The Biology of Luck (4 page)

“Tonight?”

“It'll just take an hour or two. Jessie is also up in the Bronx. Co-op City. I'll owe you one …”

Larry reaches for his cigarettes, checking himself just in time. Empire Tours is a smoke-free employer. “How about tomorrow night?” he asks tentatively.

“It has to be tonight. Even that's a stroke of luck. The cousin skidded off the road on the drive down from Albany, so she's not coming back until the morning ….”

“I have plans tonight,” says Larry. “I kind of have a date.”

“Not a problem. The whole shebang will take an hour, tops. Bring me a receipt and you can even charge your dinner bill to the company, okay?”

The arrival of the Dutch consul prevents Larry from protesting any further. Two white stretch limousines inch their way to the curbside and a phalanx of chauffeurs and liverymen, decked out in the ceremonial red-and-gold regalia of the Netherlands' mission, maneuver themselves into two long files to create an imperial catwalk. They carry neither swords nor guns, but hold their right arms behind their backs, bent awkwardly at the elbows, so that they resemble an army of overdressed dance instructors about to lead a team lesson in the minuet. Between their ranks pass two security attachés, then a gaunt, long-faced official carrying a portmanteau, and finally the consul on the arm of a significantly younger woman. The damning contrast between the rotund, mustached diplomat and his svelte companion leaves one to speculate whether she is the wife or the daughter. Or possibly an escort provided by the Dutch state for festive occasions.

The cortege crosses onto the plaza. The approaching consul
walks slowly, leaning on his companion's arm for support; the pair reminds Larry of a Salvador Dalí print depicting a miniature debutante dragging a teapot. A brass band strikes up the anthem of the House of Orange, reinvigorating the demonstrators beyond the cordon, who reply with a salute of jeers and cacophonous banging. Snipe slaps Larry between the shoulder blades. He steps forward to confer with one of the couples waiting to greet the consul, an American couple, unquestionably, presumably among the Hudson Valley philanthropists who have sponsored the event.

Larry glares at his boss, his anger mounting. He knows Snipe too well for his own good. The prick doesn't believe him—doesn't believe that he has a date. But Larry doesn't have time to give his boss the silent tongue-lashing he deserves. He is suddenly surrounded by silence. Brass and tympani bleed to an awkward halt; the howling fades to a murmur. For a moment, Larry thinks that the weather has shifted, that the heavens have opened. He looks up into the clear, distant sky. His eyes are sorting through the swirling tree-scape when the first bagel pegs him square on the forehead.

All around Larry, the self-satisfied Dutch burghers are taking cover. They're scrambling on hands and knees to find shelter beneath the banquet tables, jostling for space behind the plastic recycling dumpsters. While the police have been shielding the visitors from the canaille beyond the cordon, a second group of protestors has climbed atop the rotunda of the tomb. They've concealed themselves between the dome and the parapet, smuggling up surplus food from the unguarded caterer's tent, stockpiling projectiles for their culinary onslaught and biding their time. The arrival of the Dutch consul has sparked them to combat—he looks official enough, after all, although most likely the protesters have no clue who he is—and they've begun pelting the defenseless revelers below with preserved eel, canned sardines, and nuggets of Edam cheese. Larry crouches under a folding chair and watches as the privileged few (the consul, the gaunt dignitary, several self-selected American philanthropists) seek the refuse of the limousines and speed down Riverside Drive while the remainder of
the targeted audience is left to fend for itself. And then he sees Snipe, standing tall at the center of the pavilion like a general on horseback, steadily directing the Dutch tourists onto the awaiting busses.

The riot police have their shields up. They are engaged in a tidal struggle with a mob. The overhead barrage has come to a halt, but the assault continues from the ground as kitchen utensils and pocket-sized New Testaments replace the depleted edible ammunition. Larry decides to make a break for it. He double checks his pockets to make sure that he has not lost his cigarettes or his treasured letter, then charges through the storm to the nearest of the chartered coaches. There is a line waiting to board. He stands between the Dutch tourists and the mob, allowing those near the front of the line to take the brunt of the attack while he regains his bearing. The “shelling” soon abates. The police have resisted the first advance of the forces of disorder and it appears unlikely that the glass-bead brigade will regroup. Most of the demonstrators have already retreated from the scene of battle. Here and there, a long-haired white kid wages a losing war against a cop's baton, but boarding the bus, Larry senses that the revolution has been suspended indefinitely.

