Limitless

by Glynn, Alan

  The other guy just sat there the whole time staring at me.

  Eventually – because sooner or later everyone had to go to bed – I found myself alone again. I spent the day criss-crossing the city, mostly on foot, looking at stuff I’d never really paid that much attention to before, like those mammoth apartment buildings on Central Park West, with their roof-towers and Gothic cornices. I wandered down to Times Square, over to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. I went back in the direction of Chelsea and then down to the Financial District and Battery Park. I did the Staten Island Ferry, standing out on the deck to let the fresh, invigorating wind cut right through me. I caught a subway back uptown, and went to museums and galleries, places I hadn’t been to in years. I went to a recital of chamber music at Lincoln Center, ate brunch at Julian’s, read the New York Times in Central Park and caught two Preston Sturges movies in a revival theatre in the West Village.

  Later on, I hooked up with a few people back in Zola’s and got home to bed, finally, some time in the early hours of Monday morning.

  [ 9 ]

  AFTER THAT, THE FOLLOWING three or four weeks fused into one another, into one long stretch of … elasto-time. I was permanently … what? Up? High? Stoned? Out of it? Tripping? Buzzed? Wired? Chillin’? None of these terms is appropriate, or adequate, to describe the experience of being on MDT. But – regardless of what term you use – I was a certified MDT user now, taking one, sometimes two, doses of the stuff a day, and just about managing to snatch the odd hour of sleep here and there. I had a sense that I – or, rather, my life – was expanding exponentially and that before long the various spaces I occupied, physical and otherwise, were not going to be sufficient to contain me, and would consequently be put under a great deal of strain, maybe even to breaking point.

  I lost weight. I also lost track, so I don’t know over what period of time I lost the weight exactly, but it must have been about eight or ten days. My face thinned out a little, and I felt lighter, and trimmer. It’s not that I wasn’t eating, I was – but I was eating mostly salads and fruit. I cut out cheese and bread and meat and potato-chips and chocolate. I didn’t drink any beer or sodas, but I did drink lots of water.

  I was active.

  I got my hair cut.

  And bought new clothes. Because it was as much as I could bear to go on living in my apartment on Tenth Street, with its musty smells and creaky floorboards, but I certainly didn’t have to put up with a wardrobe that made me feel like an extension of the apartment. So I took out two thousand dollars from the envelope in the closet and wandered over to SoHo. I checked out a few stores, and then took a cab up to Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In the space of about an hour, I bought a charcoal wool suit, a plain cotton shirt and an Armani silk tie. Then I got a pair of tan leather shoes at A. Testoni. I also got some casual stuff at Barney’s. It was more money than I’d ever spent on clothes in my entire life, but it was worth it, because having new, expensive things to wear made me feel relaxed and confident – and also, it has to be said, like someone else. In fact, to get the measure of myself in the new suit – the way you might test-drive a car – I took to the streets a couple of times, and walked up and down Madison Avenue, or around the financial district, weaving briskly in and out through the crowds. On these occasions, I would often catch glimpses of myself reflected in office windows, in dark slabs of corporate glass, catch glimpses of this trim-looking guy who seemed to know precisely where he was going and, moreover, precisely what he would be doing when he got there.

  I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly – a Mont Blanc fountain pen, a Pulsar watch – just to have that infantile and vaguely narcotic-erotic sensation of being wrapped in a veil of perfume and personal attention – Would sir like to try this one? With men I would be more aggressive, getting into detailed questions and information-swapping, such as the time I bought a boxed-set of Beethoven’s nine symphonies recorded live on original instruments, and locked the assistant into a debate about the contemporary relevance of eighteenth-century performing practice. My behaviour with waiters and barmen, too, was uncharacteristic. When I went out to places like Soleil and La Pigna and Ruggles – which I’d started doing fairly regularly now – I was an awkward customer … there’s no other word for it. I’d spend an unconscionable amount of time poring over the wine list, for example, or I’d order stuff that wasn’t on the menu, or I’d invent some complicated new cocktail, on the spot, and expect the barman to mix it for me.

  Later, I’d go to sets at Sweet Basil and the Village Vanguard and start chatting with people at adjoining tables, and while my extensive knowledge of jazz usually ensured that I came out ahead in any conversation, it would also sometimes get people’s backs up. It’s not that I was being obnoxious, exactly, I wasn’t, but I engaged with everyone, and in a very focused way, on whatever level, about whatever subject, squeezing each encounter for its last possible drop of what might be on offer – intrigue, conflict, tedium, trivia, gossip … it didn’t matter. Most people I came across weren’t used to this, and some even found it quite unnerving.

  Increasingly, too, I was aware of the effect I was having on certain women I met – or sometimes not even met but just saw … across a few tables, or a crowded room. There appeared to be this curious, wide-eyed attraction that I couldn’t really account for, but which led to some intimate, revealing conversations, and occasionally, too – because I was unsure of the parameters here – some fairly fraught ones. Then one time, during a Dale Noonan gig at Sweet Basil, this pale, thirtyish redhead I’d noticed came over between numbers and sat at my table. She smiled, but didn’t say anything. I smiled back and didn’t say anything either. I summoned a waiter and was about to ask her what she’d like to drink when she shook her head slightly and said, ‘Non.’

