The Biology of Luck (10 page)

Battery Park resonates with lust as the sun approaches its zenith. A primal impulse takes hold of the young couples strolling the gravel walkways, the newlyweds who have paused to admire DiModica's bronze bull, the truant teens laid out on the cool grass. Maybe because all flesh tantalizes in the early summer, in the right light, or most likely because, at this time of year, there is more flesh exposed, midriffs, cleavage, inner thighs, the park is suddenly transformed into a dynamo of panting and groping. This desire is not the tender affection of evening, the wistful intimacy of the twilight's last gleam. It is raw, concupiscent hunger. It devours decorum, banishes shame and flouts the loftiest ambitions of the penal code—and still thrives, unappeased. It is also an unwitting slap in the face to those deprived, those shackled by time and refinement, those deficient in the desire, in the performance, those too old, those too far away, those bereft, those who for one reason or another, clinical frigidity or clerical vow, but most often lack of opportunity, do not have a playmate to fondle among strangers. It is the hollow one feels in one's gut, like the aftermath of a submarine colliding with a depth charge, when one spies a handsome, carefree young man with his palms cupping the breasts of a stunning teenage beauty, shamelessly groping her on a picnic blanket only yards from the pedestrian walkways, and knowing that one will never again have a chance to be him. It is the reason that, on an ordinary June morning, Larry avoids the park.

Today is different. Striding across the shaded lawns at an invigorating pace, ignoring the Hope Garden and the Verrazano Monument and even the pubescent sweethearts dry-humping behind the Korean War Memorial, Larry stops at the base of the Walt Whitman statue to offer his gratitude. How many cold winter mornings has he stood on these very flagstones, the park moribund and barren, staring through the miasma of his known breath, invoking inspiration from the Bard of Brooklyn? How many evenings has he passed before
the word processor in his study, eyes numb, forearms aching, spirit bankrupt, thinking of Whitman laying bricks in the torrid summer heat to bankroll his first edition of
Leaves of Grass
? Larry recognizes that he has embraced the wrong idol. Whitman had his devils, yes, but as different from Larry's own as the scorch of fire from the burn of ice. Whitman had beauty, presence, grace; his agony lay elsewhere. Melville is Larry's proper graven image. Nearsighted, homely, infirm Melville, the patron saint of the underappreciated, scribbling away at his custom house desk through indigence, through ignominy, through the premature loss of his sons, denied both acclaim in life and eulogy in death. Larry knows that his altar should be Melville's birthplace on State Street. And yet somehow he feels no kinship, no solidarity, with the Shakespeare of the Sea. Maybe Whitman is his star because Starshine is his subject, because she embodies all the spirit and splendor and sensual abandon that the Herman Melvilles and Larry Blooms of the world can only hope to experience vicariously. For Starshine is a Whitman poem, a blooming lilac, the body electric. Gazing up into the hero's larger-than-life tribute, the maestro's marble features beaming perpetually over a polished beard, Larry wonders if he has done justice to both master and model. He is certain he has. Other men expend their vitality in the act of living; he has consigned his ardor to the printed page.

Larry realizes that he is no longer alone in his contemplation. A young woman has joined him on the flagstone concourse before the Whitman statue. She is tall, pale, flat chested. Her hair has the texture of cord. Although her features are delicate, if a bit too narrow, her sober expression and awkward bearing undermine nature's limited gifts. Even her attire—a dull floral-print dress—strives toward the unattractive. Larry notices the woman is sizing him up, deciding whether he passes muster, participating in the same ritual of abortive courtship, the scoping out of total strangers in public places, women riding subway cars and waiting in airport terminals and filling out informed consent forms at the dentist's office, a pantomime of mating that always ends in the same place, absolutely nowhere, when he
notices the final defect that solidifies his intentions: under one arm, on this glorious summer morning, the woman is carrying a folded umbrella. He does not know why, of all things, the umbrella is decisive. But it is. His fellow Whitman admirer is not for him. She has been pigeonholed among the unattractive, banished beyond the pale. Larry retreats to the far edge of the concourse, careful to keep his eyes on the statue, hoping that his companion will judge him similarly and depart. There are no bedfellows, no kindred spirits, among the ugly.

The woman holds her ground. Although his gaze is focused on the statue, he senses that she is staring at him. He catches her approaching in his peripheral vision and notes that her manner exudes all the joie de vivre of a pallbearer hauling a casket. She stands beside him for a full twenty seconds before speaking.