Larry examines the innocent victims of the massacre, the beset Dutch tourists who have seated themselves in the coach like a model kindergarten class and now await further instructions. They seem largely unperturbed. A few are nursing their clothing with handkerchiefs, but the vast majority peer through the tinted glass for a view of the action. Many are even smiling. Larry glances out the window and watches in amazement. Three holdouts—two black teenagers and a bearded white man in what looks like a zoot suit—have mounted one final charge against the cordon. They are using the cigar store Indian as a battering ram. One of the teens is bleeding from the head and neck. On the steps of the mausoleum, near the caterer's tent, Snipe shouts at a diminutive, copper-skinned man in a baker's apron. Larry turns away in disgust. He blows into his microphone, opens the company guidebook, and reads the first words of the scripted tour.

“Good morning and welcome to New York City.”

It is a morning of promise and bustle.

Starshine coasts through commuter traffic, pedaling only when necessary, leaving the downhills to the forces of natures. A fine moisture clings to the air: it limns her honey-colored hair and wilts the bandanna around her neck; it gilds the handlebars of her Higgins with a patina of cold droplets. The bleary-eyed creature in a tattered T-shirt has blossomed into a beautiful woman on a bicycle. She knows what she is about.

Heads turn as she weaves her way south through Williamsburg. There are the approving smiles of the elderly Italian men playing chess outside their social clubs, the ambivalent leers of caftaned Hasids returning from their morning prayers. Packs of junior high playboys shower her in catcalls. Papaya vendors whistle under their breaths. From the open windows of striped Dodge Darts and glaring purple Chevelles float offers of easy sex, of unparalleled sex, of midnight trysts and moonlight weddings and even cold, hard cash. Compliment and insult fuse to the obscene rhythms of longing and lust. In Starshine's wake, ancient women adjust their lipstick in pocket mirrors, young mothers grope for the arms of their male companions, the middle-class white kids who panhandle in herds simulate lovemaking on the street corners. All pay tribute to life's sole universal truth: A beautiful girl on a bicycle is communal property.

Colby, oblivious to this spectacle, will be waiting for her in the
coffee shop across Atlantic Avenue from the Unicorn Diner. He'll be perched on one of the platform chairs that face the street, hiding behind his
Wall Street Journal
, sipping the dregs of his second cup of coffee. A potted cactus wrapped in a paper cone will be braced between his pinstriped thighs; his fingers will toy nervously with the ribbons. This is Colby's little white secret. He'll squander a full hour of a glorious spring morning willing the minute hand of his pocket watch toward eight o'clock in the mistaken illusion that when he enters the Unicorn Diner ten minutes late, droplets of perspiration frowning across his brow, his arrival will convey just the appropriate degree of devil-may-mare spontaneity. The image leaves Starshine grinning.

She has seen through Colby since their first breakfast date. She blew out a tire on her bicycle and showed up flustered and out-of-breath at eight-thirty; her lover materialized, unconvincingly apologetic, at a quarter to nine. Starshine wonders how far to push this game, contemplates feigning oversleep and arriving in the vicinity of noon, but deep down she derives a perverse enjoyment from Colby's persistence, from his unflagging effort to undermine his own identity, because there is a certain charm to his ongoing quest to become the man he thinks she desires. In effect, to become more like her. Sometimes, Starshine asks herself how this crusade reflects upon her own identity, whether he pacifies some post-Freudian tapeworm at the core of her being, but she is less troubled than amused by the possibility. What she knows, for certain, is that she has no business disabusing Colby of his aspirations or exposing his trifling deception. The contrived spontaneity is his crutch, his delusion. It fosters his well-being. It does her no harm. In the context of the painstakingly layered card palace of doubletalk and mutually satisfying half truths and outright lies that are the greater part of all human interactions, especially romantic relationships, she recognizes that her omissions are far more destructive than Colby's. Most of the time. There are also some days—and she fears today is one of them—when she'd like to shake him by the lapels.

