The Biology of Luck (8 page)

“Not at all.”

Larry's gaze wanders over the rows of indecipherable squiggles in Borasch's open notebook and he wonders precisely what he should think about the state of his guru's mental health. He's spent so many years reassuring his former colleague since the strike-shortened semester when they shared an office as adjuncts at Jefferson Community College, in the dark age when Larry still believed that flair at the lectern might lead to conquest in the bedroom and Borasch laundered his clothing regularly, that it's difficult to cast off the cloak of the loyal
disciple and form an objective opinion. Larry knows Borasch's search for the Great American Sentence is pointless, an intellectual cul-de-sac. It is the final refuge of an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist who has abandoned one too many Great American Novels and Great American Short Stories. The fate of the treatise on coincidence is less certain. Larry attempted to read several early chapters, mostly pages of logic symbols and Greek letters scrawled in longhand, and the material proved to be as dense, as thoroughly abstruse, as
Principia Mathematica
or
Finnegan's Wake
, maybe more so, so while there is no saying that Ziggy Borasch isn't a latter-day Bertrand Russell, deep down Larry suspects that
Fate, Fluke & Happenstance
is more style than substance.

Borasch examines Larry with his appraiser's eyes, seemingly searching for his own sanity in his companion's reassuring smile. But even Borasch must know that he doesn't have whatever it takes to write a revolutionary book; his only hope is to maintain the illusion that his meditations will alter the course of Western Civilization, for his own ego, for the expectations of others, until it no longer matters. Is that insanity? Quite possibly. And yet Larry would probably act no differently under like circumstances. Ziggy Borasch has done Larry so many good turns over the years, touting his abilities to an acquaintance at Empire Tours, referring him to his former agent at Stroop & Stone, that Larry feels obliged to perpetuate his mentor's delusions, to revere the man into his dotage. We all have our hours of need; some just last longer than others.

An unlikely couple occupies the table opposite: The man, although suffocating under a three-piece suit like an armored knight, is archetypically handsome. He boasts defined cheekbones and high temples, a sharp nose and a cleft chin, his strong but studious features converging on some mid-century standard of beauty. His is Anglo-Saxon perfection, Cary Grant and Gregory Peck and Henry Fonda rolled into one. The woman, no less stunning, flaunts a decidedly less-refined appeal. Her leather skirt cuts off at mid-thigh and the color of her aureoles is visible through her sheer cotton top. The two are bickering in hushed tones. The woman's eyes are red and
swollen. Larry suppresses the urge to lash out at them, to tell them how spoiled they are, to remind them of all they have to be thankful for. He'd give anything to kill his morning break with a girl like that. Anything. But his lot is to play court jester to Ziggy Borasch. It is all so fucking unfair.

Borasch reaches for Larry's cup and takes a sip of his coffee. His hands tremble in seismic jolts. “I can't drink this glue with milk,” he says, scowling. “Anyway, do you want to hear my latest failure?”

“Go ahead.”

Borasch flips through the pages of his notebook. The piano melds the final chords of
Build Me Up, Buttercup
into
Hey Jude
.

“‘Some people peel like an apple, down to a solid core,” reads Borasch, “while others peel like an onion, losing layer upon layer until nothing remains.' Passable, don't you think? There's something distinctively American in that. I feel like I'm getting closer and closer by day.”

“I like it,” Larry agrees. “It has potential. On another subject, we had a minor calamity this morning at Grant's Tomb. A food fight, if you can believe it.”

“I can believe anything. Or almost anything. The only thing that I have trouble believing, man, is the pandemic ignorance of humanity. It never ceases to amaze me. Try this on for size. I was at the movies yesterday, maybe the day before, and on the way out this absolute cretin is raving to his girlfriend about how the license plate of the get-away car in the flick is the same as his childhood phone number. The first two letters even match the old exchange code. ‘What a coincidence!' he keeps saying. ‘What a coincidence!” And all the time he's grinning like he just hit the mother lode. Like he's won the lottery or the Cold War. So I walk up to him, as calm as I can manage, to set him straight. I politely remind him of all the other movies he's seen in his lifetime, hundreds, thousands for all I know, in which the license plate
didn't
match anything at all. And then I point out all the numbers that
this
license plate didn't match his social security number, his mother's birthday, his own goddammed license
plate. And you do know what the guy does? Right there in the middle of the Movieplex? He spits on my shoe.”

