Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

I left Booth 8.S42 before doing anything dicey like A a Q, give or take advice, explain. I had to get away from that mortuary, Lisabeth when she returned, myself even. Szlay Literistic will have its pick of eulogists, obituarists, and apt quotation epitaphs—though for sheer eloquence none will surpass the silent punctuation of “Reykjavík, Iceland,” that pause reassuring me that I had the same city/country combo in mind while also, condescending. “Reykjavík, Iceland”—that comma spoke—I heard that comma, I saw it on Seth’s tongue before he spoke it, or didn’t: Aar’s bemused rectitude had become just a tic.

Seth, I’d been around that type before—back when I was new to a life I was better than, I’d been that type—too resentful to deal with anyone not me.

I’m imagining an airplane, planing through the air—a jet swooping through every cloud and so through everything swirling within the Cloud—all the Canadian maps, Greenland facts, and Frequently Asked Questions about water, average temperature of the Arctic (water, land, air temps), average surge of glaciers (time of year dependent), airline routes, ticket pricing, protocol for dealing with passengers deceased en route, which plane models have onboard morgues, or whether the attendants automatically upgrade corpses to first class. Aar’s flight soaring through the omnibus nimbus, through all charts and graphs, all blogs and castings and torrential feeds, until the compressed uncompressed, the zipped unzipped, and stormed with every word, every letter, I’ve ever written, the .docs, the emails, every bit I’ve deigned to store—Aar passing through them all and though he wouldn’t have had the time or life to read them, I’d like to imagine that he noticed them, and that he noticed what was missing from them—this.

LH403 (Lufthansa), Newark—Frankfurt, 18:05—Never, passenger Szlay, Aaron, losing life with altitude, losing life with speed, breasting the meridian untimely, to be descended with as a deceased body for burial under Iceland.

A corpse borne away winged to the lowerland, the iceland, that had the ring of saga to it—not a book to be written now, but a myth if written deep hesternal.

Break a hunk of ice off the land, crack off a chunk the same proportions as Manhattan Island, then slab Aar’s emberous body on out, the winds floating a hyemal pyre melting toward the Pole. Now that’s a way to pass.

Before simile rose like a star, before the star of metaphor rose, death was north, beyond Ultima Thule. This explains why the preeminent mourners are northerners, because they’re already dead. In an unheated zone of the hall Slavs huddled together, in furs clipped with leaky pens like amulets, talismanic charms. All you can ever hope for is to expire peacefully among a people who deny Self-Help, and who refuse to countenance any genre distinctions between Religion and Spirituality. Their stalls repped books both origs and trans, appropriate for all ages, mortality being a market unto itself. On angels and demons, on thaumaturgy (thaumaturgia), eschatology (eschatologia), and Ragnarök (Рагнáрёк)—books that in this world have to toil in Polish or Ukrainian or Russian, but that in the next world will repose in print forever in that one language after this we’ll all share—yes, ja, da. A drink? Why not?

To you, Aar. Prost, prosit, l’chaim.

I was drinking all the whites and reds on offer—free—and what appeared to be the Messe staple, prosecco, uncorked to toast Cal in German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Svorsk, fits of fizzy ebullience for whichever laureate just fell off a list and won the Booker, the sensation de rigueur of the rentrée littéraire, the finalists of the Prix Goncourt and Renaudot. But then I was sampling the clear harder stuff too, accepting shots like prizes, gripping bottles like they were the 108th Annual Stockholm Oslo Helsinki Awards. Members of the Royal Academy, thank you for the vodka. My ration aquavit, appreciated. I wouldn’t be standing here with you today if it weren’t for Aaron Szlay. Wouldn’t, weren’t, barely standing. A man who loved his sister, Miriam, his niece, Achsa, and the NY Knickerbockers, even through the post-Ewing/Isaiah Thomas Era. A man who also loved women he wasn’t related to, and never engaged in oragenital stimulation without trying to make it mutual and simultaneous. He died above Iceland, which has nothing to do with Thor Balk, because I am sane. He is survived by a diner out on York Avenue, which, like him, would always refill an empty glass.