The city falls away from Starshine, the dilapidated warehouses, the moribund waterfront, row houses, roof gardens, East Williamsburg,
Fort Greene, the enclaves of bohemian chic beyond the Navy Yard. She traverses Cadman Plaza at Tillary Street, cuts south at the intersection of Henry and Montague. Brooklyn Heights unfolds before her, the nation's first great suburb, an enduring testament to the futility of escape. The neighborhood embodies Colby Parker's enlightened view of déclassé. To him, this is downscale. Gritty. But to Starshine, the foundling, the orphan of a failed oboist and a lounge crooner, cutting corners on three hundred dollars a week, this world of gourmet patisseries and bridal shops is as alien as the Brooklyn Heights of Truman Capote or even Walt Whitman. Sometimes Starshine imagines she would prefer that lost Brooklyn to this one, that she is the corporeal incarnation of a Whitman poem. She is relieved that she remembered to wear cargo pants. Unshaved legs are a no-go in yuppiedom.

Starshine removes her bicycle lock from around her waist, loops the chain twice beneath the basket, and secures her Higgins to a lamppost, then saunters up Atlantic Avenue and through the heavy glass doors of the Unicorn. The twenty-four-hour breakfast nook is its own small universe of paper placemats, table jukeboxes, pseudo-nautical décor. Kodachrome desserts rotate in glass cases; lobsters struggle for elbowroom in the undersized tank. She waits for Colby in the lobby, as she always does, between the pay telephone and the cigarette machine. The stiff-backed Greek maître d' examines her with suspicion. His eyes accuse her of shoplifting acclimatized air, of planning to dine and flee. Precisely ten minutes pass before Colby arrives with the paper cone in one hand and a long-stemmed red rose in the other. He offers her both. Starshine swallows her displeasure.

“I couldn't resist,” says Colby. “It was the last one in the bucket and it had your name written all over it. You're not mad, are you?”

“It's fine, just fine,” lies Starshine. “It must have been suffering there, all alone. Poor, poor flower. But this is the last time, Colby. Got it?”

“I swear.”

It won't be the last time, of course, only a prelude to a momentary respite, but Starshine is powerless to resist a gift unless she determines
to spurn the giver. And she is not prepared to do that. Not yet. Early on, she made the mistake of telling Colby that she hated flowers, that as far as she was concerned a cactus was as romantic as a rose, but the poor lightweight took the warning too much to heart and now her apartment rivals the hot house at the botanical gardens. Colby Parker cannot be anything other than Colby Parker. He is indefatigable.

The maître d' leads them to a corner table. Starshine notices that they are the youngest couple in the room, if they are indeed a couple, that they are surrounded on all sides by clusters of gaggling women in their sixties and ancient, bow-tied men lapping oatmeal in solitude. The men all share the same hangdog look; the women exude hunger and desire. Maybe Colby has chosen the Unicorn for a reason, Starshine muses, maybe he is subliminally exposing her to wedlock's cruel alternatives. But her lover is not that clever. Nor would the plan work. One look at the elderly couples eating in silence along the far wall, reflected and rereflected infinitely by the mirrors at either end of the row of booths, reminds Starshine of the Matrushka dolls which Eucalyptus collects in the knickknack cabinet beside her bed: Yes, marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of you trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing. Starshine would prefer to die a spinster.

“So have you thought things over?” asks Colby.

“Not
that
again.”

“I'm not putting pressure on you. I'm only asking.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything. Like the poetry of Walt Whitman.”

“What about the poetry of Walt Whitman?”

“Nothing in particular,” says Starshine. “Never mind.”

Colby reaches into his breast pocket and produces two longs slips of heavy paper. “So I took the liberty of getting us plane tickets,” he says tentatively. “Tuscany in August. No pressure, just something to think about.”

“I can't go,” says Starshine. “It's very sweet of you, but I just can't. Maybe eventually. Maybe after the summer when things settle down.”