“Do you enjoy Whitman?” she asks.

“Me?”

“I don't care for him myself. All that bunk about daffodils and the scent of wheat and celestial orbs rising and whatnot. I never understood it. That's not part of my shtick. I need something meaty, something epic. I'd trade ten Whitmans for one Tennyson any day. But I'm only saying that, you know. I'm not actually sure if I mean it. It's all part of my persona. Tennyson seems to dovetail with the umbrella. “

Larry has inched backwards during the course of the woman's onslaught, struggling to expand the personal space between them, but she has inched forward simultaneously. He has no facility with strangers, and they must sense this, for they ordinarily pass him by. He often wishes it were otherwise. But now, confronted with this peculiar young woman who values poets like trading cards and off-handedly subverts her own opinions, he longs to return to the evil that he knows. What can this aggressive creature think he has to offer her? What has he done to solicit her attentions? Is it possible that, fortified with a book deal and Starshine's potential love, he is emitting some previously untapped pheromone, some pent-up aphrodisiac, which will magnet lonely eccentrics in civic plazas. In the future, he will have to be more careful.

“I'm scaring you off, aren't I?” asks the woman. “It's this over-the-top, in your face thing. But don't worry. I'm really not like this at all. I'm quite reserved, almost pathologically shy. This is my way of overcompensating. “

“Okay,” says Larry.

“By the way, we haven't been properly introduced. I'm Rita Blatt. The reporter from the
Downtown Rag
. Please say they told you I was coming. “

“I'm confused.”

“I knew this was going to happen,” Rita says. “I just knew it. The right fist never knows who the left hook is punching, if you know what I mean. I'm a reporter for the
Downtown Rag
, the city's only free weekly dedicated entirely to the offbeat—I'm sure you've picked up a copy in a pizza shop or something and thrown it away—and I'm supposed to be doing a story on a group of Dutch tourists coming back to New York to discover the city's roots. They should have warned you. Whatever. Anyway, I was going to meet you at Castle Clinton, but one of the park rangers said I had at least an hour's wait before you returned from the Statue of Liberty, so I thought I'd kill some time in the park and, what do you know, I end up running into the very person I'm looking for. Small city, isn't it?”

“Let me get this straight. You're a reporter doing a piece on my tourists?”

“You're catching on, Larry Bloom. And you look just like your company photo, although I probably wouldn't have had the courage to speak to you if not for your name tag. I have an eye for detail, you know. Of course, if I really had an eye for detail, I'd be a foreign correspondent with the
New York Times
instead of a thirty-four-year-old stringer with a paper nobody reads, but that's neither here nor there. “

“Did Snipe sign off on this?”

“That name sounds right. But don't depend upon it. I'm dreadful with names. I did a feature last month on some tycoon philanthropist who set up a guns-for-furniture exchange. For every weapon you
brought in, his company gave you a free patio set. The whole thing was preposterous, but it looked like it was going to work. These kids would come in with assault rifles and leave with chaise lounges. Nobody bothered to find out what a bunch of ghetto youth were doing with garden chairs. It turns out they were selling them on the West Side Highway. But the point is that the millionaire's name was Garfield Lloyd Parker and I accidentally called him Parker Lloyd Garfield throughout the article. Protestant names work like that, I suppose. But the old stuffed-shirt went through the roof! So I'm not really sure who I spoke to, but the important thing is that we found each other and I'm coming on your tour.”

“I'll have to phone the office.”

“As you wish. I was supposed to meet you up at Grant's Tomb, but I got tied up. Between you and me, I had a huge row with my boyfriend. I'm still somewhat riled up. You can tell, can't you?”

“I never would have guessed.”

“I didn't miss anything, did I? Wasn't it just some sort of catered breakfast?”

“You didn't miss a thing.”