  I paused, and then asked the waiter for the check. As we were leaving, with the frenetic Dale Noonan just starting up again, I saw her glancing back at the table she’d originally been sitting at. I glanced back as well. Another woman and a man were at the table, looking towards us, perhaps gesturing uncertainly, and in this fleeting tableau of body language I thought I detected a rising sense of alarm, maybe even of panic. But as soon as we got outside, the red-haired woman took me by the arm, almost pushing me along the street, and said, ‘Oh my God’ – in a very strong French accent – ‘that screaming brass shit, I couldn’t stand it any longer.’ Then she laughed and squeezed my arm, drawing me towards her, as though we’d known each other for years.

  Her name was Chantal and she was here on vacation, from Paris, with her sister and brother-in-law. I tried to speak to her in French, not very successfully, which seemed to charm her no end, and after about twenty minutes I felt as though I had known her for years. As we walked along Fifth Avenue towards the Flatiron Building, I gave her the 23 Skidoo spiel, tales of cops shooing away young men who used to gather on Twenty-third Street to see passing women’s skirts billowing up in the gusts of wind. These gusts were caused by the narrow angle at the building’s northern end, an explanation which then degenerated into a lecture on wind-bracing and early skyscraper construction, just what you’d imagine a girl in such circumstances would want, but I somehow managed – apparently – to make talk of K-trusses and wall-girders interesting, funny, compelling even. At Twenty-third Street she stood in front of the Flatiron Building herself, waiting for something to happen, but there was barely a breeze that evening and about the only thing detectable in the folds of her long navy skirt was a gentle rippling movement. She seemed disappointed and looked as if she was about to stamp her foot.

  I took her by the hand and we walked on.

  When we got as far as Twenty-ninth Street, on Fifth Avenue, we turned right. A moment later she told me that we’d arrived at her hotel. She said that she and her sister had been shopping all day, and that that would explain the bags and boxes and tissue paper and ne
w shoes and belts and accessories strewn about the place. When I looked slightly puzzled, she sighed and said I wasn’t to mind the mess up in her room.

  The next morning we had breakfast in a local diner, and after that we spent a few hours at the Met. Since Chantal had another week left in New York, we agreed to meet again, and again – and, inevitably, again. We spent one entire twenty-four hour period together locked in her hotel room, during which time, among other things, I took French lessons. I think she was amazed at how much of the language I managed to learn, and how quickly, because by the time of our last encounter, in a Moroccan restaurant in Tribeca, we were speaking almost exclusively in French.

  Chantal told me that she loved me and was prepared to give up everything in order to come and live with me in Manhattan. She’d give up her flat in Bastille, her job with a foreign aid agency, her whole Parisian life. I really enjoyed being with Chantal, and hated the thought of her leaving, but I had to talk her out of this. Never having had it so easy in a relationship, I didn’t want to push my luck. But I also didn’t see how our relationship could plausibly be sustained in the wider context of my burgeoning MDT habit. In any case, the way we’d met had been fairly unreal – an unreality which had been further compounded by the personal details I’d given her about myself. I’d told her that I was an investment analyst devising a new market forecasting strategy based on complexity theory. I’d also told her that the reason I hadn’t taken her to see my apartment on Riverside Drive was because I was married – unhappily, of course. The parting scene was difficult, but it was nevertheless nice to be told – through tears, and in French – that I would live for ever in her heart.

  There were a couple of other encounters, too. One morning I went to my friend Dean’s place on Sullivan Street to pick up a book, and as I was leaving the building I got talking to a young woman who lived on the second floor. According to the bullet-point profile of his neighbours Dean had once reeled off, she was a single-white-female computer-programmer, twenty-six, non-smoker, interested in nineteenth-century American art. We’d passed each other on the stairs a few times before, but in the way of things in New York City apartment buildings, what with alienation and paranoia, not to mention endemic rudeness, we’d completely ignored each other. This time I smiled at her and said, ‘Hi. Great day.’ She looked startled, studied me for a nanosecond or two, and then replied, ‘If you’re Bill Gates. Or Naomi Campbell.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I said, pausing to lean back against the wall, casually, ‘but hey, if things are that bad, can I buy you a drink?’

  She looked at her watch and said, ‘A drink? It’s ten-thirty in the morning – what are you, the crown prince of Toyland?’

  I laughed. ‘I might be.’

  She was holding an A & P shopping bag in her left hand and under her right arm she had a large hardcover volume, lodged tightly so it wouldn’t slip. I nodded at the book.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  She released a long sigh, as if to say, Fellah, I’m busy, OK … maybe some other time. The sigh then tapered off and she said, wearily, ‘Thomas Cole. The works of Thomas Cole.’

  ‘View from Mount Holyoke,’ I said automatically. ‘Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.’ It was as much as I could do to resist continuing with, ‘Eighteen thirty-six. Oil on Canvas, fifty-one-and-a-half inches by seventy-six inches.’

