Charlotte herself didn’t show up until midnight, having gone to work that day as if it were a normal day. She was irritated at having to stop the normality when she got home, and even more irritated that she was going to have to stop it for good. She had proposed continuing to head the Householders’ Union while serving in Congress; there was no law against that, she said, but most people hoped she would finally come round to seeing how impractical it would be. Not to mention some kind of conflict of interest.
“I plan to come back every weekend,” she declared in her brief concession to giving a victory speech. “I don’t know how, given the way this storm hammered the rail lines, but I will. I don’t like it down there.”
People cheered.
“Damn it,” she went on when urged to continue, “this is horrible. Being elected, I mean. But also what’s happened to the city. It’ll take years to regrow the trees and rebuild. It’s such a big job it’s probably best to think of it as some kind of cosmic demolition that allows us to start over. That’s how I’ll be thinking of it. We’re in the middle of another crash, headed for another big recession. Every time this happens there’s an opportunity to seize the reins and change direction, but up until now we’ve chickened out, and besides our government has been bought by the people causing the crash. And we don’t even know what to try for.
“This time we’ll see if we can do better. The new Congress has a lot of new members, and there’s a pretty great plan coming from the progressives. I think Teddy Roosevelt announced his presidential bid as candidate of the Progressive party from right here on this square, and he ran that campaign from our Met tower. Actually I think he lost, but whatever. I’ll hope to be as cheerful and tough and effective as he was. I’ll go join the people trying to do that.
“But damn.” She looked at them, sighed. “I’d rather be here among my friends. You are certainly all welcome to come down and visit me when I’m in D.C. And I’ll be here as much as I am there, I swear.”
After that Ettore and his piazzollistas set up and ripped off some torrid tangos for the crowd to dance to. Between songs Ettore wiped his brow and told everyone, with his hand drunkenly on his heart, that the great Astor, Piazzolla himself, had grown up just a few blocks south of where they stood at that very moment. Holy New York, he said, holy New York. The Buenos Aires of the north.
After another song, standing out under the prow of the Flatiron, Vlade and Idelba watched as Franklin’s friend Jojo approached Charlotte and congratulated her. Charlotte thanked her and then called Franklin over and asked them to discuss how they could coordinate their Soho and Chelsea redevelopment projects, such that they combined strengths and both got better. Franklin and Jojo agreed to this with a handshake and went over to the drinks table to see if they could find an unopened bottle of bubbly.
Vlade stood in front of Ettore’s band, swaying to a milonga, feeling the outbreak flood pour through him. Idelba said she was tired and headed over to his office. When the band had played its last song, Vlade walked over to the Met with Charlotte, steering her over the looser gangplanks; she seemed wasted.
In the dining room she sat down heavily next to Amelia Black and Gordon Hexter. Vlade sat across from them.
“Maybe you can settle Stefan and Roberto in my room,” she said to Vlade. “They can house-sit the place for me.”
He gave her a look. “Won’t you need it when you come back to visit?”
“Sure, but I can sleep in one of the other dorms, or they can. With the best will in the world, I won’t be around that much. Not at first.”
She looked so tired. Vlade put a hand to her arm. “It will be okay,” he said. “We’ll help out here. The building will be fine. And I think you needed a change of pace anyway. Something new.”
She nodded, looking unconvinced. Trying to get a hold on some kind of bitterness, some kind of grief. Vlade didn’t get it. Well, joining Congress as a plan to slow down: probably not realistic. Maybe it was just that she liked what she had been doing.
Franklin Garr came breezing in, saw them and came over and leaned down to give Charlotte a hug and a kiss on the head. “Congratulations, dear. I know it’s just what you always wanted.”
“Fuck you.”
He laughed. He was flushed and seemed a little giddy, maybe from talking to his friend from the Flatiron. “Just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. Finance minister without portfolio, right?”
“You’re already doing that,” she objected.
“Redevelopment czar. Robert Moses meets Jane Jacobs.”
