Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  Across the street from Lexington Hall was a row of frayed old stores— luncheonette, Salvation Army mission, second-hand bookstore, like that. The stores are gone, naturally, replaced by a concrete plaza built by Ronald Wegeman. It has flowerbeds and a waterfall and a gazebo where they sell ice cream. This is where the workers from the nearby office towers eat their lunches. When it was dedicated, Wegeman was asked why he was squandering such a prime piece of real estate on a project that would generate no revenue.

  "Three reasons," he said. "Number one: the workers deserve a place of peace, or at least as much peace as we can give them. Number two: we need a little empty space to keep this city livable. And number three: I'm building fifty stories of luxury condominiums across the street, and this is the best way I know of to preserve the view."

  Tollivetti, smirking, asked him, "Would you mind telling us which is the main reason?"

  Wegeman rocked back on his heels then swooped down on the microphone. "The beauty of capitalism is that it doesn't matter to the man eating lunch, you ignorant fucking pinhead."

  Agnes enters the Wegeman Tower atrium. Her heels click on the pink marble floor. Fountains whoosh and gush as a pianist plays Gershwin. Agnes passes the shops: Harris and Forrester, La Dacquoise, Marjorie Jermain, Juan Gris, Carter Stockton Ltd. The shops are lavishly appointed and conspicuously empty. but then again all they need to sell is one kayak or one box of pastry to make their rent for the month.

  Reluctantly, Agnes presents herself at the front desk. She is escorted to Mr. Wegeman's elevator by four men dressed in military regalia of green polyester. They all wear pith helmets except the one in the tall white shako.

  The Great Man's Palace Guard.

  * * *

  No one has ever had a nicer sickroom than Ronald Wegeman. It is an enormous sun-drenched expanse, all soft blues and cool greens. It overlooks the swimming pool.

  The Great Man lies propped up on a canopy bed. Madelaine is at his side. He is attended by two starched, crisp, immaculate West Indian nurses.

  "You shouldn't have done it," says Wegeman. "You should have minded your own fucking business. You should have let them finish me off."

  His face is unshaven and drawn. His hair is not in its famous pompadour. It hangs down limply from a crooked center part, giving him the look of a demented preacher. A single hair peeps out of one nostril, curling up and around like a treble clef.

  "I keep reading how fucking lucky I was," he snarls. "Lucky my big fat pimply ass."

  "Ron...." says Madelaine.

  "Most people go through a whole lifetime without getting shot, and I'm supposed to be lucky."

  Madelaine clears her throat. Her smile is Arctic. "Ron, Agnes didn't come here to listen to a lot of silly whining, did she?

  "Whining! Is that what I'm doing?"

  "You might as least say thank you."

  "Thank you, Agnes, for prolonging my miserable life."

  Madelaine sighs. "You can do better than that."

  "I'll do better when I write her reward check."

  "Ron has decided that he's a hated man," Madelaine tells Agnes.

  "I am," says Wegeman.

  "Don't be absurd," says Madelaine, laughing. "Agnes, is this a hated man?"

  Agnes hesitates, and Madelaine pounces.

  "Surely you don't agree with Ron," she says.

  Agnes stammers. "Well, I mean, just look at him. It's right there, isn't it? If anyone in New York is hated, he is."

  "I told you," says Wegeman triumphantly.

  Madelaine is aghast. "How can you say that?"

  "I'm just telling the truth," says Agnes. "He throws old ladies into the streets and blights the landscape with skyscrapers. And he's delighted with himself."

  Madelaine is puzzled. "What's he supposed to be?"

  "Not honest, that's for sure," rasps Wegeman. "Fuck. I knew it. Fuck. Fuck."

  "I would think people would be happy for him," says Madelaine.

  Agnes almost bursts out laughing at the women's saucer-eyed innocence.

  "Fat fucking chance," says the Great Man. "I've got it, and they don't, and they hate me for it. Agnes is right."

  Madelaine is dubious. She strokes her husband's hair. He probes his leg wound with a back scratcher. "It's just so hard to believe, Ron. You're such a mild little soul. Remember, you weren't shot by just anyone. That horrible man Geister had a grudge."

  One of the nurses fluffs the Great Man's pillow. He opens his pajama top and presses his palms against the dressing. He cries out in anguish.

  "Stop fiddling with it!" barks the nurse.

  Two beautiful women in matching zebra-striped bathing suits appear at the edge of the pool. They dive in and begin swimming laps. Two equally beautiful representatives from Holly Days, Inc., appear in the sickroom with stepladders and what looks like a laundry cart. They start removing Christmas decorations.

  Wegeman grimaces. "I want to show you something," he says to Agnes. "Imagine you're in New York for the first time. You're a tourist. What do you want to see first?"

  "That's easy," says Agnes. "The City Hall subway station. The original. It's closed now—the Lexington Avenue line uses it as a turnaround loop. But it's supposed to be beautiful. It's got these Moorish, sweeping tiled vaults. I've seen pictures of it. It looks like a chapel, or a mosque."

  Wegeman flashes the same look of contempt Agnes has seen him give to attorneys and anchormen and the mayor. His big catfish lips curl with gusto.