The Lapps clapped bookends stylized like sepulchral menhirs, condolence applause. I was about to lead everyone in a rousing kaddish. But the only editor who was also the only writer who was also the only reader in Greenland lit the cig in my mouth. A guard preempted with “Rauchen Verboten,” but then used his body English.

“Alright, alright, I’ll go immolate outside.”

Wettish slate the sky. The satellites were wheeling.

Faces surrounded—from Midtown, the Flatiron, faces with whom I might’ve shared rides leaving parties in Park Slope or Astoria. Or with whom I might’ve had lifechanging convos about slipped my mind subjects stumbling south down the Bowery from a launch for a handsewn letterpressed poetry chapbook of two pages in a limited edition of 12.

They said they were going back to the hotel, so I went along, but it wasn’t my hotel. It was too modern, too minimal as maximal luxe—it was this immense mercury raindrop, shaped like a tear.

Into, and through, the lobby—to throng the elevators, but I took the suspension stairs, which were mocked up into a bookcase holding coffinsized volumes.

I tried lifting the cover or lid of, I won’t record which, but it was nailed.

Up on the mezzanine was this beton empyrean of ballroom, with a party on. And who wasn’t there? I mean that literally. Who wasn’t?

We clocked each other out in the vestibule—this lady and I—sciamachy by the cloakroom hung between the doorways. We clocked each other but let it go.

I studied the wall until she went inside. They were raffling off the wall. I took a ticket. I had one chance to win the wall. At the end of the night the DJ would draw the numbers. The wall was a series of screenbanks stacked like shelves that showed new books and if I liked any title flashing past all I had to do was doubleclick it open and stand amidst the clamor and read.

This lady, she was my successor—putative, emphasis on the first two syllables, because she was Spanish, barrio Spanish, Afro-Cuban NY.

I’m not trying to say she was my replacement, I’m not trying to say I was replaceable, only that I once worked for, and that she still worked for, the Times—our careers might’ve overlapped for a weekend edition. But while I’d written criticism and then quit, she’d been hired to cover the publishing beat, rather the media beat, whose “news” about how much culture was being bought or sold for, how much it grossed, and the business behind its production, was now unequivocally established as the apotheosis of culture and criticism both: the dramas and appraisals of boardroom and backstage, in one convenient package.

The Times’s local rovers, native floaters, chatted circles around her—they were Germans whose English was so competent that the paper had been able to discard its regular permanent foreign correspondents like second swizzlesticks. Laidoff, forgotten on a tray, as the budgets melted to water everything down. With ad revenue shrinking and so pagecounts shrinking it was better to downsize a single staff job with benefits into two dozen freelance gigs, relying on Germans to cover Germany, musicians to cover Music, artists to cover Art, dancers to terpsichore on the generalist’s mass grave. Media being the last limit of our culture, this woman was one of the last culture staffers left, for the last major paper published in America’s last major publishing city—or, to put it directly, like a journalist would, the Times put her on a plane from NY to write about NY people at the bookfair—they would’ve sent her to Abbottabad had wahhabi warlords bought fullpage ads for Allah.

Finn especially, I’m sure he’s had to do with her—fill in a byline, whichever might be remembered from such filings as “Slicing, Dicing, Ebook Pricing,” or else “Remote Revision: Amazon Alters Ebook Content Without Consent.” Say Finn’s ergosedentarily decumbent with feet propped atop the slushpile of a lazy day, pondering out the window whether that pigeon below him is crippled or just resting, and the phone rings, she has his directline, and he picks up, and she goes all Torquemada inquisitive.

I can’t speak to anything about any layoff/reshuffling, he says. Regrettably. A Joshua Cohen memoir? Who? Hang up. Out amid that sixth floor catchment pool subroofed over Broadway, a pigeon either crippled or resting.

