“Come on, brother. Take me to your leader.”
The “genetic copy” doesn’t have to be asked twice. They are on the roof, and the roof is a sanctuary, a retreat with access to the light pollution of the night sky. And yet the night sky is opening into the infinite. In this night sky, interstellar gas, remnants of first light, four fundamental forces, trial by jury, confinement. They pause, mismatched brothers. Somewhere nearby the arachnid, released, makes for a gutter.
Tyrone watches as his pierced brother, the “genetic copy,” launches himself off the roof above the living room and into the loving arms of a Norway maple that is brushing against the house. A maple that keeps its secrets. By its permanence. Down onto the lawn they go, and then they are across the lawn in an interstellar flash, under the forgiving melancholy of willows beside the creek up the street. The maple takes in these things, this legacy of mistakes.
Lois DiNunzio, Means of Production accountant, first met Arnie Lovitz in the one foolproof place to meet eligible men these days, the smoker’s ghetto. The civic legislation on the subject of cigarette smoking was profound, was far-reaching, or that’s how the city council talked about it when they passed the relevant legislation in 1995. How profound, how far-reaching wasn’t clear exactly, until these little societies of smokers began to appear at street level. Cast out of their places of employment. The tide of public opinion had turned against these miscreants, as if all at once. Once, they were worldly, they were crime novelists or back-room politicians. They were salesmen out late indulging in whiskey and women and cigars. Lois’s father, Louis DiNunzio, was like that, on the road thirty weeks a year, overnight in cheap motels, with sample industrial chemicals. Who knew what he got into? Now here they were, out in front of the building.
Suddenly, your coworkers were contemptuous of you. As if the legislation tapped an enmity that had long been gathering. Madison McDowell, for example, the poor little rich girl, frequently offended with insensitive comments about Lois’s smoking. If Lois closed the office door, it was her own business whether her bronchi were sprouting malignancies. It was not Madison’s business. When Lois emerged from her office with the budgetary printouts for Vanessa or the paychecks, when she emerged for whatever stack of envelopes was in her in-box, the women of Means of Production were always staring at her. Oh, there’s the smoker again. Lois began going downstairs.
For a while, Lois stood on Fifth Avenue and smoked. In fair weather and foul. Because she liked looking at the cathedral. Sometimes she ventured into the cathedral after work, where she lit candles for the other girls in the office. It wasn’t that she cared so much about the other girls. But she liked the long wooden matchsticks, the deep red cups in which the candles flickered. In the distance, clericals in vestments scurried about. Lois had been raised on Long Island and had gone to Pace, not to some fancy school. It didn’t mean that she didn’t have any feelings. She did her job, and she would bake a chocolate cake from a mix if it was someone’s birthday. She made a cake for Annabel’s birthday. That was just a couple of months ago. Devil’s food cake. Lois didn’t understand why no one expected a kindly gesture from her. She was full of polite and well-meaning thoughts. Annabel was a good kid, and Lois wanted to do the right thing.
One day, she’s out there smoking, and this fellow is smoking alongside her, and he’s smoking a foreign kind of cigarette. It’s black and it has gold foil around the filter. There’s a sensual manner to his smoking. Like with smokers of old. He’s a big man; Lois would say he is a stout man, even. He has a mustache, thinning hair. Mirror sunglasses. And the foreign cigarettes. She doesn’t mind admitting it: She was a little boy crazy back in her day. So Lois goes straight up to the stout man with the foreign cigarettes and she asks, “What kind of cigarette you have there?” She’s never picked a guy up before, even though she was a little boy crazy, but maybe now she is going to do it, because there’s a first time for everything. Arnie, that’s his name, replies with the brand of the cigarette, some brand she can’t remember. He offers her one. Remember that stretch in summer where all it did was rain? She smoked the black cigarette in the drizzle, and what it made her feel was light-headed.
Or maybe it was Arnie who made her light-headed. Those foreign cigarettes were more potent, they were nicotine delivery systems, like the politicians said, and so she was dizzy, but there was also the stout man, Arnie. A little girl was carrying past a brace of balloons, she remembers, and Lois thought, I’m going to see this man again. The balloons prove it. And she planned to take her break the next day at the exact same time, which was
11:14
. Arnie wasn’t there the next day, with his foreign cigarettes, but the day after that he was, and soon they were talking about many things.
