All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  “A few less,” I replied.

  “And yet he’s a partner.”

  The gaps between her words disclosing that maybe perhaps she shouldn’t but she was going to anyway. To test the voltage of the third rail.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Is there a story you don’t want to share with me, Mr. Harker?”

  “I don’t want to bore you, Celeste.”

  “Are you suggesting I have the capacity to be bored?”

  A wrinkle appeared across Fleeger’s forehead that only I could interpret. Stephen, this is all you. I took a long draught from the pint glass and gestured for another as the barman set down rounds of whiskey, chardonnay, pilsner, stout, along with steak tip sandwiches, nachos, jalapeño poppers, bacon potato skins for Nelson, and a plate of fried calamari. Celeste surveyed the food with horror, mortal enemy of all that yoga, and I seized the distraction, excused myself, glanced at Fleeger’s lap phone on my way to the bathroom. His big thumb scrolling through selfies of Tara: bending over, peach crotch thong, in the mirror, wearing only a towel, kohl-tipped eyes, beckoning him. I entered the bathroom and stumbled to the urinal and pissed on a mound of ice cubes. “I fucking hate this,” I said aloud, hoping no one heard me and leaning my forehead against the cool bathroom tile wall. Do you reject Satan? And all his works? And all his pomps? The motion dispenser failed to squirt foamy soap into my moving hand. I worried I was disappearing. I stumbled back to my drink like it was a life raft.

  Outside the bar’s picture window, beyond the script of the saloon’s standard, the sky was now oily black. Green bankers lamps hanging from the coffered ceiling reflected in the big window, like in cocaine bathrooms where the mirrored walls reflect themselves reflecting themselves into infinity. I watched a number of my hands raise a number of glasses to my number of faces, piercing Maiden Lane and extending into space.

  “Tough spot for a rookie,” someone yelled at the bar.

  I took stock of the scene. Nelson and Attika now throwing darts in a nook, hands on each other’s hips and shoulders. Honda long ago disappeared. The crowd dispersing for the Metro North and Long Island Rail Road and PATH trains to New Jersey Transit. Celeste and Fleeger gestured for me to join them as the barman shifted what remained of the picked-over food to a small square table, where Celeste’s Redweld was positioned like a centerpiece. Still-life with litigation. Fleeger clipped his phone to his belt and refocused and I took a seat.

  “Look, gentlemen. The reason I came here tonight, the real reason, is that I desperately need you to give this Thomas case your maximum attention.”

  “You got it,” Robert said, sipping a fresh beer.

  “Do I, Robert? Do I really? Just so you totally understand the situation, there is only one person I answer to in top management and he only answers to the one person at the very top. I’m one tier from executive throne level. And to stay there I need to deliver results, but to deliver results I need to delegate the litigation. That’s what you guys are. My delegatees. And in exchange for you being my humble legal servants I shall pay whatever invoices you send me. Within reason, of course. You want to bill me for reviewing documents, studying surveillance footage, ‘file review,’ I don’t care. I won’t sweat the details. You’re still cheaper than most of the big midtown firms, and besides, in my opinion they lack the grit to get this done. So I’ll pay your bills. But you two.” Celeste pointed at the Redweld. “The higher-ups want to send a clear message with this one. Which is that Thomas isn’t getting anything more than nuisance value for his alleged physical injuries and certainly without a doubt absolutely nothing for the bogus PTSD claim. Wuxi made them nervous. You handled Wuxi with aplomb. Major Thomas makes them nervous. Now WorldScore wants you to handle Thomas with aplomb too.”

  “We’re on it,” Robert said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Stephen’s on it. I’m on it. We’re on it.” He flipped his wrist back and forth between us. “Right Harker?”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said.

  Fleeger paid the tab with his Kilgore platinum card and Nelson approached the table with heavy feet, sweat blistering his pink forehead. He sat next to me. He was drunk.

  “I think she likes me,” he whispered, nodding toward Attika, who now held a fresh glass of rosé. She draped an arm across Nelson’s slouched shoulders, rounded him, and sat on his lap, dangling long legs, one of her flats now Tory Burch pogless.

  “Don’t be such a gossip, Mr. Nelson,” she said.