She extracted herself from the klatsch of Germans, taking appetizing nips out of every other server. Dipping crudités. Making cocktail napkin waves. Leaving her pda with a kebab skewer on a tray, turning, retrieving it.

She was big in her little black dress, lashed to it with lathered beads. Pageboyed, her complexion the result of mixed and matched 10 sites’ cosmetic tips, glimmer, shimmer, comedogenic, an It girl who then had to earn It.

“Hey, Cohen, is that you?”

“This is me,” I said, “and this is a vodka soda.”

“Fuck, Cohen—are you alright?”

“Just fine.”

“Seriously?”

“Allergies, it’s an allergic reaction.”

“To the vodka? Or small quiches?”

“Smalltalk.”

LOL, “It’s been since, what? The New Yorker holiday party, 2000s ago?”

“The Copper Age. Early Church.”

“So?”

“What?”

“So who are you here for?”

I popped the quiche and chewed, which kept the expression straight and the tears in check and with a green mouth said, “On spec.”

“Nope, no way.”

“I’m a visiting scholar at the Institut für Sozialforschung,” swallowing, frigid crusts and core.

“Legit?”

I wheezed, “I just happened to be in Frankfurt on assignment for a blog about Euro men’s fashion.”

“Fuck you.”

“Negotiating the reorganization of IG Farben? Or attempting to overthrow the landtag of Hesse?”

“Fuck you limp,” and she went to flip around my lanyard, but I put my hand over hers and prevented her, held her.

Then she withdrew and smoothed the stripe in her hair, puce until the roots, “Why don’t you just promise you’re not filing tonight?”

“Lots of plans tonight but none include filing. Swear on my totebag.”

“Then you can be a source.”

“I’ve been called worse, even nonanonymously.”

“Mind if I ask you a question?”

She, Mary, Mariana (her own lanyard listing free from her breasts), was after the story—I’d better capitalize that, the Story—a tale that functioned like a sixth sense organ alive and proprioceptive, without which it didn’t matter what’d happened in Frankfurt, it might as well have been that nothing had happened.

The Story wasn’t everything, of course, but its telling had to convince editors that it was, or at least had to convince readers that it was—had to story its way into obliterating any intimations of alternative or individual experience. This was the worst of journalism—the realization that no matter how diligently you worked to be impartial, your presence alone was the slant, the tilt, and that even transcendence would have to become narrated, narratized, plotted.

The true story of the fair—she’d clutched for clickerpen, flippad—was that the world rights in every format to every fair’s true story were determined beforehand. All the year’s significant bookdeals were already arranged prior to Frankfurt, in emails, priority whispers. Frankfurt, then, was just where they were announced—when you brought a media property to market, you brought it presold to show it off, or show its price—though details such as the ebook royalty percentage on “copies” exceeding 100,000 might still have to be parsed by the carving stations, untangled on the dancefloor. What other industry has been so neuroticized that it needs a party as an excuse to do business? and needs a business as an excuse to party?

Everyone in this industry was a frustrated writer, which is like all Chairpeople of the Board being frustrated assemblyline workers or machinists, everyone had been a humanities grad with a dream—and that and that alone was the Story, perennially, a tale of people who’d bargained their ways into the business side of books and then once annually were given the opportunity to live their delusion of being crucial to a culture with a trip to a barbarian land conspicuously lacking in the one presence that depressed them at home: writers.

Mary, myself, and the other journalists gawking nonchalance as we sidled to the bar—awkward malcontents mentally annotating who I might’ve been—might’ve been the only writers around.

“The story is two writers discussing the story,” I said, “two writers afraid of missing the story and so inventing the story, inventing whatever it would scare us to have missed, nicht wahr?”

“Off the record?”

“Off, on, background, foreground—we’re doing Jäger shots in Germany.”

“Are we? Why don’t you have another kebab and then we’ll consider?”

“The story’s the same as it always was, what are the sums. The biggest advance is the biggest story, vice versa. It’s how one print industry rewards another for paying out its confidence so recklessly. I’m fine, I’m fine—two Jägermeisters, bitte.”

