Mere Anarchy (12 page)

“It’s not even a question,” Arbogast snapped, producing a contract from a valise stuffed with contracts for every conceivable transaction, from selling a used Cord to enlisting in the Mummers. “Autograph this, and the assorted particulars can be buffed down the line,” he said. Thrusting a pen into my hand, he guided it across the dotted lines of a document with large blank sections, whose import, he assured me, would become manifest later by simply holding it over a low flame.

Following apace came a dizzying round of check signings by yours truly, to bind the deal and secure various materials. “Sixty thousand dollars for molly screws seems high,” I bleated.

“Sure it is, but then again, you don’t want the work held up while we’re combing Gotham for one.”

Affirming our camaraderie, we all shook hands and went around the corner to Drinks “R” Us, where Arbogast treated all to a magnum of Dom Pérignon, realizing only after the cork had been popped that TWA had mislaid his luggage and that, even as we toasted, his billfold languished in Zanzibar.

• • •

T
HE FIRST TIME
I
REALIZED
we had thrown in our lot with crass bunglers came three months later, when, hours after we had actually taken possession of our under-construction domicile, I attempted to use the stall shower. Heeding our supplication for speed, Arbogast’s myrmidons had bashed the original bathroom to protons and hastily fabricated a substitute. Using as their model the lengthy gash in the hull of the
Titanic
, they had transformed the entire bathroom into an undersea kingdom, should my wife or I attempt to turn on the tap. For lagniappe, the pipes had been meticulously calibrated to produce water pressure of such caloric intensity as to reduce any unfortunate beneath the showerhead to the status of lobster thermidor. After my squealing leap through the plate-glass door, I was assured in several Baltic tongues that all would be rectified with the expected arrival of a state-of-the-art plumbing part from Tangier, which would happen the moment certain political exiles could safely be smuggled out of the Casbah.

The bedroom, by contrast, did not quite meet our accelerated target date, owing to an outbreak of dengue fever in Machu Picchu. It seemed, in fact, that no serious work could
begin
in our sleeping quarters until we received vital shipments of
wengé
and
bubinga
that had somehow been misdelivered to a couple in Lapland with the same last name as ours. Fortunately, a crude pallet on the floor was arranged for us, under some falling plaster, and after a night of being martyred by asbestos dust and the sounds of Hurricane Agnes from a toilet that would not stop flushing, I lapsed at last into a hypnagogic trance. This was shattered at daybreak by a battalion of craftsmen demolishing a pilaster with pickaxes, to the tune of “Casey Jones.”

When I pointed out that this particular alteration was not in the original proposal, Arbogast—who had popped in to see that none of his minions had been shanghaied the prior night at any of the louche venues they watered at after hours—explained he had taken it upon himself to install an elaborate security system.

“Security?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I was more vulnerable in a brownstone than in our old co-op, where affable white-haired doormen were lavishly tipped to take a bullet for the tenants.

“Absotively,” he rejoined, wolfing back his matutinal portion of sturgeon direct from Barney Greengrass’s numbered vaults in Geneva. “Any serial killer can just walk into this place. Maybe you want your throat sliced while you sleep? Or your main squeeze should get her brains scrambled by some drifter with a ball-peen hammer and a grudge against society? And that’s after he’s had his way with her.”

“Do you really think—”

“It’s not what
I
think, pilgrim. This town is awash with diabolical mental tinderboxes.”

With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.

Not wanting to be smirked at by the workers as an easy mark, I insisted that before I could agree to any new costs I would have to peruse the nuances of the risk-reward ratio, a formula that I understood with the same firm grasp I had on quantum mechanics. Since several hot stocks I had invested in recently had vanished without a trace into the Bermuda Triangle, I finally told the work foreman I couldn’t dredge up another penny for a burglar-alarm system, but when night fell I froze in bed hearing what I concluded was a homicidal maniac unscrewing the front door. With my heart pounding like the bombing of Dresden, I got Arbogast on the horn and green-lighted the installation of a set of pricey, high-tech Tibetan motion detectors.

