“You are entitled to your opinion,” I said, still sitting.
George received a nod from the women and stood to extend his hand. I looked at it and back at him. I didn’t want to shake it. He had taken something from me. I wanted to take something from him in return. Deny him closure. Deny him my acceptance. But that was not what I did. Hammurabian acts — deny for a deny — required a certain hardness that I didn’t possess. I was too much a man of this age. When I was declared unwanted, I accepted it.
I gave the handshake and left the office, bag in hand, head hanging, toward the elevator. The people around me, still working, had no idea what had happened. Life went on within the chessboard. I had always thought that upon the playing surface of Plutus, I was a back-row power, perhaps even a grandmaster who got to move the pieces. But if I had been once, I wasn’t anymore. That was the violence at the heart of chess. Anyone could be overturned at any moment.
I couldn’t get out with my dignity. Candace was standing at the elevator, trying to appear casual. She was actually whistling with her hands in her pockets and rocking on the balls of her feet. But her face showed even more worry than before.
I told her point-blank what had happened.
“That’s so shocking,” she said, reaching forward to keep the elevator door open.
“Imagine how I feel.”
“Isn’t this coming out of nowhere?”
“You tell me,” I said. “You talked to him last. This morning and also at my party. ”
“Nothing this morning,” she said, and got into the elevator because it had started to beep. “Just summoned you. That asshole.”
“And at the party?”
She shook her head and bit her nails. “He was really drunk.”
“What did you talk about? Was it Marie-Anne? Look, if it was Marie-Anne, I hope you will tell me.”
“Not at all,” she said. “He was all intellectual. Bored the fuck out of me. Totally killed my buzz. He was going on about history. I should’ve known he was an asshole. Historians are the worst people in the world.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I promise you it wasn’t Marie-Anne.”
“Well, that’s it, then,” I said, and patted her on the head. “Good luck, you. And thank you.” For a brief moment I wanted to kiss the top of her head. To muffle my mouth in her dark hair. To clutch her to me and be pained together. Then I put that thought out.
The elevator pinged on each floor like it was carrying on a xylophonic recitation.
We reached the ground floor and I stepped out. I didn’t even bother to turn around and wave a symbolic goodbye. You spun your arms during a drowning, not after.
* * *
The bars in Center City weren’t open yet. The reliable one near Shula’s Steakhouse, toward Fairmount, which tended to open earlier, couldn’t serve me today, because the bartender would have to call her manager to get his login information and he was currently indisposed. I cursed, wound my bag around my body, and headed toward Ben Franklin Parkway, gazing at its Parisian sweep. On a regular day I would evaluate the architecture, its Gothic cathedrals, the neoclassical fountains in their ovals, the honeycomb condos straight out of the Soviet avant-garde, and compare it to the places I had traveled to, trying to create a narrative about the history they were suffused with. Today I was indifferent. My hand stayed in my pocket, touching and releasing the cell phone like Lenny with his mouse. I wanted to call Richard Konigsberg. He was the man for moments like this. He was the one person I knew who not only understood the intricacies of this American life, but also knew how to explain them.
It took awhile to dial. I lost reception the first time and tried again. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello.”
“Are you in town?”
“Yup.”
“I thought you would be in Chicago.”
“Still here, buddy.”
“Let’s meet up, then,” I said. “Right now—”
“But I’m at a strip club. ”
“What kind of strip club opens this early?”
“The kind that stays open all night.”
“Don’t they run out of girls?”
“They have seventy-two every night.”
“Please. Come to the art museum café. It’s important.”
“How important?”
“Plutus let me go. I’m too angry to talk on the phone.”
“Shit.” I heard shock in his voice. “All right, see you soon. And don’t do anything stupid.”
I hung up and looked around. I was at St. Peter’s Cathedral, a good distance from the art museum, but despite the cold I decided to walk it. Philadelphia was America’s only major walkable city. You could go from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River in a light, easy stroll. You could go from Geno’s and Pat’s in the south to King Fried Chicken near Temple Hospital in the north. Most locals were comfortable walking around Philadelphia, especially in Center City, where the chances of running into a familiar face were very high, and each encounter was heightened by the joy that came with being on foot. How had Philadelphia resisted the otherwise inexorable domination of the car and the highway? It must have been an act of collective resistance of some kind. But who had resisted? When? No doubt the fateful encounter between the peripatetic and the vehicular took place long before my time, as was the case with most things in America. But I hadn’t gotten to see it. I was among those who came of age after the end of history.
I passed the Rodin Museum. The statue of the Thinker was up front, sitting hunkered in the snow, rendered white-skinned by the powder. I thought about going to sit at his feet and doing a little wail and whine, but he seemed too stentorian, too analytical, too lacking in melancholy. I recalled that the poet Rilke used to be Rodin’s assistant. And even though Rilke had been quite the sentimentalist, none of that tenderness seemed to have made its way into the Thinker. Looking at the statue, unforgiving and aloof, a philosopher with his eye on some prize beyond this world, beyond time, colder than the icicle beard on him right now, darker than the gray skies above, I could understand why Rilke had gone toward softness, love. Rilke as a reaction to Rodin. It was a good thought to have. I would have to use it at some party I might hold in the future, assuming I was ever worth visiting again.
Inside, they charged me for a ticket. When I first arrived in Philadelphia, years ago, you weren’t obligated to pay. There was a box you could drop dollars into if you wanted. But as Philadelphia became more corporate, welcomed more people coming down from New York and coming up from DC, it changed. Now the guards played another game. If they thought you could afford it, they scuttled you into a line and made you pay. A kind of class-based profiling. And that was not even the worst thing about it. By taking away the voluntariness of the contribution they changed the way a person came to art. Now you didn’t come like a lover, making an offering. You came like a debtor. You didn’t enjoy for the sake of enjoyment; you enjoyed because you had paid.
It had been a good idea to walk. The distance gave me an opportunity to calm down and replay what had happened. I paid the entry and went to the café located on the second floor. I ordered a vanilla cappuccino and reserved a latte for my guest.
When Richard Konigsberg arrived, half an hour later, he came in through the back entrance, where he had parked. I rose up with a smile. It was very taxing.
He was a tall, thin man, who wore loose-fitting suits and wide-brimmed black hats that would make him appear like some Orthodox rabbi, were it not for the fact that he was clean-shaven and every third sentence from his mouth was either laced with profanity or merged nature and women in some vulgar fashion. And these comments tended to come out in the most inappropriate moments. “Do you think that girl’s bush is deciduous or coniferous?” he had asked about an acquaintance for whom Marie-Anne had been maid of honor. “Do you think that girl would make me cum cumulus or cirrus?” was what he asked about a secretary he once hired. The more convoluted his metaphor, the more likely he was to sleep with the girl. He had never said anything about Marie-Anne.