“You’re already doing that too.”
“Okay, so maybe you don’t need me.”
“No, I need you.”
“But not for anything more than what I’m already doing.”
She looked up at him, and Vlade saw a new look on her face, an idea she liked. “Well, I wonder,” she said. “Could you give me a ride in your stupid little speedboat down to like Philly, or Baltimore? Would that work? Because I need to get down there fast as I can, and the train tracks in Jersey are still fucked up.”
He was startled, Vlade could see.
“Might have to recharge,” he said. He looked at Vlade: “How far is it?”
“You got me,” Vlade said. “Couple hundred miles? How far will your boat go when you got it up on the foils?”
“I don’t know. Pretty far, I think. Anyway I can check it out. But yeah,” he said to Charlotte, “of course! Love to take you down there to your coronation.”
“Please.”
“Your investiture.”
“You’re the investor.”
“Your congressification.”
She cracked a smile. “Something like that. My befucking.”
“Oh no, dear, you don’t have to go all that way for that. Hey I gotta take a call, I’ll come down in a while and we can celebrate.”
“No!” she called out after him, but he was off to the elevators.
Charlotte looked at Vlade. “A nice young man,” she said.
They all stared at her.
“Really?” Vlade said.
Charlotte laughed. “Well I think so. He tries to pretend otherwise, but it keeps breaking out.”
“Maybe for you.”
“Yes.” She thought things over. “How fast does that thing of his go?”
“Too fast. Like seventy or eighty miles an hour.”
“And battery charge?”
“It might have enough to get you there.”
“Is it safe?”
“No.”
“But people do it.”
“Oh yeah. People do everything.”
“Okay, maybe I will.”
“You could always get a ride with Amelia on her blimp.”
“Oh yeah, there’s a good idea!”
They all laughed together, even Amelia.
“It’s not my fault!” she protested, but they only laughed more.
When they had collected themselves, Charlotte said to Vlade, “So what about Idelba, where is she?”
“She went to bed. But she’s going back out to Coney Island to keep working.”
“And so what will happen?”
Vlade shrugged. “We’ll see when it happens.”
“But you went back over there with her.”
“Yeah.” He tried to think how to say it. “It seems good. I think it could work. I don’t know how. I mean, I don’t know what I mean by that.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yes. I guess it is.”
“Very nice,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”
“Ah well. Me too.”
At the 1964 New York World Fair’s International Pavilion, all twenty-two of the visiting Burundis slept in a single room, “just as they would have at home.”
One thought ever at the fore—
That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space,
All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same
destination.
I see Freedom, completely arm’d and victorious and very haughty, with Law on one side and Peace on the other,
A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste;
What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?
—Walt Whitman
e) Franklin
So it had got to the point where I looked up Charlotte Armstrong in the cloud and found out that she was sixteen years older than me. Sixteen years, two months, and two days. This was a kind of a shock, a blow, a mind-fuck. Not that I didn’t think she was older than me, and we had already gone very far into our young man–old woman shtick, but really I was thinking it was more like, I don’t know. As I hadn’t been thinking of her that way at all, I just thought of her as a middle-aged woman. Old, for sure, but not that old. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was stunned to a blankness.
So when she called me to talk more about getting an ocean zoom down to D.C., I said, “Yeah sure!” squeaking like a boy whose voice was changing. I said “When?” rather than Hey babe I like you but why are you so fucking ancient? which was on the tip of my tongue, I had to actually bite my tongue not to blurt that out. Not that she wouldn’t have laughed if I had, and so I was tempted, because making her laugh was a distinct pleasure, a little hook in my heart that drew a helpless smile on my face, every time. But I restrained myself, being so confused. And she named a date for our trip, and then took me far from those concupiscent thoughts with the following:
“So did you hear that Inspector Gen’s data hound cracked Morningside and found out who was making those offers on our building?”
“No, who was it?”
“Angel Falls. That’s your guy, right? Hector Ramirez?”