“That's a relief,” says Rita. “My first major assignment ever as a reporter was to cover the Tyson-Spinks boxing match. Do you remember it? The ninety-one-second knockout. Well, I got stuck in traffic and showed up just in time to cover the mass exodus of fans. I'm unlucky, that way. A regular Calamity Jane. So I'm relieved I didn't miss anything this morning. “

“Nothing important,” says Larry. “Now if you'll excuse me, I'm on break. I'll meet you at the ticket kiosk in about twenty minutes. “

Larry turns on his heels and walks briskly in the direction of the old IR Control House. It amazes him that life never offers completely smooth sailing, even for one day, that just when the morning seems as flawless as the mountain sky, a sinister cloud manages to creep its way over the horizon. And, what makes life even more mysterious, what truly probes the depth and complexity of the psyche, is that on an overcast day that one cloud would pass entirely unnoticed. But he
will not let Rita Blatt darken his afternoon. He will not even phone the office. There are too many other pleasures to absorb, the feathery feel of verdant spring air, the overhead sun sparkling off the opaque glass of skyscrapers, the promise of Starshine's caress only hours away. Larry settles onto a vacant park bench on the shaded side of the footpath and smiles at an elderly woman feeding bread crusts to the pigeons. She wears too much lipstick and her hair is hidden under a lime-green kerchief, but somehow, at the end of this magic morning, even she is beautiful. Even the image of Rita Blatt henpecking her boyfriend is beautiful. It is this sensation, this moment of omnipresent promise, that Larry has striven to capture in his prose.

He often asks himself why writers write, other writers, good-looking established luminaries who no longer have anything to prove, anything to gain, but sitting in Battery Park on a fair summer's day, he fully understands their motivation. They long to capture the ephemeral bliss of the fleeting moment, the sun's rays twinkling on the freshly cut grass. They yearn to trap the tapering gleam in an old woman's eyes, to preserve her faded beauty like a rose petal pressed under a book, to give future generations a particular midday stroll, a purple butterfly, a young mother pushing a perambulator beneath a blushing red maple. Larry reflects upon all of the dogged, driven men and women throughout the city, throughout time, composing in longhand, running quill over parchment, blotting ink, upon their obsession, upon their self-doubt, upon Whitman crossing the Brooklyn ferry, upon Melville harpooning in his musty rooming house, upon Ziggy Borasch struggling for one perfect sentence, upon Anne Frank in her garret and Gramsci in his cell, upon the blind Joyce and the blind Homer and Heller Keller before her desktop Remington, all mulish, all muddling, all fighting the dark phantoms of boredom and fatigue and isolation. And for what? An old woman, a butterfly, a flock of craven pigeons? Not that. Of course, not that. Not even for a girl named Starshine. They dream of something grander, something immutable, something to transcend their own hunger and want and sacrifice. They dream of immortality.

Larry senses that he will soon be among the immortals, that his name and Starshine's will forever be imprinted in the collective conscience of Western Civilization, vividly, indelibly, their names intertwined like so many lovers of yore. He reaches into his breast pocket for a cigarette, determined to prolong his reverie, to keep the Dutch waiting if necessary, when he recoils at the realization that somewhere, maybe on the plaza before the Whitman statue, maybe while placating Ziggy Borasch, most likely bare chested on the parapet, but possibly anywhere, absolutely anywhere in a city of nine thousand thoroughfares and eight million people, his everlasting glory has met an untimely death. Somewhere, anywhere, he has lost his letter from Stroop & Stone.

Floral shops are the last havens of masculinity.

The act of raising flowers, of trellising roses, of laying out begonia beds and watering window-box petunias, also the art of arrangement, of melting paraffin into silver vases, edging nosegays with paper frills, weaving wreaths and chaplets, fashioning corsages and sprays, transforming isolated clippings into breathtaking mosaics—all of these endeavors bespeak the feminine. But for the brief interval when Mother Nature's magical blossoms lie constrained in tepid water, packed together like refugees behind a merchant's counter, each flower bears the frown of subservience, the imprimatur of commerce, which defines it as a serf to the patrimony.

Starstine knows that truth about floral shops: that they are more virile than smoke-filled conference rooms, more exclusive than the floors of the stock exchange, more macho than conventions of Hells Angels at interstate truck stops. They are American's answer to Victorian drawing rooms. For the purchase of cut flowers anticipates candlelit dinners, hospital stays, theatrical productions, memorial services, promotion banquets, share holders' meetings, honeymoons, hearses, hours in seedy motel rooms, days in probate court, the full retinue and regalia of things men orchestrate, men pay for, men rely upon, the things men crave when they send women anonymous love notes, as though each time a man buys a woman a bouquet, he experiences a minor orgasm. No glass ceiling, in Starshine's view, is as
impregnable, as the rolling doors of the floral display cabinet. Maybe that is why she has grown to dread flowers.