Arnie grew up in Forest Hills. Lois grew up in Great Neck. They were from the same part of the world and they had common interests. Horror movies, for example. They had both seen a whole bunch of horror movies. Of course, Lois was working for this company that made movies, but she didn’t think she had seen more than one or two of the movies they made at her company. Means of Production movies were nonsense, really. They were in English, but they could have been from Timbuktu for all Lois cared. Arnie liked
Nightmare on Elm Street,
those sorts of things. When he talked about teenagers getting hacked up on-screen, he cackled in a nervous way that was endearing, as though he didn’t expect anyone to feel likewise, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Soon there was a good crew of them out there, a shifting constituency, a society of smokers facing the promenade and the ice-skating rink. Mostly secretaries, but occasionally there would be a middle-management fellow in his bow tie, or maybe the prim and proper office manageress in midcalf skirt and square-heeled pumps. They were all out there, and they were the society of the medically uninsurable. Laughing and gossiping and complaining. They discussed going bowling on the weekends. They were all going to go bowling one day, to the lanes in the bus terminal. But you took one look at Arnie, you’d see he hadn’t done any bowling in years. If he tried to go bowling or do yard work, well then he was going to have an aneurysm, because all he did was smoke and come up with plans for his business. He was a smoker and he did all his best thinking while flourishing a Gitane or a Dunhill.
Though the smokers were warm and supportive, though theirs was a caring environment, it was months before Lois realized that Arnie had once been an accountant. Isn’t that amazing! She can still remember how it came up, that day when Arnie was stubbing out one of his cigarettes and plunging the butt into the stylish metallic receptacle there. “What is it that you do, Lois?” She thought he’d never ask, but now he had, and she told him, because she liked it when people asked a question of her. He said, “I’m a consultant, myself. I do some other things on the side. I’m an
innovator,
I guess that’s what you’d call me.”
He’d been with a consultant division at one of the Big Five firms. He got hired onto the teams that went into large-cap companies and he advised the companies on public offerings, portfolio review, acquisitions, all kinds of things, and then he explained the angles from his unique vantage point, which was the vantage point of a guy with a proven track record who worked at one of the Big Five firms. What Arnie liked to say was there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the client, the client was number one, “Anything within the bounds of law and several things without.” That’s what he liked to say, and then he would give Lois this look.
They went to one of those new horror movies where all the jokes are about other horror movies. The homely kid knows he’s going to get killed first because he’s seen it all before in other horror movies. Arnie was explaining to her, before the trailers, how he’d done anything within the bounds of law and several things without, and he was telling her not to repeat any of this because if anyone found out, Arnie said, “I’d have to kill you.” After the movie he asked, “Do you think that serial killers really kill pets and all that?” It was sort of unsettling, Lois thought, but a little endearing at the same time. “They’re always saying this kind of thing. The serial killers, when they’re kids, supposedly they kill other people’s pets. They don’t feel any remorse.” He laughed nervously.
She said, “So you’re a serial killer now?”
That’s not what he meant at all! Arnie said. “But if someone wanted me to play one in a movie, I think I’d be good at it.”
People thought she could get them parts in movies. They offered up their thespian moves, their high school dramatic credentials, every day of the week, but she didn’t pay any attention, and especially not when Arnie said what he said. Maybe she had become light-headed because she’d started smoking his foreign cigarettes. She was neglecting things at the office or just barely getting the work done but not in any particularly satisfying way. She was smoking foreign cigarettes and going out for Kahlua and milk at Hank’s Franks with Arnie from Forest Hills. He knew the accountant for the Ramones. He had a summer rental down the shore. A weekend at Atlantic City was a good thing. At Hank’s Franks, Arnie remarked that a man could certainly find that he had become devoted to a woman. That’s what he said. And she replied, “Don’t try to flatter me, Arnie. I know who I am.” Who she was was a plain middle-aged woman without a husband, who didn’t expect flattery because if she did, she would have got frustrated a long time ago. “I live a quiet life and I stay home in my neighborhood and I don’t wait around for anyone.” She was as serious as she’d ever been because even if the society of smokers, with its daily menu of humor and gossip, was never serious, it didn’t mean that Lois couldn’t be.
Arnie said, “Don’t make me have to explain it.”
“Don’t make you explain what?”