“You sure?”

“I’m saying the shareholders. Can’t read. Do they even issue stock certificates on paper? Don’t they just expect you to download and print nowadays?”

LOL again, and we cheersed and took the shots down.

I spilled and either she was indulging me by refusing to notice or her break was over and it was back to her job. She recounted which panels she’d attended before asking which were my faves—the oldest reporting trick in the—and I told her, inventing who spoke on what and what they said, she asked my opinion of the opening speech, and I gave it to her, and either she was fucking with me or fucking lying too because she agreed with me, then she went on to describe the Messe hall architecture so effectively that I’ve plagiarized her—all the roach/armadillo/Transformers comparisons were hers, above—and then a male Magyar bonobo swung over and said in a menthol dialect, “Congratulations, it is very [unintelligble], New Ink,” or “News, Inc.,” “Jew Kink,” “Next Drink,” crawled on.

“Congrats—to you?” she said, the pad open again.

“Can’t imagine on what. He must’ve gotten me confused with someone else.”

“Someone like Caleb Krast?” and she twitched her pen along my ribs.

“So we’ve finally gotten to the point of this flirtation.”

“Don’t you know him?”

“Guy with chronic stink breath from an oral hygiene aversion, the cashmere sweaters that cloy at the midriff, still trying to squeeze into slimfits, preshredded—Cal, I know.”

“Have you two been in touch?”

“Not since he turned war hero. It’s difficult to get an appointment.”

“The new novel’s been picked up in a dozen languages—care to give me a quote?”

“He’s the novelist of our generation. Correction—he’s the novelist our generation deserves.”

She frowned, folded, capped, “You talk about all your friends this way?”

“You’d rather talk about the importation of Arab crime fiction to the American market? Or the enduring popularity of comix?”

She smiled, “Graphic novels.”

“Graphic just used to mean you’d get a titty scene, after which a thug would get his legs blown off.”

“Have you read any of the enhanced ebooks released for multisense ereaders? You hold the tablet and it shakes and you can manually feel the explosions?”

“Have I read them? Is that what you’re supposed to do with them?”

“Tell me another story, then.”

“Like a bedtime story?”

“You don’t have it in you,” and she smirked and then tugged my lanyard, me, close. “Who are you?—I mean, besides Aaron Szlay?”

The DJ spun up again and all around us glitter swirled like metal snowflakes. Laser tracerfire. Flashpot brisance. Strobes.

Our mouths were a tongue apart. But my teeth were too sharp and her lips were still moving.

“You have to help me out,” she said. “My deadline was a drink ago. Lene Termin at Viking hasn’t returned any of my msgs, I’m currently out of the office, no shit. The booths are all just assistants and so trained nowadays I get nothing but review copies, smiles. No one’s in NY, but it’s like no one’s even in Frankfurt. Finally I called out to Iowa, but the students kept transferring me to extensions that might’ve been Caleb’s but the voicemails weren’t set up.”

I put a fist at her back, “Why can’t we just sleep next to each other, no touching?”

She flinched and dropped the credentials, “Why can’t you do me one fucking favor?”

“Because you’re dead.”

“You’re an asshole.”

Then I was conjugating: “You’re dead, I’m dead, they’re dead, we’re all dead.”

“But you’re still an asshole.”

My reply was slurred toward the exit because—across the room past the median bar and splotched in ambers and clears amid appetizer molder—was Finn. Floridcheeked in grief carousal. He didn’t notice me, he hadn’t. This must’ve been his local lodging.

Finn’s silk shirt was busted open to the butterflycrunches navel, and the suitjacket he held and danced with whipped and spun like a ghost. It was an unbuttoned black with white pinstripes ghost he dipped and twirled around, Sufi matador dancing on the ceiling of hell.