• • •

A
S THE MONTHS PASSED,
our completion date, already postponed half a dozen times, kept receding like a six-pack in the desert. Alibis abounded to rival the Arabian Nights. Several plasterers went down with mad cow, and then the boat carrying crates of jade and lapis lazuli to line the nanny’s room was sunk off the coast of Auckland by a tsunami;
finally,
a crucial motorized device needed to elevate the TV from a trunk at the foot of the bed turned out to be hand-fashioned exclusively by elves who worked only by moonlight. The microscopic amount of work that actually took place was shoddy, as I learned in the midst of a sparkling exchange between myself and a Nobel contender in our brand-new study, when the floor buckled, costing the potential laureate his two front teeth and earning me the honor of sponsoring a record settlement.

When I confronted Arbogast with my disenchantment over cost overruns that were challenging the German inflation of the 1920s, he laid it off to my “psychotic demand for change orders.”

“Relax, cousin,” he said. “If you’ll stop your tergiversating, Arbogast and Company will be history in four weeks. My hand to God.”

“And not a moment too soon,” I fumed. “I can’t coexist another second with this infestation from Stonehenge. There’s not a scintilla of privacy. Just yesterday, after finally filching some measure of lebensraum, I was about to consummate the sacred act of love with my one and only profiterole when your workers picked me up and moved me so they could hang a sconce.”

“See these?” Arbogast said, flashing a smile usually employed by men who are about to commit mail fraud. “They’re called Xanax. Dig in—although I wouldn’t take more than thirty a day. The side-effect studies have been inconclusive.”

That midnight, a susurrus triggered the downstairs motion
detector,
causing me to leap directly upright out of bed and remain there like a hovercraft. Convinced that I could make out the sounds of a salivating lycanthrope vaulting up the stairs, I flailed through unpacked cartons in search of some silver object with which to defend the family. Stepping on my glasses in panic, I bolted face-first into a porphyry dolphin Arbogast had imported to complete the maid’s bathroom. The blow caused my middle ear to ring like the Arthur Rank logo and rewarded me as well with an unimpeded view of the aurora borealis. I think it was then that the ceiling collapsed on my wife. Apparently the pilaster Arbogast had removed to install the security system had been a supporting member, and a number of cinder blocks had chosen this moment to abdicate.

In the morning I was found curled up on the floor sobbing rhythmically. My spouse had been led away by a stocky woman in a severe suit, wearing a brimmed man’s hat, to whom she kept intoning something about always having been dependent on the kindness of strangers. In the end, we sold the house for a song. I can’t recall if it was “Am I Blue” or “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” I do remember the faces of the building inspectors, however, and the admixture of zeal and dismay with which they enumerated my sundry violations, which they said could be rectified by either further contracting work or accepting a lethal injection. I also have some dim recall of being before a judge who sat glowering like an El Greco cardinal as he mulcted me to the tune of many zeroes, causing my net worth to disappear like the lox at a bris. As for Arbogast, legend has it that, while attempting to hijack
an
expensive Georgian mantel from someone’s fireplace and replace it with a ceramic copy, he managed to get stuck in the flue. Whether he was ultimately consumed by flames I don’t know. I tried finding him in Dante’s
Inferno
, but I guess they don’t update those classics.

A
TTENTION
G
ENIUSES
: C
ASH
O
NLY

JOGGING ALONG FIFTH
Avenue last summer as part of a fitness program designed to reduce my life expectancy to that of a nineteenth-century coal miner, I paused at the outdoor café of the Stanhope Hotel to renovate my flagging respiratory system with a chilled screwdriver. Orange juice being well up on my prescribed regimen, I quaffed several rounds and upon rising managed to execute a series of corybantic figures, not unlike the infant Bambi taking his first steps.

Recalling dimly through a cortex richly marinated by the Smirnoff people that I had committed to picking up a ration of goat-cheese buttons and some Holland rusk en route home, I stumbled numbly into the Metropolitan Museum, mistaking it for Zabar’s. As I lurched down the halls, my head spinning like a zoetrope, I gradually regained sufficient lucidity to realize that I was bearing witness to an exhibition, Cézanne to van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet.