“No way!”
“That’s what she said. Her guy got into Morningside by way of one of the security firms they were using, he got all kinds of stuff, and that was in there.”
“Damn,” I said. “Holy shit. Fuck. Okay, listen—I’m going to go ask him about it.”
“You know, with the offer on the Met gone away, I don’t know if it matters anymore.”
“But he’s an angel investor in the Chelsea raft. And the building here was getting fucking sabotaged, right? No, I’m going to go talk to him about it.”
So I took the bug out to the Hudson, cutting through traffic like a butcher knifing through joints, then zoomed up the big river. Cloudy day, water the color of flint, disturbed as if schools of tiny fish were swirling around just under the surface. Got Hector’s secretariat to ask him for a meeting in the flesh presently, and he said he was about to leave but could meet briefly with me, if it was in the next hour. I said I was already there. Past the salt marsh where I had had my eelgrass satori, up the staircase of the gods to the Munster, up the rocket launch of an elevator. Burst in on Hector in his sky island, his evil villain mastermind aerie, where I said, enunciating articulately, “Hector, what the fuck.”
“What what the fuck?”
“Why were you trying to buy the Met Life tower? What kind of shit was that?”
“No shit, youth. No shit at all. It was just one of a number of bids my people have been making in lower Manhattan recently.” He spread his hands in the classic gesture of total innocence. “It’s like you’ve been telling me. It’s a great place these days. The SuperVenice. Very nice investment. Nothing but upsides down there. I don’t get your dismay here.”
“The Met was getting attacked,” I said hotly. “Your people were sabotaging it to try to scare the residents into selling.”
This caused him to frown. “That I didn’t know. I’m not sure I believe that.”
“It was definitely happening. They’ve got it tracked to a security firm called RNA. Rapid Noncompliance Abatement, very cute fucking name. The Met was noncompliant, and these clowns were rapidly abating us.”
“I would never condone something like that,” Hector said. “I hope you know me well enough to know that.”
I stared at him. I realized that in fact I did not know him anywhere near well enough to know any such thing. He knew that too, so it was a strange thing to say. I had to pause to ponder, and still came up with nothing. Smoke screen in my eyes. He was even smiling a little, perhaps at his little piece of pointing out the thin ice under us.
“Hector,” I said slowly, “I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t do something that stupid. Not to mention criminal. Joint enterprise laws, right? But you run a big organization, and no doubt you delegate a lot of the ugly parts of real estate work out to various security firms. RNA is just one sucker on that octopus arm. And what they are really like, you can’t really be sure about. So there, in that, you are vulnerable, and not doing due diligence, because you are legally responsible for what they do when you hire them. Remember what you used to say when I was working for you? When the people who understand the instruments are divorced from the people who are trading the instruments, bad things can happen. This is just another version of that. You have got people working for you, doing various kinds of dirty work without you knowing about it, and supposedly that keeps you clean, but it’s dangerous, because they’re idiots. And that makes you, if not an idiot, then at least responsible for idiotic shit. Legally responsible.”
He regarded me. “I will take in what you say,” he said. “I will make adjustments accordingly. I hope your harsh opinion here won’t interfere with our work together on the project you have going in Chelsea.”
“We’re buying you out of that,” I said. “I’ll be wiring you your money later today.”
“I don’t know if you can do that.”
“I definitely can. The contract I used was the one we use at WaterPrice to keep control of our investors’ comings and goings. It’s seriously bombproof.”
“I see.” He nodded, looked at his desk. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m sure we’ll go on to work on other things.”
“Maybe we will.”
“Here, youth—sorry to run out on you, but I really was scheduled to leave. I delayed my departure to talk to you, but my crew is getting antsy. Come on up and see me off.”
“Sure.”