The vestibule was riled with revelers who weren’t waiting for the elevators, or were, but swayingly, gropingly, humping one another up against the bookwall and the ballroom’s sliding partitions, and suddenly it struck me as impossible that they were readers too, or claimed to be, impossible that they’d ever even once just sat still in a chair or lain in bed, alone, silently, one light, and read. Indirect light. Quiet, please. I went hushing the couples stairward. The partition walls were sliding apart, or the lidcovers had been pried off the bookcoffins along the stairs, and even as I had to tipsy around them to avoid tripping, craven Danish creatures were crawling out of the darkness and seizing me, tugging at my totestrap. “We take you to what room you stay,” they said. “We are help you cannot stand.” I can’t say how or why, I just smelled it on them, through the herb liquor sulfur—they were Danish.

“I’m not a guest,” I said, or intended to say. “Just get me a cab,” like have it drive into the lobby and up to the landing at least.

Wheeliebags kept clunkaclunking past me downstairs, and all of them were mine, and I said to each, “You’re mine,” not because they were, because it entertained me. The railings were not to be trusted. I reached for them and they swatted me back, so I leaned against the coldsweat porphyry, and sat. And assed myself between the steps.

By the time I got to the lobby it must’ve been midnight, because everyone was straight above me, shooting me: my attempts to rise, my sotted swipes at their devices, my pale hairy bellyflopping, staying on my belly so they wouldn’t snap my face and tag it posthumous. #DrunkAmi. #LitSlob.

The carpet tasted bland. Because it was immaculate, unpatterned.

“Lass ihn,” was said in a foreigner’s German, but in a foreignness I recognized. “Er ist mein Arbeitskollege—mein Freund.”

Such brute fancy watches on the hands that rolled me, on the hands that grasped the strap to drag my flab upright, even as I tried stuffing the tote under my shirt and pants at once, popping buttons. My waist tumbled out into handles. I was being lifted, taken by my handles and lifted and whatever I was yelling had to do with whether anybody was fucking aware of what this fucking suit cost? Anybody?

Maleksen—bulked albinic Maleksen—he was speaking with the stubblepated guards who had my arms pinned back and were twisting my wrists: “Er kotzt.”

Sure enough if I kept protesting I’d puke.

Maleksen wagged a finger at me, before switching to the only sprache guards respect besides violence: “Bloke went bottle up on an empty stomach. But a good bloke. Good Arbeitskollege and Freund. We bunk at the Frankfurter Hof. I take him myself, no worries. Danke, mate.”

I was basically shoved into him—“Macht Platz.”

Maleksen staggered me into the doors like they were revolvingdoors, which they weren’t, headfirst.

Outside. And shivering. But Maleksen still wouldn’t let go, and no curbstumble I took or rut I forced myself into had him loosening his totehold. Whatever I was babbling went into the wind, beyond the kliegs of the hofzone and into the dimming. Au revoir, you logos. Adieu, you chains. It was too late in the day for late capitalism. Everything was closed. Maleksen jerked me back. “Wait.” Then a boot to the calf. “Move, mate.”

Because there were businessmen blundering inebriate. Because there was a crowd at the tramstop, though by the schedule of the night route a solitary kerchiefed pensioner huddling sackladen at the shelter was a crowd. Even just a cig would’ve been. Just a goddamned cig. We came to this intersection of shuttered bar, shuttered schnitzeleria/bar, vacant plaster atelier still affiched as a cybercafé, and as I hobbled along with the tracks Maleksen heaved me sharp by the strap into a turn, and now I was behind him, led, towed, like I was leashed. River gusts blew in through the gape in my fly. We crossed again, against the signal. Maleksen was scared of being followed, but also scared of not being—rather he was afraid of not having the correct followers.

He stopped again at the meridian, checked traffic—“What is the pass, mate?”

“The password?”

“It will be cracked,” he said, “but it will be more gentle if you tell me—it is not fingerprint, no?”

“To my computer? None of my passwords have computers.”

This was parkland now, grass swards scrawled over by the umbrage of bare branches. And my only witnesses, writers and the like more famous and for now more dead than I was, enpedestaled statues.