  "The City Hall station, eh?" he says mockingly. He tries to control his temper. "How about something a more typical tourist would be interested in?"

  "The Circle Line," says Agnes.

  He smiles. He picks up the telephone and asks his secretary to get him the Circle Line. He waits for a moment, then smiles again. He hands the receiver to Agnes. She hears a busy signal.

  He takes back the telephone and speaks to the secretary. "Try the NBC tour."

  Busy.

  "Try the advance ticket window at Yankee Stadium."

  It takes the secretary a minute to place the call.

  "What'd you think of the gorilla?" Wegeman asks Agnes.

  "It was quite a surprise," says Agnes. "I didn't think anybody actually liked that sort of thing."

  "Well excuse me for fucking living," he says.

  "Ron...." says Madelaine.

  "I like that sort of thing," says the Great Man haughtily. His face twists into a sour little smile. "Were you embarrassed?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you want to jump out of your skin?"

  "Yes."

  "You're a stiff, Travertine," he says, delighted with the pain he has inflicted. "GorillaGrams were made for people like you. Excellent."

  A recorded voice issues from the telephone receiver. "I'm sorry, all ticket agents are busy at the moment. Please hold on, your call will be answered by the first available representative...."

  "Hah!" says the Great Man. "In the middle of winter, no less."

  "I don't get it," says Agnes.

  "He's been doing this parlor trick all week," says Madelaine. She pours herself some Evian. She is dressed in a red velvet suit, and some of the "fun" jewelry that is her trademark: a brooch depicting three quizzical fish with gold fins and rubies for eyes, and earrings that are hexagonal bars of lapis lazuli. She seems too dressed up, Agnes thinks, considering her husband's condition. Agnes has always gone by the rule for proper sickroom etiquette that visitors, too, should look as though they bathed with a sponge. Madelaine's life is obviously going on with a minimum of interruption. "I've had enough, Ron," she says. "You just want to be miserable. Agnes, I'll see you later."

  Agnes and the Great Man watch Madelaine leave the room.

  "You know why every fucking phone line in the city is busy?" Wegeman growls.

  "Sure. A.T.& T. should never have broken up."

  "No," he says, his face darkening. "It's because it's impossible to have a thought by yourself in this cocksucking city. Think abou
t getting tickets for next year's Fourth of July game at Yankee Stadium, and you can bet your ass someone else is thinking the same thing at the same time. That's why all the fucking phones are tied up. If Fred Geister wanted to shoot me, others do, too. The idea of killing Ronald Wegeman is in the air, and I don't like it."

  His intravenous unit empties with a small belch.

  "Maybe you want to kill me too," says Wegeman. pulling the covers up to his chin. He does not have the hands of a wealthy man. There are tufts of hair on his knuckles, and his nails are bitten to the quick. "You're one of those lunatics in the Telamones Society. You weren't at the dedication to congratulate me. If you want to kill me now, go ahead. Just do me a favor and make it fast."

  His musings unsettle her. She didn't imagine that he even knew about the Telamones Society. She's glad she didn't bring Gandalf with her.

  "I don't want to kill you," Agnes assures him. "Maybe at one point I did. But I'm a lot older now."

  "I can't walk, you know," he says with remarkable calm. "The bullet did something to my spinal cord, shocked it or nicked it or exploded the filaments or something. They explained it to me with charts and slides, and I can't even program a fucking VCR. They just looked at me, like I'd have a suggestion about what to do." He rubs his temples and goes white,. and licks the accumulated crust from his lips. "I may never walk again."

  "I'm sorry," says Agnes. "That shouldn't happen to anyone."

  "Not even to a dog, right?" he says. "I like you, Travertine. Your disgust is so apparent."

  He grins with malice.

  "What is it about me that pisses everyone off? I don't want anyone taking any more shots at me. Tell me and I'll change."

  "I can't do that," says Agnes primly.

  "Now what?"

  "It's not my job to redeem you. Look into your own soul."

  "I'm sure you don't think I have one."

  "That's true. I guess you're in a pickle, aren't you?"

  "Compassion, Travertine. Have some compassion. Show me the way. Give me a makeover."

  Agnes can hardly believe she's having this conversation with him. Ron Wegeman. Weege. The Great Man. His Competency. The Billionfuckingaire. The Ruthless Cocksucker. The Master Builder—of buildings that are sleek and insubstantial and lacking in all grandeur, the sorts of places that look as though they might sustain structural damage if you went into them dripping wet on a rainy day.

  "I want to live, and if that means being maybe a little nicer, maybe a little more responsive to public opinion, if it means walking around in a purple chicken suit, then I'm gonna fucking do it," he tells Agnes. "And I know that right this second you're thinking, 'That little weasel, why can't he stand up for himself and be a man?' With people like you, I can't win."

  As if by prearranged signal, several aides converge on the bed. They present Wegeman with newspapers and reports. He puts on his glasses, and opens the International Herald Tribune. "I'll be in touch, Travertine. And by the way, the mayor is thinking seriously of privatizing the subways. By the time this dark night of the soul is over I could own the City Hall station."