He led me to a different elevator, a huge freight elevator, big enough to hold I don’t know what. Elephants. We went up one or two floors, and got out on the very top of the Munster, where Hector’s little skyvillage was tethered. Twenty-one balloons, all prisming bulbously, straining at the leash to loft away. The round platform underneath them was just smaller than Hector’s office, and mushroom-shaped cottages around the circumference and in the middle were connected by clear tubes like little skybridges. Some kind of beautiful little folly. Lots of people already on board up there cocktail partying, including several at the top of a gangplank stairway, waiting for Hector.
He smiled genially at me, shook my hand. “Good luck to you, youth. We’ll meet again in another context.”
“No doubt.”
He walked up the gangplank, and a crew on the roof rolled it aside. With a final Wizard of Oz wave to me he turned away, and the skyvillage lofted straight up, rose swiftly, and spun off east into the clouds.
So that was that. Trouble in river city, and a lesson for me going forward: the octopuses have very long arms. And more than eight of them. Maybe they are like giant squids, if squids have more than eight tentacles. It was troubling.
But now I had to get my Charlotte down to D.C. I had arranged for her to get off her last day of work early—last day for the time being, she had told her people, she was just taking a leave of absence, she was not really quitting, she would be back ASAP—and I could imagine her people actually believed this, because I did—so, I had gotten her to then proceed from her office west to the rebuilt Pier 57, where I would come into the rebuilt marina and pick her up and off we would go, out the Narrows and south. I had stocked the bug for a night at sea if necessary, but I had in mind a marina on the Maryland shore as being easier, after which we would zip up the Chesapeake to Balti
more and I would drop her off at the new harbor’s station to hop over to D.C.
Did I hope that Jojo and the rest of the gang would see me picking up our new congressperson representing the Twelfth District of the state of New York to depart down the Hudson and away to the nation’s silly capital? Yes, I did. And indeed it turned out as I had hoped, because as I pulled into the marina and lifted my chin to the gang at the bar, Jojo was among them pretending to talk to someone, ostentatiously not looking my way. Our supposed reconciliation and business cooperation pact, enacted at Charlotte’s behest, meant nothing to her; this was what her refusal to look my way conveyed. I saw that, and she saw that I saw it; that’s how good people are with sidelong glances and their peripheral vision and their eyes in the backs of their heads. And then Charlotte appeared, walking onto the marina dock, punctual as usual, weighed down by two fat shoulder bags and clumping along with that little limp she has. A solid woman, carelessly curvy, dressed for business; not precisely what you hope to see in a woman’s figure. Not that I care about that; I mean not that that’s all I care about. For instance Jojo had a great figure, sure, very trim and well-proportioned, classic features everywhere, neat and attractive without anything being extravagant, you might say. Neat; fine. And I had liked her, sure, I had been very attracted, and it still hurt that she had given up on me, broke it off with me, whatever that had been. Actually she had ripped off my idea and then accused me of ripping it off from her, and now we would be collaborating as we went forward, maybe that’s the way it happens, nothing unusual. Anyway it hurt and I still wanted her, I looked at her with a little clutch in my heart and elsewhere. But on the other hand take Amelia Black, the star of the Met and the cloud and the world; she was over-the-top, not just neat but compelling, not just perfect but interesting; and because for years she had had a professional and/or personal propensity for getting naked on her show, I had not been able to avoid noticing along with the rest of humanity that she also had a spectacular figure, with the extra splashes on a big rangy frame that certainly made for at least part of her popularity, that and her goofy sweet character. And yet I didn’t have the slightest interest in her in that way; she didn’t have the slightest appeal. Of course I liked to look at her, and she was nice. She had even done good things in our recent little euthanasia-of-the-rentier campaign, wielding the initial bolt clippers to the choke hold they had on our fiscal necks. But I didn’t want to spend time with her; I wasn’t interested in her. No clutch at heart or elsewhere. As far as I could tell, no offense, she wasn’t interesting. Or something. Who knows what these kinds of reactions really come down to. Pheromones we don’t consciously detect? Telepathy? Or just a case of being too perfect, too nice?