“Give it up, mate,” Maleksen said.

“So we’re going to visit Balk? He lives in a park?”

He was dragging me toward the willows. Behind that a road. Above us the stars. Plane weather.

“Give it to me.”

“Stop talking porn to me.”

He whirled around and as he spoke the scarred bars bent at his throat: “The computer. The laptop.”

“Let’s get clear on this—you’re mugging me? For fucking recordings you’d be getting anyway? All because why? I violated terms? Because I left Berlin or went online like once at a welfare state library? Or is b-Leaks getting impatient with me and reneging?”

“Shut up. You will type and access for me.”

“It’s just suckmypenis, alloneword. The name of that twat teacher from Sydney who taught your accent, all CAPS. I should be mugging you, for all that cash you owe me. I should be tapping Balk’s defense fund.”

“Is it touch ID?”

“It’s retinal. Or iris. I forget. It’s lobal. Ears. You’re going to have to cut off a nipple.”

“I will hurt you if I must.”

“With the blessings of Balk the utopian pacifist, I’m guessing?”

“Tetbook. Now, mate.”

“I’m only trying to make sense of this, sort out your position.”

“Toss it, mate.”

“Wait, I’ve got it—you’re striking out on your own. You’re leaking the leaker, sticking it to Balk.”

Maleksen scowled. “I count.”

I said, “You’re going rogue, like with a ransom thing. Going to publish the interviews yourself. Or sell them off for publication? Or sell them back to every last user they incriminate?”

Maleksen slashed out with his bootheel and knocked me to my knees and the tote swung around my neck and hung down in front of me.

“Fuck,” I said, “just fucking hold up.”

But he was whispering, “b-Leaks is become soft. In politics. Balk is also soft, sitting in Russian Iceland, cannot ever go outside. His intellect tells him he is persecuted because of advocacy and not because he is pederastic. I am only telling this now to you because you like him lie to yourself about your importance. I count.”

“Four” went to “three,” but then Maleksen’s two was “dva” and one was “odin,” and as I was fetching my glasses from the dirt I had to say, “You’re Russian?”

There was a strangulated swan honk from beyond the willows.

Maleksen held a gun, and though all of it was camouflaged in flecktarn browns and greens, it gleamed, as if it were a plastic laser toy, with a black wire straggling through the tangle of roots back to a busted sniper game at a condemned arcade on the Jersey Shore. Then again, the way he was aiming it was real, like all my flesh wasn’t real but pixel, to be shot to death infinitely, to be resurrected eternally—I had the hiccups.

“Why do this?” I said. “Who cares?”

But what I wanted to say was this: I’m only protecting myself. What I wanted to say was: You already know what’s in it. Everybody knows. Within themselves.

There were contrails of light through the boughs. A gray Merc idled out in the raster.

I turned back from it and smack into the gun. Its butt to my jaw, my jaw to the grass.

I wasn’t just wet but made of wetness, flowing along to the lowest ground, and then thrusting up from the matted blades. But when I put a hand to where it stung I fell again, flat, and breathed a puddle that felt like breathing a plasticbag. I wrenched off the plasticbag that had wrapped around me. It was from Kaufland, the hypermarket.

And that was morning.

I straightened my knees, slowly, achingly slowly straightened my grovel joints, patted myself down. No wallet, but Principal’s passport was still there damp under a sock, gravel. The tag wound around my neck identified my corpse as Aaron Szlay’s. What I didn’t have was a tote, with all my lives inside. Each step sparked fire but I was cold, that back of the throat cold. Every swallow was mucous. Each step twinged up the spine, and shook me into coughing fits, croupy coughing, fuck. Sneezing stuff the consistency of gauze, as if to stanch the jawblood. I rubbed my shoulder, at the totemark, the strappage. The 2.4 lbs of my Tetbook, the 2.4 tons of the book it contained, gone. I’d backed nothing up. If posture be my judge I was fucked. I had no other younger version to reload. I had no other younger version of myself.

