Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

looked like he’d never even get back to: spiriting Georgina Hawkmanaji up from that couch and out of the duplex, presumably upstairs, to her penthouse apartment, to prove definitively to her the existence of his penis, or to have her prove it to him. We all sat pretending not to be fascinated at how neatly he sheltered Georgina from her own shyness at being extracted from our nodding assembly. I’ll admit she was revealed (too late) (and unimportantly) as erotic to me, as she’d never been until seeing Abneg’s hairy fingers brushing the nape of her neck, and guiding her, like a virtuoso repositioning a cello, by the hip. So I learned how Richard Abneg, like Perkus Tooth, was someone who could uncover what hid in plain sight.

CHAPTER
Three
    I only had to arrive fifteen minutes early at East Eighty-fourth Street one day to discover Oona Laszlo existed. Perkus buzzed me up and I entered to find them standing there, in front of their chairs at his kitchen table, shuffling as if apprehended at a crime. Almost one in the afternoon, but I’d broken up a breakfast scene, coffee, cheese Danish sliced into fingers on a grease-marked white sack, a thin joint modestly half smoked and perching in a cleanish ashtray. A pair of Lucite boxes labeled WHITE RHINO, one of Watt’s brands. The New York Times , which Perkus never read. I assumed it belonged to his guest. A book Perkus had been reading last I visited, a gigantic novel entitled Obstinate Dust . Also, non sequitur, A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey , a sturdy blue trade paperback, inverted on propped-open pages. I did my best to conceal my surprise at this woman’s presence. The foot traffic was a little thicker in Perkus’s apartment than I’d previously understood. It might be that he booked us one after the next, his secret life bustled with visitors, his lonely lobby a revolving door.
    Needless to say my first thought was that Oona Laszlo wasPerkus’s lover. I was wrong. Yet this error, the tender cameo it conjured in my mind’s eye, is still, weirdly, a place I can retreat to in memory and think It might have been better. It might have been nice . I can still see them there, framed in my mistaken assumption, and feel thrilled and relieved for Perkus, who, in dwelling in that imaginary frame, remains as I first knew him.
    The two fit, inviting the mistake. If not lovers, they might be brother and sister. Oona shared Perkus’s marionette-ish aspect, large head connected to a tiny frame and seeming to sweep her nervous limbs behind its weight. She wore black (another hint, I thought, that they’d spent the night together—she seemed dressed for the previous evening), making her like a marker scribble, a silhouette in spastic motion in that cramped kitchen. They were expensive clothes, too—I noted that automatically. Expensive for Perkus’s kitchen at least. Black hair, too, in bangs and a neat bob. Had Perkus spilled a pot of coffee on his tiles and the coffee sprung to life as a woman an instant before I opened the door, it would have explained her perfectly. Oona’s mouth alone confessed female ripeness, seeming to stand for secret curves unrevealed by her silhouette. Her canines caught on her lower lip just as our eyes met, drawing it into an expression faintly lascivious and wry. Or perhaps those tooth tips tended to catch there. This might be her default look, teeth too much for lips to contain. Above this expression Oona’s eyes flitted, measuring distance to the exit. Yet if Oona was Perkus’s female synonym, she was younger and, I had to admit, alluring. If they were siblings, she’d gotten the looks. If they were lovers, I found myself thinking, he’d gotten lucky.
    Perkus didn’t seem flustered, exactly. Aggravated was more like it. His independent eye tried to follow Oona as he turned to me.
    “Chase, Oona. Oona, Chase.” He discharged the formality, then practically threw down his hands in disgust at his own