  Agnes stiffens at the thought.

  "I plan to turn it into a chichi cafe. You can have lunch with me there. We'll have fabulous linguine with truffles and eggplant bread and tiramisu. And when I own the subways, there's gonna be handicapped access like you wouldn't fucking believe.

  * * *

  Madelaine interrupts her lunch with Agnes to take a phone call from Betsy Steinfeld, the pharmaceuticals heiress, who has been in Europe. They try to make a lunch date, but neither has a free afternoon until after the house party that Alice Winters is giving Ron in Palm Beach.

  After she hangs up, Madelaine grows pensive. She says, "As you can see, Ron is very upset."

  "Taking a slug will do that," says Agnes.

  "Ron took it personally. As soon as he's feeling better I want to force him to get out and see people. In his current state of mind, I think he needs to see how much his friends love him. And they do love him. That's why we're going to Alice's. He'll kick and scream, of course, and be an absolute nightmare and try everyone's patience to the limit. But it'll be worth it."

  She tells Agnes and illustrative story. "The last time we were at Grotta del Cane, Sooks served a Mouton-Rothschild that was really undrinkable." Agnes's head spins a little, but Madelaine's assumption that she understands the set-up of the anecdote is correct. Is there anyone in New York who doesn't know that Susan "Sooks" Metalous, dog-fancier and fund-raising dynamo on behalf of the American Ballet Theater, lives for part of the year at Grotta del Cane, her villa on St. Leon, her private Caribbean retreat? Barbara Foucault probably knows how the retaining walls are holding up. Madelaine presses on: "Everyone expected Ron to do something—you know, to break the tension. I thought he'd spit it out, or pretend to shine his shoes with it for a laugh. But he just kept drinking it. Sooks opened bottle after bottle. It turned out he was pouring it into some potted trees next to the table. They were bonsai trees. He killed every last one of them, but then he's the last person I'd say has any affinity for things Eastern."

  Agnes and Madelaine dine on one of Wegeman Tower's scores of terraces. Lunch is grilled red snapper and raw vegetable salad and small, warm sourdough rolls the size of a half-dollar. A waiter stands by ready to pour the tea, and then Mrs. Blair Stanhope, Madelaine's special assistant, appears to meet Agnes and to check on the sourdough rolls, which are from a new starter just flown in.

  "She's a whirlwind," Madelaine confides to Agnes when Mrs. Stanhope steps inside to take a call. "I snatched her away from Christie's Geneva. She organized the whole place. Brought them into the twentieth century. She doesn't take any shit, if you know what I mean." Madelaine giggles, as though she has been very naughty.

  When Mrs. Blair Stanhope returns, Agnes looks at her carefully. She seems about twenty-two or twenty-three years old, tops. She exudes good breeding and athleticism. A short black sheath dress covers her ninety-odd pound frame. She looks like the woman on the Breck bottle. She brought Christie's into the twentieth century? Agnes, who wasn't even aware there was a problem, feels hopelessly inadequate. Mrs. Blair Stanhope makes her feel worse by being friendly and not in the least condescending. It's easy for her to be well adjusted, thinks Agnes.

  Mrs. Blair Stanhope goes back to her duties. Madelaine fires questions at Agnes, then asks the very same question that everyone winds up asking when getting to know Agnes.

  "Why the army?"

  Why indeed? There is no easy answer. It is difficult for Agnes to summon up all that she was thinking upon her graduation from St. Mary-Star-Of-The-Sea Academy, an all-girl Catholic high school perched on one of the few verdant hilltops in the East Bronx. Agnes had a three-quarter scholarship to Yale and a belief that the conventional routes in life were traps for the unwary. Favorably impressed by Israel's compulsory national service, she had argued for years in Social Studies classes that America needed the same thing.

  "So I enlisted," says Agnes.

  "Just because you believed in it?"

  "I was very silly."

  "What on earth did your mother say?"

  "In my mother's world, it's still V-J Day. She thought it was a perfectly sensible thing to do, which should have been a tipoff."

  "Would you do it again?"

  "Of course not," says Agnes. It was an absurd decision, even though the experience left her with some fond memories, and she did learn a few things—the types of hornets and wasps indigenous to the Carolinas; black slang and Spanish curses; she was stationed outside Stuttgart and picked up a good working knowledge of German; she learned to think on her feet while avoiding the sexual advances of a dyke quartermaster with a nose like a potato, Sgt. Avis; she learned about court-martial proceedings and how to prepare meat loaf and turnip puree for 1500 and—too late—why you should be very careful not to plunge your hands into a pot of simmering soybean oil. They took her to the base hospital but, delusional with fever, she chose not to
stay. She wandered around the compound for an hour, somehow avoiding the M.P.s, her eyes wide, her bandaged hands preceding her like steamed lobster claws. She was amazed at the warlike atmosphere of the place. Her thoughts were profound. They're acting as if there's a war on in the hope of bringing one on! If war is an industry, then this is a shutdown plant!

  "It was then that I realized I was feeding the war machine. Two years in fatigues and third-degree burns later."

  "And what about love?" says Madelaine.