There was a construction site in my head and then farther along the street was a construction site, jackhammering, pointed pneumatics of kurwa, pizda, overalled gastarbeiters cursing in Polish while breaking asphalt, drilling at sewage with sexual fury.

I felt a car creep up, but it was just a cab, which once it’d crept alongside my condition veered away and soaked me. My suit had been made to order, not to get stretched—it had pleats now.

Here’s the name of the street: Mainzer Landstraße. And here’s another streetname: Taunusanlage. The air was a sodden drear like a frozen screen. A constant pane between me and the skyscraping curtainwalls of mirrored glass just ahead.

Observe, perceive, glean everything—it was as if I were compensating for the material I’d lost by collecting the trash around me. Piking it, staving it, to fill this pit in me. To heal the welts pulsing like stoplights at my temples. Gravel in my shoes like babyteeth.

Into the Messe again. A guard halted me, examined my blood against my tag—“What happens to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m here for the panel on zombies.”

He said, “There is that today?” As if everyone was in peril.

“It’s on just now—zombie fiction, the undead.”

He was giddy now, silly, “That is the book I please to read.”

I went to the bathrooms and wet papertowels and pressed my face, spiffed up. Then slogged past the tropicalized Pacific Islander stalls, went unrecognized by the Czechs and Slovaks who just a diurnity ago had been my brothers.

Pod caffeine, strudel in a sleeve. And while I was at it, why not, grabbing the giveaway notebooks and ballpoints.

Lisabeth helmed the booth in mourningdress chic, channeling both the orphan and widow (typesetting jargon: an orphan the opening line of a paragraph stranded alone at the bottom of a page, a widow the closing line stranded alone at the top). It was as if she’d traveled prepared for a loss, a charcoal dress quivering to the knees. Her face was swollen from the crying or bouquets. Aaron would’ve appreciated that—he’d always been attracted to women allergic to flowers, and latex.

The foldingtable was shrouded in blueblack linens, furled roses and closelipped tulips, bonbons, sekt. Bereavement cards in soft and hardback, boxed sets. I lined behind the wild sprigs of a deliverer who turned around and cringed. My jaw must’ve been trickling again. Lisabeth signed for him, took another babysbreathed bouquet, set it among the aster strewings, doing her duty stalwart. Such rectitude, she wouldn’t even avail herself of a chair, but stayed standing as if all the books the agency had ever represented were balanced on her head.

I was about to pay a visit emptyhanded.

But then a woman cut in front of me—Cal’s editor, Lene Termin, Earth Mother. A batik peasant smock, a chunky butchness latebloomed with antidepressants.

Lene didn’t even meet my sneer, only said, “Pardon, Entschuldigung.”

She said to Lisabeth, “Pat Sagenhaft, my partner, just picked Seth up at Newark.”

“So helpful,” was all Lisabeth had.

“Pat’s going to sit in with him and the lawyer—Rich?”

“Spence Rich.”

“But just in an advisory capacity—make sure no one’s getting shafted.”

“Thanks.”

“That meeting’s for noon, NY noon. Meantime and with your OK I’ll go personally make the followup calls, to reassure the clients, offer like second opinion, outsider perspective. The immediate goal is fending off the poachers.”

“I understand. And thanks.”

“Again I can’t stress this enough, I’m here for you—Aaron meant a lot to me. If it makes sense to merge, you’ll merge—I’ve already got a few names in mind and even just casually a couple of feelers.”

“Already?”

“Too soon, but—interesting feelers.”

“Your partner Pat’s still with Riba Group, yes? Or Schwartzlist?”

“Then again it’s never too soon—especially with our girl to take care of, the princess of Princeton.”

“Achsa.”

“Exactly—we’ll be sure to involve her in all aspects of the process.”

“Achsa,” Lisabeth snuffed.

“I’m so proud of how you’re holding up, Lisabeth—that won’t go unnoticed. Now is there anything else I can do?”