  It was time to go. I said my goodbyes but refrained from shaking Celeste’s hand, lest she comment again on its moisture. Fleeger escorted Celeste outside to a black town car steaming exhaust as Nelson played with Attika’s hair, tucking it behind her ear. Bold move for a white man. I located my swish messenger bag fashioned from recycled plastic bits, slung it over my shoulder, and exited the bar as Fleeger closed the car door behind Celeste.

  “We don’t need a fucking glorified claims handler telling us how to handle the litigation.” He almost spat. “I don’t care where she thinks she is on the executive pyramid. We’re the frontline attorneys and we’ll handle Thomas the same way we handle every fucking case.”

  “Which is how?” I asked.

  “Fucking flawlessly, dude.”

  Fleeger stretched his long arm around me. Told me good work tonight. With the drinking. With engaging Celeste. With not being too mean to Nelson. I thanked him and he told me to go home, get some sleep, conference in the a.m., J. McKenzie, look sharp, courthouse, first thing, see you there. He ascended the stairs to O’Grady’s and I commenced the walk home, toward the stacked halogen lights of WorldScore One, the cranes atop the Manhattan high-rises almost victorious in their reach.

  4

  THE TEMPERATURE HAD DROPPED and black ice sheened the streets, absorbing the colors of the city at night. Orange, amber, yellow, red. A message buzzed my phone and I patted myself for the dopamine fix. A fresh alert from NASA advising that a radio telescope constructed inside the caldera of a dormant Hawaiian volcano had recorded the sun releasing a burst of intensely magnetic plasma. I walked north on Water Street listening to the sun. It sounded like white noise.

  A bulk carrier steamed south atop the East River, giant oyster shells of halogen lights floating on a river of insoluble antibiotics and synthetic estrogen. She rode in ballast, with a high freeboard, unladed with cargo, rumbling beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to where the slope of the city exposed its inhabitants to the rising sea. Staunch and watertight, chamfered, bulbous bow, slanted stern. The M/V Golden Dolphin, Nassau, Bahamas. Not the largest of her class but still massive and bearing the weight of state-sponsored industry. Probably China. Possibly Japan. On her way out now, through New York Harbor, the Verrazano Narrows, the Lower Bay, and then to sea.

  The day’s fifth or sixth cigarette rolled with ease in the cold riparian air and I continued walking north. Now toward the protest camp, with its increasing magnitudes of pitch-black graffiti, both runic and Cyrillic.

  DONKEE JOTEE

  WHEN YOU PAY WRONG YOU PAY TWICE

  BAHOV

  IXXI

  The protestors were making a mess of the place, occupying the open spaces, beating paths of mud through the landscaping, pitching tents in the raised flower beds, sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes anchored with rocks and chewed-up heads of winter cabbage, demarcating the boundaries of their pro-democracy camp with torn strips of yellow police tape. Shouldering bundles of paper pulled from the downtown Dumpsters to fuel the fires that warmed this squatters’ colony of no justice, no peace. Garlands of clear lightbulbs with filaments like incandescent moths. Silver packets torn to access condoms or shampoo. For fucking or washing. Light & Easy. Fair & Mild. I walked home beneath the trellises of the elevated highway.

  A girl approached me. Curvy and busty inside a zipped-up Puffa jacket, almost dwarfish, which accentuated her curves.

  “Hey, don’t I know you from high school?” she asked, t
aking me by the hand, walking us backward. I let her. She leaned against an iron truss and unzipped her jacket, revealing cleavage clawed with stretch marks.

  “Not a chance,” I replied.

  I stepped to her, knowing I shouldn’t. The drinks plus the pill had distorted my judgment with false invincibility. Now that I was talking the first step had been taken and then a second step taken and I would put up a small fight but the juice of the exchange would drown whatever qualms still wimpled inside me. I accepted the tariff of dread, knowing it would possess a half-life of no more than an hour.

  “You sassing me?” she asked. “You gonna sass me some more?” She smiled. One sharp canine peeked from behind her cracked and pink upper lip. Like a calcium stalactite, useful for peeling citrus rinds and opening cans of beans. She tightened my tie knot and I gripped my swish shoulder bag. I remembered an article I read years ago in Science Thursday. About an entomology study in which sexually rejected male fruit flies turned to booze to cope. I was at the apogee of need. Where the arc of the universe bent not toward justice but hookers. Easily susceptible to the charms being hocked by this cheap purveyor. I would keep it manual. Maintain a safe distance. Thereby limiting the exchange of fluids and cells.