Gachet, I garnered from the wall spiel, was a physician who treated the likes of Pissarro and van Gogh when these lads
were
under the weather after ingesting an unripe frog’s leg or belting back too much absinthe. As yet unrecognized and unable to pay a sou, they offered to balance Gachet’s books with an oil or pastel in exchange for a house call or a dose of mercury. Gachet’s willingness to accept proved clairvoyant, and as I luxuriated in the agglomeration of Renoirs and Cézannes, presumably direct from the walls of his waiting room, I couldn’t help imagining myself in a similar situation.

Nov. 1st:
Quelle
good fortune! That I, Dr. Skeezix Feebleman, have received a referral today from none other than Noah Untermensch, a genius among psychoanalysts who specializes in the problems of the creative mind. Untermensch has amassed a prestigious show-business clientele rivaled only by the “Available List” at the William Morris Agency.

“This kid Pepkin’s a songwriter,” Dr. Untermensch told me over the phone as he greased the skids for a meeting with the prospective patient. “He’s Jerry Kern or Cole Porter, but modern-day. Problem is, the kid’s awash in debilitating guilt. My best guess? It’s a mother thing. Candle his sconce for a while and sluice off some angst. You won’t be sorry. I see Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, maybe even a Medal of Freedom.”

I asked Untermensch why he wasn’t going to treat Pepkin himself. “Plate’s full,” he snapped, “and all analytic emergencies. Actress whose co-op won’t let dogs in, TV weatherman into paddling, plus a producer who can’t get a call back from Mike Eisner. Him I placed on suicide watch. Anyway, do your best, and no need to keep me informed about your progress. You get final cut. Ha ha.”

Nov. 3rd: Met Murray Pepkin today, and there’s no question about it, the man has artist written all over him. Bushy-haired and with eyes like hypnodisks, he is the rarefied man obsessed with his work yet lumbered on all sides by the pygmy demands of food, rent, and two alimonies. As a songwriter, Pepkin appears to be a visionary who chooses to hone his lyrics in a spare room in Queens above Fleisher Brothers Quality Embalming, where he sometimes serves as a makeup consultant. I asked him why he believes he needs analysis, and he confessed that, while the reality is that each note and syllable he pens vibrates with genuine greatness, he feels he’s too self-critical. He recognizes his relentless self-destructive choices in women and was recently married to an actress in a relationship based not so much on traditional Western ethics as on Hammurabi’s Code. Shortly after, he discovered her in bed with their nutritionist. They quarreled, and she struck Pepkin in the head with his rhyming dictionary, causing him to forget the bridge to “Dry Bones.”

When I brought up my fee, Pepkin allowed sheepishly that at the moment he was a bit strapped, having squandered the last of his savings on a duck press. He wondered if we might not arrange some form of installment plan. When I explained that financial obligation was crucial to the treatment itself, he came up with the idea that he might pay me off in songs, pointing out how remunerative it would have been over the years if I alone held the copyright to “Begin the Beguine” or “Send In the Clowns.” Not only would the royalties from his sheet music in time swell my personal coffers, but I would be
lauded
the world over as having nurtured a fledgling tunesmith equal to Gershwin, the Beatles, or Marvin Hamlisch. Having always prided myself on a keen eye for budding talent, and recalling how amply rewarded some old French homeopath named Cachet or Kashay had been writing prescriptions for van Gogh in exchange for an occasional still life to cover the cost of his tongue depressors, I warmed to Pepkin’s offer. I also reviewed my own financial obligations, which have puffed recently like a hammered thumb. There was the apartment on Park Avenue, the beach house in Quogue, the two Ferraris, and Foxy Breitbart, an expensive little habit I picked up one night trolling the singles bars, whose skin tones in a thong put a smile on my face that could only be chipped off with a chisel. Add to this a too heavy position in Lebanese guavas and my cash flow seemed a shade coagulated. And yet a voice somewhere within asserted that a flier with this tightly wound mainspring sprawled before me not only might prove an annuity but, should Hollywood one day make his life story, the role of Skeezix Feebleman could just cop Best Supporting Actor.