He said maybe he was falling hard. It should have been in a nicer place than Hank’s Franks. Because Hank’s Franks was just what it sounded like, a place where the entrées were wrapped in tinfoil, where there were always young men at the bar whose faces should not have been so crimson. Dog-faced young entrepreneurs who came from nothing, who tried drunkenly to make it across the avenue to the bus terminal and instead did the face plant in front of a hydrant. Miracle a taxi had not backed over them. When they woke, their wallets would be gone. That’s the kind of place where Lois first heard sentimental things from the mouth of Arnie Lovitz. When she was a teenager, no one ever said they cared, and even when she lost her virginity to the older brother of a friend on the girls’ basketball team, this older brother hadn’t said he cared, and he’d seemed uncomfortable when he passed her on the street after that. She hadn’t been nervous, she liked it, the thing they had done, and she didn’t care if that boy, Carl, loved her, because what she wanted was life’s experiences, which included taking your clothes off. Still, it would have been nicer to hear that you were loved in a museum, in front of a beautiful painting that showed a princess in a diaphanous robe, pregnant and standing with her soon-to-be prince of the realm. That would be a nice place to be told that you were loved. But this was Hank’s Franks. She needed to work fast.
The scene changes to a hotel out by the airport in Queens, because that was the kind of hotel that they could afford, if they were being fiscally sensible. Lois could see that Arnie was flush temporarily with his good fortune. He was proud of his love. The smokers of the promenade, watching the skaters go around and around, would have this bit of gossip to embellish soon enough. The smokers would be like hummingbirds over nectar. They would edit the story of Arnie and Lois into a little movie for the consumption of future smokers, Arnie’s tie winched over his head without being unknotted, flung onto the grimy wall-to-wall, his suit coat and his pants, pinstripes, cast onto the floor as if they were the body of a murder victim. And how about this, the two of them in the shower, two accountants, neither of them exactly thin and neither of them exactly beautiful, and here was her nipple, and she was presenting it as if it were a delectable item, and here were his lips upon it, and if they weren’t the most beautiful people God had ever put on the planet, or the most beautiful people to walk up and down the promenade to the ice-skating rink, at least they were two people in a cheap motel who could believe in this moment of love as much as anyone who ever believed in any romantic encounter. Reflections in the mirror in the bathroom were a little humbling, but soon the water vapor on the mirror made them as indistinct as any movie lovers; she wanted to laugh, it all made her so giddy, as he was putting his arms around her, because he had these gigantic arms and he was crushing her, naked in the shower, and she didn’t know that any man could fit his arms around her. It made her feel like a little girl. Soon the lights came up on the lovers on the couch, just like that, and she was the one saying that she would do anything he wanted her to do, all he had to do was to tell her, just say the words, and she would be whatever kind of lover he wanted her to be on this night, she swore it, and she believed she could be this lover, believed it without any reservation, in the motel near the LaGuardia Airport, and because of her belief no lover was any better. Arnie was stammering, throbbing with his nervousness, saying that he wanted that one thing that all men were always seeming as if they wanted, or at least that’s what she’d heard back when. It was a long time ago, a long time since she put that part of a man in her mouth, and she didn’t know if she could do it in a way that would be pleasurable for him because she wasn’t very experienced, even if she was a genius at believing. She thought that gentleness was the thing. If you treated this homely part of a body as though it were a beautiful little hatchling, no matter who it belonged to, then that person and that body would be stretched out before you like a little gossamer thread of heaven. So she treated the particular part of Arnie’s body, which was actually kind of small, as though reverence was invented for it. There was an awful lot of sadness in reverence, but that was what was good about reverence, that it was not easy. It was performed with a recognition of the absence of perfection in the world, closing in on midnight. Many things had already happened that day, and Arnie was starting to thrash around, and the thrashing said that this life was not as before, and she was about to taste bittersweet dignity in her mouth, a little bit of dignity that was coming out of Arnie Lovitz for the first time, and it was salty like tears, and also it tasted a little like bleach, bleach and tears. Arnie was being made into a good man, and Lois was being made into a tramp with a good heart at the same time. That’s how she felt about it; she felt that she was not sure. All she knew was that in the movies, sex was supposed to be excellent and you heard God’s voice, or else it was supposed to be sinful and you got an ice pick in the temple when the marauder appeared in the margin of the shot. But it was just two people on a banquette in a motel. Arnie started crying after he came.