  “Where you from?” I asked her.

  “Is that your conscience panging away? Thinking you need to get to know me first?” She placed my hand inside her jacket. Her body was warm and softened by nursing. The clot needed clearing. She gripped my lapels as I maintained one hand inside her jacket. I felt nervous and needy and wanted it over with.

  “Is it me or is everyone talking too much today?” I asked.

  “Must have something to do with all that solar magnetism they say is coming our way,” she said. “Supposed to make us act real wild.”

  She danced wild with her hands and then took hold of both of mine. No good reason for me to follow her now as she led me into an alley illuminated by ultraviolet neon lights, down chipped concrete steps, around a cheap Asian screen and into a parlor of stalls. She pulled back the curtain and I climbed onto the massage table and, now supine, she unbuckled my pants. Shadows beneath the curtains an inch above the floor, of other men here with other girls, fishers of men, high heels tapping against linoleum flooring. The girls should wear coveralls, I thought. Like at Jiffy Lube.

  “Wash your hands,” I said.

  A porcelain sink glowed beneath the neon ultraviolet light and an attendant handed her a soap cake and towels and the girl dropped a coin onto the attendant’s plate and I could smell the carbolic soap emanating from the steamy basin. Like the soap with which I once cleaned dirt and paint from my cracked hands after a day of manual labor. The girl and the woman discussed the exchange. The room was cold and I could see their breath. She returned, smiling with that one long tooth, blue and purple and now I was blue and purple and her hands were blue and purple and my stomach was blue and purple. I remembered another word of the day. Daguerreotype. Here it was, burning images onto purple trays.

  “Now we can talk,” she said, buckling my belt. “We can pretend we are on a date. So you won’t feel so guilty.”

  I pressed twenty bucks into her other hand.

  “You don’t want to be my boyfriend?”

  She pouted. I handed her an extra twenty.

  “Take it.”

  She gripped the bills.

  “I’ve seen you down here before,” she said. “Walking along the river and through the protest camp.”

  “It’s possible.”

  I refrained from telling her it was on my way home.

  “You down here looking for something? You looking to join up with Jupiter?”

  “Who?”

  “There’s this guy down here at the protest camp named Jupiter and everyone thinks he’s a prophet. He’s even got a bunch of disciples who follow him around, writing crazy words and figures all over everything. They say they’re developing a new language. Jupiter says we’re all slaves and that slaves must learn to speak a new language that only the slaves can speak. That is incomprehensible to the master. Are you a slave? Hablas español?”

  I refrained from making any obnoxious comments. The strap on my swish messenger bag reminded me of tomorrow’s court conference. I had to leave.

  “I don’t think I like you anymore,” she said. “I think I’m done with you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Outside, the mounted patrol approached the alley, cantering atop cobblestones and hard asphalt. Despite the fact these parlors existed, with bricks and mortar and cash registers and neon lights, they felt illicit, subject to a raid. I didn’t need to be seen with her. There was a system and an order and I spun inside that order and she spun outside it. With no way in other than through a man’s zipper. She twisted her hair around her finger while standing in a puddle of purple light. I placed our encounter in a black lacquered box and kicked it overboard and walked away. She watched me, but with different eyes, like those painted on the side of a Bedouin’s van to ward off evil.

  The cold rain resumed and the protestors pulled tarps over the entrances to their plastic tents. I followed home the trail of amber lights, through the campus and citadels of municipal authority, beneath crumbling gargoyles, cracked concrete, dripping verdigris, turned west at Confucius Circle, crossed Bowery, more graffiti to the ancient facades, entered Chinatown, and walked through cold, new rain toward the giant crying neon baby who wants

  scallions and

  beef and

  chopsticks full of golden noodles.

  Mei runs to the window above the walk-up’s front door. “I want to kiss you,” she says, covering her red lace bra with my white cotton dress shirt. This moment made for cotton. Together we once formed the first person plural. Us. Me and you. She spoke Chinese between bouts of breath that sounded like tiny orgasms. A marriage based on orgasms. Nothing more. When you pay wrong you pay twice. I shouldered the building’s heavy glass door and climbed one narrow flight of stairs. The apartment’s metal door sprung shut behind me and the bang echoed throughout the walk-up. Piles of clothes and papers and books and magazines. I dropped the Jacob’s Ladder on the floor and lay on the couch, face burrowed between two stain-resistant pillows.