Larry stretches to glance surreptitiously at his watch. He still has an hour before the Dutch contingent returns from their trip to Liberty Island, but he isn't in the mood for one of Borasch's tirades. He'd like to talk about Stroop & Stone, about Starshine, about the drowning girl, but he knows that Borasch's own agenda, as always, will take precedence. Larry is preparing to excuse himself when he catches sight of the handsome man struggling with his date. The woman, for some reason or another, has taken hold of the man's wallet and he is squeezing her wrist, bending her slender arm back at the elbow, in an attempt to break the grip. The woman's eyes have contracted into narrow slits. Her words are drowned out by Borasch's soap-boxing, by the speciously optimistic chorus of
Leaving on a Jet Plane
playing in the background, but Larry understands, without hearing, that she is pleading against her inevitable extinction. Maybe she is a girlfriend; more likely she is a mistress, an expendable part of uber-WASP's harem, his flock of willing females that at least partially explains Larry's own romantic difficulties. Distributed equally, there are enough pretty women to go around. But who wants to share the wealth? Would Larry, if the tables were turned? He watches the woman's arm slowly folding against itself, willpower fighting against tendon, love battling bone, knowing that in this case biology has pre-determined the outcome. Intervention would prove futile. Some situations invite rescue, a girl drowning in the bay, a naked waif on a window ledge, the victim offering herself to the highest bidder, but other traumas are personal affairs, cataclysms restricted to a private membership, and Larry recognizes that this is one of the latter. His intrusion might temporarily salvage their relationship, offer them the respite of an outside threat. It will gain him nothing.

Borasch is reading aloud from one of his notebooks, his tongue tripping over his own penmanship. The pianist is flourishing his way through pop hits and Golden Oldies, tunes to make you forget your diet and your purse strings, music telling you that you were young
once, that you are happy, that there is no real danger in a McFlurry and a packaged apple pie. Or, if you are alone, reminding you of the teenage love that has passed you by. Serenading you to tears. The woman's grasp breaks without warning and the man's wallet falls to the floor in the aisle, skidding to within inches of Larry's left foot, sealing the couple's fate. The man retrieves it. He counts his bills, slams a portion of his accumulated capital on the tabletop, the ultimate souvenir of vengeance and spite, then storms out of the restaurant before his companion can shred the offering. He is gone. She is crying. There is no longer any need for display, for dignity, so she counts the money and stuffs it into her handbag. Then she sits in solitude, stirring her lost lover's coffee with a wooden swizzle stick, joining Larry Bloom in the world of the forsaken. But her stay is transitory. His may be permanent. He is down to his last, best hope.

The music rivets him suddenly. Unexpectedly.

“Listen!” shouts Larry.

Borasch peers over his notebook in irritation and alarm.

“Do you hear that music, Borasch? Do you know what that means?”

“What's gotten into you, man?”

“Nothing,” Larry apologizes. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.”

Borasch, placated, returns to his monotonous drone, but his audience is off the radar screen. Larry's ears are elsewhere. His fingers tap to the music. Hope does somersaults in his soul. And all around him, like a messianic reveille in the land of the dead, cascades the glorious, triumphant sound of the pianist covering Strawberry Alarm Clock, crooning the most exquisite phrase in the repertoire of Western song. “Good Morning, Starshine.”

Starshine leans against her Higgins in front of the Dolphin Credit Union and scans the street for inspiration, for anyone or anything capable of driving a distressed damsel to tears, but the languid warehouses and wheezing factories of Long Island City offer little to provoke emotion. Yet emotion—and specifically, sorrow—is what the occasion demands.

She has been around the block enough times to understand the rules of the game: the practiced comptrollers of the credit union are too unfeeling, too meticulous, to confront without the benefit of a young girl's desperation. Either she overcomes her good cheer and strides through the revolving doors as a spool of nerves, fit to unravel at the least provocation, so helpless and hopeless that even the hardest of hearts will melt at her first sob, or her presence must inevitably arouse another instinct, that natural urge of street-corner loan sharks, and then her mission is doomed. Why in God's name hadn't she opened an account at a real bank like Aunt Agatha had advised? What made her think that a rag-tag army of graying swamp rats and over-the-hill tree-spikers could handle money responsibly? And yet the environmental credit union had seemed like such a good idea when she signed up, a safe, progressive alternative to the corporate megabanks with their monthly fees and minimum balances. It was the choice between saving endangered sea mammals every time she wrote a check or earning a free toaster oven if she ever took out a
mortgage. How was she to know that this five-and-dime Politburo would abscond with her fruit basket fund?