  She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at me for a moment. Then she lowered the shopping bag and put it down at her feet. She eased the large book out from under her arm, held it awkwardly and started flicking through it.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘The Oxbow – that’s the one. I’m doing this …’ She continued flicking distractedly through the book. ‘I’m doing this paper for a course I’m taking on Cole and … yeah,’ she looked up at me, ‘The Oxbow.’

  She found the page and half held it out, but for us both to look at the painting properly we had to move a little closer together. She was quite short, had dark silky hair and was wearing a green headscarf inset with little amber beads.

  ‘Remember,’ I said, ‘the oxbow is a yoke – a symbol of control over raw nature. Cole didn’t believe in progress, not if progress meant clearing forests and building railroads. Every hill and valley, he once wrote – and in a fairly ill-advised foray into poetry I might add – every hill and valley is become an altar unto Mammon.’

  ‘Hhm.’ She paused to consider this. Then she seemed to be considering something else. ‘You know about this stuff?’

  I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copyblocks and I’d also recently read American Visions by Robert Hughes, as well as heaps of Thoreau and Emerson, so I felt comfortable enough saying, ‘Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t be an expert or anything, but yeah.’ I leant forward slightly, and around, and studied her face, her eyes. She met my gaze. I said, ‘Do you want me to help you with this … paper?’

  ‘Would you?’ she said in small voice. ‘Can you … I mean, if you’re not busy?’

  ‘I’m the crown prince of Toyland, remember, so it’s not like I have a job to go to.’

  She smiled for the first time.

  We went into her apartment and in about two hours did a rough draft of the paper. About four hours after that again I finally staggered out of the building.

  Another time I was in the offices of Kerr & Dexter, dropping off some copy, when I bumped into Clare Dormer. Although I’d only met Clare once or twice before, I greeted her very warmly. She’d just been in with Mark Sutton discussing some contractual matter, so I decided to tell her my idea about confining her book to boys, starting with Leave it to Beaver and taking it as far as The Simpsons and then calling it Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. She laughed generously at this and slapped the back of her hand against my jacket lapel.

  Then she paused, as though something she hadn’t realized before was suddenly dawning on her.

  Twenty minutes later we were down in a quiet stairwell together on the twelfth floor, sharing a cigarette.

  I kept reminding myself in these situations that I was playing a role, that the whole thing was an act, but just as often it would occur to me that maybe I wasn’t playing a role at all, and that maybe it wasn’t an act. When I was in the throes of an MDT-induced episode, it was as if my new self could barely make out my old self, could just about see it through a haze, through a smoky window of thick glass. It was like trying to speak a language you once knew but have now largely forgotten, and much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t simply revert or switch back – at least not without an enormous concentration of will. Often, in fact, it was more comfortable not even to bother – why would I bother? – but one result of this was that I had a slightly less easy time of it with people I knew well, or rather with people who knew me well. Meeting and impressing a total stranger, assuming a new identity, even a new name, was exciting and uncomplicated, but when I met up with someone like Dean, for instance, I always got these looks – these quizzical, probing looks. I could see, too, that he was struggling with it, wanted to challenge me, call me a poseur, a clown, an arrogant fuck, while simultaneously wanting to prolong our time together and spin it out for all it was worth.

  I also spoke to my father a couple of times during this period, and that was worse. He was retired and lived on Long Island. He phoned occasionally to see how I was, and we’d chat for a few minutes, but now all of a sudden I was getting caught up in the kind of conversations with him that he’d always craved to have with his son – and the kind that his son had always ungraciously denied him – idle banter about business and the markets. We talked about the tech stocks bubble and when it was going to burst. We talked about the Waldrop CLX merger that had been in all the papers that morning. How would the merger affect share prices? Who would the new CEO be? At first, I could detect a note of suspicion in the old man’s voice, as though he thought I was making fun of him,
but gradually he settled into it, seeming to accept that this, finally – after all the arid years of bleeding-heart, tree-hugging crap from his boy – was the way things were meant to be. And if it wasn’t quite that, it wasn’t a million miles off it either. I did get involved, and perhaps for the first time ever I spoke to him just as I would speak to any other man. But I was careful at the same time not to go overboard, because it wasn’t like messing with Dean’s head. This was my father on the other end of the line, my father – getting animated, working things out, permitting long dormant hopes to sprout in his mind, and almost audibly … pop! – would Eddie get a proper job now? – pop! – make some real money? – pop! – produce a grandchild?

  I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant, accelerated version of myself right there on the living-room floor. Then, like in a nature documentary time-lapse sequence, the old me – twisted, cracked, biodegradable – would shrivel up suddenly and disintegrate, making the struggle to recover any meaningful sense of who I really was even more difficult.

  But moments of anxiety like this were fairly rare, and my abiding impression of the period is of how right it felt to be so busy all the time. I wasn’t idle for a second. I read new biographies of Stalin, Henry James and Irving Thalberg. I learnt Japanese from a series of books and cassette tapes. I played chess online, and did endless cryptic puzzles. I phoned in to a local radio station one day to take part in a quiz, and won a year’s supply of hair products. I spent hours on the Internet and learned how to do various things – without, of course, actually having to do any of them. I learned how to arrange flowers, for example, cook risotto, keep bees, dismantle a car engine.