  5

  VOMIT BURPS AND GRAPEFRUIT juice and Fleeger emails. Reminding me of this morning’s court conference in re Major Bud Asshole. Commanding that we cut off ze head of ze snake. Confirming my attendance at the annual Risk Rewards dinner. More exclamation marks. He was under Tara’s influence already. This year honoring … him! COMMAND PERFORMANCE! Another email from Fleeger’s secretary warning about the toxicity of air fresheners—proven cause of bone cancer and endocrine disease. For a woman whose boss built a career defending Air Wick and Johnson Wax against specious toxic exposure claims she was especially attuned to fake news stories promulgating myths about the links between artificial scents, household aerosols, and terminal illnesses. I lit the gas stove beneath the wedding gift Le Creuset teapot, sat down at the faux vintage dinette Mei left behind, and peeled and chewed a mealy clementine.

  When Mei was here I wanted her gone and now that she was gone it was not what I expected. Or what I expected but also not, perhaps much like the marriage itself. We had performed as expected, and by doing so assumed we were destined to reap the rewards: golden Manhattan honeymoon of double income no kid (Dink!), a move to Greenpoint (for the extra room), followed by a child (our first), Kilgore partnership (strong probability), another child (so blessed), real property in Pelham or Rye, perhaps Montclair (financial security assured), above-average biracial children enrolled in above-average multiethnic public schools destined for above-average private universities and above-average careers (medicine and/or finance). But we never made it past the honeymoon. Instead, something foul and slothful moved into the apartment before the first anniversary. Some spirit animal that subsisted on unfulfilled expectations took residence on the couch. Nested behind the walls and under our bed. Scratching the box spring and drywall a
t night. Gnawing on brick. Consuming the scraps left behind in the kitchen sink. Bringing with it depression and insomnia, flabby triceps, hours in front of the mirror trying on dresses, shouting matches, a permanent sink full of dishes and food, pizza boxes too big for the trash can and thus piled on the floor, plastic containers of old saag paneer stacked in the refrigerator, anxiety pills in the medicine closet (of which I’m out), vitamins to lose weight effortlessly by boosting one’s metabolism, unused sex toys, lingerie of ingrown hairs, Lululemon pants, juice cleanses, more Lululemon pants, moments of intimacy fraught with insecurity and fear, Chinese calligraphies harking happy home that failed to fend off the spirit beast gnawing at the edges of our mutual matrimonial benefits package.

  Living via genitalia and emotion, we had denied ourselves the sedate pleasure of a tranquil home. Not legally bankrupt but bankrupt nonetheless. In spite of, because of, the electronics, and the brunches, and the mimosas, and the tender eateries, and the tender boutiques, and the pop-up galleries, and the designer weed delivered via skateboarders, and the artisan cocktails poured by mustached, suspendered bartenders who could three-count a perfect 1.5 ounces of Tito’s without a jigger. As if this was a skill. Mei telling me so. Me refuting her. Her calling me condescending. Me rupturing. A failure of the entire marital financial psychological operating system. To the point when you couldn’t even cross the street together, let alone make significant decisions, let alone decide which entrée to order from the David Chang restaurant or bottle to select from the pinewood shelves of le boutique sommelier. Until the last quark of attachment stops moving and dies. Behind bolted vault doors. Double helixes of secrets stored in sealed pneumatic tubes. To protect each other from each other’s smallpox. Pending one final act of mercy.

  Let me mansplain something to you dear, now that you’re gone. You see, there was a formula we needed to follow: I work, you work, we work. Not I work, you whine. Not I work, the subway is too crowded. Not I work, the winter is too cold. Not I work, I return home to you crying in a robe, rivulets of mascara, saying you couldn’t leave the apartment. Indicting me for all the pain, it’s my fault, I’m certain to give you cancer. Talk to Fleeger’s secretary about that. She’ll educate you. It’s the Blade Plug-ins you love, not me. And then it stops, it comes to an end, not because of kindness or empathy. But because we lacked the necessary reciprocal respect for resolution. And still the sloth remains, lying on the couch, scratching itself, popping cheese puffs, complaining about the WiFi. And there it stays until you’re gone. And all that’s left is the vintage dinette. Which the spirit beast couldn’t care about less. And then he too finally leaves, out the door and down the street, with his funny, furry little body, in search of another marriage to gnaw.