined to examine for causes, a gift horse, a windfall of sex like I’d known just a time or two before. I didn’t want to think my own intensity drew in any measure on what I’d turned from: Janice’s weird crises, off away in space. Oona and I pursued expression of something that had zip to do with anyone else, I tried to believe it desperately. As for what anyone else might judge, that was obvious, and irrelevant. However this chance had come, we’d taken it. We didn’t discuss it-after leaving Perkus’s place we barely spoke. If I was looking for causes, there might be one. A few hours with Perkus and all Oona’s mordancy was bantered out of her, and my need to play the dopey straight man used up, too. All talk could fall by the wayside.
We weren’t a secret from Perkus, though we kept our hands to ourselves in his company. I didn’t know whether Oona had spoken to him privately, or if our state was obvious after that first night. Perkus granted it, no more. Nothing said in hearing of all three, that might be the rule. He did acknowledge the fact to me alone, one early evening in the middle of the month, he and I under way at Watt’s product while Oona slaved to meet a deadline, her panicking editor having pleaded for some chapters, some evidence of progress on the Noteless book. But Perkus only arrived at the subject indirectly, as a passing remark during an alienated disquisition on what he called “pair bonding.”
“So, it’s not one hundred percent a received notion,” he began, as if a topic heading had been announced, or revealed on a banner only he could see. “I mean, I always used to feel critical of anyone who fell into pair-bonding, like they were failing the test of reimagining all the basic premises.”
“What basic premises?”
“The basic premises of existence,” he said impatiently. “But then, really, if you pay attention to animals, there’s tons of pair-bonding. I was thinking about Abneg’s eagles.”
“You’re saying, basically, birds do it, bees do it, even the, uh, Chinese do it…” I could never remember the finish of that lyric.
Perkus revealed no sign he took this as mockery. I’d merely shown I grokked. “Exactly! In that context, you really can’t blame people, can you? I mean, it tends to happen, even when you think you’re in one kind of arrangement, some other group or affiliation, but then members of your group keep sort of defaulting into these pairs… I guess you should never be surprised, huh?”
“I’d say no.” Was I falling into some trap?
“Like Abneg and the Hawkman,” he mused. A fuming joint between his knuckles, Perkus studied the wending smoke as if casting distantly for a second example, though it was certainly near enough at hand. “Or you and Laszlo. It’s the most natural thing in the world, I don’t know why I should be in any way surprised. Janice Trumbull is out of reach, and so far as the animal part of you is concerned, she might as well not exist. She’s only an idea, a whisper in your fore-brain. The rest of you was howling like one of those eagles for a mate. And so then came along Oona Laszlo. Like dancing, you look around the room, and take a partner.”