Starshine sifts through her childhood, searching for tears. Her thoughts pan across past distress and anguish, first loves and last rites, delving for the enchanted moment that will send her over the brink. There are the dead: Her father at the steering wheel of the family Chevrolet, idling in the parking lot of the local strip mall, unloading a handgun into the depths of his throat; her mother, ten years younger than Lou Gehrig, gradually petrified to stone; her Uncle Luther, tight-lipped and bitter in an open casket; the bike messenger, Jim Bratton, hazel eyes plastered with shock; a dog, a brindled Boston terrier, laid to rest among her aunt's forsythias. There are the soon-to-be dead: Aunt Agatha, rasping through a slit in her larynx; the cancer, metastasized, gnawing at Jack Bascomb's liver and nodes; Colby Parker's father, so quick with his hands, laboring toward his third heart attack. And then there are the inevitably dying: Bone, the one-armed super, mangled beneath a water bed on the second-story stairwell; her boss at the Children's Fund, Marsha Riley, finally strangled by one of her countless foster grandsons; even Eucalyptus, dear Eucalyptus, asphyxiating on a fine carving of elephant tusk. Starshine flips through a scrapbook of grief and lament, assembling the mourners, chanting the requiem, casting the soil, but her eyes remain dry. All that misery, all that suffering has been wasted. Sorrow heeds no beck and call.

Yet without tears, Starshine knows the prospect of procuring her forty-five dollars is hopeless. Beloved Aunt Agatha will pass away without her apricots and tangerines. She abhors this thought, almost preferring her own demise to what must unavoidably be a strained, draining hour beside the confused elderly woman, while dreams of sugar-plums dance in the poor soul's addled head. It is all so unjust! So cruel! Dammit, she'd rather be dead herself!

That's all it takes. Her own funeral rises before her like a prophetic vision. She sees her corpse at repose on purple velvet; white lilies envelop the casket; gardenias and forget-me-nots wreath her hair. Eucalyptus, her eyes swollen, folds Starshine's waxen hands
around a miniature engraving of a trident-armed mermaid. Aunt Agatha, draped in black, sobs hoarsely through the perforation in her throat. Jack Bascomb and Colby Parker wrangle for the prerogative of first mourner and then embrace each other with the clemency of grief. They're all there, Bone, Marsha Riley, Larry Bloom, the Jesus freak counting his rosaries, the faces of her life paying tribute, their own lives shattered like so much cheap glassware. Even the Bishop of the Society for Secular Harmony, His Mystic Eminence, takes time out from his studies to eulogize her as an empyreal beacon on a sea of otherworldly darkness. The scene is so bleak, so alluring. The floodgates spring open and Starshine, fortified with the calamity of her own death and the facade of unparalleled woe, mounts the steps of the credit union in the highest of spirits.

The interior furnishings of the Dolphin Credit Union, despite the best intentions of the decorator, do not instill confidence: no more so in those customers seduced by ideology than in the smaller number attracted by geographic proximity or bargain rates. The spacious, sterile marble lobby might pass as a discount wing at the Museum of Natural History. Glass display cases and dioramas line the exterior walls, exhibiting badger skeletons and arrow heads, elucidating the hibernation cycles of birch mice and the courtship rituals of crayfish. A tin folding table, finished to resemble teak, offers customers propaganda from Greenpeace and the Committee to Save Long Island Sound, as well as a smattering of interloping flyers from Planned Parenthood of Queens and ACT-UP New York and the eight-page broadsheet of the local Communist cell. The banner above the reception desk announces: “Invest in a Sea Fund and Make a Dolphin Your Interest.” But Starshine does not have a Sea Fund. She does not even have a pension plan. All she possesses—by her own reckoning—is a measly $420 tucked away in a checking account, three hundred of which are earmarked for next month's rent and another forty-five for Aunt Agatha's fruit basket, so she passes under the green-and-white standard feeling like a fourth-class citizen in the world of third-rate finance. “Living for Today” and “Saving for Retirement” are mutually
incompatible objectives. She has embraced the former. The stubby, thickset young agent who escorts her to his windowless office has clearly chosen the latter.